Officer Hyde’s first name is Park, a terrible thing to do to a child and he gets called every insulting nickname imaginable and returns the favor. To make matters worse Officer Park Hyde is pudgy and short with freckles and kinky carrot-red hair like a bad parody of Raggedy Andy. He’s not in my line of sight at the moment. But I have excellent hearing, almost bionic like my sense of smell (or that’s the joke).

I imagine odors and sounds as colors in a spectrum or instruments in an orchestra. I’m good at singling them out. Cologne for example. Some cops wear a lot of it and Hyde’s masculine musky fragrance is as loud as his voice. I can hear him in the next room talking about me, asking what I’m doing and if I’m aware that the dead woman was into drugs, was probably a psych case, a whacko, a frequent flying loony tune. The cops are wandering around bantering as if I’m not here, and Hyde leads the charge with his boisterous clunky snipes and asides. He doesn’t hold back, especially when it comes to me.

What’s Doc Mort found? How is Chief Zombie’s leg after you know …? (whisper, whisper) What time is Count Kay returning to her coffin? Shit. I guess that’s not a good thing to say considering what went down two months ago in Florida. I mean do we know for a fact what really happened at the bottom of the sea? We sure it wasn’t a shark that got her. Or maybe she speared herself accidentally? She’s okay now, right? I mean that really had to fuck her up. She can’t hear me, right?

His words and not-so-quiet whispers are around me like shards of glass that glint and cut. Fragments of thoughts. Ignorant banal ones. Hyde is the master of dumb nicknames and comes up with dreadful puns, and I remember what he said as recently as last month when a group of us met at the Cambridge watering hole Paddy’s to toast Pete Marino’s birthday. Hyde insisted on buying me a round, on treating me to a stiff drink, maybe a Bloody Mary or a Sudden Death or a Spontaneous Combustion.

To this day I’m not sure what the latter is but he claims it includes corn whiskey and is served flaming. It might not be lethal but will make you wish it were he must have said five times. He dabbles in comedy, occasionally does stand-up in local clubs. He thinks he’s quite entertaining. He’s not.

“Is Doctor Death still here?”

“I’m in the foyer.” I drop my purple nitrile exam gloves into a red biohazard bag, my Tyvek-covered boots making slippery sounds as I move around the bloody marble floor, staring at the display on my phone.

“Sorry, Doctor Scarpetta. Didn’t know you could hear me.”