The medical examiner’s office was still deserted. Bucky and Calvin were in the break room, sharing a big bottle of Pibb and a party-size bag of Cheetos. They nodded at Jenner.

“Memorial finished, doc?”

Jenner shook his head. “Don’t know—something came up, so I couldn’t go.”

He left before Bucky could ask any questions.

In his office, Jenner sat at his computer and opened the VeriPic photo storage software. He sifted through the cases until he found the external shots of Mrs. Rosenblum.

There were just four. He pulled them all up onto the screen and pored over them, cursing that they hadn’t photographed her back, too.

They were unremarkable. An elderly woman with a stapled incision over her breastbone, a couple of sutured incisions on her torso for the drains and the pacing wires to fix her heartbeat. Small incisions in her thighs where they’d harvested leg veins for the bypass.

And that was it.

So what had he seen?

Jesus, had he seen anything? They’d taken her to the funeral home, worked on her, touched her up to get her ready for viewing that afternoon. Jones was probably right—just a trick of the eye, a little blush, a little eye shadow.

The cosmetician had said the body had been embalmed, and Jones said it hadn’t. But if he hadn’t embalmed her, why did he wrap the body? Usually they wrap the body to keep fluid from leaking—but why would she leak? Her sternotomy incision was tightly sutured, as were the chest tube and drain sites. A small amount of gauze packing would’ve kept her dry.

And then it came to him: the abdominal incision.

At the funeral home, blurred by layers of plastic, there had been an abdominal incision, a dark line under the plastic, stretching down to the pubis. It wasn’t there when Jenner had examined her.

As he thought about it, she seemed larger now, too, her belly almost bloated. That made no sense at all—she shouldn’t be decomposing. Why would she swell?

He checked the photos again: the chest incision stopped just below the breastbone, and her belly was intact.

Perhaps there’d been a screw-up, and the embalmer had started to work on her before Jones stopped him. Embalming an observant Jew would mean a huge knock to the reputation and a major lawsuit, a big enough risk for Jones to lie about.

But embalmers don’t open the belly. Jenner had once watched a funeral director use a trochar, a tool like a thick knitting needle, to prepare the abdomen: she pushed the trochar through the skin into the belly and then violently jammed it around inside in all directions to puncture the organs. Then she pulled out the trochar and instilled embalming fluid into the cavity, finally sealing the trochar hole with a button-like plug and stitches.

No, the embalmer wouldn’t do an abdominal incision.

What had they done?