Jane hated coming to the morgue.
Hated it more than useless paperwork needing to be done in triplicate.
Hated it more than pandering press statements before election dates.
And hated it more than chia seeds in her morning strawberry jam.
At first she thought it was the whole death thing. Corpses ghoulishly on display on sterile impersonal stainless trays, shrouded in crisp laboratory white or disturbingly eerily packaged in grim body bags—horrific dark humored Grim Reaper Notes to Self that one day it would be her lying there. Parts that no longer held any sum.
Then she thought it was the smell. The sickly sweet oily reek of human death that sank into her clothes like the Devil's Cologne and haunted her nose even when she was in Boston's metallic traffic exhaust fumes. Or the grotesque chemical industrial air of ammonia, bleach, formaldehyde, and dozens of other Mad Scientist brews that smothered like a toxic fog over even Maura's expensive perfume.
But in the terrible hot humid choking nights in her sweat soaked sheets, when she was supposed to be sleeping peacefully but her traitorous weeping brain kept brutally replaying the victim faces in her endless stacks of criminal files over and over and over, she knew the real reason.
It was because of the housewife beaten to death by her husband.
It was because of the child strangled by a pedophile.
And it was because of the man burned to death by a mob hit.
Jane hated coming to the morgue.
Because every time she pushed open the scarred and battered heavy doors, she was reminded bitterly and despairingly once more that the bad guys had won.