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.”

“So somehow the river water got into her lungs and stayed there until you put a tube in, but it never got into the tissue?” I asked, completely confused.

“Exactly.” He shook his head, agreeing with my perplexed look. “The tissue itself, the cells, are dehydrated, collapsed like she hadn’t had water for days. There’s a difference when you look at them under the microscope. It’s really odd.”

The cellular dehydration in a drowning victim was so odd he hadn’t done any other diagnostic work. There wasn’t anything else he could tell us, so we left. I wanted to know more about the look in his eyes when he caught me, wanted to know if he felt what I had or had seen something, but I suspected whatever he was, whatever he could do, Dr. Mohahan wasn’t about to talk to me about it.

As we left the building I turned to Danny but realized he didn’t want to talk either. Looking at him, and remembering how Mohahan had looked, I realized what I wanted might not be the most important thing. We drove back in silence.

****

We made it back to the office in time for me to beat the lunch crowd in the cafeteria. Most government buildings endured lackluster meals from a catering company that knew it had a captive audience. Police Headquarters was better off. The story went that the Walinsky family had run the best Polish deli in town, until the day a junkie came in with a stolen gun and made the building as holey as the Swiss cheese.

At least half the clientele that afternoon were cops, a fact that kept Mom and Pop Walinsky alive. They were so grateful they took the insurance check and moved the whole business into our basement much to my delight. I collected my pressed Rubén sandwich, adding the Dr. Pepper I always rewarded myself with when I did magic, and headed upstairs.

The elevator wasn’t crowded, the hallway was practically bare, and the squad room was even reasonably quiet. All of that made the woman staring down at Danny seem even more menacing. He hadn’t noticed her yet and I had a sudden urge to protect my partner. He was still reeling from the coat; he didn’t need the hate in her eyes.

“I’m Detective Mors, can I help you?”

“No, and no again, Detective Mors.” She spoke with a heavy Irish accent. “This is a family matter.”

Danny’s head snapped up when the first word left her mouth. He was standing by the last one. “Fe?”

“Me standing here for a full on ten minutes and you don’t even notice, like you don’t know your own kin and kind.” With the last comment I got it. She had the same dark curls as Danny, the same pale white skin as Danny and his daughters; somehow she was related.

“Why are you here, Fe?”

“Like I told her, family business. Get your things, we can talk about it at your place.”

“I have to work, Fe.” He pointed out the obvious. I sat down to eat my sandwich blatantly watching the show. She was almost as tall as Danny, but thin, her body willowy in a long green skirt and matching tunic. Her jewelry was bright pink-orange coral, the necklace matching the earrings which in turned matched her watch band. She was dressed like appearances mattered to her, but she was worn around the edges. I hadn’t been a detective long, but I guessed she’d come directly from a long international flight.

“This is more important than work!” she practically screamed before dropping her voice low. “Or have you forgotten family comes first?”

“I haven’t forgotten a damn thing. I have a murder case, an assault, and a theft on my desk. I have seven more hours on the clock. Go home. The girls will be delighted to see you. We’ll talk about whatever it is tonight.”

“Whatever it is? It’s the one of them gone missing and you’ll wait another seven hours?”

“Missing? Well, we certainly can handle that. Tell me who he is; my partner, Detective Mors, and I will get right on it.”

I did my best to swallow before she looked over at me but it didn’t help the hate flashing in her brown eyes.

“Pleasure.” I tried to shake her hand but she’d already gone back to fighting.

“Outsiders,” she hissed. “I bring you a family emergency and you put me off then force me onto outsiders. No, thank you, Danny Gallagher. I’ll see to things on my own.”

Danny’s hand shot out to grab her wrist, and even from my desk I could see the pressure he put on it wasn’t small. “You do anything illegal, Fe, anything, and I will have you arrested and deported. This is not Ireland. You are not special. Go to a hotel, go home, but don’t go off and play mistress of the island, because here you’re not.” I’d never heard his voice so low and bitter, the anger carrying through every syllable.

She looked from his eyes to his hand and he dropped her wrist. Without another word she turned on her heel and walked out. I sat staring at her while Danny dialed the phone.

“Fiona’s in town. I don’t know why. She might be headed to the house.” Danny didn’t sound any happier telling whoever was on the phone the news. There was a pause, and he finished conversation with “I love you too, see you tonight.” Which told me it was Katie, and the phone call was a warning, not a happy announcement.

“Why don’t we grab an interview room?” I offered. Danny nodded, still too angry to talk.

Inside he slumped in the chair, leaning back with the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes. “I hate my sister.”

“Really?” I didn’t have any siblings. The impression I got from TV was that families got along, the occasional fight being resolved with tearful hugs and professions of love. Even Danny’s girls, the only real-life siblings I knew, were like that. Fight bitterly one moment, then make up the next.

“She’s older but I’m a boy. By rights I should be in charge at home, but I left so she is, but only because I left. That part really bothers her.”

“I could tell. What’s the rest of it?”

“I have no bloody idea,” he groaned. I couldn’t tell if being in charge at home meant over his family or over an entire community. He’d said something about an island. “You know what I am. The lieutenant does too. But I’m not ready to bring all of that into the squad room. If she’d been willing to follow the rules it would be one thing but Fe…she really thinks we shouldn’t have to follow any laws, because people don’t follow the laws with us. I never agreed with her but yesterday when I saw that coat…”

“Now you think she might be justified?”

“Maybe. No. Oh hell, I don’t know. I just know my sister is in town, which means my life is going to be hell.”

“You want to take the afternoon off and go deal with it?”

“I don’t want to give her the satisfaction but…” He hesitated.

“Go. This morning gave me plenty of paperwork to fill out. Do we have any other cases waiting for us?”

“We got two calls, theft and assault. We should handle them.”

“I’ll pass them along to whoever is next. We’ve got a homicide, it trumps assault and theft. Go deal with your sister.” I tried to push him out the door gently.

“Thanks, Mal.” His smile was half-hearted but I knew he meant the words.