Bad Moon Rising by Katherine Sutcliffe Page A

paper from his jeans pocket, he handed it to her. “I almost
forgot.”
    She forced her gaze away from his and looked at it. “What’s
this?”
    “My bill.”
    Her mouth dropped open. “Three hundred dollars? Oh my
God. You’re joking, right?”
    “One hundred an hour. You can drop by my office Monday
morning and pay it. I don’t take checks, FYI.”
    He turned and entered the morgue through wide, double
doors, leaving Holly staring at the statement in her hand. The reception desk
was empty, so he continued down the long, pale green corridor, the intense cold
biting through his coat and T-shirt and the odor of formaldehyde making him a
little queazy.
    Once he had traipsed these corridors with regularity,
shadowing the medical examiner during murder victims’ autopsies looking for
evidence that could nail a suspect and make his case. He had eventually become
desensitized to the sight of corpses, though he was continually shocked over
what human beings inflicted on one another.
    As he entered the exam room, the medical examiner
glanced away from the cadaver she was working on, grunted, and mumbled behind
her nose and mouth shield, “Figured as much. Enoch mentioned you’d probably be
snooping around. Cherry Brown, right?”
    He nodded and held his breath, the stink of gastric
acids making his eyes water. Obviously, Janice Mallory was on the back end of
the autopsy. The room was swimming in blood. It dripped from the hanging meat
scales used to weigh the organs and was smeared on the chalkboard where she had
written organ weights. The deceased’s organs were scattered over tables and
the brain had been hung by a string in a large jar of formalin.
    “Grab yourself a coffee and make yourself at home. I
won’t be a minute.”
    He poured himself a black coffee and joined her at the
table. The cadaver looked to be a teenaged girl.
    “Another damn drug overdose.” Janice shook her head. “I’m
telling you, if the schools would haul the kids’ delinquent asses into this
room so they could see what waits for them on the other side of slamming, we might
see less of these.”
    She tossed the pick ups into a tray of disinfectant
and barked an order at the diener.
    “You shouldn’t be here, Damascus,” Janice pointed out.
    “You know I’m not supposed to talk to you about Cherry
Brown.”
    “But you will because you adore me.” He sipped the hot
coffee.
    She glanced at the diener and nodded at the body. “Close
her up and make it neat. The parents have enough grief to deal with without
their baby coming back to them looking like Frankenstein’s monster.”
    Turning her back on the assistant, she looked at J.D.
and rolled her eyes, lowered her voice. “Guy’s a rookie, and a shit one.
Someone at the university was asleep at the wheel when they turned him loose.”
She pulled the double layer of rubber gloves from her hands and raised one gray
eyebrow. “How’s the ulcers?”
    “Don’t change the subject, Janice.”
    “Mallory says you were vomiting up blood.”
    “It comes and goes.”
    “Get it taken care of. I’d hate to have to cut your
cute ass open when a trip to your doctor could easily prevent it.”
    He followed her to a table where she proceeded to
label the specimen cassettes. “I understand Cherry Brown wasn’t the first.”
    “Yeah? Who told you that?”
    “A source. And she’s reliable, so don’t give me any of
your famous Mallory double-talk.”
    She scribbled on a cassette, then picked up another. “A
woman was brought in last week. Tyra Smith, or so she called herself. Body’s
still in the cooler if you want a peek.”
    “Same mutilation?”
    “Identical. Evisceration and decapitation. Both women
were dead before the mutilations. Thank God for small favors, huh?”
    “Cause of the actual death?”
    She shrugged. “Possible head injuries. Could have been
strangled or had her throat cut. But since the decapitation included the neck
to the shoulders, it’s impossible to say for