Viewing The Bodies

“You know I have a phone,” West said as she lead Maria down to the Morgue, the annoyance still clear in her voice.

“Well I find I get results much faster when I do things face to face.” Maria replied with a not so subtle rebuke about West’s lack of communication hidden in her words.

West merely grumbled to herself and kept walking, leading Maria through the winding halls of the City Morgue. The place was much bigger than you would expect for a city like this, a whole wing of Barker Memorial Hospital was given over to the Morgue and it employed nearly as large a staff as the rest of the place.

Of course a thoughtful observer would notice that a lot of the rooms they passed seemed to be built to store the bodies of things much larger than humans. You would have to assume that this place was once used to store the bodies of Elephants and other massive creatures, after all that could be the only reasonable explanation.

When they finally arrived at the cold storage for Jane Does Maria felt her heart sink. Even just glancing at the list pinned to the wall she could see that there were two dozen bodies sitting on ice in the room.

“Are these all from the last couple of weeks?” She asked as West began to make preparations to pull the bodies out.

“Yup,” West said over her shoulder. “It’s been a busy few weeks, course most of these are just waiting on bloods to confirm ID.”

“Well I only want to see the ones that you don’t have anything on.” Maria replied, putting down the list and walking to the dress station. She pulled on the protective gear with the practised ease of a pro. She had had to go over Jane and John Does more times than she could recall in this line of work.

“That’s six bodies then,” West said as she wheeled the first gurney out of the cold storage. “I’ll start you with oldest.”

Maria stood and waited for the body bag to be opened, taking a few last deep breaths before the grisly business began.