Second Life. Paul Griner

the rank chemical scent from my nostrils. Car wheels, pavement, a dog lifting its leg. Such was the daily view from our belowground lair in the Danville coroner’s office, which was in even worse shape than the morgue at University Hospital. At least that had been updated in the past fifty years.

      When I closed my eyes, I saw the body of McDonald’s again, mostly her right breast with the McDonald’s logo tattooed across it, her singular identifying mark, the M of the golden arches curling around her nipple (tiny and light, so no children), the remaining smaller letters marching down her ample breast toward her sternum. An unusual tattoo, though it hadn’t helped identify her. She was a Jane Doe, pitched in a drainage ditch off Route 127, the back of her head crushed. No sexual assault but all her clothes gone, all her ID too, so aside from the tattoo we had nothing.

      Twenty-five, Buddy had said the day of her autopsy, before we’d opened her up to check her cranial plates, twenty-eight tops, while I guessed closer to midthirties.

      Buddy had tapped a pencil against his lower teeth, mulling. You think? he said and straightened, hands pressed to his sore lower back. Why?

      Her skin. I pointed to the darkened blotches of forgotten sunburns on the upper slopes of her breasts, then the smaller dark spots on her lip and forehead.

      Those sunburns too? he asked.

      Probably estrogen fluctuations, I said. They start around thirty.

      He’d glanced at my forehead, visible above my mask, and I’d had to resist the urge to shake my bangs free.

      All right, he’d said, penciling in thirty-five. You win again. Before I even had the chance to think it, he said, Like always.

      Which was why he was a good coroner; he listened and learned. I liked those moments, teaching Buddy, the rare moments of communion we had, working on a body. And, of course, sometimes he taught me.

      But that was about as far as we got with McDonald’s. No missing woman was known to have a McDonald’s tattoo, and dental records drew a blank. She had immaculate fingernails, no bruises or needle tracks, was tanned and ridiculously fit, so she hadn’t been homeless. Her liver was free of hepatitis and cirrhosis so she hadn’t been an alcoholic, and her organs were drug free. All of that meant that she wasn’t a suicide or an accidental death, so we’d classified her as a homicide, and all of that should have meant that someone, somewhere, was missing her. But no one had come forward, and if they didn’t soon, we’d run out of time; by law, we weren’t allowed to keep the body beyond six months—even with a homicide—and we were at five-plus now. She would be the first body we’d have had to dispose of ourselves, and I guessed Buddy didn’t want to have to deal with body brokers. Who could blame him?

      Missing Lia, frustrated, I’d taken McDonald’s out again, thinking we might have skipped over something important, but nothing was there, nothing at all except the tattoo, which had made me think of Lia, the twin fleurs-de-lis we’d had inked on the undersides of opposite wrists the day we’d turned eighteen. In celebration, but also false bravado, growing out of our foolish disappointment when both our breasts turned out to be too large for champagne coupes, which we’d read on a women’s blog was the perfect size. If we weren’t perfect, we decided, we could at least be distinctive.

      From the open chute window an ambulance beeped as it slipped into reverse, meaning another body was on its way, and I made sure nothing was obstructing the slide. Sometimes the maintenance engineers leaned giant rolls of paper against it or piled up sawhorses, thinking it funny to make a mess for us since, like most old morgues, Danville’s was in a subbasement—so bodies wouldn’t putrefy—a holdover from the time before air conditioning. With the elevator out, ambulance drivers used the coal chute to save their backs, dropping them down without warning. Sometimes in the morning when I opened the office, if there’d been an accident on one of the parkways, I’d find bodies stacked on top of one another like pickup sticks. As long as the bodies were in body bags, bored drivers treated them like toys.

      The body slithered down the chute in its black bag, and as I was wrestling it to the dolly, Buddy came down the long hallway from Maintenance, singing, off-key as always. That meant he was angry, which made me clumsy, and I nearly dropped the bag. Just before the door swung open I wedged my shoulder under the body and flipped it back onto the chute.

      Wait, Buddy said. He stopped by the long row of nails sticking out from the wall at head height and pulled down his white lab coat. Both of us had cut our heads on the nails and learned to avoid them.

      It’s all right, I said, sweating, my gloves slippery. I got it.

      I wanted to show I was trying, I always wanted to, since I was lucky to have any job at all, luckier still not be in prison. To get probation I’d had to have a job, yet getting a job was nearly impossible in the aftermath of being fired as a corpse wrangler from CGI, given the case’s publicity; restaurants I’d once waitressed for wouldn’t hire me as a dishwasher. Yet Buddy had hired me with few questions, which had been a double blessing; because it was a job, and because working in a morgue was one of the only things I was good at.

      Now he shrugged his coat on and said, No, I’m not worried about that guy, and he began spooling and unspooling his purple yo-yo. We’ve got something else.

      He slapped a file down on his desk, and I realized he wasn’t angry with me, which allowed me to breathe out.

      McDonald’s, he said. I see you already had her out. Weird. He flipped to a picture of McDonald’s with paper bags over her hands, held in place by rubber bands, the way bodies usually arrived at a morgue. Suicide, he said. Or an accident.

      Not possible, I said.

      Oh really? His left eyebrow, the white one, rose. Why?

      Because no one who took so much care of herself commits suicide.

      He stopped spinning the yo-yo and I realized what he was thinking: no way he could use that as scientific evidence, even if he knew I was right.

      Why is this coming up now? I asked.

      The mayor’s term is nearly up. He has to start running for office again in a couple of weeks. If she’s a homicide, the murder rate rose on his watch.

      Why do you care? If he loses, let the new mayor deal with it.

      Harold loses, he writes letters to his successor, with recommendations whether or not my assistant should be retained. He’ll get to me by cutting you.

      I ignored my buzzing phone. Damn, I said, meaning, I can’t lose my job.

      Exactly, Buddy said. And McDonald’s is the only case that can be reclassified.

      What about this one? I rested my hand on the black bag’s cool plastic zipper.

      Car accident. Only question is whether he had a heart attack first.

      I thought, If McDonald’s turns accident or suicide, cops won’t search out her family. They wanted to solve a murder, even a distant one. Changing her designation for the sake of covering the mayor’s ass would be like killing her twice.

      You didn’t find anything? Buddy asked. Just now, when you had her out? The yo-yo spun from his palm to the floor and back in a purple blur.

      No, I said, shaking my head. Not a thing.

      Well, we’ll look through other files from this year, he said and caught the yo-yo and pocketed it. His sudden stillness seemed like a type of noise and Buddy seemed to notice it too; his hand went into his baggy pocket to retrieve the yo-yo, and I held my breath, thinking he might cut himself. Besides his yo-yos Buddy kept food in there and a pocketknife and sometimes an uncapped scalpel, but his hand emerged unscathed, gripping a different yo-yo: mint green with a banana-yellow rim.

      I don’t have much hope about those other files, Buddy said, walking the dog with the yo-yo, studying its progress across the floor. People with the back of their heads blown off, a man stabbed fifty-three times by his