The Company She Kept Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’ll see ten corpses by the end of their first shift, people assume they don’t mind keeping company with the recently departed. But in Joe’s experience, a lot of cops could be quite squeamish.
    That wasn’t true for him. He’d been in combat as a young man, where he’d become familiar with death in quantity. Later, he’d come to see the dead less as sentimental bearers of memories and nostalgia, and more as conveyers of interesting and possibly important details. Their souls resided in the minds of those who’d known them, in his opinion. Their bodies were just that—the remains left behind.
    As things had turned out, this was a good outlook, because the woman in his life—whom he’d trusted professionally for decades, but who’d just recently won his heart—was the state’s medical examiner, Beverly Hillstrom.
    Her office, called the OCME for short—the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner—was an impressively modern and pleasant, if small, facility located somewhere in the basement of the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, which by contrast was a sprawling, oddly laid-out behemoth of a complex, parked on the edge of the university campus.
    Joe escorted Susan Raffner’s body through the underground passages to the door designated for such deliveries, and witnessed the handoff from the hearse driver to the OCME staffer who accepted her. Then, despite it being after hours, he continued into the small suite of administrative offices, following the glow of a light down the otherwise dim hallway.
    Beverly Hillstrom, uncharacteristically dressed—if still stylish in his eyes—in blue jeans and a work shirt, turned around from a filing cabinet as he entered her small corner office, and draped her arms around his neck before giving him a welcoming kiss.
    He ran his hands down her back and said, “Jeez, I should make late-night deliveries more often.”
    â€œYou do just fine,” she told him, and kissed him again.
    After which, true to form, they easily fell into their professional roles. Homicides were still rare enough to merit a special callout by the ME, even late at night, and they both wanted to keep the momentum begun by the discovery of Susan Raffner.
    â€œShe was really a state senator?” Beverly asked, leading the way to the far side of the office suite and the locker room where they could both change into scrubs.
    Joe wasn’t taken aback by her ignorance. The chief medical examiner had to do her share of lobbying in Montpelier, but it still didn’t amount to much, given Vermont’s part-time citizen legislature. Most of the state’s politicians were unknown outside the capitol building—even ones as outspoken and energetic as Susan.
    â€œYup,” he told her as she preceded him. “And the governor’s best buddy.”
    Beverly looked over her shoulder, familiar with Joe’s history with Gail. “Really? They were friends? No wonder this was given such a high priority. I was impressed by the tone of the officer who called me.”
    She pushed open the door to the locker room and gestured to him to follow her. “Sharing this room after hours should rank up there with smoking in the bathroom. I do take it that you want to be present for this one.”
    â€œI do.”
    He knew the drill. They both switched from street clothes into scrubs, taking just a moment, while still in their underwear, to exchange another kiss, this one compellingly seductive.
    â€œSomething to think about for later,” she suggested.
    Back outside, Beverly continued leading the way, this time down the facility’s main corridor, outside the admin suite, toward a broad door blocking the end of the hall. This was the entrance to the autopsy room.
    On the way, he noticed that the gurney holding Raffner had vanished from where they’d left it, inside the receiving door. “You summon