Instead of turning to the right, he went left. He walked back down the corridor until he got to the red box of the fire alarm. Grade smashed the glass with his elbow, pulled the lever, and then stepped into the storage room right next to it. He kept his sneakered toe shoved in the door to keep it open a crack as he watched for Lennie to go by.
It didn’t take long. She hadn’t wasted any time making sure that Grade was going to make his way out too.
Not that he wanted her to.
Once the halls were empty, Grade stepped out of the storage room and broke into a jog as he headed down the corridor. The ID he’d lifted from Lennie’s jacket as she’d walked arm in arm with him got him through the door into the morgue. There were more drawers than Grade had imagined. He snapped on gloves and started to drag them open to check the toe tags.
Ferris, B.
Wallace, S.
Vernon, R.
Finally he found Collymore, F. They hadn’t done an autopsy on him yet. It usually took a while for that request to go through. Grade pulled the drawer all the way out. The damage looked worse now, raised and livid against pale skin.
Grade dropped his backpack next to him and got to work. He plucked a couple of hairs out of the man’s head and dropped them into a baggie. Then he pulled a syringe out of the pack.
There were a variety of injection sites on a body that were hard to find in an autopsy, but that involved injection before death. Dead skin was unforgiving. Plus, blood settled, which made it awkward.
Grade lifted the man’s leg. It was stiff from the freezer, almost wooden. He slid the needle into the heel of his foot. No calluses to help disguise the puncture mark, but hopefully it wouldn’t be remarked on. He drew out a syringe of cold, goopy blood and then bagged it too.
He was tempted to add evidence on the body, but that felt like hubris. There were smarter people than Grade in the world, although he didn’t like to admit it.
Once he had what he needed, Grade bagged everything up and hitched his pack onto his shoulder. Then he hesitated as he glanced at Vernon, R.’s drawer.
Verne.
It couldn’t hurt to check. Grade pulled the drawer open and took a quick look at Vernon. He was a big, heavyset man with dirty-blond hair and a ginger beard. A brief scan of his body made it look like he’d died after an impact with a car. The bruise patterns across the backs of his thighs and the bloody injury on the back of his head matched.
Just another accident.
Probably.
The only thing was that Grade had seen Vernon before. At the Slap, talking to Ezra.
Grade hesitated for a second as he wrestled with that, but a mental “nudge” served as a reminder that he didn’t have much time left.
He laid Verne back down, closed the drawer, and left.
There were cameras at the two main exits, but not the fire door at the back of the building. Grade took the steps down three at a time and nearly wiped out in a puddle of spilled coffee on the landing. He caught himself and jogged down the last few steps.
The door had been left propped open with a fire extinguisher. Grade waited a second and then slid out and blended with the crowd.
He worked his way back around to where Lennie was, at the front of the building. She was on her tiptoes scanning the area and looked relieved when she saw him.
“What happened to you!” she said. “I thought you got stuck in the toilet. Again.”
She slapped his arm and laughed. Grade shook his head.
“I had to… finish…” he said, clearing his throat as if it made him uncomfortable. “Then I got turned around, and then some guys dragged me along with them, and we came out the back. I wonder what happened.”
“False alarm, apparently,” Lennie said. She narrowed her eyes. “I bet it was Albert. He had his performance review today, and he’s been desperate to skip it, but I’ve told him repeatedly, co-workers are like corpses, don’t touch them.”
Grade laughed genuinely and waited for the building to be cleared for them to go back in.
***
“I got a job,” he said as he walked into the Slap. “But no one kidnapped me.”
