Chapter One

December Twenty-sixth

The Jackson City Memorial Hospital morgue was quiet the day after Christmas and Corey Curtis was hoping it remained so. She wasn’t looking forward to a body rolling in for autopsy and harshing on the holiday high she was hoping to hold onto into the new year. The second the thought floated out of her brain the buzzer to the outside door leading to the loading dock sounded and her stomach sank. If she wasn’t expecting a funeral home for a pick-up it was going to be a drop-off and a case requiring a post. She enjoyed her job as Autopsy Coordinator, but she had hoped she could hang onto all the good feelings from her lovely and lively first Christmas with her girlfriend, Thayer Reynolds. She wasn’t ready to go down the death investigation rabbit hole.

She opened the back door to her friend, Sergeant Jim Collier, and behind him Officer Kelly Warren.

“Merry Christmas, Curtis.” Collier held out a tall cup of coffee.

“Ah, just what I wanted.” She backed away from the door to let them in along with a blast of cold air. She looked around the loading dock but only saw his car.

“The ambulance got stuck behind a funeral procession, ironically enough.” Collier shed is coat and pushed his way into the morgue anteroom, hanging it over the back of Corey’s desk chair. “They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“I’m in no hurry. Kelly, how’d the rest of your night go?” She raised her brows hoping for some good gossip knowing he gave Thayer’s very drunk best friend, Dana Fowler, a ride home.

“None of your business.”

“That tells me everything I need to know.”

Collier looked between them. “Were you two together last night?”

“At Rachel’s Christmas dinner at the coffee shop,” she said.

“What? I didn’t get invited?”

“You did. Or, at least, Steph did. She said you had plans.”

Collier grunted. “She wanted to work the city soup kitchen.”

Corey’s brows rose. “Wow, man, that’s awesome. She is so good for you.”

“If you say so,” he grumbled, but he couldn’t hide the light in his eyes that talking about Steph Austin sparked. She had been his partner for a short time over the summer while they worked the unidentified body linked to a drug trafficking case. The same case that got Thayer assaulted by Harold Crandall and Corey arrested for interfering with the police when she chased after the kids who’d vandalized her best friend Rachel Wiley’s coffee shop.

“Who are you bringing me?” Corey asked, leaning against the desk and sipping her coffee.

“Eh, could be interesting. Could be nothing,” Collier replied vaguely. “Let’s wait for the body and Doc Webster so we can all be on the same page at the same time,” he said referring to Corey’s boss, the forensic pathologist.

The buzzer sounded and Corey straightened and reached for the phone. “Guess we’re about to find out. If you get the door, I’ll get Webster.”

Corey gloved and gowned before dragging the irregularly-shaped, heavy black bodybag from the ambulance stretcher to the steel table so the paramedics could get back to work.

“Sergeant Collier, I was very much hoping for a quiet week,” Dr. Webster muttered as he lumbered into the autopsy suite.

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Collier said and snapped open his notebook. “Unidentified, white, adult male found this morning partially obscured by the dumpsters behind the Towne Plaza between the pharmacy and the bowling alley when the trash pick-up came.”

Corey winced. “Ah, jeez, I was just there.”

“We didn’t want to risk any damage with a preliminary search of the body but we saw no obvious signs of trauma or struggle, no blood at the scene, and no weapon of any kind.”

Corey unzipped the bag to reveal the body of a young man in dark jeans and dark, hooded sweatshirt, curled up on his side, arms and legs tucked in. “Ooh, boy.”

“Frozen?” Dr. Webster asked.

Corey pulled on an arm, the flesh was rock hard and rigid in a way not explained by death and rigor. What skin they could see was bluish and icy. “As if by the hand of the Snow Queen, herself.”

Dr. Webster studied the body. “What’s your best guess on his weight?”

Corey pursed her lips, considering. “Hard to tell because of his positioning—one-eighty, maybe?”

Dr. Webster stroked his chin. “All right. Nothing for us to do until he thaws. Corey, get his temperature and whatever external you can and pop him in the cooler. Send me an email with the preliminary external exam. Keep an eye on him and let me know when he comes up above freezing.”

“How long is that likely to take, Dr. Webster?” Kelly asked.

“Depends on how frozen he is, but from what I can tell just by looking at him, I’m thinking solid. Could be three days or could be as long as a week. If his identity or your investigation turns up something urgent, I can put in a request for CT or X-ray. Don’t forget photos.”

Corey was already sliding a new card into the camera. “I’m on it. You guys going to stick around?”

Collier nodded. “Give me something to go on, I beg you, Curtis. We’re checking through missing persons and we’re requesting security footage for all the shops at the Towne Plaza since the last dumpster pick-up, but it would help if we could narrow the time frame or get an I.D.”

Corey hooked the stool out from under the autopsy table and stood over the body to start on her pictures. “I can tell you this to start. Based on the position of the body, he most likely wasn’t dead before he got cold. Pretty classic heat conservation posture or burrowing he’s got going on right now.”

Getting his clothes off was challenging and the stainless-steel shears crunched through the frosty fabric. With the body so contorted, she had to make multiple cuts and take the clothes off in sections, dropping them into an evidence bag Kelly held out for her while Collier jotted notes about the size and description of every item.

“Check this out.” She held up his cut up sweatshirt and indicated the wasp logo. “Looks like he was a Jackson City Black Jacket at some point.”

Collier nodded. “Let’s pull the high school yearbook photos for the last…” He eyed the body. “How old do you think he is?”

“Hard to say.” She looked at his face and nearly naked body. “Seventeen to twenty-five, maybe?”

“That’s a lot of photos to go through,” Kelly said, apparently aware he was going to be the one slogging through them.

“Let’s start with the last three years then. If nothing turns up you can expand from there,” Collier said.

Corey got down to his boxer shorts and paused, the sheers hovering over his hip.

“What?”

“Urine stained.” She rubbed the thin cotton between her gloved fingers. “Yep.”

Collier looked up from his notes. “He pissed himself?”

“Looks like. Could be a response to the decrease in temperature. I just learned this. It’s called cold diuresis. Another possible check in the not-dead-before-frozen column.”

“You done with that?” Kelly nodded toward the last section of stiff, dark jeans still on the table.

“Oh, yeah.” Corey dug her hand in the pockets front and back coming up with only a ragged scrap of paper. “You know I saw a bunch of kids dressed like this at the Towne Plaza the other night,” she mused.

“Doing what?” Kelly asked.

“Being dickheads.”

“That anything?” Collier gestured to the scrap of paper.

She unfolded it, tilting it back and forth to determine top from bottom. “The fuck?” She held it closer to her face and swallowed hard, her jaw clenching fiercely.

“What now?” Collier asked.

Corey’s teeth ground together so hard she could hear them and she backed up, feeling for the counter with a hand, stumbling back against it, her legs trembling.

“Corey?” Kelly’s hand shot out and gripped her elbow, steadying her. “What’s going on?”

“You got another evidence bag?”

Collier shook a small one open, holding it out, and she smoothed the irregular paper out and dropped it in the bag. He studied the paper through the clear plastic, his eyes snapping up. “This what I think it is?”

She nodded.

Kelly peered at the paper. “I don’t get it. Looks like a prescription print out with partial signature and medical license number. Is that the date? That’s good. Looks like Christmas Eve he was alive. That narrows things down.” He looked up to see Collier and Corey staring at each other. “What?”

“The signature is Thayer’s,” Corey said.

“Shit.”

Collier sighed. “Warren, head up to the ED and ask Dr. Reynolds to join us. I’ll call ahead to Manning.”

Kelly shot Corey a sympathetic look before disappearing.

Corey sighed and snapped off her gloves so she could run her hands through her hair. “Fuck.”