daylight projected vague gray images of ameboid rain tracks from the window glass onto the bed. The sheets appeared to be acrawl with transparent spiders.
When he saw that the patient’s chart was missing, Ethan figured that Dunny had been moved to another room or transferred to the ICU yet again.
At the seventh-floor nurses’ station, when he inquired as to where he might find Duncan Whistler, a young nurse asked him to wait for the shift supervisor, whom she paged.
Ethan knew the supervisor, Nurse Jordan, from previous visits. A black woman with a drill sergeant’s purposeful carriage and the soft smoky voice of a chanteuse, she arrived at the nurses’ station with the news that Dunny had passed away that morning.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Truman, but I called both numbers you gave us and left voice-mail messages.”
“When would this have been?” he asked.
“He passed away at ten-twenty this morning. I phoned you about fifteen or twenty minutes later.”
At approximately ten-forty, Ethan had been at Rolf Reynerd’s apartment door, trembling with the memory of his foreseen death, pretending to be looking for the nonexistent Jim Briscoe. He’d left his cell phone in the Expedition.
“I know you weren’t that close to Mr. Whistler,” said Nurse Jordan, “but it’s still something of a shock, I’m sure. Sorry you had to learn this way—the empty bed.”
“Was the body taken down to the hospital garden room?” Ethan asked.
Nurse Jordan regarded him with new respect. “I didn’t realize you were a police officer, Mr. Truman.”
Garden room was cop lingo for morgue. All those corpses waiting to be planted.
“Robbery/Homicide,” he replied, not bothering to explain that he had left the force, or why.
“My husband’s worn out enough uniforms to retire in March. I’m workin’ overtime so I don’t go crazy.”
Ethan understood. Cops often went through long law-enforcement careers without worrying much about the dust-to-dust-ashes-to-ashes business, only to tighten with tension so much in the last months before retirement that they needed to eat Metamucil by the pound to stop retaining. The worry could be even worse for spouses.
“The doctor signed a certification of death,” Nurse Jordan said, “and Mr. Whistler went down to cold holding pending mortuary pickup. Oh … actually, it won’t be a mortuary, will it?”
“It’s a murder now,” Ethan said. “The medical examiner’s office will want him for an autopsy.”
“Then they’ll have been called. We’ve got a foolproof system.” Checking her watch, she said, “But they probably haven’t had time to take custody of the body yet, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Ethan rode the elevator all the way down to the dead. The garden room was in the third and lowest level of the basement, adjacent to the ambulance garage.
Descending, he was serenaded by an orchestrated version of an old Sheryl Crow tune with all the sex squeezed out of it and with a perkiness squeezed in, retaining only the skin of the melody to wrap a different and less tasty variety of sausage. In this fallen world, even the most insignificant things, like pop tunes, were inevitably corrupted.
He and Dunny, both thirty-seven now, had been each other’s best friends from the age of five until they were twenty. Raised in the same worn-down neighborhood of crumbling stucco bungalows, each had been an only child, and they’d been as close as brothers.
Shared deprivation had bonded them, as had the emotional and the physical pain of living under the thumb of alcoholic fathers with fiery tempers. And a fierce desire to prove that even the sons of drunks, of poverty, could be someone, someday.
Seventeen years of estrangement, during which they had rarely spoken, dulled Ethan’s sense of loss. Yet even with everything else that weighed on his mind right now, he was drawn into a melancholy consideration of what might have been.
Dunny Whistler cut the bond between them with his choice of a life outside the law even as Ethan had been training to enforce it. Poverty and the chaos of living under the rule of a selfish drunk had given birth in Ethan to a respect for self-discipline, for order, and for the rewards of a life lived in service to others. The same experiences had made Dunny yearn for buckets of money and for power sufficient to ensure that no one would ever again dare to tell him what to do or ever again make him live by rules other than his own.
In retrospect, their responses to the same stresses had been diverging since their early teens. Maybe friendship had too long blinded Ethan to the growing differences between them. One had chosen to seek respect through accomplishment. The other wanted that respect which comes with being feared.
Furthermore, they had been in love with the same woman, which might have split up even blood brothers. Hannah had come into their lives when they were all seven years old. First she had been one of the guys, the only kid they admitted to their previously two-boy games. The three had been inseparable. Then Hannah gradually became both friend and surrogate sister, and the boys swore to protect her. Ethan could never mark the day when she ceased to be just a friend, just a sister, and became for both him and Dunny … beloved.
Dunny desperately wanted Hannah, but lost her. Ethan didn’t merely want Hannah; he cherished her, won her heart, married her.
For twelve years, he and Dunny had not spoken, not until the night that Hannah died in this same hospital.
Leaving the ruination of Sheryl Crow in the elevator, Ethan followed a wide and brightly lighted corridor with white painted-concrete walls. In place of ersatz music, the only sound was the faint but authentic buzz of the fluorescent tubes overhead.
Double doors with square portholes opened onto the reception area of the garden room.
At a battered desk sat a fortyish, acne-scarred man in hospital greens. A desk plaque identified him as Vin Toledano. He looked up from a paperback novel that featured a grotesque corpse on the cover.
Ethan asked how he was doing, and the attendant said he was alive so he must be doing all right, and Ethan said, “Little over an hour ago, you received a Duncan Whistler from the seventh floor.”
“Got him on ice,” Toledano confirmed. “Can’t release him to a mortuary. Coroner gets him first ’cause it’s a homicide.”
Only one chair was provided for visitors. Transactions involving perishable cadavers were generally conducted expeditiously, with no need of waiting-room comfort and dog-eared old magazines.
“I’m not with a mortuary,” said Ethan. “I was a friend of the deceased. I wasn’t here when he died.”
“Sorry, but I can’t let you see the body right now.”
Sitting in the visitors’ chair, Ethan said, “Yeah, I know.”
To prevent defense attorneys from challenging autopsy results in court, an official chain of custody for the cadaver had to be maintained, ensuring that no outsider could tamper
