“It’s better than being boring,” Mark said.

Lou thanked his friend for his help, and after they exchanged the usual well-meaning promises to get together, they hung up.

For a few minutes, Lou sat and marveled at why a twenty-million-dollar airplane was carrying a midlevel crime boss from Queens, New York, from some African country Lou had never heard of. Such a third-world backwater certainly wasn’t a medical mecca where a person would go to have sophisticated surgery like a liver transplant.

After entering Frank Gleason’s accession number into the computer, Laurie sat pondering the apparent discrepancy for some time. She’d tried to imagine what the information meant in terms of the Franconi body disappearance. Slowly, an idea took root.

Suddenly pushing back from her desk, Laurie headed to the morgue level to look for Marvin. He wasn’t in the mortuary office. She found him by stepping into the walk-in cooler. He was busy moving the gurneys around to prepare for body pickups.

The moment Laurie entered the cooler, she flashed on the horrid experience she’d had during the Cerino affair inside the walk-in unit. The memory made her distinctly uncomfortable, and she decided against attempting to have a conversation with Marvin while inside. Instead, she asked him to meet her back in the mortuary office when he was finished.

Five minutes later, Marvin appeared. He plopped a sheaf of papers on the desk and then went to a sink in the corner to wash his hands.

“Everything in order?” Laurie asked, just to make conversation.

“I think so,” Marvin said. He came to the desk and sat down. He began arranging the documents in the order that the bodies were to be picked up.

“After talking with you earlier, I learned something quite surprising,” Laurie said, getting to the point of her visit.

“Like what?” Marvin said. He finished arranging the papers and sat back.

“I entered Frank Gleason’s accession number into the computer,” Laurie said. “And I found out that his body had come into the morgue over two weeks ago. There was no name associated with it. It was an unidentified corpse!”

“No shit!” Marvin exclaimed. Then realizing what he’d said, he added: “I mean, I’m surprised.”

“So was I,” Laurie said. “I tried to call Dr. Besserman, who’d done the original autopsy. I wanted to ask if the body had been recently identified as Frank Gleason, but he’s out of the office. Do you think it was surprising that Mike Passano didn’t know the body was still labeled in the computer as an unidentified corpse?”

“Not really,” Marvin said. “I’m not sure I would have, either. I mean, you enter the accession number just to find out if the body is released. You don’t really worry too much about the name.”

“That was the impression you gave me earlier,” Laurie said. “There was also something else you said that I’ve been mulling over. You said that sometimes you don’t get the body yourself but rather one of the funeral home people does.”