'My God!' She almost ran into me. 'I turn my back for a minute and he's gone.'

The man let himself out, the gate flung open wide as he fled. Foley trotted across the parking lot to shut and latch it again. When she got back to me, she was out of breath and almost tripped over a bump in the pavement.

'Kay, you're out and about early,' she said.

'A relative?' I asked.

'The father. Left without identifying him, before I could even pull back the sheet. That will foul me up the rest of the day.'

She led me inside the small brick morgue with its white porcelain autopsy tables that probably belonged in a medical museum and old iron stove that heated nothing anymore. The air was refrigerated-chilly, modern equipment nonexistent except for electric autopsy saws. Thin gray light seeped through opaque skylights, barely illuminating the white paper sheet covering a body that a father could not bear to see.

'It's always the hardest part,' she was saying. 'No one should ever have to look at anyone in here.'

I followed her into a small storeroom and helped carry out boxes of new syringes, masks and gloves.

'Strung himself up from the rafters in the barn,' she went on as we worked. 'Was being treated for a drink problem and depression. More of the same. Unemployment, women, drugs. They hang themselves or jump off bridges.' She glanced at me as we restocked a surgical cart. 'Thank God we don't have guns. Especially since I don't

have an X-ray machine.'

Foley was a slight woman with old-fashioned thick glasses and a penchant for tweed. We had met years ago at an international forensic science conference in Vienna, when female forensic pathologists were a rare breed, especially overseas. We quickly had become friends.