Chapter 3 - The Sanctuary of the Cold
Dr. Raymond Morales had worked the midnight-to-eight shift at the Cook County Institute of Forensic Medicine since the winter Harold Washington had his first heart attack. He had the yellowed, tobacco-stained fingers of a man who rolled his own cigarettes from Turkish leaf, a permanently crooked spine from thirty-five years of hunching over Y-shaped thoracic incisions, and a memory that functioned like an unindexed municipal land grant.
The basement entrance of the morgue on Harrison Street did not have a decorative wreath on the door. It smelled of industrial pine cleaner, wet stainless steel, and that cold, alkaline weight that settles into the concrete of any room where ten thousand bodies have been laid out under fluorescent light.
Ray was sitting at his zinc desk, drinking black coffee from a chipped ceramic mug that bore the faded logo of the 1984 Chicago White Sox.
When the heavy steel door swung open, he didn't reach for his glasses. He looked at the sound of my boot heels on the drain-troughs.
"Arthur," he said, his voice sounding like a flat shovel scraping across dry sand. "You're late. The state pension board sent a notice two months ago that you were dead. I told them you were too stubborn to stop drawing benefits."
"They had the wrong Arthur Vance, Ray," I said, setting Emily’s overnight bag on the corner of the intake table.
Ray’s eyes moved past me, settling on Emily. His spectacles slid down to the middle of his nose. He took in the shearling coat, the blue-ribboned bear, the posture—left arm pinned protectively over the right epigastric quadrant—and the purple crescents blooming under her jawline.
He set his coffee mug down on an autopsy log.
"Whose work?" Ray asked.
"Mark Sterling," I said. "Son of Peter Sterling. The Oak Brook logistics outfit."
Ray made a low, clicking sound with his tongue against his back molars. "Peter the pirate. The one who bought the old wire mill in Cicero and sold the brass scrap to the Taiwanese before the union could file their mechanics’ liens."
"That's him."
Ray stood up, his white lab coat rustling like dry butcher’s paper. He took Emily’s right hand with the terrifying gentleness of an old forensic pathologist who knew precisely how much pressure a human bone could endure before the periosteum tore away from the marrow.
He drew a small ultraviolet flashlight from his breast pocket and clicked the toggle.
Under the 365-nanometer wavelength, the skin on Emily’s wrist and forearm lit up in deep, fluorescent hues of orange, indigo, and sickly yellow-green.
"Patterned contusions," Ray muttered, reaching for an antique wooden-handled magnifying loupe. "Four parallel compression marks on the anterior surface. One deep, oval impression on the posterior aspect over the ulnar styloid. Thumb mark. Left hand. He was standing in front of her, pinning her against a vertical plane."
He looked up at Emily. "Drywall behind you, honey?"
"The kitchen," Emily whispered. "Between the pantry and the spice rack."
"The dent I saw," I said.
Ray nodded, stepping to the metal cabinet where the 35mm Nikon cameras were stored in velvet-lined slots. "No digital nonsense for this, Arthur. The defense will claim Photoshop before the judge finishes his coffee. We use the old Kodak Tri-X black-and-white emulsion. Twelve exposures with the millimeter scale taped to the epidermis. Then I’ll sign the chain-of-custody affidavit on county stationery."
"Can you do a fetal heart monitoring check?" I asked.
Ray stopped, his hand on the camera case. He looked at me with an expression that was almost tender—the look an old surgeon gives a dog that has been hit by a milk truck.
"Arthur, I cut dead people for a living."
"You did your residency in obstetrics at Cook County Hospital before the strike in seventy-six, Ray," I said. "You delivered half the precinct captains in the fifth ward. I don't want her in an emergency room in DuPage County. Peter’s people will have the triage desk logged by name."
Ray was quiet for five seconds. He sighed, reached into the lower drawer of his desk, and pulled out an antique, brass-tipped DeLee fetoscope—an instrument that looked like an iron stethoscope with a forehead brace, the kind of tool that required no batteries, no digital network, and no hospital admission records.
"Sit up on the gurney, child," Ray said softly to Emily. "The steel is cold, but the blankets came out of the drying cabinet ten minutes ago."
Emily looked at the high, stainless-steel table where the drainage channels led to the central floor sink. She hesitated for one heartbeat, then she saw Ray’s eyes—the tired, ancient decency of a man who had seen the worst things human beings could do to one another and had chosen to remain in the basement anyway.
She climbed onto the table.
Ray pressed the bell of the fetoscope against her lower abdomen, his forehead resting against the curved metal bar, his eyes half-closed as he counted the pulse against his pocket watch.
The room was dead silent. The only sound was the hum of the refrigeration compressors in the adjacent crypt room, where forty-eight steel drawers held the unidentified dead of the western suburbs.
Ray held his breath for forty seconds.
Then he exhaled through his nose, a long, whistling puff of air that smelled of chicory and pipe tobacco.
"One hundred and forty-two beats per minute," he said, looking at Emily with a slow nod. "Strong. Regular. No decelerations. The placenta is anterior, which probably took the brunt of the kinetic transfer when her shoulder hit the wall. The kid’s a fighter, Arthur. Takes after his grandfather."
Emily let out a sob—a real one this time, not the dry, gasping panic from the kitchen, but the wet, heavy release of a woman who has just learned that her child has survived the first battle of its life.
She buried her face in the synthetic fur of the teddy bear, her shoulders shaking against the white paper sheet.
I stood by the door, my hand resting on the brass handle of the deadbolt.
"Ray," I said.
"Yeah, Arthur."
"Where is the emergency room transport log for the western district?"
Ray didn't look up from his camera as he loaded the forty-exposure roll of Tri-X film. "Under the clipboard on the second desk. Why? You expecting someone from Oak Brook?"
"Mark’s facial nerve," I said. "He struck the corner of a quartz island. If the fracture is depressed, his private doctor will send him to the specialist at Good Samaritan in Downers Grove. That’s where the family has their name on the surgical wing."
Ray paused, his thumb on the film advance lever. He looked at me over his spectacles, his eyebrows rising half an inch.
"You dropped him with the pes anserinus strike, didn't you? The one the Korean captain taught us at the academy in seventy-one."
"His balance was poor," I said.
"Good Samaritan is full tonight," Ray said, turning the camera toward Emily’s wrist. "Water main break on the third floor. All surgical admissions from the western townships are being diverted to the trauma center at Loyola."
"Loyola," I repeated.
"Room 404 is the observation bay," Ray added, clicking the shutter with a sharp, mechanical snick. "The head of the orthopedic trauma service is a boy named Marcus Thorne. His father was the union steward at the printing plant where your brother worked."
I took the second envelope from my coat pocket and laid it on Ray’s desk beside his coffee mug.
"For the film, Ray. And the developer."
"Put your money away, Arthur," the old man hissed, his voice suddenly hard as pig iron. "I knew your wife before she was sick. I remember what she looked like when she brought you hot soup at the fourth precinct during the seventy-nine blizzard. You take care of this girl. I’ll make sure the film stays in the nitrogen vault until the grand jury foreman asks for it by name."
I stepped back out into the corridor, pulled the heavy collar of my shearling coat up against my throat, and walked toward the freight elevator that led to the alley.
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The clock on the wall read five-fifteen.
In forty-five minutes, Mark Sterling’s local anesthetic would begin to wear off, and he would discover that the man who had entered his kitchen with a stuffed animal had already closed every door behind him.
