his tone of voice somber. “No one would believe us and our sanity would be questioned,” he continued, sounding very matter-of-fact. “I can’t afford to have my credibility nor my practice taken away from me and I imagine you would feel the same way, considering you were just awarded the position of Hope’s Chief of Police.”
I simply nodded because he had a good point. Who in the hell would believe a story like this anyway? “So how do we explain the body vanishing?” I asked and was amazed I could even form words.
“It was stolen,” Dr. Moody answered succinctly, his jaw tight, determined. “As simple as that. It was here and then the next day, it wasn’t.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything more. What more was there to say? Apparently, what happened in Dr. Moody’s office, stayed in Dr. Moody’s office.
Chapter Eight
I stood in the doctor’s office, blinking, feeling sick, and realizing with sudden clarity that my life would never, ever be the same again. I was vaguely aware of the doctor speaking soothingly to his assistant, of the phone ringing incessantly, and, most striking, of the slightly putrid smell of death that filled the office.
Bloody footprints and drops of hemoglobin led up from the morgue and to the door, where a bloody handprint smeared the handle. I had no doubt the trail of crimson led out into the night and through the small town.
My first reaction was to call for backup, but I held off as soon as I asked myself what I was supposed to report. A naked corpse carrying a bowlful of bagged intestines? Yeah, not so much.
Besides, the womanizing doc had it right: we both needed our jobs. And that meant the less crazy I sounded, the better.
Now, as I mentally replayed what I’d just seen, I became more and more certain that someone was playing a trick on me… on us. On second thought, I wondered if it could have been the doctor himself who was at fault. Maybe this was some sort of weird hazing of the new police chief? The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced such was the case.
No doubt, cameras were filming me even now and this whole thing would appear on YouTube before the night was out. If so, I was gonna bust the ass of each and every person who’d had something to do with it.
Yes, it was just a childish prank. An elaborate prank but a hoax, no less. Ha-ha, they’d gotten me. I was sure the look on my face had been priceless.
Except... except... I had studied the corpse yesterday. And I’d looked for a heartbeat and found none. The man had been dead, I was sure of it. And Miguel had been sure of it. Unless he, too, was somehow in on it?
I replayed the image of the thing coming up the stairs, searching my brain for a plausible explanation for how I’d seen what I had. Its face had been all peeled up! And I’d seen inside its chest cavity, even while it was walking!
Yes, but that could have been no more than an elaborate costume and special effects makeup, I argued with myself.
Um, like incredibly elaborate, I argued back.
And what about the blood smeared across the floor from John Doe dragging his foot? That could have been real? Or not. It certainly looked real… But how? No! Things like this just didn’t happen. Not in real life anyway.
I felt like a moron for even considering it in the first place.
So, I did the only thing I could think of: I walked through the office, down the steps and into the morgue where, to my dismay, I found the metal autopsy table vacant, although it was smeared with more blood. A mean-looking bone saw had been knocked to the ground, along with scalpels, clamps, clips, tongs and scissors. More blood was on the floor, a lot of it, in fact.
I quickly searched the small morgue, in particular, the mini corner office and the freezer, all of which were empty. Then I just stood there, frowning at the room because I was certain I’d seen a corpse just fifteen minutes earlier. And now there was no corpse but one hell of a mess.
And me? All I could do was question everything… what I thought I’d seen, my own level of sanity, Dr. Moody…
Elodie, stop! I yelled at myself. Obviously, this was all just a prank. Stop trying to make sense of it.
It.