January 27th

January 29th.

Two days before February. This would mark the seventh day Dr. Jacqueline Farris would have to make an appearance at the Office of the Medical Examiner on her scheduled day off.

When she woke up that morning, a little before eight, Jackie was looking forward to spending her much-deserved free time without her non-City-employee friends, and doing some errands. It had been a rough couple of weeks, and she needed a break.

But of course as she emerged from her shower, Jackie's work phone had to ring. Again, and again.

All calls were from Vince.

Jackie could have simply ignored the calls and texts. After all, Vince was a fully-capable medical examiner— but then the fifth consecutive call came though, and by then, Jackie knew she had no other choice but to respond.

She had returned the calls, only to hear Vince sputtered out nonsense, clearly indicated that he was in the middle of a panic attack.

Feeling obligated, Jackie had promised Vince she would be by his side within the hour. By nine, she was walking through the halls of the Office of the Medical Examiner and through the double doors leading to her lab, determined as ever to return to her cozy apartment as soon as possible.

It was all wishful thinking. It was a fact that she had to accept the moment she entered the lab and saw Vince just standing there, in the middle of the room, frozen, not only moving or making a noise as his partner approached him. His only focus was the empty examining table before him.

He must be in shock, Jackie concluded as she carefully walked around him.

"Vince?"

No response.

"Vince, is everything okay?"

“He’s gone…”

Jackie stared at her friend, blinked and glanced around the lab to see if anything was out of place. Everything was normal except for the man standing several feet from her, now sobbing into his hands.

“I just went out on a breakfast break. I had checked on him right before I left, and he was there, and then I came back fifteen minutes ago, and he was gone!”

“Who?”

“Lucien Dalca!”

“Come again?”

Instead of responding, Vince rushed towards the freezer and pulled out the drawer assigned to Lucien Dalca. Or what was left of him, which was nothing, much to Jackie's absolute surprise.

Jackie dropped her purse. "Uh, Vince?"

"I—I don't know what happened," Vince choked out. "Is this a nightmare? Please tell this is a nightmare that I'm gonna wake up from in any second... I checked everywhere. I mean, it's possible to put someone in the wrong drawer, right? Everyone makes mistakes. But it's been so crazy around here that we don't have any empty drawers left. So, I couldn't have mixed him up with two of the others because we haven't opened any other cases except for Tiffany’s, who we can't even work on. I don't understand what's going on!"

This can't be real, Jackie thought to herself. "Is this some kind of joke?"

Vince shook his head. "I don't—they're gone. I don't where they are. The cameras didn't catch anything. They were right in here before I went to lunch, and now they're—shit! Where can he be?”

Jackie slowly brought her hand to her mouth when the gravity of the situation finally hit her, and breathed, horrified. “This isn’t a joke…”

“Like Hell it isn’t!” Vince shouted, frantically pacing around the label, pulling on his short black hair. “Jacks, we’re gonna lose our jobs!”

Jackie snapped out of her trance, approached her friend and pulled him into a hug before he induced a stroke. “Vince, calm down,” she softly ordered. The man looked like he was about to burst into tears. “Everything’s going to be fine. The most important that is that you didn’t get hurt—“

“But the body!”

“We’ll figure something out,” Jackie promised, although she didn’t know how. In her experience, she had never encountered anything like this, and she couldn’t recall being directed to follow a concrete procedure because people didn’t just steal bodies from a morgue. But she had to remain strong for Vince’s sake. “We’re not going to lose our jobs.”

“Should we call the police?”

"Yes, we should call the police," Jackie said, but then changed her mind. "No, no, we can't call the police yet. We should—we need to tell Khan before we can do anything. He'll know what to do."

Vince took a deep breath and nodded. "Okay, good idea. I'll break the news to him--"

"Don't be silly, Vince. I'm not going to let you face our boss alone."

***

"What do you mean, he’s gone?”

Jackie and Vince exchanged cautious glances and gulped. It was always a rare moment to see Khan, a rational, calm man, express his anger in such a manner.

Being the brave one, Jackie decided to speak up. She had known Khan better and much longer than Vince, so there was a possibility that the man would go easy on her. “Dr. Khan, um, the corpse of Lucien Dalca was placed in the assigned freezer, but it seems that, um… he was taken without permission.”

“How the—“

Vince jumped in. “We don’t know. I had checked on him right before I went on break. I had made sure that everything was locked and secured—you can even ask security—but by the time I came back, he was gone.”

"I already checked with security; they claim they didn't see anything or anyone," Jackie quickly pointed out. "It's obvious that the thieves had stolen Lucien for a nefarious reason. This was planned."

“Like this month couldn’t get any worse,” Khan complained, pressing his fingers down on the bridge of his nose as he paced around his office.

“We should call the police,” Vince suggested.

Jackie agreed.

Khan stopped in his tracks. “No, we shouldn’t. At least, not yet. We can't afford to get them involved because then the media is going to find out followed by the mayor's office—if we call the cops, we can kiss all of our careers and hard work goodbye. Not only are going to get fired and mostly likely be blackballed, we will be sued until kingdom come. The Dalca’s have money, and people with money loved bring on lawsuits.”

"Don't you think we're getting a little ahead of ourselves?" Jackie asked. "We can fix this."

Khan finally sat down at his desk. “Ya’Allah, first Tiffany Tomlinson, and now this.” He sighed. “My goodness, who did I manage to piss off…”

“I’m sure—I don’t mean to change the topic entirely, but do you know what’s going on with Rubinstein? Was he able to change Baxter’s mind?”

Khan shook his head. “Rubinstein has his hands tied. He tried talking some sense into Baxter yesterday, but he wouldn’t budge. If Rubinstein wants anything to happen, he’ll have to go to the higher courts or go to the mayor—and no one wants that.”

“The police?” Jackie suggested, but Khan just gave her a long look. “How about the feds? I know they’ve heard about the Suite Girl case and are snooping around. Maybe if they find out that Baxter’s obstructing that case, they can bring in a corruption case—that’s in their jurisdiction, right?”

Khan shook his head. Jackie's idea sounded nice, if they were living in an ideal world, but they weren't. "No, we don't want any fed involvement. I'll tell you what: I'll talk to Rubinstein again. He's the assistant district attorney. Maybe he can get the state attorney general on his side since it’s obvious that Baxter isn’t going to do a damn thing."

"Yeah, good idea," Vince said.

***

January 30th

Another late night.

Another murder scene.

"Joaquim, you know I love you, but we really need to stop running into each other at crime scenes," Jackie said, exiting out of her car. She approached the cop after locking the doors.

Joaquim let out a soft chuckle before offering to hold Jackie's things; she allowed him. "You ain't kidding. But look at the bright side, haven’t seen any stakes or detached body parts involved."

"Oh, thank goodness," Jackie said, then asked. "So, inside, what is it?" She reworded her question when the cop didn't respond. "How bad is it?”

Joaquim ran a hand down his face and yawned a few times before replying. "Sorry, had a long crazy night. I had to deal with a series of domestic disputes. And child protective services; the whole nine yards."

Jackie knew exactly how he felt. "Don't worry about it. Tell me, it is a normal crime scene or something out of Hostel?"

Joaquim chuckled at the question before realizing that the doctor was not joking. "Sorry, uh... it looks like your old-fashion shooting. No forced entry. Not that much blood…"

"Who's assigned to this case?"

"Edwin and Parker."

"Another one?"

Joaquim shrugged. "We're pretty understaffed at our district."

"Join the party," Jackie said, snorting. "Who’s the victim?"

"White male, mid to late twenties. Looked like could be model or actor. One bullet to the head."

"Execution-style?"

"Not exactly. It was a bullet to the temple, possible a suicide."

"I see."

Jackie stopped in front of the house and examined it. It looked condemned as if the entire structure could collapse the moment she stepped foot onto the porch steps. "Someone actually lives here?"

"Lived. We did a quick check online about the owner," Joaquim said. "There's hasn't been an official one since '73."

"How is it still standing?"

Joaquim shrugged and led Jackie into the house and straight to the "master bedroom"—if Jackie could even call it that. It was dark. It was damp. It was cold. There was one mattress drenched in blood. The victim was lying on his side with a bullet wound to his left temple.

Jackie put her gloves on and leaned over the body. "When did you get the call?"

"Forty-five minutes ago. A person driving by reported hearing a gunshot."

"Are you sure it's that recent?"

Joaquim nodded.

Jackie shrugged. The man didn't look like he had just died less than an hour ago; he looked like he had been deceased for the past few days. He looked so cold, so pale. Jackie lifted both eyelids and just stared. "White eyes? I don't think these are contacts. But that doesn't make any sense. People don't have naturally white irises, right?"

The color drained from Joaquim's face as he gulped. "I have to look for Edwin," he abruptly announced before running away.

Confused, Jackie watched the man rush out the room before turning back to the victim. She couldn't explain Joaquim's odd behavior; he acted like he had never seen a dead body before. Shaking her head, she continued to search all over the man's body. It did look like a classic shooting.

***

“How the Hell did you guys manage to lose a dead body?”

"We didn't lose anything," Jackie clarified, not too thrilled with Edwin's implication that she and her coworkers were incompetent. Overworked and severely underpaid, yes, but they were certainly not incompetent. "We were robbed—Good evening, Detective Parker."

Parker nodded. "Dr. Farris."

“Once again, who and why would anyone steal dead bodies?"

"I don't know. You tell me; you're the one who deals with criminals on a daily basis, not me," Jackie said, becoming more irritated, not necessary at Edwin, but at everything. "I'm just a medical examiner who can't even do her damn job because of this mess."

"I heard about the TRO," Parker added, shaking his head. "That's messed up. Didn’t even know that’s allowed for major homicide cases."

“I rather not talk about that now,” Jackie said. "And enough about my missing corpse. We've got another murder victim." She pulled out her camera to take pictures of the body before putting it away so she could continue the examination. "The body count from the past couple of weeks is awfully high, don't you think? It's not even summer yet." Before Edwin could reply, Jackie changed the subject. "Have you talked to Marcus and Teresa yet?"

Edwin nodded as he began to inspect the room. Parker followed suit. "Tomorrow morning, we're going to have a little chat over breakfast."

"Teresa's coming?"

Edwin turned to give Jackie an odd look. "Why wouldn't she?"

Jackie shrugged, deciding that this wasn't the ideal place to discuss Edwin's relationship issues. "No reason."

Edwin didn't look convinced, but he didn't press further.

"I was expecting more officers?" Jackie questioned out of the blue after a few seconds of silence. She had just noticed how quiet it was, a rarity at the scene of a crime or a suicide. It was very odd to only have a handful of cops at a potential murder scene. The EMT hadn't even arrived yet. It was all very strange.

"We're pretty stretched thin, especially for overnight shifts," Edwin replied, stepping closer to the body. "One shot to the right temple..." He looked around. "Some discharged bullets... What do you think, Parker? Murder or suicide?"

Parker shrugged and pulled out a notepad. "Could be either. No sign of forced entry. Neighbors said it was pretty quiet until they heard the gunshot. We haven't found the murder weapon yet." He stopped to pick up a stray bullet with his gloved hand and examined it closely. It was an odd bullet; not like anything he nothing like had ever seen before. "This is interesting…"

Edwin and Parker peered at it.

"Tranquilizers?" Parker suggested, staring at the bullet in amazement. "But tranquilizers aren't supposed to kill people. Sedate them, yes, but not kill."

"Allergic reaction?" Joaquim offered.

Jackie didn't join the conversation, but she did inspect the bullet. She was nowhere near a ballistic expert, but after examining dozens of shooting victims, she knew a thing or two about bullets. "I don't think those are tranquilizers…"

"What do you mean?"

"They look like actual bullets, but with blue… light inside."

"Light bullets?" Parker asked. "As in the light from the sun? How's that even possible?"

"Parker, do me a favor and arrange for the body to be picked up as soon as the CSI folks are done?"

Parker bristled at Edwin's order, but did what he was told.

"They're not here yet?"

"I just contacted them fifteen minutes ago. They'll be here soon. Maybe in ten."

Jackie found that very interesting. Edwin had more or less demanded that Khan send Jackie to the crime scene as quickly as possible. That had been more than a half an hour ago, and she usually arrived after the EMT and CSI. Something wasn't right. "I didn't know ultra-light bullets were on the market."

"Not officially, they are," Edwin said before ordering Joaquim to take one of the bullets with him. Yes, that would be considered tampering with the evidence, but Edwin had a bad feeling that he was going to have to break some serious laws with this assignment. "Jackie, how quickly do you get a court order to do an autopsy?"

Jackie raised an eyebrow and checked to see if there were any cuts and bruises on the body. "It depends. If it's a natural death or a suicide, we're not ordered to perform one unless the family requests it. If it's a murder, almost immediately; at times, within hours."

"And who determines that?" Edwin asked. He had an idea about how the process worked, but he wanted to make sure before he made any rash decisions. "The potential cause of death?"

"I do if Khan isn't available. Which he isn't tonight or tomorrow. He's on extended sick leave. Before anything can begin, we have to bring this body to the lab for identification. Nothing can really happen until we have some sort of idea who this person is."

"There's no need."

"What are you talking about? We have to ID every person that's in the morgue. It's the law."

"I mean, you won't be able to find anything. He doesn't exactly have an identity."

"And you know this how?"

“His name is Matthias, goes by Pretty Boy Matt. That’s all I can tell you and that’s all that’s documented,” Edwin said evasively.

“Do you know where he’s from?”

“Europe—Scotland, I think.”

Jackie gave him a side-eye for his self-evident response. Joaquim tried to subdue his chuckle. "Thank you. That was very helpful."

She opened the victim's mouth and was surprised to see fangs. Actual fangs, like the ones she used to wear for Halloween, except they looked real. Jackie turned her attention to Joaquim, hoping to get an explanation out of him, but he only continued to search for more bullets.

“This scene is pretty cut and dry,” Edwin said. “You can take the body to the morgue. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can get out this place without causing havoc.”

“You don’t have to—“

“Oh, I think I do,” Edwin said, glimpsing at Pretty Boy Matt. “We need to talk.”