Evan Marks loved the cold.
He had been born and bred in a climate that featured fog and frost and freezing rain. London seemed to have forty kinds of cold—and he didn't mind any one of them a bit. He liked seeing his exhaled breath come out in puffs, and the chill that penetrated his bones, made him curl his extremities, kept his senses sharp—all of it was evidence to him of being alive.
Warm temperatures did nothing but make him feel uncomfortable and lethargic. More than having distaste for showing emotion, he hated laziness—he lived to work and work gave him life.
He was one of those rare individuals who knew at an early age exactly what he wanted to do with his life. When he told his parents that he decided to study medicine, he relished in seeing the obvious pride in their faces. But the expressions quickly faded to a mix of confusion and disappointment when he added that he wanted to specialize in pathology, and that meant working with people only when they were dead. But he didn't care. Dead bodies didn't talk back and they didn't moan and groan their complaints.
As a medical examiner, he loved the challenge of performing necropsies and figuring out causes of death. Every stiff dissection was a puzzle, as he measured the lengths of gashes and slashes, weighed internal organs, and observed discolorations and marks on skin. His favorite part of the autopsies was examining stomach contents and discovering what the vic's last meal was. In the arctic solitude of the laboratory, he pieced together clues to solve the mystery of the vic's last moments of life. He was glad that his job didn't require him to interview suspects or deal with emotional friends and relatives of the deceased. And in this job, you needed to be detached. So it was easy to think of each body as another case number tagged and bagged, and stored in the freezer until he was ready to cut it open.
Evan was skittish about opening up to people. It wasn't that he meant to be unfriendly; he just wasn't interested. When he decided to live stateside, choosing an American city was easy: in New York City he became another anonymous person in the crowd, another faceless rider on the subway, and another apartment dweller who didn't know his neighbors. He didn't mind that his colleagues went with the stereotype and wrote him off as the taciturn Englishman who simply got his work done efficiently. In his case, he thought the typecasting was accurate. He was part of the crime-solving team, but he was as much the outsider as his accent and attitude made him to be. He didn't quite fit in with the brotherhood and fraternal order of the police. But no matter—he was perfectly content with the feeling of being separate. He didn't have to deal with a partner, one who could be brassy and loud-mouthed, or work on messy desks littered with fast food wrappers and file folders.
His own workspace was inside a quiet, brightly lit lab whose signature feature was the pristine metal slab on which he performed his autopsies. He took great care in keeping his autopsy table clean after each post-mortem. And after each, he washed his hands thoroughly under cool water, and then recorded his findings in an autopsy report—documents that reported each traumatic injury and fatal wound, and then summarized cause of death. There was no room in any of Evan's reports for speculation or judgment.
Everything in Evan's neat and ordered world was, quite simply, black and white. As white as the snowy blizzards that he enjoyed in his adopted home.
Until one day, Catherine Chandler joined the precinct. At their first meeting Evan felt a slight shift in his ordered world when she entered his space. Even under the harsh, artificial glare of the lab's lights she brought a flicker of warmth to the clinical atmosphere, and he could feel it shoot right through to his heart. She had stood so close that he could faintly detect the scent of her perfume—it was a sweet contrast to the smell of formaldehyde that pervaded the lab. He was about to work on a young rape victim, brutally attacked and buried in a shallow grave of leaves and dirt in Central Park. After introducing herself, Catherine had said, "I need your help, Evan. Tell me how she died so I can bring her killer to justice. She deserves some dignity, and her family deserves some peace." When she said that the vic on the table became a person, and not a case number shrouded in black plastic whose only identifier hung on her toe.
Over time, Evan continued to feel the shifts: his black and white perspectives melded into shades of gray, and his icy exterior started to melt a little bit more whenever he saw or talked to the beautiful detective. He began to take an interest in people: he started to greet his neighbors in his apartment building, he joined the precinct's softball team, and he began to make eye contact with his fellow passengers on the subway—sometimes even going so far as to give them a small smile. And Evan Marks started to understand that cold wasn't the only thing that told him what it was like to feel alive.