Grip had been mildly disappointed that morning to find that he and Morphy had drawn the task of trying to establish the dead woman’s identity. He’d been looking forward to poking around the Uhuru Community, getting the line on some of the communists there. He also had some thoughts about how the body had ended up where it had, but he could look into that on his own time.
The City Morgue was painfully bright and clean and smelled sweetly of formaldehyde. Grip’s and Morphy’s footsteps echoed on gleaming tile floors that shone so that the room seemed to be illuminated from every direction. Six stainless steel examining tables were lined up in the room and only two were empty. On three lay bodies covered with white sheets, and at the fourth a small, round man with rimless glasses over his surgical mask peered into an open chest cavity. It wasn’t cool in here the way it was supposed to be. Grip suppressed thoughts of what the heat was doing to the cadavers.
Grip cleared his throat and the man jerked his head up. He’d been lost in his examination of the corpse of an obese Caucasian man. Grip felt slightly sick, not from the grisly sight of the opened chest, but from his contempt at the condition this man had been in while alive. Disgusting.
The coroner, an ageless man named Pulyatkin, opened his palms in inquiry. Sweat misted the tops of his lenses.
“Jane Doe. Came in yesterday,” Grip said.
Pulyatkin nodded. “One moment please.” He walked back to a sink, and Grip and Morphy watched as he scrubbed his hands and forearms with powdered soap and hung his surgical mask on a peg. Then he came back to the two officers. He didn’t offer his hand.
“This is one of them,” he said, and pulled a sheet back to reveal a woman’s waxen body. “There’s two others. One of them’s older, maybe sixties.”
“This is her,” Morphy said, cocking his head slightly as he looked at the woman’s uncovered face.
Grip’s first impression—he hadn’t seen the body up close at the riverbank—was that she must have been attractive in life. The structure of her face was delicate and her body had probably been pretty good before she had begun wasting. Then he noticed the blemishes on her skin.
“We did an exterior exam,” Pulyatkin was saying, “and came up with nothing indicating external trauma. The water, of course, would have washed away most of what we would normally find in the way of fibers and such. There are no external signs of anything potentially fatal, though there are needle marks in her arms.”
“Hophead?”
Pulyatkin grimaced at the thought. “Not unless she just picked up the habit. There isn’t the scarring normally associated with any kind of regular use.”
Morphy had left the conversation and was pulling back the sheets to look at the faces of the other two corpses. Pulyatkin gave him a disconcerted look, but continued.
“What about these marks?” Grip said, pointing to the blemishes on her face.
Pulyatkin nodded. “She actually has these same marks all over her body. They appear to be blisters of some sort, though I haven’t had a chance to examine them more closely. We’re very busy here, Detective. The heat … there are always more bodies when there’s heat like this.”
Morphy was back and had pulled back the other end of the sheet, giving her feet a close inspection.
Grip asked, “How do you think she got these blisters?”
“An allergic reaction, maybe. Again, I haven’t had a chance to examine them more carefully, but their dispersal around the body indicates that their origin is internal—systemic—rather than external.”
Morphy pulled the sheet up, covering the corpse’s face. “When are you going to give the body a closer look?”
“Today, sometime. Maybe after lunch.”
“Be sure you get back to us,” Morphy said.
Pulyatkin nodded wearily. He knew his personal stake.
“You hear from your relatives back in the motherland recently?” Grip asked, almost as an afterthought.
“I haven’t been in contact with anyone from the USSR in well over a decade.”
Grip smiled in an unsettling way. “You know what to do if you ever are contacted by one of the comrades.”
“My first call, in that case, would be to you.”
Grip winked at him.
“We’ll be waiting to hear from you,” Morphy said, “about the corpse.”