Gemma Harlan, medical examiner at the Dade County Morgue, liked to play music when she performed autopsies; something soothing, but at a loud enough volume to drown out the procedure's unique noises-the sawing and hammering of bone, the sticky squelch of a face being peeled back from a skull, the occasional farts and belches of released gasses-sounds of life's straggler particles leaving the building seconds before demolition. And then there were other things the music helped her get away from, the little things she hated most about her job, such as the way the spinning sawblades sometimes smoked as the bone dust landed on the hot metal and gave off a sour, ammoniac smell; the toxic aerosol jets the same saws sometimes threw back when they hit soft tissue; the way the exposed brain sometimes reminded her of a big ugly shellfish when she'd pulled the calvarium away from the lower skull. The music also drowned out the feeling that was always with her since she'd turned forty two years ago, a lengthening shadow with an icy cold centre. It was the notion that one day she would end up someplace like this too-an empty shell, her vital organs cut out, weighed, dissected then thrown away, her brain pickled and then examined, cause of death confirmed, noted down, filed away, another stat.
She hit the play button on her portable cassette deck. Burt Bacharach and His Orchestra Play the Hits of Burt Bacharach and Hal David-instrumental versions of those beautiful sunny songs she so loved and cherished, no vocals to distract her.
'This Guy's in Love with You' came out of the speakers as she looked down at her first cadaver of the morning-the John Doe found in Primate Park, whose discovery had sparked a mass breakout by the zoo's entire population of monkeys. Four days later they were still recovering them all over Miami and beyond. Many had died, either hit by cars or shot by people who thought they were burglars, aliens or dangerous. One had been found lynched. A few had escaped out into the Everglades where they'd joined the dozens of exotic pets dumped there by their owners every year. Lions, tigers, wolves, pythons, boas had all been spotted in the swamp.
Gemma worked with three other people. There were two pathologists of opposing levels of competence-Javier, originally from El Salvador, was almost as good as her, whereas Martin, five years into the job, still occasionally threw up when the sawing started-and an autopsy assistant, or diener, as they were known in the trade. The city's medical budget didn't stretch to hiring one full time so they usually had to make do with either a med school student on work experience, or someone from the police academy. These greenhorns usually all either puked, fainted, or both. It was here Martin proved invaluable. He'd played a little football in his youth and was still quick on his feet. He'd catch the falling interns before they hit the ground thus preventing injuries and lawsuits. Of course this was dependent on him being upright at the time of crisis, which he usually was. He still had a jock's pride about fainting in front of an intern.
Death had changed a lot in Miami since the cocaine explosion of the mid-seventies. Prior to that the bodies she'd inspected had been victims of gunshots, stabbings, beatings, drownings, poisonings-crimes of passion, home invasions, street and store robberies, suicides; although she'd occasionally also had to inspect the results of political assassinations and piece together the remnants of a mob hit which had floated to shore in instalments stuffed in oil drums. Cocaine had made her job far more complicated. The drug gangs didn't simply kill their victims, they liked to torture them to within an inch of their lives first, which meant she spent more time on a body because she had to be sure the victim hadn't died from the barbaric suffering he or she had been put through before they were dispatched. Even the weapons were excessive. When they used guns, they didn't use pistols or even shotguns, they used machine guns and automatic rifles, riddling bodies with so many bullets it often took most of a working shift just to dig them all out. There was a hell of a lot of peripheral death too: innocents caught in the crossfire or having the misfortune to be in some way related to an intended target. Gemma had never seen anything like it, not even when she'd worked in New York. Miami had gone from having a below average murder rate, when it was predominantly home to Jewish retirees, Cuban refugees and anti-Fidelistas, to the off-the-chart-and-still-rising homicide epidemic it was experiencing now.
The morgue was full. They'd recently had to lease refrigerator trucks from Burger King to store the overflow.
She needed a break, a long one, or maybe she needed to change jobs. She didn't even like Miami anymore. What had seemed like a great place to live after the dysfunctional urban nightmare of New York, now seemed like more of the same, only with better weather and different accents.
First she examined the outside of the body, noting for the record that it was completely hairless. Shortly before his death, John Doe had had a full body shave. Even his eyelashes has been trimmed off.
'Don't the hair and nails, like, keep growing after you're dead?' a young and unfamiliar voice piped up behind her. It was today's diener, Ralph. They'd only met five minutes ago, so she didn't know what he looked like because she could only see his eyes-blue and intelligent-under his green overalls and face mask.
'That's the movie version,' Gemma said, with a weary sigh. She was glad she'd never gone into teaching. She didn't believe in fighting losing battles. How could you compete with Hollywood myths? 'After death, the skin around the hair and fingernails loses water and shrinks. And when it shrinks it retracts, making the nails and hair look longer, and therefore giving the impression they've grown. But they haven't really. It's an illusion. Like the movies. OK?'
He nodded. She could see from his eyes that it had gone in, that he'd learned something new today.
She carried on, noting the sixteen puncture marks around the lips-eight above and eight below, as well as a series of deep indentations along the lips themselves, some of which had broken the skin. The mouth had been sewn up.
She looked at the nose and saw a puncture mark on either side, right through the middle, very slightly encrusted with dried blood; on the underside of the nostrils was a small horizontal cut, the same width as the marks on the lips. Nose sewn up too. The object used to make the hole had been thick and long, a needle, she estimated, with an eye wide enough to hold something with the density of a guitar or violin string, which was what she thought had been used to fasten the mouth and nose. She'd seen this before a couple of times, but she couldn't remember the specifics. Once here, once in New York; some kind of black magic ritual. She made a note to cross-reference it on the computer if she had the time and that was a big if.
'Are we going to look inside the head?' Javier asked. She usually left that to him.
'Depends what the insides tell us.'
'The Look of Love' began to play as she made the T-incision from shoulders to mid-chest and all the way down to the pubis. It was around about now that the dieners would start dropping.
She opened up the body and inspected its insides. It was a predictable sight, looking a lot like a butcher's shop might two weeks after the owners had suddenly closed it up and abandoned it with all the contents inside. The organs hadn't just changed colour-reds and maroons had turned shades of grey-blue-they'd started losing their shape too, becoming viscous, and some had been disconnected from the main framework and shifted position because hungry insects had eaten through the cabling. Surprisingly Ralph and Martin had hung on in there. Ralph even looked like he was enjoying himself.
Gemma took a large syringe and extracted blood and fluid from the heart, lungs, bladder and pancreas. Then she spiked the stomach and started filling the syringe barrel with a sample of its contents-a green liquid, the colour of spinach water-but then something solid got sucked up by the needle and blocked it.
After they'd removed and weighed the organs one by one, she sliced open the stomach and emptied its contents into a glass container-more green liquid came out, murky at first, then clearing as a gritty white sediment with the consistency of sand floated to the bottom of the receptacle, followed by small shiny dark scraps of something that could have been plastic.
She noticed the stomach wasn't quite empty; there was something that hadn't come out. She opened it up a little more and saw a pale, sticky greyish ball of matter stuck to the lining. It reminded her of a shrunken golf ball. When she held it up to the light she saw it wasn't a single object, but small overlapping squares compacted into a ball.
Using tweezers she tugged and pulled at the ball until she'd managed to prise loose one of the squares. It was about a third of an inch long, made of cardboard, printed on both sides, miraculously intact despite the digestive process. One side was black, the other was multicoloured-reds, yellows, oranges, blues-but she couldn't make out the design.
She unpicked the rest of the bundle, laying out the squares one by one at the end of the slab, until she found herself staring at a jigsaw.
She spent the next hour piecingit together. Fifteen minutes in, she began to recognize the thing she was assembling.
The image she had before her was familiar, but the design differed in many ways. The drawing was more sophisticated, more detailed, the colours richer and more vibrant-what there was of it, because it wasn't complete. At least a quarter was missing. She guessed where she'd find it.
'Javier, open up his throat,' she said.
The victim had choked to death on the remaining cardboard squares.
When Javier had finished and handed her nine missing pieces, she completed the jigsaw.
It was a tarot card depicting a man sitting on a throne with a golden crown on his head. The crown was in the shape of a castle turret and studded with brilliant red rubies. In his left hand he held a blood-flecked gold sword, blade plunged into the ground; in his right fist a thick chain was wrapped tightly around his knuckles. The chain was fitted to a black mastiff who lay at his right side, head raised, teeth half bared, paws out in front. The dog's eyes were bright red and it had a forked tongue, to go with its mean, bad-tempered expression on their faces, an anger caught midway to eruption. Despite where it had been and what it had been through, and the fact that it was in pieces, the card seemed very much alive. She found herself staring at it, enraptured by its terrible beauty, unable to pull herself away. This was like no other card she'd ever seen. The man on the throne had no face. In its stead was the blank, plain white outline of a head. It seemed like it might have been a printing error, given the richness of the detail, but the more she studied it, the more she felt the design was intentional.
'You know tarot?' Javier said behind her.
'What?' She turned around, then laughed. 'No. I don't believe in that kind of stuff.'
'The King of Swords,' Javier explained, looking down at the foot of the mortuary slab. 'The card represents a man of great power and influence, an aggressive man also. It can mean a valuable ally or a fearsome enemy, depending on where and how it turns up in the reading.'
'Is that right?' Gemma said. 'So what does it mean when it turns up in someone's stomach?'