Dr. Victor Corvo tightened his gloved fingers around the knurled brass handles of his Morgue Vault 09 Tongs.
He didn’t rush. In thirty-four years as Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Corvo had learned that a hurried hand always nicked the exact artery one needed to measure. That held true even when the specimen was a six-inch cylinder of boiling mutton tallow typing a death warrant onto a register tape.
Corvo’s bespoke charcoal pinstriped suit was buttoned neatly to the sternum, and heavy black insulated rubber autopsy gloves stretched taut across his knuckles. Under Stockroom Rule S2, bare human skin never touched unbarcoded inventory.
That rule was the sole reason Dr. Corvo still possessed all ten of his original fingerprints after four months of auditing the city’s subterranean rot.
At Register 1, the fifth sausage writhed between the 450 degrees Fahrenheit chrome cylinders of the Starlight Hot-Roller Grill.
Split open lengthwise like a grease-coated eyelid, the grey tallow cylinder convulsed as its internal row of twenty-six miniature brass typewriter striker-bars hammered upward through the rear ventilation slot of the acrylic sneeze-guard.
Clack! The capital A bit into the paper feed.
Clack! The capital N struck the trailing margin of the Epson TM-T88 receipt roll:
