a narrow, white hospital-like corridor. Double sets of small square doors about the size and shape of bus terminal lockers lined the walls on each side for as far as they could see. Everything was white. It looked like the storage area of a futuristic stopping point for intergalactic travelers.
"Are all of these full?" Auntie Lil asked spryly. She eyed the doors in great curiosity. "How many of them would you say were victims of violent crime?" she inquired, without waiting for an answer to her first question. "I bet many of them have been shot. Were any of them stabbed?"
"Let's just confine ourselves to the one body, shall we?" T.S. suggested, dragging her away from the wall before she started pulling open drawers and examining the bodies for signs of foul play.
"Here she is," Rodriquez announced with a bit of flair. "Number 433."
They gathered around the small door and T.S. could have sworn that Rodriquez deliberately took his time undoing the latch just to heighten the suspense. "Now, don't faint on us, ma'am," he warned Auntie Lil in an experienced voice.
She flapped a gloved hand impatiently and Rodriquez opened the door, smoothly sliding out a gurney on a steel track. It rolled into view and stretched across the breadth of the hallway, gleaming with stainless steel emptiness beneath the glare of the fluorescent lights above.
"There's no one here!" Auntie Lil cried. "What have you done with the poor woman?"
"Done with her? We've done nothing with her at all." Though confused, Rodriquez was still quite capable of automatically heading off blame before it could be assigned to him. He frantically scanned his clipboard list. "You say she died yesterday? West Side. Right?"
"Right," Auntie Lil echoed. "How many old ladies with no known name or address kicked off yesterday afternoon, anyway?"
Rodriquez paused to glare at her briefly, then shook his head and scratched at a small insect bite that had swelled on one of his cheeks. "Hmmm. You wait here."
He turned abruptly and left them staring at the empty locker. But not for long. For different reasons, neither Auntie Lil nor T.S. had any inclination to wait in the hall of the dead while he poked around in search of the missing body. The moment Rodriquez disappeared through another set of swinging doors, both of them went scurrying after him. They were just in time to see him stick his head through a small door set off another, shorter corridor.
With the unerring instincts of a middle linebacker who smells a quarterback sack, Auntie Lil went barreling down the short hall and chose the most efficient route to success. She pushed Rodriquez through the door into the room and crowded in behind him, with T.S. hot on her heels.
They'd found Emily all right. She was lying naked on a smooth steel table that included slanted gutters on all four sides. A thin stream of water trickled through the gutters and ran into a narrow sink that hugged one wall of the room. A tiny man, nearly as gnarled and short as a gnome, was peering intently into Emily's eyes with the aid of a highly focused penlight. His thick eyeglasses shone eerily with reflected glare and he was issuing a constant patter of noise that sounded—at least from where T.S. and Auntie Lil stood— like indignant mice arguing among themselves. A slim Asian woman stared over his shoulder and was listening raptly to his lecture.
The little man's squeaky voice rose in volume as he reached his conclusion. "Look again," he commanded. "Notice the breakage around the cornea. Curiously enough, this is symptomatic of either…" Rodriquez coughed loudly and the little man abruptly stopped his speech, having finally noticed the company. He was quite unperturbed.
"Hello, what's this?" he asked cheerfully, eyeing Auntie Lil up and down with professional detachment. Auntie Lil responded by straightening her back and opening her eyes wide, as if to prove that she, thank you, was quite alive.
"These people are here to take a photo of this dead lady," Rodriquez explained, cocking his thumb toward the corpse. "I wouldn't have burst in on you like that, but this old one here, she pushed me from behind like some kind of maniac." He glared at Auntie Lil, but she was far too busy staring at Emily to notice his resentment.
A jagged V-shaped scar tapered down from the dead woman's shoulders across her breasts, coming together several inches above the navel before snaking angrily down over the shrunken tissues and protruding