Free Creepers by David Morrell Page B

smell he knew to be a combination of chemicals and death; the morgue's anteroom reeked of it. For a moment he faltered in his determination to continue. Five years before, Corelli had stood exactly here in the muted antiseptic haze of the lowered lights as a disinterested pathologist lifted a sheet from Jean's face.
    Corelli let the memories wash over him. He'd be okay--in a minute. In romantic fiction, Death arrives as the final messenger with promises of peaceful eternity. Etched on the deceased's features is the sure sign that he will be waiting patiently for his loved ones beyond the veil. In reality, death can be violent, ugly. It had taken Jean ten minutes to die. Ten minutes in terminal pain and terror. The struggle to survive was carved on her twisted death mask. Corelli had seen that anguish no mortician could disguise. His fiancee's life had been wrenched from her, stolen viciously even as she fought in vain to save it; fought to stay alive for Frank, to bear their children, to grow old with him. But Jean had lost. Her body had been too severely attacked; her will had been broken.
    "Detective Corelli?"
    Frank was so startled by the man suddenly next to him that he jumped.
    The intruder smiled ruefully. "Sorry if I startled you. I'm Dr. Geary. Tom Geary." He extended his hand. "Charming place, isn't it?"
    "I've seen better," Corelli admitted.
    "Haven't we all? So, what's your interest up here? I thought the big boys downtown were handling all cases like this." Geary's voice was cozily confidential.
    Corelli was immediately on his guard. "Sure they are, but I've been watching these Dogs of Hell ever since they got started--I knew Slade." Corelli didn't know who the "big boys" were, but there was no need for the doctor to know that; he'd string him along as far as he could.
    "Hope he wasn't a close friend. He got it pretty bad." Dr. Geary turned and led Corelli through a second door into the mortuary proper. Geary was younger than Corelli, but his salt-and-pepper hair pegged him as years older. It was his manner that betrayed his youth; he had a snippy, superior attitude that Frank instantly disliked. Geary was a smart-ass, probably fresh from his residency. But why anyone would choose a career in pathology was beyond Corelli. Either the guy was a creep or, more likely, he'd performed so wretchedly on the living that he'd been relegated to working on the dead.
    "Welcome to the end of the rainbow," Geary said cheerfully as they entered the main mortuary. Here the cadavers were stored behind a patchwork of refrigerator doors that covered the far wall. Geary went to one and flung it open.
    Corelli swallowed hard as an icy draft of air from the compartment wrapped itself around his shoulders and snaked down his body until it held him prisoner. The air smelled of plastic, of shrouds--a scent, once smelled, never forgotten. Involuntarily Corelli shuddered while Geary withdrew the shallow metal tray on which Ted Slade's body rested. Bloody drainage had seeped through the shroud; it had collected and solidified around the body in a gelatinous mass.
    "You want to look at him here? Or shall I put him on a stretcher so you can have a real good look?"
    "This will be fine," Corelli mumbled.
    "There's not much left to see, anyhow." Geary stared Corelli straight in the eyes and, without warning, whisked the shroud away from Slade's head. It was a nasty trick. When Corelli saw the mutilated body, he closed his eyes and fell back against the wall of refrigerator doors.
    "Not a pretty sight, is it?" Geary asked with a note of amusement in his voice. "You don't usually find them so bad at a ritzy joint like this one. The city morgue's another story. We get the bums whose livers have exploded from cirrhosis, the vagrants someone's set on fire as a joke, drownings, O.D.'s--it's all pretty much Dick-and-Jane shit." He looked down at Slade. "This is a class act."
    "So you've spent a lot of time downtown," Corelli said, feeling his way along