UTMC was the only hospital within miles that had a psychometric ward with a staff trained to deal with paranormal patients. It was also one of only a few in the nation to have a paranormal forensic pathologist on staff. The hospital got most of the weird forensic PMs—weirdmeaning anything that the coroner couldn’t explain—that came through the county, and when UTMC was done, the bodies were shipped to the county morgue for storage.
I had seen plenty of dead animals when I lived at the church. Butchering them for the table was a weekly part of life. And I’d killed people. Didn’t mean I liked seeing dead bodies.
And it also didn’t mean the weekend pathologist liked seeing me.
It was Friday night. Dr.Gomez was on duty. She wasn’t the pathologist who had trained with witches and a vampire doctor, but she worked with the pathologist who had been. And she had worked with Unit Eighteen enough to learn a lot more about paranormal creatures.
Gomez had very dark copper skin, a curly do that was currently pulled back in a clip, and a frown worthy of a churchman as she watched FireWind, Occam, and me walk down the dimly lit hallway toward forensics. To me she said, “I haven’t been clocked in for four hours andyoushow up.”
FireWind gave that rare, beautiful smile, the one that could charm, the one he never directed to his team. FireWind gaveusorders, saving the charm for people he couldn’t order around. “Dr.Gomez. Good to see you again,” he said.
Gomez let him waste the smile and didn’t take her eyes off me. I wasn’t sure why she had it in for me, but we always seemedto hit things on the wrong foot. She gave a harrumphing sound. “You want to see which body?” she asked me.
“John Doe fifty-three,” FireWind said.
Each year the unidentified bodies were numbered by the coroner according to gender—John or Jane Doe, based on visible genitalia if there was anything to see—and the order found. So far the county had fifty-three unknowns, most of them biologically male. Some had been identified. Most never were. The adults who died of natural causes were eventually cremated, their boxes of ash buried in one of two vaults, the location not made public. Adults who died by violence and under suspicious circumstances were embalmed and buried in graves marked by their number, so that if their killers ever went to trial, the bodies could be exhumed. Though we hadn’t had an unidentified child since I came to work for PsyLED, their bodies were embalmed and buried in marked graves for the same reason. And also so that if they were ever ID’d they could be returned to their family for emotional closure and proper burials.
Gomez said, “We’ve had a record number of unidentified human remains this year. Never thought we’d get to fifty-three. The county morgue is full, so we’ve held on to some overflow.” She turned her back on us but let us follow her into the morgue and then into the cold room, a large refrigerator with shelves, each with a body on it, each in a clear plastic zippered body bag. The bags were new—cheaper disposable bags than the HRPs—human remains pouches—used in the field. Cheaper because we needed more of them. Cheaper because the city and county tax dollars had to stretch to cover items that the burgeoning drug and homelessness problems and inflation created.
We three stayed at the open cold-room door, the chilled air almost as bad as the cold outside, where the temps were dropping faster and lower than forecast. The stench of sickly sweet old blood, old death, and misery blew out on the refrigerated air.
Gomez wheeled a stainless steel gurney to the left side of the cold room and dropped it down, about two feet from the floor, setting a brake with a foot pedal. She grabbed the corners of a clear bag and muscled it from a low shelf onto the gurney. Pressed a different pedal on the gurney and it rose to about three and a half feet high. She released the brake, whichthumped loudly in the room, and wheeled the gurney out into the bigger room where the autopsies were performed.
I stepped back, shivering in my winter jacket, feeling the necklace I was still wearing, icy against my skin, reminding me to look at it soon. There hadn’t been time when I stopped by my house to pull on dry work clothes. FireWind, Occam, and a silent Yummy had been standing in the main room, waiting, not willing to leave me alone. I’d been hurrying, too fast to think about the necklace.
“Since you’re not family, you don’t get the full compassionate viewing,” Gomez said, “with a sheet covering. This is the cop viewing.” Gomez unzipped the cheap HRP halfway around, the sound loud, echoing through the room. The scent of bleach poured out, sharp and cloying, but better than the stench of death that surely rode beneath it. She pulled back the upper half of the body bag, revealing, from my angle, a blondish head with large, looped, black thread stitches sealing the middle of the scalp together, roughly ear to ear. She turned on a bright light, glaring directly over him.
I walked to the side of the gurney. Not looking at his face, not yet, but taking in the torso and arms Gomez had exposed. The naked flesh of his chest was white where the harsh light hit it, blue on the bottom where the blood settled with gravity. Livor mortis, they called it. His chest was sealed in a Y-shaped incision, also closed with thick black thread in looping stitches.
The signs of torture were evident. Cuts. Long tearing cuts that seemed to circle from high on his back and sliced around low, to his hips or ribs, on the sides. Whipped. He’d been scourged. I reached to take his hand and Gomez stopped me, handing me a pair of blue nitrile gloves.
I pulled them on, wordless, and took his bruised hand, stiff and cold, and forced it to rotate to get a better look. His fingers had been broken. There was a blackbird tattooed on his inner arm. Amateurish work, not that I was a specialist in tattoos.
I replaced the hand next to his side and moved around the stretcher to his feet. Without asking, I unzipped the body bag all the way around and peeled back the plastic at the bottom corner, revealing his feet. There were no puncture wounds, but one foot was horribly bruised and swollen. I maneuvered it, the movement proving the bones of his foot were all badly broken.
My breath sped up. Tremors started in my bones. It took everything I had to not step away and clutch myself with both arms.
I pulled the lessons about postmortems I had learned in Spook School to the surface of my mind, dredging them close. But what I was seeing on the victim made me think of…other things. Other places. Old memories. Memories that now trailed that schooled information to the surface of my thoughts, sliding up from some dark place inside me.
I rolled the plastic up. Revealed his lower legs. The left one showed bruising in three linear spots on the shinbone. Taking the heel and toes, I rotated the foot and leg. I heard the shinbone crunch. The man’s calf displayed far more livor mortis than the other leg. More bruising, from when he was alive. I set the leg down. Smoothed the clear plastic back over his legs and feet, as if to soothe him. But it was too late for anyone to soothe this poor man.
I walked to the head of the gurney, feeling all the eyes on me. Their assessment and patience was a heavy weight.
The man’s blue eyes stared up, milky.
I closed my own eyes. Blinked against tears. Forced a breath in and out.
I tried to speak. Had no voice. No breath to say what had to be said. I tried another breath. A tear slid down my face.
I pulled off the gloves and dropped them on the dead man’s chest. Cleared my throat. Wrapped my arms around me. I felt Occam move toward me. Felt FireWind hold him back.
“Ingram?” the boss-boss said gently.
“His name was Arial Holler,” I said through my tight throat. “He’s a church boy. A few years older than Mud. Seventeen. Maybe eighteen. Churchmen don’t get tattoos. It’s a desecration of God’s sanctuary, in the eyes of the church.” I tried to swallow. Couldn’t. Arial Holler had likely been a Lost Boy, cast out from the church. I managed to speak again. “They used the Boot on him.”
“What’s the Boot?” Gomez asked.
Tonelessly, FireWind said, “The Boot refers to a family of instruments used by the Spanish Inquisition and all through the Middle Ages for torture and interrogation. They are of various designs to cause crushing injuries to the bones of the foot and/or leg. Some are vises, often with iron spikes, that squeezed feet. Other forms are made fully of iron. With those, the torturer used iced and then scalding water.”
