I get up and look at Detective Chen guiltily. “I emailed you the pictures.”

“Great,” Chen seems to mistake my guilt for apprehension about seeing the body. “This will only take a minute.

We ride the elevator to the basement level, where I finally realize what the unmistakably morgue-like smell of ammonia and formaldehyde is. I follow Detective Chen to the first room on the right. No one else is in the room. No one else alive, that is.

The detective approaches the body on the stretcher and pulls back the sheet. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a dead body.

But it’s her. Unmistakably, even from just the neck up. It’s the woman from the bar.

  “That’s her,” I tell Chen. “That’s the woman I...

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