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protective gear lying on the countertop. The two of them slipped on lab coats, face shields and gloves and entered the isola tion lab.
The room had two tables, shiny metal rectangles atop bright white cabinets. Between the two tables hung scales for weighing organs. Across the room stood a series of cabinets, metal countertops and sinks. Everything sparkled, from the glossy blue floor to the metal surfaces—everything except the blackened corpse with stiff blond hair and an exceptionally long neck.
‘‘I was so happy to get this new containment room. But it’s been one problem after another.’’
‘‘Can’t the hospital administration do anything?’’ asked Diane.
‘‘You’re talking about Jack the Bean Counter.’’ She sighed. ‘‘I’m sorry it’s so unbearable in here. Right now we have to keep working and put up with it.’’
‘‘My grandma found somebody hanging like this when she was a girl,’’ said the diener. ‘‘Neck all long like a snake. She took it as a sign.’’
‘‘A sign of what?’’ asked Diane.
‘‘That she and her family should move to Atlanta.’’ ‘‘Did they?’’
‘‘Sure ’nuff, they did.’’ He started toward the door, taking off his face shield. ‘‘I’ll be right back.’’
Diane and Lynn watched the lean young black man walk out of the room.
‘‘I never ask Raymond what he’s doing when he gets that blank look on his face.’’ Lynn shrugged, then shifted gears. ‘‘I’d like to start with the clothes. We’ll have to cut the sleeves, but I’d like to inspect the body before the hands are untied.’’
The material was stiff and hard to dropped from the body to the metal cut. Maggots surface of the table as they worked. They were putting the clothes in a bag when the diener came back in. He put on his gloves and took the bag of evidence.
‘‘I’ll label. What we calling the body?’’
‘‘Blue,’’ said Diane.
‘‘Blue,’’ said Raymond. ‘‘I guess that’s as good a name as any.’’
‘‘When we cut them down, we tied blue, red or green cord around both cut ends of the rope so we could match the ropes again after they were sepa rated.’’ Diane pointed to the blue string wrapped around the end of the rope that marked it and kept it from unraveling.
The noose was still tight around the neck, sunk deep into the flesh under the chin. Diane would hate for any family member to ever see their loved one like this. They would never be able to think of their rela tive again without seeing this image. She stood back and watched as Lynn and her diener tended to the painstaking external examination of the body.
Lynn talked into a hanging microphone as she de scribed what they found. ‘‘The victim appears to be a female at this point...’’
A pounding on the window startled Diane. The three of them looked up to see a man in his thirties standing in the outer autopsy room, looking through the window at them. He was dressed in gray trousers, white shirt and floral tie, holding a hand over his mouth and nose. Lynn flipped the intercom switch.
‘‘What’s going on in here?’’ he said. ‘‘Step out here for a minute.’’
‘‘I’m in the middle of an important examination, Jackson. What do you want?’’
Jackson bent over and gagged. ‘‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’’
The three of them looked at Jackson with their eye brows raised enough to make deep furrows in their foreheads.
‘‘We have a rotting corpse on the table,’’ said Lynn. ‘‘It would be a little better if the air-conditioning sys tem were working, but it’s not.’’
‘‘The air conditioner is working in the rest of the building.’’
Lynn glared at him for a moment before she spoke. ‘‘Well, it’s not working in here. What brings you here anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you visit the autopsy room.’’
‘‘I was talking to a patron when this . . . this . . . horrific odor came into my office.’’
‘‘The maintenance