At the Morgue

CHAPTER 4-- at the morgue

Rocky's realm isn't nearly as dark and morbid as most people like to think. She has the lights bright so she can work clearly, her office is a collection of art from the teens she works with on the weekends. Rocky helps out with a programme that takes weapons and drugs out of the hands of troubled inner city kids, replacing them with brushes and paint. The paintings were both cheerful and pained, depending on the child that created them. She has potted plants at the windows and a vase of fresh flowers on her desk. Rocky sees so many terrible things, day in and day out, she likes to be surrounded by items that make her smile, even for a moment.

When we arrived, she wasn't in her office, but the morgue itself. She was up to her elbows in the abdomen of a middled aged man. She was grumbling to herself. “Oh yes, lets block our arteries with all sorts of cholesterol. Far too much alcohol, poor sod, your liver is shot.”

“She's kind of pretty when she's working, isn't she?” Quinn was smiling. I rolled my eyes.

“Boy, I will slap you! And I'm not going to remove the gloves.” Rocky was putting up with his nonsense rather well, I thought. Quinn had a crush on her and teased her like a school boy. Someday she really would slap him. Then probably take him out to dinner.

“Sorry to interrupt, but you called us, Rocky?” I started.

“Right, yeah.” She took off her gloves and gown, leading the way to the body at the far end of the room. She lifted the sheet off gently, the way a mother would to wake a child, and left the unnamed woman's breasts covered to maintain her dignity. She held out an evidence bag to me. Inside was a small folded piece of paper, about the two inches square. “Before you go asking me, I don't know. It was tucked into her mouth. More like, nearly shoved down her throat. You'll have to have the boys and girls in the lab figure it out.”

I rolled it over my fingers, looking at the paper through the bag. It looked familiar to me somehow. Then it dawned on me, why it looked so familiar. Sure, the page had gotten wet, but there was no mistaking the texture.

“Its a book page. Paper back, probably,” I said.

“How can you possibly guess that?” Quinn rolled his eyes at me.

“First, I do a ton of reading. Second, you should know better than to question me. I'm good at this kind of thing.”

“But why would he shove a book page down her throat?” Rocky thought aloud.

I looked her over, our lady of the hills, and it hit me like a freight train. “Its a message,” I mumbled to myself more than anyone else. “Did her prints come back, yet?” Rocky shook her head, it was still a little early for all the systems to be checked. “The cloak, the dogs, the paper. I mean, she looks like Red Riding Hood.”

A weighty silence filled the morgue, heavier than the unfinished stories of lives cut off far too soon. Rocky looked confused, unsure of where I was going with that train of thought and a slight hope in her eye that I was wrong. Quinn had known me far too long, his face changed from the joker that Rocky knew so well to the stone giant that I grew up with.

“If you're right, Sammie, this is guy is sick.” His tone carried the same weight as the look on his face.

I shook my head, I didn't want to be right. The last thing I wanted was to work point on case with a crazy killer. The crazy one's are unpredictable. I'll take a Jack shot Jill over Bill any day, most in homicide will if given a choice. “I think we've got ourselves a psycho. I hate psychos!”

Quinn grinned at me slightly, “Yeah right, you love the freaky ones. You need the challenge.”

He was right of course. The freaky ones required more, they took more time and energy to make sure that the right man went away for good. While most murders are pretty straight forward, there is a number that have something about them that is just strange, that requires you to dive deeper into the mind of a psychopath. Most cops hate to work these cases and try to get rid of them as soon as possible because they can't look into hell for that long. Quinn knew that I'd already seen hell, it didn't scare me any more.

I sighed heavily and handed the evidence bag to Rocky again. “Maintain chain of evidence, send this to CSU and we'll see what they can make of it. And I really need to know who she is, this case is at a stand still until I have her name.”

Quinn suggested that her dentals should be run through missing persons. Of course, Rocky was already on that angle, she'd had more than her fair share of Unidentified and Unclaimed in her time and hated adding to that list. Missing persons files took far too long to go through, and dental records were used more to confirm identity rather than actually searching. Even DNA had to be filed through the FBI and could take several weeks. Honestly, our best bet would be that her job required finger prints. Until then, we'd have to work the evidence that Jane had given us and do the best we could by her.

Author's Note

Unedited for NaNoWriMo