Free Malicious Intent by Kathryn Fox

he said before hanging up.
    ‘You bastard!’ she screamed at the dead line. ‘Everything’s always on your terms.’
    As she slammed down the phone, the framed photograph crashed off Ben’s bedside table, shattering its glass cover. A piece sliced her finger as she brushed aside the shards. Ignoring the bleeding she picked up the photo of Benjamin squealing with delight as she lifted him into the air.

    9
    Early the next morning, Anya pulled into the car park outside the mortuary located at the Western Sydney Center for Forensic Medicine. She entered the building through a glass door, buzzed the intercom and waited.
    ‘Anya Crichton, here to see Jeff Sales.’
    The door opened and Anya followed the sound of the Stryker saw, which echoed through the corridor to the postmortem suite change rooms.
    According to the clock on the wall, she was due to give an opinion in another coronial inquest in three hours. That left enough time to chase the Deab girl’s histopathology, report back to Dan Brody and return to town. That was, if everything went to plan.
    She exchanged her navy suit for blue surgical scrubs, pulled on a couple of shoe protectors and headed back along the corridor to the autopsy suite. She entered and cupped her hand over her nose. Only a decomposing body could smell that bad.
    Holding the saw over the corpse was Gilbert Rowlands, the longest-serving pathology technician at the WSCFM.
    The room was brighter than normal, with spotlights glaring over each of the eight stainless steel tables.

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    Gilbert interrupted the rib cage separation to collect something from the body’s hair with a pair of tweezers and held it up to his plastic goggles.
    ‘Thought you’d got away, didn’t you,’ he said through a charcoal-filter face mask. The technician dissected each body and laid out the organs before the pathologist arrived. Collecting insect specimens on the job was a bonus.
    ‘Hi Gilbert, is Jeff Sales around?’ Anya almost shouted through her hand.
    ‘No one here but me and Ruby. They found her in a deck chair on her roof. And judging by these maggots, she’s been working on her tan for quite a while.’ Gilbert used the tweezers to transfer an insect from the woman’s eye to a jar containing a small amount of organic material. A second, ethanol-filled jar sat sealed on the bench beside the table.
    ‘Hey, did you hear about the intern who certified her?’
    Gilbert said, as though telling the first line in a joke. ‘Threw up for half an hour outside Cas.’
    According to hospital tradition, the most junior doctor was sent to certify bodies. She’d always remember climbing into the van and unzipping a body bag for the first time. A junior constable claimed the vagrant found floating in a local river had been there only a few hours, not two weeks as was later determined. One of the nurses offered a hospital stethoscope, but Anya had insisted on using her new Littmans Cardiology brand to listen for a heartbeat. When it sank through the chest wall, her initiation had begun.
    ‘Any idea where Jeff might be? I am supposed to meet him here.’
    ‘I don’t need him until I’m done weighing the organs.’
    Outside the autopsy suite, out of habit, Anya washed her hands in the corridor sink. Jeff Sales arrived wearing scrubs and white gumboots.
    ‘What’s with the spotlights? Looks like a solarium in there,’
    Anya said.
    ‘Impressive, aren’t they?’ Jeff grinned. ‘They’ve only been in 58
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    a couple of weeks.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘A real coup, considering we didn’t pay for them.’
    ‘Don’t tell me there’s a benefactor,’ Anya said.
    ‘No, the show put them in.’ The interruption of a television crew filming a crime series based on a female pathologist was the talk of the hospital.
    ‘Weren’t the fluorescent lights bright enough?’
    ‘On the contrary, they thought it was too light. Apparently, the viewing public expects morgues to be dark