Fatal Reaction

woman. Her sagging breasts had slipped to either side of her wrinkled chest and her feet were twisted obscenely inward by arthritis. All around the room other bodies lay on gurneys covered with sheets.
    “If you don’t leave immediately I will have no choice but to call the police,” the man in the cardigan announced, his voice quivering with fear.
    “Wait! Please!” I implored him. But Stephen was already moving across the room ripping sheets from gurneys. The man from the funeral home was off like a shot for the phone.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I shouted at Stephen. “Are you out of your mind?”
    Stephen ignored me, crossed the room, and yanked the sheet from the farthest gurney. Suddenly there before us lay the bloodless body of Danny Wohl. I shrank back for a moment, limbs paralyzed, words frozen in my mouth. Then, in spite of myself, I drew nearer to Stephen in order to take a closer look.
     

CHAPTER 10
     
    Danny’s face stared up at us with the vacant eyes of the dead. His lips were the same color as the rest of his skin, so white it made me shiver, completely drained of blood. Carved into his pale flesh was the pathologist’s trademark, a ghastly Y-shaped incision that spanned his chest from shoulder to sternum and then to the other shoulder and ran the full length of his body from neck to groin. They had hastily stitched him back up when they were finished and the long, uneven black stitches seemed horrible against his dead skin.
    “I need some gloves,” said Stephen, his eyes darting around the room. I barely heard him. I was transfixed, unable to look at anything but Danny. What lay on the gurney was someone I had known. Someone I had liked. But now the familiar tumble of his blond hair was matted with dried blood, his lips set in the grim rigor of death.
    Tearing through the contents of a set of metal drawers Stephen came upon a box of latex gloves. He pulled them on with a practiced snap and grabbed Danny’s body by the shoulders. He quickly ran his hands over Danny s arms and legs looking for cuts or abrasions. Joe Blades had been right. There were no marks on Danny’s body larger than a pinprick.
    “Help me turn him over,” urged Stephen handing me a pair of gloves. I stood aghast. “Oh come on!”
    I did as I was told though my hands were shaking so badly it was hard to work on the gloves. Once they were on I stepped up to the gurney.
    “We’ll lift him on three,” instructed Stephen.
    As my hand touched Danny’s cold flesh I felt all the oxygen leave the room.
    “One, two, three.”
    We lifted. I staggered awkwardly as we flipped him, suddenly understanding why they call it deadweight.
    “Hey! Hey! Hey!” shouted the man from the funeral home. “You can’t do that!”
    “I’m a doctor,” announced Stephen, as if that somehow explained everything. Personally, I didn’t see what that had to do with anything seeing as Danny was already dead and we were obviously in a shitload of trouble. On the other hand, at least he hadn’t run to get his shotgun.
    “What’s this cut on the top of his head?” I asked, bending over for a closer look in spite of myself.
    “The pathologist makes that incision so he can pull the scalp down over the face, lift off the top of the skull, and remove the brain.”
    This was a piece of information I could easily have done without.
    Once more Stephen bent over the body of his dead friend looking for signs of injury. He found nothing: only a small Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion on the inside of his thigh-—one of the classic signposts of the AIDS virus—a tiny shaving cut just beneath his left ear, and the mark left over from a recent inoculation—absolutely nothing that would account for the bloodbath in the dead man’s apartment.
    “What is it that you are looking for?” the man from the funeral home asked warily from the shadows.
    “I’m not sure,” replied Stephen, replacing the arm of his dead friend on the cold metal of the gurney. The fury that had driven him to force his way in here had left him, that storm spent. “I just wanted to see if I could figure out how he died.”
    Picking up the sheet from the ground, he carefully covered up the body. There were tears in his eyes.
    “Who are you?” demanded the man from the funeral home, finally stepping up to face him now that the threat of violence seemed to be past.
    Stephen looked up from the gurney as if waking from a dream.
    “I’m Dr. Stephen