Now I was chasing a running high, not trying to beat the clock. Some days I caught it early, other days it never showed up and I struggled next to E trying to keep the pace. Today sat in between: my legs moving but my head never quite catching up. We hit the first water fountain at about a mile; while she drank I talked.
“Jakob asked me to move in with him.”
“Congrats.” The word was an exhalation, she had to stop breathing to drink and her body needed the air.
“Yeah, except…” I ducked in for my own drink. “He’s a vampire, you know? Moving in with a vampire?”
There it was. Did I love Jakob? Completely, without a doubt. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. But even though he hated talking about it, he was a vampire. He didn’t tell me the details of that part of his life, so I was pretty much in the dark. With no real facts to go on I was left wondering, doubting, scared of what it meant.
E watched me drink. “So?” she asked pointedly. Elsebeth Miller (E was a nickname) was one of Jakob’s last living descendants. He found her family after one of Ronnie’s genealogy projects and helped them move to Baton Rouge. E had been four then, and Jakob filled the role of favorite indulgent uncle in her life ever since. If I was hoping for a neutral third party to assuage my fears she wasn’t it.
“So…how does that work? I mean he drinks blood, and I’m a woman…I mean…he’s great but…” I hesitated. I couldn’t help but think of the dirty coffee mug on my desk. Was I signing up for a lifetime of bloody mugs? “Mechanically, the day-to-day stuff, how does that all work out?”
“Get a moon cup, you’ll be fine, better for the environment anyway.” She started running.
“A what?” I asked completely confused.
“A…” She glanced over at me. “Never mind, I misunderstood the question. What’s your problem with moving in, again?”
“There’s stuff I don’t know. What do I do if another vampire shows up? What’s the etiquette? Is he finally going to eat in front of me? Why doesn’t he keep blood in the house? Should I pick some up when I’m grocery shopping? When does he eat anyway? He doesn’t need to every night but he’s got to at least once a week, right? Twice a week? And then there’s the little stuff, I mean what’s going to happen when—?”
“Stop! Stop right there. You don’t know. I don’t know. No woman knows what’s going to happen when she moves in with a guy. He might turn out to be a freak or have some bizarre mommy complex and expect you to clean up after him. That’s why you move in, to find all that stuff out and see if it will work.”
“I get that but aren’t there more unknowns here than usual?” We passed out of the park and into the stoplight-filled downtown area. I was glad, there were more chances to talk out here.
“Maybe a few, but I’ve lived with a vampire. A vampire, every kind of witch there is, and the occasional lycanthrope all crammed together in one small space. Somehow we all made do. If you and Jakob love each other you’ll make do the same way.”
“But…”
“But?”
“But…shouldn’t I talk to someone? Can’t I prepare?”
“Talk to him. He’s the one that matters. And you can’t prepare for life like that. It’s not a test.”
****
Life might not be a test but my work was. Four miles and a shower later, I was starting my day with the first test. Did I remember the forms to fill out for theft of a supernatural object? I took them out of my drawer, test passed. Why couldn’t relationships be that simple?
“The paperwork,” I said to Danny. “Fill it out, handle this officially.”
“No, it’s a family matter.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Family matter, whose family exactly? That coat didn’t belong to anyone you’re related to, right?”
“We’re not going there. We’re not discussing it. What else do we have for today?”
I shoved the form back into my drawer more than a little annoyed. What else did we have for today? More follow up on the murder case, more useless follow up if our visit to the great white hunter was an example, oh and paperwork, we had plenty of paperwork. So that was what we did, wasting time until our appointment with the next person in the murder case.
Christine Sweeny lived alone in a house worth more than twice my annual salary and furnished for half of it. I wasn’t jealous, just aware of the cost of things like the chic antiques and billowing white curtains. Walking inside felt like going to my favorite lingerie shop, another world of lace and silk, white and pastel colors, all female, all the time.
Even the kitchen was decorated in white and light pinks, with tiny pink and white pots of herbs lined up on the window sill. The other detectives didn’t have any notes to give us, the storm stopped their investigation before it stated, but the decor made me guess her boyfriend didn’t spend the night often.
He stood watching us go through his lover’s things when she’d been buried only yesterday. Yet he didn’t cry. He didn’t even seem sad.
“How long were you together?” I called to him, coming out of the master bathroom. There weren’t any pictures of him in the house.
“Two years, things started when she stopped doing field job. We worked together before but we didn’t start seeing each other until she left, otherwise it would have been…well you know, awkward.”
Two years was a long time to be with someone and not have your photo anywhere in the house. I casually checked out the bedroom and the closet. A small shop’s worth of designer label clothes hung from padded hangers in a rosewood closet. Suits hung together, dresses in the back, shoes nested together in cubby holes, but absolutely nothing for a man. I’d left Danny alone with the boyfriend hoping they’d bond over their shared gender. When I came out I saw I was wrong.
“So you were close?” I asked, deciding it was time to be blunt.
“We were sleeping together.” He was immediately defensive, which meant no, they weren’t.
“Any chance Christine had a safety deposit box or maybe a safe somewhere in the house?” There wasn’t a home office, only a computer on a shelf in the kitchen. Home offices usually gave us a wealth of information, receipts, bills, credit card statements. You could tell a lot about a person from the little slips of paper they left behind. Christine hadn’t left anything behind. The house was neat and tidy; even the trash can under the paper shredder was empty.
“Uh, I don’t know. I didn’t come here much, I mean, she liked my place.” He swallowed hard, looking at a photo on the wall. A naked woman curled up inside a papasan chair; the misty gray shades of the black and white photo softened the image but I still recognized Christine. “She liked the lab too, but that made sense, it was her lab once.”
“Her lab?”
“I took her old job. That’s when she first saw me really. I mean I saw her the day I started, fresh out of school, junior lab tech, and there she was stunning, distant. But then she left and I took over. I figured I’d never see her again but one night I was working late and she showed up in the lab…”
He stopped talking and blushed furiously. I could guess how that night had ended. “I didn’t even see this place the first six months we were together. She’d show up at the lab and we’d…I mean it was always so random, that was Christine.”
“Random?” I looked around at the very orderly kitchen, through the entryway to the neat living room. The couch was piled under cushions that were all different but the exact same shade of cream. The same cream the doilies on top of the TV, the back of the couch, and the coffee table shared.
On top of one of those crocheted doilies was a vase of dried roses in the same pink as the couch and the mats in the framed prints on the wall. Nothing about her house seemed random. Why did he think she was?
“Christine would just appear. I never knew when or why, she was just there.” He shrugged, still looking at her photo. “If I didn’t drop everything for her it might be weeks or months until I saw her again. She didn’t return calls
, wouldn’t give me her cell number, then I’d be in the lab late some night and there was Christine, smiling, laughing, sending me to the bathroom to wash my hands.”
“Wash your hands?” Danny looked up sharply. Maybe he was listening.
“She had a thing about the lab and the chemicals. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. We wear gloves all the time but she would still insist. And I couldn’t use the lab sink, oh no, I had to use the one in the bathroom.” He looked away from the photo finally. “Do you really need me to be here?”
“Not really,” Danny admitted.
“Good. I mean, I miss her, God, I really do but looking back, I think maybe I shouldn’t be here now…it wasn’t the healthiest relationship,” he finished. “Call me if…well if there’s any way I can help.”
I watched him walk out, positive there wasn’t going to be.
Chapter 5
Christine’s house left us with more questions and almost no answers. Things there screamed at me, the order of it all, the way it was closed off even from her lover, the difference between the image her house presented and the way she acted around him, but I didn’t know if any of it mattered. More importantly, I didn’t know if any of it would help me catch her killer.
“What do you think?” I asked Danny, hoping for his experience and insight. Even distracted over the selkie skin coat, Danny could still pick up things I missed.
“I think she was doing him on the side.”
“But she doesn’t have anybody else,” I pointed out the obvious.
“Anybody else we know about,” he corrected. “The randomness, the keeping him at a distance, it all sounds like she didn’t really give a damn about him, like he was a thing to her.”
“I can see that, but then her house doesn’t give us much.”
“Just a lot of baking soda.”
“Excuse me?”
“In the kitchen, she had about seven boxes of baking soda, the big industrial-size boxes.”
“You don’t think she was selling drugs, do you?” Baking soda is one of the key ingredients you need to turn regular cocaine into crack.
“Maybe. Maybe that’s why she sent him out of the lab, so she could get some chemical she needed to cut it.”
“You think that’s what the hand washing was about?” I hadn’t realized it might be a trick to get him out of the room but I kept that to myself.
“There was a dirty plate in the sink. You see any antibacterial soap in the bathroom? Any rubbing alcohol?”
“No.” I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.
“There were hiking boots under the computer counter, where you’d kick them off if you were typing. If she’s paranoid about germs and cleanliness why not keep soap around? Why leave muddy boots in the kitchen? No, the hand washing thing was something else.”
He pulled our car into the parking lot of a fairly quiet building. The upper floors were public health offices; the ground floor held offices where doctors and nurses dealt with their licenses. We headed for the basement, the city morgue. Dr. Mohahan, the chief coroner, wouldn’t be happy to see me. Ever since I’d made one of his corpses speak he’d been a touch afraid of me. I suspected that’s why our appointment was for eleven o’clock. We wouldn’t have more than an hour before he’d announce he had a lunch date. One of these days I was going to call him on it, ask why he’d liked me when I was helping him put bodies back together, but now he didn’t stand too close to me.
Today wasn’t that day. The whispering started when we hit the landing in the middle of the stairs, telling me they were swamped. When the bodies were all neatly in steel and silver drawers I couldn’t hear anything. From the din coming up the stairs I’d say the place was so full they were stacking them in the halls.
The noise increased steadily as we walked down, the sound of a TV store on a Saturday morning, twenty sets all turned to different stations. Some bodies whispered, some mumbled, here and there I caught a word. I walked through trying my best not to focus on it.
The shiny steel gurneys started inside the doors, their discreet sheet-covered shapes loud only for me. Normally by now Danny would have mentioned it, but he walked forward oblivious. I promised myself to force him to talk about things the minute we left.
“The good detectives from the SIU, is it eleven o’clock already?” Dr. Mohahan didn’t look up from the clip board in front of him. As relaxed as his pose was, seated on the tall rolling stool, legs hooked around the bottom rungs, finishing something up, I could see his shoulders tense when he looked at me.
“On the dot,” I said, determined to act like I hadn’t noticed. “Christine Sweeny, one of these?” My gesture covered a space that usually held three bodies, each on a table under bright lights. Today it held four times that, the three in the center, and then a ring of others pushed up against the wall.
“This one.” He nodded his head to the side. “I got her out for you.”
“So you haven’t done a work up?”
“Haven’t finished it anyway, it took a while for the water to get out of her lungs. A superstitious person would say it was like something was keeping it there.”
“Lucky for us you’re not superstitious.”
He didn’t bother with a reply and lifted the drape off the body for me. Christine’s looks hadn’t improved since she’d been taken out of the river. Her hair had dried to a dull almost blonde color, long strings with twigs and leaves from the river still in them.
“When would you say the water finally came out?” I looked at those pale lips, dry now when they’d been wet in the living room. I suspected it had been…
“First day of the storm maybe? I finally put in a tube before we left, got sick of waiting for gravity to do its job.”
First day of the storm, the minute the water got out of your lungs you came to see me, Christine. What was so important?
“My report isn’t finished so there really isn’t much here for you yet.” He looked at Danny, no doubt hoping my senior partner would step in and stop me. Unfortunately, Danny wasn’t acting very senior today.
“Right, I’ll only be a second.” I gave him a winning smile before I wrapped my hand around her arm. The noise in the background of my mind got louder, like someone turned up the volume on the radio without tuning into the station.
Concentrating on Christine, and the memory of her ghost, made it clear. Now I could hear her voice, repeating over and over again: “Stop them.” I let myself go, blocked out the room around me, the dozen other voices of the dead, and poured my consciousness into her last moments.
She was bent over, a strange position, something poking into her back for an instant and then choking, horrible choking on warm salty water. The water came up from her lungs and out of her nose, gagging her. Her vision was a field of perfect seafoam green, unbroken solid color as she fought with her hands, reaching out to grab someone, anyone, fighting for breath. Her fingers hit something, grabbed, tearing fabric and flesh, but already the world was going dark.
Betrayed, held down, drowning in this space where everything she could see was green. Her hands grabbed, clutching the flesh of the person who held her down, one last spasm before life slipped away from her.
I blinked once, then twice, coming out of it. Danny was talking to me; at least his lips were moving, even if I wasn’t hearing any words. I nodded, taking a deep breath of my own, the feeling of drowning, the taste of salty water still in my mouth.
I took my hand off Christine and now the other deaths in the room screamed up at me. Too many deaths wanted my attention. One of the victims somewhere had been beaten to death; those last few minutes of fear and pain threw me off balance. I stumbled back, running into Dr. Mohahan.
He caught my arm by reflex but his skin on mine did something else. His eyes went wide with fear and he practically dropped me.
“You okay?” Danny asked, and his voice brought back the world and shut out the dead. The room was quiet with the noise of the living,
a clock ticking, a phone ringing somewhere.
“I’m fine.” I turned back to Mohahan. “What about you?”
“I’ll be all right, in a minute, I need a second.” His gesture and his broken speech added up, but the thing we’d shared didn’t. He wasn’t a death witch, so why was he so shaken?
“You’re a spirit witch?” I asked, grasping at straws.
“Oh no.” He laughed. “My family maybe…every few generations we have one…but not my generation, not me. I don’t even like people, they make me nervous. That’s how I ended up working here.”
“But you heard, I mean you saw what I saw…”
“Don’t be silly.” He shook himself like he was throwing something off. “My grandmother may have fancied herself some sort of witch but I’m quite normal.”
“But you saw—”
“You threw me off balance; sorry about that, you’d think I could catch someone without half falling myself. Did you get what you needed?” His eyes were pleading with me, asking me to let it go but I didn’t want to. I wanted to know what he saw, what he felt, but I knew he wouldn’t go into any more.
“What would bring water up from the lungs? She remembers the water coming up filling her mouth and nose, not being poured in or coming in like her head was under water.”
“Well, if she’d already had the water in her lungs, if she was drowning but then pulled out and someone tried to pump it out of her. Or she could have been drunk; people drown on their own vomit more often than you’d think.” He spoke with the authority of a doctor, confident now that we’d moved past his moment of weakness.
“Any sign of alcohol in her system?” Danny asked.
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “No alcohol, no drugs, but also no river water in her lung tissue. In fact, there’s nothing in her body that shouldn’t be there. She drowned, the usual evidence proves it, but there’s no good evidence on how.”
Blood, Dirt, and Lies Page 5