"Oh, that's right." My head was throbbing.

"We're real flattered to get the assignment," Jo added dryly. "A couple of months ago, the body of some guy from Panama eventually linked to this cartel turned up in a South Florida canal. When they did the autopsy, they found his tongue in his stomach because his compatriots cut it off and made him eat it."

"I'm not sure I want to hear all this," I said as the poison sped into my mind again.

"I'm Terry," Lucy let me know. "She's Brandy." She smiled at Jo. "U of M girls who didn't quite graduate, but hey, who needs to because during our hardworking semesters of being dopers and getting laid, we learned some pretty good addresses for home invasions. We've developed a nice social relationship with a couple One-SixtyFivers who do home invasions for guns, cash, drugs. We're setting up a guy.on Fisher Island right now who's got enough guns to open his own damn gun store and enough coke to make it look like it's fucking snowing:"

I couldn't stand to hear her talk this way.

"Of course, the victim's undercover, too," Lucy went on as big, dark crows began making rude noises and lights went on across the street.

I noticed candles in windows and wreaths on doors. I had given virtually no thought to Christmas and it would be here in less than three weeks. Lucy dug her wallet out of her back pocket and showed me her driver's license. The photograph was her, but nothing else was.

"Terry Jennifer Davis," she read to me. "White female, twenty-four years old, five-six, one hundred and twenty-one pounds. It's really strange to be someone else. You ought to see my setup down there, Aunt Kay. I got this cool little house in South Beach and drive a Benz V -twelve sports car confiscated in a drug raid in Sбo Paulo. Sort of silver, smoky.

And you ought to see my Glock. A collector's model: Forty caliber, stainless steel slide, small. Talk about sweet."

The poison was beginning to suffocate me. It cast a purple hue behind my eyes and made my hands and feet go numb.

"Lucy, how 'bout we cut the show and tell," Jo said, sensing how all this was affecting me. "It's like your watching her do an autopsy. Maybe more than you want to know, right?"

"She's let me watch," Lucy bragged on. "I've seen maybe half a dozen."

Jo was getting annoyed now.

"Police academy demos." My niece shrugged. "No axe murders."

I was rocked by her insensitivity. It was as if she were talking about restaurants.

"Usually people who died of natural causes or suicide. Families donate the bodies to the anatomical division."

Her words drifted around me like noxious gas.

"So it doesn't bother them if Uncle Tim or Cousin Beth is autopsied in front of a bunch of cops. Most of the families can't afford a burial anyway, and might in fact get paid something for body donations, isn't that right, Aunt Kay?"

"No, they don't, and bodies donated by families to science are not used for demo autopsies," I said, appalled. "What in God's name is wrong with you?" I lashed out at her.

Bare trees were spidery against the overcast dawn, and two Cadillacs drove past. I felt people staring at us.

"I hope you don't plan on making this tough act a habit." I dashed my cold words in her face. "Because it sounds stupid enough when ignorant, lobotomized people do it. And for the record, Lucy, I have let you watch three autopsies, and although police academy demos may not have been axe murders, the cases were human beings. Someone loved those three dead people you saw. Those three dead people had feelings. In love, happy, sad. They ate dinner, drove to work, went on vacations."

"I didn't dean..~." Lucy started to say.

"You can be sure when those three poor people were alive they never thought they'd end up in a morgue with twenty rookies and some kid. like you staring at their naked, opened-up bodies," I went on. "Would you want them to hear what you just said?"

Lucy's eyes brightened with tears. She swallowed hard and looked away.

"I'm sorry, Aunt Kay," she quietly replied.

"Because it's always been my belief you ought to imagine the dead listening when you speak. Maybe they hear those sophomoric jokes and asides. For sure, we hear them. What does it do to you when you hear yourself say them or hear someone else say them?"

"Aunt Kay..: "

"I'll tell you what it does to you," I said with simmering fury. "You end up just like this."

I threw my hand out as if introducing the world to her, as she looked on, stunned.

"You end up doing just what I'm doing right now," I said. "Standing on a driveway as the sun comes up. Imagining someone you love in a fucking morgue. Imagine people making fun of him, joking, making comments about the size of his penis or how much he stinks. Maybe they banged him around a little too hard on the table. Maybe halfway into the goddamn job they threw a towel over his empty chest cavity and went to lunch. And maybe cop wandering in and out on other cases made comments about crispy critters or being burned by a snitch or FBI flambй."

Lucy and Jo were staring at me in astonishment.

"Don't think I haven't heard it all;" I said, unlocking my car door and yanking it open. "A life passing through indifferent hands and cold air and water. Everything so cold, cold, cold. Even if he had died in bed, it's all so cold in the end. So don't you talk to me about autopsies."

I slid behind the wheel.

"Don't you ever wave an attitude around me, Lucy." I couldn't seem to stop.

My voice seemed to be coming from another room. It even occurred to me that I was losing my mind. Wasn't this what happened when people went insane? They stood outside themselves and watched themselves do things that really weren't them, like killing someone or walking off a window ledge.

"Mese things ring in your head like a bell forever," I said. "Slamming their ugly clapper against the sides of your skull. It isn't true that words will never hurt you. Because yours just hurt the hell out of me," I said to my niece. "Go back to Miami."

Lucy was paralyzed as I jammed my car into drive and sped off, a back tire bumping over the granite border. I caught her and Jo in my rearview mirror. They were saying something to each other, and then getting inside their rental car. My hands shook so badly I couldn't light a cigarette until I was stopped in traffic.

I didn't let Lucy and Jo catch up with me. I turned off on the Ninth Street exit and imagined them flying by toward I-64, heading to the airport, back to their lives of undercover crime.

"Goddamn you;" I muttered to my niece.

My heart slammed against me, as if trying to break free.

"Goddamn you, Lucy." I wept.

10

The new building where I worked was the eye of a fierce storm of development I never could have imagined when I moved into it in the seventies. I remembered feeling rather betrayed when I charged in from Miami just as Richmond's businesses decided to charge out to neighboring counties and malls. People stopped shopping and dining downtown, especially at night.

The city's historic character turned victim to neglect and crime until the mid-nineties, when Virginia Commonwealth University began to reclaim and revitalize what had been relegated to ruin. It seemed that handsome buildings began springing up almost overnight, all of similar brick and glass design. My office and morgue shared space with the labs and the recently established Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, which was the first training academy of its type in the country, if not the world.

I even had a choice parking space near the lobby door, where I sat in my car this moment gathering my belongings and my spinning thoughts. I had childishly turned off my car phone so Lucy couldn't get hold of me after I'd sped off. I turned it on now, hoping it would ring. I stared at it. The last time I had acted like this was after Benton and I had had our worst fight and I ordered him to leave my house and never come back. I unplugged my phones, only to plug them back in an hour later and panic when he didn't call.