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He wagged his head in a no. “That would be disgusting,” he stated. “Bodies still rot in there. Just takes longer. Like meat in your fridge at home.”
Okay, that made sense. The morgue cooler was exactly that—a cooler, not a freezer. Early in my time at the coroner’s office, I’d stupidly wondered aloud why it wasn’t a freezer, until it was pointed out to me that performing an autopsy on a frozen slab of meat would be a wee bit difficult. Oh. Yeah.
“So what happens to them? State pays for them to be buried or something?”
His chin dipped in a nod. “Riverwood Funeral Home handles the pauper burials for this parish and they get reimbursed a set amount for each one. They have a plot set aside for the pauper burials—no headstones or anything, though.”
I frowned. “Why not? What, poor people don’t deserve a real grave?”
A whisper of amusement lit his eyes. “They get a real grave. And the exact location is recorded. But there are a lot of people who’d never pay for a funeral if they knew the state would do it for free.”
“Ah. I get it,” I said. “People who want to be able to visit the grave are gonna pay for it. Bet there are still people who don’t care, though.”
“Agreed, which seems fair enough, I suppose. Funerals can be expensive. And are for the survivors, not the decedents.”
I simply nodded in response. We’d had Mom cremated after she hung herself. There’d been no funeral. No one would have come to it anyway.
“That’s what happened with the other headless guy,” Jerry said.
I gave him a blank look. “What happened?”
“No next of kin was found, so Riverwood took him—gave him a pauper burial.”
I sat on the edge of the desk. This was the guy who’d been killed while I was stumbling down the road, high as a kite. Maybe I could milk Jerry for some info. “What was the deal with that?” I asked. “That happened right before I started here. Who was he?”
“He was identified as Adam Campbell—lived in a fishing camp down at the end of Sweet Bayou.” Then he shrugged. “Wrote for magazines—tech articles, that sort of thing. Neighbors said he was a nice guy. Some teenager got lost out there a couple of months ago, and Adam let the search teams use his yard and house as a base of operations. Cooked for them too—big pots of gumbo, crawfish, jambalaya. I think everyone was disappointed when the little teen bastard was found alive and well.” A smile flickered across his face.
“If he was so nice, why didn’t any of those people step up and pitch in for a real funeral?” I asked, frowning.
Jerry pushed away from the desk and stood, grimacing as he audibly popped his back. “Because people suck, and everyone’s always sure that someone else will take care of it.” He glanced at the clock. “Time for me to drag my sorry carcass out of here. Have fun with the stiffs.”
“Always,” I replied as I sat in his seat and pretended to pick up where he’d left off with the game of solitaire.
I waited until I heard his car leave the parking lot, then grabbed my lunchbox and scurried to the cooler. The MVA was scheduled to be picked up by Riverwood, which meant I suffered no guilt as I scooped the brains out of the bag and into my jars. The heart attack I left alone since it was going to Scott Funeral Home. Kang had been a dick, but I wasn’t going to back out of our deal.
I poured tomato soup in on top of the brains and then quickly blended them up with my cheapo handheld blender. It didn’t look terribly appetizing, but at least it wasn’t instantly recognizable as brains.
My appetite gave a soft little nudge as I made my little brain concoction. I knew I needed to try to resist those first nudges of hunger, try and hold out a bit to make my supply last as long as possible.
But not right now, I told myself. I need to be sharp for work, right? I indulged in a few big gulps from one of the jars, then replaced the lid and stuck both jars into the lunchbox with the blue frozen thingies that would hopefully keep the brains from going bad before I got home and could put them in the fridge. I didn’t have a ton of brains to spare, but I also didn’t feel like dealing with the hunger right now.
The doorbell buzzed as I was putting the lunchbox back in the drawer. It was Kang, and he gave me a tight little nod as I stepped back to give him room to push the stretcher in.
“You’re here for Blackwell, Travis?” I asked.
He glanced at the paper in his hand. “That’s right. Is he all ready?” he asked.
I narrowed my eyes into a glare. “Uh huh. He’s all ready. All there. All that good stuff.”
Kang gave a slow nod. “I appreciate that.”
“Yeah, sure thing,” I replied as I turned and headed to the cooler to retrieve the body, not adding “asshole” even though I really wanted to. The urge to run over his toes with the stretcher when I returned was pretty strong, but I managed to resist it. I was even nice and helped him pull the bag from our stretcher onto his.
He buckled the straps holding the bag onto the stretcher, then paused and looked at me. “I didn’t really think you’d keep to our deal. I apologize for misjudging you.”
I shrugged in acceptance of the apology. “Yeah, well, you shouldn’t be so mistrusting.”
His lips twitched. “When you’ve been around as long as I have, you learn that trusts are easily broken.”
