Free Crime Rave by Sezin Koehler Page A

Examiner Guy Severin, now accompanied by several open-mouthed morgue assistants and a host of others who heard about the growing body parts, is more and more frightened as he watches the entities become whole. His greatest fear ever since becoming a mortician was that one day he’d be performing an autopsy or embalming and the corpse would open its eyes. Then he read a case in the New England Journal of Medicine about a man who was bit by a snake with paralytic venom who ended up being totally conscious during the start of his own autopsy and just by chance was able to open his eyes before getting his ribcage sawed open.
    Anxiety courses through Severin’s body, adrenaline makes his hands shake, certain that any moment one of these people will sit up and start talking. Severin thinks he’s going to have a heart attack in that moment. No, he’s sure of it. He shudders, trying to get a grip.
    Red Feather and Günn burst into the room. Their jaws hit the floor as they see and hear the creaking of what were body parts that are now mostly bodies.
    “No fucking way.” Günn’s left eye starts twitching again.
    “Way,” Severin responds. “Can I go now?” I am freaking the fuck out.
    Red Feather flashes with irritation. “No Sev, help us get these bodies loaded up. Ambulances waiting outside. All of you: Move it!” The group jumps to action. “Make sure they’re all strapped down properly. No room for error here.”
    In moments the bodies are fully covered with plastic over the sheets, the black straps making zebra stripes over the gurneys. One by one, they’re wheeled out of the morgue, into the LA sun and placed in ambulances. Patrol cars not manning the explosion site wait to join the cavalcade.
    Red Feather and Günn take the lead, clearing traffic ahead of the ambulance train, sirens blaring all the way to the UCLA medical campus, where dozens of staff wait to greet them and hopefully catch a glimpse of one of the medical marvel bodies.
    “So much for keeping this on the down low,” Günn snickers.
    “The more people that see it, the less cuckoo our report’s gonna sound,” Red Feather retorts.
    “Touché.” Günn flips him the bird and feels her tension slightly ease.
    Red Feather parks the car and he and Günn step out, walking toward the line of ambulances. Unlike every other investigation they’ve worked on, nobody stops a single person from snapping photos. They’ll need all the documentation they can get.

7:00 AM Office of the Mayor
    T he Countess Barona, a pale and perfectly coiffed woman in her fifties dressed in a modern spin on Victorian fashion, high neck and lace bodice, taps the nails of her manicured hand on the armrest of the uncomfortable wooden chair in the mayor’s office. Their conversation is interrupted by the phone ringing off the hook. The tendons in her fingers creak and her joints crackle as she tattoos faster. The mayor glances over at her, frowning at the noise she makes. Barona smirks and only raps harder. She’s his biggest campaign contributor, and she deserves his undivided attention, not forced to sit here in this cheap chair that will surely give her some sort of rash, waiting while he dallies on the phone. Probably one of his boyfriends. The Countess snorts and starts drumming her high heel on the floor in an unpleasant counterpoint to her fingernails.
    “Be right there,” the mayor says hanging up the phone.
    Finally. She stops her rat-a-tatting.
    “Who, pray tell, was that?” the Countess hisses, “We are in the middle of something.”
    “What are you doing here anyway? In case you missed the morning news, there was a terrorist attack last night and the city’s in a state of emergency. And you’re here for what, idle chitchat?” Mayor Charles Ellis snaps, regrets it instantly. He’s too tired and too upset to think straight, having been up since just after the explosion at 1:00 AM, unable to get the number of possible dead from clanging about his brain.