Free Morgue Drawer Four by Jutta Profijt

I’m not feeling very well right now…”
    “Is everything OK, Martin? Are you sick?”
    “No, I’m not sick,” Martin said. His voice sounded like he had at least one bullet lodged in his diaphragm.
    “Last night you were a bit off, too,” Gregor said, sounding him out. “You can tell me if something’s wrong. Is something not OK?”
    “It’s green,” I interrupted, because the stoplight that had allowed him to stop and talk had since turned again.
    “I know that it’s green,” Martin said out loud and irritated into the phone.
    “What’s that?” Gregor asked back.
    “Nothing, just the stoplight is green,” Martin replied. “So, everything is just fine with me, I’m just feeling a little wiped.”
    Yikes, he got “wiped” from me—it actually didn’t belong in his vocabulary at all. Gregor pretended he hadn’t noticed anything. “Well then, maybe tomorrow…”
    “Hold on!” I yelled, and Martin gasped in fright.
    “What it is?” Gregor called, apparently highly alarmed by the frightened gasp. Presumably he suspected an accident or something.
    “What about the SLR?” I asked.
    “The SLR?” Martin echoed.
    “What did you say?” Gregor asked.
    “You wanted to ask him whether an SLR had been reported stolen,” I reminded Martin.
    “Say, do you know if a Mercedes SLR was reported stolen last week?” Martin babbled obediently into his headset. He had apparently lost all will to argue with me.
    “No idea,” Gregor answered. “Why are you interested in that?”
    “Do me a favor and check, OK?” Martin asked in a voice underlain with deep exhaustion.
    It was quiet on the line for a moment, and then Gregor asked Martin to wait for a second, and we could hear some mumbling in the background, and then he got back on the phone.
    “No SLR has been reported stolen in Cologne. Not last week, not the week before, and not since. Tomorrow will you let me in on why you want to know that?”
    “Yes, yes,” Martin answered, then mumbled another thank-you and hung up.
    “You see?” I asked triumphantly. “People who have bodies in their trunks don’t report their cars ripped off.”
    “Maybe the reason why no theft was reported was precisely because there was no theft,” Martin retorted.
    “But…” I couldn’t fathom the new direction our conversation had suddenly taken.
    “You told me about a theft and a body. Maybe one of the two is incorrect, maybe both are incorrect. In any case I still have no evidence to support your story.”
    This whole discussion proved only one thing: that Martin was pretty clever.
    We spent the rest of the ride in silence. Martin was driving like a robot, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t thinking anything. His brain was switched off. By contrast, I was mad. I was making an effort to pump all of the energy from my frustration into the convolutions of Martin’s brain, but I couldn’t tell if he noticed. He was on autopilot; maybe he was in shock.

     
    He parked his “car” along a quiet side street, shut it off, and dragged his feet along the sidewalk. The door to another parked car opened, Martin took a frightened leap to the side but then relaxed a bit again as he recognized the person getting out.
    “Birgit! What are you doing here?”
    She beamed at him; I could only gape. Her naturally blond hair fell long and smooth and shiny over the fur collar of an orange-colored winter jacket, which, unfortunately, concealed her upper torso under a bulky mass of down. Her legs were inside black pinstriped pants that ran down to black high heels. Unless her jacket was covering up some monstrous deformity, the woman had to be pretty hot. Not quite as hot as her colleague, Katrin, but still. How had Martin landed this knockout?
    “I wanted to show you my new car,” she called in high spirits, hugging Martin briefly, and then hopping back across the sidewalk and opening her passenger side door for him. “Hop in.”
    Martin sighed softly but sat down on the