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out?”
    â€œYour point being?”
    â€œYou’re not a teen anymore. Few years you’ll be thirty. What people like changes. I haven’t listened to Screaming Trees since high school, and back then I didn’t know about Stax Records or Blue Note.”
    â€œYour point being?” Teenager-sulky.
    â€œStop moping and come up with some new shit.”
    Silence until we pulled to the curb at the end of a long line of hearses. Of course it wasn’t that easy for him. His work had ground to a halt in the years after Cynthia disappeared. Getting back to work frightened him. I didn’t understand that. In the years after leaving the job, I’d have been happy to have work to cling to as everything else crumbled. Learning the ins and outs of private investigation had consumed a lot of nights that could have been spent self-destructively. In times of grief, the work is always there. I hoped one day I could make him see that.
    As we exited the car, Ben said, “ The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles went backwards.”
    T he younger Thomas Kroon ushered us into an office that was tastefully accoutered, the huge brass-rimmed desk and the wall panelling a matching walnut. The word sumptuous came to mind.
    â€œPop can’t make it,” Younger said. “I’ll give you a tour, introduce you as our security consultant. Then you’ll have the run of the place.”
    I nodded my head at Ben. “My secretary here has never seen a decomp. You by any chance have some Vaseline?”
    Younger looked at Ben. “Maybe he should avoid the back rooms,” he said.
    The outer office had two facing desks and a smaller empty desk behind, and an entire wall given over to a dry-erase board covered in inscrutable shorthand.
    Carrie, a cheerful woman of about forty, handed a sheaf of papers to Kroon the Younger. Together they loaded the Xerox. At the opposite desk a portly young man worked the dispatch lines. He nodded at us as we passed.
    â€œShe did have the code,” Younger said as we passed out of the offices, down a grey carpeted hallway to a wood door. Even before he opened it, the death-smell filled our nostrils. I looked over and saw Ben rock as if slapped in the face.
    I dashed back down the hallway to the office. “Anyone smoke here?”
    Carrie held up a pack of du Mauriers. “Down to my last three.”
    I broke a smoke in half and ripped off the filter. I handed Ben the two halves and instructed him how to wedge them into his nostrils. We followed Kroon inside the back room. A decomposing body has a cloying, tangy odour. There were several in the room, on gurneys, in bags. A wide-hipped black woman sat at the embalming table reading a Walter Mosely novel while the fluids drained out of a Caucasian lady, green-skinned by now, weighing conservatively five hundred pounds.
    â€œMeck,” Ben said.
    I noted the camera above the door, its red light on. The wire ran down to a plug to the left of the basin. “Back up power source?” I asked.
    â€œThe battery is supposedly good for eight hours,” Younger said.
    â€œGuh,” Ben said.
    We toured the freezer, the storage room, the freight elevator. The crematorium was in a separate building out back. The burying ground and all-purpose chapel was a few blocks east.
    â€œKeys to the back door?” I asked.
    â€œPop and Jag and Carrie and I. Though I assume anyone could duplicate them.”
    â€œWhat about the elevator?”
    â€œLocked at night.”
    â€œChuh,” Ben said.
    â€œRest room?” I asked.
    â€œHallway, second door on the right,” Younger said. Ben took off, sprinting.
    I held out my hands apologetically, what can you do?
    â€œGood help is hard to find,” Younger said.
    Back in his office I said, “I’d like to put the building under physical surveillance. That means staying overnight. Most of these people work Monday to Friday?”
    â€œExcept Vonda,