Carved in Blood (Evan Lane Mystery Book 1)

by E. R. FALLON

  I merged behind a city bus into the tense snarl of traffic and inched my way, along with the rest of the poor bastards, to the intersection. One thing that was decent about Seven Sisters was that the city was near the ocean and there was a regular breeze that pushed away the smog. Car horns blared behind me as I made a sharp left turn onto Em’s street. I’d long ago ceased honking back at them.

  I waited by the former warehouse’s old loading dock with the engine running. A text pinged on my phone. From Em, who was running late. I didn’t mind. She was a single mother and worked hard. I opened the bag of food. My nose twitched and I gagged at the smell of the sandwich meat. I took out the donut wrapped in paper. I was a vegetarian and had been ever since my senior year of high school when I read that my mother ate pieces of some victims, but not Ben. I had to read the morbid details in a sensationalized newspaper article, and when I spoke to Detective Mack about it, he gently told me the tabloid might have had some facts correct.

  I signed up for the Navy before my mother confessed to her crimes, and I hadn’t allowed her conviction to prevent me from honoring that commitment. After my service, I won a college scholarship to study chemistry, and while I was away at college, with my good friend Ben gone and my mother in prison for killing him, I’d lost touch with Detective Mack.

  I didn’t communicate with my remaining family. I became estranged from them during my mother’s trial because of one simple fact: I’d believed in her guilt, while they insisted she was innocent. I suspected they were trying to protect their family’s name and their money from her victims’ families. I never got any of that money myself, and neither, as far as I knew, had the families of Alice’s victims. It had been hard for me to comprehend that my mother, who had given me life, had taken lives, but I had accepted that fact.

  I’d lost most of my high school friends during my mother’s trial and every single last one after her conviction. Everyone either wanted to know too much about Alice that it became uncomfortable for me to remain close to them, or they chose to dissociate themselves from the lovely butcher’s child. I didn’t have anyone to turn to during that time except Mack. But I’d made a couple of new pals in the Navy, and then in college, where I finally figured out who, deep down inside, I’d known I always was. In college I was able to surround myself with people who supported me for who I was, and my happiness only increased when I met Sammie.

  I slowly finished the donut. I put the radio on and drank some coffee, and spent a few minutes trying to convince myself the message from the killer didn’t bother me. Not one damn bit. Okay, it scared the hell out of me. Although I thought about my mother sometimes, not about her crimes, usually, but about the sweet things she sometimes had done for me when I was a kid, I hadn’t visited her, or written to her, in years. I still had friends at the ME’s office but it would have looked suspicious if I rang them to see if they knew anything Gilani hadn’t mentioned.

  Em walked out from the building’s wide gray door and approached the van. Her red hair hung damp around her pleasant, round face. She waved to me and made a gesture of drinking coffee. I mimicked the gesture to let her know that, yeah, I’d bought coffee. Em slid open the van’s side door and hopped in. In the rearview mirror I watched her looking for Josh in the seat next to mine. I reached around and handed her a coffee and the bag with sandwiches. I pulled out of the parking lot with Em eating.

  “Thanks for picking me up first, chief.” She winked at me through her square-framed eyeglasses.

  Em and Josh had given me the title in jest. Even Gilani, the real chief, had found humor in it. “Anytime.” It had taken me some time to get used to the nickname, but ultimately I was okay with it. “How’s Trent?” Her son.

  “The sitter was late, but she showed, eventually. When I got out of the shower, she was there, thank God, but I didn’t have time to dry my hair. Sorry I’m late.”

  “What were you, a few minutes late? Don’t worry about it. I didn’t even notice.” I hadn’t. “How’s your son?” I asked again.

  “He’s doing well. We saw his dad last night.”

  I sat up straighter. “Everything okay? I thought you didn’t get along with his father.” A bicyclist cut in front of me and I swerved to avoid hitting him, an occurrence so common in the city that Em didn’t make a sound from the back. She kept chewing.

  “That’s true. But I don’t want Trent growing up to resent his mom for keeping his father away from him so I let him see his dad, when the guy’s sober enough. How’s Sammie? And you?”

  “We’re fine.” How I never revealed more than a small amount of personal information about myself to Em and Josh was a running joke between them. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust they would do anything other than accept me, but given my job, I didn’t want anyone besides Sammie knowing about my mother’s crimes.

  “What’s the word on the scene?” Em asked. “Blood and guts aren’t so hot on my stomach in the morning.”

  “Scene’s not bad, according to the real chief.” I smiled at Em in the rearview and picked up speed on the way to Josh’s part of town. Even if we didn’t end up cleaning away much blood, people liked that our presence seemed to cleanse whatever taboo death had left behind, however imperceptible.

  “Another neat one. How odd.” Em’s gaze met mine in the mirror. “Is there any connection, I mean, to the kid at the high school?”

  “Possibly. I can’t say more.”

  “If someone’s killing boys, it makes me worried for Trent.” Em’s voice wavered.

  Nothing in the past had ever seemed to shake her that much, and I needed to comfort her. “You haven’t a thing to worry about. Trent’s a lot younger than those boys. They lived on the streets and not under the best circumstances.” I hoped like hell I’d be right.

  Josh lived with his wife, Martina, and their daughter who was in college, and the daughter’s little girl, in a pleasant neighborhood with bungalow houses. Josh had a bad back, and he worried sometimes that I’d ask him to leave because of that. I’d assured him that he was out of luck because he’d never get rid of me. Lots of crew members had come and gone, but Josh was dependable. He’d moved to the States from Honduras a decade before, and had worked for the city in some aspect ever since then. Em was often the one I worried wouldn’t stay.

  I beeped the horn to let Josh know we were parked by his house. I gulped my lukewarm coffee. Josh, a big guy with a surprisingly smooth, elegant walk, was hard to miss as he exited his pink-roofed house that had a well-kept, gated front yard. A loud advertisement came on and I shut off the radio. Josh’s curly dark hair and smiling plump face appeared at the passenger side window and I waved at him. He opened the door and crouched to enter. Although it had never been officially decided, Josh, who was with me from the very beginning, rode up front, while Em sat in the back. It had taken the city a few tries to find a second reliable employee after the slot had been vacated, and then Em came along.

  We didn’t wear uniforms, just jeans and t-shirts mostly, and shorts and tank tops in the warmer months, because it got hot under the hazmat suits. Without the suits on we looked like we were heading to bed instead of venturing to work. But we were comfortable, and elbows-deep in blood and gore, what more could one want?

  Josh got settled, I indicated his coffee in the holder, and Em handed him a breakfast sandwich from the back.

  “Thanks, chief,” he said.

  “Anytime.” I’d bought food for them practically every day, yet every day they thanked me as though I’d bought them presents. Sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner, depending on the time we were on duty. We tended to work through most meals so we ate before the job. What we’d see on-site changed with any given job, and who’d want to eat after seeing blood and guts?

  The first time I saw a dead body wasn’t when I was in the service but when I worked for the ME. My face had turned so pale, apparently, the medical examiner had asked if I was sure I was in the right profession. But I hadn’t vomited.

  Em�
��s face had looked that way, too, alabaster, the day of her first crime scene. I had her study crime scene photos online when she first came on board the team to prepare her for the real thing. Unlike me, people like Em and Josh didn’t get into our line of work because it appealed to them for personal reasons. More likely, it was a job to them, an opportunity to earn a decent living, something they might have continued to do for a long time, but, still, a job. Eventually, Em became so accustomed to the rank, stinking, hard-to-look-at, gut-wrenching aftermath of death that she joked along with us as we worked. It might sound tasteless, but when you see so much death you get used to it, and it becomes an ordinary thing. So you laugh as you work.

  I entered the luxury building’s address into the GPS and pulled into the main street. “How’s the family?” I asked Josh.

  “Martina and me have been after Gina to enroll Isabella in preschool.”

  Em whistled from the backseat. “Isabella’s that old already?” she asked about Josh’s granddaughter. “I can’t believe that. Seems like a few months ago she was born.”

  “They grow up too fast.” Emotion thickened Josh’s voice. He looked out the window at the passing traffic and the blurred buildings in the commercial district.

  The sun poured into the van through the window and I flipped down the visor.

  “Sammie’s fine?” Josh asked.

  Em barely hid her snicker. Whenever one of them asked about Sammie, I always replied, she’s fine. “Shut up or I’ll put you with the body bags,” I teased them.

  Body bags. We did keep a few of those in the van just in case a body was dismembered and someone forgot to pack up a part—or two, before our arrival. It did happen.

  Em played along. “You wouldn’t.”

  I glared at her in the rearview and she flipped me the bird. I didn’t reprimand her. I wasn’t a very strict boss. I laughed.

  Josh stared out the window and chuckled. He turned and faced me. “Where are we headed today?”

  “The Tower on the Cove. You know, one of the new luxury buildings with those fancy sounding names? The places that don’t only look rich, they sound rich?”

  “What the heck are we doing there?”

  “A body was found there, and we’re cleaning up. Didn’t I text you with all this earlier?”

  “I read your first text, then Isabella started having a tantrum and I got distracted. Never got around to reading the second one. Sorry, chief.”

  I patted his wide shoulder. “It’s all good.”

  “The Tower on the Cove place?” Em said belatedly. “That’s surprising.”

  “What kind of murder was it, some rich people thing?” Josh asked.

  “No. Some young guy they already ID’d as a street kid, so no one gives a fuck,” I said.

  “That’s messed up. Like the kid at the high school.”

  I let out a sigh. “Unfortunately, yeah.” I reminded Josh to put on his seatbelt. He groaned and I said, “It’s the city’s rule. Besides, I wouldn’t want to have to tell Martina something happened to you.”

  Josh relinquished. With one hand steering, I groped around for a red biohazard bag on the floor at my feet. I handed one to him to throw away the food wrappers and empty coffee cups.

  “You should really clean the van, chief,” Josh said.

  “Sure, we can do it later.”

  “Sounds like fun,” he murmured.

  I used a more serious tone. “Remember, like I’ve always said, any of the details I tell you about a case that aren’t mentioned in the press shouldn’t leave the van, okay? They stay between us. You can’t even tell your families. Gilani’s risking his job by giving me some of this stuff, and I’m risking mine by telling you.”

  Josh saluted me. “Understood, chief.”

  “Won’t tell a soul,” Em said from the back.

  And for some crazy reason, every time I made them swear on something, and they did, I felt they would keep their word, every time.

  Chapter 2

  To uphold discretion, I’d been instructed by Gilani to park in the luxury building’s maintenance lot. We changed into our rubber boots and disposable yellow hazmat suits. A guy rounded the building’s corner and came running toward us from across the parking lot. The sun beat down on the asphalt and made it warm inside my suit and boots. My back and neck itched from sweat but a breeze from the rippling blue water cooled my face. The van doors were open, and Em and Josh sat on the rim of the opened back. One side of the van was pushed down from Josh’s generous weight.

  “What are you doing? You can’t do that outside here!” The small, wiry man in a fitted gray suit reached us, and was out of breath.

  Em pulled her long, now less wet, hair back in a ponytail, and she and Josh each gave me a look that said, Who the hell is this guy? I shrugged but had a hunch I knew: the manager of the building, the person Gilani had warned me about.

  I quickly reached to shake his well-manicured hand in an attempt to disarm him. The man was smaller than me, and I wasn’t a very big person myself. “Sir, we’ve been sent by the city—”

  He stared at my glove, and even when I removed it, he wouldn’t shake my hand. “I know who you are. I’m Phillip Arnett, the manager of the Cove. You can’t stand around dressed like that, out here.” He indicted our suits. “People will see you and be frightened. This is a high-end building, not some flophouse.”

  “With all due respect, sir, the body was found here, not at some flophouse, so . . .” I said. Behind me, I heard Josh and Em snickering. I stood in front of them like a papa bear, when Josh was large enough to protect himself and Em and me at the same time. “If you’re not going to evacuate the building temporarily, and our chief said you weren’t, there’s a good chance someone inside will indeed notice us.” Arnett grimaced at me and crossed his arms. He had slicked-back, very light hair, one of those tan, glowing faces that made it hard to tell his age, and he wore too much cologne. “Listen,” I said. “We’re already dressed. We’ll be in and out of here fast if you let us get our equipment and head inside.”

  “You can’t use the main elevators.” From the look on his face, he was aghast at the idea of us trudging through his glistening marble lobby, which I’d seen through the glass front door when we pulled into the lot.

  “How about we use the service elevator? After all, that’s the reason I parked here, isn’t it, to use the service entrance?”

  Arnett smiled a little at my sarcasm and made a sweeping gesture to a bolted metal door at the side of the building. “Help yourselves. It’s never locked.”

  “After what happened here, you might want to think about changing that; not locking the service door, I mean.”

  Arnett didn’t acknowledge my comment.

  “After what’s happened, it’d do you well to take me seriously,” I said.

  Arnett winced, and he nodded fast. Then his arrogant exterior returned. “Apartment 102, the apartment needing a . . . thorough cleaning, is on the tenth floor and nearest to the elevator once you step out.” I smiled at the delicate way he’d put what we did. “Don’t leave the elevator until you arrive at floor ten, please. One of our janitorial staff found the . . . the body after tenants in the nearby apartments began complaining about a smell. It hasn’t been easy trying to keep the news from spreading. I don’t need you scaring our tenants. Some of them work from home.”

  “We’ll exit the elevator on the proper floor. But if you’re that concerned about someone seeing us, you might want to evacuate the building,” I said.

  Arnett laughed in disbelief. “I already told your superior I can’t do that.” He paused. “A lot of our tenants are at work this time of the day, but how long do you think it will take you to finish? I want you out of here before people come home from work or go out for the evening.” He handed me a key. “This is for the apartment. I trust you’ll keep the noise down?”

  Em and Josh got up and stepped around to my side. “It’ll take a few hours,” she told Arnett. “We’ll b
e gone before the day is over. Is the electricity on in the apartment? I know it’s vacant. We’ll need to have power for our equipment.”

  “There’s electricity. Is there any way you could change inside the apartment and not walk through the floor wearing those things?” Arnett pointedly overlooked Em and spoke to me.

  I gave him a blunt no. He stared at me for a moment, and then seemed to comprehend that I wasn’t going to offer an explanation even if he demanded one. He walked away, calling over his shoulder, “My office is inside the lobby. I’ll come upstairs to check on you to make sure you finish on time.”

  “What an asshole,” Josh said when Arnett was out of earshot. I grunted in agreement. He crushed his coffee cup and dropped it into the biohazard bag, and then tossed the bag at the back of the trunk. I helped him and Em pull our heavy-duty cleaning gear out of the back.

  We dragged our stuff through the barren service entrance, past a row of receptacles with festering garbage. The elevator, not as large as I’d assumed, was a tight fit, but we squeezed inside.

  On the ride up to the tenth floor Em glanced at the glowing buttons to her right. “What do you think will happen if we get off at a different floor?” she asked.

  “That dude will probably call the city and complain,” Josh said. “Who knows, maybe he’ll even sue the city.”

  I chuckled, but lawsuits had happened before, and for sillier reasons. The elevator dinged once we reached our floor. We kept our hazmat hoods down to look less intimidating and hauled and rolled the gear into the hall. The heavy cleaning equipment bounced along the floor and created a lot of noise, rattling the walls. Given the hour, there weren’t many tenants coming and going in the hallway, thankfully, but a young man leaving an apartment across from ours gave us an interested glance.