“Hold on,” I say, and I go to the phone and dial the extension for the fingerprints lab. No one answers. I try the switchboard. Everyone is gone for the day because of the weather, I am told. I get a spoon and ink pad from a drawer. Turk wipes off the dead man’s hands and I ink his fingers, pressing them one at a time against the curved paper strip. “What I can do if you have no objection,” I tell Stanfield, “is see if Richmond City will pop these into AFIS so we can get that going.” I press a thumb inside the spoon while Stanfield watches with an unpleasant expression on his face. He is one of these people who hates the morgue and can’t get out of it fast enough. “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone in the labs to help us right now, and the sooner we can figure out who this guy is, the bet- ter,” I explain. “And I’d like to get the prints and other information to Interpol in the event this man has international connections.”
“Okay,” Stanfield says with another nod as he glances at his watch.
“Have you ever dealt with Interpol?” I ask him.
“Can’t say I have, ma’am. They’re sort of like spies, aren’t they?”
I page Marino to see if he can help. He drops by forty-five minutes later, by which time Stanfield is long gone and Turk is tucking John Doe’s sectioned organs inside a heavy plastic bag that she will place in the body cavity before she sews up the Y incision.
“Yo Turk,” Marino hails her when he passes through opening steel doors. “Freezing leftovers again?”
She glances up at him with one raised eyebrow and a cocked smile. Marino likes Turk. He likes her so much he is rude to her at every opportunity. Turk doesn’t look like what one might conjure up from her nickname. She is petite, with a clean prettiness and creamy complexion, her long blond hair tied back and clipped up high like a show horse’s tail. She threads heavy white waxed twine into a twelve-gauge suture needle as Marino continues to pick on her. “I tell ya,” he says, “I ever get cut, I ain’t coming to you for stitches, Turk.” She smiles, dipping the big, angled needle into flesh and tugging twine through.
Marino looks hung over, his eyes bloodshot and puffy. Despite his quips, he is in a foul mood. “You forget to go to bed last night?” I ask him.
“More or less. It’s a long story.” He tries to ignore me, watching Turk and oddly distracted and ill at ease. I untie my gown and take off my face shield, mask and O.R. cap. “See how quickly you guys can get these into the computer,” I tell him, all business and not especially friendly. He is keeping secrets from me and I am pissed off by his peacock display of adolescent behavior. “We’ve got a bad situation here, Marino.”
His attention lifts off Turk and lights on me. He gets sen- ous. He drops the childish act. “How ’bout you tell me what’s going on while I smoke,” he says to me, meeting my eyes for the first time in days.
Mine is a nonsmoking building, which has not stopped various people high in the pecking order from lighting up inside their offices if they are surrounded by people who won’t snitch on them. In the morgue, I don’t care who asks. I don’t allow smoking, period. It isn’t that our clientele need to worry about inhaling secondhand smoke, but my concern is for the living who should do nothing in the morgue that requires them to have hand-to-mouth contact. No eating, drinking or smoking, and I discourage chewing gum or sucking on candies or lozenges. Our designated smoking area is two chairs by an upright ash can near the soda machines in the bay. This time of year, this is not a warm, cozy place to sit, but it is private. The James City County case isn’t Marino’s jurisdiction, but I need to tell him about the clothes. “It’s a feeling I have,” I sum it up.