“Because she was sick.”
What? Now I’m expected to be an adoring mother, a soulmate, and a human thermometer? “She didn’t tell me.”
“After dinner she told me her stomach hurt and she felt cold.” Terrie nibbled at an already worn nail, a sign of imperfection that Evelyn pounced on and savored. “But then she can talk to me more easily than you.”
Terrie paused, and for once seemed to realize she had been slightly less than tactful, but decided her concern for Angel took precedence over discretion. “I mean, you’re her mother—”
“Exactly.”
“And she doesn’t feel that you want to listen to her,” Little Miss Perfect Child Psychologist went on. “It’s kind of a weak spot in your relationship. She’s such a sensitive child.”
Evelyn looked at Terrie’s vacant blue eyes as a wave of fury passed through her. She’d had it. She had been up all night, was sore, tired, in trouble with her boss, and worried sick about her daughter. At that moment she could murder over a cup of coffee, let alone the suggestion—no, statement—that she was an abysmal, coldhearted bitch of a mother.
“Yes, she is,” Evelyn said. “Imagine how such a vulnerable child would feel if she found out her father had shacked up with you long before our divorce.”
She regretted the words as soon as they hit the air. Even the satisfaction of seeing the blood drain from Terrie’s face didn’t make up for the icy sense of foreboding that invaded her cells.
“Did you tell her that?” Terrie asked in a horrified whisper, all bubbles gone.
“I would never tell her that. She’s such a sensitive child.” Evelyn brushed past the other woman, not gently, and reclaimed the orange vinyl chair next to her only child as if all the armies of the world couldn’t oust her from it.
For a moment she thought Terrie might spend the rest of the visit in the hallway, but the sturdy younger woman entered with a burst of cheerfulness for everyone except Evelyn, whom she ignored for the next fifteen minutes while she spoke to Angel in the “you poor kid, that must have been awful, why didn’t you tell us you were that sick” vein. At first Angel gave little response to the gushing, as her stitches had begun to hurt and her tolerance was frayed. But after the nurse introduced a little morphine into her IV, Angel relaxed and told Terrie about her pain and fear in much more detail than she had told her mother.
Maybe Terrie’s right, Evelyn thought in horror. Because I keep my feelings to myself, does Angel feel she has to do the same or I won’t respect her, think her weak? Am I by example creating a wall between us? Or is she just telling Terrie these things because she knows it’s what Terrie wants to hear, in that peculiar chameleonlike way that so many women develop?
Then she glanced at the TV screen, which had pictures with no sound, and saw a bouncy anchorwoman talking away with a blown-up picture of Destiny Pierson in the background. She felt an ache of sympathy for Darryl, but didn’t turn the sound up. Even though the news would have no personal meaning for her daughter, she still didn’t want Angel to know that another teenage girl had died on the same day her life was, however briefly, threatened.
Chapter 11
THE NEXT MORNING SHE left Angel at home, safely ensconced with her phone, her cable TV, her overly indulgent grandmother, and her school assignments (which would almost certainly be ignored), and plunged back into the maelstrom the murders had created around the ME’s office. Vans from the four local TV channels clogged the parking lot and the front steps were filled with representatives from CNN, Parents of Murdered Children, Block Watch, and Black on Black Crime Prevention.
“Excuse me.” She pushed by the same bleached-blond anchorwoman she had watched on Angel’s hospital TV as she joined the line of employees running the gauntlet.
Someone clutched her elbow. “Here,” department intern Jason announced to the group at large. “This is Evelyn James. She will answer all your questions.” He melted into the crowd before she could stick out a foot and trip him.
Eager faces, microphones, cameras, and very bright lights not only invaded her personal space but decimated it. She knew she resembled a deer in the headlights of an oncoming train. Not just any train, the high-speed kind. The reporters nearly salivated as they shouted questions.
“Was the mayor’s daughter raped?”
“Was her body mutilated?”
“Is it true there were racial epithets carved into her skin?”
I work with dead bodies, she thought, and these people are giving me the creeps. She thrust her shoulders back, lifted her chin, and looked the biggest camera directly in its cold lens. “All inquiries should be directed to the medical examiner, Mr. Stone.”
Having delivered the party line, she pressed through the crowd, which extended into the lobby. The wizened receptionist, Mrs. Anderson, had been forced to light a cigarette and let the halo of smoke clear a space around her desk.
“Where you been, missy?” she queried. “Hell of a time to skip town. Not that I didn’t think of it myself, but Greyhound won’t give tickets on credit anymore.”
“My daughter had her appendix out. Where’s Jonathan?”
“Tony’s bellowing for you,” the receptionist noted with satisfaction, and tapped long nails on the chipped countertop. “Has been since yesterday morning. You’d think the exercise would work off some of the fat in his neck, but no, he looks just the same, like a basketball on a tire.”
Evelyn’s coworker Marissa squeezed past the crowd, ignoring the pleas of reporters the same way she ignored men who shouted from passing cars, and plucked her sheaf of messages from between Mrs. Anderson’s bloodred nails. The young Hispanic serologist had the face of a model and a thousand-yard stare. “Hey, heard about your daughter. How’d that go?”
To Evelyn’s surprise, she put her arms around Marissa and let the woman give her a tight hug. “It was awful. They wheeled her into surgery and I just wanted to die. Even though I knew it was stupid. People have had this done for a hundred years.”
“But for a hundred years, it wasn’t your kid. And that makes all the difference. Then you have to jump back into this zoo.”
“I didn’t even make it to the door before Jason threw me to the wolves. That kid doesn’t like me,” she went on in a rare moment of petulance. “And I have been nothing but nice to him.”
“ ’Cause he wants your job, honey,” put in Mrs. Anderson. “His position now is through a federal grant. Once the money’s up, so is he.”
“Come on. He’s a kid. He doesn’t even have his degree yet.”
“His master’s,” Marissa said seriously. “He’s got a bachelor’s. Once he gets his master’s, he’ll have something over you.”
“Oh.” As Evelyn digested this, a weak tornado of worry began to swirl in her stomach. She couldn’t lose her job. Particularly not to some pimply geek like Jason, but under any circumstances, she could not lose her job.
The moment of panic passed, and she continued to protest: “But he has no experience. And tossing me to the reporters is just his idea of a joke.”
“Don’t be naïve,” Mrs. Anderson snapped. “You put a fox in the henhouse, don’t be surprised when you lose some eggs.”
“Yeah, but—” Evelyn searched for another objection. “He’s still totally green. Does he really think that Tony will think that he can just waltz in and do all the work?”
“He will if you keep taking off for family emergencies. People like him, with no families, don’t understand that. Besides, Tony doesn’t care about work, he just wants someone to bullshit with.” Marissa spoke with conviction and, Evelyn had to admit, accuracy. “He’s got you and me, his hos, to do the real work.”
Evelyn had to laugh. “I think I should object to being referred to as a ho.”
“I sure as hell object to being treated as one.”
“Okay, okay. Anybody know where Jonathan is?”
“He’s at viewing, probably,” Mrs. Anderson volunteered. “You know, where they all stand in
a circle around the dead bodies, listening to the case histories? No way to start the day, I always thought. You want I should tell Tony you left the country? It’s guaranteed to put him in intensive care. I’ll send flowers.”
“I’ll be up in a minute. I just want to get with the doctor first. Isn’t this a nonsmoking building?”
“You can’t scare me,” the woman said with absolute certainty. “I raised kids.”
Evelyn dove back into the crowd and fought her way to the rear of the building, where a deskman who would have looked more at home in a Browns uniform guarded the doorway.
“Morning, Greg.”
“They keep tryin’ to come back here,” he said, referring to the visitors. “Don’t know why. They’d probably puke if they did.”
“Death fascinates people.”
“Makes them puke, too. You be careful if you leave the building, them vultures harass people until they say something, and the ME said nobody makes any statements but him if they want to keep working here.”
“I’ll be careful.”
She found Jonathan standing over a cancer victim, writing fastidious notes on a preprinted form. “How is your daughter?” he asked without preamble.
“She’s fine, thanks. Everything went okay. Did you do Destiny?”
A smile surfaced. “There’s several ways one could take that question, but if you’re asking if I did the autopsy on the Pierson kid, yes, I did.”
“What did you find?”
“Hang on.” He prodded the unfortunate man on the gurney. Normally Evelyn found his unflappability comforting, but this morning it was all she could do to keep from tapping her foot. A stench washed through the dock, of decaying flesh, fecal matter, body odor, and industrial-strength cleaner, but it smelled like that every day and she took no notice. She did notice a news crew in the parking lot, their camera snatching some footage every time the overhead door in the loading dock opened, their van planted in a space labeled For Authorized Vehicles Only.
Jonathan finished and she followed him to his office, one cubicle out of a room he shared with three other pathologists. The available shelf space had been filled with medical texts, Unnatural Death by Dr. Michael Baden, and a picture of his parents and brother. “Sit.”
Evelyn sat.
He opened a file, and she could see the standard form bearing the outlines of a female body. Jonathan had filled in every injury or mark on the skin. There were more present than any young girl should have to suffer, but they were all minor compared to the dark red line around the neck.
“She was strangled with the chain around her neck, no surprise. The links left distinct marks. Her skin wasn’t waterlogged, except for her left hand, which lay in a puddle, so any swim right before her death was a brief one.”
“But—”
“But,” he went on, “she had some water in her lungs, and a culture showed bacteria consistent with river water. It did not come from a bathtub.”
“So she got a mouthful of water, but she didn’t drown.”
“She definitely didn’t drown. She was pretty healthy up until he tightened the chain.”
Evelyn shuddered.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t usually get the willies.” His brown eyes saw, as always, so much more than the surface. “Something about this case getting to you?”
She hesitated. “I spent yesterday in a hospital with my sixteen-year-old. I guess there’s just too many dead girls around all of a sudden.”
“Oh.”
She felt a qualm about keeping her personal connection to the victim from him but didn’t want to get into it. “Were there any other injuries?”
“Besides the broken finger, she had scrapes, bruises, mud and dirt on her hands, a broken nail. It’s all minor. It could be from our perp and it could be from fighting the elements, clawing her way up that bank.”
“Sexual assault?”
“No sign of it, but then the water could have washed a lot away. We took swabs, so Marissa should have the results this morning. But there were no signs of injuries. Maybe he got her skirt off and then she bolted.”
“I hope so.”
“You sure you’re okay? Maybe you should have taken another day off.”
She smiled at him. “And miss getting on the six o’clock news? Not on your life.”
“Yeah, that’s you. Such a ham.”
“I’d better find Tony before he pages me. Thanks a lot.”
Evelyn went up the back staircase but turned away from Trace Evidence, knocking instead on the door to the Toxicology Department. Tox had twice the staff as Trace and much more organization, but then their jobs were more easily regimented. On a regular basis, they tested three items from each body: blood, urine, and stomach contents. The staff rotated among the instrument stations every few months to avoid burnout, and they were even allowed to have a radio.
Once admitted, she wound between benches filled with small plastic jars of samples from autopsy, clipboards, and scattered tools to a corner desk tucked in between the HPLC and the compressed air tanks. The hard-packed liquid chromatograph hummed as it separated controlled substances—legal and illegal drugs—from bodily fluids. Ed Ferullo, pale, ponytailed, as rotund as Tony but frighteningly smart, crammed another few words on a yellow legal pad and pointedly ignored her.
She amused herself for a moment by checking out the latest comic strips, which covered the wall, window, and HPLC, and even extended onto the gas tanks. Underneath these flapping pieces of paper, textbooks, a true-crime novel, and what looked suspiciously like a Harlequin romance were stacked in a perfect pyramid in one corner of his desk; in the other corner sat an Egyptian sarcophagus (one-eighteenth scale) and several manila folders with illegible labels. Ed ensured his privacy by making sure that no one but him could read his writing. Evelyn picked up the romance.
“I didn’t know you cared for these, Ed.”
Without changing his position in any way, he said, “Idiot woman poisoned a character with a campfire made of oleander branches. I am writing to tell her that the stupid smoke won’t do it. She had to poke the sharpened branches into the little weenies or oysters or whatever her star-crossed lovers are eating.”
“Glad to know you’re keeping the world safe from inaccuracy in romance literature. I have a question.”
“Did you know,” he said conversationally, storing his legal pad and pen in a precise configuration on his desk blotter and staring out his obstructed window as he spoke, “that Cleopatra was not Egyptian?”
“Yes.” It was an interest they shared; possibly, she thought with relief, the only interest they shared. “She was descended from Alexander the Great. Although since they had gone through quite a few generations, she must have been partly Egyptian.”
“Perhaps.” He remained silent, either pondering the last pharaoh’s ethnicity or waiting until he made Evelyn fidget with impatience. “What is your question?”
She pulled over a stool and perched on it, discovering too late its lack of structural integrity. She hung on and swayed to one side. “I have two girls, both apparently snatched and subdued without much of a struggle, at least not a struggle that did them much physical harm. They weren’t knocked out with a head injury, yet they must have been immobile for several hours at least.”
“Your cement-shoes lady.”
“And Destiny Pierson. Is it possible that they were drugged somehow?”
“No, not possible. No one ever uses drugs in this world.”
“Can you check for drugs? Or chemicals?”
“If you read the lettering on the door as you came in, lady, you know this fine unit exists for no other reason than to test the life fluids of those who have departed this plane of existence, for drugs and other illegal substances.”
“I don’t mean to try your patience, Ed.” Talking to him required a delicate dance and a good amount of groveling. But if he paid off, it would be worth it.
; “Then you’re doing a good imitation.”
“I mean, can you flag their specimens and test for things you don’t normally test for? Not just narcotics but the date-rape drugs, stuff vets use on animals, anything that would cause sleep, relaxation, or unconsciousness? Please?”
He sighed. “How many times do I have to explain this? This is real life. This”— he pointed at the HPLC—“is not the Bat Computer. We can’t pour in alphabet soup and have it spell out a message. If you want me to look for something exotic, you have to tell me what I’m looking for.”
“I’ll try to find out. I know I’m asking for a miracle.”
“That’s okay, you can ask,” he said with relish. “Because you’re not going to get one.”
She played her trump card. “You know, in the old detective novels they knocked people out with some chloroform on a rag. Clamped it over the delicate heroine’s mouth, one breath, and out she goes.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “That’s silly. No one does that anymore.”
“I know.”
“Besides, it would leave burns on the skin. And the victim would promptly throw up, conscious or unconscious. And where would he get it? I mean, unless your killer works in a chemistry lab.”
“Just a thought.” She paused discreetly, and then added: “Of course, he could mix bleach and nail polish remover and distill it.”
“Easier than that,” Ed snapped. “Just mix bleach and methyl ethyl ketone—otherwise known as paint thinner—and suck the precipitate from the bottom. Easier than distilling.”
“The bucket had been full of chlorine tabs for a swimming pool. Could he dissolve those and use it for the bleach?”
“No! Pool chemicals can be made up of a bunch of different chemicals, which are not the same thing as plain old household bleach.” A gleam, just a pinpoint, had developed in his eyes. “Well. I’ll take a look at the samples on the two females in question, and see what I can get out of the HPLC and that antiquated piece of junk called a mass spec. Just to make you happy.”
She gave him a brilliant smile. “Thanks, Ed.”
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