Cold City RPG - (P#8) Scene #4 - St Joseph's Hospital Morgue

Cold City RPG

(P#8) Scene #4 - St Joseph's Hospital Morgue (#1, #2, #3, #5)

St Joseph's is a large complex with several hospital wings feeding from a central administration building. During the war years it lost many of it's satellite buildings, but had remained relatively intact itself. The once landscaped grounds now hold a series of temporary wards allowing the hospital to be slowly refurbished.

Dr. Lutzow

Dr. Juliet Bloom (PC and RPA agent), through an old "social" acquaintance, had arranged ID to freely access the hospital. Once there she made her way into it's basement level morgue to meet with a Dr. Horst Lutzow. 

The stairwell leading down to the basement is damp and in a poor state of repair, paint peeling from the walls. Reaching the basement level Dr. Bloom could hear the muffled hum of a generator in the distance. The corridor was cold and poorly lit, but ahead she could see a sign for the Leichenschauhaus (morgue) and followed it.

St Joseph's Hospital, Berlin

Approaching the morgue itself, she passed six or seven trolleys that lined the walls. Each trolley was occupied with a corpse and covered with an off-white sheet and she could almost taste the smell of death in the air, a sickening mix of disinfectant and decaying flesh.

A trolley in the morgue corridor

Pushing through the swinging wooden doors Dr. Bloom entered the morgue, a wide room with a small adjoining office space. Dr. Lutzow was working on the corpse of a young man, but turned to face her as the doors swung shut. "Ja? Wer bist du?" 

Juliet introduced herself and shook Dr. Lutzow's cool damp hand. She wanted to understand the reason behind Pvt Grey's death, but Dr. Lutzow visibly closed-up as she brought this up and described his death as a "drowning, death by misadventure." Backing this up he confirmed that the others who had visited him earlier could confirm his findings.

Juliet got to look at the autopsy report, but it didn't make sense. Lutzow was frightened and hiding something...

Outside agent Renoir leaned against their Jeep smoking his strong French cigarettes. Juliet shared her concerns about Dr Lutzow with him prompting Renoir to take a look for himself. 

Agent Renoir

Borrowing a white coat, Renoir went down to the morgue and found Dr Lutzow scribbling on some paperwork, the Pvt Grey autopsy report. Dr Lutzow had two copies, one that he'd showed to Juliet and one other. Renoir distracted the doctor and used his pickpocket skills to steal the two copies. Dr Lutzow had been concealing something around Pvt Grey's death, but why? Who had put pressure on him?

The real autopsy report indicated that Pvt Grey had died, not from drowning, but from damage to his occipital lobe. In particular the Brodman Area 17, the primary visual cortex at the back of the head and the optical nerve, without any apparent external trauma. Toxicology revealed no signs of alcohol or drug abuse an cause of death remained inconclusive. Dr. Bloom could confirm now that the deaths of Pvt Grey and Gunter Roth were linked.

Somewhere across the dark streets of Berlin, Gavril was helping his colleague Wheeler to walk out of a out of a Freidrichstraβe back-alley.