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He snorted delicately.
“It’s kind of douche,” Jun muttered. “That jackass is outside the door too. I can practically smell him lift his leg to piss on us!”
Sterling emerged out of the back, all storms and aggravation. “Hector is on his way over.”
“Oh hell. What happened?” I asked, shoving the box at Cye.
Sterling raised a brow. “The police want you to ID a body. Apparently, they think they’ve got FryerVats in the morgue.”
I hugged my wool coat tight across my chest. Sterling put his hand on the small of my back and stayed close.
Hector said, “This is just a courtesy. You don’t have to be here. We’re just making nice-nice.”
I nodded, throat dry.
“Don’t answer any questions beyond is this his body. Yes or no. That’s it. You got that?”
“Yes.”
“And you,” he told Sterling, “say nothing. Don’t say a damned word. Just stand there.”
Sterling nodded.
“You ever see a dead body before?” Hector asked.
Seen plenty of dead bodies. “Yes.”
We went into the glass-sided building, which was all old polished linoleum and reeked of cleaning fluids and other chemicals, and under all of it, the very faint, fetid smell of death clung to the walls.
Hector went to sign us in, then he came back and escorted us down some stairs and through a few more hallways, all smelling more and more of strange chemicals and death, until we got to a room with two swinging double doors.
“Ever been in a morgue?” Hector asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Basically a big room with lots of human-sized drawers. Just go with it.”
Hector pushed open the doors and led us into a bright room filled with the scent of decades of death. In it was a human in a white coat, and a police detective that looked bored, but smelled vaguely intrigued once we arrived.
Hector didn’t introduce himself. “My clients are here as a courtesy. Let’s make this quick.”
The man in the white coat yanked open one of the metal drawers. The freezing cold metal groaned and creaked, and the drawer slid open, and on it was sheet-covered corpse. He folded down the sheet over the otherwise naked body. It revealed FryerVats in all his miserable dead glory: skinny, reedy arms, a concave chest devoid of any hair. Grim, corpse-gray. He smelled of death, chemicals, grease, wanderer, and under all that: burning.
The softness of his left elbow was marred with a single, black crater where the skin had blackened and rotted away. The big vein along his bicep was burnt out: all lumpy and sagging under his skin. His other arm showed pin pricks and bruising as well.
His face was gray, and even in death sunken and tortured.
Someone had ripped his belly open with a large knife. The wound had been stitched shut once the coroner had finished fishing around in it. The report said blood loss had killed him.
I focused on the black crater on his arm. “What are those... marks?”
I knew exactly what those marks were. I wanted to know what they thought those marks were.
“Track marks,” the detective said, trying not to sound bored even as he stared at Sterling, practically drooling. “IV drug use. He burnt out all the veins in that arm. Abscessed, went necrotic. The gut wound is what killed him, though.”
The silver had made his death inevitable. Something to scorch him from the inside, ruin his cardiovascular system, make him suffer. A small needle of pure silver in an organ, or an injection of it into the bloodstream, killed quickly. Within an hour or so. That hadn’t been what killed FryerVats, because a pure silver killing left a distinctly grotesque corpse.
FryerVats had been executed with a little less drama than a pure silver needle. He’d been injected with a silver suspension, probably silver nitrate. The dose had been carefully calibrated so he lived long enough for his veins to burn out and his skin to die, then gutted like a salmon to bleed.
