Somebody must have called the head coroner to alert him to the fact that a Cleveland cop and an FBI agent had just strolled through the front doors of his building.
Johnson barely looked at Dana and shifted his gaze immediately to Templeton. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I know what you’re here for.’
Brushing past them, Johnson led Dana and Templeton down the hall to the main autopsy room thirty feet away. Ever the gentleman, he opened the door and went in first. Dana entered next, with Templeton bringing up the rear.
The sickly-sweet smell of formaldehyde filled Dana’s nostrils as she entered the room, tickling the tiny hairs lining the inside of her nose and making her want to sneeze. From the corner of her left eye, she watched Templeton wrinkle up his own nose against the offending odour, and she didn’t blame him one little bit. The entire space stank of death.
The autopsy room itself was a cold, sterile place, filled with refrigerated drawers were used for storing the dead bodies. Dana had seen a lot of horrible things over the course of her fourteen-year career with the FBI, but for some reason or another the stark sight of Christian Manhoff’s naked and bloated body lying dead on a shiny metal slab twenty feet away suddenly made her want to cry.
Was this where life ended up? she wondered. Whether you lived it the right way or the wrong way? Whether you lived it with love in your heart or with your heart filled with hate? Was this the end waiting for all of them? Her? Johnson? Templeton?
Dana closed her eyes and tried not to think about the fact that Crawford Bell and Eric Carlton had laid on tables just like these recently, in this very same room. Maybe even the same table. Not to mention her poor mother and father. Whatever most people’s faults might be – and Dana knew that everybody had their fair share – she also knew that the vast majority of human beings deserved a fate far better than this. Deserved to be kept warm and safe and loved. Deserved better than having someone like Dr Phillip Johnson clinically poking at them and prodding at them and slicing open their sternums to find out just how much their hearts and spleens and livers might weigh.
‘Could you bring us up to speed on what you found out with Christian Manhoff, Dr Johnson?’ Dana asked, wanting to break the heavy silence in the room. She needed conversation in the air right now – even if that conversation was with a man who despised her as much as Johnson did. Needed some sign of life amidst all this death. Needed to escape the haunting thoughts still floating around inside her brain and threatening to suck her down into the black hole of a clinical depression.
Johnson bristled, obviously irritated at the prospect of having to explain his exact, complicated science to an ignorant layperson such as Dana. ‘Not sure what exactly there is to bring you up to speed on, Agent Whitestone,’ he said gruffly. He shook his head in thinly veiled annoyance. ‘Someone shoved a large rawhide bone down Christian Manhoff’s throat and he choked to death on it. There isn’t much more to it than that.’
Dana eyed Manhoff’s naked body. ‘You didn’t cut him open,’ she observed, a sharp stab of irritation slicing hard through her chest at the nine-millionth example of Johnson’s incompetence. ‘There could be some evidence inside him, you know.’
Dana pressed her lips together while she waited for the coroner’s reply. The comment had been made to remind Johnson of the fact that he’d failed to fully autopsy the little girls in the Cleveland Slasher case the first time around – a mistake that had set back the investigation by at least three months by delaying the discovery of the plastic letters shoved inside the little girls’ uteruses. To remind Johnson of the fact that his carelessness had cost innocent people their lives. Had cost innocent children their lives.
‘I’m doing it tonight,’ Johnson said, clearly making up the lie right there on the spot. If nothing else, thirty years on the job had obviously taught him very well how to deal with people like Dana – people who seemed to exist for no other reason than to make his life more complicated. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow morning and let you know if I find anything interesting, but I highly doubt I will. To me, this