He tossed his jacket into an aged leather club chair when he reached the ID office, where all the medical examiners eventually started their day. Stacked on the solitary desk were the records of the cases that had come in during the night and that fell within OCME jurisdiction, according to the medicolegal investigation team. These cases represented those deaths that had occurred in any unusual or suspicious manner, including suicide, accident, criminal violence, or merely suddenly when the victim was in apparent good health.

Jack sat down at the desk and began going through the cases. He liked to pick out the more challenging ones because they gave him the opportunity to learn. That was what he most enjoyed about forensics. The other medical examiners tolerated this behavior because Jack also did the most cases of anyone.

The normal morning process involved the medical examiner on first call for the week to come in early, usually about seven or slightly before, and go through the cases to determine which ones definitely needed postmortems, then assign them out on an equitable basis. Even Jack had the duty about a dozen times a year, which he never minded since he was invariably there anyway.

Within a couple of minutes Jack found an apparent meningitis case of a teenage boy from a private school on the Upper East Side. Since Jack was generally known as the infectious-disease guru after having made several lucky diagnoses in the past, he read the record slowly and put it aside. He thought that case might be good for him, since many of his colleagues shunned infectious cases. He truly didn’t care.

Jack slowed down on his perusal of the next case as well. It was another relatively young individual, although this time it was a female. The victim was a twenty-seven-year-old woman who’d been brought into an emergency room with supposed rapid onset of confusion, spastic gait, and ultimately coma and death. There had been no fever or malaise, and according to her friends, she was an avid health enthusiast, shunning drugs and alcohol. Although her friends had been enjoying cocktails at the time of her collapse, they claimed the victim had consumed only soft drinks.

“Oh, shit!” a voice lamented, loud enough to snap Jack’s head up.

Standing in the opened doorway leading out into the empty ID room was Vinnie Amendola, one of the mortuary technicians, a newspaper under his arm. He was still holding on to the doorknob of the connecting door as if he might change his mind and flee. It was clear that the source of his outburst was Jack’s presence.

“What’s the matter?” Jack demanded, wondering if there was some emergency.

Vinnie didn’t answer. He glared at Jack for a beat before closing the door behind him. He stood in front of Jack’s desk, arms crossed. “Don’t freaking tell me you’re reverting to your old ways,” he said.

Jack could not suppress a smile. He’d suddenly realized the cause of Vinnie’s feigned anger. Prior to John Junior’s birth, when Jack would come to work early to cherry-pick the autopsy cases, he’d drag Vinnie down with him to the autopsy room to get a jump on the day. In addition to his regular mortuary-tech duties, Vinnie was responsible for coming in early to facilitate the transition from whatever the night techs were doing, although what he mostly did was make the communal coffee and then read the sports section of the Daily News.