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D ead bodies give me the ick,” said Fields as they pulled into the underground parking garage of the D.C. medical examiner’s office.

“Since when?” replied Carolan as he searched for an empty spot.

“Since always.”

“I’ve been at multiple crime scenes with you where we’ve had to deal with dead bodies. You’ve held tarps and sheets up for me, you’ve gone through their pockets, looked in their mouths and under their fingernails. I’ve never heard you complain. Not once.”

“Because when they’re at the scene, they’re victims. But the minute they get to the morgue, they become corpses. And corpses freak me out.”

“So moving them from the scene to here somehow transmogrifies them?”

“It amps up the ick factor. That’s all I’m saying. It amps it way up.”

“I’ll bet you don’t like hospitals either,” replied Carolan as he found a vacant stall and pulled in.

“What the hell do hospitals have to do with anything?”

“It’s called nosocomephobia and it’s nothing to be ashamed about. At least ten percent of the population has it. A fear of doctors, lab coats, clinical settings, and hospitals. It stems from unresolved issues around illness, pain, and death.”

“Listen, I don’t like cherry ice cream. I don’t like men with back hair. And I don’t like corpses. Okay? It’s that simple. None of it needs to be explained by me having a phobia.”

“What is it they say?” Carolan asked as he turned off the ignition and opened his door. “The first step toward fixing a problem is admitting you have one?”

Fields gave him the finger.

“It would appear we’re still in the denial phase,” he stated. “We’ll have to work on that.”

Fields gave him her other finger and got out of the car.

“You want to explain to me what we’re doing here?” she asked as they walked across the garage.

“Newton’s first law of investigations,” Carolan replied.

“Which is?”

“An investigation that’s in motion tends to stay in motion.”

“Well, let me tell you something about motion. If I see a single corpse so much as twitch in there, my Glock’s coming out and they’re getting a free ride on the nine-millimeter train to hollow-point station.”

Carolan smiled. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. “Kinemortophobia. Fear of zombies.”

“Just keep your eyes open,” Fields responded, squaring her shoulders and stepping through the large glass doors. “It’s always the people who don’t believe in zombies who are the first to go.”

After presenting their credentials at the desk and signing in, they waited for a member of the ME’s team to take them back. Out of curiosity, Carolan scanned the names for anyone he might recognize. None rang a bell.

A few minutes later, a young man in scrubs appeared. “The FBI was just here an hour ago,” he stated.

“And now we’re back,” Carolan responded.

Exasperated, the young man checked his clipboard and said, “This way. Follow me.”

The young man took them back to a large, rectangular room. The far wall was studded with stainless-steel icebox-style doors, behind which human bodies could be stored on pullout drawers and kept cold.

The rest of the room was painted a chalky, pale blue with large porcelain floor tiles to match. The ceiling was covered with white acoustic panels. Stainless-steel counters, shelving units, and deep sinks lined the remaining walls.

Amassed in the center of the room, perfectly spaced, were six metal gurneys with a black body bag atop each.

“These are the attackers from outside the Naval Observatory?” Carolan asked.

“John Does one through five,” the young man replied, confirming the information on his clipboard. “John Doe number six was bagged inside the residence of the Norwegian ambassador. Where do you want to start?”

“That one,” said Carolan, pointing at the nearest body bag.

“Lucky number six,” the young man stated as he grabbed a pair of latex gloves from a box on the counter and put them on each of his hands with a snap.

Carolan and Fields followed suit, albeit with considerably less flourish, especially Fields, who quite visibly would have preferred to have been anywhere other than here.

“What are we looking for?” the ME staffer inquired as he unzipped the first bag.

“Pornography,” Carolan replied.

“Excuse me?”

“Back in 1964, when Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked for his definition of pornography, his answer was ‘I know it when I see it.’ That’s my answer too. What are we looking for? I’ll know it when I see it.”

Whether or not the answer made sense to the young man, it had the desired effect of getting him to stop asking questions. Carolan wasn’t here for chitchat. He needed to think and to observe.

While he and Fields inspected the first body, he sent the young man to unzip the other bags.

“Hell of a shot,” Carolan commented as he examined the hole in the corpse’s head.

After reading the report, he had gotten down on the floor of the kitchen in the Norwegian ambassador’s residence and had re-created what it had taken for Harvath to make that shot.

Only someone who had gone through as much trigger time as a guy like that could have had both the ability and the balls to pull it off.

“Besides porn,” said Fields, keeping her voice low as she forced herself to be professional and stand next to her boss, “what exactly are we looking for?”

“Anything that shouldn’t be here. Anything unusual or out of the ordinary,” he replied. “Their clothes have already been bagged for evidence, so we’re looking for distinguishing features like scars, tattoos, unusual bone growth—anything that might help us identify who they are.”

“Wouldn’t the agents before us have done this?”

“Yep. And now we’re doing it. Here,” said Carolan, opening the bag wider, and lifting up the man’s left arm, which was covered in a sleeve of tattoos from his shoulder to his wrist. “Hold this so I can get some photos.”

Fields shook her head. “This is why Black people always die first in horror movies. They listen to the White people,” she replied, pulling out her phone. “ You hold the zombie’s arm up. I’ll take the photos.”

As she began snapping pictures, the young ME staffer informed her, “The other FBI agents already did that. They had proper cameras and everything.”

Without missing a beat, she responded, “Somebody must have screwed up because they sent us to retake them all.”

“But they had proper cameras, lenses, all that. You’ve got what? An iPhone?”

She ignored his question and instead gave him another task. “As soon as you’re done unzipping those bags, I need you to come back over here and help my colleague roll John Doe number six onto his side.”

“Looking for more pornography?”

Fields smiled at him. “Sometimes it hides in interesting places.”

The young man wasn’t thrilled to be put to work, but the quickest way to get on with his day was to help the two FBI agents wrap up their examination and move along out his door.

They were on the second-to-last corpse when one tattoo in particular caught Carolan’s attention.

“Make sure you get a good picture of this,” he said.

Fields looked at it and snapped two photos, just to be sure. It was on this John Doe’s upper right thigh and appeared to be a half sword, half tree.

“What is it?” she asked.

Her boss shook his head. “I don’t know, but I think I’ve seen it before.”

“Where?”

“I don’t remember. And if you don’t stop asking me questions, I’m not going to tell you which of the bodies I just saw move behind you.”

Fields briefly glanced over her shoulder before raising her left hand, palm out, as if to say, “I get it. No more questions.”

They finished with the final corpse, thanked the young staffer, and exited the morgue back into the garage.

“Hungry?” Carolan asked.

Fields looked at him like he had grown a second head. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“No, I’m serious. I ran out of the house without breakfast this morning. All I’ve had is coffee. The low blood sugar is killing me.”

“You couldn’t pay me to eat right now.”

“Come on. We’re a nine-iron from the Wharf. There’s got to be over a dozen restaurants down there. Just pick one.”

“Are you buying?”

“If I’m the only one eating. If not, we split like we always do,” Carolan replied. “There’s the Grill, Bistro du Jour… I don’t care. I just need something.”

She looked at her watch. “Okay, we’ll go to Hank’s.”

“The oyster bar?”

“They have some of the best damn fries in the city.”

“So now you’re eating?”

“Listen, it’s Hank’s or nothing. Your call.”

“Fine. Hank’s.”

Within eleven minutes, they were sitting at a table outside with a view of Recreation Pier, the Potomac, and the boats in the Wharf Marina.

It was hot and steamy, but Fields didn’t care. After the trip to the morgue, she wanted as much fresh air as she could get. It was also nice to see the water.

Everywhere she looked there were American flags as people got ready to celebrate the Fourth of July.

By the time the waiter came to take their order, her appetite had returned.

She asked for a crab cake sandwich with Old Bay french fries on the side.

Carolan ordered a shrimp po’boy and subbed in hush puppies.

The setting and the food beat the hell out of the Shake Shack or the Five Guys near the office.

For a few moments, she could relax and almost forget that she was a law enforcement officer.

Across the table from her, Carolan scrolled through the photos she had AirDropped to his phone.

Zooming in on several of them, he stated, “Based on all the red, white, and blue ink, I think we can safely say our John Does were not foreign actors.”

“So they were Americans attacking Americans? Why?”

“I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’ve got a splitting headache. Where’s that guy with my Coke?”

As if on cue, the waiter appeared carrying their beverages. Setting the glasses down, he told them their lunch would be ready soon and disappeared back inside.

Carolan pulled the paper off his straw and went after his soft drink like a man who had just stumbled out of the desert.

“God, you have no idea how much I needed that,” he said, pausing as the sugar from the Coke began to work its magic.

She was about to admonish him that he needed to take better care of himself when their phones chimed in unison.

“It’s a text to us from Gallo,” she stated, looking down at her phone.

Sipping his Coke, with his eyes closed and his face turned up toward the sun, Carolan replied, “What does it say?”

“The Bureau has compiled all the CCTV footage from the cameras in the area, as well as from the cell phones of protesters who were recording at the time of the attack, and have produced a master video. It’s encrypted in the cloud. He’s given us a login and password.”

“I’m not watching that before I eat. But feel free,” Carolan replied.

“And you make fun of me for being grossed-out by the morgue.”

“The purposeful taking of innocent life doesn’t give me a queasy stomach, it pisses me off,” her boss responded. “And when I get angry and try to put food on top of it, I get acid reflux, which pisses me off even more.”

It pissed Fields off too, but not to the extent that she couldn’t watch the video and try to learn from it, which is what she did until their lunch arrived.

Once they began eating, the conversation shifted to sports—primarily how the Washington Nationals were doing and what their hopes were for the Commanders in the upcoming season.

Fields then mentioned that friends of hers were planning simultaneous bachelor and bachelorette parties in Vegas and that the guys had picked the dates to coincide with a big MMA fight they wanted to attend. Suddenly a light bulb went off for Carolan and he waved the waiter over.

“What’s going on?” Fields asked.

“That tattoo of the sword and the tree,” he replied, fishing some cash out of his wallet. “I remember now where I saw it.”

As the waiter approached, he handed the money to him and told him to keep the change.

Taking one last bite of his sandwich, he washed it down with what was left of his second Coke and said, “Let’s go. We need to get back to the office.”