The mortuary had two main entrances, plus the garage and the receiving door where the bodies came and went in hearses and coroner transport vehicles. Plus my room, which technically wasn’t my room anymore, so I couldn’t control the door. That meant five entrances I had to watch if I was going to spend any more time in the funeral home. If an agent of the FBI came to one of them, I needed to know about it, and I needed time to escape out one of the other ones.
My old room was the easiest. As long as Margo didn’t rent it out to anyone, it would stay locked and empty. I worried that maybe someone would open it casually, trying to get a breeze or something, but this was an Arizona summer: everything was sealed shut tighter than a space station, and the air conditioning ran full blast. Just to be sure, during my lunch break the next day, I loosened the screws in the door latch, making it stick when someone tried to open it. So that was one door taken care of.
The others were harder. The mortuary didn’t have any security cameras, as I’d learned when I first considered breaking in, but they did have a motion sensor connected to an alarm, which in turn connected to an antitheft call center somewhere. Could I mess with that at all? Probably not, without alerting the call center that something was up. Preventing people from tampering with their equipment was practically their whole job. I’d need something else. The ideal solution, of course, was some kind of camera system, so I could know when someone was coming and then immediately see if they were a threat. That was probably out of my price range.
The burnt corpse of Luke Minaker never showed up—the autopsy was more problematic than they were expecting—so I went to the hardware store after work and looked for motion-sensing lights, like the kind you’d put in your driveway. Most of them were around seventy or eighty bucks apiece, but I found a cheap-looking brand on sale for sixty. The roll of bills I’d taken from Assu’s car contained $200, minus the $4.95 I’d spent on Mexican pizza, and with my own meager savings, I managed to raise my grand total to $286.18. Four lights was $240. I put them in my cart and went to the doorbell section, but the cheapest wireless doorbell I could find was thirty dollars—that was way beyond my limit. I looked again, wondering if I’d missed something, but I couldn’t find anything cheaper.
I flagged down one of the sales people. “Do you have any cheaper doorbells? The wireless ones?”
“Not in the store, but we do have some online.”
“I need to buy them today,” I said, “is there any way you could give me the online price?”
“It’s not an item we carry here, just at the central warehouse. You have to order online.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about these driveway lights?”
“I’m afraid that if you want the motion sensor, what you’ve got in the cart is already the best we can do.”
“But I need something cheaper. Is there any way you can make me a deal?”
“You’re buying motion sensors and wireless receivers,” the man said. “That’s the most expensive option in both categories. Is there a way you could alter your project with a standard light fixture, or maybe a standard doorbell?”
If only he knew what my project was. “No, it’s got to be these.”
“Four sets of each. Is this for an apartment complex?”
“Exactly,” I said. “I’ll let my boss know this is the best I can do. Thanks.”
“No problem. Let me know if you need anything else.” He smiled and walked away, and I stared at my cart full of boxes. I could afford three sets. Which door of the mortuary could I risk not watching? None of them. Maybe I could shoplift the fourth set? I looked around, wondering where the cameras were, but decided that it was too risky regardless. Shoplifting was not on my resume, and three sets was better than nothing. I put the fourth one back, paid at the register, and spent another twenty bucks on batteries. I walked home with the bag over my shoulder and my other hand up under my T-shirt, clutched tight around the handle of a small steak knife I’d borrowed from Parker’s kitchen. No one followed me or tried to drown me. I got back to Parker’s place, returned the knife to its drawer, and dumped out my boxes on the floor. He wouldn’t be back from his date for another few hours, so I had time to work unimpeded.
A motion-sensor light was really two devices: a motion sensor and a light. When the former detected movement in its field of view, it sent a signal along a little wire and turned on the latter. The doorbells were the same: push the button and a signal goes through a wire to a little wireless beacon, which sent another signal through the air to a chime box. All I had to do was get the trigger from the first one to talk to the second one. I opened the packages, pried apart the devices, and basically just fiddled around with wires and knives and screwdrivers until I somehow made it work. Trigger the motion sensor, and it rang the doorbell. I rigged the other two sensors to work the same way, loaded them up with fresh new batteries, and stashed them in my backpack. I took the lights and all the rest of the parts and packaging outside to the communal Dumpster and threw it all in. When Parker came home I was already lying on the couch, pretending to be asleep.
The next morning I got to work early and walked all around the building, trying to decide which door least needed an alarm. Obviously the front door needed one; I placed a motion sensor in the garden nearby, aimed it at the walkway, and used rocks to hide it and secure it in place. I turned it on, walked up the door, and the chime box in my backpack rang out a classic ding-dong. I went around to the back and did the same, covering the rear door people would use if they approached from the parking lot. I tested it, and the second chime box made the same ding-dong sound. It was great that they both worked, but if one of them rang and I had seconds to get away, I’d need to know which door someone had used. They claimed to have sixteen different tones, so I opened the chime box and puzzled for a minute over which settings to use. Most of them were just variations of the same basic tones, and I needed something instantly recognizable. “Auld Lang Syne”? Beethoven’s Fifth? I set the back door to “Happy Birthday,” and the final chime to “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” The front could stay as it was.
But which of the last two doors should I alarm? The garage door and the receiving door were far enough apart that I didn’t think I could cover them both with a single sensor. I hemmed and hawed for a bit, trying to work out the best of two bad choices, and settled on the receiving door: it went practically straight into the embalming room, which is where I’d spend most of my time, so if anyone came to that I needed to know ASAP. I put the alarm at the base of a bush, tucked in just under the leaves, and angled it to catch both the door and as much of the path leading up to it as I could. I tested it, and the chime box in my backpack sang a cheerful Christmas carol. It worked.
Barely half a second later my backpack sang again: ding-dong. Someone was coming in the front door, probably Margo. I anchored the last sensor with a couple more rocks and zipped my backpack closed. I counted to twenty and walked around to the front. My backpack ding-donged again as I went in.
Margo was in her office. “Good morning, Robert.”
“Morning.”
“We’re getting the Minaker body today. You ready?”
“Disturbingly ready,” I said. Margo raised her eyebrow, and I smiled. “I’ll go prep the room.”
The body of Lucas Minaker arrived at 10 A.M., and we laid him out on the table and unzipped the body bag. Jasmyn grimaced and looked away. He was burned from head to toe, hairless and earless and in many places skinless; what skin was left was scorched in an intricate, semirandom pattern of yellow and brown and black, stretched tight over his bones and well-cooked muscles. He looked like a bratwurst.
“Give yourself a minute,” said Margo. “Your first burn-body is always hard.”
Jasmyn sat down, breathing shallowly, and Margo gently pushed the girl’s head down toward her knees. I started as we always started, by examining the body in careful detail, making sure nothing was wrong or out of the ordinary before we got to work. The first part of this process was, technically, making sure the body was dead, but in this case it was obvious—not only was it burned, but the autopsy had opened his chest in a giant Y-shaped cut: shoulder to sternum, shoulder to sternum, and sternum to waist. They had cracked his ribs and opened him up like a suitcase, removing the internal organs and examining them, and then putting them in a plastic bag and storing them back in the chest cavity. I could see a corner of this bag poking out of the gap in the Y incision.
“Been a while since we had an autopsy,” said Margo. “Kathy didn’t get one.”
“Most people don’t,” I said. “Surprising she didn’t, though. Didn’t anyone suspect foul play?”
“You’d think,” said Margo. “Just an accident, though. Drinking a glass of water or something.”
At home, in my mom’s mortuary, her twin sister Margaret would have called organs by now—an autopsy embalming was done in two parts: one for the circulatory system and one for the removed organs. The latter was easier. “Jasmyn,” I said. “Have you done an organ embalming?”
“Yes.”
“Then take these,” I said, opening the chest and pulling out the bag. “We’ll set you up on the other table, and you can face away from us and just deal with these. The heat that burned him didn’t get this deep, so they’re pretty much just normal organs. It’ll be simple and familiar.”
“I can do the body.” She took a deep breath, long and slow and controlled, and then stood up. After a moment she raised her eyes and looked at the burned body. “I can do this.”
“Just do the organs,” said Margo.
“Don’t coddle me,” said Jasmyn.
“It’s not coddling, it’s business,” said Margo. “I know you can do an arterial embalm, now I want to see how the new guy handles it.”
“Fine,” said Jasmyn. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the body yet. She stared a moment longer, her teeth clenched, and then turned away abruptly to the other table. Like she’d been holding her breath underwater and now it was time to pull out. I gave her the bag and she got to work, carefully mixing an embalming formula of germicide, anticoagulant, perfume, and glutaraldehyde—a knockoff of formaldehyde that a lot of mortuaries were using these days. It wasn’t as toxic, but it wasn’t as effective, either. Normally you’d mix a dye in there as well, but the organs didn’t need that. I thought about the poison chemicals and looked up at the ceiling, where our old embalming room had had a big metal ventilator hood to suck out the fumes.
“Let’s hope this fan doesn’t give out on us,” I said.
“There’s four of them and they’re brand new,” said Margo. “Had them put in last winter.”
“Just a thing I like to say,” I said. That had been my aunt Margaret’s thing, too.
The inside of the body wasn’t as cooked as the outside, and the blood vessels were still in pretty good condition. We’d be able to do a full arterial embalming, but first we had to finish the inspection. I zipped the body bag the rest of the way down, exposing his lower half—his groin area was horrifying—and Margo and I pulled the now-empty bag out from under him. Moving the bag exposed his arms, and Margo and I stared at them in surprise.
His forearms had one spot each, perfectly hand-shaped, with no burned flesh whatsoever.
“Well,” said Margo. “You don’t see that every day.”
“Thank goodness,” I said.
I touched one of the unburned patches, prodding it with my finger. It was soft and almost mushy, like dead bodies were supposed to be, without any of the firmness of the parts that were more cooked. I picked up the arm and rotated it gently, looking at the handprint—it was unmistakably a hand. I wanted to test it for size against the marks on my backpack, but there was no way to do that without making Margo and Jasmyn curious about questions I really didn’t want to answer; I’d pinned a T-shirt over my backpack to cover the handprints, and thus far I’d managed to hide them and the entire attack from everyone. Instead I put my own hand on the print, testing it for size that way, hoping I could draw a useful comparison to the backpack prints later. I was surprised to find that my hand only fit the print on the arm when the arm was flat against the body’s sides, as if Assu had just walked up in front of him and grabbed Lucas’s arms. I had expected the opposite, with the grip reversed, as if Lucas’s arms had been raised in front of his face in a defensive position. What did it mean?
And what did it matter, if the Withered who’d done it was already dead? Could I learn anything from the body that would help me find the others? Or was it all just morbid fascination?
My backpack chirped a cheerful “We Wish You A Merry Christmas,” and I grabbed it and bolted for the door.
“Cell phone,” I said, “I gotta take this.” That song meant someone was at the receiving door, and I didn’t have any time to spare. I got into the hall, slung my backpack over my shoulders, and got ready to bolt. First I had to see who it was, though, so I lurked outside of the embalming room and listened.
The sound of a door in the adjoining room. Footsteps. “Margo, you here?” I thought I recognized the man’s voice, but I couldn’t place it. Not Harold. Younger.
“Come on in, Simon,” called Margo. More footsteps. “You brought me that new shipment of detergents?”
“Right here,” said the man. More footsteps. “Hey Jazz—good night, why didn’t you warn me?”
“It’s a dead body,” said Jasmyn. “What did you expect to see in an embalming room?”
More footsteps and the heavy thunk of a box being set down on a counter. “I’m gonna start leaving these damn boxes on the sidewalk if you keep scaring me like this.”
They made idle small talk while Margo signed for the package, and I wondered: if he was just a delivery man, then I was safe, wasn’t I? He wasn’t from the FBI. But I’d heard his voice somewhere before, and that made me nervous. It wasn’t any of Jasmyn’s friends, and I didn’t know anybody else in the city. What if it was someone who knew me from another city, under a different name? I couldn’t risk being seen. I walked away quietly, moving toward one of the side rooms. There was a window there with a perfect view of the receiving door. I reached it just in time to peer out through a gap in the curtain and watched the man walk out into the sun and back to his truck. My backpack sang its Christmas song as he went.
He wasn’t wearing the coat this time, but I knew him plain as day. He was the man who’d tried to drown me.
Should I follow him? Could I, even if I wanted to? I peered at the truck, trying to make out the license plate, but all I could see was the company logo on the side: DIAMOND DELIVERY. He got in and drove away.
Margo had called him by his first name: Alvin? Simon. If she was on a first-name basis, she’d know more about him as well. I could get all the info from her. I walked back to the embalming room, set my backpack in the corner, and washed up again.
“I heard you talking,” I said.
“We didn’t hear you,” said Margo.
“I’m pretty quiet on the phone,” I said. I nodded at the box of corpse detergent. “Delivery guy?”
“Panhandler,” said Margo. “Now help me set these features before another one shows up.”
“Yes, it was a delivery guy,” said Jasmyn. “Margo, you’re as bad as my friends from school.”
“I’m sorry I missed him,” I said. “Her friends from school are the only people I even know in this town.”
“Lord have mercy on your soul,” said Margo. “You’re going to start spelling your name with a smiley face instead of an O.”
“No way Robert uses a smiley face,” said Jasmyn. “Maybe a devil emoji, though.”
I said nothing, and got back to work.
* * *
Over the course of the afternoon I managed to deduce the delivery man’s full name: Simon Jacob Watts. The motion sensors pinged one other time, but it was only Harold. When we finished embalming Minaker, I washed up, changed my clothes, and walked the three miles to the library, where I used their free Internet to find everything I possibly could about Watts, including his home address. There wasn’t much on him. No history of violence, no criminal record. I found an online map and wrote down the directions to his house, out in the suburbs. I zoomed in on the satellite image and stared at it, feeling like a missile drone looking down on my target. What would I do?
I walked out to find it, though it was another few miles from where I was. By the time I got there, it was already dark. A couple of windows were still bright, though I couldn’t see anyone inside. The front lawn had a bike and a toddler-sized plastic car; apparently he had kids. I slipped around to the carport, being careful not to touch the car, in case he had an alarm. I peeked in the side windows and even opened the garbage can, though I didn’t see anything immediately interesting. I slipped into the backyard and found that he had a small wooden deck outside his kitchen. It reminded me of the layout of Brooke’s old house in Clayton. The kitchen light was on and the blinds were open, and I could see Simon and a woman I assumed was his wife sitting at the kitchen table, smiling and picking at leftovers. The clock on their wall said it was nearly ten in the evening, so I assumed the kids were asleep. Their fridge was covered with crayon drawings stuck up with magnets. A cat slept on the floor. I backed away, not wanting to attract its attention.
By every appearance, Simon Watts looked totally normal. But serial killers always did. He wasn’t raving about the Dark Lady, or sharpening meat hooks, or cutting out letters from a magazine to write an anonymous note. He was just sitting there, talking to his wife, without a care in the world. And yet he was my only connection to Rain.
They didn’t seem to have a dog, so I took the risk and looked for a place to hide. I found it in a plastic playhouse in their backyard. It was weathered by the sun and sported more than a few spider webs on the door; it didn’t look like the kids used it very much. The night air was warm, and I didn’t even need a blanket. I crept inside the playhouse, propped myself against the back wall, and sat with a perfect view of the back door and the car.
And settled down to watch him, all night long.