Curveball Issue One: Death of a Hero

Part Four: Farraday City Morgue

The Farraday City Morgue is a modern building, built when the crime families moved in and started renovating the city. The police stations, hospitals, and morgue are all state-of-the-art facilities. CB is amused that a city government so thoroughly owned by organized crime will spend so much money on a crime-fighting infrastructure—it seems counter-intuitive. Still, there’s a difference between “well-run” and “honest”—the city faithfully protects the people who can afford to pay for that protection.

He finds the room where the bodies are stored by calling the morgue and pretending to be one of the Mayor’s aides and berating a nervous orderly who doesn’t want to offend City Hall. An autopsy room is reserved for that case, and it’s always kept locked and under armed guard. It’s an interesting complication.

He arrives at the morgue at 8:30PM. It’s closed to the public by then, but it’s trivial to get in—he loiters around one of the smoking areas until an orderly comes out for a smoke break, banters with his fellow smoker for a while, then sticks his foot in the door when the orderly goes back inside. Once inside, it’s easy to stay out of sight: the evening shift is lightly staffed, and entire parts of the building are completely empty. Nobody expects to see him, so nobody does.

He makes his way to the room the nervous orderly described. Sure enough, when he peers around the last corner he sees a bored uniformed officer standing in front of the door, talking on a cell phone.

“Yeah, I don’t know. All I know is, if I don’t get her something this time I’m going to catch all kinds of hell, and I don’t want to deal with it any more. You know? I mean, it’s not like she’s my wife or anything…”

CB looks at the cell phone and winks. It pops. The officer frowns, then starts shaking the phone.

“Crap…” the officer turns it over in his hands and pries open the back. “Oh, come on, I know it had more of a charge than that!” He looks down the hall apprehensively, and CB pulls back to stay out of sight. A second later, the officer swears again, and muttering under his breath about a spare battery, he disappears down a side hall.

CB waits a moment for the officer’s footsteps to fade, then runs up to the locked door. He pulls out a thin, flat piece of metal from his trench coat pocket, wedges it between the door and frame, and pulls down forcefully. The door clicks, and pulls open easily. CB steps inside, pulls the door behind him, and re-locks it. A few moments later he hears the officer resume his post.

I’ll have to figure that out later, CB thinks.

It’s dark, so he fishes out his Mag-lite. He’s in an office with four desks, each desk has a computer. One of the desks has a stack of folders on it. Swinging double doors sit at the other end of the room.

CB picks up the folders and walks across the room, swinging open one of the doors and stepping through. It’s the Autopsy Room, and it’s large: rows upon rows of cold chambers are set into the walls. He lets the door swing shut behind him, then flips the light switch. Cold fluorescent lights flicker on, and he sees that all but six of the cold chambers have name tags—the room is almost full.

How long has this been going on?

The last twelve tagged chambers are John Does—those are the ones CB discovered today—but the others are identified. A quick scan of names suggests that all of the victims are men.

The autopsy table is empty and clean, so CB spreads out the folders, going through each in turn. The police reports go back as far as six months. Going through the folders, he realizes the bodies in this room are only for the recent crimes.

A serial killer, then. They’re always cheerful cases.

Six months ago, the first known victims appeared—three men found laid out in an alleyway, arms and legs bound, gagged, throats cut. A month later, five more victims. Three weeks after that, another five. A month later, two more bodies, and for the last three months bodies have been popping up with increasing regularity, and in ever greater numbers. 73 dead in all so far.