by Susan Dunlap
Fact: If organs burst, gases escape into surrounding tissue. She checked the abdomen. Already there was a slight greenish discoloration.
Again she stood still, not breathing, listening to the sound of the air conditioner, the hum of the refrigerator, straining to hear stray footsteps outside. But she could hear nothing beyond the heavy double doors.
She pulled out her magnifying glass and gazed painstakingly down the inside of the arm, one of the easiest places to find a vein, an area that recreational drug novices find appealing. Kiernan didn’t picture Lark tattooing her arms with tracks. If Lark had had a habit she managed to conceal, she would have shifted her injection site quickly. But coming across the tiny telltale indentations on the arm would have been a clue. That there were none was no clue at all. Slowly, carefully, she checked the left hand, peering through the glass at the webbing between the fingers, an easily camouflaged site. No marks. None on the right hand, none between the toes, none in the pubic area.
“Kiernan, you ready yet?”
She jerked up and spun toward the door. It took a moment for her eyes to focus on Tchernak, and another to see him clearly enough to note the pinched skin around his eyes and mouth. “You’ve been in here over an hour, you know.”
She would have guessed ten minutes. But that was the way it was with skin scanning. Suddenly she realized her back ached and she was shivering.
“The cleaning crew’s already here. Harris is getting jumpy.”
“One more minute.”
“Harris says the inspectors could be here anytime. He’s shaking like a bad punt. I can’t even distract him with the time I set Lawrence Taylor on his duff. I don’t have any better stories than that.”
“Lie.” She couldn’t let herself think of Harris, not now.
It was a moment before Tchernak said, “He says the thefts have been in here—equipment. When they come, the inspectors aren’t going to stop and chat; they’ll be trotting right in these doors. Don’t fool around.”
“I’ll just be a minute.” As Tchernak let the door swing closed, she could see the small, deadly pale man pacing in the doorway. He had made his deal; he knew the risks. She had to push him out of her mind. Turning back to the body, she bent down over the face. “Eyes show postmortem clouding with some scleral hemorrhage in the medial aspect of the left eye.” Not surprising. Had Lark lived longer, her entire face would have been bruised from the force of her spine striking up into her skull. Had she lived, her mind would have been captive in a useless body—if she had any mind left at all.
She had to finish, to see inside Lark’s mouth, under her tongue, the last camouflaged place she could have injected herself.
She pushed gently at the teeth. No give. She stopped. Not surprisingly, rigor had begun. It might not be set completely, but it began in the muscles of the eyelid and lower jaw, and the mouth was already quite firm. If she forced the teeth apart and broke the rigor, it would not reset. It might affect the autopsy, skew the findings, and announce to the pathologist and anyone who read his report that someone had been disturbing the body. She pulled a penlight from her pack and shone it under the edges of the tongue. She bent closer, then moved farther back. But there was no way she could see the entire area. Sighing, she straightened up.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. All the other more likely areas were negative. No shooter goes straight to the tongue.
But it did matter. Even if it was a one percent uncertainty, it mattered. She needed to go into this investigation untethered by the slightest doubt.
“Kiernan,” Tchernak called, urgency clear in his voice.
Quickly she moved around to the far side of the gurney.
“The cleaning crew is across the hall. You’ve got to get out of here.”
Her gaze shifted from the tongue to Lark’s teeth. Stuck between the two upper left incisors was a seed.
Footsteps resounded in the Harris’s hallway. She pictured the inspectors coming toward Harris, hands reaching out, grabbing his pension and medical insurance.
She bent closer to the mouth. A poppy seed!
The footsteps grew louder.
Were there more seeds? No time to find out. The image of Harris filled her mind—outside the poorhouse, in the snow. “Damn you, Harris,” she muttered, shoved the gurney back into the fridge, and raced out the far door.
CHAPTER 12
“HOW CAN YOU EVEN think of breaking into Lark Sondervoil’s apartment? Those inspectors in the morgue were close enough to tackle you and throw you for one big loss. Have you missed the concept of learning from your mistakes? What are you—the kid who repeats the first grade her entire life?” Tchernak said as the Jeep turned onto the main road.
“Look, I don’t want to go there any more than you want me to.”
Tchernak’s traditional farewell to her was “No speeding! No baiting! No fenestration!” He glared in disbelief. “In that case, you won’t go.”
“I have to. If the pathologist finds the poppy seed suspicious, he’ll have the cops running all over her place by noon.”
“He won’t worry about that. He’s not thinking about the Highway Patrol report; he’s wondering how she died falling over a cliff. Even you don’t think a bagel would skew CHP’s tests.”
“Police do investigate, Tchernak.”
“My point exactly.”
She put her hand on his arm, “Lark had scheduled a press conference after her gag. She was killed before she could speak. What was she going to clarify, or announce, or reveal? There’s some connection between her and Bad. This is my only chance to see what. Even if the cops sift through her apartment, they could miss that.”
“Miss what? You don’t know there is any thing, much less that it’s there! Or that the police will disturb it if it exists at all.”
“Tchernak, I agreed you could be an assistant on this case, not an offensive lineman. You’ve got your arms up so high protecting me, I’ll never be able to throw the ball!”
Tchernak stared at her openmouthed.
She restrained a grin. “Say the cops don’t shake out the apartment. Then they let it go, and the landlord cleans it out and rents it by the weekend. Lark’s got no family—or so Yarrow says—no one’s going to bitch if the landlord collects double rent the rest of the month.”
“Still—”
“No, I’ve got to get in there before anyone else thinks of it.”
“And if the cops come and find you, then what?”
“Then I move to Nebraska and raise championship wolfhounds.”
It was three in the morning in Pacific Beach, the section of San Diego just below La Jolla. Kiernan pulled the Jeep up in front of a row of Cape Cod garden apartments that hunched uncomfortably between a stucco six-plex and ersatz Spanish villas. Down the street a couple of stucco cottages sat on the same-size lots. Cars filled every spot of curb, legal and otherwise.
Tchernak had finally been willing to override his opposition to breaking and entering and come along. But Kiernan had not been moved. What she didn’t need was another body to stumble over inside Lark’s apartment; what she did need was someone at home in La Jolla with Ezra. He could sit guard outside the apartment, Tchernak had insisted. “Don’t you think you might be a bit conspicuous at three in the morning?” she’d countered. “All I need is to have to come rushing out of an apartment I’ve just spent half an hour getting into so I can tell the patrolman you’re not a potential mugger or burglar.”
But, in fact, with the number of pickups, mini-Jeeps, and cars with surfboards still strapped on top, the party going strong across the courtyard of the Salem Harbour Garden Studios, the car alarm down the street warning the night wind: “Step back, you’ve come too close,” Tchernak could have sat naked on the sidewalk and not been noticed.
Kiernan checked the mailboxes of the Salem Harbour Studios and found Lark’s: number five. Number five would be at the back of the northside rectangle. She hurried through the narrow courtyard, past the colored
lights that reminded her of the one vacation trip her family had taken. Leaving Baltimore in February when the snow covered the hubcaps and arriving in a Miami motel, they had paused just long enough to change clothes and race to the palm-dotted beach, to swim and sun the whole warm, soft, amazingly bright day—and spent the rest of the week huddling in the shade of umbrellas, applying tea and thick white lotion to their sore bodies, and watching their skin peel. Even so, that first day on the Florida beach had been a spot of magic in her childhood, and the memory of it was the unfilled wish that had drawn her west to the land of palm trees.
This courtyard looked as if it had been designed by someone with a similar Miami week. Tall palms, short palms, mixed with the night-closed flowers of bright yellow day lilies, orange hibiscus, and red and yellow fists of lantara. San Diego was desert, its water so hard, its citizens bought bottled—but here the grass was as long and green as any lawn in Miami.
Number five was a studio up seven steps from the narrow walkway. Decorative wrought iron barred the window next to the door. Window bars, the lace curtains of urban blight! They scarred the view, were a danger in fire, fostered paranoia in the neighborhood, and more to the point, created a major obstacle to her getting inside and—God forbid the door should be blocked by a foreign body—getting back out. Purposely, she did not turn around to check for paranoids on neighboring stoops or behind windows. Might as well wear a Day-Glo T-shirt that said “Burglary—and More!” on the back. She listened, but the only sounds were the salsa music coming from number seven, on the street a car engine refusing to turn over, and the rustle of the branches of a tall star pine at the rear of the property. She waited long enough to assure herself, then pulled open the metal screen door, peered through the stained-glass panel into the dark room inside, and tried the handle. Lark hadn’t sounded like a young woman whose door would be open. It wasn’t.
Despite the laid-back ambiance of Salem Harbour Studios, Kiernan knew she had a limited amount of time to get inside. She had considered bringing a set of picks but decided the dangers of being apprehended with them outweighed the advantages. Instead, she’d opted for a key ring that could have hung from the belt of a school janitor—guaranteed to provide entry to the twenty most popular locks.
Normally, this was a moment Kiernan loved, the instant before entry. She savored its seductive illegality, its warmly illicit promise of penetration; she forced herself to stand a moment on the threshold husbanding her urges, feeling them throb against her skin, delaying the moment of delicious release. Normally, she gave herself the luxury of running her mental fingers down the soft, sensuous walls of her victim’s valuables, wrapping her hands around jewels, and kneading out their secrets.
But entering the home of a dead woman was not the same. And this apartment in particular, this rent-by-the-week studio that for all her effort would give her no more than a flaccid drip of information, hardly elicited that kind of foreplay.
A sharp breeze chilled her back. Across the courtyard a door opened and music rushed out. Against her better judgment she looked over her shoulder in time to see a young blond couple amble down the steps, looking neither at her nor back at the apartment from which they had come. Their gaze was entirely focused on each other; they seemed to be walking by instinct and luck.
Kiernan turned back to the door, trying the first four keys in rapid succession. She checked on the progress of the couple—halfway to the street—then went through the next six keys. Again, she glanced after the couple, not really suspecting them but suspicious enough to assure herself that their behavior didn’t change when they thought they were out of sight.
As reassured as she could be, she inserted the next key. The tumblers fell into place, the knob turned, and she pushed the door all the way open till it smacked softly against the wall.
She readied her flashlight and stepped inside. After the tropically bright lights outside, the studio was black. The music from number seven pushed in the door after her, so loud she couldn’t make out the hum of the refrigerator, which in the standard breaking-and-entering resounded like the heartbeat of a waiting giant. She gave her eyes one more moment to adjust to the dark, then peered ahead at a square of light, trying to make out whether it was a small window or a pane set in the back door, a back door that she might need. Stepping inside, she swung the front door softly shut behind her.
To her right, she heard the rasp of a breath. Movement. She pivoted. Too late. She could sense the blow coming at her head, but she didn’t feel the pain.
CHAPTER 13
KIERNAN’S HEAD THROBBED. THE frontal plate of skull hurt. And—oh, shit—she was going to throw up!
No, she was not! O’Shaughnessys did not regurgitate; that had been her parents’ mantra on that family trip to Florida. She’d heard it after her first infraction on the D.C. beltway, after her second around Charlottesville, and as a sort of Greek chorus echoing every comment on any topic through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. She’d been an adult before she could see an advertisement for hush puppies, East Carolina barbecue, or key lime pie and not feel a swirl in her stomach.
She pushed herself up and leaned back against the wall. Where the hell was she? The room was black. In the distance, way in the distance she could see a fuzzy pale square. A window?
Then the memory of entering Lark Sondervoil’s flat eased into focus. Anxiously, but in cautious consideration of her throbbing head and key-limeish stomach, she pushed herself forward onto all fours and felt around for her key ring, making larger and larger arcs with her arm, till she could no longer balance and sat back with a thump of disgust. Bad enough that someone had beaned her, but nabbing the keys she’d spent years collecting was adding insult to considerable injury. She’d get him, and—
Get who? Was she even sure the who was a him? She recalled realizing someone was in the room and instinctively turning toward the noise. The wound was just behind her hairline, which meant that her assailant had come up behind her and struck down. She sighed—big help; when you’re just over five feet tall, a twelve-year-old kid could strike down on you.
But she could ponder that later. There were two boons here. First, her assailant had already struck her and departed; he was not likely to come back. She could search the apartment in luxurious leisure. And second, someone else had figured there was something worth finding here. Or there had been. One out of two wasn’t bad.
She braced her hand to push herself up and felt a cylinder. Her flashlight! She turned it toward her watch: three thirtyish (as clearly as her still-dazed eyes could tell). She hadn’t been out more than a few minutes. And whatever the other failings of her assailant, at least he’d been quiet enough not to disturb the neighbors.
She shone the light across the floor where it wouldn’t be noticeable from the windows. The studio was a twenty-five-foot square, with a kitchenette area in the right corner (where the square of light was), a bathroom-size insert in the corner to her left, and a door, probably to a closet, in between. The rest of the floor space could have been furnished by the Tchernak Decorating Company—no furniture other than a double futon in the right-hand corner, dowels attached ladder-style to the front wall, a loop of heavy rope hanging from screws in the side wall, and weights of various sizes piled neatly next to a ghetto blaster. Someone unfamiliar with gymnastics might take the place for an S and M dungeon, but Kiernan could picture Lark placing a heel higher and higher up those dowels, stretching her hamstrings longer with each lift. From the loop of rope she would suspend herself upside down; or hanging on to the side loops, she’d walk up the wall till she was inverted, then flip down and start again. And the floor—not carpeted, but covered in springy, good-quality linoleum—was just big enough to practice simple drops and flips. She had suspected the studio had come furnished, but not furnished like this. This had the feel of Hollywood accommodation.
The room seemed to have as little to hide as did Lark’s body. An illusion? Kiernan made another sweep with the light. Not
hing on the floor, not even a phone book. She pushed herself up and braced against the wall till her light-headedness cleared, then walked unsteadily across to the closet. It was small—the average San Diegan who’d rent a studio in this loud and unprivate complex wouldn’t need space for more than a string bikini and a surfboard. Lark had three sundresses, a black scoop-necked all-purpose dress, half a dozen shirts and T-shirts (ironed and on hangers), and a variety of shorts hanging from clips on a ladder hanger. On the floor shoes were paired and aligned in two rows.
Lark’s mother would be proud, Kiernan thought sardonically, closing the door. Her mother would be escorted into a Heavenly viewing room, seated amongst her friends. From there they would all look down on Lark’s closet, and Mrs. Sondervoil would delight in saying, “Such a good girl, my Lark. I knew she’d have her closet tidy.” The late Mrs. Sondervoil’s late friends would murmur in approval and envy.
There was quite a different viewing room for mothers of women like herself, Kiernan suspected. With a start, she realized her mind was wandering; the blow to her head was taking its toll. Concentrating hard on the job at hand, she walked to the kitchenette and checked the refrigerator—hiding place of choice in recent years. But it held neither secrets nor food. Bottles of Calistoga water and trays of ice cubes were its entire payload. The cabinets and drawers echoed the transitory and indifferent quality of dwelling here: a set of cheap stainless, plastic plates from microwave dinners, two plastic glasses, and two mugs from Starbuck’s coffee, easily the nicest thing in the kitchen. Above the stove was a bag of loose tea. PERUVIAN COCA TEA, the label said! Another entry in the positive drug-findings sweepstakes. She poured an ounce into a plastic bag and pocketed it.
Beneath the counter, drawer after drawer was empty until she came to the row nearest the living room: One held phone books, another a scrapbook. Quickly she checked the phone books for turned-down pages or numbers noted in the front, but Lark had not personalized it.