I sat silently for another couple of minutes. Why the hell had I told him about my mom and her abuse? Because for a short time he’d been almost nice to me? Great. He treated me like a normal person, so of course I had to make sure he knew I wasn’t normal.
Taking a deep breath, I stood and returned to the morgue. After pulling gloves on over the gauze, I finished getting everything ready for the autopsy.
Dr. Leblanc returned as I was getting the body of Brenda Barnes onto the table. I hid a smile as I noted he was deliberately noisy as he walked.
“Everything go all right?” he asked.
“Went great,” I said brightly. “All put back together.”
He glanced down at my hand. “Does it bother you? We can postpone until the morning, or I can get someone else to assist if it hurts too much.”
“Oh, no, I’m cool,” I assured him. “Allen did it in four stitches. Hardly aches at all.”
Dr. Leblanc gave an approving nod. “He’s good. I know you have your differences, but anything is better than the emergency room for such a minor wound.”
I got the body stripped of clothing and shoved the block under her shoulder blades so that her back was arched, making it easier for Dr. Leblanc to do the Y-incision and examine her organs. With her head dropped back I could see remnants of the zombie makeup—green, grey, and beige grease paint along her jawline, and square patches of lingering adhesive on her neck.
I stepped back and looked over at the pathologist.
“Why doesn’t he like me?” It bothered me now. It had never bothered me before, at least not like this. But now Allen was someone I could actually respect, and suddenly his opinion of me mattered. And that bothered me as well.
A grimace flickered across his face as he shook his head. “I don’t know, Angel. It’s been like that since day one.”
Taking a deep breath, I did my best to throw off the stupid desire to give a shit about Allen’s opinion of me. “Oh, well,” I said. “Brenda’s been waiting long enough. Let’s get to cutting.”
Chapter 7
The autopsy of Brenda Barnes went quickly, though Dr. Leblanc remained puzzled about the cause of death despite knowing what had killed her: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which was a condition where the heart muscle got too thick to pump blood properly, he’d explained. What he couldn’t figure out was how the heck she could’ve had that condition, since her medical records showed absolutely no sign of any thickening whatsoever in a full physical she had right before being laid off only a year earlier.
Muttering about misread test results and sloppy record keeping, he returned to the main building in the late afternoon, leaving me free to finally scarf down some brains to appease the insistent waves of hunger. I peeled up the gauze and tugged the sutures out of my healed flesh since they itched like crazy now, then taped the gauze back down. Later I’d figure out how to keep Allen from wanting to check it in a few days. Oh yeah, and figure out some way to explain why it healed without a scar. Maybe I could buy some miracle scar cream and claim it did the trick. I groaned and resisted the urge to beat my head against the cooler wall.
After making absolutely sure I was alone in the morgue, I retrieved an empty container from my cooler and “harvested” the brain of Ms. Barnes. During an autopsy the organs—including the brain—were removed, examined, and samples taken to be stored in formalin. Yet afterward, the organs weren’t returned to their former body cavity but instead ended up in a big plastic bag that was set between the body’s legs for its trip to the funeral home. Therefore, once the autopsy was complete, I snagged the brains out of the bags for my own consumption.
In fact, that’s how I’d met Kang. He’d confronted me after he noticed that the brains were missing from the body bags when they arrived at his funeral home.
I got the container safely tucked away in my cooler and back in my car without incident. The rest of my shift was blissfully dull with only one other body pickup—an apparently natural death of a man with a history of heart disease who showed all the signs of a heart attack. Once he was in the cooler and logged into the system, Derrel and I grabbed a bite to eat at Paco’s Tacos, then I returned to the morgue and managed to squeeze in several hours of studying. When midnight finally rolled around, I clocked out, left the van keys in the box by the door, and got the heck out of there.
Lightning followed by a tooth-rattling crash of thunder heralded the start of another goddamn downpour. I dashed to my scrappy little Honda, yanked the door open and clambered in. It sure as hell wasn’t worth much on the open market, but it ran—most of the time—and right now it scored points for being dry.
I jammed my keys into the ignition and cranked the car. Hunger—the normal human kind—reminded me that, though I’d gorged on tacos at seven, it was now after midnight. What the hell. A late night snack never hurt anyone. There wasn’t a whole lot open at this hour, but the flickering neon of Double D’s Diner promised destressifying pie and hot chocolate, plus the parking lot had only three other cars in it. Score.
The rain still pelted down in torrential sheets. I clutched my dorky raincoat around me, pulled down my hood, and made a dash for the slim awning over the door, then scowled blackly as the rain abruptly eased to a mere drizzle.
“Really?” I snarled up at the sky. “You couldn’t ease up thirty seconds earlier?”
I shook the worst of the water off and entered the diner, hung my raincoat on a peg beside two normal-yellow ones and a bedraggled umbrella, then headed to the counter. The waitress slid a mug of hot chocolate and a plate full of apple pie to me as soon as I sat down.
“You know me too damn well, Lurline,” I said with a laugh.
The rangy, well-worn woman grinned. “I know how you are when you get off work in the middle of the night.” She leaned her elbows on the counter. “Anything good today?” she asked with a gleam in her eye.
“Sorry,” I told her. “Only one today and there was no mess or yuck of any sort. Very ordinary natural death.”
She heaved a disappointed sigh and pushed off the counter. “How’m I supposed to live vay-car-ee-us-lee through you if you don’t got any good stories?”
I laughed. “I’ll make up something good and gory for the next time I come in here.”
“You better!” she announced, then sauntered away to check on another customer.