King of Swords

the John Doe found in Primate Park, whose discovery had sparked a mass breakout by the 200's entire population of monkeys. Four days later they were still recovering them all over Miami and beyond. Many had died, either hit by cars or shot by people who thought they were burglars, aliens or dangerous. One had been found lynched. A few had escaped out into the Everglades where they'd joined the dozens of exotic pets dumped there by their owners every year. Lions, tigers, wolves, pythons, boas had all been spotted in the swamp.

Gemma worked with three other people. There were two pathologists of opposing levels of competence - Javier, originally from El Salvador, was almost as good as her, whereas Martin, five years into the job, still occasionally threw up when the sawing started — and an autopsy assistant, or diener, as they were known in the trade. The city's medical budget didn't stretch to hiring one full time so they usually had to make do with either a med school student on work experience, or someone from the police academy. These greenhorns usually all either puked, fainted, or both. It was here Martin proved invaluable. He'd played a little football in his youth and was still quick on his feet. He'd catch the falling interns before they hit the ground thus preventing injuries and lawsuits. Of course this was dependent on him being upright at the time of crisis, which he usually was. He still had a jock's pride about fainting in front of an intern.

Death had changed a lot in Miami since the cocaine explosion of the mid-seventies. Prior to that the bodies she'd inspected had been victims of gunshots, stabbings, beatings, drownings, poisonings — crimes of passion, home invasions, street and store robberies, suicides; although she'd occasionally also had to inspect the results of political assassinations and piece together the remnants of a mob hit which had floated to shore in instalments stuffed in oil drums. Cocaine had made her job far more complicated. The drug gangs

didn't simply kill their victims, they liked to torture them to within an inch of their lives first, which meant she spent more time on a body because she had to be sure the victim hadn't died from the barbaric suffering he or she had been put through before they were dispatched. Even the weapons were excessive. When they used guns, they didn't use pistols or even shotguns, they used machine guns and automatic rifles, riddling bodies with so many bullets it often took most of a working shift just to dig them all out. There was a hell of a lot of peripheral death too: innocents caught in the crossfire or having the misfortune to be in some way related to an intended target. Gemma had never seen anything like it, not even when she'd worked in New York.

Miami had gone from having a below average murder rate, when it was predominandy home to Jewish retirees, Cuban refugees and anti-Fidelistas, to the off-the-chart-and-still rising homicide epidemic it was experiencing now.

The morgue was full. They'd recently had to lease refrigerator trucks from Burger King to store the overflow.

She needed a break, a long one, or maybe she needed to change jobs. She didn't even like Miami anymore. What had seemed like a great place to live after the dysfunctional urban nightmare of New York, now seemed like more of the same, only with better weather and different accents.

First she examined the outside of the body, noting for the record that it was completely hairless. Shordy before his death, John Doe had had a full body shave. Even his eyelashes has been trimmed off.

'Don't the hair and nails, like, keep growing after you're dead?' a young and unfamiliar voice piped up behind her. It was today's diener, Ralph. They'd only met five minutes ago, so she didn't know what he looked like because she could only see his eyes — blue and intelligent — under his green overalls and face mask.

'That's the movie version,' Gemma said, with a weary

sigh. She was glad she'd never gone into teaching. She didn't believe in fighting losing battles. How could you compete with Hollywood myths? 'After death, the skin around the hair and fingernails loses water and shrinks. And when it shrinks it retracts, making the nails and hair look longer, and therefore giving the impression they've grown. But they haven't really. It's an illusion. Like the movies. OK?'

He nodded. She could see from his eyes that it had gone in, that he'd learned something new today.

She carried on, noting the sixteen puncture marks around the lips — eight above and eight below, as well as a series of deep indentations along the lips themselves, some of which had broken the skin. The mouth had been sewn up.

She looked at the nose and saw a puncture mark on either side, right through the middle, very slightly encrusted with dried blood; on the underside of the nostrils was a small horizontal cut, the same width as the marks on the lips.