The Girl In the Morgue

by D. D. VanDyke

  Mickey took another bite of the second donut, just about annihilating it. He started to speak with his mouth full, and then chewed and swallowed first. “So what were they into? You know, where they drank, who their friends were? Hobbies or interests? If either of them has an internet trail, I need to know where to look.”

  “Jenna was big on some medieval stuff. Historical reenactment…some kind of Society for….” She reached for her notebook.

  “SCA?” Mickey asked. He popped the final bite of donut into his mouth with a regretful sigh, and unpaused the game to start playing again. “Society for Creative Antiquity?”

  “Does everyone know about these guys except for me? I’d never heard of it before.”

  “Sure. Some pretty interesting dudes. Like, you think I’m a geek because of all of the tech stuff, but these guys take it to a whole new level. Dressing up, talking old-fashioned English, making their own beer and mead.”

  “Mead?”

  “Honey wine, kinda. Some make sure everything’s authentic, right down to their underwear. I mean, they’re really serious about this stuff. It’s more than cosplay.”

  “Cosplay? English, I told you, Mickey.”

  “Cosplay. Costume play. Dress-up, you know, for conventions. Come as your favorite character.”

  “Huh. So you have any contacts in those circles?”

  “There’s a big Renfaire coming up. That’s one place all these guys go to show off how old-school they are. You can go and watch them sword fight and everything. I know a couple of chat rooms where they hang out. I’ll see what I can find on Jenna. Was her boyfriend SCA too? They tend to stick together, socialize with other members.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask when I spoke with him.”

  There came a buzz and closing music from the game on the screen, and a skull and crossbones flashed up, which Cal assumed meant Mickey was dead for the last time. He swore and smacked the desk.

  “I was going for a high score today,” he griped. “I figured out that—”

  “Stick to the case, Mickey. Focus.” Cal unscrewed the cap from the Coke and handed it to him. “Here’s your power-up. Get onto these guys for me. I want a report by morning.”

  “I’ve been here all day, now you want me to put in overtime?”

  “You’ve been playing games all day, not working. That’s not overtime.” But Cal threw one of Sergei’s twenties on the desk to sweeten the deal.

  Mickey grabbed it and mashed it into the pocket of his wrinkled jeans. “Thanks, boss. I’ll find you something.”

  “Yeah. Remember there’s a four-year-old little boy who’s never going to see his mother again. The least we can do is figure out who did it and put him behind bars.”

  “Poor little dude.”

  “Doubly so. Four years old, autistic, non-verbal.”

  “Aw…so he can’t even talk? Does he know what happened to his mom?”

  “I don’t know how much of it he could understand. But he definitely knew we were talking about her. He was asking for her.” She told Mickey about Alan’s repeated lifting of Cruiser’s shirt.

  She stopped. Mickey’s eyes were far away. She’d seen that look before, and knew he was gone, thinking about the next alien invasion or piece of technology he was going to build. “Mickey!”

  “I’m listening,” Mickey said. “I was just thinking…”

  “Think about this case,” Cal said sharply. “Let’s get this boy some justice.”

  Cal walked into her blue-and-white painted lady with a sigh. As soon as she shut the door, she started to cough, an acrid smell burning its way down her throat and into her sinuses. “Mom, it’s me.” Cal tried to stop coughing. “Are you cooking?”

  Starlight drifted into the room, a scarf tied around her shoulders and a quartz crystal pendant hanging on her skinny chest. “What, Callie-Gee?”

  “What’s burning? Have you got something in the oven?”

  She shook her head. “No, they’re smoldering herbs of protection. Rosemary and chamomile. They repel negative psychic energy.” Her eyes dropped to Cal’s left hip, where her Glock was nestled in its holster under her tailored jacket. “It would be helpful if you wouldn’t bring machines of violence and destruction through our doors. Can’t you leave them at the office?”

  “It’s those weapons that will keep you safe if someone with evil intentions does come into the house,” Cal snapped. She was exhausted and couldn’t bear an extended discussion over personal safety.

  Starlight looked at her with sad, sunken eyes. Cal was immediately sorry for her short temper and reached out for her mother.

  “Mom, I’m sorry. But you know I’m not going to leave my guns outside the door. We’re lucky I’m licensed to carry.” She gave Starlight a gentle squeeze, feeling her sharp bones, frail as a bird’s, just under the skin. She rubbed Starlight’s back for a moment, and then released her. “I thought you were going to go see Sergei. Did you call him?”

  Starlight’s expression brightened. “I just wanted to make sure you got home safely first. Then I’m going over to meet him at Vyazma for dinner.”

  “Good! That’s really good. Uncle Sergei could use some company and cheering up.” Having Starlight trying to cheer up Sergei would probably be more productive than telling Starlight to cheer herself up. Maybe… Cal didn’t want to think about the maybe. Well, not in any detail, though her mom could do with getting laid. Oddly, she seemed to sleep around less, not more, since Cal’s father died.

  Starlight nodded. “Maybe I should take some herbs with me to leave at Vyazma. Cleanse it of any negative vibrations from that poor girl’s death.”

  “Sure, though she wasn’t killed there,” Cal said. “Take some bundles of herbs. But you know you can’t burn them there because of the fire code. They’ll have to do their job in natural form. Maybe Sergei will let you put some around his office or make a little memorial to Jenna.”

  Starlight drifted away to get her magical plants together. Cal went up to her bedroom to divest herself of her boots and blazer.

  As soon as she opened her door, she knew someone had been there. She stood for a moment, frozen. No movement came from within. She glanced toward the bathroom, and then back at the bed.

  “Thomas?” she whispered.

  There was nothing, no answering whisper. Cal stepped into the room, shutting the door softly behind her.

  The room was strewn with red rose petals. Some protective charm of Starlight’s? Or had Thomas been there, as she half-expected? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d shown up in her bedroom unannounced.

  She couldn’t call Starlight and demand to know if she’d left the rose petals there. If they weren’t her mother’s doing, she would panic over someone entering the house without her knowledge. And there was no way to reach out to Thomas, if he had been there and was gone. No working phone number. No email address. Only Cole Sage knew how to reach him, and she wasn’t about to involve the prizewinning investigative journalist in her love life.

  Lust life.

  Whatever.

  Cal felt angry, abandoned, and betrayed all at once. Thomas was the one who’d pursued her, not the other way around. For him to suddenly drop out of sight without a word wasn’t fair. No goodbye? No “sorry, sweetheart, it’s just not going to work out between us”? What right did he have to play with her heart like that?

  Not that he had her heart. Just her body.

  Yeah, that’s what she told herself.

  She swore. Snowflake, curled up amidst the flower petals on the bed, opened his eyes and lifted his head to look at her. He rolled over to present his belly for a scratch.

  “Who was in here, huh Snowflake?” Cal scrubbed his tummy until he decided he’d had enough and tried simultaneously to bite her and claw her with his strong back legs. He left tiny scratches, which Cal was long used to.

  She shifted to the spot beneath his chin he liked and he let go. “Was it Thomas? Or was it Mommy Starlight? Just tell me
that.”

  Snowflake purred contentedly and shifted his head to get Cal to rub his forehead.

  “I’m getting ready to go,” Starlight called from the second floor, where her bedroom was. “The car’s here.”

  Cal waited until she was sure Starlight was going down the stairs to the first floor before opening her door, to make sure Starlight wouldn’t decide to come up and glimpse the rose petals. Then, she followed and caught up.

  She hadn’t seen her mother in a dress for quite a while. Starlight had donned a slinky black number and heels, with a patterned scarf tied in a bow around her tiny waist providing a splash of color.

  “Whoa, Mom. Sergei’s not going to be able to keep his hands off you!” Cal gave an appreciative whistle.

  Starlight colored. “Starlight, Callie,” she said. “And it’s just a friendly dinner. Between…friends.”

  “Your lips say friends, but your dress says…” Cal made an explosion with her hands. “Va-va-voom!”

  Starlight smiled demurely. Cal was happy to see some pink in her cheeks.

  “You have a nice time, Mommy Starlight. I won’t turn into a pumpkin if you’re not home before midnight.”

  Starlight touched Cal’s cheek. “You look tired. There’s ginger tofu in the fridge. Have a bite to eat and a nice bath and get some sleep. There’s lavender in my bathroom. Put some in your water. It’s protective and it helps you sleep.”

  “Sounds good. Have a nice time with Uncle Sergei.”

  “I will.”

  Cal walked her mother out and watched as one of Sergei’s cars, with one of Sergei’s men, picked her up.

  Once Starlight was on her way, Cal called for pizza delivery—one to the house, one to the office for Mickey.

  Chapter Eight

  Cal texted Brody first thing in the morning. He called her shortly after. “Hey, Cal. I hear you’ve been getting in the way of the Duncan homicide. I mean, more than before.” There was a smile in his voice, but also a note of friendly warning.

  “In the way?” Cal put as much outrage in her voice as she could without overselling it. “Who says I’ve been in the way?”

  “I’ll give you three guesses, and one of them better start with M.”

  “Is it my fault if I’m a thorough investigator? They’re lagging behind. That says more about them than me.”

  “Macey says you interfered with a witness.” Brody’s voice teased, but there was an undertone of serious inquiry to it.

  “I talked to Jenna’s ex. Wouldn’t that have been your first move?”

  “You talked to him before Macey did? You told him Jenna was dead?”

  “I assumed that Macey and Raymer would get there ahead of me. I didn’t expect to be the one to have to tell him about Jenna. But what was I supposed to do once I got there? Give him some lie about why I was there asking him questions? If it were your case, you would have gone to the ex first, wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess I would have. I still think it was the boyfriend, but…even if they didn’t suspect the ex, someone still had to do the notification.”

  “Yeah. And lucky for Macey, she didn’t have to do it. So I did her a favor.”

  Brody grunted in guarded assent.

  Cal let the silence hang between them for a moment. “So…what else have you heard from Macey?” she asked eventually. “Any progress on the case? Have they arrested Randy yet?”

  “You know self-defense doesn’t require an arrest. They had a confession, he was cut up…but things are getting more complicated. Now they’re hung up and twisting.”

  “Because the scene didn’t make sense?”

  “No. Macey did a GSR.”

  “Good. I told her she should, but I didn’t think she was going to.”

  “Look, Macey’s a grump, but she’s a good cop, and so is Raymer, so they did it. They didn’t find any residue. Not even enough to believe he even picked up the gun, much less fired it.”

  “Nothing? Did they test his clothing?”

  “Clothing too. Sleeves, pants, everything. He was nowhere near that gun when it was fired.”

  Cal swore. “Then why did he confess? And what are Macey and Raymer going to do about it?”

  “He might have been there when it happened, but not close enough to the gun to get contaminated. They interrogated him. Went over it and over it, telling him that they knew he wasn’t the one who killed Jenna. He still insists that he was.”

  “How? He was wearing rubber gloves? He changed all of his clothes before the police got there?” Cal shook her head. She stared out the window. “What about neighbors? Do we have any witnesses? People who were seen arriving at or leaving the apartment? Eight shots from that cannon, someone must have heard them.”

  “No one who will admit it. There was loud music playing. There was shouting and arguing. TVs playing. All of the usual low-rent apartment noise pollution, and those are old, thick walls. Macey and Raymer will question the residents again, see if they can squeeze something out of them, but you know how it’s going to go. No one wants to rat or get involved. And no one wants to take the chance of putting themselves in the sights of some psycho’s gun.”

  “Yeah. Speaking of the gun, I forgot to ask: who owns it? Who’s it registered to?”

  “Funny about that. It really is Roubicek’s, all legal, though not for carry. So except for the GSR, the eight-round kill and the sequence, which is all squirrely, but not conclusive, everything checks out.” Clearly, Brody was being ironic. “With no residue…”

  “That’s the clincher.”

  “Yup.” Brody paused, cleared his throat and trailed off. “Cal…”

  There were a few seconds of silence and Cal sensed that Brody wanted to talk about something else. Probably, about them. “Us.” Whatever. “The Talk,” they called it. But the last thing Cal wanted to do right now was to talk about their relationship. When she was on a case, it consumed her. Her mother caused more than enough unavoidable emotional turmoil.

  “Cal—” he started again.

  “I’d better let you go,” Cal said quickly. “Call if you hear anything else, m’kay?”

  Apparently annoyed at being cut off, Brody said, “I’m not your spy, Cal. Let Macey and Raymer do their jobs.”

  “Like they’ve been doing it so far? Are they going to investigate it properly?” No answer came from Brody. “Now that they’ve come up with the GSR problem, are they going to have CSU process the scene?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Now he sounded petulant.

  That made Cal push harder. “Wouldn’t you? I think you’d probably know if they were going to do a full-on investigation instead of just railroading Randy.”

  “They’re not railroading him. They’re trying to find out what happened. They did challenge him with the evidence. But so far he’s not cracking.”

  Cal grunted. “He’d crack if I had him.”

  “Stay away from Roubicek, Cal. Screw up Macey’s investigation and she’ll have your licenses pulled—and she wouldn’t be wrong. Jay can’t protect you forever.”

  Cal ignored the implications of that and hung up.

  After her morning routine, Cal checked Starlight’s room. Nobody home. The dogs bitched at her until she let them out and fed them, and made sure Snowflake’s dispensers and litter box up on the top floor were taken care of. Fortunately, the dogs couldn’t make it up there, and her cat never over-ate—at least, not of the dry food.

  She had leftover pizza for breakfast and took what remained back to her office. Entering by the front door, she called down the stairs to Mickey, pretty sure it was too early in the day for him to be decent, unless he was still up after an all-nighter.

  “Mickey! I’ve got cold pizza!”

  “Bring it down.”

  Cal waited, listening. She couldn’t hear any movement. No running water, no toilet, no sounds of Mickey getting up from the couch and getting his clothes on.

  “Mickey, you dressed?”

  “I said come o
n down. Come see what I’ve got.”

  He still hadn’t answered the question. Cal considered whether she dared to enter the wizard’s lair without being absolutely one-hundred-percent sure that he was ready to receive company.

  She sighed and went down the stairs. “What’ve you got, Oh Great and Terrible Oz?”

  “Please. I’m Gandalf at least. Oz was a fake.” Mickey was sitting at the computer. The room smelled stale and sweaty—as usual. Empty bottles and snack wrappers littered the desk and floor around him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He turned his head to look at Cal and nudged a stack of papers on the desk. “Come see. I’ll show you.”

  Cal got closer, breathing shallowly through her mouth until she opened a window. “You found something.” She looked down at the sheets of text, trying to make sense of it. “What am I looking at?”

  “USENET group for the SCA.”

  “What’s a use-net?”

  “It’s a group on the internet where people go to discuss things. There are groups for everything: in this case, medieval reenactment. They talk about events, costuming, tournaments, anachronisms, pet peeves…and gossip.”

  “Gossip sounds good.” Cal pulled out a spare chair and started flipping through the pages to see what Mickey had managed to dig up. “What did you find out?”

  “Randy was part of the SCA group as well. It wasn’t just Jenna.”

  “Good to know, but not exactly a clue to sorting out what happened…is it?”

  “There are some rumors about Randy. Or Sir Randolph, if you like.”

  “Sir Randolph?” Cal couldn’t help chuckling at the vision of Randy Roubicek as medieval gentry. “What rumors?”

  “He apparently has a mistress.”

  Cal rolled her eyes and made a noise of disgust. “A mistress. What do we know about this mistress?”

  “Not a lot of details. Her mundane name is Pat.”

  “Mundane?”

  “Real. Sometimes people use their real names, and sometimes they have Society names they’re known by. Like a stage name.”