Molten Mud Murder

by Sara E. Johnson

  “Bugger,” he said, hopping up and shaking yolk off one of his Nikes, almost falling again. “Where did you come from?”

  “Are you okay?” Alexa looked up at him. He was a six-foot beanpole. She dusted off the one unbroken egg and retrieved the basket. “I’m sorry. I was jogging and thought I had the path to myself. It’s so early.” She thrust the basket into his hand.

  “Well, watch where you’re going.” He blushed scarlet in the budding light and brushed dirt off his knees.

  “You’re right. I will. I’ll pay you for the eggs.”

  His giant brown eyes widened, parting his furry unibrow. How old was he? Fifteen? Sixteen? “No worries,” he croaked. “I was taking them to some lady who’s renting our cottage. She’ll never know she didn’t get them.”

  “Maybe she will. What cottage?”

  “Trout.”

  “That’s me,” Alexa said. “I’m her.”

  “Her who?”

  “The lady who’s renting your cottage. I’m Alexa Glock.” She offered her hand. The teen looked at it suspiciously, thought for a second, and then shook it.

  “Here,” he said, handing her back the lone egg and the basket. “Saved me a trip. Well, not really.” They both laughed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Stevie. I mean Steve. Steve Ingall. My mum made me, I mean asked me, to deliver these…well…that.” He pointed to the egg. “She’s stopped by, but you weren’t there.”

  “Tell her I love the cottage and everything’s choice. Where do you live?”

  “We’re farther down Trout River Road about a kilometer, but you can cut through on the path just past Okere Falls. We’ve got a little farm, Mum and me and Sissie. Flying Fish Farm. Chooks and sheep.”

  “Tell your mum I’ll drop by soon and return the basket. Her name’s Sarah, right?” Alexa remembered this from the contract she signed for two weeks’ rental. “I’m going to go back and cook this egg.”

  The morning light strengthened as Alexa jogged back to the cottage, careful not to jounce her breakfast.

  * * *

  Fortified by fresh fried egg and toast, Alexa left Trout Cottage early enough so that she arrived at the department at 7:50 sharp. She was excited about checking the duct tape used to bind the mud man’s wrists. Fingers crossed, she strode through the main entrance and flew down the basement stairs. The hallway was dim. Alexa found the switch, flicked the lights up.

  The lab door was unlocked, but when Alexa pushed it open, it was empty and dark. Jenny had said she’d arrive by seven thirty and set things up. Alexa grabbed gloves from the wall dispenser, pulled them on, and strode to the evidence shelf where she had stored the tape in a labeled plastic box.

  No box. No tape. The bottle of developer lay on its side, a fallen soldier with nothing to guard.

  What the hell?

  The lab was silent except for the hum of a computer and overhead lights. Alexa scanned the room. The far end was dark except for a line of light seeping from the storage closet. Shouldn’t it be locked?

  “Good morning,” she called. “Hello?” Silence.

  Alexa scanned the lab again and came to a stop at Jenny’s desk. A jacket and backpack were swung over the chair, and a takeout cup stood on the desk. She walked over and touched it, could smell tea. Barely warm.

  “Jenny?” Alexa called out once more, her voice coming out raspy, low. “Jenny?”

  This wasn’t right. The light seeping from the storage room door beckoned.

  She edged to the closet, the hair on her arms standing, the chemical reaction to fear pooling in her armpits. Taking a deep breath, she pushed open the door. One step in and she froze; Jenny’s body, crumpled and slight, lay on the tile floor, and a trickle of darkening blood leaking from a tangle of long black hair pooled near her nose.

  “Jenny.” Alexa leaped, knelt, felt for a pulse on Jenny’s neck and screamed, “Help! Help!” The pulse was faint. “Jenny, can you hear me?” She touched Jenny’s cheek, pressed the clammy skin. No response.

  Where the hell is a towel? A rag?

  She jerked off her cardigan and pressed it to Jenny’s head. Impossible to tell where the blood was leaking from. She had to leave her, get help. “I’ll be right back.”

  Alexa sprinted through the lab into the hallway. Deserted.

  “Hello? Help!” she screamed again. Where the hell was somebody? Down the hallway and through the exit door, she took the stairs two at a time and arrived breathless on the first floor lobby. Ms. Welles, taking paperwork from a nervous-looking woman with a tot clinging to her leg, turned toward her.

  “Call 911!” Alexa yelled. “Jenny is hurt.”

  “What are you talking about?” Welles asked. The tot’s eyes widened.

  “Call 911. Call an ambulance. Call the police. Hurry.” Welles frowned.

  Alexa knew she wasn’t making sense. She was in the police station, for God’s sake. Place should be crawling with cops. And who knew what number to call in New Zealand to get an ambulance? Not 911. She slowed down. “The lab assistant has been attacked. In the lab, unconscious. And bleeding. Call an ambulance and DI Horne. Now.”

  Paling, Welles picked up the phone.

  Finally.

  Alexa dashed back to the lab.

  * * *

  “Tell me again what you saw when you arrived in the lab,” Horne said thirty minutes later. Jenny had been rushed to Rotorua Hospital. The DI had ushered Alexa into his office and given her a bottle of water. She was seated while he, Jimmy Trimble, and Leo McNamara, the borrowed detectives from Auckland, paced like hungry vultures circling her chair. The office door was shut and the police station in lockdown. No one in. No one out. Ms. Welles was compiling a list of all people in the building at the estimated time of attack.

  “I arrived at 7:50 and came down to the lab. The—” Her scar was itching.

  “Did you head directly to the lab, right when you got here?” Horne interrupted.

  “Yes. I headed right to the lab.” The sudden thought that the attacker might have still been in the lab made Alexa’s mouth go dry. She fumbled with the bottle’s cap but couldn’t twist it off.

  “Go on.” His face was expressionless, but the blue in his eyes had darkened to slate.

  “The door was unlocked, but the lights were off. I thought that was strange.” She wished the men would sit down or back up. Give her room to breathe. She struggled with the cap, finally got it to release its grip, and sucked down water as her eyes landed on a framed photo on Horne’s desk. Two girls. Braces.

  “Yet you still entered the lab,” McNamara said. “Strange.”

  “Yes,” Alexa replied. “I turned on the lights and went straight to the evidence shelf to get the…to get a sample we prepared yesterday. It was gone.”

  “What do you mean?” Horne asked.

  “The sample wasn’t where we left it yesterday. It was drying overnight.” She stared at McNamara. “It was a portion of the duct tape we had separated yesterday. The box I had stored it in wasn’t on the shelf. I looked around and noticed Jenny’s jacket at her desk, so I figured she had to be here.”

  “Did anyone come in or out of the lab?” McNamara asked.

  “Let her finish,” Trimble said.

  “No one was around,” Alexa said to McNamara. “I called out Jenny’s name and then noticed the door to the evidence closet was cracked and a light was on. I walked over and pushed it open.” Alexa gulped more water, grateful for the hydrating coolness. “That’s when I saw her. I checked her pulse and yelled for help, but no one could hear me. No one was in the hallway either, so I ran up to the lobby.”

  “Who was the first person you saw?” Horne asked, finally sitting behind his desk.

  “Ms. Welles. She called for help, and I went back down to stay with Jenny.”

  “Why didn
’t you stay with Jenny and call for help with your mobile?” McNamara asked. His face was hard, and his hands were clenched. “What if someone had come back and finished her off?”

  “You’re right. I should have.”

  “How many people knew about this tape you were testing?” the DI asked.

  Alexa thought. She knew. Jenny knew. Who else? “I mentioned it to you on the way to interviewing Mindy Koppel yesterday. And Jenny recorded it in our preliminary report. I don’t know if Jenny mentioned it to anyone.” She had been excited to tell her boyfriend about the process, Alexa remembered.

  “Someone knew about the tape,” McNamara said. “And wanted it.”

  They all thought of the slight body being whisked away on a stretcher. Would Jenny Liang survive?

  Horne sat quietly, lips pursed, and finally spoke. “We have to talk to everyone who was here at the station. See what they saw or heard. See what they were doing between seven a.m., when Jenny logged in, and eight. Find out who had access to the preliminary report. Check security cameras.”

  “I can help,” Alexa blurted.

  “Actually, no, you can’t,” Horne said. “Having found Jenny makes you a person of interest.”

  “A suspect,” McNamara added.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Heat flooded her face. “Why would I attack Jenny?”

  No one answered.

  “The blood on the floor was congealing when I got there.” She looked down and noted the tip of one running shoe splotched with egg. She hadn’t wanted to wear running shoes to work, but her Keds and pumps were muddy.

  The Egg Boy! Smacking into Stevie on the path this morning might clear her. “I can account for my whereabouts this morning to prove I wasn’t at the station earlier.”

  Horne pushed a Post-it pad at her. “Name and number. And then you can wait in the canteen. Have a cuppa.” He spoke to Trimble and McNamara. “Let’s get the interviews going.”

  The door swung open. “What the hell is going on here?” a man in a black silk suit demanded.

  “District Commander Teal.” Horne stood quickly. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  “I repeat.” The two men faced each other, shoulders squared. The newcomer looked to be younger than the DI, his angular face unlined, but his hair a silken gray.

  “Our lab technician, Jenny Liang, was attacked in the storage closet of the lab this morning,” Horne said, his voice even and mild.

  “Attacked in our own house? Is she dead? Who did it? Who are these people?” Teal looked at Alexa, Trimble, and McNamara.

  “Liang was rushed to the hospital unconscious but breathing. I’ll let my temporary staff introduce themselves.”

  Jimmy Trimble reached over to shake Teal’s hand and introduce himself. “On loan from Auckland, sir.” McNamara did the same.

  Teal’s quick once-over indicated he wasn’t impressed with McNamara’s ponytail and scruffy blue jeans. “How’s Joe?” he asked, looking from Trimble to McNamara.

  “Joe?” McNamara said. “Oh, Commander Inspector Nelson. Joe Nelson. He’s holding down the fort back in Auckland. He’s cleaning up the mess from one of our drug cops going bad. He’s in court today.”

  “Heard about that. Bad PR. Who’s to say we don’t have a bad cop here too. And you are?” He turned to Alexa. A wave of aftershave, Hugo Boss maybe, made her lean back.

  “Alexa Glock. I’m working forensics for the mud pot murder.”

  “Glock?”

  “Yes, sir. Temporary hire.”

  “Like the gun?”

  “Like the gun.” Pleeze.

  “Ms. Glock is the person who found the lab technician,” Horne explained. “We were just interviewing her. We’ll need to talk with you too. Perhaps Detectives Trimble and McNamara can take care of that now.”

  “Yes. Get on with it. We need this station opened. Come. Take a look.” He waved them over to the large window in Horne’s office overlooking the street below. A half dozen uniformed officers with five German shepherds and one chocolate Lab circled the parking lot like aquarium sharks at dinnertime. “The North Island police dog unit is scheduled to start training at nine o’clock. We’ve got to open. The press is going to go bonkers when word gets out.”

  McNamara, Trimble, and Teal left for Teal’s office. Alexa was offended Horne considered her a suspect. As if reading her thoughts, he indicated the Post-it pad. “Give me some info so I can check you off the list.”

  Alexa fumbled for her phone, checked her contacts list for Sarah Ingall, and wrote her name and number. “I’ve never met this woman, but I bumped into her teenage son this morning as I was running. She owns the cottage I’m renting.”

  “Bumped into?”

  “Literally. Knocked him down. I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten me.”

  He held her gaze a moment too long. “You are hard to forget.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Senior Officer Rangiora found Alexa in the canteen sipping bitter coffee with her right hand while her left contorted up and over her opposite shoulder blade like a double-jointed gymnast, mauling unsatisfactorily at her scar and pondering whether to leave. Mary’s funeral was over. What was holding her in Rotorua? She didn’t need the hassle. She quickly straightened, sloshing coffee on the table.

  “Senior said your alibi checked out and the security camera confirms you entered the building after the attack occurred.”

  “No surprise,” Alexa snapped.

  “DI Horne said for you to go check on Jenny Liang. And then stop by the dental clinic for Koppel’s records. Welles faxed them the forms. There is an all-hands meeting at one o’clock.”

  Who else had been caught on security camera? she wondered.

  The tall officer escorted her to the door just as the station was opened and the posse of dogs and trainers entered the building. “Of all days to be overrun by dogs,” Rangiora said. “We stationed a guard at Liang’s door,” he added.

  The implications chilled Alexa and made her forget about abandoning the case. She had to help find Jenny’s attacker.

  In the parking lot, she found herself searching for the old blue Honda she’d left behind in Raleigh. It was nowhere. Her mind jumped from the horror of seeing Jenny crumpled on the floor to the horror of becoming a “person of interest” to the aggravation of having her car stolen. Finally, she recognized the silver Vitz hatchback and drove the three blocks to the hospital, replaying what Horne had said: I’m hard to forget.

  She wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad.

  The three-story hospital was half the size of Rex Hospital in Raleigh, but the scent of iodoform disinfectant whisked Alexa straight back to childhood. She had spent three weeks in the burn unit, mostly flat on her stomach, and three months in physical therapy rehab. She’d been thirteen. “Activity and motion will reduce the pain,” the physical therapist had insisted, while Alexa, enduring another round of physical “terrorphy,” knew the opposite was true. A metallic taste had flooded her mouth.

  She had bitten her tongue.

  Alexa got directions from a stylish woman at reception. One floor up and past a nurses’ station, a uniformed officer was sitting in a chair, toying with his iPhone. Alexa introduced herself. The officer slipped the phone in his pocket, stood, and asked for ID. He frowned as he scrutinized her temporary badge.

  “There’s no photo. I can’t accept this, ma’am,” he said. His badge identified him as Officer Scott Tulliver.

  “Good for you. DI Horne won’t mind a quick call to assure you I’m permitted.” She looked through the crack in the door as Tulliver called the station. Liang’s face, shoulders, and arms were exposed above a tight white sheet; her partially shaved head was ensconced in wires and electrodes.

  “Yes, Senior. I know. Here she is.” The officer handed his phone over.

  “Glock—is that you?�
��

  “Yes,” Alexa said. She cleared her throat. “Officer Tulliver wants to verify that I can check on Jenny. I’d say he’s doing a thorough job.”

  “Agreed. Put him back on.”

  “Yes, Senior?” Tulliver said back into his phone. He listened for a sec and then hung up. “You can go on in. He said it was okay.”

  “Thanks. Has her family been notified?”

  “Her boyfriend is on his way from Auckland. Her parents are flying up from Christchurch.”

  “I’m glad. Thanks for being vigilant. Has anyone been by to check on her?”

  “Just that Maori cop, the girl with the blue mustache and beard.”

  “I believe Officer Cooper has a moko, a form of tribal identity.” Alexa scrutinized his face until he averted his eyes. Mary had explained the significance of Maori tattooing over beers one night when Alexa had asked about the blue lip-and-chin tattoo she had seen on a woman at the Four Square grocery store. Mary explained that all Maori women have a moko on the inside, close to the heart, and when they are ready, an artist simply carves it on the surface.

  “What does your tattoo mean?” Alexa had asked, shocked by the word, carved.

  Mary had glanced at her shoulder where her iridescent bird-fish-woman was hidden but hadn’t answered.

  Alexa pushed the door open. Why had Officer Cooper been by? Had she been at the station this morning? If not, how did she know Jenny was here?

  Quiet hum of machine. Steady bleeps. Barely audible inhalation, pause, exhalation. Jenny looked twelve years old. Her blue-veined eyelids, void of makeup, flickered and then stilled. Alexa reached for her cool hand and squeezed gently. “Jenny. It’s me, Alexa Glock. From the lab. I’m checking on you.”

  No response.

  “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

  No response.

  “Your boyfriend is coming.” What was his name? Eddie? Ethan? Evan. “Evan is on his way to be with you. Your parents too.” She didn’t know what else to say, hardly knew the girl, but stumbled on. “Be brave. I’ll come back later. We’ll find whoever did this.”

  No response.

  If Alexa had arrived first at the lab, this would be her. An orderly bustled in, followed by a doctor who snapped, “She’s not to receive visitors.”