Dead Guilty

image. She stood back and watched as Lynn and her diener tended to the painstaking external examination of the body.
Lynn talked into a hanging microphone as she de scribed what they found. ‘‘The victim appears to be a female at this point...’’
A pounding on the window startled Diane. The three of them looked up to see a man in his thirties standing in the outer autopsy room, looking through the window at them. He was dressed in gray trousers, white shirt and floral tie, holding a hand over his mouth and nose. Lynn flipped the intercom switch.
‘‘What’s going on in here?’’ he said. ‘‘Step out here for a minute.’’
‘‘I’m in the middle of an important examination, Jackson. What do you want?’’
Jackson bent over and gagged. ‘‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’’
The three of them looked at Jackson with their eye brows raised enough to make deep furrows in their foreheads.
‘‘We have a rotting corpse on the table,’’ said Lynn. ‘‘It would be a little better if the air-conditioning sys tem were working, but it’s not.’’
‘‘The air conditioner is working in the rest of the building.’’
Lynn glared at him for a moment before she spoke. ‘‘Well, it’s not working in here. What brings you here anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you visit the autopsy room.’’
‘‘I was talking to a patron when this . . . this . . . horrific odor came into my office.’’
‘‘The maintenance man said it’s a problem with the vents. You’ll have to talk to him.’’
‘‘He’s home sick.’’ As Jackson spoke, he breathed through his mouth and tried holding his nose.
‘‘Surely he’s not the only person the hospital em ploys who can fix air conditioning.’’
‘‘He’s the only one who can look into this. We’ve had an injudicious use of vacation time, and the other man who does this kind of work is out of town.’’
‘‘Then you’ll have to call in someone from outside the hospital.’’
‘‘We don’t have the money.’’
‘‘Then we’ll have to put up with the smell until Mar lon gets back.’’
‘‘This is impossible.’’
‘‘No,’’ said Lynn. ‘‘Just difficult.’’
‘‘I’ll see what I can do.’’ He hurried out of the lab. The door slammed behind him.
‘‘Bean counter?’’ asked Diane.
‘‘That’s him. I won’t ask you what you did, Raymond.’’
‘‘That’d be best, Ma’am.’’
‘‘Yes, well, getting back to Blue. We gave the clothes an initial inspection before you got here,’’ said Lynn, speaking to Diane. ‘‘It’s hard to tell, but the coveralls look relatively new.’’
‘‘From Sears,’’ said Raymond.
‘‘Maybe at your lab you’ll be able to pick up some more information,’’ said Lynn.
‘‘How’d a crime lab in a museum come about any way?’’ Raymond asked Diane as he rolled the body over while Lynn held the head and neck.
‘‘The Rosewood Police Department made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’’
‘‘Uh huh,’’ said Raymond.
‘‘The city and county assessed the museum’s prop erty value so high it couldn’t pay the taxes. The mayor and chief of detectives suggested that if we would op erate a new crime scene evidence laboratory in the museum for the city, the city would arrange for the money from the real estate taxes paid to be returned to the museum for services rendered.’’
‘‘Sounds to me a great deal like extortion,’’ Lynn said. ‘‘A deal with the devil,’’ Raymond said.
‘‘ Collaborative partnership is the operative term.’’
‘‘Yeah, we get that all the time here too,’’ Lynn said. ‘‘Whenever I hear that, I know my money is about to be cut and my workload increased. Makes me want to gag more than this smell.’’
‘‘From the mayor’s point of view, it’s a perfect solu tion. They get a new crime lab, and we get to keep the museum and the taxes we can’t afford to pay. As an added bonus, they send us one of their employees.’’
‘‘That would be Neva?’’ asked Lynn.
‘‘She’s kind of caught in the middle. She’s not to blame.’’
‘‘So, your forensic anthropology unit was swallowed up by the city’s crime lab?’’
‘‘No. I wouldn’t stand for that. The crime lab is separate. Half my salary and that of my forensic staff is paid by the city to operate their crime lab. It takes a team of accountants to do the paperwork. The one big downside of it is that on paper, I and a chunk of my staff