On the horizon the outline of low hills was starting to take shape, darker against darkness. Somewhere beyond them, the first light was moving up the sand in Broken Harbor, seeping into all those empty houses, into the emptiest one of all. It was five to six. I said, “Have you ever been to a post-mortem?”

Richie shook his head. He said, “There’s a first time for everyone.”

“There is, yeah, but it’s not usually like this. This is going to be bad. You should be there, but if you’re seriously not on for it, this is when you need to speak up. We can say you’re getting some kip after the stakeout.”

He crushed his paper cup into a wad and tossed it at the bin with a hard downward snap of his wrist. “Let’s go,” he said.

*

The morgue was in the hospital basement, small and low-ceilinged, with dirt and probably worse things ground into the grout between the floor tiles. The air was chilly and damp, motionless. “Detectives,” Cooper said, eyeing Richie with a faint anticipatory smirk. Cooper is maybe fifty, but in the tube lighting, against white tile and metal, he looked ancient: grayish and shriveled, like an alien stepped out of some hallucination, probes at the ready. “How nice to see you. We will begin, I think, with the adult male: age before beauty.” Behind him, his assistant—heavy build, stolid stare—pulled open a storage drawer with a horrible grating screech. I felt Richie brace his shoulders beside me, a tiny jerk.

They broke the seals on the body bag, unzipped it to reveal Pat Spain in his blood-stiffened pajamas. They photographed him clothed and naked, took blood and fingerprints, bent close while they picked at his skin with tweezers and clipped his fingernails for DNA. Then the assistant swung the instrument tray around to Cooper’s elbow.

Post-mortems are brutal things. This is the part that always catches rookies off guard: they expect delicacy, tiny scalpels and precision cuts, and instead they get bread knives sawing fast careless gashes, skin ripped back like sticky paper. Cooper at work looks more like a butcher than a surgeon. He doesn’t need to take care to minimize scarring, hold his breath making sure not to nick an artery. The flesh he works on isn’t precious any more. When Cooper is done with a body, no one else will need it, ever again.

Richie did well. He didn’t flinch when the pruning shears snapped Pat’s ribs open, or when Cooper folded Pat’s face downwards on itself, or when the skull saw sent up a thin acrid smell of scorched bone. The squelching sound when the assistant dumped the liver on the weighing scales made him jump, but that was all.

Cooper moved deftly and efficiently, dictating into the hanging mike and ignoring us. Pat had eaten a cheese sandwich and some crisps, three or four hours before he died. Traces of fat in his arteries and around his liver said he should have been getting fewer crisps and more exercise, but overall he had been in good shape: no illnesses that showed, no abnormalities, a long-ago broken collarbone and thickened ears that could have been rugby injuries. I said quietly, to Richie, “Healthy man’s scars.”