Hottest Blood

by Jeff Gelb

  Morgan shook his head. “M.E. verified that cause of death was massive gunshot trauma to the brain.”

  “She got a rap sheet?”

  “Zip. I ran her through our computers and the NCIC files. Not even a traffic citation.”

  “Entropy requires no maintenance,” suggested Lofley cryptically. He bent over the microscope again like a monk over his alms. “Who knows? Maybe she offed her old man because he liked to out dick trawling.”

  Morgan had abandoned his perch on the corner of the nearest desk and was heading toward the door. “Whatever. Just make sure you personally tag that slug and file it away in the evidence room. I don’t trust that nimrod clerk of yours.”

  “Ja, mein herr,” grunted Lofley without looking up.

  For the rest of the day Morgan tried to stop thinking about Ursula D’antoni. But it was like trying to stop his tongue from exploring a broken tooth.

  He considered himself an efficient jobber, not a scanner of human souls. He was known as one of the bounty hunters: that one-sixth of any big-city police department that is routinely responsible for 80 percent of the arrests. Fellow cops admired his investigative technique but resented his overtime pay.

  Still, this case troubled him. One fly in the ointment was the complete absence of a clear motive. He had canvasses the entire neighborhood yet turned up not one tale of wife abuse or infidelity on the part of Keith D’antoni. Nor was there evidence that she had a lover waiting in the wings. And Ursula D’antoni was an heiress who was far wealthier than her husband, so money had not been the motive.

  But motives were not Morgan’s bailiwick. What really troubled him was the sexual force of her, which pulsed from her willowy body like radioactive motes.

  He had fist felt it a week ago. Morgan had responded to a call from the prowl-car team that had originally investigated a neighbor’s report of a gunshot coming from the D’antoni residence. The couple lived up in the Heights, a plush glass-and-redwood dwelling with a crushed marble cul-de-sac, sunken den, and velvet-and-damask furniture.

  An ashen-faced uniformed cop had pointed him back to the den, where his partner was keeping a wary eye on woman above the muzzle of his police .38. She was sitting on the floor under a varnished oil painting of some naked little Hindu god. A scattering of silk zazen cushions and pretty origami roses surrounded her. Her husband’s mangled head rested in her lap. The weapon was still in her right hand, though she wasn’t aiming it at anyone.

  “She won’t drop it, Lieutenant,” the patrolman explained. “I don’t think she hears me.”

  She had looked up at him when Morgan entered the room. For a moment, a mere micromoment shorter than the space of a heartbeat, he stared into those eyes the color of crushed berries and felt an archetypal revulsion and fascination. That moment passed and then his back broke out in cool sweat. HE felt his eyes quivering as if he had splashed shampoo into them, and a fuzzy white noise filled his head.

  But that, too, passed. Now he felt his pulse fire boosters, his breathing quicken as if he had just dashed up a flight of stairs. His throat pinched shut, and warm blood crept up the back of his neck. His legs trembled as though his calves had just turned to water.

  All of it seemed like a visceral prelude to something bigger—the physical component of a dangerous mental insight. For during that moment he also suddenly understood something, glimpsed a few lines of psychic graffiti.

  It was nothing he could state neatly as a law. Rather, it was a realization that everything in his world had somehow, suddenly and definitely, changed forever in a radial paradigm shift of perception.

  Then she talked to him, and the dangerous insight was forgotten. Her voice slid down the bumps of his spine with the tickling grit of a cat’s tongue.

  “I love Yama,” she told him, looking up at the painting as she spoke. “He knows that death is the greatest gift Shiva has ever given his children.” Then she surrendered the weapon butt-first.

  She looked at Morgan again and smiled a dreamy, fey smile. Abruptly, he felt his penis engorge with hot blood. It was suddenly so hard that it twitched with each heartbeat. His response shocked him so deeply that, for the first time in years, Morgan was forced to pull the laminated Miranda card out of his pocket before he could read her rights to her.

  * * *

  “Twenty years now I’ve been practicing criminal law, yet only recently did I comprehend the truth, Reno: ‘Evil’ is a point of view, not an immutable fact of nature.”

  It was an odd opening remark. Morgan looked a question at Eric Coleman across the wide pecan veneer of the lawyer’s desk. The silver-templed attorney was quaintly dapper in a Harris tweed jacket and burgundy Countess Mara tie. But a patina of nervous perspiration coated his brow like glazed plasticine.

  Morgan shrugged. “Whatever. ‘Evil’ isn’t my usual turf.”

  Coleman nodded, leaning closer across the desk in his growing urgency. He rubbed a knuckle across his mustache. “No, it’s not, is it? Evil is a cause, and you deal with effects.”

  The remark left the cop groping for words. The ormolu clock on the desk ticked off at least ten uncomfortable seconds while he tried orient himself. Coleman had called him last night at home and asked—his normally suave voice oddly strained—to see him. As a rule, Morgan considered lawyers the most accomplished liars since Simon Peter denied Christ. But he made a rare exception in the case of Coleman. The man was brilliant but absolutely straight-arrow when it came to trial advocacy. Besides—the client he wanted to discuss was Ursual D’antoni.

  Yet this meeting was clearly unorthodox, if not exactly wrong, and both men knew it. The crucial discovery phase of the legal process was approaching, when the prosecution would be required to detail, for potential defense rebuttal, precisely what evidence would be introduced into trial. For the defense attorney and the case officer to meet like this would usually be considered potentially compromising for either side.

  Normally Morgan would have refused, even a request from Coleman. But something almost…plaintive in the man’s voice had struck a resonant chord of curiosity within the cop.

  By now Morgan was thoroughly baffled. “Did you call me in to discuss metaphysics or Ursuala D’antoni?”

  Actually hearing her name had the same effect as slapping Coleman with a wet towel. He started, then leaned back in his chair.

  “Ursula? She’s…”

  His voice trailed off. For some reason Morgan was convinced the man had been about to say “innocent.” Instead, Coleman now said emphatically, “She won’t be prosecuted.”

  The almost childlike petulance of the lawyer’s tone surprised Morgan even more than the words.

  “Are you saying…do you mean you have proof she’s innocent?”

  He hadn’t meant to be so blunt. After all, he would soon be squaring off against Coleman as a witness for the prosecution. But Coleman was clearly not interested in the usual niceties of legal punctilio.

  “She hasn’t admitted or denied anything,” said the attorney. “Nor do I care if she did it.”

  “You don’t care?” repeated Morgan woodenly. For a moment he wondered if this highly respected lawyer had finally stressed out and gone soft between the head handles. Then a more likely possibility occurred to him: The model family man had knuckled under to midlife crisis and become infatuated with his mysterious client.

  Morgan slid that thought to the back burner of his mind. He said, “Well, I agree they won’t pin Murder One on her. There’s no clear intent and sure’s hell no sign of malice aforethought. But whether you care or not, the forensics evidence is damning.”

  “All-peering science,” said Coleman scornfully. “DNA fingerprinting, mass spectrometers, thin-layer chromatography…I’m not talking about guilt, I’m talking about justice. She won’t be prosecuted, do you hear me?”

  The attorney’s voice climbed an octave or two up the scale, startling the cop. The man’s obvious desperation now struck Morgan in its full force. He watched, his heart b
eginning to scamper in his chest, as Coleman reached into the wide top drawer of his desk. He slid an eight-by-ten matte-finish color photo across toward Morgan.

  “Look at her,” said the attorney. “Really look at her.”

  Morgan did look. He gazed long and hard into those huge, almond-shaped, sloe eyes. Cool sweat broke out in his armpits, and it felt like flying neutrinos were invading him. Again he had the absurd feeling—as he had on that first night he saw Ursula D’antoni—that he should look away before his retinas wear seared.

  Bur he couldn’t look away. Staring into her eyes made him feel that he was watching a poisonous but lovely serpent undulating across crushed velvet, that he was watching the rhythmic beauty of death itself. For a moment he felt a last-gasp feeling of panic, like when he was young and in bed at night and his leg would fall into the crack between the wall and the bed, where the bogeyman lived: There was always that moment between the realization and the motor act of pulling his leg out, when his blood iced over in helpless fear as he wondered if he’d be in time or pulled under forever.

  Suddenly, with no visceral segue, he was hard—a boner more intense than a morning piss hard-on. But this time the turn-on didn’t stop there: He felt that familiar, tightening tingle between his rectum and his testicles, the signal that he was on the threshold of an orgasm. For a moment the room went blurry, as if he were seeing it through a wet windowpane.

  Finally, mercifully, Coleman pulled the photo back across the desk and placed it lovingly into the drawer again.

  “She wants to see you,” he announced. “Tomorrow morning.”

  Morgan hadn’t felt his unsated since high school, when heavy makeout sessions had left him with a bad case of lover’s nuts. It was at least thirty seconds before he could meet the lawyer’s gaze. “See me?”

  Coleman nodded. “At Central Lockup. She refused to request bail, you know. And she says we should go together.” At the mention of seeing her, the attorney smiled for the first time since Morgan had arrived.

  “But why?”

  Coleman leaned back in his chair again and let the clock tick out another silence that grew embarrassingly intimate.

  “Because, Reno,” he finally replied, “she wants you to.”

  That night Morgan finally drifted down a long tunnel into sleep around two o’clock and woke up in his battered Morris chair several hours later with a crick in his neck. I won’t go, he decided. The hell do I care what she wants? But at nine sharp—red-eyed but freshly shaven and showered—he met Coleman downtown at Central Lockup.

  Maybe it was just his imagination logging some overtime, Morgan told himself—but the hard-boiled cop who let them back to the conference area almost seemed to…resent their visit. Morgan’s suspicion was confirmed when the guard, a perpetual curmudgeon whom he had never seen crack a grin in the past ten years, now smiled almost shyly as he spotted Ursula D’antoni waiting for her visitors behind the plexiglass divider.

  But Morgan forgot about the cop—and about everything else—when she flicked those crushed-mulberry eyes on him. Her black hair was pulled into a heavy Psyche knot over her nape. Detainees awaiting trial were permitted their own clothing, and she wore a cool green shirtwaist dress and white kid sandals.

  “Ursula,” he heard Coleman’s adulatory voice saying beside him, “I brought him.”

  She nodded. It was just one curt but graciously regal forward tilt of her head. For the first time Morgan noticed, when she closed her eyes, how the lashes curved sweetly against her cheeks.

  “I knew you would,” she replied, and again the sound of her purring contralto moved up and down Morgan’s spine on tiny geisha fee.t

  Morgan parted his lips to speak. But staring into her unwavering gaze, it was as if everything Freud had termed “defense mechanisms” had suddenly switched into inoperative mode. All his thoughts skittered around inside his skull like frenzied rodents, refusing to be caught. Her eyes bored even deeper into his, probing to his core, and now a door slammed shut deep down inside him—slammed shut on everything his life had been, on everything he had ever believed.

  “You do understand,” she said with a quiet urgency, “that we all serve Yama?”

  “No, I don’t understand. Who is Ya—”

  “Shush!” she cut him off impatiently. “Yama is the Hindu god of death. His cousins, Eros and Thanatos, are locked in their final, fatal embrace. Don’t you sense it? All mankind has developed a collective subconscious wish—a universal wish not to exist.”

  A sense of alarm seeped through Morgan, a primitive revulsion he could not yet focus. He felt dizzy, as if a few pints of blood had just been drawn out of him.

  “At the very moment when a man has a climax,” she went on, “his heart stops beating. You must understand this—you go inside of a woman seeking death, not pleasure!”

  One part of him knew that what she was saying was insane. But that didn’t matter anymore. He knew only that he wanted what she wanted. Now police work meant nothing. There was only her and the inexorable forces that threatened her unless he intervened.

  She understood what he was thinking and offered him a little quicksilver smile. For a moment her mulberry eyes seemed to glow like LED numerals.

  “Sit down,” she invited him, and he had to because his legs were suddenly turned to rubber by the force of his orgasm.

  “Any chance,” Morgan remarked, three days after the meeting in Central Lockup, “you could run the D’antoni test again?”

  Dez Lofley shot him a puzzle-headed look. “Why? It’s been run twice already.”

  “I’m just skittish, is all. The DA can’t turn up any sign this woman ever even bounced a check. The entire prosecution is going to hinge on those lab results. As for the defense, maybe Eric Coleman could try for an insanity plea—she’s muttered some strange things about Hindu gods and whatnot. But Coleman prefers acquittals. That means he’s surely going to request backups while he hammers away at his favorite theme: the unreliability of forensic science.”

  “Whatever pops your corn, ace. I’ll run it. I just wonder sometimes if these defense jerkoffs ever take the time to smell what they’re shoveling. No number of instant replays can change the final score.”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Morgan. He turned to leave. Then, as if remembering something incidental, he turned back to the technician.

  “By the way: Coleman wonders if you could stop by his office.”

  Lofley, who was monitoring an effluent spewing into a gas chromatograph chamber, glanced up at the homicide detective. “Why me? What’s the caper?”

  Morgan shook his head. “Nobody tells me anything.”

  Lofley’s forehead runneled in a frown. “This sucks some major kielbasa. A lab tech for the prosecution talking to a lawyer for the defense—in private?”

  “Why not? Afraid you’ll take a bribe?”

  Lofley studied him for a long minute before he shrugged. “The whole world’s going insane—I’m just proud to be part of it. Yeah, okay. I’ll stop by.”

  “Your Honor, we simply do not know how it could have happened,” explained County Prosecutor Jared Maitland. “All we know is that Lofley removed the bullet from the evidence locker for a final backup analysis. After this, apparently, he didn’t notice it was gone at first because he assumed—” Maitland paused and corrected himself. “Because he was sure that another lab tech had filed it away again. We have a trace on it, but so far nothing’s turned up.”

  Judge Hiram Neusbaum frowned as if his private chambers had suddenly been occupied by a troupe of not particularly funny clowns. His normally avuncular gaze now radiated official reproof as it shifted from Maitland to Morgan to a thoroughly miserable-looking Dez Lofley.

  “A discovery proceeding is supposed to itemize evidence, gentlemen. Are you telling me you don’t have any? What about this”—he glanced down at the stack of briefs and depositions in front of him, sifting through them—“this neutron-activation test.”

  “Yes, Your
Honor,” said Maitland, “the test to detect primer gunshot residue. Only…”

  He trailed off for a moment and stared at Lofley, who visibly flushed. “There was apparently a sampling error. The polythene vial containing the specimen removed from Mrs. D’antoni’s skin was somehow…mixed up with another vial.”

  “But can’t that test, at least, be duplicated?”

  Maitland winced. “That’s impossible, Your Honor. It would require a second sample. I’m told that primer residue adheres to eh skin in measurable quantities for only about forty-eight hours at most.”

  A grave silence filled the chambers. Again Judge Neusbaum glared from one man to the other, doling out the full measure of his disapproval.

  “Mr. Coleman,” he finally announced curtly, “I believe the next move is yours.”

  Coleman looked oddly strained for a lawyer who was about to carry the day. Consistent with her apathy throughout the proceedings, Ursula D’antoni had opted not to attend today. Now Coleman said quietly, “I request dismissal of all legal proceedings against my client, Your Honor, on the grounds of insufficient evidence for an actionable cause.”

  Maitland deferred by lowering his eyes. Judge Neusbaum aimed a final withering glance at Dez Lofley.

  “They say even a blind hog can root up an acorn now and then, Sergeant Lofley. How a forensics technician in your position of responsibility can be so grossly incompetent twice in once case defies the imagination. I’ll be sending a memo to Internal Affairs about this. Charges dismissed.”

  A few minutes later, as Morgan and Lofley were exiting together from the municipal building, a lone sob hitched the lab tech’s chest. His eyes met Morgan’s.

  “I want her, Reno,” Lofley confessed in a whisper, his face a study in abject misery.

  Morgan nodded his understanding. “I know you do,” he said gently. Making Dez the fall guy had not been necessary after all, Morgan realized: He was still thinking of the eight-by-ten photo of Ursula D’anotni he had spotted under Judge Neusbaum’s stack of depositions. “Don’t we all?”