Bone Gods

yeah?”
    “Yeah,” Lawrence said. “Doubt you gonna show me anything Jack hasn’t already.”
    “Very well,” Pete said. “You call me when you’ve got something.” She descended Lawrence’s untrustworthy stairs, boards groaning under her boots.
    “You tell trouble,” he called after her, “he comes around, just keep his ass right on movin’.”
    “Right,” Pete muttered, shouldering through the front door and back into the rush and hum of the world. “I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

CHAPTER 9
    The city mortuary at Wapping was plain and practical, with nothing haunted or ethereal in its makeup, and Pete appreciated that fact. Ghosts were easier to deal with if they appeared among steel refrigerators, faded by fluorescent bulbs.
    She found Dr. Nasiri in one of the autopsy rooms, working over a skinhead with an impressive sector of his skull cracked apart like a clay flowerpot.
    “Hello there,” Nasiri shouted over the whine of her Stryker saw. “Put on a mask and booties, will you?”
    Pete did as she asked. “I’d hoped to get another look at Mr. Carver,” she shouted back. “And possibly some closeups of his wound patterns.”
    “Sure. I’ll get you copies when I’m done here,” Nasiri said. She put the saw aside and lifted out a section of the skinhead’s ribcage, the way Pete would lift the top off a plastic tub. The Y-incision and the thin line of the saw blade bisected his blurry hand-done tattoos and a ragged white scar over his left nipple.
    Pete had gotten past the reflexive throat clench sometime during her probationary year at the Met, but she didn’t return Nasiri’s smile as she set the ribcage aside in a metal tray and worked to remove and measure the internal organs, slapping them onto the scale with the acumen of a butcher.
    “Know what did this naughty boy in?” she said in a bright tone, as if she were a professor asking question.
    “Zombies?” Pete offered, pointing to the hole in the man’s head.
    “Stupidity,” said Nasiri. “Tried to rob an off-license and the owner slammed him in the skull with a cricket bat when the guy called him, quote, a curry-stink Paki bastard and then foolishly turned his back. Apparently his favorite vodka was on the high shelf.”
    Pete moved a step away from the steel table. “Tick a box for Darwin, then.” Her head was beginning to throb as Lawrence’s hospitality wore off, and the smells and sights of the mortuary weren’t mixing in a way she’d call pleasant, or even tolerable.
    “Stupidity is the leading cause of death in the United Kingdom,” Nasiri said. Her hands kept moving, weighing the man’s heart even as she stared at Pete across his chest cavity. “But not for your Gerard Carver, is it?”
    “You’re asking me?” Pete said. Her mask pressed against her mouth, a sterile papery kiss, and the air conditioning in the mortuary had made her mouth dry.
    “Aren’t you the one with the spooky psychic powers?” Nasiri said, her cheeks twitching. “Aren’t they why Heath has you coming in here on the sly, telling me to slip you autopsy files, and getting evidence from you in turn he couldn’t possibly use in a court trial? He believes in your uncanny visions from the other side?”
    Pete pulled her mask off, the itchy paper all at once suffocating. Nasiri was taking the piss, and she knew better than to argue with a skeptic. She’d been one for too long to think there was any merit to it.
    “I’m not psychic,” she said, crumpling up the mask and tossing it at the bin. She missed.
    “At least you can admit it to me,” Nasiri said. “I mean, bored housewives saying bodies will be found near water, I at least understand. They’re attention seekers. You I don’t get at all.”
    “I’m not telling Ollie I can wave my hands and make a killer appear,” Pete said. “I’m not a fake and Ollie’s not an idiot. Not like this is the Yorkshire police and Peter Sutcliffe. It’s one man, and I really can help Ollie close his case. Wondering whether you think I’m full of shit or not isn’t going to keep me up nights.”
    “You used to be a DI,” Nasiri said. She packed the organs back into the skinhead’s chest, plopped the ribcage back into place, and covered the table with a paper sheet. “You used to be a good DI. And yet you chucked it to chase spirits. If you’re not psychic, you must believe there’s something else out there. Or else you’re a complete nutter and hide it very