Free The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller by Noreen Ayres

slid open as if by a bidding hand. The odor of preservation chemicals rolled out. “I have to get samples to take back to the lab,” I said.
    “Later, then,” Boyd said, by way of goodbye.
    Glancing at Lenore, still busy with the meth death, I stepped inside the cooler. Full house. Bodies lay on gurneys wedged under long shelves horizontal to the wall, with more on the shelves. On a shorter shelf were the tiny forms of two unclaimed babies wrapped in cold plastic instead of soft layettes. Next to them, fetuses hunched nut-like in formaldehyde solution within glass gallon jugs.
    I found the vials of blood for Dr. Schaeffer in two labeled paper sacks sealed with green tape, then went to a supply room to get similar packaging to hold my bullet in its case. When I came out Dr. Schaeffer was near the gurney weigh-station doffing her protective clothing. When she slipped off the hair hood, her ash-blonde hair, close in color to my own, swung around a square jaw. Diamonds in a setting that spelled “Lenore” winked from a gold chain around her neck. Her soft pink dress made her look like any preschooler’s mom, not someone who was only a moment ago up to her elbows in blood. At the end of the hall, holding the inner door for me, she said, “Three months, Smokey. Can I last?”
    “Sure you can.” I signed out at the desk. She didn’t.
    “If I don’t ace the bar exam on the first try, I don’t know what I’ll do.” She held the door to the parking lot for me too. “This July. I just have to show the sonofabitch.”
    “That would be your husband.”
    “You met him once, didn’t you?”
    “He seemed nice enough to me,” I said, aware that people don’t want you to verify their own bad opinion of an ex. It reflects badly on their choices.
    We were by the line of cars parked in front of the building. I stopped at mine. The sky was a pale gray slate. A chilly mist blew in our faces. “Should’ve brought my sweater,” Lenore said, rubbing her arms as she looked back toward the morgue. She was still on the sidewalk when I unlocked my car door.
    I said, “Why don’t you go take your buddy in there to the movies,” I said. “Or the tennis courts. Something.”
    “Not yet,” she said, and gave a quick smile and turned away.
    As I pulled out, a white bus with a sheriff’s star on the front stopped at the gate to the Intake Center. Inside were inmates arriving from outlying detention facilities or returning from a work crew, many with Hispanic features under shocks of dark hair. Some might be from this same area of modest frame houses. As children they may have walked these same sidewalks to school. How many would wind up like the two young Hispanics I just left, covered with white plastic and lined up like piano keys in a morgue refrigeration room, feet exposed and a toe wearing a red-bordered WARNING tag attached by thin wire to forbid unauthorized disposition. Even in death, captive.
    For my Juan Does presently being showered down for the final time outside the back doors of the morgue, the strenuous swim was over. They would not go on to wash cars, bus tables, work fields, pound nails, cut lawns, and join in a massive labor force without which the texture of Southern California life would not be the same.
    Some of the men on the bus were gazing my way; others stared straight ahead. In a moment I would be in motion, driving away, free, making the most minor of choices they could not, while next to me sat the sacks holding human blood and the small, quick, cruel agent of another human’s destruction.
    I felt a surge of futility, as I often do when coming away from an autopsy. No one escapes. Does any demise matter over any other? It’s easy to reach a place where it seems nothing about avictim’s life has any more meaning than its violent end, as though that person were merely born to be murdered.
    I drove, thinking about Lenore Schaeffer struggling toward her Great Escape and wondered if there were such a