6

Assistant Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Ulf Möller had volunteered himself for the New Year’s Day autopsy of Zombie Doe. He was standing outside the back entrance to the morgue, smoking a cigarette, when Kovac pulled up and parked in the chief’s spot.

The morgue was open for business, receiving bodies 24/7/365. An ambulance sat in the delivery bay now, having dropped off its unlucky cargo. There had been no autopsies planned for the day, however. Death never took a holiday, but MEs did. Anyone dead on New Year’s Day would be just as dead on January second. But Kovac had pressed for an exception. It was important to ID their Jane Doe as soon as possible, for the sake of any family who might have been looking for her and for the sake of the case. Ulf Möller hadn’t hesitated to say yes to Kovac’s request, giving up his holiday afternoon with his wife, Eva, and their two daughters.

Tall and lean, Möller had a European elegance about him right down to the way he held his smoke, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He was wrapped in a handsome black leather trench coat, a plaid cashmere scarf wound artfully around his neck. Despite the cold, he wore no hat. The icy breeze teased the ends of his fine sandy hair, though not a strand strayed out of place. He watched Sam approach with a wry expression.

“I appreciate this, Doc,” Kovac said.

Möller sketched a brow ever so slightly upward, a certain kind of amusement lighting his eyes. “How could I resist? It isn’t every day I get to autopsy a zombie. Maggie is going to be jealous, I think.”

ME humor: every bit as dark and inappropriate as cop humor. Civilians would have been offended to hear it, but it was a necessary vice for people who dealt in death and depravity on a daily basis.

“She got the vampire on Halloween,” Kovac reminded him. “And that Santa Claus burglar who died inside that chimney.”

“Greedy bitch,” Möller said mildly. He took a long pull on the cigarette and exhaled a jet stream of smoke.

Head honcho Maggie Stone, who had performed the autopsy on Rose Reiser a year ago, had gone to Vegas for New Year’s with the latest of her slightly shady boyfriends. Möller, who had spent the last New Year’s holiday visiting family in Germany, had done the autopsy on the Fourth of July vic—Independence Doe.

“What do you think, Sam? Is this the work of our serial killer?”

Kovac shrugged. “You’ll have to tell me. I don’t like the coincidences: holiday, dumped on the road, stabbed, disfigured . . . I don’t want to think there are a lot of guys running around doing shit like that.”

“Any prospects for an ID of the victim?”

“No local missing persons matching her description. At least, not yet. Someone goes missing New Year’s Eve, it might take a day or two for anyone to sound the alarm,” Kovac said. “I pulled a few sheets for missing females in a five-state area. Whoever she is, I hope to God she has a record and we can ID her from her fingerprints. That face is nothing to work with. Have you had a look at her yet?”

“And start the party without you and your lovely partner?” Möller said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Cigarette?”

Kovac took the offer automatically, as a matter of male bonding. He had officially quit the rotten habit about thirty-two times—had quit entirely when he had been seeing Carey Moore and spending time around her little girl, Lucy.

Intellectually, he knew smoking was a stupid thing to do. And Liska kicked his ass for it every time she caught him doing it. Emotionally, he didn’t always care. In his darker moods, he did it deliberately, daring the universe to kill him. Who would give a shit anyway? Today was one of those days.

Möller shared his lighter. They both lit up and stood there in the freezing cold, tarring up their lungs like a couple of fucking idiots. Kovac felt perversely pleased with himself. He reminded himself how much he liked smoking, how soothing the ritual of it was; how a cigarette was like an old friend you called up every time the world kicked you in the teeth, and you went out and got drunk together and felt like shit afterward.

Liska pulled up to the curb then and parked her car in a loading zone. She got out wearing her don’t-fuck-with-me face and stomped up to them.

“You’re a couple of damned fools, and when you die slow, lingering, horrible deaths, don’t come crying to me.”

Möller arched a brow. “Lovely to see you, as well, Sergeant Liska. Happy New Year.”

Liska gave him the stink eye.

Kovac had the grace to feel guilty. He dropped his smoke and ground it out in the snow that had accumulated on the sidewalk overnight. He picked up the butt and discarded it properly. She could accuse him of being a fool, but at least he had some common courtesy.

Liska shot him her mother’s look of utter disgust nevertheless and headed into the building. Kovac looked at Möller and shrugged.

The ME’s mouth curved up on one side in amusement. “You make such a lovely couple.”

“The hell,” Kovac grumbled as they fell in step behind his partner. “She’d eat me alive.”

“And not in the good way,” Liska tossed back over her shoulder. Typical Tinks. Always with the smart mouth.

Kovac had to admit, the two of them had been partners longer than he had stayed married to either of his wives. He doubted there was much one of them didn’t know about the other. Liska delighted in embarrassing him with the details of her dating life. He weighed in routinely on her ex-husband and had learned to read and assess her moods with sharp accuracy.

She was pissed now, but his smoking a cigarette had little to do with it. Quick and tense, her every movement was reminiscent of an angry cat snapping its tail.

“Speed?” he guessed as they hung up their coats and grabbed yellow gowns.

“Isn’t answering his phone,” she said curtly.

“How is that a problem? It’s not as much fun to call him a lazy-ass selfish dick on his voice mail?”

She stood still and looked up at him with grave meaning. “Kyle got into a fight last night.”

“Kyle?”

“I know. Right? Kyle doesn’t get into fights.”

“Does he have an explanation?”

“Sure. It’s bullshit. He claims he and his friends went skating on the lake last night, that he crashed into some kid and got into a fight with him.”

“You don’t believe him.”

“It was seventeen below zero last night,” she reminded him. “Nobody was skating on Lake Calhoun. The knuckles of his right hand are scraped. He wasn’t wearing gloves when he hit whoever he hit. They weren’t outside,” she concluded. “He’s lying to me.”

“And you think he’ll tell Speed the truth?” Kovac asked. “Speed is more apt to give him pointers. How to Sell a Lie 101 by Speed Hatcher. The asshole ought to do a video series. Maybe he could pay his back child support with the proceeds.”

“I don’t know what good he would do,” she admitted. “I just know I want him to suffer through this too.”

Kovac held his tongue and bent over to pull on the yellow paper booties over his shoes. Suffering was not on the Speed Hatcher agenda any more than shouldering his share of the responsibility for parenting two teenage boys.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Liska said.

“Well, that’s going to save on conversation, then.”

“I’m worried,” she admitted.

“I know.”

He put a hand on her shoulder and gave a little squeeze at the rock-hard tension there. “Kyle’s a great kid, Tinks. You’re doing a great job raising him and R.J. But they’re boys. Boys do stupid things. Boys get into scrapes. It’s a wonder half of the male population even makes it to maturity.”

“That’s a fact.” She tried without much success to muster her usual smartass smirk.