Death Warmed Over

by Kate Flora

  Right now, with burned hands and a mind filled with horrible images reminding me what I'd just witnessed, I didn't see any way that the world could be righted.

  Chapter 4

  "Thea."

  Roland Proffit was coming toward me, his big hand outstretched. Roland's face was a study in contradictions. Lean and severe, thin lipped, with a powerful nose topped by the kindest eyes. His manner was similar. He was quick to assess and act. At 6' 4" he had a strong, imposing presence, yet his manner, especially with victims, with traumatized people, was surprisingly gentle. That outstretched hand wasn't for a conventional handshake, but preceded an arm that wrapped around me and gave me a hug. Followed by eyes that assessed me for damage, and analyzed what I might need from the first aid kit he was carrying.

  "I know it was awful," he said. "How are you holding up?"

  I waved my phone. "Keeping busy. Losing myself in work."

  He nodded. "Things don't change much, do they?"

  He looked around. "So where do you want to do this? Nice house. Too bad there isn't a big comfortable sofa." He jerked his chin toward the front of the house. "I'd suggest my car, but it's a zoo out there."

  The fireplace had a wide raised fieldstone hearth, like a long bench plenty big enough to sit on. "How about right here?" I said, lowering myself to it. We probably looked pretty funny. I'm tall. He's very tall, so we were folded up like storks. But it was a place to sit, and relatively quiet.

  Before he started in on his questions, Roland bandaged my hands, giving me a cute matching set of little gauzy fingerless mitts, shaking his head and clucking as he wrapped me up. I felt him holding back a lecture—something about not going back to work or taking it easy. But he knows I'm one of the tough guys. Anyway, I didn't see how I could take time off. People needed me.

  Then Roland started to take me through the same questions Scafaro had asked, yet from him, they were very different. Partly, it was his pace. He talked like we had all the time in the world, even though we both knew we didn't.

  "Wait," I said, as we settled into our conversation, "what about Scafaro? Andre wanted him to hear this."

  Roland shook his head. "I think he's found something else for the lieutenant to do."

  Trust Andre to get that right, I thought.

  "When you got to the gate," Roland said, "was it latched?"

  I considered. "No. The latch hadn't caught."

  "What about the front door. You said it was open. How open? Could you see into the room?"

  "No. It was almost closed. But when I knocked, after Ginger didn't answer the doorbell, it swung open. So I went in."

  "The floors look like they've all been recently redone," he said. "Did you see any signs where someone had tracked in dirt? Did you notice any footprints?"

  Anything that had been there would be gone now, or all mucked up, after the flurry of emergency activity. "That's funny," I said.

  "What?"

  "I did see footprints. Sock prints, actually. Because I could almost, but not quite, see the imprint of toes, like feet in wet or sweaty socks."

  "Where?" he asked.

  "From right by the front door toward those closed pocket doors. Lots of footprints, actually, like someone had gone back and forth several times. I thought Ginger must have slipped off her shoes, to avoid messing up the floor and wondered if I should take mine off, but there weren't any shoes."

  I tried to remember whether she'd been wearing shoes. I couldn't. "And they weren't Ginger's feet. Her feet were tiny." We'd joked about that one day, when she was wearing these darling little embroidered boots and she said they were actually kid's boots. She'd said she also had a pair of those kid's sneakers that lit up when you walked. I was jealous. I've always wanted a pair of those.

  "Only leading toward the living room?"

  I nodded. "Back and forth."

  I tried to recall whether I'd seen any tracks when I went into the living room, but I'd been in such a hurry. And once the door was open, my focus had been on Ginger and that dreadful circle of heaters. "I'm sorry, Roland. I didn't notice. Once the door opened and I saw her... that's all I saw."

  "That's okay," he said. "You're doing fine. You said the doors were closed, so you didn't go into the living room when you first entered the house. Why not?"

  "Because I expected it to knock my socks off. You know how long we've been house hunting. I wanted to save the best for last." I looked away, biting my lip to stop a bit of 'poor me.'

  He patted my arm reassuringly. "So you went into the dining room?" I nodded. "See any footprints there?"

  I considered, then shook my head. Those shiny floors had been unmarked. "No. Then I went into the kitchen, but I never really got a chance to look around, because that's when I heard the sound."

  "Sound?"

  "Someone moaning? Or crying? A muffled sound like someone needed help. So I ran back into the foyer, pushed those doors open, and I saw her."

  I stopped. This was the hard part. I decided to let Roland lead me through it.

  "Tell me what you saw."

  "In front of the fireplace. There was the chair in the middle, with Ginger tied to it, and around her that ring of space heaters."

  It was important, I knew, and I was the only person who had seen it the way the killer had set it up. I'd disturbed things trying to rescue Ginger.

  "Did you notice anything particular about the heaters? About their spacing or arrangement?"

  It seemed like an odd question. My focus had been on Ginger, on processing what was happening, getting her out of there, trying to save her life. I hadn't paid much attention to them. Now I considered. My first thought was that they had all been alike. Evenly spaced around her, like squat, crouching, red-faced beasts with long orange tails. But that wasn't quite right. The two in front of her had been smaller heaters, closer together and closer to her, like her tormenter had run out of big ones.

  Or like her tormenter had wanted a particularly fierce blast of heat right in front of her.

  I told Roland that.

  He walked me through everything I'd done. Whether I'd noticed anything unusual about the room. I hadn't. Had I seen anyone in the back yard? I'd never even looked out there. There had been sheer curtains but not heavy drapes. Light but no view.

  Had Ginger said anything to me? I repeated the words, or pieces of words, that I had heard. Airy. Bobby. So long. Safe. Sorry.

  He wrote them down. "Nothing else?"

  "I don't think so. Roland, I was so shocked... So wrapped up in trying to save her. In calling for help. There might have been something else and I just don't remember. She forced out those few words... it was a struggle for her to say that much but it seemed terribly important... and then she started screaming. I told her not to try and speak, but it was like something she had to tell me. I only wish..."

  But there were so many things I wished.

  "That's okay," he said. "Sometimes things come back later on. Or things that seemed random suddenly make sense. Connect up with something else you knew. You know how it works. If you remember anything else, tell Andre."

  He backed me up, then, to when I first arrived. "What about cars on the street? You said you saw Ginger's car in the driveway. Did you notice any other cars?"

  I told him about the truck that had veered into my lane. Largish. Dark green. Pickup. I thought it had a double cab, but wasn't sure. Between the ringing phone and spilling coffee, I hadn't noticed the driver. Or the make. I wasn't much of a witness, if there had been anything to witness, but who goes out to look at a house and conscientiously records everything they see along the way?

  Sure, Andre and I have this remembering game that we play. But it's a game. It's play. Describing someone we've passed on the street or seen briefly in a car. It's different under stress conditions when a life is at stake. At least, it's different for me. Maybe he can do it all the time. I'm not usually around him under stress conditions.

  That last was almost a lie, given our hist
ory.

  He wanted to know how the street looked when I turned onto it. I'd noticed the trees. The way the houses were set back from the street. Had I noticed any cars? I shook my head. "I was thinking about living on this street. I wasn't looking at the cars. Wait. I did notice one or two. There was one of those pseudo-Hummer things. You know—the one Toyota makes. A bright, shiny blue. It looked brand new, like the owner just brought it home or he took it to the carwash every day."

  I think of certain types of cars as men's cars or women's cars. This was a guy car. Like those open Jeeps. Like muscle cars. Jaguar sedans, on the other hand, I think of as women's cars.

  During mud season, cars get pretty dirty. Between dirt, sand, and road salt, they become a universal tannish gray color, no matter what color they were to start with, often with arcs of clean where the wipers have been working. That's why this one stood out. What was the other one? Oh. Right. "And an older car. Smallish. I don't know the make. But it was that kind of odd mallard green?"

  "Teal?" he said.

  I nodded.

  "What about people on the street? Did you see any people? We'll do a canvass, of course, but just in case?" His smile was a bit cynical. "You know how eager people can be to talk to us."

  I did know. I replayed turning onto the street and driving down it. Had I seen any of the people who might have been my new neighbors? Maybe the game Andre and I played was working, because I had.

  "A grouchy-looking woman out walking a black lab. Hair a slightly too bright blonde, pulled back in a ponytail. She was wearing a Red Sox hat and a pink coat. A woman carrying a toddler in a red snowsuit. An older woman in a black down coat scraping her windshield." The suburbs in the daytime. The population overwhelmingly female. I hadn't even noticed that I was seeing them.

  "Sorry I can't be more helpful," I said.

  This time Roland's smile was genuine. "You're doing fine. We never know what will be helpful 'til we get into it."

  I looked at my watch. It was getting later and later, and my work was waiting. Roland read it right. "Places to be?" he said.

  "Always."

  "I'll walk you out to your car. Make sure you can get out. Keep those reporters off your back."

  "My hero," I said. But in fact, he was. Roland had been there for me during some pretty tough times. Picked me up and put me back together a few times.

  "Find the monster who did this, Roland."

  "We will. Meanwhile, you keep thinking. What you saw. What you might know. I haven't even gotten to asking you about Ginger Stevens. We can get most of that from her co-workers and friends, but keep your thinking cap on. You're a good observer."

  Roland cleared the way, and soon I was back in my Jeep and heading for the highway. But instead of planning what I would do if the Stafford Academy headmaster called, I was pondering Roland's last question. What DID I know about Ginger Stevens?

  Chapter 5

  I pulled over at a donut shop a few miles away. I really needed something to eat, and a donut place was the only kind of fast food I could think of where I might not have to smell cooking meat. Once I was inside, I found I couldn't face the thought of eating, so I just got coffee. I loaded it with cream and sugar and went outside, leaning against the car, trying to air out my hair and clothes a little, and sipped cautiously. I wanted to speed back to the office and bury myself in work, filling my head with charts and graphs that would push images of Ginger aside, use some of my bad energy to bully our recalcitrant client into giving up their data. But first I badly needed airing.

  Actually, what I badly needed was a scrub brush to clean out the inside of my head. A shower. Therapy to help me get past the moment when I'd accidentally put my hand on Ginger's arm and her skin had started to slip. Otherwise, that feeling would live with me forever. Andre kept saying 'box it up.' But I had no idea how I was supposed to get these ugly things into a box.

  Fingers of wind made sneak attacks on my body like the sudden gropings of middle school boys. While the wind tried to turn me into a popsicle, I closed my eyes and said a prayer for Ginger. I hoped she was in a better place. I hoped there was a better place. But my nature is to fix things, so it wasn't long before I moved on to the question of justice for Ginger and whether there was anything I could do to help.

  It was freezing out. One of those days that looks appealing through a car window and is actually miserable. The people going in to get their coffee were red-nosed and grimacing. The weatherman predicted snow for later. When I couldn't stand it anymore, I got in the car, cranked up the heat, and drove to the office. Even with the heat blasting, I couldn't seem to get warm.

  On the way, I called Suzanne for an update on her condition and our clients'. Magda said she wasn't back in the office yet. Magda sounded worried, and Suzanne had been gone so long that I was worried, too. Suzanne is a slave of duty, and there was plenty of duty calling today.

  I rummaged in the back for some clean clothes, then ran, bunched-up clothes in one hand and my overstuffed briefcase in the other, the bandages cushioning my hands as I crossed the sandy lot to the building. We had a suite of offices on the second floor of a bland beige office building. My feet thudded heavily on the stairs and I was out of breath by the time I reached the door. Something else I was behind on—I was badly overdue at the gym.

  * * *

  My desk had experienced a pink slip storm while I was out. I gathered them up and sorted them into 'needs attention' and 'can wait.' The 'can wait' pile was smaller. On top was one with URGENT in Magda's loopy penmanship, with the word underlined three times. I guess that that meant it was urgent. The message was to call Suzanne at home.

  The fact that Suzanne was at home suggested bad news, but when I reached her, she sounded like her usual chipper self. She wanted to plan how we would deal with the situation at Stafford Academy if it escalated, and whether I would need Bobby there as well, when we were so busy.

  I said if they decided they needed help, I could handle it. Then Suzanne changed the subject. "I almost hesitate to ask, Thea, but what did you mean about a body of your own?"

  I filled her in on getting to the house, finding Ginger, and Ginger's death and she asked me what in hell was my problem? Okay. Suzanne didn't say hell. She said heck. She's a proper, ladylike sort who hasn't spent as much time around cops as I have.

  "You're not going to get involved in that, I hope."

  "Doing my best to avoid it. But I'm the one who found her, so avoiding involvement is difficult. I'm kind of a major witness."

  "You don't need this, Thea. We don't need this. Let the police handle it."

  I didn't argue that the police couldn't handle it without civilian cooperation or that the choice wasn't mine because I knew she wouldn't listen. Like my mother, Suzanne is always urging me to live a more careful life, while overlooking the realities of the situations I get involved in. Not that I could see how being careful would have helped me this morning. House hunting was supposed to be a pretty benign activity and it wasn't one easily undertaken without a realtor. I hadn't read anywhere about a rash of attacks on realtors. Maybe I should do an internet search?

  But the things I'd observed in that living room suggested elaborate planning and a deep, twisted need to do harm. They suggested that this was personal. Not a random attack on a cute realtor, but a deliberate attack on Ginger.

  I couldn't think about that right now. Before I disconnected, I followed up on another of my intuitions—that Suzanne didn't sound quite like herself. She wasn't acting like herself, either, at home in the middle of the day. And she hadn't mentioned the doctor or seeing me in the office later in the day. Something was up.

  "So what did the doctor say?"

  There was an uncharacteristically long silence. "Bed rest," she said gloomily.

  "Serious bed rest or just take it easy bed rest?"

  "Serious. Confined to quarters. No being an independent school goddess. No being a domestic goddess. If I want to carry this kid to term, I am confined to
my bed. To be waited on hand and foot. Not," she continued darkly, "that there is anyone around here to wait on me." Silence. Then, "I'm already restless and it's only been two hours. Promise you'll bring me work. Send Magda to keep me organized. Not let me lose my mind."

  I promised.

  Suzanne's form of domestic goddesshood was complicated, because she was the goddess not only of her own home, but, as headmaster's wife at a private school, she was the goddess of the whole community. Half the time, she went home not to her family or her house, but to a tea, or a fancy dinner, or to attend a campus event. Often, as well, she went home to entertain VIP houseguests. Sometimes she was flying off to distant cities to attend fundraisers with alums. Bed rest meant having to find coverage in every aspect of her life. Never mind that she had a small child to care for. If I was stressed, she was on an emotional rack.

  We both loved helping schools. It had been a very special moment when she'd asked me to move from employee to partner, and between us, we had built a fine business. But our business depended on quick and responsive personal service. On our individual reputations as much as on our good staff and excellent work. That meant delegation was hard, and because boarding schools were a 24/7 world, we could no more put off attending to things than Andre could when he was deeply enmeshed in a case. Sometimes, though no one would believe it when we said we were consultants, our work also felt like life or death. Or life and death, given some of the situations we'd been called on to deal with.

  "So. Stafford Academy? Have they called again?" she asked.

  "Not yet. But my intuition says they will."

  "Mine, too. Look, I'm feeling a little flattened by all this. Let me think about what's on my plate right now that can't wait, and I'll call you."