Carved in Bone

trips for quick X-rays when we didn’t want to drive clear across the river to the morgue. Miranda hipped the door of the truck shut and waved me on with her good arm.
    I crossed the river—our own River Styx, one of my colleagues had once joked, but that made me death’s boatman, and I wasn’t sure I liked the label—then threaded behind the hospital and angled in beside the morgue’s loading bay. Punching the combination code for the adjoining door, I hurried inside. My first stop was the X-ray room. I found Ledbetter’s file and clipped his films to a light box. His ribs were a mess: six ribs on the right side were fractured, three of them in two or more places. The seventh rib—the last of the “true ribs,” so-called because they joined the breastbone, while the “false ribs” below them did not—had one of the worst comminuted fractures I’d ever seen; it looked like one end had been fed through a KitchenAid garbage disposal before being patched back together with Bondo. I couldn’t believe Dr. Hamilton’s autopsy report had failed to mention the injuries—and I couldn’t believe I’d neglected to check the X-rays weeks ago. I studied the multiple bone fragments, which were denser and paler on the negative than the healing callus, trying to determine if any of the pieces were so displaced as to have pierced the lung. It was hopeless: the ribs themselves could easily have blocked the camera’s view of any wayward fragments, unless the fragments happened to align with the intercostal spaces. I’d have to revisit the corpse.
    I swung open the heavy cooler door and switched on the light. Ledbetter’s remains—what remained of them—were on a gurney in a far back corner, wedged behind two other bodies. One was an immense young white woman who filled the gurney’s flat surface almost entirely, the dimpled flesh of her hips and thighs lapping up the rim around the table’s perimeter and drooping over the edge. The other was her exact opposite, an ancient, scrawny black man.
    Ledbetter’s decapitated head lay on its right side, propped in place by folded-up paper pads. Three inches of neck still clung to the head; below that, a messy eighteen-inch swath of stainless steel gurney divided the neck from the pelvis and legs.
    The bag of organs wasn’t on the gurney.
    I jockeyed the two other corpses out of the way and looked closer.
    Up close, it still wasn’t on the gurney. Or under the gurney. Or anywhere in the same room with the gurney.
    Damn. I raced out of the cooler and down the hall, sticking my head in every door along the way. In one of the autopsy suites, a young pathology resident of indeterminate gender was bending low over a body, the gooseneck light pulled down close. When I barged in, the resident straightened abruptly, whacking the light. “Son of a bitch,” moaned a strangled voice, still of indeterminate gender.
    “Sorry,” I called, beating a hasty retreat.
    I made my way up the long hallway toward the front desk, a part of the morgue where I seldom ventured. The receptionist sat behind a bulletproof glass window. On the other side was a small waiting room, which was entered—generally by grieving family members, arriving for the grim task of identifying a son or daughter, sibling or spouse—from a corridor in the hospital’s basement. The morgue was, by design, as far off the beaten track as possible. People had to work pretty hard to find it, and once they found it, things generally got a lot harder for them. Then there were the other people who might come in the front way—the ones the bulletproof glass had been put up to defend against: the pissed-off brother of a guy who’d been shot by a cop. The boyfriend in a love triangle, trying to make sure that the ME’s autopsy wouldn’t find a bullet from the wife’s purse gun inside her dead hubby. Far as I knew, the glass had never been put to the test, but then again, its mere presence might have deterred some borderline crazies.
    As I approached the desk from the morgue’s inner recesses, I struggled to dredge up the name of the young woman perched there. She was the latest in a long line of short-lived receptionists. Short-tenured, anyway. Tiffany? Kimberly? Tamara? As I got closer, I decided I hadn’t even met this one yet. That meant the last one had come and gone in less than a month.
    “Good morning, young lady, I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said, extending my right hand to introduce myself. We