The Dark Places

red. “You can’t keep me away from crime scenes!” She raised her voice unprofessionally. “I have a right as a citizen to be here, like anyone else. You can’t do this to me, Surin. One mistake, one night of, let’s face it, pretty crappy sex, and you’re hell-bent on ruining my career!”
Everyone was frozen to the spot. The tension in the air was palpable. Parker thought that at any minute Surin was going to draw her weapon and put a bullet between this crazy woman’s eyes, but she was just standing there smiling.
“Madison, I’m not trying to ruin your career. I’m just doing my job.” And with that, she turned and walked back to the scene, leaving the reporter red-faced and humiliated.
By the time she got to her Pulsar, Madison was shaking with rage. Oh my God, I can’t believe I just lost it like that! In front of cameras, in front of Surin! She put her head on the steering wheel and fought back the tears that had involuntarily sprung to the corners of her eyes. Stop it! She mentally chastised herself for being a wimp. What do you expect — you fucked the woman’s fiancé, she told herself. Leaning back into her chair, she took a deep breath. Right, you know something is going on, you can feel it. Do not stop; do not slow down. With that, she started up her car and did a wide U-turn. I’m going to go to my favourite place in the world, she thought and made a beeline for the Baltimore State Library.

12
The car trip to the morgue was long and quiet. Parker kept glancing furtively across at Surin until finally, he couldn’t take the silence any more.
“So, she’s a handful,” he scoffed, instantly regretting the words that fell out of his mouth.
Surin turned to him as a pensive look crossed her face. “Cop to cop?” she asked.
“Anything,” he replied, just happy to be talking.
“Do you think she’s attractive?”
Parker nearly swerved the car into the gutter.
This was one of those questions — the one a woman asks a man, and there is absolutely no right answer. Do I look fat in this? Am I getting old? You wouldn’t want me to get fake boobs, would you?
Surin must have sensed his apprehension and continued. “I know she’s pretty in an all-American cheerleader way, blue eyes, hair to her ass, smile like a goddamn toothpaste commercial.” She sighed and ran her hand along the window frame. “I just thought looking at her you could tell that, that was it, you know what I mean? Women can tell this about other women when there’s nothing else below the surface. I was wondering if men could too.” She looked at Parker, not a hint of jealousy or anger clouded her features. It was honesty she was after, so that’s what he decided to give her.
“She is an attractive woman, Surin. There is a sexuality she has that men respond to immediately; it’s primal, and she knows it.” He looked at her, making sure she was listening.
“But within the first minute of meeting her, I can tell you this much, after you get past the blue eyes, the hair, the smile, there is a vapid woman who uses her looks to get just about anything. She has conned her way through most of her life using her pretty face, she isn’t ashamed of it, and she thinks she deserves it. I mean, she made shaking my hand feel like an act of indecency! That is a woman to stay the hell away from, trouble with a capital ‘T’.”
Surin sat quietly, taking it all in. “So, to answer my own stupid question, he knew exactly what kind of woman she was when he jumped into bed with her?”
Parker looked over at her, not wanting to see such betrayal in her eyes. “Maybe that’s why he did it,” he replied.
***
They entered the morgue together, preparing themselves for the autopsy on Isabelle Lacross.
“This is the first one you have sat in with me.” Surin grinned at Parker, her previous mood forgotten or buried. “You’d better not be a spewer,” she said semi-seriously. “Vicks under the nose, breathe through your mouth,” she said.
“I have been to an autopsy before, Elliott,” Parker replied with a scowl on his face.
“Yeah, where you stood behind the glass in the viewing room. That’s not going to cut it here, no pun intended.” She smirked at her own joke. “We are going in.” With that, she pulled on a pair of green scrubs, a mask and scrub cap and walked off to find Vector.
Parker didn’t consider himself someone with a weak stomach, but there is something about the smell of an autopsy floor in a morgue that was more mental than physical. It’s an overtly chemical smell that’s almost sickly sweet. Your brain immediately tells you that it must be rotting flesh that you’re smelling — the pungent odour of death — but in reality, all it is usually is formalin, formaldehyde and a mixture of various cleaning products. Morgues, in general, consist of offices you would find in any other government building, staff rooms with kitchens, and in some cases, a chapel for the family and friends of the deceased to find some measure of peace. The actual autopsies are performed in extremely sterile environments on designated floors. Access to the viewing rooms is restricted and mostly reserved for the police and family who need to identify bodies. Any contamination, including decomposed and burnt remains, are well contained and usually kept in special rooms with vacuum ventilation.
Even though Parker knew all this, the foreign smell still hit him like a wall when the automatic doors slid open, and it caused an involuntary gagging reflex that he tried extremely hard to disguise. Surin was standing with Vector talking inaudibly.
“Ah, Detective