Identifying the Body

Maxine wanted to beat her own head in. Wanted to take the steering wheel in both hands and pound her head against it until the stupidity lodged inside shook loose. If she hadn't been sitting in a car with her tablet, poring through documents and files from a case she'd given up on over three years ago, she would have literally kicked herself.

She'd been saved by the legendary Man in the Suit years ago, and she hadn't even noticed.

Worse, she'd done it during a period when she'd been actively researching the urban legend and hunting up any possible leads about the mysterious vigilante. She'd probably known more about the Man in the Suit than any other person in the city, and then hadn't recognized him when he sat down at the table with her. The single most important interview since Moses talked to God, and she couldn't remember what the man had said!

It was so obvious, looking over her notes. He even LOOKED like the sketch one of her sources had provided. Draw a pair of glasses on the sketch and that was John Anderson, the mundane-if-handsome actuary she'd dated years ago. How stupid could she be, to be fooled by a pair of glasses?

Maxine let out a quiet groan and let her head thud (softly) against the steering wheel. Just once. She allowed herself a few moments of raging frustration.

It wasn't just the lost opportunity to break a major story—Maxine had moved beyond that point long ago. It was also sorrow, and shame. She'd attributed her miraculous survival to a ridiculous strain of luck. Whenever a new rumor surfaced about "the Man in the Suit" helping this or that person, she'd always thought bitterly "he didn't save ME" and quashed the rumor. And now he was dead, and there was no possibility of thanking him.

Or was there?

Maxine lifted her head from the steering wheel as a thought occurred to her. Quickly she minimized the documents and pulled up a map, locating the nearest morgue. Finding it, she gave a small nod of satisfaction and picked up her phone.

"Hey, Waverly?" She said into the phone. "This is Max. Still at Westwood Mortuary?" She grinned at the response. "Of course I'm calling about the shootout. Let me buy you a midnight snack.

"Midnight" was pushing it... it was 3am before Waverly could be coaxed away from the bodies into a corner bodega manned by a bleary-eyed hispanic woman. It took another fifteen minutes before the tired woman came back with Waverly's chicken pasciatto and Maxine's double espresso, and by the time the two women finally found a clean booth to sit at, Max was practically champing at the bit.

"So, the Babbage Corporation shootout." Waverly bit into her sandwich with a gusto that made Max wince. "Messy business. Mr. Mpala called in Yona and Stanley to help us deal with all the bodies. Stan was pissed, he'd just gotten to bed..." Waverly shook her head. "That boy needs to lay off the tequila."

"Yes." Maxine gave a little nod, trying to hide her impatience. "It probably gets a little old for him... when you've seen one body, you've seen them all."

"Not like this." Waverly shook her head, mouth chewing away. "Thirty-seven bodies, all riddled with bullets." She paused to consider that. "Well... maybe 'riddled' is the wrong word..."

"How so?" Max asked, rubbing her eyes.

"Well, okay." Waverly answered, licking her fingers thoughtfully (Maxine tried not to remember that twenty minutes ago those fingers had been wrist deep in some guy's colon). "The first four bodies on my slab were full of lead. We're talking arms, legs, head, stomach, groinal regions..."

"I get the picture." Maxine set her coffee aside for a moment. "Psychos with machine guns."

"Except here's the thing." Waverly raised a finger. "I'm the morgue's gunshot girl, right? I know how to get to a bullet and fish it out without tearing up a person's insides." She shrugged. "More than they are already, anyway."

"You're the best at your job." Maxine smiled.

"Don't I know it?" Waverly gave a smug grin. "But see, what that means is that they let me take all the really shot up ones. Come to find out, most of the ones Stanley and Yona were carving up had just one or two shots apiece."

"What?" Max frowned.

"Most of the bodies either took one in the head, or two in the knees." Waverly repeated, mock-shooting with her finger at Maxine. "I got the only four that were a real crap shoot." She smirked. "Heh. Crap-shoot."

So there were two groups—four people against an undeterminate number. Four people that had, apparently, died in a hail of gunfire. "That's awful." She managed.

"Tell me about it." Waverly sighed. "You get good at a crappy job and they just throw more crap at ya."

"Yes." Max nodded, her mind flashing back to the bloodied front of Riley's shirt.

"What's worse," Waverly continued, "Is that they expect me to identify all four of those bodies. I mean, Riley, okay. He fell on his front, so the explosion let his face intact..."

"Explosion?"

Waverly stopped mid-sentence. "Didn't I say? There must have been some sort of explosion, too. The kneecapped ones might've lived, but whatever fire there was cooked them good. I'd say the bullet-ridden ones were lucky, but..." She shrugged. "They must've been closer to the fire than the others. There's a body in a three-piece suit that I'm never going to identify... there's literally nothing left of his face."

"So... Riley, someone in a suit..." Maxine answered, trying desperately to stay on topic, "...two others, you mentioned?"

"Both women." Waverly nodded, her face sobering a little. "Again, too burnt to get much of an ID on yet... they were both small, and the one was Middle Eastern, but that's about all I can work out. Though, there was one weird thing." Waverly picked up her fork. "Their hands..." she gestured, "...were, like fused together. Must've been the heat, it literally melted the two into one carbonized chunk." She shrugged.

Maxine nodded, noting it down. "They died holding hands?" She suggested.

"Leave it to you to put the romantic spin on things." Waverly smirked. "I try not to speculate too much. I mean, yeah, could be, but could just be they fell on top of each other just right, or one was trying to help the other up." She took another bite of her sandwich.

Again Maxine nodded, but it was more absentminded than anything. Readers would like the handholding explanation better, so that was probably what she'd go for. "Don't suppose you can tell me anything about the other bodies."

Waverly got that devious look that Maxine knew too well. "Hey, gumshoe, I can't possibly tell you about bodies I didn't cut open... unLESS I STOLE THE MANAGER'S SHEET!" She triumphantly produced a clipboard with a paper tacked to it.

"Holy shit, Wave!" Maxine snatched the file. "Isn't he going to notice this is missing?"

"Well, okay, I didn't steal it, I copied it." Waverly leaned back, still looking very pleased with herself. "Stealing sounded better. Knew you'd want it."

"Hell yes I do." Maxine's eyes flew over the page. 37 bodies in total... so the four on the one side, 32 on the other. The racial profiling seemed to be all over the place, the ages were mostly young to middle-age, apart from the body of a very old man that'd been found on the stairwell. Weapons, wounds, bullets found at scene...

Maxine frowned suddenly. "Hang on. The police report says to look for someone with a broken arm, but there's nothing here that fits that."

Waverly glanced at her. "What's that?"

Maxine pointed to the report. "The CSI team noted that a door had flecks of bone and blood on the edge. It had been bent at an odd angle, as if it had been slammed forcibly on someone's arm."

"Or neck, or head, or leg." Waverly hypothesized.

"My point is that I don't see anyone on this report who has any of those." Maxine pointed out.

Waverly took the report back and looked it over a few moments. "Hm. Yeah, guess you're right."

"So... what?" Maxine asked. "There was someone else there? Someone who got away?"

"Maybe." Waverly shrugged. "I'm actually not supposed to speculate about it. That's the detective's job. You'd be better off talking to them."

"You got nothing out of Fusco." Her editor stared at her.

"Absolutely nothing." Maxine frowned in annoyance. "He shut up like a box. Bunch of baloney about 'the investigation being ongoing.' and not being allowed to talk to reporters."

"Shit." Her editor sighed heavily. "Figures we'd run into a real hard-lining, by-the-book detective on one of these things."

"That's the thing, Fusco isn't any of those." Maxine protested. "Guy's got a serious rep for playing fast and loose with regulations. I mean, his department doesn't even know what he and his partner were doing out there."

The editor nodded pensively. "So... corruption scandal? Badass vigilante cop who doesn't play by the rules?"

"Gut feeling?" Max shrugged. "No to the first, Maybe to the second." (Definitely to the second, but she wasn't about to drop that bombshell just yet.) "In either case, this story's got legs on it, Perry. Put me on the front page, with a big splash of Detective Riley, and I'll guarantee you every awards committee is going to be kissing your ass two months from now."

"Yeah, heard that before." Perry looked unimpressed. "Look, Max, it's a cop-killing, but the rest of it sounds like some sort of high-class gang fight more than anything. I don't hear about any kids or teenagers caught in the crossfire, I don't hear anything that gets it past second page." He raised a hand to forestall Max. "Ordinarily, I'd say sure, let's do a solid for the city, but we got a lot of big stories going on right now. Capitol Hill is going all sorts of crazy, there's that viral dotcom startup, and someone ran over Punxswtawney Phil."

Maxine cocked her head. "Who?"

"That little groundhog from Youtube? Does all the funny videos?" The editor waved the topic aside. "Point is, we got a lot of things competing for that front spread right now. So, good as a cop shooting is, I'm afraid it's got to take a back seat right now." He turned his chair around, indicating the interview was over. "You post the blog entry yet?"

Max ground her teeth. "A quick and dirty bare-bones summary, yeah. I said I'd update with more details as they became relevant."

"Then start updating it."

Maxine left the office, fuming. What was she supposed to update it with? A personal anecdote about how Detective Riley had saved her life several years ago, while posing as her dinner date? Wild assertions about how John Riley aka John Anderson was the epyonmous Man in the Suit, the elusive urban legend? She'd lose her professionalism and her credibility in one fell swoop.

She collapsed into her desk, frowning. She knew it was true. She knew, if she could get John's face on the front page, that thousands would probably recognize him. Stories would start to pour in. She could write the biggest expose of her career, and she would feel again like she was doing good in the world.

But it wasn't happening, because Perry wouldn't give her the front page for a cop-killing.

Maxine resisted the urge to bash her head against the monitor. What sort of crazy world were they living in, when a cop-killing wasn't dramatic enough to net a front-page story?

Sighing, she opened up the blog, added in the details from the coroner's report (some details—too many might cost Waverly her job), and typed "Det. Fusco could not be reached for comment" at the end. She saved the edits, re-posted to the relevant social media sites, and sat back with a sigh.

Ten minutes. Four paragraphs. On a blog that barely a fraction of New Yorkers read. All that a heroic man would ever get for a life that he'd given helping total strangers. Perry was right about one thing, without any juicy hooks, no one would care about this story in a week or two. It'd be impossible to revive it. It'd be dead and buried, just like...

Buried. The funeral piece. Maxine snapped her fingers as it occurred to her. The paper would have to do a follow-up article in a week or two, when the funeral was being held. Perhaps the news would have quieted down by then. The funeral story usually merited a smaller profile than the shooting, for obvious reasons, but...

If she could build a story. Get together a real moving story of human pathos and drama, find some juicy hooks... maybe even find a way to prove that Riley had been the Man in the Suit... she could get this story out to the public and finally give her rescuer the recognition he deserved.

But for that, she needed to build a story on John Riley—a person who might not even exist.

No, she decided, as her mind thought back to the crime scene. John Riley had existed. And he'd left behind three women.

If Fusco wouldn't talk, one of them would.

A/N: This was an interesting chapter to write. My brother's a journalist, so I know something of the work that goes into composing news stories, but I still had trouble working out what I wanted to say and how-what details to hint at and what to leave unspoken. Waverly the mortician rather grew out of the role I had planned for her, but that's okay.