He bit down on his lip and tried to clear his imagination. He told himself to simply be a blank slate, and wait for something to be written upon it. He wondered if his shallow breathing and sweaty forehead, or the clamminess he suddenly felt in the palms of his hands might be observed by Big Black, and with an immense force of will, he insisted to himself: Be calm.
And then, he took a deep breath, and inwardly spoke to all his voices: Everyone needs a way out.
Francis squirmed in his seat, hoping that no one, especially Big Black or Mister Evil or any of the other administrators could see how much turmoil he was in. He was pitched to the edge of his chair, nervous, frightened, but compelled to be there, and to listen, for he expected to hear something that day that was important. He wished that Peter was at his side, or Lucy, although he didn't think he could have persuaded her that listening was crucial. Francis at for this moment was alone, and guessing that he was closer to an answer than anyone else might imagine.
Lucy came through the doors to the hospital's morgue and felt the chill of too much air-conditioning. It was a small, basement room, located in one of the distant buildings on the fringe of the hospital grounds that was generally used to house out-of-date equipment and long-forgotten supplies. It had the questionable virtue of being near the makeshift burial ground. There was a single, shiny steel examination table in the center of the room, and a bank of a half dozen refrigerated storage containers built into one wall. A glass paneled and polished steel bureau held a modest selection of scalpels and other surgical implements. A filing cabinet and a desk with a battered IBM Selectric typewriter were stuffed into a corner, and a single window was set into the cinder block wall, high up, looking out onto the ground, and only permitting a single shaft of wan, gray light to slip in past a crust of dirt. A pair of insistently bright overhead lights hummed like a matched set of large insects.
The room had an empty, abandoned quality, save for a slight smell of human waste that lingered in the cold air. On the examination table there was a clipboard with a set of forms attached. Lucy looked around for an attendant but no one was around, and so she stepped forward. She noticed that there were sluicing channels on the examination table, and a drain in the floor. Both wore dark stains. She picked up the clipboard and read a preliminary autopsy report that stated the obvious: Cleo had died by strangulation caused by bed-sheet. Her eyes dwelt for a second on the entry: Self-Mutilation, which described her severed thumb, and for a moment on her diagnosis, which was schizophrenia, paranoid type, undifferentiated, with delusions and suicidal tendencies. Lucy suspected that this last observation had been, like so much else, added postmortem. When someone hangs themselves, their preexisting potential for self-destruction becomes a little clearer, she thought.
She read on: No next of kin. There was an entry for In case of death or injury please notify: which was answered with a line through the space.
A medical examiner, a famous man in forensic circles, had once addressed her senior year class on evidence, and had, in most grandiose terms told all the law students that the dead spoke most eloquently about the means of their passing, often pointing directly to the person who had illegally helped them on their path. The lecture had been well attended and energetically received, but in this moment, Lucy thought it was ridiculously abstract and very distant. What she had was a silent body in a refrigerated cooler in the corner of a dingy, forgotten room and an autopsy protocol crammed onto a single sheet of yellow paper fastened to a clipboard, and she didn't think it was telling her anything, especially something that might help her in her pursuit of a killer.
Lucy put the clipboard back down on the examination table and moved over to the cooler. None of the doors were marked, so she pulled first one, then a second open, revealing a six-pack of Coca-Cola that someone had left behind to chill. The third, though, was hesitant, as if stuck slightly, and she guessed that it contained the body. She took a deep breath, and slid open the door a couple of inches.
Cleo's naked body was jammed inside.
Her bulk made it a tight fit, and when Lucy tugged on the sliding pallet that Cleo rested on, it wouldn't budge.
Lucy gritted her teeth, and got ready to pull harder, when she heard the door open behind her. She spun about and saw Doctor Gulptilil standing in the entranceway.
For a moment, he looked surprised. But he removed this look and shook his head.
"Miss Jones," he said slowly, "this is unexpected. I am not sure that you should be here."
She did not reply.
"Sometimes," the medical director said, "even as public a death as Miss Cleo's should have some privacy."
"I would agree with that, at least in principle," she said haughtily. Her initial surprise at the doctor's arrival was immediately replaced by the belligerence that she wore as armor.
"What is it you expect to learn here?" he asked.
"I don't know," Lucy replied.
"You think this death can tell you something? Something that you don't already know?"
"I don't know," she said again. She was slightly embarrassed that she couldn't come up with some far better response. The doctor moved into the room, his portly figure and dark skin gleaming under the overhead lights. He moved with a quickness that contradicted his pear-shaped figure, and for a second she thought he was going to slam the door to Cleo's temporary tomb shut. But, instead, he put his hand out and tugged; finally the dead woman slid forward, so that her torso was exposed on the slab between them.
Lucy looked down at the purplish red ligature marks that surrounded Cleo's neck. They seemed to have been absorbed by skin that had already turned a porcelain white. The dead woman had a faint, grotesque smile on her face, as if her death had caused some joke somewhere. Lucy breathed in and out slowly.
"You want something to be simple, clear, obvious," Doctor Gulptilil said slowly. "But, Miss Jones, answers are never like that. At least, not here."
She looked up and nodded. The doctor smiled wryly, a little bit like the small grin that Cleo wore.
"The outward signs of strangulation are apparent," he said, "but the real forces that drove her to this end are shrouded. And, I suspect, the actual cause of death would elude even the most distinguished examination by the greatest pathologist we have in this nation, for the reasons are obscured by her madness."
Doctor Gulptilil reached out and touched Cleo's skin for a second. He looked down at the dead woman, but he directed his words toward Lucy.
"You do not understand this place," he said. "You have not made an effort to understand it since you arrived, because you arrived here with the same fears and prejudices that most people who are unfamiliar with the mentally ill embrace. Here, what is abnormal is normal and what is bizarre is routine. You have approached your investigation here as if it were the same as the world outside the walls. You have looked for documentary evidence and telltale clues. You have searched the records and walked the hallways, just as you might have were this not the place that it is. This is, of course, as I have tried to point out, useless. And thus, Miss Jones, I fear your efforts here are destined for failure. As I have suspected they would be from the start."
"I have some time remaining."
"Yes. And you have invited a response from the mysterious and perhaps nonexistent target of your pursuit. Perhaps this would be an appropriate activity in the world you are accustomed to, Miss Jones. But here?"
Lucy fingered her shorn locks. "Don't you think this is unexpected, and might work?"
"Yes," the doctor said. "But on whom will it work? And how?"