Dr. Victor Corvo took a measured sip of cold espresso from his Pyrex beaker, swirling the dark sediment with a glass stirring rod.
“A clinic without current is merely a morgue with a waiting room,” Corvo said, his velvet baritone slicing through the panic in the triage bay. “Follow me, gentlemen. We are going to visit the dead.”
He set the beaker down on the nurse’s counter, turned, and pushed through the hospital’s rear basement exit.
Julian Vance and Marcus Cole fell into step right behind the pathologist’s long black wool coat.
They hurried across the flooded alleyway that separated St. Jude’s from the New Marrow Municipal Morgue. The alley smelled of wet brick, carbolic acid, and river mud.
A heavy iron freight ramp sloped down into the earth, lined with glazed white ceramic tiles that had turned yellow with age.
At the bottom of the ramp sat the morgue’s loading bay.
The subterranean air was thirty-eight degrees, cold enough to turn their breath into white plumes. Resting on iron sawhorses along the walls were stacks of polished galvanized steel trays and rows of embalming aspirators.
