alongside the General Hospital, it was the first or, depending on how you looked at it, last stop for corpses in the city. A single ambulance sat with its rear doors open as a gurney was rushed with indecent haste from the building’s interior. Tyrell and Lucas watched in amazement as paramedics fussed over what looked like a surgeon lying on the gurney, his face pale white beneath his oxygen mask and his eyes rolling up in their sockets.
“Don’t patients normally get wheeled in, not out?” Lopez asked.
At the entrance, a beat cop barred their way. “Been an incident, sir, I can’t let you past right now.”
Tyrell and Lopez flashed their badges.
“What’s happened?” Tyrell asked. “Was that a doctor being wheeled out?”
“Toxic-material breach,” the cop said. “Something to do with three John Does brought here yesterday.”
“Out of the Potomac projects?”
“Yeah.” The cop nodded. “The hell’s going on with them? They’re supposed to be dead, but they’ve half killed one of the top surgeons in the hospital.”
Tyrell and Lopez shot a glance at each other.
“The Does are our case,” Tyrell said to the cop, “we need to get in there.”
The cop nodded and opened the entrance doors for them.
Tyrell led the way through the corridors and down a flight of stairs toward the morgue. A series of polished steel doors partitioned the morgue from the autopsy rooms, where corpses afflicted with the gruesome lesions of crime, neglect, or both were dissected and their decaying remains examined for silent testimony to their demise.
A small dressing room provided the chance to don gloves and a filter mask before Tyrell and Lopez pushed through into the autopsy room proper.
Three of the four steel trolleys dominating the room were covered with pale-blue plastic sheets, the interiors of which were flecked with ugly spots of fluid that even after all these years still made Tyrell’s stomach turn. He looked instead at a man dressed in a surgical gown approaching him. Tall, wiry, and with thin-rimmed spectacles adorning an aquiline nose, he looked every bit at home in a morgue.
“Detectives Tyrell and Lopez,” Tyrell announced.
“Dr. John Fry,” the surgeon said. “You guys pick up the three crackheads here?”
“Yeah. What’s the story?”
“You ever thought to check them over for toxicity?”
Tyrell shook his head. “We figured that was your job.”
“I’ve got one of my surgeons on his way to General with cyanide poisoning after he cut into one of your John Does.”
Tyrell stopped in his tracks, Lopez alongside him. “There was nothing at the scene to suggest poisoning. Your man going to be okay?”
Fry regarded them briefly before turning to look over the top of his spectacles at the three corpses.
“He’ll be fine. Have you spoken to the district attorney yet?”
“Thought we’d wait and see what you had to say.”
Fry nodded almost absentmindedly before waving them to follow.
Tyrell watched as the surgeon lifted the sheets off the three bodies. Each had been opened with a Y-shaped incision across the chest, encrusted around the edges with dried blood. The skull caps had been placed loosely back atop their respective craniums, the brains still inside. Tyrell wondered briefly whether it made a difference if they somehow got mixed up, but refrained from asking.
“You say these were found in a crack den, a group overdose?” Fry asked.
Lopez took her cue when Tyrell remained silent.
“That’s how it looked to have played out, but Tyrell has reservations about it.”
“How so?” Fry asked him.
Tyrell voiced his doubts over the crime scene as he had found it. Fry appeared lost in his thoughts for several seconds before speaking.
“Only two of these men died from overdoses of crack cocaine.”
Tyrell noticed Lopez smile quietly beside him, but pretended not to. “What makes you say that?”
Fry gestured to the bodies.
“One of the victims shows none of the usual external signs of crack addiction. Crack is smoked through a hot pipe in order to obtain the maximum high between evaporation and inhalation. This gives habitual users crack lip—dry and blistered lips. This individual, we’ll call him Alpha, shows no sign of this affliction.”
“Sometimes addicts getting their hits off low-quality crack who then smoke something pure can inadvertently overdose,” Lopez suggested.
“Possibly, but when large amounts of dopamine are released by crack consumption,” Fry explained, “it also releases a large amount of adrenaline into the body, which increases heart rate and blood pressure, leading to long-term cardiovascular problems as a result of the release of methylecgonidine. Alpha shows no sign of such disorders, which precludes any kind of long-term addiction for him