Riley, she discovered, wasn’t chatty when she was working, so Bryn kept her silence, too. There was something oddly Zen about the prep room; it was like a chapel, hushed and peaceful. As Bryn made her incisions and hooked the carotid out of Mrs. Jacoby’s pale, fleshy neck, she concentrated on the details. Don’t break the surface was the first rule; the dead did bleed, particularly from the carotid, and it was a mess that ruined the clear field of vision and made embalming that much tougher. If she screwed this one up, she’d have to go for the femoral.
She didn’t screw it up.
The mechanics of the embalming went smoothly enough, and Mrs. Jacoby had died peacefully in her sleep. It was only a matter of pumping out the blood and pumping in embalming fluid, applying the hydration cream to keep the tissues supple, and suturing the mouth.
“You know the worst thing about this business?” Riley suddenly said. She stepped back from her table, sighed, put her hands on her hips, and stretched as if her back ached, which it probably did; Bryn’s already had a twinge, even though she’d probably done a lot less standing and leaning. “You can get used to the bodies, the smell, the mess. I’ve picked up bodies that were melted into furniture, they’d been down so long. You can get used to the grief, too.”
Bryn nodded. She’d already experienced that; after the first few days, she’d realized that the tearful stories still moved her, but not in a deeply personal way. She’d put up a wall to muffle the vulnerability. That was manageable. She’d seen the bad (Melissa) and the sad (most of the rest), and so far, only one that was crazy, but it was all a manageable process now. A continuum.
“You get used to thinking of them as just skin, bones, flesh, to-do lists, but every once in a while you find something that makes you realize they used to be just like you. Just like us.” Riley stared down at the man she was working on. He was a tough one, a car crash victim in his thirties. Handsome, too, though Bryn had more reason than most to subscribe to the whole beauty-is-skin-deep theory. “He had plane tickets in his pocket. He was supposed to be headed to Hawaii today—can you believe that? First class. He probably paid extra so he could really enjoy himself, and somewhere, right about now, they’re calling his name at the ticket counter and moving on to a standby because he hasn’t shown up.”
Riley was right. That made it uncomfortably real. There were so many layers of reality to the world. Nothing stopped for death; nothing stopped for grief or horror or tragedy.
As if she’d read her thoughts, Riley said, “The worst part of it is that it never stops. Death keeps coming. We get older; we get tired; we get sad and lonely because nobody understands what we do or why we do it. Police and firemen, they’re heroes. Us, we’re pariahs. And every day, there are more bodies.” She said it without any particular emotional emphasis; it was an observation, delivered calmly, but it chilled Bryn deep down.
“Then why do you do it?” she asked.
Riley turned and met her eyes. She didn’t smile. “Because I’m good at it,” she said. “Because it needs doing. Why do you?”
Originally, it had been because the money was good and the job was stable, but Bryn understood what Riley was saying. There was a certain unspoken honor to this job, a certain quiet dignity. We, Bryn thought, are the great dirty secret, the reality that runs under everything else.
And Riley was right. It was lonely.
“Don’t mind me,” Riley said, and finally smiled. It didn’t reach her sad eyes. “I’ve been at this awhile. I get maudlin. Some people drink; some get depressed; some run around having sex with anyone with a pulse. Me, I get philosophical. It’s healthier.”
“What do you do when you’re not, you know, here?”
“I shower three times before I leave the building, and then I go out to dinner with friends. I watch movies and read books. I exercise. I live a normal life.” Riley cocked her head and looked at Bryn with suddenly sharp, inquisitive eyes. “Don’t you?”
“Well, I have a dog.” That was just about the only normal thing in her life anymore. “Mr. French.”
“Dogs are good. Pets are good. People will let you down.” Riley shook her head and put her mask back on. “That’s good work on Mrs. Jacoby, by the way.”
“It’s easy.”
“Nothing’s easy here. Just delicate.”
As Bryn warmed the tinted wax in the palm of her hand and gently, gently applied it to Mrs. Jacoby’s pale, lifeless lips, she had to agree.
Joe Fideli gave her shots every day. She didn’t see McCallister at all, although she knew Fideli was in contact with him. By special arrangement, she and Fideli carpooled; he didn’t like having her on the road alone, unprotected. So she had a bodyguard from the minute she left the fortress of her apartment until she arrived at the funeral home, with was always buzzing with activity until closing time.
And still, she felt very alone when the phone rang in her office, and the distorted voice said, “I got your good-faith money, Bryn. Very nice.”
Him. Bryn sat very still in her leather chair. She was suddenly hyperaware of the paperwork sitting in front of her, the crooked angle of the pen beside it, the way light from the desk lamp fell across things in shadows and glares. She’d closed the door to work on files, and in here, it was so silent it might have been on another planet.
She spun the chair to look out the window. That was better. There was normal life out there: sun, trees moving gently in the breeze, clouds passing. Joe Fideli pulled up in the mortuary van and backed down the ramp that led to the downstairs loading dock, delivering more clients. She felt obscurely glad to have him here, somewhere close.
“Bryn?”
“I’m listening,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Are you ready to do business?”
“How are your Returné customers doing?”
“They’re dead,” she said. “What did you expect? You know how quickly the drug wears off.”
“They were already dead. Now they’re just … normalizing their state.”
She felt her free hand clench into a fist, and forced herself to stay calm. Don’t take it personally. But it was tough, when all that stood between you and that awful future was a shot controlled by someone else. “Like you said before, I can always get new customers.”
“Hmmm, any prospects?”
“I have a thirtysomething man downstairs with lots of money,” she said. “He should be good for a few months of profit.”
“Family?”
“He was single; no next of kin to speak of.”
“Excellent. You don’t have to worry about conscience nibbling away at you for robbing the wife and kids. See, I know something about you, Bryn. You’re softhearted.”
“I’m practical. You don’t get into the death business if you’re softhearted.”
“You do if you inherit it.” It was hard to pinpoint, but Bryn thought his tone had been sounding lazily amused, but now it changed. “Enough chat. You want to do business, bring another hundred thousand to the address you’ll get in your e-mail. I pick up the money, and I e-mail you another address where the goods will be waiting for you.”
“No way. I’m not leaving money and walking away. What do you take me for?”
“Bryn, I had a good working relationship with Uncle Lincoln, but I don’t know you. And I don’t trust you.”
“Why not?”
He laughed. It sounded horrible and mechanical through the voice filter. “Because I don’t have any hold on you. Fear is the basis of any good relationship, and you’re not afraid enough of me. Not yet.”
He hung up. Bryn stared at the receiver for a moment, then slowly replaced it in the cradle. She looked mindlessly at the paperwork for a moment more, then stood and walked out of her office, down the hall. There was a viewing in progress in the Lincoln Suite—the boy, Jake Hernandez, who’d been shot in a drive-by. She drifted through the people talking outside the room in hushed tones; some nibbled the cookies; some used the tissues. There were a few family members and friends who had that hardened, dead-eyed look; nobody had said Jake had been in a gang, but then, nobody had needed to. She’d seen the tattoos and the knife and gun scars.
Bryn passed through the door that led to the other world, the Formica-and steel-world, with a sense of actual relief. She came down the stairs just as the loading-dock door slid up, and Joe Fideli, standing in the back of the van with two sheeted gurneys, looked back at her.
“Hey,” she said. “Need a hand?” She didn’t wait for his answer. The metal ramp was off to the side, and she brought it over and put it in place to bridge the gap between the van and the concrete.
“What’s up?” he asked her as he maneuvered the first gurney in line with the ramp.
“Our friend called,” she said. “He wants another hundred thousand. He’s sending me an e-mail with the address of where to leave it. Then he’ll send another e-mail with the location of the drugs.”
“Smart,” Joe said. “Low risk for him, high profit. If we do anything out of line, he can cut and run and never contact us again.” He pushed the gurney out, and Bryn grasped her end and pulled it over the ramp onto the dock’s clean, firm surface. They repeated the process with the second body. “I’ll run it by Pat, but it sounds like we need to play along a little more. Once he starts trusting you, it’ll be easier to set this guy up for a personal meet. Once he shows himself, we’ve got him.”
“Can’t you just pick him up when he gets the money?”
“He’s not stupid. He won’t get it himself. We could spend all day chasing down handoffs.”
Bryn concentrated on the logistics as they wheeled the gurneys down the hall and into the prep room; Riley was washing a body, and waved to them without speaking as the gurneys went into refrigeration. Each body had an ID tag and a plastic envelope of paperwork, which Bryn clipped to hanging boards above the appropriate stations.