Dead Certain

they were in the process of rehabbing themselves. She was a petite woman, ten years my senior, with a close cap of blond curls and an intelligent, heart-shaped face. From beneath her gray lab coat peaked the last two inches of a pretty floral dress, and sweet little grosgrain ribbons decorated the toes of her shoes. In one hand she held a Styrofoam cup of coffee and in the other a bagel wrapped in paper. Given a hundred chances, most people would never guess that Julia Gordon was a woman who took dead people apart for a living.
    “So what brings you down to doctor land?” she asked. Julia was an assistant medical examiner at the Cook County ME’s office. I’d forgotten that their building was just around the corner on Harrison.
    “A little arm-twisting session with one of the Prescott Memorial trustees,” I said, figuring that now that we were on the front page of the newspaper, there was no use trying to be coy.
    “I won’t ask who was doing what to whom.” She chuckled. “I seem to recall you going to work on me a couple of times, and there was never any question about who was going to end up on top.”
    “You wouldn’t happen to have fifteen minutes for a little bit of hypothetical arm-twisting now?” I asked as it suddenly occurred to me that this was too good an opportunity to be missed.
    “Hypothetical? Does that mean that no bones will be broken?”
    “You have my word that it won’t hurt a bit,” I assured her.
    “In that case why don’t we go back to my office. If you want, you can have half of my bagel.”
    “I’ve already eaten,” I lied, falling into step beside her. I don’t care how much Muzak and air freshener they pumped into the place, the medical examiner’s office was one of the few places that could kill even my appetite.
     
    One look at the new Robert J. Stein Institute for Forensic Medicine and it was clear that if death were a business, in Chicago at least, it would be booming. A low-slung edifice of gray marble and dark, reflective glass, from the street it looked like any other kind of administrative building. But once you passed through its doors, there was no escaping the fact that the dead are an exacting clientele. Chilly even in summer, the temperature was kept at sixty-five degrees because it was kinder on the bodies. The air was thick with the smells of formaldehyde and decay. We took the elevator to the fourth floor, far from the metal storage lockers and the grisly tile of the autopsy suites with their drains in the floor.
    As far as I was concerned, Julia Gordon’s office was gruesome enough. Beside the glossy posters of bullet wounds that decorated the walls, the bookshelves were dotted with anatomical oddities floating in jars. On the back of the door there hung another poster, this one displaying the characteristic tire marks made by various brands. It wasn’t until you looked closely that you realized that all the marks that had been photographed were made in the flesh of the victims of traffic accidents.
    I looked around at the files and papers that littered her desk. “I hope I’m not imposing too much on your time,” I began. “You look busy.”
    “To be perfectly honest, I’m grateful for the distraction. There’s something I have to do this morning that I’ve been trying to avoid. You’re just giving me a chance to procrastinate a little longer.”
    “What is it?” I asked, wondering what a woman routinely dissecting would view with such dread.
    “I have to call a resident at a community hospital out in Park Ridge who made an error. She was on duty when the paramedics brought in a four-year-old girl who’d been struck by a hit-and-run driver. Instinctively, and no doubt out of kindness, she insisted on washing the little girl’s body before her parents saw her. I know that she meant to spare the parents, but in doing so she destroyed any evidence that we might have found that would lead to finding her killer. Now, even if an eyewitness were to materialize, I don’t think that would be enough for the prosecutor to take before a grand jury.”
    “You make being a lawyer seem like a day at the beach,” I said, thinking about Claudia’s comment about wishing that she had a job where mistakes didn’t matter.
    “Oh, I don’t know if our jobs are really that different,” she replied. “After all, what I deal with is the aftermath of people’s fear or greed or stupidity. I’m sure that you could say the same about your work. The