Dead Calm

by Annelise Ryan

  Just when I think life can’t get any more complicated, Cass proves me wrong. “And I should probably warn you, it isn’t just any dead body. According to Hurley, the contractor says it’s the body of a space alien.”

  Izzy and I stare at each other with matching expressions of incredulity. “You go,” Izzy says with a hint of a smile. “I can sew Meredith up faster than you can. Give Otto a call and see if he’s available. If he is, let him go. If he’s not, let me know, and I’ll come out there.”

  I step away from the table and peel off my gloves. “You’re afraid it’s real,” I tease Izzy, though to be honest, I’m glad he’s playing things safe and sensibly. He looks tired, and he’s been on his feet for two autopsies and five hours now, and it’s only his third full day back at work. I’m worried about him.

  Izzy shoots me a cautionary look. “Just don’t let Arnie get wind of it,” he says. “If you think his conspiracy theories have been crazy up until now, I’m betting this will make those look tame.”

  “Um, about that,” Cass says with a sheepish look. “Arnie already knows about it. He was at my desk when the call came in. That’s why it took me a few minutes to get back here.” She shrugs and gives us an apologetic look. “I’ll go call Doc Morton for you and let you know what he says.” With that, she beats a hasty retreat from the room.

  Izzy wishes me luck as I head for the bathroom to change into some fresh scrubs. I don’t have time for a shower, much as I’d like one, but I do a quick sink washup before heading out front. Hurley is there waiting for me.

  I hop in the car and give him a tentative smile, some small part of me hoping this is some kind of practical joke. But judging from the tired, worn look on his face, I feel certain it is real.

  “This may be a late night for one or both of us,” I say. “We should run by the house so I can get my car.”

  He says nothing; he simply nods and pulls into traffic.

  “Cass said the contractor thinks the body is a space alien?” I say in a half-joking tone, still clinging to a meager hope that Hurley will break into a smile and say “Gotcha!” But all he does is look over at me and roll his eyes.

  “Arnie knows,” I tell him.

  This makes him let out a long, heavy sigh. He shakes his head woefully.

  “Helluva day, isn’t it?” I say, trying to sound chipper. Still he says nothing. Exasperated, I turn toward him as much as my seat belt will allow. “Hurley, what’s going on? Why aren’t you talking to me? I thought we fixed things earlier.”

  “Sorry,” he says, flexing his fingers on the steering wheel. He flashes me a meager smile. “It’s not you or us. I’m just tired and frustrated. And angry with myself for not collecting the extra clothing from our suspects earlier, or doing a more thorough search at Lansing’s place. I should have been on top of that right away.”

  “Okay,” I say with a shrug. “So we move on. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Maybe not,” he says. “Junior called me a bit ago to tell me that John Lansing is refusing to let anyone in his apartment at this point. He told Junior we’ve taken enough of his stuff and that literally taking the clothes off his back was going too far, particularly since it was someone else who killed his wife. So now we’re trying to get a warrant, but I’m not sure we will. I want to search both houses for potential sedating agents, too, but without knowing what it is we’re looking for, and with no definitive proof that the victims were sedated, I doubt that’s going to happen. And just to add to the fun, guess what judge is on call for the warrant?”

  “Who?”

  “Judge Kupper.”

  “Oh.” I frown at this.

  “Yeah,” Hurley says. “If he’s involved in this case with Hal and Tina, then he has to suspect that Jeremy Prince talked to me before he was killed, especially if they’ve tried to find his family. I don’t know that he’d be blatant about making my life miserable, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he tested me a bit, to see what shakes out.

  “And on top of all that,” he goes on, “I think both John and Pamela are beginning to suspect that this wasn’t the simple murder-suicide we told them it was. At the rate things are going, they’ll probably both lawyer up any minute now.” He rolls his lips in and shakes his head.

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it,” I tell him. “Mistakes happen. We’re both exhausted. And I goofed up, too. I searched the medicine cabinets in both houses. There was a prescription for some sleeping pills at Meredith Lansing’s place. I forgot about that.” I slap myself upside the head, both literally and figuratively. “I need to tell Arnie so he knows to look for that drug in our victims.”

  I’ve never seen Hurley this down before, this defeated-looking. I know we’re both exhausted and stressed out, but Hurley has been under more stress in the past, and he handled it just fine. I’m worried about him. I reach over and gently massage the back of his neck. The muscles there are hard and taut beneath my fingers, so I continue for the short ride to our house.

  Hurley pulls up to the curb behind my hearse to let me out. He shifts into park, reaches behind his neck, and grabs my hand, kissing the back of it. It’s a sweet gesture that makes my stomach flip-flop.

  “Hey,” I say with a wink, “at least all this chaos in our lives will cure you of those thoughts you’ve been having lately about us having another kid.”

  He breaks into a sly grin and winks at me. “Nope, I still want another one.”

  I gape at him and pull my hand back, narrowing my eyes at him. “Okay, where are you hiding the stuff?”

  “What stuff?” he says, cocking his head to the side.

  “Your whips, chains, and leather,” I say. “Clearly you’re a closet masochist. There’s no other explanation for this level of insanity.”

  He breaks into a loud belly laugh, and it does my heart good to see his mood improved, even if only for a minute or two. I get out of the car, climb into my hearse, and then follow Hurley as he drives out to our new home site.

  The land we bought is a total of five acres that belonged a farmer in the area who no longer farms and is selling off parcels to finance his retirement. It’s a quick ten-minute drive, through and out of town, five of which we spend at stoplights that I hope aren’t an indication of how the rest of my day is going to go. Along the drive, Cass calls and tells me that Doc Morton will meet me at the site. “And you should probably know that Arnie is already headed out there, too,” she adds. “He thought you might need some help processing the scene.”

  This elicits a smile from me. Arnie hates doing scene work. He’s a lab rat by nature, and he likes his machines, and his slides, and his reference books, and his clean, sterile work area. But given that the man can find a conspiracy hiding inside a roll of toilet paper, it’s not hard to figure out why he’s offering to help out with this particular scene. His paranoia, while amusing, is also useful in his job. I’ve seen him suss out clues so obscure and well-hidden that most people would never find them. But given his hard-held beliefs in things like aliens, I fear it may be difficult to rein him in with this case.

  The road up to the top of the bluff is a rutted dirt track for now, though we plan to grade it and maybe even pave it at some point since it will be our driveway once the house is done. I follow Hurley up it, eating his dust both literally and figuratively, until we reach the flatter area above.

  I see that Arnie is already there when we arrive. There are four construction workers and the head contractor, Marvin Holmes—a moniker that makes me wonder if his name helped him decide on his career—standing around. Marvin has met me before, and he knows I drive a hearse. His workers, however, who all look like members of a third-world chain gang, stare at my car with wide eyes and gaping mouths.

  Marvin came highly recommended by several doctors I know who have used him to build their own homes, so I hope his workers only look like criminals and lowlifes because of the hard work they’ve spent their lives doing on other job sites. At the moment, they are all standing a
round an excavator that is sitting near the edge of a large, raw wound in the ground, a rectangular area that is some fifty feet wide and seventy long.

  As I approach this gargantuan hole, I see that the depth of it varies. On one end, it goes down nearly twelve feet, but on the other, the end where the excavator is currently parked, it is only about five feet deep. Since that’s where everyone else is standing, I make my way there and peer into the hole.

  I can see why the body was reported to be an alien. There is an entire skull lying cockeyed on a small shelf of dirt about five feet below the edge. It’s abnormally shaped. Despite appearing small, like a child’s skull, the top is large and bulbous-looking, the jawline narrow. The eye sockets look larger than usual, and they are set far apart. A few feet away I can see what appears to be a rib cage half embedded in the dirt.

  Marvin says, “The skull came out of the ground, caught on one of the bucket teeth. It fell off as my guy started to swing the bucket around, and as soon as we realized what it was we stopped digging and called you guys.” He pauses, and winces. “I think Lenny—he’s the scoop operator—might have scraped over the skull with the bucket.”

  Otto arrives and walks over to where the rest of us are standing, and I fill him in on what Marvin just told us. When I’m done, we all fall silent as we stare at the bones. I can tell from where I’m standing that the rib bones don’t look normal either. The cage is small and narrow—almost forming a cylindrical shape—and the sternum is misshapen.

  A minute or so goes by before Hurley says, “Is it a child?”

  Arnie, who has been shifting back and forth from one foot to the next, clearly excited, says, “It’s an alien skull. I mean, just look at it! It’s like the Starchild skeleton.”

  “Starchild?” Hurley asks, making me wince. The last thing Arnie needs is any sort of encouragement, but it’s too late now.

  Arnie gives Hurley a disdainful look and then brings us all up to speed, whether we want him to or not. “The Starchild skull was unearthed in 1930 from a mine about a hundred miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. They found it with another, normal skeleton. The Starchild skull looks just like this one, bulbous and big on top, flat in the back, with the eyes close-set. And I’m betting our skull won’t have any frontal sinuses, just like that one.”

  Arnie pauses and gives his rapt audience a distrustful look. “Supposedly,” he goes on in a skeptical tone that makes it clear he doesn’t believe what he’s about to say, “DNA testing proved the Starchild skull was human, because they found both an X and a Y chromosome. But that was based on a minimal amount of partially degraded DNA. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t an alien hybrid. For all we know, the aliens might have Y chromosomes just like ours. Or perhaps they somehow altered the fetus in a woman who was already pregnant.”

  The chain gang members all take a couple steps back, though I’m not sure if they’re trying to distance themselves from the skull or from Arnie.

  I give Arnie my best skeptic’s look.

  “Come on,” he says, seeing the same expression on Hurley and Otto. “Are you going to tell me that ancient men were able to build things like the Egyptian pyramids and the Mayan temples without some form of advanced technological assistance? And is it a coincidence that ancient drawings from these areas feature men with large, bulbous heads and small facial features? What about the geoglyphs, the Nazca lines in Peru, giant figures that can only be identified if you’re looking at them from up in the sky? They look like landing strips, and those ancient people had no way to make such a thing, not to mention a need for it.” He pauses and his eyes grow wide. “Or did they?” he asks in a dramatic, suggestible tone.

  Otto, who has stood by with admirable patience up until now, says, “Arnie, I hate to burst your bubble, but odds are this skeleton is from a child who may have suffered from hydrocephalus.”

  “Hydro-what?” one of the chain gang members says. “Is it contagious?” They all back up another step.

  Otto shakes his head. “Hydrocephalus simply means fluid on the brain. It’s caused by a birth defect, not a disease.”

  I look at Otto and say, “I’ll snap some pictures from here, but we need to get a closer look at it, see if there are other bones in there.”

  He nods. “We’ll need a ladder of some sort so we can get down there without disturbing the scene any more than it already is.”

  “Gotcha covered,” Marvin says. He snaps his fingers at one of his workers, a skinny, sinewy guy with a glazed, stoner expression in his eyes and long hair that looks like it hasn’t been washed in weeks. “Hank,” Marvin says, and then he nods in the direction of the parked vehicles.

  It takes Hank a few seconds to glean Marvin’s meaning, and the dopey, clueless look he has on his face makes me fear our new house—assuming it ever gets built—will be about as sturdy and straight as the one my son built out of pots and pans on the kitchen floor the other day. Hank finally discerns what he’s supposed to do and scurries toward a large, blue pickup truck. He grabs an extension ladder out of the back bed, carries it over, and starts to set it in the hole, aiming it right at the skull.

  “No!” I yell, nearly dropping my camera and making the poor guy jump. His cohorts snigger and snort at this. “Not there.” The skeleton is resting on a small ledge that is only a couple of feet wide, five feet below ground level, and bordering part of the twelve-foot-deep area of the hole. “We need to put it down in the deep part so we can stand on the ladder below the level of that ledge where the bones are.”

  Hurley steps toward Hank, and does a gimme gesture with his hands.

  Hank hands the ladder to Hurley, who then—with some help from Marvin—releases the latches that hold the sliding parts in place. Then they carefully lower the ladder into the hole, extending it past the ledge with the skeleton.

  I have my scene kit with me, and after setting down my camera, I search through it for the fine-bristled paintbrush I know is in there. I’m not sure it will be all that useful because the dirt around the skeleton appears to be wet and muddy, so I also grab a few other tools, stuffing some into the pockets of my scrubs and handing others, along with my camera, to Hurley.

  “Ladies first,” Hurley says, waving a hand toward the ladder.

  I survey the scene for a moment. “There’s no point in more than one person going down there.”

  “You’re not going to just start digging those bones loose, are you?” Arnie asks, looking askance.

  I consider his question, wondering if I’ve overlooked some bit of procedure or protocol. I can’t think of any, so I shrug and say, “Yeah, why wouldn’t we?”

  “Shouldn’t we call someone first, like the FBI, or national security, or SETI?”

  “How about the National Enquirer?” Otto suggests. “I hear they’ll pay big bucks for something like this.”

  “Or what about the men in black?” I toss out with more than a hint of sarcasm.

  “Fine,” Arnie says in a snide tone. “Mock me if you must, but those guys exist. They don’t look or act like the movie characters, but I promise you, they exist. And we should call someone. This could be a groundbreaking, historic find.”

  The chain gang members start whispering back and forth between themselves, and seconds later the cell phones come out. They inch back toward the edge of the hole.

  Hurley sees this, too, and takes action. “Marvin, tell your men they can go home. I assume it’s close to their usual quitting time anyway, and there isn’t going to be any more work here today, maybe not for several days.”

  Sensing that their opportunity to take a potentially valuable picture is fading fast, the workers hold their phones out, and I hear several clicks.

  “Now, Marvin,” Hurley snaps, clearly growing impatient.

  Scowling, Marvin directs his men to back up and go home. They do so, but several of them get in a few more clicks before they leave. Their retreat is accompanied by the sputtering sounds of an engine approaching, and seconds later an older-model
white panel van pulls up, parking on the grass beside Marvin’s pickup. I half expect to see Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones jump out in their tidy, black suits. And if Arnie’s wide-eyed expression is any indication, he expects this, too. Though this type of windowless van is more in keeping with a kidnapping pedophile than an alien hunter.

  “What’s up with the creeper van?” I ask, as we all watch. We can’t see the person behind the wheel because Marvin’s pickup is in the way, but a moment later a young man who looks like he’s all of twelve comes hurrying around the end of the pickup toward us. He’s wearing large, dark-framed glasses that sit crooked on his nose, and his face is pockmarked with zits. His light brown hair is cut short, spiking up in places, and he’s wearing a stunning outfit—and I mean stunning in a Taser sort of way, not a fashionably chic sort of way: Bermuda shorts, a hideous Hawaiian shirt, sandals, and mid-calf, black socks. The footwear is uniquely Wisconsin. A clue to his identity is the camera he has hanging from a strap around his neck.

  “Howdy there, folks,” he says as he approaches, pushing his glasses up his nose. He stops a few feet away and gives us a goofy smile. “I’m Cletus Barnes, the new photographer and reporter for the Sorenson paper. I hear you guys found a dead body?”

  His spinach-colored eyes look huge behind those glasses, making me guess that his vision without them is somewhere in the 20/1,000 range.

  “You’re Alison Miller’s replacement?” I ask. Just saying Alison’s name makes my heart clutch inside my chest.

  “I am,” he says with enthusiasm. “Bummer what happened to her, but hey, life goes on, right?” He glances into the hole. “As does death.”