Empties Read Free Page B

people who would call anyone William, and he had never encouraged the use of his nickname, so everyone just used his last name.  
    Gibney stood up to his less than average height. “Let’s go look before we eat lunch. Better to risk killing your appetite now instead of losing your lunch later.”  
    “I’m not... overly squeamish.” Benek got up, retrieved the autopsy file from the desk, and followed the coroner out the door and down the long, green-tiled hallway to cold storage.  
    “You know,” Gibney said as he fell back and walked next to him, “you’re a pretty good dresser compared to the dicks out your way,” and Benek remembered how his mother had always yelled at him to be neat. “Even got a tie.”  
    “My dead mother’s idea,” Benek said, wondering at his admission to a vague credential.  
    Gibney turned left through an open door into a small room and stopped before a desk. “There should be an attendant here,” he said.  
    “What’s the file say?”  
    Benek looked inside hastily. “Drawer 104.”  
    Gibney went past the desk and pushed through a swinging door. Benek followed him into a large, brightly lit room, and they crossed the white floor tiles to the far wall. Gibney located 104 at waist level, and pulled it out. “Ready?” he asked without looking up at Benek.  
    “Go ahead,” Benek said, and Gibney unzipped the bag. The head was taped shut. Slowly, Gibney removed the adhesive strip  
    and lifted the cutaway portion of the skull. Benek, feeling slightly queasy, peered into the bloody hollow, then flipped through the autopsy report.  
    “What now?” Gibney asked.  
    Benek found the notation. “Says here the skull was filled with blood when opened.”  
    Gibney scowled and looked surprised. “I didn’t record every detail myself.” He took the report and checked the entry. “That just can’t be. A medical cadaver’s head just wouldn’t be filled with blood. It had to have been pumped in later—but why, even for a gag?”  
    “Maybe to confuse us,” Benek said.  
    Gibney nodded. “Bet you it was watered blood, maybe even red dye. I’ll check our samples. If it’s blood I’ll bet you there’s two types. That would indicate it’s part of some gag.” Then he shook his head. “Still a waste of time, ours and their effort. File the paperwork and get back to cases you can solve. It’s just plain stupid to chase after something like this. All you’ll find is a lot of ingenuity. No crime has been committed.”  
    “Then you rule out murder?”  
    “Murder! There’s not one sign that he was anything but dead from natural causes, long before someone sat him down on that bench.”  
    “But you can’t say when he died.”  
    “No,” Gibney said, “but that’s not strange with a body that’s been on ice for a while, and brainless. I don’t know. It’s the damnedest thing. All I can say is that the evidence of what killed this man, or how long he’s been dead, is too old to trust, so unless we find out who he was, we’ll just never know. And, as I said, what we would find out, if we could and did, wouldn’t be worth the work. You’d have better luck staking out bicycle thieves.”  
    “That’s been done, successfully, on occasion.”  
    “Yeah, and my dog almost said a recognizable word to me, once, a long time ago.”  
    As Benek watched Gibney zip up the bag and slide the drawer shut, it occurred to him that the hoax might easily have been set up right here, with Gibney in on it all the way, including everything he had just said.  
    “I know, I know,” Gibney said, “but I assure you we had nothing to do with this. Consider for a moment that maybe our autopsy destroyed the signs of a previous brain removal. Johansen had not been instructed to be especially careful about the signs, after all. There was nothing exceptional about the body.”  
    “Sounds plausible,” Benek said as they left the area. “Then why was an