was a dentist in Timmins. We both went to him. But that was years ago.”
“The records could still help us.”
She was suddenly suspicious. “Who is ‘us’?”
“The Toronto police.” He pulled his dressing gown tighter.
Another pause. “I don’t know if he’s still alive. The dentist, I mean.”
“It’s worth a try,” Dan said, shielding his face from the sun with his hand.
“Just a minute and I’ll see if I can find my old address book.”
He heard her shuffling off. He sipped his coffee and waited. She returned in less than a minute.
“I have it here,” she said. “I keep everything.”
As she relayed the information in a halting voice, Dan wrote down the particulars.
“I’m sorry I have to ask,” he said, “but you mentioned that Darryl smoked drugs. As far as you know, does your brother have drug debts?”
“I don’t think he has anything like that. I know he liked to smoke marijuana once in a while, but I don’t think he was mixed up in anything like that.”
He thanked her and hung up then called directory assistance in Timmins. The operator was unable to locate the dentist in question. She offered to look back several years till she found the name. Not much to do, Dan concluded, accepting her offer to help. The answer came quickly enough: the number had been delisted ten years previously.
He’d just clapped his cellphone closed when it rang again. He saw the name Hillary on his screen.
“He has a gold cap,” she declared without preamble. “I just thought of it. It’s on one of the lower front teeth. You can’t really see it much except when he smiles. I hope that helps you.”
“Yes, it’s a great help,” Dan said, trying to picture the dangling monster smiling at him. It was an eerie thought. Or maybe the gold tooth had been removed along with the left ear. Perhaps it was a psychopathic gold prospector the police should be looking for. “With any luck, it should tell us what we need to know. Thank you very much.”
He finished his coffee without any further interruptions then went inside to dress.
The Centre of Forensic Sciences on Grosvenor Street was the largest laboratory of its kind in Canada. At any given moment, it employed more than two hundred and fifty personnel. Its slogan was Scientia pro justicia: “Science for justice.” Working neither for the law nor against it, the centre was supposed to be as impartial as death. At any rate, that was its claim.
Dan closed his eyes and leaned his head against the coolness of a wall. His stomach, no longer grateful for the late-night Wendy’s combo, had been rumbling for the past hour, demanding breakfast while the rest of him just wanted to go back to sleep. In the main-floor bathroom, he rinsed his face with cool water and surveyed the rugged landscape that constituted his features: jagged nose, brooding eyes under dark brows, broad cheekbones, and powerful chin. A red sickle ran from below the right eye up to his temple, arresting the viewer’s gaze before granting permission to go further. It was a lasting gift from his father for coming home from school late when Dan was ten.
He pulled on the paper towels. At first they refused to give way before giving way far too easily and flooding the floor with brown sheets folded in half. He stooped to pick them up and left them on the counter for the next person who came along, presuming that person wouldn’t be too picky about his drying towels. After all, you never knew where they’d been.
He came back out and sat in reception. A clock ticked at the far end of the hall. Somnolent, hypnotic, it was a reminder to the living of what no longer existed for the dead arrayed for viewing one floor below. He stared at it, his gaze blanking dully before the numbers registered.
Time.
Clock.
Morning.
He’d left the slaughterhouse seven hours ago. Three hours before that he’d been passing a quiet night with Trevor and Ked until it got interrupted. Was it not ironic to be sitting in the hallway of the Toronto morgue waiting to meet a corpse after spending the evening watching The Exorcist?
He stood and paced. Sitting was out of the question if he wanted to stay awake. A green brochure on a magazine stand caught his eye. He scanned the shiny chrome tables on the cover, turned the page and browsed the paragraphs outlining the manufacturer’s specifications for modular mortuaries. He’d never heard of such things.
Fascinated, he read the jaunty, upbeat descriptions of “stand-alone, self-contained plant rooms” that would prove “ideal for any contemporary disaster situation.” The rooms in the images were pristine. No bodies under sheets, no trails of blood or dismembered limbs lying on the floor. No doctors and nurses running around with worn expressions as the body count from the latest suicide bombing or train wreck piled up, proving just how far from ideal any contemporary disaster situation was likely to be.
Dan had visited dozens of morgues over his fifteen-year career. Like cemeteries, he found them to be lack-
lustre places, as opposed to the creepy television portrayals with their atmosphere of incipient doom. Hospitals were far more threatening to his peace of mind.
He’d once looked up the meaning of “morgue,” intrigued by its similarity to the French mort or “dead.” Surprisingly, the words were unrelated. It meant “to look at solemnly.” Even more surprising were the associated synonyms of condescension, disdain, and pride. An unusual usage, Dan thought as he read on, only to learn that in its original form a morgue was a room in a prison where jailers studied the newly convicted to help identify them in future. It was only later, in the fifteenth century, that the word came to designate a room used for cold storage of bodies.
Not to be outdone, the ever-colourful Brits came up with their own euphemisms: “Rose Cottage” and “Rainbow Room,” which allowed doctors to discuss such matters freely in front of worried patients.
In one of the first detective stories, Edgar Allan Poe had written famously of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Since then, few had bettered his creative ingenuity. Without realizing it, he’d established a number of crime fiction conventions, including that of the eccentric but brilliant problem solver, an ineffectual police force, and what was to become known as the “locked room mystery.” That single work changed
the course of literary history, though its author thought
little of it other than to say he felt its popularity stemmed from being “something in a new key.” Novelty
or not, it earned him a substantial fee of $56 on publication in 1841, adding a further brick in the wall of Poe’s literary immortality. That, of course, was after a lifetime of financial hardship, but before being murdered at forty and defamed posthumously by his literary executor. Was his reputation as a great writer any consolation to him now?
Dan settled in for a long wait. Every once in a while someone in a uniform came through the hall and tossed him a sympathetic smile, telling him it would be just another few minutes, before disappearing down the corridor and around a corner that hid the aftermath of who knew what disasters, ideal or otherwise?
At
