Serpents in the Cold Read Online Free PDF

shoulder and moved him tenderly back onto the street toward the car he’d left parked opposite Epstein’s Drug. “C’mon,” he said. “We need to go see the body.”

6
    _________________________
    Southern Mortuary, South End
    THE ROOM, TWO levels beneath Boston City Hospital’s main floor, was as cold as an icebox. The windowless walls were scrubbed white tile, and beyond the tile Cal knew there lay old stone, many feet thick, that would be damp to the touch. He could sense the bay beneath them and around them, a subtle scent of moist decay, brine, loam, and shale, a smell that three hundred years and hundreds of thousands of tons of landfill couldn’t affect or change. It was a place that somnambulists and creeps might haunt while the rest of the city slept, for even now, at three in the afternoon, it was night down here.
    Large sheets of sheer plastic hung like soiled shower curtains on hooks separating gurneys upon which bodies lay, visible through the plastic. The coroner, Fierro, stood at the head of a stainless steel autopsy table smoking a cigarette. On the table, covered with a sheet, lay the body of Dante’s sister-in-law, Sheila Anderson. The outline of her face pressed against the sheet; Cal stared at the dark contours of eyes and nose and mouth.
    Fierro waited with a silent decorum that surprised Cal. When Cal nodded, he rolled down the sheet to just above her neck. Pale, blue-hued, and sleeping, as if she had not suffered at all. Fierro stared at them, squinting through his cigarette smoke, ready to show them the reason why she could never wake and rise ever again.
    Cal placed his hat on the stainless steel worktable. “This isn’t a formal identification. Owen already ID’d the body, right?”
    “He did earlier, but I knew you’d come.”
    Cal nodded. “Thanks.”
    Fierro replaced the sheet, pressed at the edges about the stainless steel table as if he were making a bed. The lights above the steel tables flickered and buzzed, and a dull pressure throbbed behind Cal’s eyes.
    Dante stared at the sheet and looked as if he were somewhere else altogether, perhaps remembering how Margo had been examined, gutted, and stitched back up in this very same room. He’d aged since then. Cal suspected they both had. Only Fierro seemed untouched; his complexion gleamed, absent of wrinkles or age. Years before Cal had mistaken that look for serenity, a man who liked his job, who came home at the end of the day without any worries on his mind, but it was only later that Cal realized Fierro was simply indifferent. To Fierro these people were merely cadavers, and their waxy, soft, once volatile and industrious flesh something to be considered and inspected, then ordered and classified, and then filed away. Living bodies interested Fierro even less.
    Dante cleared his throat. “I’d like to see the body.”
    Cal looked at him.
    Fierro put his hand to his mouth and coughed. “A lot of hate went into this. Whoever named him the Butcher wasn’t too far off the mark.”
    “The Butcher killed her?” Cal asked, surprised.
    “Didn’t Owen tell you that?”
    “No,” Cal said.
    Fierro stepped forward, took hold of the sheet that draped her body, and folded it precisely and efficiently down below her feet. She was naked, just as she’d been found, but the rigor that the police report had spoken of was gone. Now, nine hours later, after Fierro’s autopsy, what blood was left in her body had pooled in her back and legs.
    Cal stared down the length of Sheila’s body. The gash across her neck had been sewn shut once the body had thawed—a violent cross-stitching like the lacing on a football. Cal realized he was no longer looking at Sheila but at something that had once been Sheila. He didn’t want to think this way, to think like Fierro did, or to believe that such a thing as one’s soul—the essence that made up a person even in death—could be so completely gone.
    “Why’d you tag her as a Jane Doe?”