Free Remains Silent by Michael Baden, Linda Kenney Page B

filled by telling her about Pete Harrigan and the cancer that took his life. When they arrived, Jake went right to the morgue, leaving Mycroft in the car with his favorite chew toy and a bowl of spring water and depositing Manny in the adjacent waiting room, intended for families brought to identify their loved ones. It was a depressing little room, with flickering fluorescent lights and no windows. Manny felt her excitement disappear, replaced by the grim reality of death and sorrow. She wondered how a man like Jake could spend his life facing it. What tragedies had he seen? How did he defend himself against them? Death from old age usually requires no autopsy, she knew. So the deaths Jake contemplated were homicides, suicides, accidents lives cut short. She had seen a few dead bodies in her work and often felt she was their champion. But to handle them, to dwell on them? Unthinkable.
     
     
Manny?
     
     
She nearly jumped from her couch. Jake! You scared me. Finished so soon?
     
     
Havent started. Theres no diener.
     
     
Diener?
     
     
Autopsy assistant. Moves the body, sews it up when the MEs finished, helps with the stuff in between. The skin under his eyes was gray with fatigue. I just got off the phone with the coroner in the next county over. Hes running things here since Pete . . . since theres no Baxter County ME. He said the regular dieners out of town and they cant track down the backup man.
     
     
How long till they find him?
     
     
He gave her a small smile. She hoped it was meant to be charming.
     
     
Actually
     
     
She knew what was coming next.
     
     
     

MANNY HAD NEVER been to a live autopsy. It was the fitting end for a day in which she was dressed to kill. She was head-to-toe Chanel, even her scarf. The outfit was so chic Coco herself would die for it again. She had never considered herself a girlie girl. Since her parents had only one child, her Italian father had raised her like a son. She had learned to fish, throw dice and a football, and fix her own electrical outlets. She liked martial arts, James Bond, and Saturday afternoon monster flicks. When she was little, her father had taught her to play in the sandbox with the boys; now she competed in a rather larger arena.
     
     
Theresa Alessiss daughter found Theresa lying dead on the kitchen floor and called an ambulance, Jake explained. The paramedics tried CPR. Useless. They telecommunicated with the emergency-room doctor, who pronounced her dead, and brought the body here. Nobodys touched her since. If this were the city, the diener wouldve taken her out of the body bag, removed her clothes, and prepared her for autopsy. Here, shes still in the body bag. Since we dont know what happened to her, we have to do the examination carefully.
     
     
He led her through the morgue door, which swung shut behind them.
     
     
Oh my God!
     
     
The autopsy room was far smaller than the one Jake was used to, but it had the same look. A metal table stood in its center, the foot end over a sink and a black body bag on top of it, one that was clearly inhabited. Two white body bags, equally occupied, lay on stretchers against the wall.
     
     
Whats the matter? Jake asked.
     
     
There are dead people in those bags, just lying around.
     
     
He gave her a look. Its a morgue.
     
     
And that smell!
     
     
Formaldehyde used to preserve biological specimens.
     
     
Its awful. Is it safe?
     
     
Some people think it can cause cancer. Ive been breathing it for twenty years, and it hasnt done me any harm yet.
     
     
But have you tried to have children?
     
     
Another look. Very funny. Lets check on the body. He grasped the zipper pull of the black body bag, which bore a heavy paper tag that read ALESSIS, THERESA, along with an identification number. Right corpse. Time for us to get changed.
     
     
How come those other bodies are in white bags? Manny asked.
     
     
Whites used in hospitals up here. The bodies are probably waiting to be shipped to a