The mansion’s morgue was in the basement. It looked more like a real morgue, or at least the ones Bryce had seen on TV, than he’d expected.
There were fifteen small doors lining a brick wall. Doors to corpse-sized refrigerators, obviously. In the center of the room was a large metal table on wheels resting below a single, naked lightbulb suspended above it. A smaller metal table covered in various tools and instruments sat adjacent to the larger one.
On top of the larger metal table rested a body covered by a single white sheet. No doubt the remains of David Cho lay underneath.
“Remember, you have just thirty minutes,” Giles said from the doorway. “You may alter the body however you see fit to uncover details relevant to the crime. When the estate bell chimes, your time is up.” He left the room, closing the door behind him.
Bryce, Jacqueline, and Darrel looked at one another solemnly, then shifted their gazes in unison to the body on the table.
Jacqueline was the first to act, likely for the same reason she’d seemed like a logical choice to investigate the morgue: her four decades of experience as a nurse. It’s not like she’d ever worked in a burn unit, though. She was used to dealing with sick babies and their mothers, not crispy dead bodies. But just the same, you can’t be a nurse for forty years and not get at least somewhat accustomed to the sight of blood and gore.
Besides, it wasn’t as if the group had forced her to come here. They’d all decided in the foyer collectively that at least one person needed to investigate each area. Frank had stubbornly insisted on getting the crime scene, so when he asked for a volunteer to take the morgue, Jacqueline had stepped forward after a long, seemingly endless delay. She was the logical choice, anyway; she knew that. Which is precisely why she eventually had relented.
After she volunteered, Darrel had agreed to come as well. He was a high school biology teacher, after all, so he’d figured that he might be the second-most qualified to examine a body and figure out what was wrong with it. And furthermore, he’d really enjoyed chatting with her in the mansion’s aquarium room earlier that afternoon.
Bryce had surprised even himself by choosing to investigate the morgue. But, in the end, part of him thought it might be kind of cool to get to see a real dead body up close. Of course it sucked that David Cho had been barbecued like a small chicken, but at the same time, what was done was done. David Cho wasn’t coming back no matter what. At least, that’s what Bryce kept telling himself again and again as they all stood there and looked at the human-shaped lump under the white sheet.
Jacqueline, needing a cigarette so badly her hands were shaking, grabbed the sheet covering Mr. Cho’s body and ripped it off in one quick motion, sending it floating to the concrete floor at their feet.
“Gross!” Bryce said as he took a step back without ever averting his gaze.
David Cho was lying faceup on the metal table. A tiny reflection of the naked lightbulb suspended above him glimmered in his vacant eyes, as if in an attempt to give them artificial life. He was still fully dressed. At least where the fire had not burned his clothes away, that is.
“So, like, what now?” Bryce asked.
Jacqueline and Darrel looked at him the way they might if they were scolding a small child.
“I’ve never exactly done an investigative autopsy before,” Jacqueline said. “Oh Lord, I need a cigarette.”
“Tell me about it,” Darrel said as he eyed the charred body warily.
Then Bryce surprised both of them.
“You guys notice something weird about this?” he asked.
They shook their heads, unsure what the young kid was referring to.
“Well,” Bryce continued, “look, like, at the burns on his clothes and stuff. I mean, the dude burst into flames right in front of us, right? But he’s only burned on the top half of his body. His pants and lower shirt look totally normal. And aside from his neck, his face wasn’t even burned at all.”
Darrel nodded slowly as his eyes widened.
“I mean, what causes a guy to burst into flames but only in such a small area?” Bryce asked.
“It’s a very good point,” Jacqueline agreed. “And look here, there’s no burn marks at all on the sides. Come on, let’s flip him over, just to make sure he didn’t burn anywhere on his back, either.”
The three of them tentatively grabbed David Cho’s stiff corpse and rolled it until it was facedown on the table. Then all three of them stepped back in shock and gasped.
“Holy crap, is that a bullet hole?” Bryce said.
They gathered around the body and looked down at David Cho’s back. Right there in the center of his unburned, otherwise neatly pressed white dress shirt was a small hole with a smear of dried blood running from it down to the waistline of Cho’s pants. Jacqueline grabbed a pair of surgical scissors from the small table and cut the shirt open at the hole. She pulled it away.
They all looked at the small hole in Mr. Cho’s back. Nobody spoke for several long seconds.
“Was there a hole like this in his chest?” Darrel asked.
“I don’t know, it was, like, too crispy and burned to tell,” Bryce said.
“I think this is an exit wound, anyway,” Jacqueline said, as she poked at the hole with a tweezers.
“How can you tell?” Darrel asked.
“Because it’s too big and slightly irregular to be an entrance wound. When I started out as a nurse, I worked in an inner-city ER for a few years. So I’ve seen my share of bullet wounds.”
Neither Darrel nor Bryce had any reason to doubt what she said or challenge her theory. Nonetheless, they eventually flipped the body back over and examined the charred skin on David Cho’s chest. Once they were looking for it, they found the bullet’s entrance wound rather quickly. It was, as Jacqueline had predicted, slightly smaller and rounder than the hole in David’s back.
It was a pretty conclusive find, with obvious, yet odd, implications: David Cho had been shot and set on fire.