Shadowfires

support.”
    “Well, I'm hoping we can avoid attorneys,” Kordell said.
    “I've absolutely no intention of retaining legal counsel,” Rachael assured him.
    The medical examiner nodded glumly, clearly unconvinced of her
sincerity. He said,
“I'm not ordinarily in the office at this hour.” It was nine-thirty Monday night. “When work unexpectedly backs up and it's
necessary to schedule late autopsies, I leave them to one of the
assistant medical examiners. The only exceptions are when the
deceased is a prominent citizen or the victim of a particularly
bizarre and complex homicide. In that case, when there's certain to be a lot of heat involved-the media and politicians, I mean-then I prefer not to put the burden on my subordinates, and if a night autopsy is unavoidable, I stay after hours. Your husband was, of course, a very prominent citizen.”
    As he seemed to expect a response, she nodded. She
didn't trust herself to speak. Fear had risen and fallen in her ever since she had received the news of the body's
disappearance, and at the moment it was at high tide.
    “The body was delivered to the morgue and logged in at 12:14 this
afternoon,” Kordell continued. “Because we were already behind
schedule and because I had a speaking engagement this afternoon, I
ordered my assistants to proceed with the cadavers in the order of
their log entries, and I arranged to handle your
husband's body myself at 6:30 this evening.” He put his fingertips to his temples, massaging lightly and wincing as if merely recounting these events had given him an excruciating headache. “At that time, when I'd
prepared the autopsy chamber, I sent an assistant to bring Dr.
Leben's body from the morgue… but the cadaver couldn't be found.”
    “Misplaced?” Benny asked.
    “That's rarely happened during my tenure in this office,” Kordell said with a brief flash of pride. “And on those few occasions when a cadaver has been misplaced-sent to a wrong autopsy table, stored in the wrong drawer, or left on a gurney with an improper ID tag-we've
always located it within five minutes.”
    “But tonight you couldn't find it,” Benny said.
    “We looked for nearly an hour. Everywhere. Everywhere,” Kordell
said with evident distress. “It makes no sense. No sense whatsoever.
Given our procedures, it's an impossibility.”
    Rachael realized that she was clutching the purse in her lap so
tightly that her knuckles were sharp and white. She tried to relax
her hands, folded them. Afraid that either Kordell or Benny would
suddenly read a fragment of the monstrous truth in her unguarded
eyes, she closed them and lowered her head, hoping the men would
think she was simply reacting to the dreadful circumstances that had
brought them here.
    From within her private darkness, Rachael heard Benny say, “Dr.
Kordell, is it possible that Dr. Leben's body was released in error to a private mortuary?”
    “We'd been informed earlier today that the Attison Brothers' firm
was handling funeral arrangements, so of course we called them when
we couldn't find the body. We suspected they'd come for Dr. Leben and
that a day employee of the morgue had mistakenly released the cadaver
without authorization, prior to autopsy. But they tell us they never
came to collect, were in fact waiting for a call from us, and don't have the deceased.”
    “What I meant,” Benny said, “was that perhaps Dr. Leben's body was released in error to another mortician who had come to collect someone else.”
    “That, of course, was another possibility that we explored with, I
assure you, considerable urgency. Subsequent to the arrival of Dr.
Leben's body at 12:14 this afternoon, four other bodies were released to private mortuaries. We sent employees to all of those funeral homes to confirm the identity of the cadavers and to make sure none of them was Dr. Leben. None of them was.”
    “Then what do you suppose has happened to him?” Benny asked.
    Eyes closed, Rachael listened to their macabre conversation in
darkness, and gradually it began to seem as if she were asleep and as
if their voices were the echoey phantom voices of characters in a
nightmare.
    Kordell said, “Insane as it seems, we were forced to conclude the
body's been stolen.”
    In her self-imposed blackness, Rachael tried unsuccessfully to
block out the gruesome images that her imagination began to
supply.
    “You've contacted the police?” Benny asked the medical examiner.
    “Yes, we brought them into it as