Free The Deadly Embrace by Robert J. Mrazek Page A

still there, Inspector?” she asked as J.P. resumed applying her makeup.
    “I’m here,” he said wearily. There was another pause before he added, “You should know that Golders Green is also the city’s largest crematorium.”
    “Oh no,” she said.
    “I will probably be fired for telling you this, but I would strongly advise you to hurry.”
    As she headed toward the door, Nicholas Ainsley was standing at Joss Dunbar’s desk.
    “Look here,” he called out to one of the military policemen in the corridor. “This desk has been jimmied, too.”
    Joining him behind Joss’s desk, Liza could see that the metal lock bar on the right bank of drawers had been gouged away. Turning to the sergeant of the security detail, she said, “I want this room sealed off until I return. No one is to touch anything.”
    “Under whose authority?” demanded the sergeant, looking at her with obvious skepticism.
    “Major Sam Taggart,” she said.
    “Yes, sir,” he said.

CHAPTER 7

    T raffic slowed to a crawl near Buckingham Palace and came to a complete stop at Green Park. British military police had blocked all civilian traffic to allow passage of another seemingly endless military convoy. Although Liza’s driver was a native Londoner and claimed to know several alternative routes to Golders Green, his efforts were to no avail. Most of the residential neighborhoods in the north of the city were choked with fire engines and rescue vehicles
    “Please hurry…. Please hurry,” she kept repeating as they inched past scores of indistinguishable streets filled with identical row houses, many reduced to charred ruins from the recent bombing raids.
    “I’m trying the best I can, Lieutenant,” he said, “but it is four bloody miles any way you slice it.”
    Nearly an hour after they started, the staff car pulled up at the side entrance to what looked to Liza like a Charles Dickens-era prison. Twelve-foot-high soot-covered walls surrounded two enormous brick buildings. As she approached the entrance, Liza glanced up to see black, oily smoke wafting skyward from a circular brick chimney that towered over the roof of the second building.
    When she stepped inside, her nose was assaulted by the overpowering smell of a bleach-based disinfectant. It could not mask the cloying odor of decaying corpses coming from a large holding room off to the left. Liza headed straight for the front desk, where an elderly woman with a white doily pinned to the front of her rose-colored dress was fanning her face with a folded newspaper.
    “Sorry, dear,” she said, “but we just got another delivery from the raid two nights ago. Poor lads was trapped inside a ship they was unloading that took a direct hit.”
    “I’m Lieutenant Marantz, and I’m here to participate in an autopsy,” said Liza, showing the woman her identity card. “The decedent’s name was Lieutenant Jocelyn Dunbar.”
    “If it’s military, dear, you’ve gawt to see Captin Sleeves,” she said. “‘E’s down that ‘allway over there.”
    “Thank you,” said Liza.
    As Liza started down the hall, the woman called after her: “A piece of advice for a girl as pretty as you are, dear ...‘E’s got loose hands, if you know wot I mean.”
    Liza smiled back at her and said, “Yes … thank you.”
    An officer was standing in a shadowy doorway about halfway down the corridor. As Liza approached him, she saw that he was talking to the young scrubwoman who was mopping the floor of the office.
    “Captain Sleeves?” she asked, coming up to him.
    Over his shoulder, Liza could see that the girl’s blouse was unbuttoned and her cheeks were red with apparent humiliation.
    “What is it?” he demanded without turning to look at her. Although he wore the uniform coat of a British Army officer, there were no badges or campaign ribbons on it.
    “I am Lieutenant Marantz,” she said, holding out her military identity card, “and I am here to participate in the autopsy of Jocelyn