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dick, use Sister M.
    Weasel: What, what the . . . (inaudible) . . . zombi walks.
    Fox: By the by, man, where is H.G.? She been missing for a week.
    Weasel: Yeh, I know, like that's cold, real cold.
    Fox: You better find her, man, before the Wolf finds out, or you'll be cold, stone dead cold if there's a leak.
    Weasel: No, no worry. I can do . . . Fox: We will be waitin' on you all. 
    Weasel: Bye. 
    Fox: Huh. Huh. (end of call)

    Tuesday, October 26th, 8:15 a.m.
    Winter had arrived early within the four walls of the room. It was that cold. The air had a chill, brittle quality to it and there was a light condensation on the stainless steel surface. The pathologist wore gloves.
    Doctor Kahil Singh was an elderly man with close-cropped silver hair. His face was long and angular and he wore rimless glasses. Dr. Singh was one of three pathologists at the Richmond General Hospital. Today he had drawn duty in the hospital morgue.
    He had arrived for work at 7:30 this morning to find three accident victims waiting for him in their drawers. Two of the bodies had come from a motor vehicle collision last night on Highway 99, the police report stating that a bottle of Cuervo Tequila was found smashed on the road. The third corpse was a floater fished out of the Fraser River.
    Dr. Singh did not like floaters. So he took that one first.
    This had been Singh's practice ever since medical school, for as one of his professors way back then had so wisely put it: "If you take the ugly ones first, the worst is over." And this one was certainly ugly. Bloated and immense, the girl's body was partly decomposed and here and there fibrous strands of muscle clung to exposed bone.
    Singh assumed at first that the skull had been sliced away when it met with a boat propeller. A drowning suicide,  he thought,  with a subsequent clean cut. So the doctor peeled back the waterlogged flesh that had closed around the neck, and using a strong magnifying glass examined the top vertebra.
    Two minutes later, Singh called the RCMP.
    Corporal James Rodale was not pleased with the telephone call. It was not that he was a lazy man neglectful of his duty. It was just that Rodale was one of those men with a weak breakfast stomach. He did not need the scales of nausea tipped by a morning autopsy. Luckily, Singh was a perceptive man. When the doctor noticed the look on the Corporal's face as he entered the autopsy room, he suggested that Rodale wait for exhibits on the far side of the morgue. Rodale was grateful.
    "There's a phone on the table," the doctor said. "Use it if you want."
    Corporal James Rodale was slim and his movements precise. He wore the brown serge working uniform of the RCMP. His hairline was receding so he always wore his hat, and the regimental badge sat square in the center of his forehead. Rodale had since birth had different colored irises: the left eye was reddish brown, the right one green. At school the other students nicknamed him "Stoplight."
    As the autopsy was performed, Rodale sat at the table with his back to Dr. Singh. Though he kept his eyes averted he knew what was going on. The pathologist was recording his findings by means of an overhead microphone. Between the calls that Rodale made on his other investigations, some of the comments got through.
    "The body is that of a white female in her early twenties. Needle marks cover the interior aspect of both arms . . .
    "There is a 4.5 cm. incision on both the left and right sides of the neck close to vertical plane. There is a horizontal cut from the anterior to posterior aspect of the neck 6 cm. superior to the suprasternal notch . . .
    "The heart weighs 280 grams. The coronary arteries show minimal atherosclerotic streaking and are widely patent. On sectioning, the myocardium is of a uniform tan brown color. The aorta is intact . . .
    "The labia are bruised. There are a few adhesions of the fallopian tubes ..."
    Almost an hour later. Dr. Singh was finished. He wiped his gloves on a clean