Read The Bone Bed for Free Online

and then the odontology lab, everything in the CFC’s round building flowing in a perfect circle, which I still find tricky at times, especially if I’m trying to give directions. There is no first or last office on the right or left, and nothing in the middle, either.
    We wind around to the autopsy and x-ray rooms, our rubber-soled booted feet making muffled sounds, and then we are in the receiving area, where there are walls of stainless-steel intake and discharge refrigerators and decomp freezers with digital displays at the tops of their heavy doors. I greet staff we encounter but don’t pause to chat, and I notify the security guard, a former military policeman, that we’ve got a potentially sensitive case coming in.
    “Something that involves what appears to be unusual circumstances,” I tell Ron, who is powerfully built and dark-skinned and never particularly animated behind his glass window. “Just be aware in the event the media or who knows what shows up. I can’t predict how much of a circus this might be.”
    “Yes, ma’am, Chief,” he says.
    “We’ll let you know when we get an idea of what might be headed this way,” I add.
    “Yes, ma’am, Chief. That would be good,” he replies, and I’m always ma’am and Chief to him, and I think he likes me well enough even if he doesn’t show it.
    I check the sign-in log, a big black ledger, and one of the few documents I won’t permit to be electronic. Looking over what I recognize as Marino’s small snarled handwritten entries for bodies that have arrived since I checked when I first got here around five, I’m reminded that what Lucy reported is only partially true. While there was no need for an investigator to respond to any scenes after hours, there are cases, four of them, that require autopsies. The person who would have decided to have the bodies sent in for postmortem examinations was the investigator on call, who I now know was Toby for the suspected blunt-force trauma from a fall and Marino for the rest of them.
    The ones he handled occurred in local hospitals or were DOAs, two motor-vehicle fatalities and a possible drug overdose suicide, and responding to the scenes of the fatal events or actual deaths wouldn’t have been necessary unless the police requested it. Marino must have got the information over the phone, and I turn around to ask him about the cases we have so far this day, but the person I sense nearby isn’t him after all. I’m startled to find Luke Zenner inches from me as if he traded places with Marino or materialized out of nowhere.
    “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He’s carrying his briefcase and wearing a white shirt with the sleeves folded up to his slender elbows and a narrow red-and-black striped tie, sneakers, and jeans.
    “I’m sorry. I thought you were Marino.”
    “I just saw him in the parking lot scouting out one SUV or van and then another, whatever looks the best and has the biggest engine. But thanks for thinking I was him.” He gives me an ironic smile, his eyes warm, his British accent belying his Austrian roots. “I’ll accept you meant it as a compliment,” he adds wryly, and I’m not sure if he dislikes Marino as much as Marino dislikes him, but I suspect their feelings are mutual.
    Dr. Luke Zenner is new in more ways than one, recently board-certified, not even three years ago, and I hired him this past June, much against Marino’s wishes, I should add. A talented forensic pathologist, Luke also is the nephew of a friend of mine whose funeral we just attended, Dr. Anna Zenner, a psychiatrist I became close to more than a decade ago, during my Richmond days. That connection is the source of Marino’s objection, or at least this is what he claims, although resentment likely is the more accurate reason for why he is blatantly unkind and unhelpful to a very nice-looking young blond-haired blue-eyed doctor who is a citizen of the world with a personal tie to me.
    “You heading off? A scene?