Read Online Always Kiss the Corpse by Sandy Frances Duncan - Free Book Online

get access to DNA testing—” She spotted the sign: Anacortes–Whidbey Island. She pulled into the right lane and slowed. “And we better talk to Sandro’s colleagues—find out how he looked and acted recently.”
    They drove west along a two-lane highway, the sun now behind them. Noel said, “There’s Mrs. Vasiliadis’ comment, ‘A mother should recognize her own son.’ How do you recognize someone?”
    â€œHmm,” Kyra murmured, thinking she’d recognize any of her three ex-husbands if they popped up in that field among the cows. “It’s the whole picture, the gestalt.”
    â€œBut suppose all you have is appearance, no motion, no gesture, no slouch or stiffness.”
    â€œLike the corpse for Mrs. Vasiliadis?”
    â€œOnce I was Christmas shopping at a mall in Nanaimo, figuring what to get my parents. I kept seeing bits of them in half the seventy-year-old couples around. Then my parents really did appear. Looking like a seventy-year-old couple, but I instantly knew it was them. Now how did I know that? And not the other couples I’d been turning into them?”
    Good question. “You’ll recognize your parents in their coffins because you’ll have gone through their deaths with them. Like I will with mine. But this mother didn’t, the death was sudden. Nobody in Sandro’s family, or his oldest friend, had seen him for what, months? Years? Why? Just busy?”
    Now trees loomed ahead. The flat farmland fell away, the road curved and they swept across a narrow two-lane bridge. Below, maybe a hundred feet down, the waters swirled, ignorant of direction. “Deception Pass,” said Kyra. “This bridge was a 1930s make-work project.”
    â€œWell now.” Noel examined it. “How much is an island a real island if the island is connected to the mainland by a bridge?”
    â€œYou mean,” said Kyra, “a bridge can keep an island from being a real island? And if so, maybe Islands Investigations International shouldn’t be on this case in the first place?”
    â€œJust wondering.”
    â€œThat logic’s hard on Prince Edward Island with its new Confederation Bridge.”
    â‰ˆÂ Â â‰ˆÂ Â â‰ˆ
    Claude Martin’s office was spare: two wooden chairs, a bare wooden desk with another chair. No computer, no family pictures, just a phone and blotter. Noel hadn’t seen a blotter in years. Impressive-looking certificates hung on the wall. The receptionist had showed him in. Now Martin the mortician was taking his time. Noel sniffed hard. No embalming or other funereal odors. Despite their absence, he shuddered.
    He should have insisted: the sheriff! Not that he particularly wanted to chat with some local sheriff, but he didn’t want to be in a funeral home. He shifted in the chair. Now his stomach was clenching. They had taken Brendan to Brentwood Gardens in Nanaimo—the package that had been Brendan, the shell. A bald old gentleman had told Noel he could see Brendan just as long as Noel wanted. Brendan’s body lay in the chapel. Noel entered the chapel. The backs of twelve rows of benches faced him, all empty; an aisle between them, a small raised platform ahead. At the end of the aisle, the coffin. A recorded organ, barely audible, had dirged through the thick chilled air.
    Enough. The matter at hand was Claude Martin. Where the hell was he.
    Who would decide to become a mortician? Noel could grasp garbage collecting and septic tank cleaning, jobs you needed virtually no training for. Get desperate enough, you can work on a tank-truck that sucks shit out of concrete septics. Going to school for dozens of years to become, say, a dentist, and spend the rest of your life manipulating broken teeth and patching up rotten gums, even that he could figure. But learning to clean a corpse, drain the fluids or whatever, smear makeup on dead skin? In keeping with the