Chapter 24
Music had the power to affect the entire mood of a place, but the song playing on the speaker system changing from Taylor Swift to One Republic did nothing to lighten the air in the room. Lisette stared at the body in the drawer, her tears flowing freely. “Do we—” She paused, gathering herself together. “If my mom is there, whose ashes do we have?”
The answer hit me like a brick to the head. I glanced at the heavy black-and-yellow bag propping open the outside door, then at my dust-covered shoes. The truth was hiding in plain sight. “It’s not ashes. It’s cement.”
Lisette let out a pained cry and stumbled toward her mother’s body. Miguel caught her with his arm around her waist. “No, Lis. Don’t.”
With the two of them distracted, Suzanne seized the opportunity to make a run for it. She headed straight for me. I spread my legs and bent my knees, bracing myself. I’d do whatever it took. She was not getting by me.
She faked left, trying to juke me. My body instinctively followed, but then I corrected, lunging right. She barreled into me. I channeled every linebacker move I’d ever seen during my UT college-football-watching years, wrapped my arms around her, and tackled her. We fell to the ground in a huddled mass, with me on top.
At that moment, heavy footsteps pounded down the stair well just beyond the door. A voice bellowed, “Suzanne, what the hell were you doing in my office?”
The door banged open, hitting the wall, and Benjamin Alcott appeared above me, something cradled in his arms. He tried to stop himself from careening into us but he’d been going too fast, hadn’t anticipated an obstacle, and tripped over us. Whatever he’d been holding flew from his arms and crashed to the floor, shattering.
He scrambled up, but his shoes lost their grip against the shards of ceramic and gray powder spilled across the floor. He stumbled, careening against the counter, his arm splaying across it, knocking a jar over. It crashed to the ground, spilling its contents. Gold nuggets scattered across the floor, mixing with the shards of ceramic.
Something skittered on the ground until it lay right in front of me. My stomach turned over as I recognized what had been in the jar. Gold fillings. Not only had they been selling off parts of dead bodies, they’d been collecting whatever treasures they held, right down to the teeth fillings.
Miguel had managed to keep Lisette away from Marisol’s body. He’d shut the door and now he leapfrogged over her, landing squarely on Benjamin Alcott, pinning him back to the floor. “Not so fast, partner,” he said, channeling Clint Eastwood. He pinned the mortician’s arms behind his back and hauled him upright. “We have some questions for you.”
I heaved myself up and off Suzanne. It wasn’t graceful, but I managed to stand up, dragging her alongside me. “And for you,” I said. I fished my phone from my pocket to dial 911, but a text flashed across the screen. Emmaline had sent a message fifteen minutes ago. I’m on my way.
* * *
The next two hours were a blur of activity. Miguel and I had managed to restrain a defeated Suzanne and a volatile Benjamin for the remaining ten minutes it took for Emmaline and her law enforcement team to arrive on the scene. Emmaline, gun drawn, one hand braced on top of the other, along with another officer, came through the delivery bay door. They split up, checking the back room and ensuring that no one else was lurking nearby. Seconds later, they had handcuffed Suzanne and Benjamin.
As she read them their rights, another pair came down the stairwell and through the door. “All clear upstairs,” one of them announced.
She held up a tri-folded paper. “I would have been here sooner, but I had to wait on Judge Abernathy for the search warrant. Took a while due to exigent circumstances.”
“Layman’s terms,” I said, still working to calm my jackhammering heart.
“We had to show good cause for a nighttime intrusion and probable cause for felonious activity,” she explained. “Turns out David didn’t leave things to chance. He found a legal pad of notes and a few letters Marisol had kept. She outlined her suspicions and what she’d discovered about what was going on here at Vista Ridge.”
I knew it! I only wished Marisol had gone to the authorities with her suspicions from the beginning. “Where did you find it?”
“David put it in an envelope and dropped it off at the station sometime this morning. Being as small as we are, you’d think it would have gotten to the right person quickly, but . . .” She let the sentence fade away, the implication clearly being that Santa Sofia’s size didn’t mean incompetence or apathy didn’t exist. It was something she’d have to work on. I knew it would weigh on her because making the discovery earlier might have saved David’s life.
She turned to Benjamin and Suzanne. “So, which one of you is the brains behind the business?”
Suzanne stayed silent, all the color drained from her face. She knew the jig was up, but her brother was indignant, his face red with fury, drool dripping from the corner of his mouth. “We have all the licenses we need,” he said, spittle flying from his mouth alongside his words.
“I looked up your licenses, actually. You don’t have current funeral establishment or tissue bank licenses on file with the State of California.”
“What?” Suzanne screeched, swinging her head to face her brother.
Emmaline gave her a sad, resigned look. “It’s true. Your brother ran the business side of things, I take it?”
Suzanne gave a slow nod. “He’s got the degree in mortuary science. I went to medical school, but didn’t finish—”
“See, that’s another interesting bit of information,” Emmaline said, interrupting her.
“Shut up!” Benjamin pulled against the restraints of his handcuffs, but the officer next to him gave a hard yank, jerking Benjamin back into submission.
“What’s interesting?” Suzanne asked. Her lower lip quivered. “We did everything we needed to do to open this place.”
“If by everything you mean forgery, then yes, I agree,” Em said, her voice sweet and encouraging, when in reality, the words themselves were problematic.
“No, no, there’s no forgery. Tell them, Ben,” Suzanne pleaded with her brother.
“Shut. Your. Mouth,” he said through gritted teeth. The quiet and reserved mortician was gone. In his place was an angry, cornered animal.
Emmaline moved closer to Suzanne. “See, what he doesn’t want you to know is that you both have a little trouble with the follow-through. He never graduated, either.”
Suzanne’s jaw dropped. “No degree in mortuary science?”
Emmaline shook her head.
“No funeral establishment license?” she asked.
Again, Emmaline shook her head. “Nope.”
“N-No tissue bank license?”
“That’s the trifecta,” Emmaline said, holding up the warrant as if Suzanne had just won a prize. “But here’s the pièce de résistance. This stuff you do down here? The body parts?”
Suzanne nodded, gulping, her eyes wide.
She dropped her voice to a confidential whisper. “It’s not actually legal.”
“But we sell to labs. For research. I don’t understand.”
“Saying you’ve cremated someone, then turning around and harvesting their body parts without family consent? Not legal no matter who you’re selling to.”
From her reaction when we barged in, I suspected that she knew that deep down. She just chose to ignore it and trust her brother.
She looked at Benjamin, her eyes wide with fear. “Ben, what’s going on?”
“Dammit, Suzanne, shut the hell up.” He looked at Emmaline. “We want a lawyer.”
Emmaline was calm. “Sure thing,” she said. “You’re going to need it. We’re charging you with two first degree murders. You better hope your lawyer’s a good one.”
“Murders?” Suzanne shrieked. “What are you talking about?”
Emmaline cocked her head, trying to get a read on Suzanne. “Marisol Ruiz. Murdered because she figured out what she had were not, in fact, her father’s ashes, but powdered cement. All that time she spent in the memorial garden, even though she had what she thought were her father’s remains? She figured out what was going on behind closed doors in here. And David, her husband, because he figured out what had happened to his wife.”
Suzanne shook her head violently. “Uh-uh, no, no, no. I did not murder anyone.” She turned to her brother again, horror on her face. “Did you . . . Ben, oh my God, did you kill them?”
Benjamin lunged, taking everyone by surprise. “I’m going to kill you if you don’t shut your mouth,” he snapped. He closed the distance between himself and his sister before the deputy who’d been charged with detaining him managed to grab his handcuffed hands and yank him backward.
Suzanne spun her body around to face Emmaline. “I want my own lawyer,” she said.
“I’ll make a note of that,” Emmaline said. She took Suzanne by the arm and led her outside, handing her off to a female deputy. “Take her in, and keep her separate from her brother.”
“Sure thing, Sheriff,” the deputy said.
Em went back to the deputy whom she’d charged with watching Benjamin. “You have him under control now?”
“Completely, Sheriff,” he said, jerking Benjamin’s handcuffs to illustrate the point.
“Good. Take him in, book him, and put him in a cell. No interaction with his sister. Got it?”
“Got it,” he said, and he dragged Benjamin Alcott out of the surgical room.
“Black market body parts?” Emmaline asked me as the rest of her team donned gloves and started to execute the search warrant.
All I could do was grimace. Blood and bones. Marisol’s nightmares made sense. I looked at Miguel, reading his expression. He still didn’t know what had happened to his father. Was he in the casket they’d buried, or had he been a victim of Suzanne’s tools and Benjamin’s black market business? Was that why he hadn’t been buried in his suit? We wouldn’t know immediately, but Emmaline would find out the truth for the Baptistas, and for so many other families.
It was over.