Brendon Ellery stared at the open door of locker 31.
The darkness hiding the empty drawer.
No shroud.
No body.
No Father Joseph D’Angelo. He’d tagged and bagged the dead priest himself after the autopsy and filed it away in locker 31. Ellery stood back, fingers tapping impatiently on the edge of the locker door, marshalling his thoughts into some sort of logical order. He’d bagged the body and finally closed the file on D’Angelo, he looked up at the plain clock face, ten hours ago, over a week since he’d first come downstairs to Hospital Hell. Since then he’d taken lunch, cut open a crack baby, dead two weeks before birth, congestive heart failure, and dissected a septuagenarian who’d O.D.’d on domestic bleach after his wife’s last lethal stroke.
No signs of a break in. Nothing else missing.
Well, it’s not as if he just did the Resurrection Shuffle out of here under his own steam. Ellery’s face twisted into an ugly little smile as he closed the door on his erstwhile Lazarus’s bed. That’s one option that’s not happening. He checked the residents of the neighbouring lockers. The only viable alternative left, accepting the fact that a: the dead weren’t walking and b: he wasn’t losing it, was body-snatching. The thought didn’t shock him; it numbed him.
He was a man of the world, and had certainly heard of weirder things, especially in high profile cases… including hideously maimed corpses waking up the moment before the scalpel made its first incision, but they were always before the cutting got underway.
Turning his back on the bank of lockers, Ellery pushed through the swing doors and into the twin smells of disinfectant and ammonia, hospital smells. An empty gurney rested against the wall. His footsteps echoed as he headed back towards reception, tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth, lips curling into a genuine smile as his eyes fixed on the surveillance camera at the end of the corridor, its single black eye looking down from above the swing doors.
“Got you,” he said softly, pushing through the second set of doors into reception.
Brendon Ellery took the phone from the wall-mount and jabbed out the number of an office in Westwood, waiting for someone to answer. Mannelli picked up the phone, making it his problem.