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“That’s very kind of them.”
“Yeah, well…we’re not there just for coffee.”
“Oh. Then what are we there for?”
“Because it’s the only place in town with a freezer big enough to store a corpse.”
—
The coffee was decent. Barbara had to give Nicholls that.
A scrawny woman with short, bleached hair (an older version of the purple-haired girl) had served them, more with a scowl than a smile.
“This is Carly,” Nicholls introduced them. “Carly runs this place with her husband, Hal, and daughter, Mayflower.”
Barbara smiled and held out a hand. “Good to meet you, ma’am.”
The woman shook it, reluctantly.
“I think I met your daughter last night,” Barbara continued. “Mayflower’s a pretty name.”
“Thanks.”
“After the ship?”
Carly regarded her coolly. “We’re all pilgrims here. Trying to protect our land.”
Our land. Except it was the land of the Dghelay Teht’ana first, Barbara thought. The earliest known humans in the region. The first non-Indigenous settlers here were vampyr, a few hundred years before the white men came.
She lifted her mug and took a sip. “Good pilgrim coffee. Guess you have it shipped in?”
Nicholls cleared his throat obtrusively. “Shall we head out back?”
“You know the way,” Carly said, which immediately made Barbara wonder how many bodies got stored here before being buried or taken to Anchorage.
Barbara followed Nicholls through the door behind the bar, still clutching her coffee mug, a small medical bag in her other hand. The walk-in freezer was at the back of the kitchen. They walked past grease-stained cookers and shelves lined with tinned goods and long-life products and up to a thick steel door.
“This is a pretty big walk-in for a place like this,” Barbara said.
“Well, folks here hunt and eat a lot of meat,” Nicholls replied. “Plus, in winter the ground can be too hard to bury bodies, so we often have to store them here till the thaw.”
“Right.”
Barbara was pretty sure that storing bodies in a commercial freezer must violate several food hygiene laws, but places like this tended to be a law unto themselves. Still, it would have been nice to know before she ordered a burger last night.
Nicholls pushed down on the heavy handle and the freezer door swung open. A blast of cold air hit them. Barbara shivered. The body bag was laid out on a steel table to the left of the large room. Metal containers and hunks of wrapped-meat lined storage shelves on the other side. Their breath puffed out in small, icy clouds.
“Did anyone check the body over before you stuck it in here?” Barbara asked.
“Doc Dalton,” Nicholls replies. “He’s the local GP. Determined cause of death and approximate time, which you have in the report.”
Barbara nodded. But a GP was not a coroner. Marcus’s body would still have to be autopsied back in Anchorage. Moreover, bodies were normally kept between minus 2 to minus 4 degrees in a morgue. Commercial freezers were kept at a minimum of minus 18. She remembered that from when she worked shifts in the local café as a teenager. Freezing and defrosting could compromise tissues and DNA.
Barbara sighed. “It would have been better to keep the body somewhere cold but not deep-frozen till I arrived.”
Nicholls sipped his coffee. “Well, I’m afraid we don’t have anywhere else that’s suitable.”
“What about the cells at the station? Turn the heating off. The room would stay cold.”
