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look. Can we treat this one like it’s a homicide, just long enough for you to clear it?“
    “What do you mean?“
    “Take a ride with me, over to the channel.“
    “A ride? You got rocks in your head or what? I got paperwork up the wazoo here that I’m not gonna file, much less clear, by Christmas. You got any idea, any fucking conception, how many real cases I have? Guys who didn’t decide to end it all by pumping five rounds from a nine mil into their fucking chests from twenty feet away. Wives who got beaten to death by their husbands over a botched dessert or maybe what cable station they were gonna watch that night You think I got the time to ride all over hell and back with you on the chance, the remote possibility, that my floater last night wasn’t a suicide or an accident?“
    “Guinness, the bridge is, what, a mile from here? Maybe? I’ll even drive you.“
    He mulled it over, though I was pretty sure the last couple of minutes was just an act. “Tell you what. You take me to the morgue first. We look at the floater, you tell me whether or not she’s your girl. She is, then we’ll ride over to the bridge. What do you say?“
    The best I was likely to get. “Okay. My car, then?“
    He inclined his head toward a set of hooks where usually ignition keys on big wooden blocks would hang. “We’ll have to. All ours are over in the Congo there.“

    The morgue was built back in the thirties. It was almost new in November, 1942, when the bodies from the Coconut Grove fire were taken there by the hundreds, at least as many people standing in line outside the mortuary that next Sunday morning, waiting to identify friends and loved ones. Now, though, the morgue is literally falling down on the pathologists and technicians who work inside it, gaps in the hung ceiling where the rectangles of Styrofoam have crumbled onto the examining tables and slabs. They’ve been talking for years about moving the place out to Framingham on state-owned land that would be a cheaper site than building or renovating in Boston . Until then, the medical examiner struggles with an inadequate budget and a pared-down staff and conditions more appropriate to the end of the nineteenth century than the predawn hours of the twenty-first.
    I noticed a couple of cosmetic touches since my last time there. Somebody had cleaned the two fifteen-inch sphinxes that crouch at the head of the staircase, even slathered a little paint on the swinging double doors. But the air was still the same. Unnatural temperature and humidity, too warm in summer, too cold in winter, too heavy all the time.
    Guinness spoke to a technician, using phrases like “the floater“ and “not family.“ The technician ran a finger down Ate top sheet on his clipboard and then motioned us to follow him- la the body room itself, the honeycomb of beige square doors was set in a wall of beige tiles, and the handle on the door would remind you of an old-time icebox. The technician Pulled down on the handle, and the drawer snicked out on its casters, coming to a sudden, vibrating halt between Guinness and me.
    The technician whipped the sheet back over the body and own to the waist. There’s no sense of modesty in a morgue, no further indignities that can give the dead any final offense. Just glary lighting searing vivid memories into the minds of even occasional visitors like me.
    I looked down. There wasn’t much left of the face, the eye sockets empty, the features and the teeth staved in here, pushed out there from the fall or the rocks or the creatures you prefer not to picture. The hair seemed a shade darker, but it had been in the water for a while. The body type was about right, the flesh more flaccid in death than in life as I remembered her. There were no surgical marks on the chest or scalp.
    I said, “When’s the autopsy?“
    “Not scheduled,“ said the technician.
    I looked up at him. “How come?’
    Guinness said, “Not that it’s any of your business,