I awoke alone in Clair’s bed, recalling a kiss laid on my cheek in the pre-dawn light. She had risen early to head to the morgue. I had called my dog-sitting neighbor last night to have Mix-up’s needs tended, no need to rush home to fix his morning plate of kibble and grits.
Through the window the golden light of a new sun blazed over the leaves and limbs of the live oaks in Clair’s deep yard. My shoes were still in the paper booties worn at crime scenes and I now understood the odd looks I’d gotten at the Thai restaurant. I’d kicked my shoes off immediately inside Clair’s door and we’d fallen into an embrace, finding our way to supper an hour later.
I kept clothes in Clair’s closet and changed into jeans and a beige blazer over a white dress shirt. Clair had tossed the paper inside and I read it with my coffee. A headline below the fold stood out:
POLICE SILENT ABOUT THIRD STRANGE KILLING
The subhead read, Won’t Rule Out Random Attacks.
Uh-oh, I thought, three reporters had contributed, meaning the media was smelling something. A quote stood out, Silas Ballard: “They [the MPD] kept drilling me about who Kayla knew and associated with, like trying to lower her reputation, like she did bad things and got killed because of it.”
I felt irritation, though I couldn’t fault Ballard’s intentions, only his naïveté. All we’d done was ask the same questions we asked day in and day out. Ballard had the rural dweller’s suspicion of the city.
Asked if the attacks were related, the standard “departmental spokesperson” basically said anything was possible. Asked if the attacks were random, the spokesperson said no relationship had been established between the killings, though that didn’t mean none existed. It was a masterly job of weasel-wording.
There was also suspicion about the postmortems, Clair’s office specifying results as “preliminary work-ups awaiting toxicology and other tests”. That allowed us to keep them vague for now, but the clock was ticking.
I was heading to the morgue when a thought hit. I pulled my cell and pressed the newest number on my list.
“Detective Ryder?” she answered. “I mean, Carson?”
“It’s Detective Ryder today, Holliday. Business. You think you’re ready for the morgue?”
There were two distinct categories of answers Wendy Holliday could have given. One was, Do I have to? The other was, I can’t wait.
She said, “I’m out the door.”
Holliday was pacing out front when I rolled up. Four men were in the waiting area, one hunched over in a chair as the others made consoling sounds. Terry McGuiness was here to make the official identification of the body, looking far better composed than the last time I’d seen him.
Holliday followed me down the long and marble-floored hall denoted by a sign saying ADMITTANCE WITH AUTHORIZED ESCORT ONLY. We passed Clair’s office, the door open to a desk topped by a vase brimming with floral pyrotechnics, the product of Clair’s gardening prowess. The chair was empty and we walked to the main autopsy suite, a white room, cold and smelling of disinfectant.
Clair stood at the table checking the lights, recording system, instruments; such a stickler for order, one might think she was preparing to operate on a living body. When Clair saw Holliday beside me, her eyes moved to me and held a question.
“I thought I’d bring a student,” I said, my hand on the small of Holliday’s back. “You two met the other night.”
Clair’s eyes remained on me for two beats then she turned to Holliday. “You ever see an autopsy before, Miss Christmas?”
“It’s Holliday, Dr Peltier. Wendy Holliday.”
“My mistake. A senior moment, perhaps. Have you ever attended a postmortem?”
“I’ve seen one on videotape. So I know what to expect.”
Clair said, “We have one thing to do first. The hardest part.”
“I’ll fetch him,” I said, returning to the lobby, pondering Clair’s senior moment remark. She was barely forty-seven. When Terry McGuiness saw me he wiped his face and walked my way, his steps tight and mechanical.
“Your friends can be with you, Terry,” I said. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
He swallowed hard, struggling to hold it together. “It’s OK. I don’t want them to remember Paul like … he is.”
I guided him into the suite. Holliday had retreated to a respectful distance, letting Clair center the situation. She brought McGuiness to the cooler drawer, me at his back. He wavered but stayed up, maybe his last piece of strength.
“It’s him,” he confirmed, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It’s my Paul.”
I walked him toward the reception area. “We have to talk soon,” I said. “But I need to know about anyone who had a beef with Paul. Former friends, co-workers, ex-lovers. Anyone. We want justice, Terry.”
He stopped, leaning against the wall for support and wiping tears from his eyes. “Paul didn’t make enemies. That was me, making cracks, pissing people off. The old me, mostly, a nasty little bitch. But then I met Paulie and …” his voice trailed off. He looked at me. “We were going to San Francisco.” He said it as though it was important for me to know.
“Paul had no enemies?”
“P-Paulie helped everyone. He worked their shifts, remembered their birthdays. When friends with kids wanted a night out, he’d be their sitter. He needed to do things for people … even people like me.”
“Excuse me?”
“When I met Paulie I was a whore with a hundred-buck-a-day coke habit, a real fuck-up. He looked past all that and saw inside me, what I wanted to be. He pushed me into a program, stayed with me every step. I’ve been clean for four months, mostly.”
“Where you working?”
“The Crane’s Roost restaurant in Daphne. I put in sixty hours a week waiting tables.” He paused. “Saving for San Francisco.”
We continued to the lobby, no sound but heels on the white floor. The lobby was empty, McGuiness’s friends smoking outside, the receptionist taking a bathroom break. We were alone.
“I need you to consider who might have had a grudge against Paul,” I said, handing McGuiness my card. “It’s hard right now, but it’s necessary.”
But Terry McGuiness wasn’t listening. He was staring into a place he’d thought forever full, now forever empty. McGuiness looked at me, a sad realization in his eyes.
“That person I’ve been? I don’t think I can be him any more. Not without Paul.”
“You said it’s who you wanted to be, Terry,” I said, tucking my card in his shirt pocket. “Plus you gotta do it for Paul, right?”
“For Paul,” he echoed. “Right.” But his eyes belonged to someone different. He turned away and slumped toward a changed world.
I trudged back to the autopsy room, the body now on the table. Clair reached for the scalpel. “So you know what’s about to happen, Miss Holliday?”
“The Y-incision. Like I said, I’ve seen a videotape.”
Before my first autopsy, I too had researched the procedure, soaking up photographs, fearful I would perform poorly, blanch or faint. After the initial shock of a body opened under light as white as snow, I had been transfixed by the oddly haphazard arrangement of tubes and tanks, pumps and bellows, that carried our consciousness in its journey from nothingness to wherever. I recalled the elderly pathologist, Dr Earnest Grey, opening to my interest and telling me wondrous things, explaining how the stomach’s process of digesting a piece of steak would require over a hundred books crammed with chemical equations.
I retired to a chair in the corner to study cases, but Holliday remained beside the table, her attention as rapt as mine those many years ago. I studied files and made notes for a half-hour, until I heard Clair say, “What’s this?”
I walked over and saw the resected stomach draped over Clair’s gloved palm like a deflated sack. She had a pair of forceps inside the stomach, removed them with an object clasped in the jaws.
“The victim seems to have swallowed a penny.”
Clair dropped the coin into a small metal bowl. It rattled in a circle and I realized I’d recently seen dozens of pennies spinning and dropping. I recalled a fresh bright penny found within a meter of Kayla Ballard’s body. Another penny atop the dirt beside Tommy Brink’s wheelchair.
Not in the dirt, on top of it.
And now a penny swallowed by Paul Lampson.
“I think the killer may be someone from class,” I whispered, hearing my heart pounding in my ears.
The Fed-Ex man rang Gregory’s doorbell at nine. He unwrapped two books on forensics, three on police procedure. Gregory reclined on his couch and started reading.
Ema had been basically correct about Locard, Gregory discovered, finding additional references to the forensics scientist and his lauded principle. Her nattering had sparked his study of police procedures and helped him create his Event Skin. Drab little Ema was making him better. He should schedule more time with his sister and pull everything about cops from her head before …
Gregory froze. He sat up, a book falling from his hand to the floor. Before? Had he just thought the word Before?
Before what?
“Before I kill her,” he said slowly, feeling his lips make the words real. There! He’d said the word aloud and heard himself say it. Voicing the thought didn’t necessarily mean he’d end Ema’s life, merely that the possibility had entered the programming. It meant he could formalize his research: What was her property worth? What was the range of her investments? How much time would he have to spend with an idiot lawyer to claim her estate?
Gregory stood and studied himself in the full-length wall mirror. Could the man in the glass kill the only constant in his life? It would be an incredibly dramatic move, one that would put him in direct contact with the police.
“Mr Nieves? I’m so sorry to have to inform you that your sister was found …”
My God … what if Ryder showed up at his door? Gregory paced the floor. He was entering a new realm, but every realm he’d entered since that night had made him better. More alive. More master of the world. He was even beginning to understand the painting above his mantel: it was about assembling order from chaos.
As he paced, Ema’s voice called out …
“I just thought of one other way the criminal could get caught …” she said, sounding as vivid as if she were standing in the room. “An attack of conscience.”
Gregory froze. Conscience. Like Love, the word seemed everywhere. But Love could be understood in a basic fashion: you had something you wanted. If someone took it away, you felt shitty. Love was simple math.
What he didn’t understand, exactly, was what a conscience was or did, though he assumed if he had one, it was a much better one than the morons had. Yet when he closed his eyes, stilled his head, and went looking for it in his skull, it stayed hidden.
Hello? What do you look like?
The more he considered the concept, the more upset he became. Was it actually possible something in his head could send him to the police to confess?
“I killed people. Put me in jail.”
It was irrational. Senseless. Macabre. But above all, it was totally unsettling that he might have something so horrible within his head.
A conscience!