The Viewing

The body arrived on a Tuesday. John Doe, gunshot wound to the face, found in an alley behind a dry cleaner's. No identification, no witnesses, no leads. Just another county cremation—$800 for basic services, no frills. Justin Brothers had been a funeral director for twenty years. He'd seen worse. But when he unzipped the bag, he saw the hair. Dark brown, graying at the temples. The same pattern he saw in his own mirror every morning. The ears were right too. And there, just below the jawline, curving like a crescent moon—a scar. The exact scar Bobby Marks had given him when he was nine years old. He pulled back the sheet. The body was male, mid-fifties, soft around the middle. And just to the left of the navel: three moles, arranged in a perfect triangle. Justin's hand went to his own stomach. He didn't need to look. He knew where those moles were. He'd had them his whole life. The face was gone—that's what a close-range gunshot does. But everything else was there. Everything that made a person recognizable. Everything that made this body look exactly like him.