“I haven’t worked out there yet. Everyone that goes is in such good shape, I thought I should lose a few pounds before I start.”
“I don’t think they’d care, Herb. And if they do, just impress them by flashing your gold card.”
“You’re not being very supportive here, Jack.”
“Sorry.” I picked up a file to fan myself. “It’s the heat.”
“You need to get in shape. I’ve got guest passes. They’ve got Pilates at the club. I’m thinking of taking a class after work.”
Herb smiled, biting into a rice cake. His smile faded as he chewed.
“Damn. These things taste like Styrofoam.”
The phone rang.
“Jack? Phil Blasky. There’s, um, a bit of a situation here at County.”
County meant the Cook County Morgue. Phil was the Chief Medical Examiner.
“I know this is going to sound like a paperwork problem . . .” He paused, sucking in some air through his teeth. “. . . but I’ve checked and double-checked.”
“What’s wrong, Phil?”
“We have an extra body. Well, actually, some extra body parts.”
Phil explained. I told him we’d stop by, and then shared the information with Herb.
“Could be some kind of prank. County are a strange bunch.”
“Maybe. Phil doesn’t think so.”
“Did he say what the extra parts were?”
“Arms.”
Benedict thought this over.
“Maybe someone is simply lending him a hand.”
I stood up and pinched the center of my blouse, fanning in some air. “We’ll take your car.”
Herb recently bought a sporty new Camaro Z28, an expensive reminder of his refusal to age gracefully. Silly as he looked behind the wheel, the car had great air-conditioning, whereas my 1988 Nova did not.
We left my office and made our way downstairs and outside. It was like stepping into a toaster. Though it couldn’t have been much hotter than the district building, the blistering sun amplified everything. A bank across the street flashed the current temp on its sidewalk sign. One hundred and one. And the sign was in the shade.
Herb pressed a gizmo on his key chain and his car beeped and started on its own. It was red, naturally, and so heavily waxed that the glare coming off it hurt my eyes. I climbed in the passenger side and angled both vents on my face while Herb babied the Camaro out of its parking space.
“Zero to sixty in five point two seconds.”
“Have you taken it up to sixty yet?”
“I’m still breaking it in.”
He put on a pair of Ray-Bans and pulled onto Addison. I closed my eyes and luxuriated in the cool air. We were at County all too soon.
Cook County Morgue was located on Harrison in Chicago’s medical district, near Rush-Presbyterian Hospital. It rose two stories, all dirty white stone and tinted windows. Herb pulled around back into a circular driveway, and parked next to the curb.
“I hate coming here.” Herb frowned, his mustache drooping like a walrus. “I can never get the smell out of my clothes.”
Years ago, when my mother walked a beat, cops would smear whiskey on their upper lip to combat the stench of the morgue.
Sanitation had improved since then; cooler temps, better ventilation, greater attention to hygiene. But the smell still stuck with you.
I made do with some cherry lip balm, a small dab under each nostril. I passed the tube to Herb.
“Cherry? Don’t you have menthol?”
“It’s a hundred degrees out. I wasn’t worried about windburn.”
He sniffed the balm, then handed it back without applying any.
“It smells too good. I’d eat it.”
The heat hit me like a blow dryer when I got out of the car.
A cop walked over and eyed the Camaro—there were always cops around County. He was young and tan and didn’t give me a second glance, preferring to talk to Herb.
“Five speed?”
“Six. Three hundred ten horses.”
The uniform whistled, running his finger along some pinstriping.
“What’s under the hood, five point seven?”
Herb nodded. “Want to see?”
I left the boys with their toy and walked into the entrance, to the right of the automatic double doors.
The lobby, if you could call it that, consisted of a counter, a door, and a glass partition. Behind the counter was a solitary black man in hospital scrubs.
“Phil Blasky?”
He shot his thumb at the door. “In the fridge.”
I signed in, received a plastic badge, and entered the main room.
Death overpowered the cherry, so strong I could taste it in the back of my mouth. It had a sickly-sour smell, like rotting carnations.
To the right, a mortician in an ill-fitting suit hefted a body off a table and onto a rolling cot. When he finished, he pulled off his latex gloves and shot them, rubber-band-style, into a garbage can.
Next to him, resting on a stainless steel scale built into the floor, was a naked male corpse, grossly obese, with burns covering most of his torso. The LCD screen on the wall blinked 450 lbs. He smelled like bacon.
I held my breath and pulled open the heavy aluminum door, which led into the cooler.
The stench worsened in here. Bleach and blood and urine and meat gone bad.
Cook County Morgue was the largest in the Midwest. Indigents, unclaimed bodies, accident victims, suicides, and cases of foul play all came through these doors. It held about three hundred bodies.
Just my luck, they were running at capacity.
To my left, corpses lay stacked on wire shelves warehouse-style, five high and thirty wide. Stretching across the main floor was a traffic jam of tables and carts, all occupied. Some of the dead were covered with black plastic bags. Some weren’t.
Unlike movie depictions of morgues, these bodies didn’t lie down in peaceful, supine positions. Many of them had kept the poses they died in; arms and legs jutting out, curled up on their sides, necks at funny angles. They also didn’t look like a Hollywood conception of a corpse. A real dead person had very little color. Regardless of race, the skin always seemed to fade into a light blue, and the eyes were dull and cloudy, like dusty snow globes.
The temperature hovered at fifty degrees, fans blowing around the frigid, foul air. It chilled my sweat in a most unpleasant way.
To the right, in an adjacent room, an autopsy was being performed. I focused on the figure holding the bone saw, didn’t recognize him, and continued to look around.
I found Phil Blasky near the back of the room, and walked up to him carefully; the floors were sticky with various fluids, and all of them clashed with my Gucci pumps.
“Phil.”
“Jack.”
Phil was leaning over a steel table, squinting at something. I stood next to him, trying not to gape at the nude body of a toddler, half wrapped in a black plastic bag, lying next to him. The child was so rigid and pale, he appeared to be made out of wax.
“I went through every stiff in the place a second time. No one is missing arms.”
I glanced down at the table. The arms were severed at the shoulder, laid out with their fingertips touching, the elbows bending in a big M. They belonged to a female, Caucasian, with fake pink nails. A pair of black handcuffs connected them at the wrists. There was very little blood, but the jagged edges to the wounds suggested they didn’t come off easily.
“I suspect an axe.” Phil poked at the wound with a gloved finger. “See the mark along the humerus, here? It took two swings to sever the appendage.”
“It doesn’t look humorous to me.” Benedict had snuck up behind us.
“Funny,” Phil said. “Never heard that one before, working with dead bodies for twenty years. Next will you make some kind of gimme a hand joke?”
“I did that one already,” Herb said. “How about: It appears the suspect has been disarmed?”
&nbs
p; “She was always such a cut-up?”
“Would you like a shoulder to cry on?”
“Can I go out on a limb here?”
“At least she’ll get severance pay?”
Phil cocked an eyebrow at Herb.
“Severance?” Herb said. “Sever?”
I tuned out their act and got a closer look at the arms. Snapping on a latex glove, I pushed back the cold, hard fingers and peered at the handcuffs. They were Smith and Wesson model number 100.
“Those are police issue.” Benedict poked at them with a pencil. “I’ve got a set just like them.”
So did every other cop in our district, and probably in Chicago. They were also sold at sporting goods stores, sex shops, and Army/Navy surplus outlets, plus a zillion places over the Internet. Impossible to trace. But maybe we’d get lucky and the owner had etched his name and address on the . . .
I inhaled sharply.
This couldn’t be right.
On the cuffs, next to the keyhole, were two small initials painted in red nail polish. I tugged out my .38, holstered under my blazer, and looked at the butt. It had the same two red letters.
JD.
“Herb.” I kept my voice steady. “Those handcuffs are mine.”
CHAPTER 2
I treated the morgue like a crime scene, calling in the CSU, cordoning off the area, gathering a list of employees to question.
No one had seen anything.
The Crime Scene Unit, consisting of Officer Dan Rogers—tall, blond, goatee—on samples and Officer Scott Hajek—short and compact, blue eyes hidden behind glasses—on photographs. They were young, but knew their stuff.
Rogers scanned the arms with an ALS, and they glowed flawlessly pale under the high-intensity light.
“Not a thing.” Rogers scratched at his beard.
Unusual. Under Alternate Light Source, even the tiniest bit of foreign matter glowed like a hot coal. Particles, hair, dirt, bone fragments, blood, semen, bruises, bite marks—they all fluoresced.
Dan bent down, his nose to one of the wrists.
“They’ve been washed. Smells like bleach.”
“Are you sure? The whole morgue smells like bleach.”
Rogers, in a move characteristic of his thoroughness, touched the tip of his tongue to the arm.
“Tastes like bleach too. Probably diluted with water, or it would have mottled the skin.”
“Get a sample to burn. And go brush your teeth.”
Rogers dug into his breast pocket for some cinnamon gum. After popping three pieces, he moved the soft blue light closer to the fingers on the right hand.
“I have a slight indentation on the index finger. Looks like she usually wore a ring.”
Hajek brushed past me, zooming in on the fingers. He snapped a close-up.
“I missed the taste test.” He playfully shoved Rogers. “Can I get one with you sucking on the fingers?”
Rogers showed him a finger of a different kind. Hajek’s shutter clicked.
“When you’re done scraping the fingernails, I need one of the fakes.”
“Finished already, Lieut.”
Rogers snapped off a pink press-on nail, bagged it, and handed it to me. Then he used a scalpel to take skin samples from each arm, putting them into glass tubes.
“Nothing on the handcuffs?”
“Wiped clean. I can take them back and fume them to make sure.”
“Do it. You’ll need these.”
I took the cuff keys from my ring, where they’d been attached for the last year. Rogers undid the handcuffs and placed them in an evidence bag. Then he brought the ALS around.
“No abrasions on the wrist.”
Hajek moved in, shooting a few frames.
“Thanks, guys,” I said. “If you can get the pictures on my desk tomorrow, along with the prints.”
“I’m on it.”
Rogers dug into his bag, removing fingerprint ink and two sets of cards. I left him to his work and went off in search of Herb.
Benedict stood in the lobby, talking to one of the attendants. Herb’s hand cradled a snack-size potato chip bag, half full. The other half was in his mouth.
He must have noticed the question on my face when I approached, because he said, “They’re fat-free.”
“Herb—it’s a morgue.”
“My Pilates instructor told me to eat small snacks several times a day to keep my metabolism up.”
He offered the bag.
“Try one. They’re baked. One-third less sodium too.”
I politely declined. “Get anything?”
“They run three eight-hour shifts, twenty-four hours. I questioned the four attendants here, and no one saw anything. Full list of employees is in my pocket.”
“Won’t help.”
The thin black man standing next to Herb offered his hand. I took it.
“And why won’t it help, Mr. . . . ?”
“Graves. Carl Graves. All them bodies come here in bags. Cops and EMTs wrap them up before dropping them off. Be real easy to put some extra parts in a bag, wheel it in, then sneak them out. No one would see a thing.”
“How many bodies are dropped off every day?”
“Depends. Sometimes, five or six. Sometimes, a few dozen.”
“Who has access to the morgue?”
“Cops, docs, morticians. Some days fifty people sign in.”
“How many employees?”
“Around twenty, with the ME’s staff.”
I frowned. If the arms had been here for a few days before being discovered, we could be dealing with several hundred suspects.
“Thanks, Mr. Graves.” I handed him my card. “If you hear anything, let us know.”
Graves nodded, walked off.
“Anything with the arms?” Herb asked, lips flecked with bits of greasy potato.
“Nothing, other than the fact that they’re my handcuffs.”
“Should I read you your rights?”
“Not yet. First you have to trick me into confessing.”
“Gotcha. So . . . was the rest of the body hard to dispose of?”
“Yeah. I’ll never get those stains out of my carpet.”
My cell rang, saving me from further interrogation.
“Daniels.”
“Ms. Daniels? This is Dr. Evan Kingsbury at St. Mary’s Hospital in Miami. Mary Streng was just admitted into the Emergency Room. You’re listed on her insurance as a contact.”
My heart dropped into my stomach.
“She’s my mother. What happened?”
“She’s sedated. I know you’re in Chicago, but is it possible for you to get here? She needs you right now.”
CHAPTER 3
I hadn’t realized how fragile my mother had become until I saw her in that hospital bed, an IV cruelly jabbed into her pale, thin arm. She couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, eyes that were once bright and active now sunken and sparkless.
This couldn’t be the woman who raised me, the tough-but-loving beat cop who played both mother and father in my upbringing. The woman who taught me how to read and how to shoot. The woman with such inner strength that I modeled my life on hers.
“The doctors are overreacting, Jacqueline. I’ll be fine.” She offered a weak smile in a voice that wasn’t hers.
“Your hip is broken, Mom. You almost died.”
“Didn’t come close.”
I held her hand, feeling the fragile bones under the skin. My veneer started to crack.
“If Mr. Griffin hadn’t made the police break down your door, you’d still be lying on the bathroom floor.”
“Nonsense. I would have gotten out of there soon enough.”
“Mom . . . you were there for four days.” The horror of it stuck in my throat. I’d called her yesterday—our twice weekly call—and when she hadn’t answered, I assumed she was out with Mr. Griffin or one of the other elderly men she occasionally saw.
“I had water from the bathtub. I could have lasted another
week or two.”
“Aw, Mom . . .”
The tears came. My mother patted the back of my hand with her free one.
“Oh, Jacqueline. Don’t be upset. This is what happens when you get old.”
“I should have been there.”
“Nonsense. You live a thousand miles away. This is my dumb fault for slipping in the shower.”
“I called you yesterday. When you didn’t pick up, I should have . . .”
My mother shushed me, softly.
“Sweetheart, you know you can’t play the what-if game, especially in our profession. This isn’t the first time this has happened.”
She couldn’t have hurt me more if she’d tried.
“How many times, Mom?”
“Jacqueline—”
“How many times?”
“Three or four.”
I didn’t need to hear that. “But you never hurt yourself, right?”
“I may have had a cast on my elbow for a while.”
I fought not to yell. “And you never told me?”
“I’m not your responsibility.”
“Yes . . . you are.”
She sighed, her face so sad.
“Jacqueline, when your father died, you were the only family I had left. You were also the only family that I ever needed. I would never, ever allow myself to become a burden to you.”
I sniffled, found my center.
“Well, get used to it. As soon as you’re released, you’re moving in with me.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Please, Mom.”
“No. I have a very active social life. How could I get intimate with a gentleman when my daughter is in the other room?”
Reluctantly, I played my trump card.
“I spoke with your doctors. They don’t feel that you’re able to take care of yourself.”
Mom’s face hardened.
“What? That’s ridiculous.”
“They’ll only release you from the hospital into my custody.”
“Was it that Dr. Kingsbury? Smarmy little bastard, talking to me like I’m a three-year-old.”
“You don’t have a choice, Mom.”
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