Pearl

Chapter Five: By the Books

The room smelled of dust and death.

The officer shifted his weight from foot to foot, crowded into the back of a small room in the funeral parlor. The line of people circulated like cogs in a clock, moving from the folding chairs, to the closed casket, to the grieving family members, back to the chairs.

It was almost too mechanical, this form of mourning. He preferred good ol' fashioned solitary visits to gravestones.

The couple that he had met at the medical center stood at the front of the room by a low podium. To their left stood a young girl, maybe early teens, and beside her a man just a few years older than the victim. The siblings, he guessed. They stared at the passing crowd with glassy, unbelieving eyes.

The officer's own eyes were glued to the portrait of the victim, framed and resting on an easel in front of the casket. The face was similar to what he remembered, but younger, and livened even by the forced smile. High school senior portrait, maybe. Probably the only formal picture they had of her.

He shifted his weight again as family and friends skirted around him.

It just wasn't right, any of it. The ambulance had taken far too long to get her to the hospital. It was a half hour drive. Maybe a full hour with traffic, but that seemed unlikely given the time of night.

And the on-call EMT crew hadn't heard of any new company poaching on their zone when he had asked them once they had arrived at the scene just a few minutes after.

"...shame about the closed casket," a young woman said in a hushed voice as she and her companion returned to their chairs, just a few feet away from the officer.

"Well, what can they do? I heard her face was just mush after the accident. They say she hit the steering wheel, just wham-o," the companion slapped his fist into his palm for emphasis.

"Oh my god, don't say it like that!"

"What? It's not like they can hear me or whatever."

But the officer could. His ears perked up and he appraised the man who had spoken as the pair shuffled past down the row of chairs. He was young, mid twenties, with a bored expression. Just some asshole cousin, probably. Every family had at least one. But what he had said didn't sit right, and not just because of the callous attitude.

The officer looked up at that closed casket.

He had seen her face. The bloodied hair, the cuts across the lips and the bridge of the nose, the premature stillness of death lingering over the muscles - he could never forget it.

All in all, definitely not mush.

His heart thumped in his chest. He needed to see.

The service lasted another thirty minutes, with couples and families trickling out as they paid their respects and moved on to the next room, where a small reception had been prepared. The snack table, he was told by a well-meaning chatterbox, featured some of the victim's favorites - Twizzlers, Bugles, and Oreos - in addition to normal lunch fare like finger sandwiches and a veggie tray.

After he extracted himself from his volunteer tour guide, the officer made himself move with the crowd. When it was his turn, he stared down at the casket, shared a silent nod with the father, a damp handclasp with the mother, and bore the quiet eyes of the siblings. That duty done, he followed the slow trickle of mourners into the hallway.

Rather than moving on into the next room, however, he circled back around to the primary entrance to the service. He lingered just outside the open door, angling himself so that the decorative curtain that framed the door on the inside helped hide him without making it obvious that he was hiding.