He raised his brows, surprised. “Not tracking you, Warshawski, just looking for you.”

“Okay,” I said. “You found me.”

“A friend of mine at the state lab called me a little bit ago, about Doris McKinnon, or at least the woman whose body we assume belonged to Doris.”

I waited some more.

“Dr. Roque collapsed in the morgue this morning while he was starting the autopsy. He was there on his own: state can’t afford full-time tech support anymore, so it wasn’t until a guard saw him on a TV monitor that they called for help. He was airlifted to the med center in Kansas City, with some kind of acute flu.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said formally. “Does this mean the autopsy is on hold?”

Everard grinned humorlessly. “We’re not quite a hick place down here, Warshawski, despite what the New York Times says. We do have more than one pathologist in the state. No, the problem is that McKinnon’s body is gone.”

29
Data Swapping

“Gone?” I echoed stupidly.

“Disappeared, vanished. I can’t think of any other synonyms.”

I was too bewildered to say anything. Everard took my silence as criticism.

“We’re not like Chicago, with thousands of homicides every year. We have security—guards, cameras, all the modern stuff—but we don’t need to run our path lab as if national security depended on it. At least we never thought we did.”

I shook my head. “Not that. Anyway, the Cook County Morgue has been a disgrace recently, with bodies stacked every which way, oozing their secretions into one another. No, I’m trying to remember what the sheriff said this morning.”

I stared at the scarred counter through the whisky, which gave everything beneath it an amber glow. I’d asked Gisborne if they had a cause of death yet, and he’d slapped me down: I didn’t have a right to ask even if I discovered the body “the first time.” Yes, that was it, and then he made a good recovery, claimed he’d meant “in the first place.”

When I repeated this to Everard, he frowned in a worried way. “You don’t think Gisborne knew already, do you? He and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I’ve known him practically my whole life.”

“I grew up with people who are doing five to ten for fraud and arson, just to name a few counts.”

“Gisborne is honest. I’d know if he wasn’t,” Everard shot back.

“Just harassing you,” I said. “You know him, I don’t. It struck me as odd. If you’re so sure he’s honest, why did you come looking for me to tell me about McKinnon’s disappearance?”