“How?” I breathed. “Do they think it was Ed?”
Grief had carved furrows into Derrel’s face, and I realized that he’d quite possibly been working with Marianne for as long as he’d been an investigator. “He’s the primary suspect,” he said, voice gravelly. “Though there aren’t any witnesses at this time.” He exhaled. “Anyway, I just wanted to prepare you. I know that you and Marcus and Ed had all been friends for a while before…”
I nodded, not feeling a need to finish his sentence, before Ed inexplicably disappeared during a hunting trip with his best friend, Marcus. It hadn’t been at all inexplicable to me, mostly because I’d been the one who’d told him that if he didn’t run I would kill him and eat him. Not necessarily in that order. To my credit, this had been after he’d shot me and Marcus with the intent of then chopping our heads off. I wasn’t that much of a meanie pants.
But why would he come back and kill Marianne? I pulled the stretcher out and maneuvered it up to the house, past the unusually somber paramedics and cops. Marianne might not have been a cop or EMT, but she’d worked with them for long enough that she was definitely considered one of them. In fact, the law enforcement and rescue community had rallied around her in a touching and awesome display of support after Ed’s shocking flight.
She was lying on her back in the middle of her living room, arms and legs splayed as if she’d tripped and fallen backward. Her eyes were open, and her face seemed calm, but a thin line of blood tracked from the bullet hole almost perfectly centered in her forehead. I swept a glance around the room, oddly puzzled. The house was neat and clean, comfortably furnished with a few knick-knacks on high shelves. An upright piano rested against one wall. A vase on a side table was filled with flowers. Nothing seemed out of place. No sign of struggle. Then again, if it had been Ed, she’d have let him in, right? But why would he kill her?
Detective Abadie had his head down while he made notes in a steno pad. He glanced up as I entered and gave me a slight nod—a far cry from his usual lip curl coupled with mild disdain.
Sean and another crime scene tech were still taking pictures of the body, so I positioned myself by the wall near Abadie.
“Do you think Ed did it?” I asked him under my breath.
His mouth tightened. “We have no suspects at this time,” was his gruff reply, but the grim set of his eyes told me all I needed to know.
I swallowed. “Does Marcus know?”
Abadie gave a short nod. “He’s on his way, though he won’t be allowed behind the tape.” That made sense considering how close he and Ed had been. Abadie gave me a sudden narrow-eyed look as if wondering if it was wise to have me picking up the body since I knew both the victim and Ed. But then he must have realized that pretty much everyone here knew them, so tossing me out would be pointless.
The crime scene techs finished their pictures. Derrel and I moved forward together as if we’d choreographed it and carefully turned Marianne over so that Sean could photograph the back of her head and the other side of her body. Derrel slipped paper bags over Marianne’s hands and taped them around her wrists with surgical tape, just in case she had any evidence on her hands or under her nails that could lead to a suspect. Finally we picked her up and placed her in the body bag. I zipped it closed, clasped the buckles of the straps that held the bag in place, and clenched my jaw against a wave of utter helplessness. Why her? Why the hell would anyone want to kill Marianne?
I began to wheel the stretcher out when Abadie stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Angel…”
I gave him a questioning look.
“I don’t know if you read the newspaper,” he said, “but—”
“I saw it,” I said with a sour twist of my mouth.
“It’s bullshit. Try not to let it get to you too badly. They’re only writing crap like that because it’s election season, and they’re trying to stir up some controversy.”
I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it. Then tried again. “I thought you hated me.”
His lip curled with mild disdain. “I don’t hate you. I just don’t like you. Big difference. But I do hate assholes, and that reporter is an asshole. Airing your shit in the paper like that is bullshit.”
I fought for a smile, but it wasn’t happening, so I settled for a nod. “Thanks.” And then, because I had absolutely no idea how the hell else to respond to all that, I simply nodded again and continued on out with the stretcher.
Marcus pulled up as I reached the van. I yanked the back doors open and slid the stretcher in, then turned to him as he leaped out of his car and jogged up to me, agony written across his features. “Angel, it is true? Is Marianne…?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s her. I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else I could say that could get rid of the grief on his face. And I didn’t know how much was for Marianne or for the thought that Ed had done this.
He gave a shuddering sigh and sank to sit on the curb, burying his head in his hands. “God damn Ed,” he said hoarsely. “I swear I’ll kill him if I ever see him again. She didn’t deserve this.”
I slowly closed the van doors, then leaned back against them. “Why do you think it was Ed?”
He lifted his head, gave me a perplexed look. “What are you talking about? Angel, who the hell else could it have been? We know Ed went off the deep end.”
I frowned but didn’t argue the point. Marcus wasn’t in any state of mind to listen to anything right now. But for some reason I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that Ed had “gone off the deep end,” at least not to such a degree that he would start killing non-zombies. And a single gunshot to the head? If he’d killed her because he was crazy, wouldn’t it have been a lot more violent? Wouldn’t there have been a fight, or struggle, or something?
But those arguments could be raised another time when the emotional wound wasn’t quite so raw. For now I kept my mouth shut, sat down on the curb beside him, and put my arms around him while he wept on my shoulder.
Chapter 9
The autopsy of Marianne was brutal. Not the actual procedure, but the general mood of the room. There was none of the usual joking or conversation that usually helped lighten the atmosphere. The humor that we used as a self-defense against the horror of what we had to do was gone. In some ways it was worse than when we had a kid come through.
Also, we had several observers, which further dampened the mood. Detective Abadie was present since it was his case, but Captain Pierson was also there, silently watching from a discreet distance away while Sean, the crime scene tech, took numerous pictures.
I’d been working with Dr. Leblanc, the parish forensic pathologist, for about two months now, and I prided myself on the fact that I was getting to the point where I could almost anticipate his needs, like a well-trained surgeon’s assistant, or some shit like that. Not that I knew crap about surgery—only what I’d seen on TV—but in those shows there was always some nurse or whatever standing right beside the doctor while he snapped out things like, “clamp!” or “scalpel!” Of course, considering how much the reality of police work and death investigation varied from what I’d seen on TV, there was every chance that the medical shows I watched were just as inaccurate.
I didn’t hand instruments to him or anything, but I knew his routine—which helped keep me from dropping things or doing anything equally idiotic with people watching.
“Why are they all here?” I murmured to Dr. Leblanc at one point.
He breathed a soft sigh. “It’s going to be rather high profile since the number one suspect is her boyfriend—”
“—Who also happens to be the number one suspect in the beheading murders,” I finished for him.
He nodded gravely and bent back to his examination. Together we removed the bags from Marianne’s hands and allowed Sean to take detailed pictures of them. I didn’t see any sign that she’d clawed or scratched anyone, but Dr. Leblanc still took scrapings from beneath the nails, and then clipped the nails and colle
cted them in a small paper envelope. I assumed it would be sent to the DNA lab to be compared to whatever suspect they came up with. Ed most likely. Did they even have his DNA to compare it to? I worried over that for several minutes until I finally realized it was a stupid thing to worry about. Let the detectives figure out how to handle that detail.
It was my job to cut the heads open on bodies, but Dr. Leblanc assisted on this one since Marianne had been shot in the head. My respect and admiration for him soared as he carefully walked me through the process of doing it in a way that preserved the evidence of the bullet wounds in the skull. I was insanely aware of the presence of watchers, but somehow Dr. Leblanc made it seem as if I was doing him a favor and completely in control, instead of having to be, essentially, told step by step what to do. It didn’t even bother me that I kept having to pause so that Sean could take pictures of the wounds.
I gently tipped the brain out and set it in the bed of the scale, then returned to the now-empty skull.
“The forehead wound is definitely the entry point,” Dr. Leblanc said in a normal voice, gesturing the observers over. “See how it’s concave on the inside of the skull?” He pointed to the beveled edges, while Sean took more pictures.
“Like when you shoot a BB through a glass window,” I said, then flushed, certain I’d said something moronic.
But Dr. Leblanc gave me an approving smile. “That’s exactly it,” he said. “Don’t ever believe someone who says they can tell from the exterior which are the entry and exit wounds. You almost always have to examine the interior of the skull.”
My flush turned into a glow of pride. I stepped back to give Sean more room to take his pictures, then moved on to help finish up the rest of the autopsy. By the time it was time for me to sew up the Y-incision on her torso, the others had all filed out. I finished up in peace while Dr. Leblanc wrote up his notes, then I carefully put her back in the body bag. After I closed up the big plastic bag that contained all the organs the pathologist had removed and cut samples from, I set that in the body bag as well, between her legs. That’s one brain that I won’t eat, I decided as I wheeled the body back to the cooler. There was no way I could eat someone I’d known and liked.
Dr. Leblanc was ready and waiting for me when I returned to the cutting room with the next body of the day: a twenty-something man who’d most likely died of a drug overdose. Those still gave me a chill whenever I had to deal with one. There but for the grace of god go I and all that shit, though I rather doubted that god had anything to do with me being turned into a zombie. Though, if I hadn’t been turned that night, I would’ve definitely died. I’d already been high as a kite when my would-be rapist had slipped Rohypnol into my drink. When I’d fallen unconscious and started having trouble breathing, he’d panicked and was on his way to take me out to the swamp to dump my body when he took a curve too fast and wrecked his car. Either the drug overdose or my injuries would have been more than enough to kill me if Marcus hadn’t seen the crash and decided on the spot to do the only thing that could possibly save me.
I got the body of the overdose victim onto the table and prepped while Dr. Leblanc made his initial observations and jotted notes on his pad. I stepped back as he picked up a scalpel off the sideboard, but to my surprise he extended it to me, handle first.
I automatically took it, looked stupidly down at it, then back up to him. “Um. You’re kidding, right? You want me to cut him open?”
“You can do this, Angel,” he assured me. “You’re a tough, no-nonsense chick with an iron stomach. You’ve watched me do it a few hundred times. Now, cut that body open.”
I made a face. “Why can’t I just stick to cutting heads?” I said. I might have whined a little bit.
Dr. Leblanc chuckled. “Because I’m lazy.”
“Hardly!”
“How about, because you’re fully capable of doing it, therefore you should.”
I scowled down at the scalpel in my hand. The pathologist had been dropping hints for a while now that he would soon start having me participate more in the autopsies—a statement I hadn’t really understood until now. “I’m fully capable of doing many things that I probably shouldn’t,” I said.
A smile quirked his lips. “I trust that you have the judgment to apply proper discretion. Besides, what you really are is fully capable of being more than a simple morgue tech. There are some agencies where the morgue assistant—or the diener—does almost all of the work of opening the body up and pulling the organs out, whereupon the pathologist simply comes over and takes a look and cuts his samples off.” He gestured to the body lying on the metal table. “A bit more training and you could probably get to that point.”
I stepped grudgingly up to the body. “Okay, so maybe you are being lazy.”
He chuckled. “Curses! Here I thought I was being convincing in my mentor persona.”
“Nope. I see right through you,” I replied, but the truth was that any time Dr. Leblanc made one of those comments it warmed my crusty little soul more than I could have ever explained. More than anyone else in my life, I felt that Dr. Leblanc truly thought I was smart and had potential.
“Dieners make more money,” he added with a sly wink.
“Well why the hell didn’t you just say that to begin with?” I replied, raising the scalpel.
I found myself wincing as I pressed the scalpel into the skin, which was a bit silly since I was used to cutting the heads open. That involved slicing the scalp from ear to ear over the top of the head, peeling the scalp back, and then taking a bone saw and cutting the top of the skull off, thus exposing the lovely, luscious brain.
Yeah, so it probably wasn’t lovely and luscious to most people. But ever since I’d been turned into a zombie the sight of brains got my mouth watering as much as fried pickles and a roast beef po-boy did.
Following Dr. Leblanc’s murmured instructions, I made two incisions from the outer edge of the collar bones to the middle of the sternum, then carefully sliced the rest of the way down the torso.
“Be careful not to nick the bowels,” he cautioned as I maneuvered the scalpel around the belly button. “That’s never fun.”
I gave a short little nod as I crept the scalpel down the abdomen at a snail’s pace. A lesser man than Dr. Leblanc would have snatched the blade from me in frustration at how slow I was going, but he didn’t seem to have the slightest bit of impatience. I fucking adored Dr. Leblanc.
I finally pulled the scalpel free as I reached the pubic bone. “Holy shit,” I said. “I just cut someone open.”
“That you did!” he said, giving me a pat on the back. “Next thing you know you’ll be doing surgery.”
Snorting, I handed the scalpel back to him. “God help anyone who has me as a surgeon.”
He quickly filleted the flesh back from the ribs, then stood back while I took a pair of pruning shears and crunched through ribs and sternum to remove a large triangular section of ribs. “I’ll give you a pass on the surgeon thing for now. But only for now.” He glanced up at me. “I didn’t go to med school until I was in my late thirties. And I wasn’t even the oldest in my class.”
“Uh, I think I should get through the GED first.”
“Fair enough. How’s that going?”
“All right,” I said, but apparently I didn’t sound very convincing. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Okay, I only recently found out that passing the test is one of the conditions of my probation,” I continued, wincing. “Which means I get to see if I can make up for five years of being an ignorant slacker in a little over a year.”
He shrugged as he pulled the lungs out and set them on a cutting board. “I have the utmost faith in you. And what will happen if you fail? Do you truly think you’ll be tossed in jail, or isn’t it more likely that your probation would simply be extended until you pass?”
I let out a gusty sigh. “Well…it would most likely be extended. Which means I’d keep studying and try again.”
“Ah, that’s m
y girl,” he said. “You’re too tough to let a little setback like that defeat you.” He met my eyes. “Not that I think you’re going to fail, mind you. You’ve done a good job of surviving these past few months,” he said. “You’ve turned your life around in ways that you probably never imagined.”
“I had some help,” I said, managing a weak smile. “I mean, I don’t think I could have done it on my own.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But I think you’re past that now. You don’t need help surviving, do you?”
I started to protest, but then I had to stop and consider. “No, I think I have that much down pat. But at the same time it would really suck to not have people around who have my back, y’know?”
He smiled, gave a nod. “Yes, we all need that. However, I believe it’s time for you to take the next step.”
I gave him a blank look. “Er, what would that be? You mean learning how to cut bodies?”
He chuckled low. “That’s a start, but I’m talking in more of a metaphysical sense.” He set the scalpel down, crossed his arms and leaned back against the sink. “You’ve spent this time surviving. But that’s just existing. You can do more. Now it’s time for you to thrive.”
I didn’t even know how to respond to that. Finally I said, “Okay.”
We continued the autopsy, but I found myself thinking about what Dr. Leblanc had said. He was right, and in more ways than he probably knew. I had the potential to live a very long time. Was I going to stay an uneducated goob forever?
I guess that’s up to me.
After I finished cleaning up I swiped the brain of the overdose guy and stuck that container in the cooler in the trunk of my car while retrieving my other container—the one that held my actual dinner. It, too, contained brains, but they were cleverly mixed in with broccoli and stir fry sauce and various other stuff that made the whole thing that much more yummy. Sure, I had no trouble eating brains straight-up, but making the whole thing somewhat gourmet not only made it easier to hide but also kept me feeling more, well, human.
Angel Crawford #2: Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues Page 9