Bay Seven

"She didn't break the system. She spoke its language. That's the part that keeps me up at night." — Detective Sergeant Alexander Stout

The Campbell Street service entrance opened onto a corridor that smelled of disinfectant and recycled air. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, their light flat and unforgiving against institutional green walls and grey linoleum that squeaked under their shoes. Small black signs pointed the way — Pathology, Histology, Mortuary Services — each one directing them further from the hospital's public face and deeper into its working anatomy.

Stout had briefed Garrett in the car. The basics — enough for him to understand what they were walking into and why it couldn't wait until morning. Garrett had listened without interruption, asked two questions, and then sat in silence for the remainder of the drive with his gaze fixed on the passing streetlights and his hands still in his lap.

The mortuary office was at the end of the corridor. A half-glazed door with a light on behind it. Stout knocked.

The man who opened it was in his late fifties — grey-haired, lean, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He wore a white coat over a checked shirt, the coat clean but softened by years of laundering. A hospital ID badge was clipped to the breast pocket. Colin Marsh — Mortuary Services. His eyes moved between the two detectives with the measured curiosity of someone whose workplace sat at the boundary between medicine and law and who was accustomed to visitors from both sides arriving at unconventional hours.

"Detectives? What can I do for you?"

"Detective Sergeant Stout, Tasmania Police." He held up his warrant card. "This is Senior Constable Garrett, Victoria Police. We need to verify the status of a body held in your cold storage. Cody Brian Jennings, admitted second of August. Bay seven. Police investigation hold."

Marsh stepped back to let them in. The office was small and meticulously kept — a desk bearing nothing beyond a computer and a telephone, a wall-mounted calendar with shift rotations pencilled in neat block letters, a kettle and a single mug on a side table beside a folded newspaper open to the crossword. Half completed, the pencil resting in the fold. A door at the rear led through to the cold storage facility.

"Bay seven," Marsh said. He settled into his chair and typed with the unhurried deliberation of someone who respected the system he was navigating. Scrolled. Clicked. Scrolled again.

His fingers stopped on the keyboard.

"Jennings, Cody Brian. Admitted second of August, twenty-one—twenty. Bay seven." He read the next line on the screen. Read it again, his brow drawing down. "Body released today at eleven-forty. Authorised cremation."

The words landed in the small office and the room changed around them. Stout felt it in his chest — not shock, but the particular lurch of a mind that had braced for one discovery and been handed something entirely different. He'd expected an empty drawer. A missing body. Evidence of a desperate act carried out under cover of darkness. Not paperwork. Not an authorised release. Not the system itself opening its doors and handing over its contents with a signature and a smile.

"Released," Stout said.

"That's what the system shows. Released for cremation earlier today. All paperwork logged as complete — release authorisation, cremation order, transfer of custody documentation." Marsh leaned closer to the screen, his reading glasses sliding down to the bridge of his nose. "Officer authorising release — Detective Sarah Lahey, Tasmania Police."

Beside Stout, Garrett's jaw tightened. His arms, folded across his chest since they'd entered the office, pressed closer to his body. Nothing else moved.

Stout ran the arithmetic and the numbers burned. Eleven-forty this morning. The blood results had come in first thing. Sienna had been building the surveillance application, securing Professional Standards authorisation, coordinating the Victorian secondment. Webb and Garrett had been on a plane crossing Bass Strait. The entire apparatus of the covert operation — the briefing, the encrypted communications, the careful compartmentalisation — had been assembling itself through the morning and into the afternoon. And at eleven-forty, while none of it was yet in place, Sarah Lahey had been standing in this building with signed paperwork and a funeral director, having a body released through the system designed to hold it.

Hours. Not days. Not even a full shift's worth of hours. She'd walked out of this mortuary with Cody Jennings' remains before Stout had finished his first coffee.

"The paperwork is in order?" Stout asked. His voice held steady. The ground beneath it didn't.

"From what I can see on the system, yes. Authorisation form signed by the investigating officer. Cremation order filed. Transfer of custody completed to —" Marsh scrolled again. "McAllister and Sons Funeral Services, 14 Derwent Park Road, Moonah. Collection logged at twelve-fifteen."

Stout let the full shape of it settle. This wasn't a theft. There was no broken lock, no tampered drawer, no gap in overnight footage to be analysed and puzzled over. Sarah hadn't smuggled a body through a service corridor under cover of darkness. She'd walked through the front door of the mortuary in the middle of a working day with documentation and credentials and a contracted funeral service company, and she'd had a body under active police investigation hold signed over to her custody and transported to a funeral home for destruction.

The system hadn't failed. The system had performed flawlessly — processing forms, checking credentials, following protocols, releasing the body to an officer with the correct paperwork accompanied by a registered funeral service provider. Every mechanism had functioned. Every safeguard had held. And Sarah had moved through all of it because she hadn't broken the system. She'd spoken its language fluently enough to make it do what she wanted.

The same pattern. Karl's access card at every door in the station. Beatrix walking through the building at one in the morning. The staged bedroom. The emptied house. Again and again — not brute force but fluency. Not breaking in but being let in. The locks didn't fail. The people holding the keys were given reasons to turn them.

"Mr Marsh. You weren't on shift when this happened."

"No. I'm nights. Six to six. The release was processed during the day — eleven-forty, that's Janet's shift. Janet Howell. She's been here longer than I have."

"I need to speak to her."

Marsh's hands came together on the desk. His thumbs pressed against each other, the knuckles whitening slightly. "It's nearly eleven. Janet will be at home. She starts at six —"

"Now, Mr Marsh."

Marsh held Stout's gaze for a moment. Whatever calculation was running behind his eyes completed itself quickly. He reached for the desk phone and dialled.

The phone rang four times. Five. Six. Then a voice — distant, thickened with sleep, carrying the confusion of someone wrenched from whatever dream had been keeping them company.

"Janet, it's Colin. I'm sorry to wake you." Marsh's tone had shifted — gentler, apologetic, the voice of a colleague who understood the transgression of an eleven o'clock call. "I've got two detectives here in the office. They need to speak with you about a release you processed today."

The tinny sound of a question through the receiver.

"Jennings. Bay seven."

A shorter question. Sharper.

Marsh held the phone out to Stout. "She's awake."

Stout took the receiver. "Mrs Howell, this is Detective Sergeant Stout, Tasmania Police. I apologise for the hour. I need to ask you about the release of Cody Jennings from your facility earlier today."

Silence. The sound of bedclothes shifting, a lamp clicking on, the creak of a mattress as someone sat up and pulled themselves from one state of consciousness into another. When Janet Howell's voice returned it had shed the grogginess — underneath was something clear and measured, the voice of a woman who chose her words with care because her profession required it and her temperament demanded it.

"Today. Yes. The cremation release. I remember."

"Walk me through what happened."

"A detective arrived mid-morning. Late thirties, dark hair, neat. She had the authorisation paperwork with her — release form, cremation order, transfer of custody documentation. Everything was signed. I checked her identification — warrant card, photograph matched, name matched the paperwork. Detective Lahey." Howell paused, organising the sequence with the precision of someone trained to recall procedural details accurately. "She was professional. Knew the procedure without being told — said the investigation had concluded its requirement for the remains and that the coroner had approved cremation. The funeral directors arrived with her. McAllister and Sons — I've dealt with them for years, they're a well-established firm. Two men with their vehicle. I completed the transfer documentation, they collected the body from bay seven. The whole process took approximately thirty minutes."

She stopped. Drew a breath.

"Standard procedure. Nothing about it raised any concern at the time."

At the time. The qualifier hung in the air between the phone and the mortuary office — two words that separated the transaction Janet Howell had processed twelve hours ago from the transaction she was now being asked to describe to a detective at eleven o'clock at night. The gap between those two realities was where the damage lived.

"The paperwork she brought," Stout said. "The release form, the cremation order — were they standard forms? Ones you'd normally see?"

"The release authorisation was a Tasmania Police form — I recognised the format, we see them regularly for investigation holds. The cremation order was a coroner's office document. Both appeared to be originals, not copies. Both carried the appropriate signatures and reference numbers. I checked them against our records. They matched the formatting we have on file."

Forged. Or sourced from within the system by someone with access to blank forms and the knowledge of which signatures and reference numbers would survive inspection. Either way, what Stout was hearing described wasn't a panicked improvisation. Sarah hadn't woken up this morning and decided to take a body from the morgue. She'd obtained official documentation — Tasmania Police release forms, coroner's office cremation orders — completed them with the correct formatting and reference structures, contracted a funeral service company to provide the logistical capability, retrieved a warrant card she'd surrendered when she went on administrative leave, and presented herself at the mortuary with everything necessary to make the release indistinguishable from routine.

This had been planned. Not hours in advance — days. Perhaps longer. While Stout had been searching Karl's house and briefing with Sienna and watching surveillance footage and feeling the ground shift beneath his feet one revelation at a time, Sarah had been assembling the components of a fraudulent body release with the same methodical precision that characterised everything else in this investigation. Each piece sourced separately. Each piece slotting into place. The documentation, the funeral directors, the warrant card, the timing — all of it calibrated to execute within the narrow window before anyone thought to check whether the body was still where it was supposed to be.

And she'd done it this morning. While the operation to watch her was still taking shape in meeting rooms and phone calls and encrypted messages. She'd been ahead of them before they'd started.

"Mrs Howell, the investigation hold on the body — the system shows it was active when you processed the release. Did Detective Lahey address that?"

"She did." Howell's voice tightened almost imperceptibly — the first crack in the professional composure, the sound of a memory being re-examined under new light. "She said the hold had been lifted as of that morning and that the updated documentation would be processed through the system later in the day. She had a reference number for the hold release — I checked it against the format and it appeared genuine." A pause. Longer this time. "In hindsight, I should have verified the hold release independently before completing the transfer. But the detective was standing in front of me with what appeared to be legitimate documentation, the reference number matched our standard format, and the funeral directors were waiting. I processed it."

"You did what anyone would have done, Mrs Howell." The words were genuine — not comfort, not strategy, but the honest assessment of a detective who'd spent the past five days watching systems fail under the weight of credentials that appeared legitimate. Janet Howell hadn't made a mistake. She'd followed her training exactly as it was designed to function, and the woman standing in front of her had exploited that training.

"Detective Stout." Howell's voice had changed again. The professional composure was intact but something else had joined it — a dawning gravity, the particular quality that entered a person's voice when they understood that a conversation they'd thought was routine was in fact the opening of something much larger. "Is there a problem with this release?"

Stout looked at Garrett. Garrett's eyes were fixed on the wall above Marsh's desk — the shift calendar, the pencilled rotations, the ordinary infrastructure of a workplace that had been used as a tool without knowing it. His face was unreadable but his stillness communicated its own answer.

"Mrs Howell, I need to ask you not to discuss this conversation with anyone until you hear from me directly. Not your colleagues, not your supervisor, not hospital administration. I understand that's a significant request given your professional obligations. I'm asking it because the integrity of an active investigation depends on it."

Three seconds of silence. The weight of what Stout was asking — and everything it implied about what had happened in her mortuary that morning — filling the space between them.

"Yes," she said quietly. "I can do that."

"Thank you. You've been extremely helpful. I'll be in touch."

He handed the receiver back to Marsh. Marsh replaced it in its cradle with both hands, the gesture slow — a man handling the instrument that had just delivered information he wished he hadn't received.

"Mr Marsh. The same applies to you. Nothing we've discussed tonight leaves this office. Not tomorrow morning, not during shift handover, not in any form. You speak to no one about this until you hear from me or from Detective Inspector Blackwood directly. Understood?"

Marsh nodded. His hands rested on the desk beside his keyboard, the half-finished crossword sitting in the fold of his newspaper where he'd left it when the knock came. The pencil lay in the crease between six across and twelve down. An ordinary Tuesday night in the mortuary, interrupted by something that would sit behind his eyes for a long time.

"Understood," he said.

Stout and Garrett left the mortuary office without speaking. The corridor stretched ahead of them — green walls, grey floor, the fluorescent tubes casting their indifferent light across linoleum that squeaked under their shoes the same way it had when they'd walked in twenty minutes ago. Twenty minutes. That was all it had taken to discover that an operation twelve hours old was already chasing a ghost.

Garrett broke the silence as they pushed through the Campbell Street door into the cold night air. The wind off the river hit them both — sharp, immediate, carrying the mineral smell of cold water and the distant sound of a city that was mostly asleep.

"McAllister and Sons. Moonah."

"Yes."

"Now?"

"Now."