Avriel Kaplan: Well dressed, well groomed, beautifully handsome, quiet and brooding and exactly the kind of man Ariel Declan doesn't need to know. But, that is not for her to decide.
Alexander Kirk: wickedly handsome, well known and well liked, egot...
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Time slipped by unnoticed as Deborah examined the body on her table. To some, it was just another body from the projects. To her, it was one too many bodies coming from the very wrong side of town with the same cause of death. How many people had to die before it became too many? She noted the cause of death in her journals and logs. Another death recorded as natural causes.
Deborah put down her pen and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. How many was that? Three, four, five in as many weeks. She understood Death to be a cruel mistress, as ruthless and careless as Time himself. It came for everyone. Still, she couldn't shake the feeling that some other forces were at play.
All the bodies that she had seen come through her morgue were in various states of decomposition. Which wasn't a surprise given the source of the bodies. The warmer months were the worst for bodies to be discovered weeks after death. Each was as flawless as a week-old decomposing body could be, but each had little contra-indicators that could have, should have, signaled an unnatural cause of death and triggered an investigation. Some had tears in the skin that oozed and stank, but we're not caused by bloating. The tears were in places that suggested self-mutilation in various measures. She had seen everything from scratches on the arms to gouged out eyes. Those cases were all investigated, as much as investigation could be done in the slums, and subsequently ruled as natural deaths, despite her pleas to rule them otherwise.
Her latest guest's fingernails were broken and torn like she had been clawing at something. Deborah collected samples, bagged them and tagged them and sent them up as evidence when officer Ben arrived before her autopsy began. He wanted to watch her work. She collected DNA from under the woman's fingers and sent that as well. She found no other foreign materials on the woman's decaying body no evidence of a struggle and no wounds. Her frustration grew. She put new gloves on, dawned her face shield and resumed her examination of the body. She only had time to perform a quick autopsy; she lined-up her tools and prepared to begin her work when the door opened.
"Ben! What a surprise. I was just about to start. Do you have an ID for our guest?"
"Um," eyebrows raised Ben skirted the autopsy table and moved to stand as close to Deborah as he could without getting too close to the body. "Y-y-ya. We do. She's um. I'm. Man, Deb. She reeks. I'm sorry. I have no idea how you do this. I'll. I got to go. Uh. Jones, Sharmetra Jones. I have to go notify next of kin." He was out the door before Deborah had time to start laughing.
She finished her examination and discovered nothing too suspicious or out of the ordinary. All the woman's organs looked like they had been deprived of blood, and therefore robbed of oxygen and nutrients, the life forces of the cell. She found that to be very odd yet consistent with all the other cases that had recently come through her morgue. Cautiously she wrote up her report and prepared it to be sent off to Dr. Kirstin Maldonado, the chief medical examiner.
