“Good point,” Jack said. “I didn’t think of that. How can we find out?”

“I suppose I can call my friend back at the FAA,” Lou said.

“Great,” Jack said. “I’m heading back to my office at the morgue. You want me to call you or you call me?”

“I’ll call you,” Lou said.

After Laurie had written down all that she could remember from her conversation with Marvin concerning how bodies were picked up by funeral homes, she’d put the paper aside and ignored it while she did some other busywork. A half hour later, she picked it back up.

With her mind clear, she tried to read it with fresh eyes. On the second read-through, something jumped out at her: namely, how many times the term “accession number” appeared. Of course, she wasn’t surprised. After all, the accession number was to a body what a Social Security number was to a living individual. It was a form of identification that allowed the morgue to keep track of the thousands of bodies and consequent paperwork that passed through its portals. Whenever a body arrived at the medical examiner’s office, the first thing that happened was that it was given an accession number. The second thing that happened was that a tag with the number was tied around the big toe.

Looking at the word “accession,” Laurie realized to her surprise that if asked she wouldn’t have been able to define it. It was a word she’d just accepted and used on a daily basis. Every laboratory slip and report, every X-ray film, every investigator’s report, every document intramurally had the accession number. In many ways, it was more important than the victim’s name.

Taking her American Heritage dictionary from its shelf, Laurie looked up the word “accession.” As she began reading the definitions, none of them made any sense in the context of the word’s use at the morgue, until the next to last entry. There it was defined as “admittance.” In other words, the accession number was just another way of saying admittance number.

Laurie searched for the accession numbers and names of the bodies that had been picked up during the night shift of March fourth when Franconi’s body disappeared. She found the piece of scratch paper beneath a slide tray. On it was written: Dorothy Kline #101455 and Frank Gleason #100385.

Thanks to her musing about accession numbers, Laurie noticed something she’d not paid any attention to before. The fact that the accession numbers differed by over a thousand! That was strange because the numbers were given out sequentially. Knowing the approximate volume of bodies processed through the morgue, Laurie estimated that there must have been several weeks separation between the arrivals of these two individuals.

The time differential was strange since bodies rarely stayed at the morgue more than a couple of days, so Laurie keyed Frank Gleason’s accession number into her computer terminal. His was the body picked up by the Spoletto Funeral Home.