“No. Phillip said Steven was part of the legion, too. In fact, Steven was there the day we talked. He was sitting across the street watching us. No, watching is the wrong word. It was almost like he was guarding us.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

“I couldn’t forget it if I wanted to,” she said in a distant voice. “He looked exactly like Phillip.”

Chapter 14

The autopsy technician looked dispassionately at the waxy white face that was marred by a single bullet to the temple. He’d seen countless bodies like this one in his twenty years at the medical examiner’s office. Bodies that had been sealed in a plastic body bag, transported in a police van, and delivered to a nondescript ramp at the back of a concrete building that smelled of formaldehyde and congealed blood.

The technician was a fixture there. He’d gone from wearing an afro to sporting a shaved head. He’d gone from picking up bodies to wielding a scalpel and saw, and, having seen everything that had passed through over two decades, he was unimpressed with the dead man who’d proclaimed himself the angel of death.

There was nothing ethereal in the body’s appearance. There was nothing supernatural about its aura. It was simply a body, and when the police officers who’d dropped it off left the inconspicuous building located just a stone’s throw from Penn’s Ivy League campus, the technician processed it as he normally would.

He and another autopsy technician loaded the body onto a gurney. They stripped it of the black suit and hat, removed the black T-shirt and underwear, and took off the Doc Martens and socks. They took a single key from his pocket, along with his wallet, which was empty except for a North Dakota driver’s license and a Community College of Philadelphia ID. They filled out a property form listing all his personal effects, and the senior technician and an investigator from the medical examiner’s office signed it. Next, they rolled the gurney onto the scale. The body was 170 pounds and five feet, eleven inches tall.

They took pictures of the face, the torso, and the lower extremities. Then they wheeled the body into the doctor for inspection.

“So this is the angel of death,” the doctor said, looking at the body.

“I guess it is,” the technician said. “At least, it was.”

The doctor turned on the light above the gurney, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and started the tape recorder as he began his examination of the body.

“White male, early- to midtwenties, with short, dirty-blond hair and a penetrating wound in his temple consistent with a bullet wound,” the doctor said. He reached down with his gloved hand and opened both eyes. “Blue eyes. Nose has no visible contusions. Lips are dry and extremely chapped.” He took a single finger and opened the mouth. “Teeth are in good condition.”