"A person's remains are rarely handled immediately after death. They're usually kept in the morgue for two or three days—you know, to make sure the body won't suddenly come back to life before it's handed over to the funeral home." As he led Mills and Antony through the gloomy corridors of the hospital morgue, the night watchman said, "Sometimes doctors make the wrong call, or the body is only in a state of suspended death. The first time I worked a night shift, a corpse sat up by itself. Scared me so badly I nearly pissed myself."
"I know about that." Antony spoke enthusiastically to the watchman. "In the eighteenth century, 'body snatchers' were also called 'resurrectionists.' They specialized in stealing corpses from graveyards and selling them to surgeons at high prices, leaving empty graves behind, as if the people buried there had risen from the dead. To them, an unattended cemetery was a ready-made corpse field. Even medical students studying surgery got involved in stealing bodies."
The watchman gave Antony a strange look.
"Don't listen to him." Mills shoved the watchman. "Take us to see the body that came in today."
"Brother, I don't know what you two are planning, but I don't want to lose my job." The watchman turned around and eyed them suspiciously.
"What do you want?"
The watchman rubbed his thumb and index finger together at Mills.
"Don't ask me." Mills jerked his chin at Antony. Antony remained unmoved, so the watchman simply stopped walking.
After about a minute of stalemate, Antony had no choice but to pull out his wallet and hand him two more green bills bearing Benjamin Franklin's portrait.
The watchman shrugged and led them past two more racks of bodies. Like store shelves, they were packed with corpses covered in white