Pumpkin Eater. Jeffrey Round

other great fear was of making the opposite kind of mistake. Of declaring the wrong person dead or, worse, speaking too soon and declaring the wrong person still alive. His gut instinct told him he’d found Darryl Hillary rather than some other unfortunate as he stared up at the body hanging from a meat hook, but logic told him not to jump to conclusions. In this case it might simply mean delaying the delivery of bad news another day, if bad news it turned out to be. One more day for Darryl Hillary’s sister to live in hope. Was that such a bad thing? Sometimes not seeing was believing. Often, the relatives of victims preferred not to learn the truth, to go on believing their loved one was still in the land of the living even when all the evidence, forensic and otherwise, told a different story.

      He took a last sip of coffee and looked down at his phone, his thumb rolling through the listings till he found the number for Darlene Hillary.

      She picked up on the first ring.

      “Ms. Hillary?”

      “Darlene, yes.”

      “It’s Dan Sharp.”

      He heard a sharp intake of breath. “You found Darryl?”

      “I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m calling.”

      The voice turned hard. “What does that mean?”

      “It means the man I found hasn’t been identified yet.”

      “I don’t understand. Oh, you mean he’s ...”

      Dan felt the weariness overtake him. “A body has been found, but no identification has been made.”

      “He’s dead then.”

      The voice sounded like a sack of wet cement hitting the ground. Dan sensed the instinctive clenching, the withdrawal that occurred when the news was bad. She was remarkably contained.

      “I prefer not to jump to conclusions. We don’t know for sure, so there’s still reason to hope.” He paused to let that sink in. “I was wondering if you would know the name of Darryl’s dentist. I’d like to get his dental records to see if we can rule out the possibility that it is your brother.”

      There was a hesitation. “I’m sorry, I can’t think straight. You want to know Darryl’s dentist’s name?”

      “Yes, if you know it.”

      “I don’t think he had one. Not in Toronto.”

      A total recluse, Dan thought.

      “What about before that? A childhood dentist maybe?”

      “There was a dentist in Timmins. We both went to him. But that was years ago.”

      “The records could still help us.”

      She was suddenly suspicious. “Who is ‘us’?”

      “The Toronto police.” He pulled his dressing gown tighter.

      Another pause. “I don’t know if he’s still alive. The dentist, I mean.”

      “It’s worth a try,” Dan said, shielding his face from the sun with his hand.

      “Just a minute and I’ll see if I can find my old address book.”

      He heard her shuffling off. He sipped his coffee and waited. She returned in less than a minute.

      “I have it here,” she said. “I keep everything.”

      As she relayed the information in a halting voice, Dan wrote down the particulars.

      “I’m sorry I have to ask,” he said, “but you mentioned that Darryl smoked drugs. As far as you know, does your brother have drug debts?”

      “I don’t think he has anything like that. I know he liked to smoke marijuana once in a while, but I don’t think he was mixed up in anything like that.”

      He thanked her and hung up then called directory assistance in Timmins. The operator was unable to locate the dentist in question. She offered to look back several years till she found the name. Not much to do, Dan concluded, accepting her offer to help. The answer came quickly enough: the number had been delisted ten years previously.

      He’d just clapped his cellphone closed when it rang again. He saw the name Hillary on his screen.

      “He has a gold cap,” she declared without preamble. “I just thought of it. It’s on one of the lower front teeth. You can’t really see it much except when he smiles. I hope that helps you.”

      “Yes, it’s a great help,” Dan said, trying to picture the dangling monster smiling at him. It was an eerie thought. Or maybe the gold tooth had been removed along with the left ear. Perhaps it was a psychopathic gold prospector the police should be looking for. “With any luck, it should tell us what we need to know. Thank you very much.”

      He finished his coffee without any further interruptions then went inside to dress.

      The Centre of Forensic Sciences on Grosvenor Street was the largest laboratory of its kind in Canada. At any given moment, it employed more than two hundred and fifty personnel. Its slogan was Scientia pro justicia: “Science for justice.” Working neither for the law nor against it, the centre was supposed to be as impartial as death. At any rate, that was its claim.

      Dan closed his eyes and leaned his head against the coolness of a wall. His stomach, no longer grateful for the late-night Wendy’s combo, had been rumbling for the past hour, demanding breakfast while the rest of him just wanted to go back to sleep. In the main-floor bathroom, he rinsed his face with cool water and surveyed the rugged landscape that constituted his features: jagged nose, brooding eyes under dark brows, broad cheekbones, and powerful chin. A red sickle ran from below the right eye up to his temple, arresting the viewer’s gaze before granting permission to go further. It was a lasting gift from his father for coming home from school late when Dan was ten.

      He pulled on the paper towels. At first they refused to give way before giving way far too easily and flooding the floor with brown sheets folded in half. He stooped to pick them up and left them on the counter for the next person who came along, presuming that person wouldn’t be too picky about his drying towels. After all, you never knew where they’d been.

      He came back out and sat in reception. A clock ticked at the far end of the hall. Somnolent, hypnotic, it was a reminder to the living of what no longer existed for the dead arrayed for viewing one floor below. He stared at it, his gaze blanking dully before the numbers registered.

      Time.

      Clock.

      Morning.

      He’d left the slaughterhouse seven hours ago. Three hours before that he’d been passing a quiet night with Trevor and Ked until it got interrupted. Was it not ironic to be sitting in the hallway of the Toronto morgue waiting to meet a corpse after spending the evening watching The Exorcist?

      He stood and paced. Sitting was out of the question if he wanted to stay awake. A green brochure on a magazine stand caught his eye. He scanned the shiny chrome tables on the cover, turned the page and browsed the paragraphs outlining the manufacturer’s specifications for modular mortuaries. He’d never heard of such things.

      Fascinated, he read the jaunty, upbeat descriptions of “stand-alone, self-contained plant rooms” that would prove “ideal for any contemporary disaster situation.” The rooms in the images were pristine. No bodies under sheets, no trails of blood or dismembered limbs lying on the floor. No doctors and nurses running around with worn expressions as the body count from the latest suicide bombing or train wreck piled up, proving just how far from ideal any contemporary disaster situation was likely to be.

      Dan had visited dozens of morgues over his fifteen-year career. Like cemeteries, he found them to be lack-

       lustre places, as opposed to the creepy television portrayals with their atmosphere of incipient doom. Hospitals were far more threatening to his peace of mind.

      He’d