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maybe even to say something, but the woman with the dead baby was out of view.
    "I really do," she said once more inside her head.

    An exhumation and the scientific, the clinical , procedures that follow it are nothing short of ghoulish. No one with a heart could say otherwise. The very idea of waking the dead with the scrape of a shovel is a revolting affair. No matter if it is part of one's job. No matter whether it is clinical. Ripperton made an excuse, and Hannah stood alone with medical examiner Lina Kent as she and her assistant, an Asian man with the singsong name of Ron Fong, went about the business that was Enrique Garcia. Halogen lights blasted the boy's little figure, a mummified body with sunken eyes and reptilian lips, drawn tightly in a peculiar smile. Body fluids had stained the shiny polyester fabric that had cushioned his lifeless frame. While M.E. Kent recorded each observation into a shoulder microphone, Fong, chomping on a mouthful of peppermints, snapped photographs with a Polaroid camera. Images spat out of the camera.
    "Looking at the original autopsy report I see no mention of the crescent-shaped contusion on the subject's right forearm.... Ron, take a close-up, please."
    The M.E., a sixty-ish woman with snowy hair and dimestore bifocals on a chain around her corrugated neck, stepped aside while Fong reloaded the camera and took three shots in rapid succession. Dr. Kent was so nonchalant about her request for the close-up that Hannah nearly missed its importance. She looked through the report. Nothing had been written about a crescent-shaped mark.
    "What is it?" Hannah asked.
    "Hard to say for sure," the M.E. said slowly. "But I'd be willing to bet a cup of coffee that it's a bite mark."
    "There's no mention of any bite trauma," Hannah said, flipping through reports and stepping closer to the little body stretched and pinned out like a butterfly on a corkboard.
    Dr. Kent looked at the clock with the red sweep second hand. They'd been picking apart Enrique's remains for two hours--longer than they thought they'd need, given the fact that he'd been autopsied before.
    "So there's no mention of bite trauma," she said, repeating Hannah's remarks. "That's not really surprising. Dean Wallen was about the worst pathologist that ever made a Y incision on a cadaver." She tossed her latex gloves into an empty stainless-steel drum marked for hazardous waste. "Cases like this make me wonder how many more we'll have to dig up and review. Whenever something like this happens it invites more prisoners with half-good lawyers to call the evidence into question. I've done seven of these and I don't want to do any more."
    "Retirement is next year," Fong reminded her.
    "Six months," she said, pausing and adding with a smile, "and twelve days. Give me a calculator and I'll give you the hours and minutes."
    While the M.E. and her young assistant refocused on the work at hand, Hannah stared at the body. She hadn't noticed it before in the blinding light of late summer's day, but the child's skin was covered with the milky white of mold spores that resembled baby powder, or a light dusting of snow. She felt a chill deep inside. The eyes had sunken into their sockets, but other than that he was remarkably preserved. Though the image was oddly sweet in its own peculiarly horrific way, Hannah felt her stomach churn. The baby was a beautiful boy , she thought . Beautiful, and stiff, like some waxy doll no one wanted anymore. Beads of sweat collected at her temples, though the room was kept on the cool side. Rather than touch her hands to her face, she turned her head to her shoulders and wiped the perspiration. And though the stench of death hung in the air, it wasn't the smell but the sight before her that gave her pause. It was familiar in its own cruel way.
    Back in her office later that day, Dr. Kent phoned Hannah. Enrique Garcia had not only been bitten and bruised, but evidence found in his lung tissue indicated he had most