A/N: The credit for the idea with the missing body goes to Mounty Swiss. always there for bouncing off ideas!

December 1971, Monday 27th: The Strange Case of the Missing Body

"Oh, come on, Bernie, I know you are busy, but unless I get the results of the post-mortem, I have no case. The perp had too much time to fabricate an alibi already. Yeah, I really appreciate it! Thanks for bumping my case up to the top. Yeah, I certainly owe you!" Mike put down the receiver, happy with what he had achieved.

He glanced around, glad to see that bar Steve and Larry Mullen, all detectives in Homicide had returned to work. Some of the men were still looking a bit shook up, but Mike was confident that he had enough staff in both Robbery and Homicide to deal with all that life could throw at him.

Irene was back at work today as well. Mike smiled when he remembered how nice it had been to have breakfast with Irene and give her a lift to work. As anticipated he never got a quiet moment with her the day before, with Jeannie and Steve around until the convalescing Irene was too tired to stay up any longer.

His pleasant thoughts were interrupted by the phone ringing. "Stone!" he barked, and then he listened to the person at the other end of the line for a while. His face turned red and his eyes bulged. "What do you mean there is no body? A body is too big to be mislaid! If it was the file… What? The file is missing, too? So are you trying to tell me that the stiff from Tuesday upped and left and brought his paperwork with him?" All faces in the bull pen were turned towards Mike's office. He checked his voice. "Okay, Bernie, I understand that you were dealing with extraordinary circumstances and so were we. I'll try and find out what happened up here and I'll get back to you."

He looked around in disbelief.

Roy Devitt walked in and saw Mike in the office, which was nominally his for the time being. He flinched.

"Roy! Just the man I wanted to see! We seem to have a baffling case that concerns Homicide and Robbery. A missing corpse…." Mike greeted his colleague.

"Please tell me this is a joke to get back at me for my feeble attempt of humor," Devitt replied in mock horror.

"Afraid not, Roy, though I can smell a prank!"

Mike related all that he knew so far. "From the morgue's point of view, they never received the body. No documentation and no unaccounted-for body in the cooler. The number of bodies tallies with their paperwork. On the other hand Bernie is aware that there was a homicide, as he was out there himself and did the preliminary on the victim."

Norm Haseejian came closer. "I can account for the stiff. There was definitely a body there and we even have the photos to prove it." He alluded to a case of Chief Ironside's right hand man, who had dealt with a body gone missing, very much to the delight of Mullen who had been called out to the crime scene. None of his colleagues had liked the way he riled Ed Brown and gloated. *

Norm continued, "Unless the ambulance crew took him to the wrong place… You know, things got a bit hectic when we got back here, I'm not sure what happened to the paperwork in the first place." Norm was apologetic.

"I know that and I don't think either you or Steve did something wrong, but let's go through this again," Mike assured.

All they could establish was that the body was whisked off by an ambulance.

Mike and Roy sat down and looked at each other, while Norm tried to locate the ambulance crew to find out where they had taken the body. Mike's fingers drummed an angry rhythm on the desk. "As if we didn't have enough real crimes to deal with!"

"Wait a minute, Mike, do you want to imply that I wasn't on top of things?"

"No, Roy, not at all, but don't you smell a rat, too? Doesn't this remind you too much of Ed's missing body and remember the fun some idiots knocked out of it? Let's go down to the morgue and do some detecting ourselves!"

They were met by a very upset Bernie. "Mike, I can't explain this! The numbers are right but something is definitely wrong here. See this release form?" He handed Mike a sheet of paper. "We have no PM record of a corpse with this ID number."

Mike glanced over the paper. "You mean a body was released to the relatives for cremation without a post-mortem?" There was a sinking feeling in his stomach. No body, no case! Whoever made the mistake, would have to face serious consequences.

Bernie nodded uncomfortably. "Mike, look at the signature on the form."

Mike looked again. "Steven Keller. No, even Steve being sick wouldn't make such a blunder." He scrutinized the signature and the form closely. "It looks like his signature alright, but the timing is wrong! Could he have written this before Norm brought him home sick?"

Devitt took the sheet out of Mike's hand. "I sure hope you're right, Mike. It could be a forgery. I say someone could have used a release form that Steve filled in and doctored it. But why? Why would someone want to set up the kid?" Devitt was aghast.

"A prank, I hope, and God help the person who did it!" Mike threatened.

Bernie watched with a mix of consternation and relief. As long as he wasn't responsible for mislaying a body…

"Now, guys, let's get this cleared up pronto. Bernie, I need to use the phone! We have to establish a time-line!" Mike took control.

He switched the phone to speaker, so that Bernie and Roy could listen in and rang Haseejian to find out when the team had left for the crime scene and when Steve had returned to the bureau.

"Mike, the kid looked quite green around the gills by the time he came back here. He started to do the paperwork alright and mumbled something about you wanting him to release a body to their relatives and that he never got to finish the job this morning. Before he could get stuck into it, he started running to the bathroom and I took him home. Come to think of it, when I returned I couldn't find any paperwork on his desk, so I assumed someone brought it down to the morgue!"

"Norm, are you sure he wasn't at the morgue at all?"

"Positive! I distinctly remember that he started chucking up when I mentioned the morgue."

"And you, Norm, did you go there at all?"

"No, as the paperwork was gone I concentrated on going back to canvas the neighborhood again."

"Now, Bernie, my friend, who brought the virus into the morgue? I am no wiser on that, but I have a fair idea where we might find our stiff. "


*Ironside, season 5, ep 10:"When a body sees a body"