Read Shadowfires for Free Online Page B

lightly and wincing as if merely recounting these events had given him an excruciating headache. “At that time, when I'd
prepared the autopsy chamber, I sent an assistant to bring Dr.
Leben's body from the morgue… but the cadaver couldn't be found.”
    “Misplaced?” Benny asked.
    “That's rarely happened during my tenure in this office,” Kordell said with a brief flash of pride. “And on those few occasions when a cadaver has been misplaced-sent to a wrong autopsy table, stored in the wrong drawer, or left on a gurney with an improper ID tag-we've
always located it within five minutes.”
    “But tonight you couldn't find it,” Benny said.
    “We looked for nearly an hour. Everywhere. Everywhere,” Kordell
said with evident distress. “It makes no sense. No sense whatsoever.
Given our procedures, it's an impossibility.”
    Rachael realized that she was clutching the purse in her lap so
tightly that her knuckles were sharp and white. She tried to relax
her hands, folded them. Afraid that either Kordell or Benny would
suddenly read a fragment of the monstrous truth in her unguarded
eyes, she closed them and lowered her head, hoping the men would
think she was simply reacting to the dreadful circumstances that had
brought them here.
    From within her private darkness, Rachael heard Benny say, “Dr.
Kordell, is it possible that Dr. Leben's body was released in error to a private mortuary?”
    “We'd been informed earlier today that the Attison Brothers' firm
was handling funeral arrangements, so of course we called them when
we couldn't find the body. We suspected they'd come for Dr. Leben and
that a day employee of the morgue had mistakenly released the cadaver
without authorization, prior to autopsy. But they tell us they never
came to collect, were in fact waiting for a call from us, and don't have the deceased.”
    “What I meant,” Benny said, “was that perhaps Dr. Leben's body was released in error to another mortician who had come to collect someone else.”
    “That, of course, was another possibility that we explored with, I
assure you, considerable urgency. Subsequent to the arrival of Dr.
Leben's body at 12:14 this afternoon, four other bodies were released to private mortuaries. We sent employees to all of those funeral homes to confirm the identity of the cadavers and to make sure none of them was Dr. Leben. None of them was.”
    “Then what do you suppose has happened to him?” Benny asked.
    Eyes closed, Rachael listened to their macabre conversation in
darkness, and gradually it began to seem as if she were asleep and as
if their voices were the echoey phantom voices of characters in a
nightmare.
    Kordell said, “Insane as it seems, we were forced to conclude the
body's been stolen.”
    In her self-imposed blackness, Rachael tried unsuccessfully to
block out the gruesome images that her imagination began to
supply.
    “You've contacted the police?” Benny asked the medical examiner.
    “Yes, we brought them into it as soon as we realized theft was the
only remaining explanation. They're downstairs right now, in the morgue, and of course they want to speak with you, Mrs. Leben.”
    A soft rhythmic rasping noise was coming from Everett Kordell’s
direction. Rachael opened her eyes. The medical examiner was
nervously sliding his letter opener in and out of its protective
sheath. Rachael closed her eyes again.
    Benny said, “But are your security measures so inadequate that
someone could waltz right in off the street and steal a corpse?”
    “Certainly not,” Kordell said. “Nothing like this has happened
before. I tell you,
it's inexplicable. Oh, yes, a determined person might be clever enough to find a way through our security, but it wouldn't
be an easy job. Not easy at all.”
    “But not impossible,” Benny said.
    The rasping noise stopped. From the new sounds that followed,
Rachael figured that the medical examiner must be compulsively
rearranging the silver-framed photographs on his