The Curse of Tenth Grave by Darynda Jones

Author:Darynda Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466890510
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

16

Right? And I’m not even on drugs.

—T-SHIRT

I went straight to the Office of the Medical Examiner from Parker’s office. Wade was a friend of mine, but without clearance, he would never have let me look through his files willy-nilly.

“Hey, Charlotte,” he said.

“Hey back.” One of his assistants walked in. I had no choice but to take advantage. “How’s the chlamydia?”

The assistant chuckled.

“Oh, don’t worry. You won’t shock her. The moment Parker called, I told everyone all about you and your … creative sense of humor.”

“Man. I was so looking forward to humiliating you.”

“I know. I was looking forward to being humiliated. So, anything, huh? How’d you rate that?”

“Haven’t you heard? Parker and I are now besties.”

“I didn’t think Parker had any friends.”

“Well, he does now, thank goodness. That stick up his ass was getting longer and straighter.”

He laughed and led me to a computer. “Okay, so you look up the files here, and then, depending on how old the case is, you may have to take the call number to the dungeon.”

“Wade,” I said, surprised. “Last time you had me in the dungeon, we got the cops called on us.”

Wade looked over his shoulder at a lab tech who’d walked in to grab a file. “Nope. Told him, too.”

“Dang it. You’re no fun since you got married.”

“Hon, I’ve been married longer than you’ve been alive.”

“That’s a long time.”

“Call out if you need any help.”

“Are you off to perform an autopsy?”

“That’s the plan. Want to come in?”

The smile I offered was part in-your-dreams and part surely-you-jest. “No thank you.”

One would think that, with all the corpses at a morgue, the place would be filled with the walking dead, wandering about, trying to find their bodies. It didn’t work like that, thankfully. I didn’t need a sudden influx of life stories to hit me all at once. That had happened to me in my late teens. I’ve never been the same.

I sat at the computer, which was perched on a lab table, and started looking at the names Cookie had texted me along with the dates of birth. The OME may not have gotten all the kids here, but surely they’d had to autopsy a couple. A child dying was not an everyday occurrence.

The first one popped up on the screen immediately, and unfortunately her files were in the dungeon. I wrote down the number and went on to the next name. By the time I got to the bottom of the list, only two names were not in Wade’s system. Seven were, with all those residing in the basement/dungeon. I always got the feeling Wade was a big D&D fan.

I told a tech I was headed into the pits of despair. He smiled and nodded. I could have walked out with a corpse at this point and no one would care. But why would I? Probably why security wasn’t terribly tight. Like, they didn’t have an armed guard or anything like Parker did.

I made my way down to the basement, which was actually a rather well-lit room on the lower level.

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