chapter four

word count: 527 Words

Jessica made her way home through the bustling hoards of office workers walking as fast as she could. Stan had told her to go to the hospital and get checked out, but she didn't bother. She just wanted to get home, home where she could be alone and sort her thoughts. My Gawd! The baby! She'd delivered a dead baby, and they'd stuffed it in a canister of grease and stuck it out in the garbage. The baby she'd been carrying in her belly all these months...gone now...

".... look man… no panties…"

Jessica maneuvered into a quick two-step to keep from colliding with the hooker. That ragged lady didn't even see her and went on about her unseemly business unfazed by the encounter. Another junkie wandering the streets, Jessica didn't live in the best part of town. Finally she reached home. By the time she'd crawled up the vomit and semen-stained staircase, she felt faint. The corridor pulsed like a living entity in itself, crawling with the murmurs of its inhabitant hidden behind shabby doors, punctuated by occasional screams or huffy pants of sexual exhaustion, ominous sounds creeping through cracks and crevices riding on the backs of cold drafts and bad odors. Once behind her own door, she fell into an exhausted sleep.

Stan paced. Up and down, up and down the hallway where he stood guard. He didn't tell Jessica the implications of their act. Charges for abuse of a corpse? Was a stillborn a corpse? Would they they think he or Jessica killed it? He didn't know. When he'd seen the Medical Examiner's black van pull into the yard, his heart missed beats. That was when the reality hit. They could be brought up on charges. Why had he panicked? He shouldn't have stuffed that baby into the canister.

"Stan, is something wrong?" It was the other guard, Vic.

"Nah, I'm just restless."

"You been pacing up and down this hallway like crazy. You can stay in one place for a while, you know. You're squirrelly today."

"Do you have any idea what the Medical Examiner said?"

"Huh? I dunno. I didn't get to go near him. It's Kramer, remember. I don't want anything to do with that guy."

Bud Kramer! That guy had an international reputation for deciphering even the most mysterious murders. Nothing got past his prying eyes and intellect. And of equal fame was his irascible temperament. The terminator, once he found his murderer, he beat the poor sap to a pulp, pulling together a body of evidence a saint couldn't disprove. A genius! By the time his report went to the DA, if the finger pointed your way, you might as well pack a bag for jail right there. Obviously, the DA loved this guy. He made the attorney's job easy. Stan didn't know how the hell he kept getting reelected, gathering the support of the people, with such a caustic personality. Apparently even they could see the man got the job done despite his mean streak. But they didn't have to put up with him every day.

"And I sure don't want to put up with him either," he murmured.