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sheet covers what I imagine to be a body. A box of test tubes ful of blood and urine is balanced on top of the torso.
    We reach an anteroom with a large glass door. Ruiz taps on the window and is buzzed in by an operator sitting at a desk. She has blond hair, dark roots and eyebrows plucked to the thinness of dental floss. Around the wal s are filing cabinets and white boards. On the far side is a large stainless steel door marked STAFF ONLY.
    I suddenly get a flashback to my medical training when I fainted during our first practical lesson working with a cadaver. I came around with smel ing salts waved under my nose. The lecturer then chose me to demonstrate to the class how to direct a 150mm needle through the abdomen to the liver to take a biopsy sample. Afterward he congratulated me on a new university record for the most organs hit with one needle in a single procedure.
    Ruiz hands the operator a letter.
    “Do you want me to set up a proper viewing?” she asks.
    “The fridge wil be fine,” he replies, “but I’l need an SB.” She hands him a large brown paper bag.
    The heavy door unlocks with a hiss like a pressure seal and Ruiz steps aside to let me go first. I expect to smel formaldehyde— something I came to associate with every body I saw in medical school. Instead there’s the faint odor of antiseptic and industrial soap.
    The wal s are polished steel. A dozen trol eys are parked in neat rows. Metal crypts take up three wal s and look like oversized filing cabinets, with large square handles that can accommodate two hands.
    I realize Ruiz is stil talking. “According to the pathologist she’d been in the ground for ten days. She was naked except for a shoe and a gold chain around her neck with a St.
    Christopher’s medal ion. We haven’t found the rest of her clothes. There is no evidence of a sexual assault…” He checks the label on a drawer and grips the handle. “I think you’l see why we’ve narrowed down the cause of death.”
    The drawer slides open smoothly on rol ers. My head snaps back and I lurch away. Ruiz hands me the brown paper bag as I double over and heave. It’s difficult to throw up and gasp for breath at the same time.
    Ruiz hasn’t moved. “As you can see the left side of her face is badly bruised and the eye is completely closed. Someone gave her a real working over. That’s why we released the drawing instead of a photograph. There are more than twenty stab wounds— not one of them more than an inch deep. But here’s the real kicker— every last one was self-inflicted. The pathologist found hesitation marks. She had to work up the nerve to force the blade through.”
    Raising my head, I glimpse his face reflected in the polished steel. That’s when I see it: fear. He must have investigated dozens of crimes, but this one is different because he can’t understand it.
    My stomach is empty. Perspiring and shivering in the cold, I straighten up and look at the body. Nothing has been done to restore the poor woman’s dignity. She is naked, stretched out with her arms against her sides and her legs together.
    The dul whiteness of her skin makes her look almost like a marble statue, only this “statue” has been vandalized. Her chest, arms and thighs are covered in slashes of crimson and pink.
    Where the skin is pul ed taut the wounds gape like empty eye sockets. At other places they natural y close and weep slightly.
    I have seen postmortems in medical school. I know the process. She has been photographed, scraped, swabbed and cut open from her neck to her crotch. Her organs have been weighed and her stomach contents analyzed. Bodily fluids, flakes of dead skin and dirt from beneath her fingernails have been sealed within plastic or beneath glass slides. A once bright energetic vibrant human being has become exhibit A.
    “How old was she?”
    “Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five.”
    “What makes you think she was a prostitute?”
    “It’s been nearly two