Page 48 of A Forgotten Mistake

“I don’t know! I just had to complete this shadow day thing for school, and everyone said it was super cool that I got to go tohomicide, but I’m seeing that they were very wrong! I’m going to have to lie to them and tell them we did something neat.”

“Who the hell thought it was a good idea to give Liam a child?” Matthew asks. I pretend I don’t notice that Jesse, who is walking with him, snaps his head around and gives me a look of absolute horror. Like what do these two think I’m going to do with the kid? They act like I’ve been known to resort to cannibalism. I don’t feast off the flesh of humans, I feast off their misery.

“Noooo, you poor thing,” Jesse says, cooing to him even though the “kid” is taller than him.

“Do you want me to teach you how to arrest someone?” I ask as I grab Matthew’s arm. “First you have to gain the upper hand. It’s best if you tell them something that’ll knock their spirit down a little first. Like ‘How are you still single at your age?’”

Matthew’s face scrunches up, telling me I’ve done a decent job. “Jesus Christ, you were single at this age too, like a fucking month ago!” he protests. “We’re the same age!”

“And once they’re close to tears, you pin their arms behind them. Just don’t let them cry too much or things get a bit slippery.”

“Only you could make someone cry enough that their arms are slick!” Matthew says.

I ignore him, which is best to do. “If they don’t want to go down peacefully, you go for the eyes or the nuts.”

“Leave my nuts alone!” Matthew cries.

“You can weigh his intelligence when he decides to save his nuts over his eyes,” I explain. “Are you writing this down?”

Cole’s brow furrows. “Am I supposed to?” Weirdly, he looks confused by this, but that’s probably just because he’s naive to the world.

“So now that we have him in handcuffs, we can go about our day,” I say.

“Uncuff me,” Matthew demands.

“Can you get sued for this?” Cole asks, like he wants to take notes onthatpart.

“Let me tell you a secret, Cole. This morning, I was handed a case that another team was working on for two weeks. I figured it out in forty-seven minutes. If you make yourself invaluable, you are allowed to doanything.”

Jesse laughs, clearly agreeing with me. “I mean… he’s kind of right. There’s no way we’d put up with any of this if he wasn’t useful. And because he is, we’re all stuck going along with his antics.”

“See? They’re all my lackeys because I am superior.”

“Now you went too far,” Jesse says as I laugh, pleased with myself.

“Next thing I will teach you is how to pick a lock.”

“Aren’t we the good guys?” Matthew asks. “Why would we be picking locks? Absolutely no one should have okayed this.”

“Ah, right. I mixed things up there. Okay, Cole. We’re going to do a fake case and see if you can figure it out. I’m going to take this pencil and stab Matthew a few times and then you’re going to learn how to identify blood splatter.”

“Does being valuable save you if you stab your coworker as well?” Cole asks.

“It depends how much the other coworkers like the one you stabbed,” I explain. “With Matthew, everyone will look the other way. Some may even clap.”

“People like me!” Matthew says, sounding a bit desperate for my taste. “I’m like the fun and nice guy!”

I sigh. “So what do I do with him if I can’t show him dead bodies, can’t show him blood splatter… do you want to see our confiscated items room? There’s some neat stuff in there. If you aren’t a narc, I’ll even let you play with some of it?—”

“Why don’t you come down with me?” Jesse breaks in as he rudely pushes me and my phenomenal ideas out of the way. “I’m a medical examiner, and I promise I won’t show you any dead bodies, but I can tell you about what I do?”

“Okay. Yeah… sure. Anything sounds better than being allowed to play with the drugs in the confiscated pile,” Cole says, so the three of us head down there. The moment we’re in the room, Cole’s eyes latch on to the drawers hiding the dead bodies, and he proceeds to pay no attention to Jesse at all.

“Are there dead people in there?” he asks, and I can’t tell whether he’s horrified or curious.

“There are,” Jesse replies as he leans against a table. “And I know it sounds a bit creepy, but it’s such a vital part of an investigation. There are so many things that can be learned from the dead. We can discover how long ago someone died, but we also have to consider other circumstances. What was the weather like? What kind of things were in their environment? Was it a closed space or was there air circulation? Did it freeze the night before? Then we’ve got rigor mortis and livor mortis, which is a huge topic itself. Oh! You want to hear somethingfascinating? We can tell stages of decomposition from the stage of larvae found in the body. So at first you have the eggs, of course. Takes about a day for them to hatch, then they begin to feast on the fluids exuded from the body as they migrateintothe body?—”

“I love that you thought I was being a bit much, but you’re now giving the kid the ick by talking about larvae in decomposing bodies and masses of maggots,” I say as Cole stares at Jesse with wide and horrified eyes. “He’s going to lie in bed tonight and feel the larvae you so happily talked about crawling all over him.”

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