Cinnamon Lips

Rankin and Forsythe thought the bruise looked like a kiss, a tender blessing behind her ear, but Josep, the coroner, said he couldn't make it out. Josep said he was too long in the tooth to see anything more than the facts. It seemed that the one blow had killed her though, cracking the skull at the base and knocking her straight out, never to wake up. She had a thin sliver of glass in her ear that looked like a piercing. Josep ran the trolley into the chiller room, next to the body pulled from the water that morning. When he stood at her head, looking at her face upside down, a spark of recognition flashed in his mind but couldn't place it. He said nothing. Rankin and Forsythe continued to argue about lunch then left.

They returned an hour later. Forsythe was still finishing a pulled pork sandwich and he waved away an assistant who tried to shoo his food out of the morgue. Josep told them he hadn't had a chance to look at her properly and they feigned annoyance but slunk off again to get coffee and pastries. They didn't have any leads anyway and didn't expect to get any; her mother had been the only person they could track down and she hadn't seen her for over a year. They checked in again at the end of the day, sharing a cinnamon swirl, but Josep wasn't around so after staring gormlessly at the kiss for a few minutes, they left for a bar, not bothering to brush away the crumbs that had drifted down onto her lips.

Later that night, Josep was about to start examining her when the recognition grabbed him again. She had worked somewhere he went. Where was it? Damnit, where? The supermarket? No, he could picture the four women who worked there easily, two being part of a running fantasy in his head. The cinema? Hmmm, maybe but it didn't jump out at him. The garage! She hung around the garage where that greasy prick would rip him off for new brakes and oil changes every few months. Maybe she was a girlfriend, surely not an employee, not with that hair.

He got in his car, which was behaving today, fortunately, and he drove out to the garage. Everything was shut up but not with any real security in mind so he easily climbed in through a broken side window and used the light from his phone to begin snooping around. He clattered against toolboxes and stumbled over chains, looking for a clue, anything, a connection. He slipped on an oil patch and flung out his arms, grasping something hanging on the wall. He managed not to fall but he grazed his shoulder and face. He brought the light up and saw he had caught hold of a tool in a rack made from a rusted metal sheet. The tool was a heavy pipe with the last quarter bent at a right angle. It had a hexagonal mouth for loosening bolts. A mouth, he noticed, with hard metal lips. A door banged.

Rankin and Forsythe were on duty when Josep's body turned up a few months later. The new coroner didn't agree but they were adamant that the heavy mark on his temple looked just like a kiss. After searching all the unmarked morgue units, they eventually found where Josep had hurriedly stored the woman who they'd brought in that day. They pulled it open and were hit with the foul stink of a rotted corpse. The new coroner mumbled something about dodgy temperature controls and how some sort of contaminate must have got in. Rankin swore he smelt cinnamon but said they would check it all out, after lunch of course.