“Dis way, guys.” Gesturing with his clipboard, Stickney indicated that they should follow him through the door. He led them along a corridor, past offices to a stairwell leading to the basement, talking the whole time. “No death certificate for this case as such. Before we issue official-kine death certificate we need one ID, and so far cannot—got no hits so far on the ID.”

“What have you got?” Olive asked.

“Got autopsy report.”

“Can we see the remains?”

“That’s where we going, sister. Like I was telling you. To da kine—morgue.” And to Sharkey: “Surf up today morning?”

“Head-high.”

“Is that the coroner’s report?” Olive asked, because Stickney, wagging his arms in the stairwell, was rattling the pages.

“Pathologiss,” he said.

“What do you do?”

“Medical examiner. I do some assisting. Like, I helped with this case.”

“The accident victim?”

“The assumption is accident, but who knows the real true reason for decease. Look like he got smoosh pretty bad by one car. But, hey, what led up to it is the question.”

Sharkey looked away, his hands flying to his face.

Olive asked, “What’s the answer?”

“Autopsy,” Stickney said, chewing the word. “Or you can say necropsy.”

They had come to the bottom of the stairway, where a windowless corridor led to a heavy door. Stickney poked some numbers onto a keypad on the wall, then pushed open the door.

The smell of disinfectant was strong—stronger than anything Olive knew at the hospital, stinging her eyes. When Stickney flicked on the inside lights, she saw what might have been a bank of filing cabinets, a gray wall of handles and labels. Stickney tapped the paper on his clipboard, all the while glancing at the labels. Then he bent over, and in one graceful motion, saying “One-two-tree,” caught hold of a handle and pulled at it, sliding out a long platform on chuckling rollers, a shroudlike cloth on it, lumpy from the body beneath it.

“Here one decease,” Stickney said, and swept away the cloth, bunching it and tucking it under the gray bony feet, a plastic band around one ankle and on the other foot a toe tagged and scribbled with a number and a date.

The rest of the body was as gray as the feet, but in places with the dull yellowish pallor of old rubber. It was damaged in places, deeply scored—slashed and stitched, like a big mended monster doll, part of the skull broken open, a piece of the cranium missing, a Y-shaped scar running from the shoulders down the chest, the stem of the Y ending at the lower belly.

Sharkey had turned away and was staring wildly at the floor.

“We’re wondering who he is,” Olive said.

“The one thing I cannot tell you,” Stickney said. “Because we never find out.”

“Did you take fingerprints?”

“Always we take—if got fingers, the body.”

“Sometimes no fingers?”