Vanish Read Free

good whiff. She was definitely drinking a rum and Coke.”
    “At nine A.M.?” Maura looked across the table at her assistant, Yoshima. As usual, he was
    silent, but she saw one dark eyebrow tilt up, as eloquent a comment as she would get from
    Yoshima.
    “She didn’t get down too much of it,” said Officer Buchanan. “The glass was still pretty full.”
    “Okay,” said Maura. “Let’s take a look at her back.”
    Together, she and Yoshima log-rolled the corpse onto its side.
    “There’s a tattoo here on the hip,” noted Maura. “Little blue butterfly.”
    “Geez,” said Buchanan. “A woman her age?”
    Maura glanced up. “You think fifty’s ancient, do you?”
    “I mean—well, that’s my mom’s age.”
    Careful, boy. I’m only ten years younger.
    She picked up the knife and began to cut. This was her fifth postmortem of the day, and she
    made swift work of it. With Dr. Costas on vacation, and a multivehicle accident the night
    before, the cold room had been crammed with body bags that morning. Even as she’d worked
    her way through the backlog, two more bodies had been delivered to the refrigerator. Those
    would have to wait until tomorrow. The morgue’s clerical staff had already left for the evening,
    and Yoshima kept looking at the clock, obviously anxious to be on his way home.
    She incised skin, gutted the thorax and abdomen. Removed dripping organs and placed them
    on the cutting board to be sectioned. Little by little, Gloria Leder revealed her secrets: a fatty
    liver, the telltale sign of a few too many rums and Cokes. A uterus knobby with fibroids.
    And finally, when they opened the cranium, the reason for her death. Maura saw it as she lifted
    the brain in her gloved hands. “Subarachnoid hemorrhage,” she said, and glanced up at
    Buchanan. He was looking far paler than when he had first walked into the room. “This
    woman probably had a berry aneurysm—a weak spot in one of the arteries at the base of the
    brain. Hypertension would have exacerbated it.”
    Buchanan swallowed, his gaze focused on the flap of loose skin that had been Gloria Leder’s
    scalp, now peeled forward over the face. That’s the part that usually horrified them, the point at
    which so many of them winced or turned away—when the face collapses like a tired rubber
    mask.
    “So . . . you’re saying it’s a natural death?” he asked softly.
    “Correct. There’s nothing more you need to see here.”
    The young man was already stripping off his gown as he retreated from the table. “I think I
    need some fresh air . . .”
    So do I, thought Maura. It’s a summer night, my garden needs watering, and I have not been
    outside all day.
    But an hour later she was still in the building, sitting at her desk reviewing lab slips and
    dictated reports. Though she had changed out of her scrub suit, the smell of the morgue still
    seemed to cling to her, a scent that no amount of soap and water could eradicate, because the
    memory itself was what lingered. She picked up the Dictaphone and began to record her report
    on Gloria Leder.
    “Fifty-year-old white woman found slumped in a patio chair near her apartment swimming
    pool. She is a well-developed, well-nourished woman with no visible trauma. External exam
    reveals an old surgical scar on her abdomen, probably from an appendectomy. There is a small
    tattoo of a butterfly on her . . .” She paused, picturing the tattoo. Was it on the left or the right
    hip? God, I’m so tired, she thought. I can’t remember. What a trivial detail. It made no
    difference to her conclusions, but she hated being inaccurate.
    She rose from her chair and walked the deserted hallway to the stairwell, where her footfalls
    echoed on concrete steps. Pushing into the lab, she turned on the lights and saw that Yoshima
    had left the room in pristine condition as usual, the tables wiped down and gleaming, the floors
    mopped clean. She crossed to the cold room and pulled open the heavy locker