Free Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues by Steven Womack Page A

Marsh. You did Fletcher, right?”
    “I was there. I was the one who did the on-scene. You were already gone by then.”
    “They took me down to E.R.”
    “So what do you want to know?”
    “What killed him, Marsh? What killed Conrad Fletcher?”
    “You know how much trouble I’d get in for divulging that?”
    I leaned forward in the chair, a self-conscious attempt to convey sincerity with body language. I’m never able to pull off that sort of thing, but I keep trying.
    “Marsha, I just want to know because, well, I’m involved. It’ll be a matter of public record eventually, anyway. Let me know what I’m up against. Whatever you tell me doesn’t go any further than this office.”
    She stood up, thumbed through a stack of file folders, and pulled out one near the top. “C’mon. I’m only doing this because Dr. Henry’s out of the office and Charlie’s out running a D.O.A. car wreck.”
    She walked past me quickly, her lab coat brushing against my arm. I followed her out of the office, past Kay Delacorte’s desk, and through the door into the autopsy room. Two tilting tables with bright overhead lights sat shiny, cold, and clean. Off to the left were the tool kits laid out on white towels, the brutal Stryker saw on its side, on a shelf by itself. Marsha’sheels clicked sharply on the tile floor as we walked out of the autopsy room into the receiving room.
    “We got him in here just after midnight. I grabbed a couple hours’ sleep, then came in at five to do the autopsy. He’s in the cooler now. The mortician’s supposed to pick him up around two. You ready for this?”
    “Who else you got in there?”
    “Suicide, came in about five thirty this morning. We haven’t even cleaned him up yet. But it’s not too bad. Small caliber under the chin. He’s in one piece.” Her left eyebrow tilted up. “Mostly …”
    Jesus, I thought, I hope I don’t pass out on her.
    “C’mon,” she grinned. “At least this one hasn’t got a steering column through his chest.”
    “Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”
    She pulled the heavy metal latch on the cooler door, and we walked into the refrigerated room. Unlike in the movies and on television, this morgue didn’t have a bunch of neat shiny drawers, each with a sterile body laying there in repose. This was just a big refrigerator, with a bunch of gurneys scattered in loose rows all over the place. On one to our right, a young man was spread out barefooted, worn jeans, blue work shirt pulled open and splattered with a surprisingly small amount of blood. And below his chin, a dark ugly hole lined with burn marks.
    Toe tags, the latest fashion for today’s teen.
    Farther in and to our left, Conrad Fletcher was on another gurney. I hesitated for a second, drawing in a deep breath, steeling myself. Even from eight or ten feet away, I could see the ugly Y-shaped cut of the autopsy surgeon’s knife, the one that started at each shoulder, met at the center of the torso, then continued down. I’d never seen an autopsy performed, but I knew how one worked. And I knew the body lying over on that table was empty of guts and of brain. Whatever made Conrad Fletcher Conrad Fletcher was long gone, and the stiff blue-gray slab on the table was just residue. I told myself that as I stood there, a feebleminded attempt to distance myself from the awfulness that I knew the corpse represented.
    “You okay?” Marsha asked.
    “Yeah, I just needed a second. I never could get used to this.”
    “C’mon, Harry, this one really isn’t that bad. You’ve seen worse.”
    “I know. Just been awhile.”
    She walked over to the table. There was a small sheet draped roughly over his crotch, but modesty was something that was neither called for nor particularly appreciated here. No neat white sheet covering him over head to toe. Just something thrown over his privates, almost as an afterthought.
    She crossed around the gurney and stood, arms folded over the file in front of her. I