Riley and Plank positioned themselves on either side of the body bag while Lily crouched at the head. The morning sun beat down on all of them, relentless, turning the parking lot into a griddle.
“On three,” Lily said. “One, two?—”
They lifted. Two hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight rose from the asphalt, transferred to the gurney with the efficiency of people who’d done this too many times before. Sheldon held his strap with white-knuckled intensity, his face going red from the effort of keeping the gurney steady.
“Got him,” Riley said.
Lily was already securing the straps, her movements quick and sure. “Sheldon, you can let go now.”
He didn’t let go.
“Sheldon.”
“Right. Letting go.” He released the strap and stepped back, pulling a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket to mop at his forehead. “That was heavier than I expected. Though I suppose decomposition gases could add to the overall mass. Did you know that the average adult male contains enough gas postmortem to?—”
“Why don’t you get the doors?” Lily suggested, nodding toward the Suburban.
“Doors. Yes. I can do doors.” He scurried toward the vehicle, nearly tripping over a crack in the pavement. “Door opening is actually a very underrated skill. There’s a whole science to the timing of it?—”
The rear doors of the Suburban swung open, and Riley and Plank maneuvered the gurney into position. The body slid into the dim interior with a soft metallic whisper, and then they were closing the doors, sealing him away for the trip back to the funeral home.
Lily stripped off her gloves and tossed them into a biohazard bag. “I’ll get him logged in and prepped. Have everything ready for you when you get back.”
“Shouldn’t be long. We’re just going to canvass the immediate area, see if anyone recognizes his description.”
She nodded, already moving toward the driver’s side. “I’ll pull the x-ray equipment and get the table set up.”
“Perfect.”
Riley and Plank climbed into the back of the Suburban, folding themselves into the space on either side of the gurney. Sheldon was already in the passenger seat, his handkerchief now being used to clean his glasses in small, obsessive circles.
Lily paused before getting in, her eyes finding Cole across the parking lot. He was talking to one of the uniforms, his Stetson pushed back on his head, but he must have felt her gaze because he looked up and winked at her.
Then she was behind the wheel, the engine turning over, and I watched the black Suburban with its white magnetic signs pull out of the lot and disappear into morning traffic.
Somewhere in that vehicle, a young man I didn’t know was beginning his final journey. In a few hours, he’d be on my table, and I’d learn everything his body had to tell me. Every wound, every bruise, every secret written in tissue and bone.
But first, I needed to find out who he’d been while he was still alive.
I stripped off my coveralls—the thick canvas had done its job, keeping the worst of the scene off my clothes underneath, but the material was damp with sweat and smelled like death and garbage. I stuffed them into a biohazard bag and tossed it in the back of Jack’s Tahoe. The lanyard with my coroner’s ID went around my neck, the laminated card settling against my chest—King George County Coroner’s Office, my unsmiling photo, my name in block letters.
“You ready?”
Jack’s hand found the small of my back, warm and steady. I leaned into it for just a moment—letting myself take the comfort he was offering—then straightened and nodded.
“Yeah.”
Cole ambled over, his Stetson pulled low against the sun that had turned from brutal to punishing in the hours we’d been working the scene. It had to be close to ten by now—the morning had disappeared into evidence collection and body extraction and the endless documentation that turned a death into a case.
“I’ll take the nail salon and the check-cashing place,” he said. “Y’all take the vape shop and the Chinese place.” He nodded toward the strip mall, where a few more cars had appeared in the parking lot as businesses prepared to open. “Meet back here in an hour?”
“Make it forty-five,” Jack said. “I’ve got a council meeting at one o’clock I just can’t wait to be at.”
Cole chuckled. “Copy that.”
He headed off with that lanky, unhurried stride, and Jack and I followed a few paces behind.
The strip mall looked different now that the sun had climbed high enough to burn away the early morning shadows. The beige stucco showed every water stain, every crack, every place where the cheap construction had started to give up the ghost. The parking lot was filling up—a minivan outside the nail salon, a couple of sedans near the check-cashing place, a delivery truck idling by the Chinese restaurant’s back entrance.
