Free Rogue Angel 53: Bathed in Blood by Alex Archer Page A

a “Doe, Jane,” but came up empty. She had no idea what the Magyar equivalent would be.
    Maybe this wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought.
    Checking the other cabinets revealed that they, too, were arranged alphabetically, and with that information she was able to deduce that each drawer held the cases for a particular year, with the most recent being at the far end. Unfortunately, she didn’t find what she was looking for there, either.
    Almost five minutes had gone by since she’d first stepped foot in the morgue, and Annja was starting to get anxious. The longer she stayed here, the greater her chances of being caught.
    Turning her back on the filing cabinets, she moved to the desk. She sat in Petrova’s chair and began riffling through the folders on top. One of them caught her eye, and when she pulled it from the stack, nearly knocking over a cup of moldy coffee in the process, she saw that instead of a name this file had a number written on its tab. Curious, she opened it.
    Inside she found a report on a twenty-eight-year-old male who had been discovered dead of a drug overdose. Or, at least, that was what she thought it said; she knew a few words in Czech, and Slovakian was quite similar. She looked for the section of the report where the individual’s name would be listed and found the spaces blank.
    That was when it clicked.
    The number was for those cases where the subject was unidentified.
    She searched through the stack and quickly checked the handful of files that were identified by number only, glancing at the photograph stapled to the inside left of each folder. They were split roughly between men and women, but none of them were the woman she was looking for.
    She sat back, flummoxed and irritated, wondering where Petrova had put the file. She tried to remember if he’d had anything in his hands; perhaps he’d taken the file with him.
    No, his hands had been empty. She was certain of it.
    Which meant it had to be here somewhere.
    She leaned forward, deep in thought, and only realized the doors to the morgue had opened when they banged against the interior wall. With seconds to avoid being seen, if she hadn’t been already, Annja did the only thing she could think of.
    She slipped underneath the desk.
    A male voice called out in Slovakian. Annja only recognized one word—
Petrova
—but it wasn’t too hard to figure out what was being said given the tone and inflection. “Dr. Petrova, are you in there?” or something similar was her guess.
    She’d left the door to the office partially closed. Now she heard it squeak as someone pushed it fully open and footfalls sounded close by.
    “Petrova?”
    Annja held her breath, praying that whoever was standing on the other side of the desk didn’t notice the damage to the doorjamb or find anything irregular about the fact that the lights had been left on in Petrova’s absence. Something thumped onto the desktop, making her jump slightly, but she didn’t give herself away.
    Seconds passed and Annja didn’t hear anything more. Had Petrova’s visitor left the room?
    She let her breath out slowly and waited a few more seconds before climbing quietly out from beneath the desk.
    No one was in sight.
    As she got to her feet, her gaze fell on the manila envelope in the center of Petrova’s desk. Picking it up, she opened it and slid out the file it contained.
    The dead woman’s face stared back at her from a picture inside the file.
    Annja pulled out her cell phone and quickly took pictures of each page. When she was finished, she returned the file to the envelope and put the envelope back on the desk.
    Five minutes later she was exiting the hospital and heading for her hotel, wondering how she was going to get the pages translated.
    * * *
    T ELLING HERSELF SHE didn’t really have a choice, Annja gritted her teeth and dialed the number. The phone rang twice and then a smooth male voice said, “Annja. What a pleasant surprise.”
    “Hello,