I lost myself in what I was doing, my mind pulled into a body that was completely autolyzed and putrefied and hardly recognizable as human.

Death had rendered this man defenseless, and bacteria had escaped from the gastrointestinal tract, invading as it pleased, fomenting, fermenting, and filling every space with gas. Bacteria broke down cell walls and turned the blood in veins and arteries a greenish-black, making the entire circulatory system visible through the discolored skin like rivers and tributaries on a map.

Areas of the body that had been covered by clothing were in much better shape than the head and hands.

"God, how would you like to run into him when you're skinny-dipping at night?" Ruffin said, looking at the dead man.

"He can't help it," I said.

"And guess what, Chuckie-boy?" Marino said. "After you die someday, you're gonna look ugly as hell, too."

"Dу we know exactly where the container was in the ship's-hold?" I asked Marino.

"A couple rows down."

"What about weather conditions during the two weeks it was out at sea?"

"Mostly mild, averaging around sixty with a high of seventy. Merry El Niсo. People are doing Christmas shopping in their friggin' shorts."

"So you're thinking maybe this guy died on board and someone stuck him inside the container?" Ruffin asked.

"No, that ain't what I'm thinking, Chuckie-boy."

"The name's Chuck.".

"Depends on who's talking to you. So here's the daily double, Chuckie-boy. If you got tons of containers stacked like sardines in a hold, tell me how you sneak a dead body into one," Marino said. "No way you could even open the door. Plus the seal was intact."

I pulled a surgical lamp close and collected fibers and debris, using forceps and a lens, or, in some instances, swabs.

"Chuck, we need to check on how much formalin we've got," I said. "It was low the other day. Or have you already taken care of that?"

"Not yet."

"Don't inhale too many fumes," Marino said. "You can see what it does to all those brains you haul over to MCV"

Formalin was a diluted formaldehyde, a highly reactive chemical used to preserve or "fix" surgical sections or organs, or in anatomical donations, entire bodies. It killed tissue. It was extremely corrosive to respiratory passages, skin and eyes.

"I'll go check out the formalin;" Ruffin said.

"Not now you won't;" I said. "Not until we're done here.

He pulled off the cap of a permanent marker.

"How about buzzing Cleta to see if Anderson left," I said. "I don't want her wandering around somewhere."

"I'll do it;" Marino said.

"I gotta admit, it still blows my mind a little to see chicks chasing after killers." Ruffin directed this at Marino. "Back when you got started, they probably did nothing but check parking meters."

Marino went to the phone.

"Take off your gloves;" I called after him, because be always forgot, no matter how many Clean Hands signs I posted.

I moved the lens slowly and stopped. The knees looked abraded and dirty, as if he had been kneeling on a rough, dirty surface without his pants on. I checked his elbows. They looked dirty and abraded, too, but it was hard to tell with certainty because his skin was in such bad shape. I dipped a cotton swab in sterile water as Marino hung up the phone. I heard him tear open another pair of gloves.

"Anderson ain't here," he said. "Cleta said she left about a half hour ago."

"So what do you think about women lifting weights?" Ruffin asked Marino. "You see the muscles in Anderson's arms?"

I used a six-inch ruler as a scale. and started taking photographs with a thirty-five-millimeter camera and a macro lens. I found more dirty areas on the underside of the arms, and I swabbed them.

"I'm wondering if it was a full moon when the ship left Antwerp," Marino said to me.

"I guess if you want to live in a man's world you gotta be as strong as one;" Ruffin went on.

Running water was relentless and steel clanged against steel and overhead lights allowed no shadows.

"Well, it will be a new moon tonight;" I said. "Belgium's in the eastern hemisphere, but the lunar cycle would be the same there."

"So it could have been a full moon," Marino said.

I knew where he was going with this and my silence told him to stay away from the subject of werewolves.

"So what happened, Marino? The two of you arm-wrestle over your job?" Ruffin asked, cutting the twine around a bale of towels.

Marino's eyes were double barrels pointed at him.

"And I guess we know who won since she's the detective now and you're back in uniform," Ruffin said, smirking:

"You talking to me?"

"You heard me." Ruffin slid open a glass cabinet door.

"You know; it must be I'm getting old:" Marino snatched off his surgical cap and slammed it into the trash. "My hearing ain't what it used to be. But if I'm not mistaken, I believe you just pissed me off."

"What do you think of those iron women on TV? What about women wrestlers?" Ruffin kept going.

"Shut the fuck up," Marino told him.

"You're single, Marino. Would you go out with a woman like that?"

Ruffin had always resented. Marino, and now he had a chance to do something about it, or so he thought, because Ruffin's egocentric world turned on a very weak axis. In his dim way of seeing things, Marino was down and wounded. It was a good time to kick him around.

"Question is, would a woman like that go out with you?" Ruffin didn't have sense enough to run out of the room. "Or would any woman go out with you?"

Marino walked up to him. He got so close to Ruffin, they were face shield to face shield.

"I got a few little words of advice for you, asshole," Marino said, fogging up the plastic protecting his dangerous face. "Zip those sissy lips of yours before they kiss my fist. And put that tiny dick back in its holster before you hurt yourself with it."

Chuck's face turned scarlet, all this going on while the doors slid open and Neils Vander walked in carrying ink, a roller and ten print cards.

"Straighten up, and I mean now," I ordered Marino and Ruffin. "Or I'm throwing both of you out of here."

"Good morning," Vander said, as if it were.

"His skin's slipping badly," I told him.

"Just makes it easier."

Vander was the section chief of the fingerprints and impression lab, and wasn't bothered by much. It wasn't uncommon for him to shoo maggots away while he fingerprinted decomposed bodies, and he didn't flinch in burn cases when it was necessary to cut off the victim's fingers and carry them upstairs in ajar.

I had known him since the beginning of my time here, and he never seemed to get any older or change at all. He was still bald, tall and gangly and always lost in oversized lab coats that swirled and flapped around him as he hurried up and down halls.

Vander put on a pair of latex gloves and lightly held the dead man's hands, studying them, turning them this way and that.

"Easiest thing's gonna be to slide off the skin," he decided.

When a body was as decomposed as this one, the hand's top layer of skin slips off like a glove and, in fact, is called a glove. Vander worked fast, sliding off the gloves intact from each hand and working his own latex-sheathed hands inside them: Wearing the dead man's hands, in a sense, he inked each finger and rolled it onto a ten-print card. He removed the skin gloves and left them neatly on a surgical tray, then popped off his latex ones, before heading back upstairs.

"Chuck, put those in formalin," I said. "We'll want to save them."

He was sullen, screwing the lid off a plastic quart jar.

"Let's turn him," I said.

Marino helped us flip the body facedown. I found more dirt, mostly on the buttocks, and got swabs of that, too. I saw no injuries, only an area over the right upper back that seemed darker than the skin around it. I looked at it through a lens, staring, blanking out my thought process as I always did when looking for pattern injuries, bite marks or other elusive evidence. It was like scuba diving in water with almost no visibility. All I could make out were shades and shapes and wait until I bumped into something.