Death Warmed Over

by Kate Flora

  "If we don't get the data, we're going to finish that report anyway," I said. "We'll just do what we can and write, 'estimates pending correct data' wherever we need to."

  "How about a nifty set of initials," he said, "like ACDSD?"

  It sounded good. Very official. Almost military. "What is ACDSD?"

  "Asshole client didn't supply data."

  "I love you, Bobby."

  "Take it easy, Thea," he said. "Things are going to be fine."

  Every office needs an optimist like Bobby. I said I'd talk to him in the morning and disconnected.

  * * *

  My briefcase was bulging with work I hadn't gotten to. After a few more calls, I'd turned my phone to vibrate and it had been dancing the rest of the way home. I knew what some of it was about. Conference planning where the organizer wanted to lay off everything onto me and Suzanne—a place we'd been before with a conference organizer who'd then had the temerity to get herself killed at the conference. Some small, but serious, issues at two client schools where they wanted to discuss the details of on-campus suspensions—calls I had to return. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Ignoring the rest of my messages, I called Roland and told him I was ten minutes out.

  By the time I pulled onto our street, I'd been pecked by so many beaks I was a lace doily remnant of the woman who'd set out in the morning to buy herself a house.

  However grueling Roland's questions, right now I welcomed the respite. He would deal straight with no game playing, wasn't going to nickel and dime me about a bill, and he wasn't likely to have had a sudden bout of amnesia.

  As I pulled into my driveway, though, I wished I'd found a way to put him off. I used the word 'home' because this was where we slept and hung our clothes. But this place felt so little like home it could plunge me into instant depression. A curtain twitched as our landlady, Mrs. Ames, did her routine check on my arrival. The apartment was nice enough, but from the outside, the house looked as tired and worn as I felt. I'd always hated the fact that it was painted a color that only belonged in black raspberry ice cream. The walls of dirty snow didn't help.

  Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. I pounded the steering wheel. I lived in a freakin' purple house with a man who was never home. I was never home. I couldn't find a house to buy no matter how hard I tried. How was I ever going to achieve a simpler life when just getting up in the morning immersed me in messes like this?

  * * *

  True to his word, Roland had brought us both safe, meat-free dinners—two huge, messy eggplant parmesan subs and a plastic tub of salad. Very wise choices. He got out plates while I found him a beer and poured myself a glass of delicious Bogle Phantom, a wine I chose because I loved the name. Besides, if I drank too much Phantom, I'd never get drunk because the wine really wasn't there. I could tell myself I just had a phantom drinking habit. My father, much as I love the man, also has this phantom habit. I believe he needs it in order to live with my mother.

  Roland looked as tired as I felt. We weren't either of us as resilient as we used to be—as Indy says, it's not the years, it's the mileage—and investigating murder and child abuse was a hard business. Harder, even though cops are tough, when the murder is gruesome. Though few would believe me, consulting was tough, too. I'd been on the phone almost constantly all day, interviewing, reassuring and cajoling. The only easy conversation had been with my husband. In the brief minute or two that he'd allotted me, Andre had been kind, caring, and concerned for my state of mind. Also, as was too often the case, unavailable. He didn't know when he'd be home. At least he expected to be home. Tonight I definitely didn't want to sleep alone.

  Roland and I settled in the living room, spread our food out on the coffee table, and went to work.

  "Sorry I was a grouch earlier," he said. "I haven't eaten all day."

  As we ate, he filled me in a little on why he thought anything I could tell him might be helpful. "Here's the thing," he said. "Not only do we have little to go on in finding her killer, we don't even know who our victim is."

  Of course we did. I was there. I saw her. I burned my hands trying to save her.

  I set down my sandwich and stared at him. "What are you talking about, Roland? It's not like she was burned beyond recognition or anything. It was Ginger."

  "Not so simple, Thea. That's the name she was using, but she's not Ginger Stevens," he said. "Ginger Stevens was the name of a New Hampshire child who died more than thirty years ago at the age of four. Not Ginger, actually, but Virginia. Fourteen years ago, someone applied for a social security number in that name." He shook his head, a man used to solving mysteries, who found this one surprisingly hard. "So, other than knowing that she was using a dead person's identity, we have no idea who the woman who called herself Ginger Stevens really was."

  They were doing fingerprint searches, but Roland was dubious. If she was in the system at all—or had been—it could have been as a juvenile, given her probable age. Many states were protective about their juvenile records, so the prints might not have been entered. Others had been careless, or the prints hadn't been entered for minor crimes, or the systems didn't communicate well with each other. Modern TV shows have led people to believe information is available at the click of a button. The reality is often far different.

  I felt like I'd been sitting on a chair and someone had kicked it out from under me. This morning had been bad enough. Now the mystery about Ginger's death had just gotten a lot more complicated. If she was using a stolen identity, was that because she had some dark secret? And had that dark secret been the reason she was killed?

  Chapter 7

  Soon, the low table held the remnants of our dinner. Crumpled foil and napkins smeared with tomato sauce. The smell of tomato and spice pretty much wiped out anything else. Roland's offhand remark about not having eaten himself, when I knew he was one of those fast metabolism guys who have to eat every few hours to keep going, told me that he felt almost as sick at the thought of meat right now as I did. And he was a tough guy. He might have come late to the party, but that slightly off barbeque smell still filled the house.

  Roland looked at the paper splotched with red. "Normally, eggplant wouldn't be my first choice, but..." A long pause. "Some things you never get used to." A hesitation. "It's such a distinctive smell."

  I thought about the slipping skin on Ginger's arm. Wondered, briefly, if I would lose my dinner. "I'm just a civilian," I said. "Am I going to have to become vegetarian?"

  He shook his head. "Only for a while. As for being just a civilian, Thea? If I believe that, you're gonna sell me what? The Penobscot Narrows Bridge?"

  "I'd sure like to sell you on the idea that I don't know enough to make this conversation worthwhile."

  "And I'm not buying."

  He sat across from me on the comfortable mushroom-colored couch, pen poised over his notebook, and started in on his questions.

  "This killing wasn't random. It was planned," he said. "You saw what someone did to her."

  He gave it a beat as he forced me to remember. A friend, yes, but also a cop with a particularly nasty homicide to investigate. "You're good with people, Thea. You're observant. And they talk to you. At this point, almost anything she might have said would be more than we've got now. Everyone gives us the same line: she was pleasant, she was quiet, she kept to herself. No one knows where she came from. Who her family is. No one is a close enough friend to have been a confidant. Even if she was being guarded about her life, there has to be more than that. No one can be that careful."

  "Phone bills?" I suggested, unable to keep from stating the obvious. "They should lead you to people she knew. Her cell phone records? What's on her desk? In her files? Matchbooks, business cards, sales receipts. Things she's scribbled on little pieces of paper. People keep stuff."

  He rolled his eyes. "You don't think we're doing that? Of course we'll call those people. But the ones we've contacted so far don't know anything. No one knows if she has parents, siblings, or other relatives, no
t even people she's worked with for the two years we can document that she's been living in Maine. Her office doesn't even have an application or a resume on file for her. The only person she's ever mentioned other than clients is the boyfriend."

  His dark eyes gazed into mine. "Yes, most people keep stuff. But not Ginger. Her apartment is sanitized. As though she wanted to leave no clues to her identity. Unless her killer did that. Frankly, I've rarely seen a place with so few signs of personality. Her clothes are generic. No labels that would give us any clues. Nothing from a boutique, or from a chain that isn't national. There is no paper trail. No names in her books. No stolen library books. No diary, journal, or notebook. No old papers regarding former rentals, places she's owned, bills that aren't recent. No personal letters or photographs. We're going over things again, in case there's something she—or we—missed, but right now, it's like she dropped from the moon about two years ago and brought nothing with her."

  "What about her credit history? Car payments?"

  "She paid cash for the car. The only credit cards are recent."

  I looked at the poised pen and sighed. "That's so odd. She never seemed secretive."

  But had she? I tried to think back over our conversations. "I don't know where to begin, Roland. Or how to tap into something I might know. Maybe if you ask me some questions?"

  "How long have you known her?"

  "I don't know her. She's my realtor."

  He gave me a version of Andre's 'get with the program' look. I'd always considered it uniquely my husband's, but maybe it was a cop thing.

  I tried to recall our first meeting. "We met at her office. I'd seen a house with her company's sign out front, and when I called, she was the person on the desk... on duty, I guess they call it. She was very pleasant and asked me a bunch of intelligent questions that told me she was really trying to zero in on what I was looking for. At that point I had dealt with a couple other realtors who were real sleazy, or tried to foist their own agendas on me, and Andre and I were getting impatient to find a place. So we made a date, I blocked out some time, and she took me to look at houses."

  "When was that?" he said.

  "Last fall."

  The pen remained static. Of course. I hadn't said anything yet. "She was a smart woman, Roland. Despite what others have told you, I found her very outgoing. Almost chatty. But there was something."

  I called up those first impressions. What had there been about her that didn't seem to fit with her affable realtor persona? "She had a way of hesitating before she spoke, like she was weighing her words. Or vetting them. Like she wanted to be careful about what she said. Everything she said. Almost like she had secrets she was afraid might slip out."

  I hadn't even known I'd thought that until Roland asked. Or I'd just put it down to caution. Realtors have a lot of requirements about how they represent things. And who they represent.

  That he did write down.

  I tried to think back to those first times with Ginger, going with her to look at houses. What did I know, or think I knew, about her? We'd spent a fair amount of time in her car, with me as her passenger. I'm rarely in the passenger seat, except when Andre is driving, and since he drives like a cop—too fast, confident, aggressive yet totally in control—I'm often clinging to the edge of my seat and praying that we'll get there alive. Since Ginger drove like a sane person, I'd had a chance to observe her.

  "She was sad. I mean, she had an outwardly bubbly personality, the kind of good humor that made her good at her job, but sometimes she'd fall into these silences and get a faraway look, like she'd remembered something sad. They were very brief, and then she'd pull herself back and go on. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed them."

  "Can you recall anything particular in your conversations that might have triggered that reaction?"

  Could I? I thought about sitting with Ginger in her car. Pulling up in front of a house we were going to look at, smallish but pretty. She'd asked me how many people would be living there. I'd said just the two of us, though we were hoping. And then I'd stopped, because the possibility of a family was a sensitive thing for me. I thought she'd sensed it, and that was the first time I'd seen her do that mental retreat. I described the scene to Roland.

  "Family. Children," he said. "Did you notice any kind of a pattern?"

  "When I talked about relationships. About me and Andre. How happy we were to be married. She had a boyfriend, but even when I first met her, I got the impression that things weren't working between them. Later, she made those remarks about how he had to go, he was snooping through her things and helping himself to her money. She hinted that maybe he was doing something illegal. She said when she confronted him about it, he said well, she wasn't perfect, either, was she? But I have no idea what he meant. What she meant. She never elaborated. She just seemed very hurt by it. Discouraged about the possibility of having a long-term relationship."

  "What else did she say about the boyfriend?"

  "His name was Randy. Short for Randolph, not Randall. And he had one of those forgettable last names. Smith or Jones. Or Clark, maybe?"

  I thought about driving around with Ginger in her car. The Toyota RAV4 she'd gotten instead of the Prius she wanted. She'd explained it was "because some people are turned off by 'green' cars, and it could create a 'holier than thou' impression." Trying to recall what she'd said about the boyfriend.

  Mostly we'd talked about houses. The things people did with them, the awful décor, the neglect, the failure to take advantage of views, or create gardens or lawns. We'd both been appalled at how little some people were willing to do to clean up their houses for a buyer, even when they claimed to be very eager to sell.

  One house we'd gone to smelled of dirty diapers and sour milk. Another reeked so badly of cat litter we had to leave. Sometimes, even though they knew we were coming, people hadn't even bothered to make the beds. One had a car up on blocks in the driveway. Ginger had been distressed by that. While I'd looked around, she'd taken the seller aside and had a quiet chat. But these were not things that would interest Roland.

  "The boyfriend?" he said impatiently.

  I was trying to help. I really was. I forced myself to concentrate, even though I knew memory didn't work like that. Then I changed my strategy. "Ask me more questions," I said. "Prompt my memory. Help me get in the 'remembering' groove."

  "The boyfriend. What else did she say about him?"

  "Mostly it was about how it wasn't working. I think she felt betrayed. Betrayed and angry. He'd been some kind of a manager. Convenience store, something like that. She said at first it had been all glow and roses. He was unemployed, and discouraged, but she'd been supportive and helped him work on his resume and applications. And he'd seemed so sweet and grateful. So happy to have her help. She said he was fun, at first. Wanting to do things together and making her laugh. Having dinner ready when she got home. A lot of thoughtful things.

  "But it wore off pretty quickly. He wouldn't look for work. He was happy to let her work while he sat around and watched TV. He stopped doing things around the house. Despite her encouragement—you know, she even did stuff like tweak his resume and get him set up on LinkedIn—he wasn't trying to find a job."

  Had Ginger said anything else about the boyfriend? "She was annoyed that he stopped helping around the house no matter how hard she was working. She'd come home after a long day and he'd be waiting for her to make dinner. Even though he was a good cook. She said he used to work as a cook, before he moved on to managing a store."

  I wondered if there was a way the cops could search LinkedIn, and whether knowing only Randolph and Maine would be enough.

  "Did their troubles sound like disagreement or did it sound like there might have been violence involved?"

  I thought about what I'd seen in that living room. "She never mentioned feeling threatened, and she never seemed to be trying to hide bruises or injuries or moving like she hurt. She was just aggravated. Disappointed. But Ro
land, the crime, what was done to her—it wasn't some ordinary domestic thing, an angry boyfriend. It felt way too planned. Too ugly and vicious for that. It felt like hatred. Revenge. You're the expert. What do you think?"

  He shrugged. Cops. Even the ones I liked could be so infuriating. We're supposed to bare our souls. They get to sit there impassively and refuse to answer our questions.

  "Dammit, Roland. Don't play cop games with me."

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them. I knew how this worked. I also knew that I was more deeply affected by this morning's events than I was allowing myself to acknowledge. I was drawing this out, and then I'd go to bed and wait for Andre to come home, listening for every little sound. And in the morning I'd drive to Stafford Academy and immerse myself in work. Handling their problem, working on tasks for other clients. Build a barrier of work between me and this morning.

  I was terrified of what would happen if I got into bed, turned out the lights, and closed my eyes. The horror movies would begin. "Sorry, Roland. I'm just. You know. It was horrible."

  "Sorry," he said. "Habit."

  Our words crossed.

  He ducked his head.

  I smiled.

  He said, "Yes. It looked like it came from something bigger than a domestic spat. But we do see people who get pretty unhinged when they're rejected. All those domestic violence murders where the woman has left some guy and he won't let her go. That deep-seated fear of losing control. She ever suggest that that might be the case with him? That he was controlling? That if she tried to make him leave, he'd lose it?"

  I hadn't. "I heard lazy. Leeching. Jerk. Manipulator. I even heard thief, but I didn't know whether that was because he had a record or because he tried to steal money from her. I did get the impression that she thought it would be hard to get him to move out. But not because he'd be violent. My overall impression was more of a weak guy who thought he'd found a sugar mommy than someone likely to go off the rails. More passive-aggressive than aggressive. I never saw signs of him obsessively keeping track of her whereabouts. He didn't call or text her all the time, at least he didn't when I was with her. And she never seemed to be nervous about not responding to calls or texts, which women with controlling husbands or boyfriends are. But we're talking fragments, Roland. Little bits of conversation here and there. We're not talking about hours of girl talk over drinks or pizza. You know what my life is like. I don't have time for girl talk."