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here instead?’
    Theresa tried not to roll her eyes. The first words Harris spoke to her on her first day at the ME’s office had been to complain about the fit of his lab coat, and every word since had kept to a similar vein. A dozen years later he still had no other form of conversation. Tall, skinny, with a grayish pallor to his skin, his cheeks had begun to sink as if the eternal negativity was eating him up from the inside out. He went on: ‘You know why? I’ll tell you why. Because I had the courtesy to answer my phone! Why couldn’t they get an actual diener to work as diener? Why not Causer?’
    ‘The county’s trying to show a little compassion,’ Theresa explained, unnecessarily. Harris knew perfectly well why he had been pressed into service. He just didn’t care.
    ‘Because they were friends? As if. The last friend Causer had came with a screw cap. And he was the wrong color to make Johnson feel warm and fuzzy. Causer could have made the incision while eating a muffin.’
    As fed up as she felt toward the general boorishness of Harris, Causer and the dead Johnson, Theresa couldn’t help a quick, slightly hysterical giggle at the image of Mitchell Causer plunging a scalpel into Darryl’s chest while holding a breakfast pastry in his other hand, a plastic apron over his flannel shirt with a beer gut barely held in check by a scratched WWF belt buckle. She choked it off as the other doctor spoke.

    ‘Looks like some bruising starting over the abdomen. Someone slugged him in more than just the head.’ Banachek hesitated, holding the scalpel over the dead man’s chest, still trying to comprehend the depth of their collective violation. ‘How could anyone be killed here ? And who’d want to kill Darryl?’
    ‘Besides his wife?’ Theresa couldn’t help saying. ‘His comments about her always sounded so – violent.’
    Harris said, ‘Nah. She crashed the Christmas party here once, and I’m pretty sure that if he had ever hit her, she’d have flattened him. And she wouldn’t have waited until he was at work to do it. Face it, it was Justin.’
    ‘No,’ Banachek said, dragging the scalpel from Darryl’s shoulder to groin.
    ‘No,’ Theresa said. ‘Justin hardly seemed like some hair-trigger maniac to me.’
    ‘How would you know?’ Harris fixed her with a suspicious gaze, ready to verbally pounce if she had been secretly dating one of the deskmen, and not because it would have been interracial or cougar-like or against county policy. He would care only that a piece of gossip existed without his knowledge.
    Despite that, it was a valid question. Theresa saw Justin in passing, long enough to get a quick patient history that usually consisted of abbreviations or phrases: MVA (motor vehicle accident), GSW (gunshot wound), suicide – hanging, suicide GSW, decomp, stabbing, or industrial (meaning an accident at work). Occasionally, there might be an addendum, such as: ‘This guy owned the car dealership at Euclid and Fifty-fifth, you know, next to the restaurant that used to be the BirdHouse?’ They had not had in-depth conversations about politics or their personal lives or even their preferred sports teams. Theresa couldn’t claim to know the man just because he had beautiful eyes and a certain gravity to his aura.
    But she protested anyway. ‘This is a morgue. We attract very strange people. We’ve had estranged family members who thought we hid a victim’s body because they weren’t invited to the funeral and thus it didn’t happen. We’ve had abusive spouses or parents who thought we framed them by pointing out that the victim died of blunt impact trauma instead of falling down the basement steps. We’ve had self-styled psychics who thought this building bulged with trapped souls trying to cross over to the light. Remember? They stood outside with picket signs.’

    ‘Then where’s Justin?’ Harris asked, picking up the long-handled clippers. Most people used them to trim trees;