by Vic Kerry
Ashe cut his eyes to Cybil. “I’ve got to go. The detective working on Marianne’s case needs for me to ride up to Birmingham with him tomorrow. We’re leaving early so I need to get in bed.”
“The band just started,” she said.
“Maybe Stewart could give you a ride back to campus,” Ashe said.
“No, I came with you, and I’ll leave with you. Besides, I left some stuff in your office, so I’ll need you to let me in.” Cybil snatched up the beer that had been his. She chugged it down. “No need wasting it.”
She patted Stewart on the arm as she walked past him. Ashe and she left the bar.
Cybil let Ashe open his office door and turn the light on. She slipped past him, allowing her hip to brush against the front of his pants. Her backpack lay in one of the chairs he kept for visitors. She snatched it up and pulled it onto her back. The straps were tight and pulled her coat open. This drew her peasant blouse tight across her breasts. She turned to face Ashe, sticking her chest out as far as she could, which wasn’t far.
“I got my stuff,” she said.
He looked at her and then to his desk. “I think I left Detective Semmes’ number in my desk.”
He stepped past her. She smiled when she knew he couldn’t see her. Ever since she’d flashed for the stuffed alien toy, he’d been avoiding looking at her anywhere except her eyes. She didn’t mind it too much though. He had very pretty eyes. She could understand why Marianne had been with him even if he was a giant geek.
“I guess I’ll be going,” she said.
Ashe looked back at her and smiled. “Be careful. I’ll see you in a day or two.”
“Thanks for tonight. It was fun,” she said.
He turned around and looked at her. “I should be thanking you for dragging me out to the parade and that bar. I’m sorry we had to leave so early.”
“It’s okay,” she said, walking to him.
Cybil licked her lips. She thought about kissing him because there was no way he would kiss her first. Instead, she gave him a hug and put her mouth close to his ear.
“I’m sorry about everything. I’m around if you need anything,” she whispered.
He let the embrace fall away and nodded his head. “Thanks again, Cybil. You’ve been really great to me these last few days. If you don’t mind, tell my electrical engineering class to read ahead in the next unit, and I’ll have a special make-up day for them. Also drop in on my graduate class, and tell them to download the lecture by Dr. Marcus O’Shea from Columbia University’s website. It’s the one about the emotional engram machine.”
“Why not have them listen to one of your lectures on that, since you invented the thing?” she asked.
“He’s the guy I asked for help. It was some of his theories that helped me make it,” Ashe said. “I’ll be back in a few days.”
“Okay, sleep well, and have a good day tomorrow in the Ham.” Cybil started out of the office.
“The Ham?”
She turned back and smiled. “It’s slang for Birmingham. Goodnight.”
He mumbled something as she left, but she didn’t understand it. Deep inside her she wished that she could help him figure out what happened to his girlfriend. Maybe she would do some poking around while he was away for a few days.
A thin layer of fog settled over the campus when she left the building and headed to her Vespa. It would be thick by the next morning, she thought as she kicked the scooter into starting and headed toward her apartment.
Ashe sipped the police station coffee from a small Styrofoam cup. It tasted scorched and too bitter. Morning had come too soon for him. He slept poorly from the time he’d gotten home until his alarm sounded. As promised Semmes was at his house on the dot. The four-hour drive north bogged down in Montgomery due to school and work traffic. Although Semmes drove a marked Mobile PD cruiser, he refused to ride with the lights on even in the heaviest traffic.
After all that time riding, the lead detective on the case in Birmingham left them waiting in the main lobby of the police station. Semmes sat beside him on the hard wooden bench. He too sipped at a cup of coffee, but he seemed to enjoy it. His badge hung from the pocket of his sports coat.
“How much longer do you think we’ll be sitting here?” Ashe asked.
“Probably just a few more minutes. They said this detective had a few people to interview this morning over at the hospital,” Semmes said.
“We couldn’t have just gone to that hospital?”
“According to the detective, the hospital isn’t very excited about this and wants to keep it hush hush.” Semmes took a slug of the coffee. “Plus I don’t know how to get there. I don’t get up here much.”
The doors to the outside opened. A gust of cold wind blew inside. A bald man with dark brown skin that was almost the color of the coffee Ashe drank walked in. A young man with rumpled hair followed behind him. They both wore black peacoats. The bald man smiled and walked toward them.
“You must be Detective Semmes from Mobile.” He extended his hand. “I’m Perry Monroe. We’ve been communicating back and forth about the Heinz case.”
Semmes stood up and shook Monroe’s hand. “Nice to meet you in person.” He pointed to Ashe. “This is Dr. Ashe Shrove from Alabama Tech. He’s the gentleman I was telling you about.”
Ashe stood and put his hand out to Monroe. They shook. The bald detective introduced his partner as Joey Brewer. All four men crossed from the lobby into the interior of the police station. They ended up in a conference room on the third floor.
A large television covered the majority of a wall. A window looking out on a downtown park made up another wall. They all sat grouped at one end of the conference table. Ashe and Semmes sat beside each other.
“So y’all had someone get up and walk out of a morgue down there in Mobile?” Brewer asked.
“It was more than just somebody,” Semmes said.
“It was my fiancée who died mysteriously the same night,” Ashe finished.
“I didn’t realize that. I’m sorry,” Brewer said.
“Rookie mistake,” Monroe said. He turned his attention to Semmes. “You know how it is when you are first made a detective. We just can’t seem to keep our mouths shut.”
“We’ve got a long drive back home,” Ashe said. “Can we get to it, please?”
Monroe nodded. He turned the on television and pressed play on the DVD player. The screen showed a cold storage room in a morgue. The camera was positioned so that it showed both walls that had drawers in them. A man in dark scrubs walked through the room and off screen. The time marker noted the time.
“This is a few minutes before the incident. We’ve interviewed that morgue tech. He said that nothing happened out of the ordinary,” Monroe said.
“What was his name?” Semmes asked.
“Jackson. Steven Jackson,” Brewer said. “He has a small record for misdemeanors like possession of drug paraphernalia, but according to his personnel records, he’s been clean on every single drug test, even randoms.”
“Someone is coming on the screen,” Ashe said.
A man in a lab coat walked into the morgue. It was not the same man from Marianne’s abduction in Mobile. This man was shorter and stockier. He walked to a drawer near floor level and slid it open. A black body bag lay in the drawer. He unzipped the bag. A woman’s face stared up at the ceiling. Ashe couldn’t tell anything about the detail of her face. The camera was positioned too far away from it. The only thing he could tell was that she was probably later middle-aged and a light-skinned black woman.
“That is Heinz in the drawer,” Monroe said. “The doctor is unknown.”
“No one saw him come in, or he wasn’t required to sign in?” Semmes asked.
“There is a doctor on record entering the morgue at this time. The name on the sign-in was Smith. St. Vincen
t’s Hospital has no doctor named Smith with privileges,” Monroe said.
Ashe listened but kept his eyes on the screen. He saw no similarity between his fiancée and this woman. The doctor pulled out a device from his lab coat’s deep pocket. The angle and distance of the camera made it difficult to see what it was, but he placed electrodes on the woman’s forehead. After a few seconds, she sat up in the drawer. The doctor helped her down from the drawer. They walked out of the morgue. Monroe switched the television off.
“That’s it,” he said.
“Does that look familiar to you, Ashe?” Semmes asked.
“It’s almost exactly what happened with Marianne, the device is even the same. The woman was much older than Marianne. I couldn’t tell anything else about her from the camera,” Ashe said.
“We have a photo of her,” Brewer said.
He opened a manila folder lying on the table and took a picture from it. Brewer passed it to Semmes. Ashe looked at it as well. The face from the photo was pleasant and familiar. Ashe was sure he’d seen it before. He searched his memory.
“I saw that woman last night.” He recalled the woman on Dauphin Street.
“That’s impossible,” Monroe said. “She’s dead.”
“Apparently not,” Semmes said. “You saw her walk out of that morgue. Not many dead people can do that.”
“Unless they aren’t dead,” Brewer said, “or are zombies.”
“Rookies,” Monroe said to Semmes. Then he turned to Brewer. “There are no such things as zombies or vampires.”
“Don’t be so quick to judge,” Semmes said. “So far we have two women presumed dead, who have walked out of hospitals alive.”
“Only after being visited by a mysterious doctor,” Ashe said. “I guess I should say doctors because that wasn’t the same man who stole Marianne.”
“I want to get back to what you just said,” Monroe said. “You claim to have seen this woman last night. Where at?”
“Dauphin Street in downtown Mobile. It was after the parade last night,” Ashe said. “Except she had these weird amber-colored eyes instead of dark brown. It was the same woman though.”
“She was alive?” Monroe asked.
“Very much so. She told me and the person I was with that she was the president of a society that would be parading on Mardi Gras night at almost midnight. She kept mentioning a very specific time that the parade would start and finish, 11:15 p.m. to 11:59 p.m.”
“Did she try to eat your brains?” Brewer asked.
“What kind of a stupid question is that?” Ashe said. “I just told you she spoke to us. She didn’t attack us or do anything unusual, except she walked a little stiffly.”
“She is dead,” Brewer said. “Rigor mortis made her shuffle just like a zombie.”
“Rookie, we’re going to have to have a talk after Detective Semmes and Dr. Shrove leave,” Monroe said. He turned to Ashe. “Are you willing to sign an affidavit stating you saw her?”
Ashe looked at Semmes who nodded. “Of course. I’ve got no reason to lie about this.”
“We’ll get something drawn up and send it down to Semmes,” Monroe said.
“I think we’ve gotten everything we’re going to get from here,” Semmes said. “We’ll keep in touch.”
The detective stood. Ashe did the same. They left the police station. The air outside still felt very chilled. As they walked down the sidewalk, Ashe put his hands in his pockets to keep them warm. The traffic moved steadily down the street.
“What was the name of that society Heinz said she was in?” Semmes asked. “I don’t remember any society parading that late on Mardi Gras night.”
“She said it was a new one called the Knights or Mystics of Mayhem,” Ashe said. “This is the first time I’ve celebrated Mardi Gras so I don’t know all the names yet.”
They crossed the street at an intersection and headed to the Mobile PD cruiser. Semmes pulled a cigarette out and lit it.
“I’ll have to go check them out.” He took a drag off it. “You about ready to head back south?”
“Yeah.”
Ashe looked forward to nothing else. He needed some quiet time to process everything. Life seemed to be moving in a direction he didn’t like, and he thought that he might need to be making some changes.
Chapter Five
Cybil carried a stack of papers down the hall toward Ashe’s office. He’d left the keys in the mailroom with a note asking her to put any work from his classes on his desk. She jingled the keys trying to find the one that opened the door. His office smelled like Ashe. Although she’d been in his office many times when he wasn’t there, the fact that it retained his scent had slipped her notice. She sat behind his desk and put the papers down, face up so that he would notice them.
Someone knocked on the door. Cybil sat up straight and fumbled to arrange the desk, trying to hide her surprise. She looked up. A uniformed police officer stood there. He held a large brown padded envelope.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Are you Ashley Shrove?” the police office asked.
“No, I’m his work-study, but I can probably help you.”
“I’m supposed to leave this with him.”
Cybil stood and walked to the door. “You can leave it with me. I’ll make sure he gets it.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s okay. I do stuff like this for him all the time. That’s why they hire us, so we can do the dirty work.”
“Are you sure it’s not to give them something to look at?”
“I don’t think they’d pay me for that. I’d probably have to pay them.”
“You’re pretty nice looking. You think you might go out with a cop sometime?”
Cybil looked at him. He was buffer than what she liked but had nice eyes. She didn’t have much interest but figured Marianne’s computer was in that envelope. She wanted to try and find something out about her death. Ashe would be overly appreciative if she could find some clue that might help out.
“There’s a bar downtown called Bayside. Do you know the place?” she asked.
“I’ve had to break up some fights there a time or two. It’s a pretty rough place for someone your size,” he said.
“It like it rough.”
He grinned. She knew that look well. His mind instantly went to sex. All men’s did, and she knew how to use that her advantage.
“Tomorrow night, 8 p.m. One of my favorite bands is playing there, but you’ve got to leave that with me.” She touched the envelope.
“Sounds good.” The police officer handed her the envelope. “I’ll see you then.”
“It’s a date.” The envelope was heavy. Now she was positive it had Marianne’s laptop in it. “What’s your name?”
“Zack McAllister.”
“Cybil. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He tapped the bill of his hat and walked away. Cybil returned to Ashe’s desk. She put the envelope down and tore into it. A pink Dell notebook computer hid inside. A sticky note was stuck to the top. It thanked Ashe for letting them process the computer, but said they found nothing out of the ordinary.
“Let’s see what I can find,” she said aloud as she flipped the top up.
When the desktop pulled up, a picture of Marianne and Ashe smiled at Cybil. A few icons framed the photo, but it showed a happy couple. She felt sorry for Ashe. He seemed to love his fiancée. She even felt a little guilty that she was attracted to him. It would be a rebound for him if anything happened between them, but she figured that might not hurt him too much anyway.
The touch pad was more sensitive than the one she usually used on her own laptop. The arrow cursor soared across the screen. She reined it in and opened up the area for recent files opened. There were several Word documents there including one called guest list. Cybil fi
gured it was a listing for Marianne and Ashe’s planned wedding two years from then. He had told her at the beginning of last semester that he had planned a long engagement. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Next Cybil opened the media player. She remembered being told that Marianne still had her earbuds in when they found her dead. The track listing showed a variety of interesting musical choices. Marianne seemed to be a big fan of chick music. Cybil recognized a few Liz Phair songs along with Joni Mitchell and Carole King. In the folder for lectures, she found several different ones including the one that Ashe told her to have his graduate students listen to. The last folder she checked was recently added. Several Elton John songs were there including “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. She was getting ready to close this out when a song title caught her eye. “Pink-Striped Hair” was its name. She knew that song well. It was by the Goth Sox.
“Why would she have this?” Cybil said.
The music of the song started to play over the low-quality speakers of the laptop. She’d heard this song many times. The Goth Sox always opened and closed with it. It was their only hit song, meaning it was only one they had recorded in an actual studio. Something seemed off about the music. It echoed. Cybil stopped playing it.
“Dell speakers really suck,” she said.
She shut the computer down and shoved it back into the torn-up envelope. Maybe she’d ask Ashe about why Marianne would have the Goth Sox on her computer since he’d never heard of them. Surely they knew each other’s musical taste. She’d known all of her boyfriends’ musical tastes. Sometimes that was the reason she’d broken up with them. The deal breaker list always included country, frat rock and party rap.
Her cell phone chirped. She dug it out of her pocket and answered it.
“Cybil, this is Ashe.”
Her heart fluttered. He’d never called her on her cell before. “What’s up?”
“We’ll be back in about an hour. We’re just coming to the delta. Is there anything I need to know about?”
“Not really, I gave out everything you asked for me to. Oh, and the police brought back Marianne’s laptop.”
