Celebrity in Death (In Death #34)(29)

Eve walked down the white tunnel of the morgue. She’d long ago gotten used to the smell of death coated with lemon-scented industrial cleaner. She’d stopped thinking that the men and women at Vending or heading to an office had recently lifted the internal organs out of a corpse, or were going to after the next hit of coffee.

She no longer wondered how many occupants resided in the cold drawers, or how many gallons of blood washed down the gullies of the tables on a daily basis.

But when she passed through the doors of the autopsy room and saw Harris on the slab, the resemblance to Peabody gave her a hard jolt.

Chief Medical Examiner Morris turned away from a comp screen. He wore a navy blue suit with razor-thin lines of silver. He’d twisted his ebony hair into a ladder of sleek tails at the back of his head.

Some sort of gritty, back-beating rock played at low volume, and a vending cup of coffee steamed away where he’d set it down on a steel tray.

His exotic eyes skimmed past Eve, then back. “I’d hoped Peabody would be with you.”

“She’s on her way.”

“It’s a … I’m not sure what to call it.” He walked to the body, naked on the slab, the Y incision tidily closed. “Really, the resemblance is only surface. And yet.”

“I know.”

“I’ll admit I’m grateful Carter was on last night, and did the work here.” He tapped a finger to the screen to bring it on. “I would have found working on her very disturbing. You didn’t request me.”

With a shrug, Eve slid her hands into her pockets. “It was late.”

“No.” Now those dark eyes softened a bit as he looked at Eve. “You thought because I’d lost Amaryllis, that we’d had to bring her here to my house, even this surface resemblance to a friend would cause me pain.”

“There wasn’t any point in it.”

“There’s a point in thanking you for your consideration. I miss her.” He brushed his fingers over his heart. “I think I’ll always miss the potential of what we could have been together. But I’m better than I was.”

“That’s good.”

“When I came in here this morning, looked at her, it made me unspeakably sad. People who do what we do, who work with death day after day, we can still find it unspeakably sad. I think it’s important we do, from time to time.”

“I barely met her, and I didn’t like her. I’ve made a point in picking out all the physical differences between her and Peabody. And still, it hits a spot.”

“I think, after all this time, all this death, it’s good we still have a spot that can be hit. Coffee?”

“That?” She glanced at the steaming cup, could smell the raw bitterness from where she stood. “Pass.”

“It’s foul,” he agreed with a bit of cheer. “I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad that I’ve gotten used to it.”

“I could hook you up with some real.”

“If I had real coffee in here, there’d be a stampede. Even the dead might rise like zombies. I’ll stick with foul, avoid the horror.”

“I don’t think real coffee’s going to make Harris rise up and bite your throat.”

“Brains,” Morris corrected. “Zombies eat brains.”

“Okay, that’s just sick.”

“Well, they are zombies, after all. In any case,” he said as the foolish moment took the edge off. He glanced at the screen, at the hard data. “After the initial sadness came the gratitude. This loss isn’t mine, or yours. I think, from time to time, we have to be grateful, too.”

“I wanted to kiss Peabody on the mouth last night. I resisted, but I wanted to.”

It made him smile. “Aren’t we the softies, the murder cop and the dead doctor. Well. Someone else will just be sad this morning.”

“Not so much,” Eve told him. “She was a bitch. I haven’t talked to one person who knew her who liked her, with the exception of her mother. And I don’t know if that was ‘like’ or just shock and grief over the loss of a child.”

“Even less like our girl then. A pity for the victim, though I doubt she suffered much as, according to the results of the tox screen Carter ordered, and I’ve just reviewed, she was very drunk. Blood alcohol level point-three-two—along with some considerable traces of zoner.”

“She drank her way through the evening. She had herbals in her bag, and I found six butts on the roof. They’re at the lab. Could be she had some zoner mixed in.”

“She sounds like someone who didn’t care for her own reality very much.”

“COD?”

“Drowning. Water in the lungs. She was alive when she went in. The head wound …” He brought it up on-screen, split it with a magnified section of the pool skirt. “It was severe enough to render her unconscious, but not fatal. Without the dunk, she’d have suffered a mild concussion, required a couple of stitches, and a blocker for the headache. Carter’s reconstruction, and I concur, indicates a fall.”

He switched data, brought up the computerized reconstruction.

“She fell or was pushed backward, struck her head on this pebbled surface. The blow would have rendered her unconscious, as I said, for several minutes. Longer, I expect, with her BAL and the zoner.”