I nodded my head. "Thanks."
"There are a few rules you need to know first," Mom said, as we walked downstairs. "Number one, you don't tell anyone about this, except maybe Dr. Neblin. Especially not Max. Number two, you do exactly what we say, when we say it. Number three—" We reached the embalming room and stopped just outside. "This is a very gruesome body, John. Mr. Bowen was torn in half at the trunk, and most of his abdomen isn't even there. If you feel like you have to leave, for goodness sake leave—I'm trying to help you here, not scar you for life. Show me that I can trust you, John. Please."
I nodded, and she stared at my face for a moment. Her eyes were a mixture of sadness and determination. I wondered if she could see through my eyes like windows, into the darkness inside, and the monster that lurked there. She opened the door, and we went in.
Roger Bowen's body was laid out on the embalming table in two pieces, with a gap of five or six inches where his top and bottom didn't quite meet. His chest was marked with a huge "Y" incision—shoulder to breastbone, shoulder to breastbone, and down the center from the breastbone to what was left of his waist. The incision was loosely laced shut, like a threadbare quilt. Margaret was at the side counter, sorting the internal organs from the autopsy bag and preparing to clean them with the trocar.
I was home again. The tools on the walls were in their right places, the embalming pump sat obediently on the counter, the formaldehyde and other colorful chemicals looked festive in rows along the wall. I felt myself slipping into familiar patterns—cleaning, disinfecting, stitching, sealing. His face was bruised, and his jaw was broken, but we rebuilt it with putty and recolored him with makeup.
While we worked, I thought about Crowley, and how he'd collapsed in the street after killing Max's dad. He'd pushed himself too far, waiting until the last possible moment before killing. But it made sense—letting time pass between kills made him harder to track, and it gave the public uproar time to die down. People grew less careful again. This time, though, it had nearly been too long—he'd only barely managed to replace his failing organs and regenerate. Worse than that, he'd had a witness—me—practically in his grasp, and then he'd been forced to let me get away. That seemed like a weakness I could use, but how?
There was always the fear angle—he didn't want to be discovered and now he had been, irrefutably, and in demon form. He knew now that whoever sent him those notes wasn't bluffing.
But watching him that night revealed more than his fear—it had revealed something about how the demon worked, biologically. I'd already guessed that his body was falling apart, but I hadn't realized how fragile he was. If he could get that close to death just by waiting too long, then I didn't need to kill him, just prevent him from regenerating, and let him die on his own.
A gash through his stomach, a bullet in his shoulder—these were wounds he could heal, perhaps in seconds. But his internal organs were different for some reason. When they stopped working, he stopped working. All I needed was a way to make sure that they stopped working permanently.
Using a photo, Mom and I finished rebuilding Mr. Bowen's face, and then started on the actual embalming. The body was too damaged to embalm normally, which made our job harder and easier at the same time. On the plus side, we only had to prepare half of the body for the viewing—the upper half would be dressed and displayed, while the bottom half and the organs were tucked neatly into a pair of large plastic bags, to be shoved down into the lower half of the coffin, out of sight. No matter how someone dies, it's never a good idea to look into the lower half of the coffin. Even though morticians prepare the whole body for burial, they only need to make part of it presentable. If there's any of it you can't see already, the odds are you don't want to see it at all.
The hard part, of course, was that we had to inject the embalming chemicals in three different places: one injection in his right shoulder, and one in each of his legs. We did our best to seal the major blood vessels before pumping in a coagulant to close up the smaller ones, and then Mom began mixing the careful cocktail of dyes and fragrances that would accompany the formaldehyde. I hooked up a drain tube, and we watched as the old blood and bile drained safely away.
Margaret looked up at the ventilator fan spinning doggedly above us. "I hope the motor doesn't give out."
"Let's step outside just in case," said Mom. "We deserve a break anyway." It was late afternoon, and already below freezing, so we retreated to the mortuary chapel instead of the parking lot, and relaxed on thinly upholstered benches while the body slowly pickled in the other room.
"Nice job, John," said Mom. "You're doing great."