Night and Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

“When do you go
off duty?”
    The attendant hesitated, looking at Iverson, then said, “Six-thirty.”
    I nodded and looked at Iverson. “The same with you?”
    Iverson nodded slowly.
    “Okay, this is what’s going to happen,” I said. “A Browne and Poole hearse will be arriving
to pick up this girl sometime today. You can let them do the pickup here at the station, or you
can load her into a meatwagon and meet the hearse at the perimeter. All the same to me.” I
paused. “But if there’s any problem...if anything happens to the corpse, or if anything keeps that
hearse from making the pickup, I swear to God that neither of you will be alive when the sun
rises tomorrow morning. Am I making myself completely clear?”
    It was complete bullshit. I couldn’t make that kind of trouble for anybody, anymore than I
could bring MaryAnn Klinger back to life. But they didn’t know that. And frankly, it felt good
saying it.
    The morgue attendant was looking at Iverson. He didn’t know who I was or if I could make
a threat like that. Iverson didn’t know either, but he clearly had a good imagination. He’d seen
the disk, and whatever it meant, he wasn’t laughing.
    “I’ll handle it,” Iverson said stiffly.
    I walked back to the cooler, stared down into the sightless eyes of MaryAnn Klinger for a
moment, then covered her face with the sheet. “Let’s go,” I said, turning to Iverson. “I’m done
here.”
     
    My second stop uptown was a boarding house on Clinton Avenue. The 15-year old missing
girl I was looking for, Rachel Stein, supposedly lived there. At least that’s what she’d told a
friend downtown.
    Her friend hadn’t been anxious to rat Rachel out, but when I explained what happens to
young girls alone in the city, the girl had produced a postcard, sent a week earlier. The postcard
had a Clinton Avenue return address.
    As I walked along Clinton and stared down at the childish scrawl of the Stein girl’s
handwriting on the postcard, I worked to get my anger in check. I didn’t have the muscle to
bring any kind of trouble down on the cops at Uptown station, but I wasn’t done with the Klinger
case. There was something seriously bent about the whole thing . . . the girl tapped dry, the
evidence of the wound removed, the quick order for cremation.
    Each thing, taken by itself, could be explained. People end up in dumpsters. Vees aren’t
supposed to just tap anybody when they get hungry, certainly not tap them dry, but it happens.
Police investigation is cursory at best. And they didn’t have the facilities at Uptown station to do
an extensive postmortem examination of an unusual wound. Short of sending the corpse to
Central, the only option would be to send the tissue containing the wound. Getting that
tissue...well, Vee cops aren’t gentle with human corpses, anymore than a butcher is gentle with sides of beef.
    Even the order for quick disposal of the corpse wasn’t surprising. Which is why I was in a
hurry to get to Uptown station. The official rule was three days. In the real world, two days was
about the maximum, and sometimes not that long. If a human corpse wasn’t claimed quickly, nobody
was going to track down next-of-kin.
    But when you put it all together, there was a stink coming from the whole damn thing. I’d
have to ask Joshua to talk to his buddies at Uptown station, find out who was involved, maybe
even find out what was going on.
    My hunch was that somebody important had gone off the rails and tapped the Klinger girl
dry. Uptown night shift knew who it was and was anxious to keep the lid on. Remove the
evidence, destroy the corpse, and it never happened.
    Of course, in the end, knowing who’d done it wouldn’t help me. Knowing wouldn’t let me
to do anything about it. But I like to finish puzzles.
    The boarding house was a dead end. The woman who ran it admitted that Rachel Stein had
stayed there for a few nights, but said Rachel had packed up and left a couple of days