A Beautiful Poison by Lydia Kang

Author:Lydia Kang [Kang, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2017-07-31T18:00:00+00:00

Dr. Gettler went painfully by the book. Before they could autopsy, they had to telephone the police station to bring over the paperwork. But now, Jasper could read about the details of the crime scene from another perspective.

Found lying on bedroom floor. No signs of trauma to body. No bruising. Apartment in same order as before, no signs of forced entry, though door left open. No signs of burglary or struggle. Daughter corroborates the above. Empty bottles and glasses of whiskey but appear to be over twelve hours old. Habitual opium ingestion. Question of overdose. Medicine bottles taken as evidence for testing.

There were lists of witnesses, mostly the landlady, Birdie, and Holly.

Gettler thumbed through the pages. “Hmm. They almost didn’t call the ME.” He closed the files and put them on the table in front of Jasper, then headed for the door. When Jasper still stood there, staring at the file, Gettler spoke to him more gently (as gently as that ungentle Brooklyn accent could deliver).

“Son. It’s one thing to do an autopsy on a Jane Doe. It’s another to cut into someone you know. You sure you can handle this?”

Jasper didn’t look up. He was thinking of Florence and the sight of his scalpel pressing against her milky-white abdomen. He remembered the sensation in his hands when the violation of metal on flesh occurred, the precise moment when the tip of the blade sliced into her, like an oar in calm water. It had bothered him. He just hadn’t known it until right now.

Jasper betrayed nothing. “I can handle it. Let’s go.”

It was odd to be in the building at night. Not that Jasper wasn’t used to it. He used to stay after hours and scrub the dirtied corners of this very building. But he’d felt like a peasant then, someone who was smaller and less consequential than even the wastepaper baskets.

Now, all was different. Over a few short weeks, he’d become an essential member of the medical examiner’s department. The sound of Dr. Norris’s shoes pacing his office was a comforting heartbeat. Dr. Gettler’s curses were poetry. The laboratory fumes and the scent of the Bunsen burners blended into a perfume, repellent and improbably enjoyable. The other chemists and pathologists worked at a feverish pace, and they yelled at Jasper to order this, answer that, fetch those, catalogue these, and cook something down to a syrup of human and chemical sludge that just might reveal how the person had died. Here, he revealed the souls behind the crimes—the real ones, not hidden by suits and smirks and rolls of cash. Here, money and names didn’t matter. Right and wrong were dictated by chemical truths.

The city morgue had become intensely alluring, and he couldn’t get enough of it.

He was also becoming increasingly rattled by the same things that attracted him. He didn’t yet possess the ability to unpack and understand the center of his discomfort. He wanted this, after all. He knew certain details repelled him—like the chewed hangnails and fingernails on a corpse, bitten to the quick just like his own.

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