The body was facedown, arms and legs floating freely in the black water. Because I spend way too much time at the movies—and, more to the point, because I was in the process of flipping out—my brain flashed the opening scene of Sunset Boulevard, when William Holden is lying dead in Gloria Swanson’s pool, but he goes ahead and narrates the whole rest of the movie anyway.
Now, I’m sure a more normal person wouldn’t have thought of that. In fact, a sane human being might very well have had the presence of mind not to go to an empty industrial building alone in the middle of the night in the first place.
But there I was, standing there in the dark, my flashlight trained on a corpse lolling in the jet-black water. My first instinct, in case you’re wondering, was to get the hell out of there as fast as was humanly goddamn possible. But I managed to ignore it; I even talked my foot into taking half a step toward the pool.
Was it Axel? That seemed the most likely thing, didn’t it? I took another half step forward to get a better look at the body, but I couldn’t see much. The waterline was about four feet below the floor, and the face was completely submerged. Since he—or, I suppose, she—was wearing a baseball cap, I couldn’t even tell what the hair looked like.
I was just steeling myself to go all the way to the edge of the pool when I heard something. In retrospect, I think it was just some ventilation system going on, but anyway it scared the hell out of me. I turned tail and ran up the stairs—flashlight bobbing every which way, boots clanking on the metal steps, fight-or-flight instinct set firmly on flight.
I ran up the stairs and out the front door, suddenly terrified that the fence gate was going to be locked. If I hadn’t lost it before, I sure as holy hell did then.
What am I going to do if I’m locked in here? And what if whoever shoved whoever’s in the pool into the pool is still here—assuming it wasn’t an accident, right? And what if I can’t get out, and I’m going to get killed because I left my goddamn cell phone in the car because I’m a moron and I don’t know enough to…
The gate was open. I was too relieved to feel stupid.
I ran toward the car, vaguely aware that—considering that I was dressed like a bloody ninja—the bobbing flashlight was the only thing keeping me from getting run over. And though it was probably just the fear talking, the whole time I had this incredibly creepy sense that somebody was watching me.
I’ve never been much of a runner, but—darkness be damned—I booked down the road like I was in the goddamn Olympic relay. After what felt like ten or twenty miles, I made it back to my car, hand shaking as I tried to dig the keys from the pocket of my fashionably snug jeans. Once I finally retrieved them, I had to go through a whole other shaking thing as I scrambled to slide the key into the lock.
Then the car alarm went off.
It sounded like a bloody air-raid siren—to me, anyway—and I jumped back so far I wound up in the middle of the road. Luckily, no one chose that particular moment to run me over, because I spent a fair amount of time just standing there trying to calm down enough to remember which little button I had to push on the key chain to stop all the flashing and honking. I fumbled with the gizmo for what seemed like forever until I finally got the thing to shut up. It wasn’t until I jumped into the car and locked the doors that I achieved something approaching normal breathing. I started the engine and, the Beetle having a snug little turning radius, pulled a one-eighty and headed back toward town along East Shore Drive.
When faced with dead bodies—something I’ve encountered far more times than a girl would like—I’ve been known to go running straight into the manly arms of Detective Brian Cody. And, well… this time was no different.
Okay, call me a wimp. But where the hell else was I gonna go?
He answered the door in a pair of navy sweatpants flecked with white dog hair. Don’t ask me how I remember that, but I do. Also, please don’t ask me to defend the following conversation, which was utterly nonsensical:
“Alex, baby, what the—”
“Remember how I told you I had to work late tonight?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“There’s a dead body in the Deep Lake Cooling pool.”
“What?”
“Somebody’s floating in the Deep Lake Cooling pool.”
“In the…?”
“It’s really cold in there. You die in three minutes.”
That’s when he grabbed me by the arm and walked me over to the couch.
“Just sit down, okay?”
“I don’t need to—”
He pushed me down on the couch, then went away and came back with a glass. I sniffed at it.
“Tell me that’s not whiskey.”
“The medicine of my people.”
“Do you seriously expect me to—”
“Bottoms up.”
I did as I was told.
“You know,” I said a minute later, “you giving me whiskey is what we writers call a creaky stereotype.”
“And it’s obviously working.”
“Huh?”
“You already sound more like yourself.”
“Oh.”
He was sitting at the opposite end of the couch, looking at me like the proverbial bug under the microscope. “You feel ready to talk now?”
“I was ready to talk before.”
He let that one pass. I sat up and told him about my evening’s adventures, which took all of five minutes. (Granted, I saved some time by editing out the part where I ran out of the building like terrified poultry.) Then he spent a while berating me for being dumb enough to meet Axel at the Deep Lake Cooling plant by myself in the middle of the night. He seemed inclined to continue in this vein for quite a while, but eventually he had to stop reading me the riot act and report the body.
If I was hoping to spend the rest of the night soaking up sympathy, I was out of luck; Cody told his dog to keep me company and headed off to the scene of the crime.
Knowing the man as I do, that much was fairly predictable. What surprised me was that he was back inside of an hour. And he was looking at me funny.
“Um, Alex…”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t happen to stop at the Citizen on your way to Deep Lake, did you?”
I had the feeling there was an insult in there somewhere. I stood up because it seemed like the thing to do. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It’s just—”
“What, do you think I’ve been drinking and driving or something?”
“No, I—”
“Are you nuts?”
“Listen, just calm down for a second—”
“Christ, you know I hate it when you tell me to calm down.”
“Alex—”
“Come on, tell me what you guys found. Who the hell was it floating in there? Was it Axel?”
“Er…”
“Come on, Cody. Would you just tell me already?”
“It was nobody.”
“What?”
“Alex, there was nobody in there.”
“Are you crazy? Of course there was. I saw it.”
“Baby, I know what you think you saw, but—”
“Think I saw? I know what I saw. I went down into that godforsaken basement with the big-ass flashlight you gave me and I shone it into the goddamn pool and there was a person floating in there. And they weren’t doing the goddamn backstroke, either. Whoever it was was floating facedown. Facedown, okay?”
“Isn’t there any way it might have been, you know…a trick of the light or something?”
“What light? I told you, I looked in the pool and there was a dead body in there. And I tried to see who it was, but then I heard a noise and it scared the crap out of me and I ran out and got into my car and drove straight here, okay? Now do you believe me or don’t you?”
“Baby, please ca—” He cut himself off, and just in time too. “Please try and listen to me, all right? I’m not saying that I don’t believe you. I’m just saying that we went to the scene just now and the place is totally deserted. We looked in every corner of the building, and there’s no body.”
“That’s impossible.”
He shrugged and sat down on the couch. “Honey, I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Wasn’t there even any evidence?”
“I told you, there was no—”
“Like wasn’t the floor wet or anything?”
“Wet from what?”
“From fishing the body out.”
For a minute he looked like he wanted to strangle me. Then he just looked intensely perplexed. “It…”
I crossed my arms and fixed him with a distinctly uncharitable glare. “Yes? Come on, spit it out.”
“You know, the entire place is pretty damp. I mean, with the water coming up from the bottom of the…Oh, hell.”
“What?”
“All right, now that you mention it…part of the floor was wet. A little wet, anyway.”
“And that didn’t clue you in that maybe your girlfriend was telling the truth? Some big-city detective you are.”
“Give me a break, all right? When we didn’t even find a body in there or any sign there’d ever been one, it didn’t instantly occur to me that maybe somebody’d removed it, all right?”
“You just figured it was never there in the first place.”
He shook his head and stared at the carpet. “Yeah.”
“And you therefore figured I must be a moron.”
“Yeah—no. Hey, I never said that. I just thought you were, you know… mistaken.”
“Well I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“I swear, Cody. There was a body in there.”
He shook his head again. “Okay,” he said after a while. “Let’s work this. If there really was a—”
“Cody.”
“Okay, okay. Assuming there was a body, do you think you could identify it?”
“You mean, do I know who it was? Hell no.”
“Could you at least tell if it was male or female?” I shook my head. “Approximate age?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t you remember any details at all?”
I thought about it. “It was wearing a hat.”
“Okay, that’s something. What kind of hat?”
“I’m pretty sure it was a baseball cap, but I didn’t get that good a look at it. So, come on, tell me. What was it like over there? Was the front gate open at least?”
“Yeah, it was open just like you said, and the front door was ajar. There was just no body.”
“So what do we do now?”
“We’re doing nothing. Right now, you are getting into a hot bath and going to bed. I am going to get my sorry butt back to the crime scene and try to clean up the mess I just made. Jesus, if they ever heard about this back home…”
“They’d toss your gold shield in Boston Harbor.”
“Something like that.”
“Seriously, how are you going to deal with this?”
“After I finish kicking myself, I’m going to try and figure out what happened to our corpse and who the hell it is.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Then, if I manage not to screw up any further, I’m going to try and figure out who killed him, and why the body got moved, and who helped.”
“Helped? Why would you automatically assume that—”
“Baby, you don’t want to know how heavy a waterlogged corpse is.”
I sat down on the couch next to him. “You got that right.”
“And there was some water back there on the cement, but not a whole lot of it—I’m an idiot, but I’m not that much of an idiot. Even if a single person could drag a body out of that pool, which I really doubt, there’s no way on earth they could do it alone without making a mess.”
“You mean without getting water all over the place?”
“Yeah. You saw that intake pool. It’s got a little railing around it, but the sides are straight concrete three feet down to the water, and there’s nothing to grab on to except that little safety ladder. So a guy trying to do it by himself would have to hang on to the ladder, lean down, and drag the body up with one hand. Ask me, it’d be impossible.”
“But how could they do it?”
“You mean how could they kill him?”
“I mean, how could they get rid of the body so fast? From the time I left the building until you guys got there it was… what? Forty-five minutes?”
“Probably more like half an hour.”
“Right. That isn’t really much of a window, is it? I had to leave, and then they had to get there, get the body out, carry it to a car, and drive off before you guys got there.” Something struck me. I didn’t much like it. “Unless…”
I looked at Cody. Cody looked at me. I could tell that we were thinking the same damn thing.
“Unless,” I said, “they were there the whole time.”
THE WEEKEND CAME AND WENT, and Ochoa did a story on the cops’ search for a body in the Deep Lake Cooling plant—but no corpses cropped up in the greater Gabriel area. In fact, not only did the body in question not get found, two other people went missing.
First off, Axel seemed to have vanished—and I mean poof. I tried his usual haunts, talked to the greasy-haired weirdos he hung with on the Green, but nobody had seen him since Friday. As far as I could tell, the last person who’d definitely seen him in town was, in a word, me.
And, okay…If you’re wondering if I was basically assuming that Axel and the Deep Lake Cooling corpse were one and the same, well…of course I was. I had, after all, been supposed to meet Axel there—and now he was nowhere to be found.
True, he’d said he was planning on leaving town the minute he got some money together. Maybe he’d somehow gotten the cash, had blown me off entirely, and was presently hitchhiking his way to the West Coast in search of folk-rock stardom.
Or maybe he’d gotten coshed over the head and had died of hypothermia in the Deep Lake pool. Maybe he’d been buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the woods, to be found by some poor schmuck during turkey-hunting season.
Even though Axel wasn’t what you’d call an upright citizen, I found myself hoping he was on his way to Santa Cruz—that fabled land of drum circles and astronomical rents. The other version was just too goddamn awful. The more I thought about it, though, the more I had to admit that both outcomes sounded equally likely.
But if he’d really been thrown into the pool, then …why? Why would someone want to kill a spaced-out musician whose major crimes (as far as I could tell) were a rotten singing voice and a disdain for chicks with military haircuts?
And then there was his buddy Robert “Sturdy” Sturdivant—for my money, a way more likely target. The Gabriel cops had arrested him for possession with intent to sell, and everyone from the Jaspersburg P.D. to the F.B.I. was working like crazy to pin the sale of the deadly Melting Rock acid on him. His parents—as it turned out, yet another pair of high-profile Benson professors who’d spent way more time on their research than their offspring—had put up their lake home to get him out of jail.
But as we’d report in Tuesday’s paper, Sturdivant repaid their parental devotion by jumping bail. He’d shown up at their Benson Heights manse while his parents were at work, ripped off their Bose Wave radio and some of his dead grandmother’s jewelry, and hit the road.
The authorities had found out about it when the Feds came by on Monday morning, slavering to interview the housekeeper about Junior’s history of misbehavior. What they’d found was a middle-aged lady wringing her hands over how such a sweet little boy could’ve grown up so bad, and did they really think the family was going to lose their cabin over it?
She’d tried to talk some sense into him when he’d come barging in, she said, but he wouldn’t listen to her—not even to her, and she’d practically raised him.
That was Friday. From what the cops could tell, not a soul had seen him since.
What had become of Sturdivant was, of course, an open question.
And maybe, just maybe, the Deep Lake corpse wasn’t Axel, after all.