by Tony Healey
“Ida, this is Detective Stu Raley. He’s my partner. You can trust him, okay?”
“I know,” Ida says. “Pleasure to meet you.”
Stu nods. “And you.”
Harper starts the car, drives through the empty parking lot. She glances up at the mirror, sees Ida looking out the window at her truck. “It’ll be fine there, Ida. I promise.”
“Alright.”
“Listen, I’ve told Stu about your . . . gift,” Harper tells her. She feels Stu tense in the passenger seat.
Neither Ida nor Stu says anything.
“He’s skeptical.”
Stu glares at her. “Jane . . .”
“It’s alright, Detective Raley,” Ida says from behind. “I’m used to people thinking I’m a little soft in the head. Goes with the territory. I spent four years in a mental hospital because no one believed a word I was saying. You’ll either be convinced, or you won’t. I’m not out to impress anyone.”
Stu clears his throat. “Uh, that’s fine. Yeah.”
Harper thinks: So far so bad.
Barnie watches the morgue overnight. The job involves him sitting at a desk watching television, trying to stay awake until the morning supervisor arrives. His proclivity for eating several bags of cheese balls every night, washed down with cans of Coke, has seen him balloon to a solid three hundred pounds.
Occasionally, people arrive at the morgue to deliver a body, or to take one away. It’s Barnie’s job to ensure everything is kosher. So when he sees Detectives Raley and Harper—and a third person he’s never met before—approach the entrance, he’s not too surprised. He knows they have that girl in storage, the one from the high-profile murder case that’s all over the local paper. It’s not unusual to have homicide people, and coroners, revisit a body to confirm some theory or other.
They ring the bell and he buzzes them in.
“Evening, Barnie,” Raley says.
“Detective.” He nods his head. “Harper, you along for the ride tonight?”
“I am.”
Barnie peers around Harper’s side at Ida. He lifts the sign-in sheet attached to a clipboard and sets it down on the counter in front of them. “Does your friend there have ID?”
“I’m afraid not,” Raley says. “But you’re due for a quick bathroom break, aren’t you?”
Barnie stands up behind the desk and stretches for effect. “You know, I think I am. And I should walk the perimeter of the building to make sure there are no unsavory characters milling around. That should take ten minutes or so. Sign yourselves in while I’m gone?” He hands Raley a clipboard and a pen, then walks down the hall toward the restroom.
Stu follows Harper and Ida through the door.
Down a corridor, and through a door at the very end, Harper leads them into a room with chilled cabinets on either side. They have metal doors that open outward, revealing a sliding gurney. She locates the one for the latest victim, but pauses for a moment.
“Ida, are you okay so far?”
Ida gives her a sharp nod but doesn’t speak. Harper wonders what she might be picking up on in there—what auras must surround the cold bodies in the walls.
She pulls the gurney out on its runners. The body is covered in a sheet. She peels it back to reveal the girl. Ashen faced now, a distinct blue tinge to her lips, her eyelids. Stu shifts uncomfortably as Ida approaches the body, extends her hand, and brings it to rest on the girl’s icy skin. Her face tightens with revulsion, but she keeps her hand there, powering through the urge to recoil.
Harper moves back to stand with Stu, to give Ida space.
“I’m still not sure about this,” Stu hisses in her ear. “If we’re caught bringing her in here . . .”
Harper fixes him with a sharp look. “Not now.”
Ida throws her head back, her whole body rigid, one hand on the girl’s forehead, the other arm outstretched at an angle. A deep moan rises from her throat, as if she’s being electrocuted. Stu goes to help her. Harper grabs his wrist. “No. Let her do this.”
The already-low lighting in the room dims even more, and the temperature seems to jump up a few degrees.
The moan rises in pitch. It sounds as if Ida is in agony. “I can’t . . . I don’t believe this . . .”
Harper’s grip tightens. “Leave her.”
The connection is different. A living being has warmth, the reassuring rhythm of its heart, the flow of hot blood through miles of veins. It has the marriage of mind and spirit, united in forming a whole.
Ida relishes such connections. They bring insight, allow her to experience the bond of humanity she has missed out on. Tapping into memory, into feelings. Touching a pregnant woman’s stomach, hearing the hum of the tiny life within . . . all of it a wonder.
With the dead, it’s different.
It is not a merging of psyches, but an electric shock, a charge of energy fusing her to the spirit locked within the lifeless body. The voice howls like the wind: unbalanced, completely open. Pulling her in, forcing her to see, to hear, to feel . . .
Waking in a car. The door opening, getting pulled out under the armpits. It’s dark.
Cold.
The dark sky is heavy with clouds and rain. Her feet drag in the wet earth. She is pulled back through rows of green, and when she is lowered to the ground, her senses come alive. She tries to scramble away, but he has her pinned. His face is a white mask; his eyes float in darkness. She tries to fight, to get loose.
He holds her, hits her. She can feel him wrestle with her underpants, tearing them apart in his fury. She tries to push him back; he hits her again. All she can do is grab at the mud, hold on to fistfuls of it as he breaks his way inside her, the pain radiating up her body despite the grogginess of whatever he injected her with.
Then his hands are around her throat. They are pressing; she pulls at his wrists, but they won’t be moved. His arms are heavy steel, pushing down, crushing her. There is a throbbing light; it pulses, growing stronger, coming, going.
Ida knows this is her only chance.
What’s your name? she asks the girl in the last moments. We don’t know your name. We need to know.
Nothing comes. She is getting pulled back; the connection is coming apart, the fibers holding it in place breaking one by one.
Please. Tell me your name.
The darkness fades; the light creeps in around the edges like a false dawn and Ida hears a whisper. The last sound of the girl’s soul. A final word.
“Gertie.”
The lighting flickers above them. Ida is thrown back, stumbles on rubbery legs, and falls.
Stu rushes forward before Ida can crack the back of her head on the hard linoleum, catching her in his arms and lowering her slowly to the floor. Harper drops to her knees beside her and checks for a pulse.
“She’s okay. Just out cold,” she says. She looks up at Stu. “Now do you believe?”
“This could be an act,” he says.
Harper taps Ida’s face. There’s no response, so she does it again, this time a bit harder, shaking her shoulders. Ida’s eyes crack open, then try to close again. Harper shakes her. “Don’t go back to sleep. Wake up.”
“Huh?” Ida groans.
Harper looks at Stu. “Does this look like an act to you?”
“Could be. People fake being crazy all the time.” He goes to say something else, rethinks it, gets to his feet instead. “I’ll put the body away.”
“How long have I been out?” Ida asks.
Harper smiles. “Seconds.”
Ida groans again, rising to a sitting position. “Oh.”
“What did you see?”
Ida tries to stand and almost doesn’t make it before Harper scoops her under the arm and helps her up. Stu gets to her other side just in time.
“You’re not going to be sick or anything, are you?” Stu asks her as they head for the door.
Ida shakes her head. “I just need air.”
They steer her past the desk. Barnie is
just returning from his patrol. “Jesus, is she okay?”
Stu waves him off. “She gets a bit funny around the dead.”
Barnie rolls his eyes. “One of them, huh?”
Passing through the doors to the outside, they are hit by the cool night air. Ida inhales deeply, sucking it in, coming back to herself with each intake.
Harper and Stu let go of her arms and step back to give her space. Ida stands steady, but still looks diminished, as if she’s been drained of energy.
She looks like someone who’s just given birth, like everything’s been sucked out of her.
“Ah, that’s better. I feel like me now.”
Harper asks her again: “What did you see?”
“He gave her something to make her sleepy. She tried to fight him off, but couldn’t. She had dirt, in her hands. Squeezing it as he was . . . squeezing her. She could feel him doing his business, even as she was dying.”
“Anything more? Could you see his car? What he looked like?”
Ida shakes her head. “She was too panicked to notice the car. He wore a hood, a white hood with the eyes cut out. And a belt around his neck. I got the impression he put it on after he kidnapped her. It scared her.”
They walk to the car. Stu is the first to speak. “I have to look at the facts. That’s what I believe in, what can be proved. You could be makin’ this up.”
“Stu—” Harper starts.
Ida shakes her head. “No, he’s right. I don’t blame him for not believing me. But there’s one more thing. She gave me a name. Whether it’s hers or not, I can’t be sure. She said ‘Gertie.’”
“Gertie,” Stu repeats. “No second name?”
“No. That was it,” Ida tells him. “Now, if that girl turns out to be a Gertie, or related to someone called Gertie . . . will you believe?”
Stu swallows.
Harper opens the door for Ida. “Let’s get you back to your truck. You’ve still got a drive tonight. Or we can put you up in a motel if you don’t feel up to it.”
Stu looks at Harper. “Who’s paying for that?”
Ida shakes her head. “I’m feeling okay now. I’ll drive home. Never been much for motels. Dirty sheets and even dirtier bathtubs.”
She climbs in. Harper shuts the door behind her. Stu is still standing there. “You okay?”
“I’m on the fence here,” he says in a low voice.
“I figured as much. But she’s right, Stu. If that name has any bearing, you have to believe her.”
Stu looks down at the window, the outline of Ida’s face there in the dark. “Or put her as a suspect,” he says, walking around the front end to the passenger side. “Anyway, what does it matter what I believe? As long as the case gets solved, I don’t give a fuck if tea leaves and chicken bones point us in the right direction. I just wanna bag this prick.”
Harper watches him climb in, then gets in herself.
Ida gives them a wave from the cab of her truck and then heads out of the parking lot and onto the dark streets. She feels cold, as if she’s back in the morgue, surrounded by the sleeping dead again.
Ida flexes her hand—she can still feel the icy kiss of the young woman’s skin against hers, the charge of electrified particles that connected them both in those long, torturous moments. Ida runs the heater, turning the dial all the way to max. Soon warmth fills the truck, but she still feels the chill that inhabits her bones.
For a short while, we were connected. I felt the ice in her marrow. The awful agony of his hands around her throat, squeezing, squeezing, forcing her last breath away.
She turns on the radio, hoping that will take her mind off what she just experienced. Bobby Womack singing “Deep River” warbles through on the radio waves, semi-distorted as if it’s beamed in from Mars.
Ida sings along to it, just to drown the voice in her head, the whisper of a broken soul saying a name, repeating it over and over and over and over.
“Gertie.”
8
“You want a beer, Lester?”
He pulls up a chair at the kitchen table and sits down. “No, I got to drive.”
“Coffee then.”
“Okay,” he says.
Ceeli called him over to her place on the pretense of another auto repair, but he can’t find anything wrong with the vehicle. He knows the real reason she wanted him to come to her house.
“Mack not here today?” Lester asks her.
She rinses two cups. “Nope. He got work out of town. Won’t be back till tomorrow night.”
“Workf hard,” Lester notes.
“Sure does. Not that I see any of the money,” Ceeli says, shaking her head.
Lester can hear someone walking on the flattened dry grass around the side of the house; then he sees Ceeli’s neighbor cross the window. The back door is already open, but Julie knocks on the frame. “Yoo-hoo!”
“Ah, hi ya Julie honey,” Ceeli says. “Want a coffee?”
“No thanks, Ceeli, I’ve gotta run.” Her gaze falls to Lester, and for the briefest moment, she is unable to contain her expression, to keep the mask up. Revulsion flashes across her features; then it’s gone, buried behind an exterior of mock acceptance. “Hey, Lester.”
“Hello Julie.”
“You headed out somewhere?” Ceeli asks her.
“Oh, yeah, heading into town. Wanted to know if you needed somethin’.”
Ceeli shakes her head. “Don’t think so.”
“Well, alright then. You got my cell, you need anythin’,” Julie says.
“I got your cell.”
Julie nods at Lester. “Bye to you.”
He smiles because he knows it repulses her. “Have a nife day!”
When Julie has gone, Ceeli breathes a sigh of relief and sags against the kitchen counter. “God, that woman gives me a headache. There’s no getting rid of her.”
She makes the coffee and tells Lester to go to the living room. Ceeli sets the cups on the coffee table as Lester throws himself down on the sofa.
She stands over him, pushes his head back, her finger under his chin so that he looks up at her. “You’re the only joy I got in this world right now, Lester.”
He swallows.
Ceeli straddles him, her big legs on either side of his, and kisses him. He can taste her bad breath, her cigarettes and coffee. The sleep that has covered her teeth in a gritty film she has yet to brush away. Pulling away from him, she sucks on his deformed top lip.
She reaches down, feels his limp dick through his jeans. She moves to the floor, kneeling before him, and sets about freeing his flaccid penis. His work bottoms gather at his feet.
“Honey,” she says, her hands on his thighs, bending forward to lick his genitals, then the end of his prick. She stops and looks up at him. “Somethin’ the matter baby?”
“Put it in your mouth.”
“Soft like that?”
He stares at her, silent. Demanding. Ceeli holds his floppy dick and puts it in her mouth. Lester sits back, one hand on the table, the other on Ceeli’s head, moving his fingers in her wiry black hair. He closes his eyes, thinks of the girl. In the field, in the rain. He was soaked through afterward, covered in mud. When he arranged her body, he’d wiped away the water that had collected in her eye sockets. Just thinking about her, about how he’d taken her among the rows of wet soybeans, is enough to get him hard. His cock throbs in Ceeli’s mouth, and she instinctively works on it. Her tongue slides around his shaft, the tip of his dick. Lester pictures the girls, sees them in his mind, and it’s enough to push him near the edge. He takes a handful of Ceeli’s hair and forces her to take him farther down her throat. Thinking of the young woman in the rain. On top of her, between her legs, his hands around her throat as she looks at him, big bright eyes pleading with him.
Ceeli gags as Lester thrusts his hips forward, mercilessly fucking her mouth. All the while, his eyes are closed.
There is the girl, the smell of the damp earth, the rain coming down around them in
the dark. Cold water running down his back, dripping off his twisted face. After, he went back to the car for his Polaroid and the crown, then returned to her. He placed the crown on her head and took pictures. Polaroids are like printing your own postcards, your own mementos of something you want to hold in your heart forever.
Lester opens his eyes.
The girls are still there.
The Hope and Ruin Coffee Bar is busy as usual, everyone jostling to keep their place in line. Harper’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She checks it.
“Morelli,” she tells Stu.
“Answer it, I’ll get these.”
“Thanks,” she says, heading for the door to take the call outside. “Caramel latte.”
Stu waves her off. “I know, kiddo.”
Outside the heat is already cloying, the sultry air sticking to her skin. She swipes the phone and holds it to her ear. “Harper.”
“Detective. Where you at?”
“I’m going to check in with Albie, see how he’s doing with the dead girl’s phone. We’re still going through the files you gave me, trying to get what we can from them.”
“Well, I have some good news. We’ve got a name to put with the girl,” Morelli says.
“Really?”
“Yes. Gertie Wilson. Parents had her listed as missing last night. They went and identified her at the morgue a half hour ago. I’ve got Dudley bringing them in as we speak.”
“Okay. Do you want us to come to the station?”
“No, you do what you’re doing, and check in later. If you’re okay with Dudley interviewing the parents, that is.”
Harper grimaces. “I’ve got no issue. So long as he’s tactful, sir.”
“I’ll have Clara O’Hare join him. You know Clara. She’ll make sure he doesn’t go too far.”
“I appreciate that, Captain.”
“What you said about Albie, he already got into the phone. Came up with the same name. Did it about an hour ago. He’s getting into all the messages and call logs as we speak.”
“Excellent.”
“Oh, a heads-up—I’m going to hold a conference at the front of the station in the next hour. It might be best to avoid coming in until after then. Luckily, the files in your possession are the only copies left of the originals. The real records. The press will only be able to dig so far,” Morelli says.