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If this is Stewart, then Ahn is with Henry.
Heat pricks the back of my eyes as I breathe in, hold the putrid air inside me. Sheridan is still against the wall, forehead braced on the back of his hand, shoulder blades high and tight.
Three burned fingers hang off the edge of the gurney by Ahn’s thigh, and that’s all I see as I cross the morgue.
A halo of LEDs above Ahn banishes any shadows as she works on Henry’s corpse. The horrors are exposed, laid bare: every scorched curl of flesh and muscle, all the ashen knobs of his vertebrae.
He’s mostly gone. Burned away. All that remains are fragmented patches of desiccated tissue stretched across fire-ravaged bones. The skull lies on its side, resting on a cracked cheekbone.
Ahn’s opened the chest and removed the brittle sternum and ribs. My gaze follows the seared aortic arch until it disappears behind a mass of charred lung tissue as she slices through the pericardium.
Shoes squeak behind me. Sheridan’s breath shivers against the back of my neck.
“What do you have?” I ask Ahn. It’s like speaking in a crypt. I can’t get my voice soft enough.
She cups the charcoal heart and eases it free from the chest. It goes onto a dissection tray between us. The stench of smoke, the tang of despair, hang unmoving over the corpse.
“There’s a question about the identity of this body.”
My hand flies to the gurney. I squeeze down on frigid metal, hard enough the blisters that formed when I pressed my palms to the overheated metal of my SUV burst. I’ve jostled the corpse, and the lower jaw falls open as if it’s laughing at me. “What?”
“I’m not certain this is Agent Ellis.”
Ahn grabs a remote and points it at the computer terminal above us. A spinal X-ray dated five years ago fills the screen. The upper left-hand corner reads, Ellis, Henry.
“Five years ago, Agent Ellis was in a car accident on an advance trip in Paris. He was taken to the US embassy for examination after two days of back pain.”
“He told me it was no big deal.”
I remember when it happened. He called me from the embassy and told me he was fine, that he’d be back on the advance. I’d wanted to send him home. He refused.
“According to the X-rays the embassy took, Agent Ellis did not have a spinal injury. He was prescribed painkillers and told to follow up stateside. It doesn’t look like he did. There’s nothing in his records.”
Ahn changes screens. A new X-ray appears. It’s another spinal shot, but instead of a name, the image is marked Doe, John, and the date is today.
“Do you see this sliver of white?” She points to a half-inch-long line running down the left lateral portion of the cervical spine. It looks like a hair or a scratch on the film. If it weren’t for Ahn, I would have blinked right past it.
“What am I looking at?”
“That may be evidence of bone growth running along multiple vertebrae. We sometimes see it on people who have had spinal surgeries. Compressed disks, minor fractures, removed screws. Things like that. If you compare this X-ray to the one from Agent Ellis’s medical file…”
She pulls them up side by side. There is extensive damage from the fire in one: the arms have separated from the shoulders, the long bones of the thighs are split in half, and both scapulae are cracked in two. “Five years ago, that bone growth wasn’t present.”
“Henry never had spinal surgery.”
“An overgrowth can also happen after trauma, such as a car accident. Did Henry ever complain of a stiff neck?”
He did, but the words don’t want to be said. It’s like if I say, yes, he bitched about his neck all the time, then that’s it, this corpse is him, and there’s no possibility that my friend is still alive.
I want to believe in fairy tales, in magical possibilities where there’s a happy ending for this story. If there’s a question about the identity of this body, then maybe it’s not Henry.
Which means this could be—
My mind slams shut on that thought.
“Right now, I cannot say with certainty that this is or isn’t Agent Ellis. That could be an artifact from the fire or trauma that I can’t clearly see. I need to open the spinal column and physically examine the vertebrae. I also need to check if Agent Ellis had any recent X-rays taken.”
“Aren’t there other ways? Dental? DNA? Body measurements? Is this body the same height as Henry?” There are a dozen different ways to identify remains.
