The morgue

The coroner’s office was sterile, cold, and poorly lit in the sublevels of the police station. The tilework had a grime to them that no amount of scrubbing could clean off, brought on from several years worth of neglect where OTHER priorities in the room’s took precedence. Years ago, the place was almost filled twice over on a weekly basis. The consequence of a city that was home to people who valued human life the same way a chain-smoker went through packs of cigarettes. Now? Not many people died in New Gotham anymore, at least not in the ways of the past. The werewolf and vampire war saw to a lot of big fish in the Gotham Pond, pulled out and taken out of the picture. The only ones left of the ‘super’ criminal underworld were jokes at best or D-listers at worse. Even so, the years since had been quiet until now.

Speaking of cigarettes, the woman leaned back in her leather seat and pulled out one from a pack in her lab coat, lighting it in her mouth and exhaling a puff of smoke to relax her nerves after the latest autopsy. The last couple of weeks had brought her back to the crimes of the past and that was not a good thing. Back in the day before the whole Dracula business, she had seen things in this city that would turn people to go to church, if for any other reason than to pray not to be next in the rotating door of tragedies this city had to offer, and she had seen plenty. People dead with permanent grins on their pale faces, chalk skinned like party clowns. People eaten alive by fungal infection starting from the lungs out or their innards used as compost while rose branches grew out of every orifice in their bodies like garden planters. She had even seen people who had literally died of fright. She had seen it all, which explained why her hair was a silvery white even in her mid-thirties. Many who ended up wheeled into her morgue died in ways both imaginative and sick, it really wasn’t a surprise she lost so many interns who chose desk jobs after a month in here. She considered transferring too, but then if she did, who’d replace her?

A metallic clank from the freezer caught her attention, making her wheeze as she got up to her feet and stepped out of her office to look inside the locked room where the dead were left in the cold to keep preserved. Getting there, she found the place just as she left it, with not a thing out of place save for the remains still under the white cloth where she left it and three refrigeration cells filled and locked, waiting for process so they could be buried. She was about to close the door behind her when she jumped with a start to the sight of Batman standing right behind her. The man giving her a scowl but not being too intimidating as to scare her off.

“Oh… It’s you. The NEW Batman. Gordan told us we were getting a new…”

“You have a new arrival; I need to know who it is and what killed him.”

Making a sour face and exhaling a puff of smoke from her nose, the woman stood still for a slow 2 seconds before nodding and turning to open the door again. “Fine, might as well come in, the rest of the station is giving you a pass, which is a lot more than the original got.”

Making their way into the morgue proper, the coroner leaned against the far wall, with her cigarette between her fingers and carefully watching Damien pull back the white cloth to find the lower half of a man on the smooth, polished table. The lower waist and legs had already become a sickly green and pocketed with bite marks from the Gotham river’s fauna. Dropping the cloth, Batman turned to look at the coroner for answers.

“Where’s the rest of him?”

“That’s all the port authority found floating out in the river, fortunately enough for US he died with his wallet in his pants.” Gesturing to the items carefully strewn over a table along with a written report, Damien pulled it open to read, quickly going over the coroner’s findings. The table had the man’s pants neatly folded after being cut apart so they could be removed, along with a sea water-stained leather wallet and a collection of pocket change, paper cards, a personal ID and coupons sitting out to dry.

“Herschel Welsh, age 46, no priors, had been unemployed for the better part of 5 years after the smelting plant was destroyed when Dracula brought up that fiery wall around the city. After reconstruction, the factory was never planned for rebuild and was flattened to make way for a grove.”

“My report is pretty slim considering the rest of the body is missing.” The coroner explained, pulling the cloth back to expose the raw flesh underneath. “But for the most part these grooves in the meat of the leg caught my eye, not hard really, you’d think someone took a pitchfork to him.” Using a pen, she pointed out grooves in the shanks of the two severed legs, lining vertically down the thigh that even cut through the femur. “At first, I thought maybe his legs were removed using the sharp end of a pickaxe, the way the grooves are even to each other, but if you see the edges of each cut, they were all done at the same time.”

“Meaning?”

“These injuries were caused by teeth, BIG ones.” The woman explained, puffing another plume of smoke from her cigarette. “And whoever bit his legs off has a mouth big enough to swallow a watermelon whole!”

Closing the folder and placing it back on the table to the side of the metal slab where the legs were displayed, Batman turned his attention to the contents found in the victim’s pockets. The money and change were still wet, and a few business cards were still drying. One was to a prospective machine workshop across town, another was to a bar near the world tree, along with a pack of matches from the same location. Shifting his attention to the three labelled lockers to the wall, Batman approached them, reading off the names on each cot locked away to keep the bodies fresh.

Opening the first, he recognized it as the first victim in the string of murders he had been investigating. The crime scene showed nothing, but the body post autopsy revealed deep gouging claw marks that went down the body’s chest and stomach, practically cutting him open from sternum to crotch. Plucking the autopsy report binder off the storage door the body was stored in, Damien quickly read over the coroner’s findings.

“Death by exsanguination.” She explained from across the morgue, taking another puff of her cigarette. “The wounds were deep enough to rupture his spleen and liver. Even if he didn’t bleed out to death or desperately trying to keep his intestines inside of him, he’d have been dead in seconds.”

“Should you really be smoking down here?” Asked the Dark Knight with a raised eyebrow.

“Who’s alive down here to tell me otherwise?”

Hesitant, Damien shrugged and went back to the report. “Dental records revealed this was Dr. Gavin Saul. He was on retainer with Dr. Langstrum until the lab was destroyed. Where there any information on what he had been doing for the last five years?”

“Not really, the police checked for any extended family in Gotham, but the man kept to himself.”

Frowning, Damien was careful to return the binder where it was hung and closed the freezer door, then turned his attention to the other two bodies in storage. Brian Rufus and Antonio Montino, the head enforcers to Two-Face and his criminal empire, or they used to be. Both men bore the same injuries as the doctor to the left of them on the rows of refrigerator cots. The contents of their belongings were just as pedestrian as the good doctor, if not standard for their line of work; large sums of money ranging around $500.00 each bound in rubber bands, a pair of automatics with spare clips, along with a back up. They also had some contraband like narcotics and some personal care products, both had a stack of matches from the Bistro they were found behind. Rufus even had a packaged stick of teriyaki style beef jerky. But that just left a very big question left unanswered.

“They still had these in their possession when they were killed, which meant it wasn’t a robbery. Even an animal attack would see some of these items taken out of their pockets.”

“The police had the same questions you did. Had to keep one officer dragging them in here not to eat the jerky.”

Closing the two freezer cots, Batman returned the binders and traced his gloved hand over to the next freezer cots, finding them empty and untagged.

“No remains of the two werewolves?”

“Brooms aren’t standard issue when picking up bodies, but the way this city functions now, they may have to change that policy. But yes, we have the two of them here, we just have them as samples instead of bodies.” Moving over to a separate table away from the autopsy table, the coroner showed a pair of labelled jars with a manifesto of their contents. “Even if we did find anything, the way they died instantly contaminated any evidence we’d collect from their bodies. Doesn’t help they go Gremlin in broad daylight after they kicked the bucket. The best I could tell their tribe leaders were they simply died.”

“Gremlin?” Wondered Batman, a confused look behind his cowl.

Smiling as she put out her cigarette and lit another, the woman shook her head. “You’re younger than you look if you don’t know that one.”

Ignoring her comment, Batman looked to the other three and thought hard about what he had so far as evidence. Coming to a thought, he looked back to the coroner and nodded his head her way before taking his leave out of the morgue.

“I think I have what I need for a hypothesis, if I’m correct, I’ll let the commissioner know my findings once I’m sure of what I have.”

Seeing the door close, the coroner took a puff of her cigarette, looking back at the five dead in her care and snorting. “Sure thing, it’s been quiet down here anyway, maybe I’ll head up to visit the living for a change.”