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“And maybe she was anxious and frightened and wearing a rosary for superstitious reasons.”
“Right. It’s only a piece of the puzzle.”
Saber nodded, and they ducked through trees and brambles to get back to her car.
“Now where to?”
“I have an idea,” Doug said. “Get back on the highway and drive north, off island.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the morgue.”
They drove over the bridge off of the island and into the more rural, less prosperous Kitsap County.
“I’ve never really spent much time here,” Saber explained as they drove.
“I almost never leave the island,” Doug said. “Not lately, anyway.”
“Morgue is a good idea,” she said. “You think we can just walk in?”
“Sure, and if they kick us out, that’s fine.”
Saber shuddered.
“I really hate conflict.”
“I’ve noticed that about your generation. You’re all so scared of someone arguing with you,” Doug said, chuckling a little. “It’s ok to ask for things and be told no.”
“The way you picked up that woman’s rosary, too. I would never dream of doing that.”
“Normally I wouldn’t either,” he said. “I wanted to catch her off guard.”
“It certainly worked,” Saber said. “I thought she was going to die of shock.”
Doug chuckled a little again.
The morgue was a large, squat, beige, concrete building that you would drive right by and never wonder about. It was part of a larger complex of government buildings, including a public clinic, that all seemed to blend together, beige and boxy, utterly and convincingly uninteresting.
Saber, feeling a different kind of nervousness than she did at the mansion, followed Doug up to the building, through the open front door, and to the unoccupied reception. There was no bell to ring and no buzzer, so for a moment they just stood there in a very bland waiting area where, she assumed, the relatives of the recently deceased waited to be called into the mortuary.
“Hello?” Doug called, and they heard something, somebody, moving around in the office attached to the reception.
An older woman in a bright, cheerful yellow cardigan appeared.
“Hello, can I help you?” she asked, pushing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses up her nose.
“Hi,” Doug said, smiling at her, “we’d like to speak to the head clinician.”
“Head clinician?”
“Or pathologist. How would we speak to him?”
“For what purpose?”
“That’s private.”
“Are you looking for someone? There is only one deceased person here at this time and they’ve been identified.”
