Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(67)

It was a carefully crafted answer that did not contain a falsehood but didn’t exactly tell the whole truth. I hoped that the answer plus my somber demeanor would lead her to believe I was there as next of kin to someone awaiting autopsy. I didn’t want her calling back to the investigations department and announcing that a reporter was in the lobby. If GTO refused to talk to me, I wanted him to tell me so to my face.

The receptionist asked my name and then made a call. She spoke briefly to someone and then looked up at me.

“What’s the name of the deceased?” she asked.

Now I was cornered. But I had an out. Burbank was considered part of the Valley so I could still answer without lying.

“Marshall Hammond.”

The receptionist repeated the name and then listened. She hung up without another word.

“He’s in a meeting and will be out as soon as it ends,” she said. “There is a family room down that hall to the right.”

She pointed behind me.

“Okay, thanks.”

I walked down the hall, hoping there would be no one in the “family” room, but had no such luck. This was Los Angeles, where more than ten million people lived. And died. Some unexpectedly, some by accident, and some by murder. I knew that the county coroner’s office had a whole fleet of pale blue vans with racks in the back for making multiple-body pickups. There was not a chance the family room would ever be empty.

In fact, the place was almost full with small groups of grieving people huddled in silence or in tears, probably hoping there had been a mistake and it wasn’t their loved one they had been asked to come identify or to arrange for transfer and burial.

I didn’t mind skirting the truth with the receptionist but here I felt like an intruder, an impostor they assumed was among them in loss and grief. I had been in their place once, with my brother, and I had knocked on the doors of homes where loved ones had been taken by violence, but something about this room was sacred. I felt awful and thought about making a U-turn and just waiting for Gonzalo Ortiz in the hallway outside the door. But instead I took the first seat near the door. The last thing I wanted was to interact with someone in the throes of their own pain hoping to assuage mine with a smile of understanding. That would be like stealing.

The wait felt like an hour as I listened to murmured pleas, and one woman began to wail. But the truth was that no more than five minutes after my arrival I was rescued from the family room when a Latino man in his fifties, dark-skinned with a salt-and-pepper mustache, stepped in and asked if I was Mr. McEvoy. I was up and out of my seat faster than I could say yes. I led him out into the hallway and then hesitated when I realized he had to lead.

“Let’s take a shortcut,” he said.

He waved me down the hall in the opposite direction from Reception. I followed.

“Are you Investigator Ortiz?” I asked.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “And I have a private meeting room set up.”

I decided to wait till we got to the private room before explaining who I was and what I wanted. Ortiz used a card key to swipe the lock on a door marked authorized personnel only, and we were admitted to the pathology wing of the complex. I knew this because of the odor that engulfed me as we entered. It was the smell of death cut with industrial-strength disinfectant, a sweet and decidedly sour smell that I knew would stay in my nasal passages long after I left the premises. It prompted me to remember the last time I had been in this place. It was four years earlier, when the chief medical examiner had gone public with complaints about health and safety issues in the complex coupled with budgetary issues that affected staffing and crippled service. He reported autopsies being backed up by fifty bodies at a time and toxicology testing taking months instead of weeks. It was a move to persuade the county commissioners to give him the budget he had requested, but it only resulted in the chief’s being forced out of his job.

I doubted much had changed since then and was thinking of bringing up the issue with Ortiz as a way of breaking the ice when I informed him I was a journalist. I could mention the stories I wrote about the deficiencies for the Velvet Coffin in hopes that it would help convince him to talk to me about the atlanto-occipital-dislocation cases.

But as it turned out, I wasn’t going to have to tell him I was a journalist or worry about breaking the ice. It had already been broken. Ortiz led me to a door marked meeting room b. He knocked once and opened the door, holding his arm out to usher me in first. As I entered I saw a rectangular table with six chairs in the middle of the room. Sitting at the far end of the table were Detectives Mattson and Sakai.

I probably revealed my surprise with a slight hesitation in my step but then I regained speed and entered the room. I did my best to recover with a half-smile.

“Well, well, LAPD’s finest,” I said.

“Have a seat, Jack,” Mattson said.

He hadn’t bothered intentionally mispronouncing my last name. I took that as a sign that maybe he had learned something from the stunt he had pulled arresting me. My surprise slipped into bafflement. Were they following me? How did they know I was coming to the coroner’s office?

I took a chair directly across from Mattson, and Ortiz took the seat beside me. I put my backpack on the floor next to me. There was a momentary pause as we all stared at one another. I decided to start out incendiary and see what it got me.

“You guys here to arrest me again?” I asked.