“Judge me all you want, but I saw what happened to the guys at the station who ate like that,” Chase rolled his eyes, resting his free hand on his washboard stomach. “I’d prefer not to turn into a walking heart attack if I can avoid it.” Despite the training the officers went through to get their jobs, plenty of them put on guts after just a few years in the field. The job really wasn’t as demanding as most people thought it was. They often spent most of their days doing paperwork or patrolling in cars, rarely exercising. He wouldn’t have been surprised if more than half of his old coworkers couldn’t pass the physical exam if they were asked to take it again tomorrow. The only reason he hadn’t become like them was because of his personal habits.

Having always participated in athletic sports or otherwise worked out in some form or fashion, Chase considered himself to have a pretty active lifestyle. Of course, he didn’t shy away from indulging in sweets and snacks once in a while, but he’d never ate them regularly enough to get a taste for the stuff. His biggest vice was alcohol. While he wasn’t an alcoholic by any means, he did like to go out to the bars in Manhattan with his roommate, Derek Morris, on a fairly regular basis. If there was ever a reason to hit the town—celebrations, holidays, breakups, you name it—the two of them would be there.

As Alix led the way to the morgue, Chase fell in step at her side, absently working on peeling the thick skin off the orange in his hands. He’d heard a bit about the body she was telling him about. It had been found recently enough that his old coworkers were still talking about it down at the station. They hadn’t thought it was strange though. Usually the bodies found on the coast belonged to drunken sailors who stumbled over the edge of their ships. He wondered why they were supposed to investigate this one now.

At her question, he shook his head. “Wet, yes, but not old. We never dealt with the bodies after they were taken to autopsy.” In fact, this was the first cadaver he was going to see. He wasn’t sure what to think about that.

Trailing slightly behind her, he took a moment to look around the lab they had walked into. It was clinical in appearance, like the surgery room at a hospital, with ominous steel tools on the surface of one of the tables near the back. He shivered at the cold air. It certainly wasn’t a place he hoped to find himself in very often.

His attention was drawn back to the matter at hand when the technician greeted them. As the man referred to him as Bronson, Chase stared at him, unsure if he was being serious or not. Luckily, Alix cleared it up as a joke.

“Nice to meet you too,” the new detective nodded, though privately he wasn’t sure what his opinion was of the scientist yet.

Moving on to the examination of the body, Chase edged a little closer to the table, morbidly curious as Karl pulled back the sheet that covered it. Right away, the pungent odor of partially rotted flesh made him wrinkle his nose. No dead body ever smelled good, but this one was particularly stomach-churning. It didn’t look any better either. He had to force himself not to avert his gaze as the technician described his findings.

When Karl handed over the tox reports, he accepted his eagerly, happy to look at anything beside the cadaver in front of him. He skimmed over the paper in his hand and glanced over Alix’s shoulder—an easy task, since he stood about a foot taller than her—to read hers as well.

“They both ingested cyanide,” he connected aloud, looking up at the technician with some alarm. “They were poisoned?”