Powder Burn by Carl Hiaasen Read Free Book Online Page B

through in a mug shot. Really, it would be a big help.…”
    All look alike when they’re dead. Meadows saw Jessica’s body again as it arched into the air, Sandy’s as it dragged along the ground. “I’ll be there,” he said, and hung up.
    THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S office, Meadows discovered after a series of wrong turns, was a featureless two-story annex attached to Flagler Memorial Hospital. Buildings without architecture, Miami was full of them.
    Meadows was intercepted by a laconic clerk who seemed as anonymous.
    “I’m here to look at a body,” he said.
    “Are you next-of-kin?”
    “Uh, no. Definitely not.”
    “Name?”
    “Christopher Meadows.”
    The clerk leafed through a stack of pink carbons.
    “We don’t have a Chris Meadows. We have a Christine Reilly, but she’s already been ID’d by her daughter.”
    “Meadows is my name. I was asked to come down here and look at a body that was found this morning.”
    “OK, whose body?” The clerk tapped a Bic pen on her desk. She had all day.
    “I don’t know. They didn’t give me a name.”
    “Is this a joke?”
    “No, Detective Nelson told me to come. He said he was going to meet me here.”
    The clerk mashed an intercom button. “Dr. Appel?”
    “Yes, Lorie,” a voice reverberated. It sounded as if the man were in Key West.
    “There’s a man named Meadows here wants to look at a body. Says Nelson sent him.”
    “Right. Send him back.”
    Meadows edged cautiously through one set of swinging doors, then another. He found himself standing in a vast room, walled in old tiles the color of lima beans. It took several moments before Meadows realized he was surrounded by human bodies.
    They lay, one after another, on silver autopsy tables. Some were splayed open at the sternum, the skin stretched back and the chest cavity open like a Thanksgiving turkey. Meadows thought the corpses looked very small. The whole room smelled rotten and cold. He swallowed hard.
    “Hello there.”
    Meadows spun around. Dr. Harry Appel stood behind him.
    “Hello,” Meadows replied shakily. “You scared me.”
    “Didn’t mean to,” Appel said. “Sit down.”
    Meadows sat. Appel, a tall man with tortoise-shell glasses, turned back to his work. In one hand he held a half-eaten ham-and-cheese sandwich. The other hand held a human heart, a small bloody violet balloon. Meadows thought he was going to be sick.
    “I’d offer you a sandwich,” Appel was saying, “but this is the last one in the house.” The doctor noticed Meadows pale. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He put the sandwich in a paper bag. “I normally don’t eat on the job, but we’ve had a very busy morning. As you can see.”
    Meadows nodded weakly and looked at the floor.
    Appel placed the heart on a scale and read the weight aloud into a Dictaphone. Then he took a plastic bag, the same kind sold as sandwich bags in any grocery store, and pinched an edge until it opened. He slid the heart in, twisted a metal tab to seal it and dropped the whole soggy package back into the chest cavity. Meadows watched, transfixed.
    “I have to do this,” Appel explained. “Used to be I could throw the organs away after I took lab samples. Lately, though, a lot of families insist that their loved ones be buried intact, with all the parts and pieces.”
    Meadows just nodded.
    “So, you’re here to see the Juan Doe?”
    “Uh?”
    Appel ran his hands under a faucet, rinsing blood off the diaphanous surgical gloves. He wiped them on his wrinkled green lab coat and motioned to Meadows. “I think your friend is over there.”
    He led Meadows to a table where a skinny corpse lay. The top of the skull had been cut away with a fine saw. It hung as if by a hinge, exposing the upper hemisphere of the brain. The skin was pulled down over the face into a wrinkled rubbery mask. The nose was in the wrong place. The mouth was a sneer.
    Meadows stood six feet from the table, frozen.
    “Oh, Christ,” he wheezed.
    “Don’t worry,”