Free Close to the Bone by Lisa Black

a heart attack waiting to happen, and the autopsy confirmed it. She had always wondered how, even with a partner, he managed to heft dead weights on to gurneys without becoming one himself.

    His body had a few bruises to the arms and two to the ribs, one rather harsh one on the left clavicle, thought to have occurred as he stumbled around in pain or possibly looking for a phone, according to the scribbled notes of the responding officer. There were no signs of foul play; the door was unlocked but closed, victim’s wallet still in his pocket. Cash and two guns were found in the bedroom, undisturbed. Neighbors had not seen or heard anything unusual that evening, though neighbors tended to keep their observations to themselves in that corner of town. Discretion being the better part of valor, and all that.
    George had died on a Saturday night, so there had been no need to clear the building since there was only a skeleton staff present on Sunday anyway. The night-shift deskmen hadn’t been particularly close to him since they worked at different times and so would have been expected to suck it up. Dr Harris had been assigned that weekend, probably complaining the entire time that a former employee should have known enough to die during business hours.
    Theresa pulled out the source of her brain twinge, the crime scene photos. George had not been much of a housekeeper, and his home had many obstructions which could cause a fall – stacks of newspapers, empty boxes, an abandoned mop, spilled liquids and scattered shoes. It didn’t quite qualify for an episode of Hoarders , however, and the clutter had some sort of order to it. The newspapers were stacked, and the boxes set parallel to the wall. George had probably considered the place rather tidy.
    Except for the corner of the living room used as a home office, and the bedroom.
    A cheap computer desk held a dusty monitor, yet more stacks of paper, three staplers and a coffee can brimming with pens and pencils. A clean end of the desk had a small mountain of sheets and notes on the floor underneath it, almost as if one stack had fallen over or had been gone through. Theresa could see a two-drawer file cabinet, similar to Dr Reese’s, except that instead of glossy walnut, George had a cheap metal one with scratches and some deep dents. It had been emptied, its contents in one large heap next to it.

    She studied the photos, then turned each over one by one. She wondered why they had even been printed – most scene photos weren’t in this digital age, when doctors and other people with access could view them on their computers, zooming in and out at will. (Theresa had access only to cases with samples assigned to Trace Evidence; simply browsing through death scenes out of morbid curiosity was not allowed … The medical examiner’s office really did try to preserve the privacy and the dignity of the deceased.)
    Certain aspects of the scene sorted themselves out as she studied it. The living room coffee table had stacks of playing cards and magazines next to an array of remotes for the home entertainment system. Cardboard boxes had been stacked behind the sofa in a nearly perfect rectangle of bricks – apparently, George spent way too much time on the home shopping channels. But the file cabinet and the desk drawer had everything removed from them and put in a condensed but not neat pile.
    The kitchen: the back half of the counter had cereal boxes, a blender, a toaster, a knife block, and so on and so forth packed into a continuous block from one wall to the next. The kitchen table had been similarly loaded up to three-quarters of its capacity, with the remaining quarter left as pristine as the front half of the counter.
    The bathroom: medicine cabinet contents undisturbed (all over-the-counter, basic first-aid kind of stuff – no syringes, no industrial-sized jugs of sleeping pills, no worn bottles of expired Xanax such as addicts carry around to lend themselves legitimacy