“Insedentary?” Regina was beginning to panic, and her reaction to insecurity and fear was always unfortunate. “What kind of device? What the hell’s a insedentary device?” Her disposition turned ugly. “I can’t write this fast and it’s not fair] Why should I know how to spell words like this? I’m not used to them. It’s not like I hear them every day at the mansion!”
Dr. Scarpetta gave Regina a quizzical look. “Maybe this isn’t a good time for you to see your first autopsy, ” the chief decided.
Andy got on his portable radio and raised Trooper Macovich on the air. “Can you return the package to its origin?” he asked in the code language of the EPU. “And I need you to check out an ID number with AFIS. ”
“Ten-fo, ‘ Macovich’s voice came back, decidingly lacking in enthusiasm.
“Ten-twenty-five us in the morgue bay. ”
“Ten-fo. Be there in fifteen. ”
“Now you’ve really done it, ” Andy complained to Regina minutes later as they waited inside the frigid bay, sitting in plastic chairs by the Coke machine.
Two Swifty’s Removal Service attendants were carrying a pouched body on a stretcher, making their way slowly and with difficulty down the ramp. The attendants, a man and a woman dressed in dark suits, seemed to be having a hard time getting the stretcher’s legs to unfold.
“I didn’t do a thing, ” Regina retorted. “You’re not nice to me!”
“I told you to be quiet and mind your p’s and q’s and you didn’t, ” Andy said.
The attendants were in a bind. They couldn’t open the stretcher’s legs, which meant they couldn’t set down the dead person, who clearly was very big, and so there wasn’t a free hand to open the van’s tailgate.
“Look at that, ” Regina said, pointing at the attendants. “Why don’t you go help those poor people instead of sitting here picking on me. ”
“As long as you stay in your chair and behave, ” said Andy, who didn’t trust Regina for a minute.
He trotted over to the van.
“Here, let me help, ” he said to the female attendant.
“That’s mighty nice of you, ” she replied, and gave him her end of the stretcher.
“I thought you got this thing fixed, Sammy, ” she irritably said to her partner as she tugged on the stuck stretcher legs.
“It just needed oiling, Maybeline. ”
“Then why ain’t it working? These legs are froze stiff and one of the wheels was sticking the other day. Bet you didn’t get that fixed, neither. ”
Sammy was silent as Andy held on with one hand and tried the van door with the other.
“How many times I got to tell you, don’t say you getting something fixed and then I find out you didn’t. ” Maybeline was furious. “Breaking my back doing this stinking job and you sitting around all the time watching the TV. ”
“I think the tailgate’s locked, ” Andy said as the stretcher fishtailed and moved around perilously. “I think it’s best you forget the legs and let’s unlock the van. Then we can just slide the body in. We won’t need to roll it. ”
“Can’t roll it anyway, not with that stuck wheel Sammy couldn’t bother to fix. What did you do with the keys?” Maybeline yanked at the stretcher’s legs.
“In my pocket. I can’t get ’em right this minute. I don’t exactly have a hand free. ” Sammy was about to lose his temper. “Quit tugging on the legs before we drop the damn body on the floor!”
Regina, sensing an emergency, made her way over to the stretcher at the same time the buzzer sounded and the bay door began to screech open.
“I’ll get the keys out for you, ” she told Sammy as she began to pat him down the way she saw cops search people on TV.
Regina had no reason to know that Sammy was extremely ticklish. When she started digging in the right front pocket of his pants, he shrieked and jumped six inches into the air. What Macovich witnessed when he drove into the bay was a crazy white man in a dark suit screaming with laughter and begging that ugly Crimm daughter to “Stop!” Next, the man grabbed himself, and the end of the stretcher he had been holding crashed to the floor and the huge black body pouch thudded on concrete. Andy, meanwhile, was shouting at Regina, and a woman attendant howled in pain as the stretcher pinched her hand and knocked her in the face, leaving her bleeding and holding her nose and a finger.