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Southern Mortuary, South End
THE CITY MORGUE resided in a decrepit four-story brick building just off of Massachusetts Avenue between Albany and Harrison. This time Cal and Dante entered through the main entrance instead of through the underground Boston City Hospital annex and its rat-infested tunnel. The lobby was done up in the Egyptian Revival theme popularized by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb at the time of its construction. In the ornate marble lobby two sphinxes greeted those who had come to identify the dead—sometimes family members and lovers, husbands and wives, and at other times estranged children now fully grown, called to give voice and a face to a man or woman who’d abandoned them decades before—and guarded the stairs that led down to the medical examiners and the refrigerated storage drawers in which the dead lay interned. At first it had been a place to honor the dead and comfort those coming to identify them, but in the decades since, the building had fallen into disrepair. Now it was a dark, rambling labyrinth filled with the smells of decay and damp, and the constant sound of dripping pipes.
As Cal and Dante descended the ramp down two floors beneath the city streets, the stinging odor of formaldehyde bit at their nostrils. Underground it was as cold as the day they’d come to view Sheila’s body. An elevator clanged open and they stepped back to allow a technician in green scrubs from the city hospital to pass, pushing a gurney on which a body lay beneath a bloodied sheet. They followed the sound of its clacking wheels and his slow, plodding feet down the tunnel.
The doors to the morgue opened, and in the white-tiled room they could see Fierro and two technicians discussing a body they’d just pulled from the storage drawers. On two other tables beneath the glare of white fluorescents lay covered remains. Fierro glanced up, pushing his glasses onto the top of his head, and frowned. He spoke quickly to a technician at his side, pulled the sheet up over the body, and slid the drawer back into storage. At the door, he raised up his hands to block the view and ushered Cal and Dante back into the hallway.
“What the hell are you two doing here?” He raked his fingers through what was left of his limp hair, accidentally knocking his glasses to the floor.
“Need to see if you’ve gotten anything on the women found in the trailer out at the city dump. Same as Sheila, right?”
“Cal, Dante,” Fierro said as he bent over to retrieve his glasses. “Owen’s been looking for you for two days. He’s already told me not to talk to you two, and he’s pissed off as hell.”
Cal shrugged, uncaring. “C’mon, Fierro, have they identified the bodies?”
Fierro reached into his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. He motioned them down the hallway between a row of empty gurneys pressed against the damp wall. “You two are going to be the death of me, you know that.” He handed them each a cigarette and lit his own. “This office performs most of the state’s examinations, almost three thousand autopsies a year. I’m so busy I don’t even have time to use the john. I’ve got a freaking bladder infection, a headache that never quits, and when I come home my wife doesn’t want to touch me because she says I stink of formaldehyde.”
From down the dim hallway came the distant sound of the elevator doors opening, and after a moment, as the three of them turned out of the hall, single footsteps, sharp and measured and officious, echoed on the floor, followed by a thick, phlegm-filled cough. Before he came into view, Cal knew it was Owen.
Owen’s eyes widened slightly when he saw them. He took his hand from his mouth, reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, and wiped his nose. “Sooner or later I knew I’d run into you two.”
“You’re not sounding too good.”
“You’re an asshole, Cal.” He sounded congested, and he winced when he coughed into his handkerchief.
Owen looked at Dante and then back to Cal. “If you two aren’t here to ID a family member, then you’re trespassing.”
A speckled redness touched his cheeks but left the rest of his face sickly pale. He nodded, resigned. “What has the doctor here told you?”
“Nothing. We were about to beat it out of him.”
“I think he’s got more important things to be doing than wasting his time with you clowns.” He nodded at Fierro. “You almost done with the Hyde Park shooting?”
“Almost.”
“Good. I’ll be back after I talk to these two.”
INSIDE MAMA’S DINER it was warm and filled with the chatter of people, the odors of coffee and of meat cooking on the grill. They took a booth by the front windows, and when a waitress came with coffee, they ordered breakfast: eggs, steak, and hash for Owen and Dante, eggs and blood sausage for Cal. Owen was staring beyond the window, and Cal was surprised by how much older he looked; the light reflecting off the snow had turned his face white, transparent-looking, and yet it couldn’t erase the lines about his eyes.
“Owen, you have something on the bodies?”
Owen stirred sugar into his coffee and sighed, looked from Cal to Dante as he laid the spoon on the Formica table.
“First off, tell me why you two were looking for a meat truck over at the city dump, and in the early hours of the morning?”
“Got a tip from a dispatcher about a missing truck, that’s all.”
“Why a missing truck?”
“Trucks are the only traffic down at Tenean this time of year. You see them coming and going like clockwork.
“And then there was the state of her body postmortem, as if she’d been killed on the beach when we know she wasn’t. When I saw the tracks at the beach all I could think was that perhaps it had been a reefer. It was a hunch, but I didn’t think it would end up anywhere. You had to have thought of that too.”
Owen nodded. “Yeah. We’d thought of it.”
“So, who are the women?”
Dante turned away and looked out the window. Hiding their faces from the driving snow, pedestrians labored against the wind and passed by slowly.
“Okay, this is what we’ve got, and I’m telling you only because you found the trailer.”
He lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and leaned back in his seat as the waitress arrived with their food. She refilled their cups with coffee and then passed down the row of booths.
“We know one of the Jane Does as Margaret Hill, a hooker from Roxbury, pimps for a creep named Shea Mack—”
Dante swore as he slopped coffee onto the table and his hand. Cal pushed his napkin across to him and Dante worked to pool up the liquid before it dripped onto the floor.
“You know this Shea Mack?” Owen asked.
Cal shook his head, but Dante nodded. “I’ve heard of him.” Shaking, he balled up the sopping napkin and put it aside.
Owen began to carve up his meat, placed a small piece in his mouth. “That figures.”
He chewed for a moment and then swallowed with obvious discomfort. “Okay, well then maybe you know a little of how he works. Real piece of shit. We’ve got beat cops looking for him, but no word yet.
“The other victim we identified as Anne Montague. She’s from Weymouth. Her parents have had a Missing Persons out for her since the end of December.”
From between bites of food he said, “We’ve been in touch with the State Police and agencies from three other states, Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. So far they’ve gotten back to us with nine missing young women from Providence to Portland, all in the last twelve months.”
He pushed the plate away from him although he was only half-done.
“This all seems to be the work of the Butcher—maybe this Scarletti character you told me about. Hell, he’s got the credentials for it. His record of arrest shows two burglaries and three aggravated assaults: assault with the attempt to cause bodily injury to another person by use of a deadly weapon, assault with the attempt to cause bodily injury to a police officer, assault with the attempt to cause serious bodily injury and have sexual activity with a person under the age of consent.”
“What do you mean ‘maybe’? We know who did this—it was Blackie Foley! Why haven’t you already taken him in?”
“Those are his salvage yards, okay? He leases part of the property out to trucking companies so that they can load and unload, switch trailers, or dump them. For years we’ve known that he’s used it as a front for black market smuggling. We’ve never been able to make anything stick on him, but we’ve known all about it.”
“So you’re going to let him slide?”
“Christ, Cal, why would he jeopardize his business by leaving a truckful of bodies in a place he knows we watch? The yards are his property and he has every right to check on them whenever the fuck he wants.”
“This is all bullshit, Owen.”
“Let me finish. A bum tipped him off about the rig, and as soon as he discovered the trailer, he called it in. He also said somebody chased him halfway across Boston.”
“So what did you say to him?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Fuck him.”
“No. Fuck you, Cal—fuck you both.”
“So that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Owen sipped from his coffee, placed the cup on the table, and squared his hands around it. They were a boxer’s hands, much like Cal’s. Dante noticed the glimmer of Owen’s wedding band shimmering dully beneath the lights of the diner.
Owen pursed his lips, looked at Dante. “So you knew this Margaret Hill?”
“It was a long time ago, Owen. The faces, the names, they all blend together.”
Owen stared, unconvinced, pushed his coffee cup to the center of the table. “That’s okay. I’ve got to get back to the station.”
“What about Blackie?” Cal asked again.
“Like I said: Blackie had nothing to do with this.”
Owen hesitated. He stared at Dante, wiped at his nose with the back of his hand. “I’ve been dreading this all day. I should have just done it back at the morgue.”
“Dreading what?” Cal asked.
Owen ignored him, kept his eyes locked on Dante. “Giordano has been on me these past couple of days. He’s pissing blood about how nobody questioned you before.”
Cal stiffened in his chair. “What the fuck is this shit, Owen?”
“Dante was the only real relative Sheila had. We got to ask him questions.” He stood, pulling his coat about him, and pushed a dollar bill across the table.
A sickly grin pulled at Dante’s lips. “You’re not going to cuff me?”
“No, and if it makes you feel any better, you can ride up front with me.”
“This is bullshit, Owen, and you know it,” Cal said.
“It’s all part of the process, you know that. I promise to make it as harmless as I can.”
Outside, they had to lower their heads against windblown snow as traffic rumbled past. Cal and Dante huddled together for a moment against the side of the building, attempting to light a cigarette.
“Just go with it,” Cal said in a low voice. “Giordano is a real greaseball prick, and he’ll try to heavy-hand you.”
Dante shook the match and inhaled off the cigarette. “I’ll be fine.”
Cal watched Dante’s fingers tremor as he reached toward his lips, took the cigarette, and passed it over.
“I’ll be fine,” Dante repeated, as if he was saying it more to himself than to Cal.
Owen reached casually for Dante’s shoulder, turned him in the opposite direction toward the city morgue. He gestured to Cal with his handkerchief.
“You can follow us in your car if you like. It’s up to you.”
“Does he need an attorney?”
“I don’t know.” Owen looked at Dante. “Do you?”
Dante shook his head and Owen nodded. “Good,” he said. “That’ll make it easier.”
Owen blew his nose violently, looked down at the handkerchief, and frowned in disgust. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and glared at them. “I wish this fucking cold on you two idiots.”