by Amy Lane
Jackson laughed. “Heh heh heh heh heh….”
And Henry slumped, looking profoundly embarrassed. “Rivers. Definitely Rivers.”
Ellery’s eyebrows ratcheted up. “Not bad, old man.” And then, before Jackson could preen, Ellery continued, “Are we still on the case?”
Jackson rolled his eyes. “Yes, we’re still on the case! Jesus, we’re not babies.” He looked over Ellery’s shoulder. “Sorry, Toby. I know I’m late, but is there any way I could get—”
Toby’s office was very government official—the chairs were only as comfortable as they had to be, and the desk was a utilitarian monstrosity. Toby often had interns and attending doctors in there, students looking to see if learning from the dead was any more appealing than healing the living. This afternoon he’d been alone, but that didn’t mean he didn’t come prepared.
He rooted in the bottom drawer of the utilitarian desk and came up with two sets of scrubs. “Men’s room is around the corner, Jackson—you know the drill. Young man, there’s a small washroom here. I’m going to run you through the basics of making yourself contaminate-free there—and see if maybe we can stop that nosebleed while we’re at it. Meet back here in ten.”
Jackson grimaced. “Sorry to take your time like this, Toby.”
But Toby just grinned fondly. “I’ve missed you here, Jackson. You liven the place up, you know what I mean?”
Jackson groaned at the pun while Ellery took the proffered scrubs and the small packet of antiseptic wash, gauze, and shoe and hair covers.
“I’m sorry I don’t have enough for you, Ellery,” Toby said, sweetly ignoring the fact that Ellery didn’t really do the morgue, not after his first time when he’d tossed his cookies all over the floor. If Henry thought he had the fortitude, good for him.
“No, you’re not.” Ellery shrugged. “But I’m glad he’s back too.”
He followed Jackson down the hall and to the bathroom. Jackson stood, once again without his shirt, as he rinsed it out in the sink.
“So…,” Ellery said, leaning against the wall. Jackson spared him a look in the mirror, his green eyes taking him in with a flicker of appreciation Ellery liked very much.
“So he got on my last nerve, like I thought he would,” Jackson told him, wringing the shirt out. “And I made him let me out of the car so I could walk to the bus stop and cool down.”
“And…?”
Jackson rested his weight on the sink, his head dropping for a moment in discouragement. “And he got out of the car and tackled me.”
“Wow.”
Jackson turned his head. “Ellery, I swear I was trying not to be an asshole.”
“What did he want from you?” Ellery closed the distance, took the shirt from him, and wiped his face down first before rinsing it out. He could tell by the way Jackson’s mouth worked that he was having trouble framing his answer.
“He’d told me something personal because, you know, the case, and I guess he wanted the same from me.”
Ellery was standing so close to Jackson’s overheated, sweaty body that he was starting to sweat in sympathy—but he didn’t back away. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said, wiping down Jackson’s shoulders.
Jackson sighed and covered Ellery’s hand with his own. “I’m sorry,” he said softy.
“You were doing really well,” Ellery said, pulling Jackson’s battered knuckles to his lips for a kiss. “And suddenly we’re back to… I don’t know. November? Is that where we are?”
Jackson’s faint smile was reassuring. “Christmas,” he said throatily. “We’re not back to November.”
Ellery searched his brilliant green eyes. “Why aren’t we in June?”
Jackson closed those eyes, and Ellery took a step back. “When do I get to stop?” he asked plaintively. “When do I not have to… I don’t know… let the bad things that hurt me affect everybody else? Isn’t it bad enough that you were hurt too? Isn’t it bad enough I had to sit by your hospital bed and worry if you were going to live or die?” He rubbed his chest. “I just don’t understand why I have to talk about stuff that….” He took a deep breath. “Give me the cloth and let me get my face some more. I need to put a butterfly on my cheek and my eyebrow and cover them before I go in there.”
“Jackson,” Ellery said softly, and Jackson concentrated on the cloth in his hand, scrubbing with what looked like unnecessary force.
“What?”
“You will never not have to talk to me. Especially if you’re going to keep walking in to places bloody and pissed. I will never not expect you to unload your shit on my shoulders, and I swear to you, you’re going to carry your fair share of my shit too, so get used to it. That shit’s ours.”
Jackson scowled at him, and Ellery stole the T-shirt and used it to wash his hands, then grabbed the sterile gloves from the kit Toby had given him to help clean Jackson up.
“Did you just tell me to suck it up, buttercup?” Jackson asked, and he sounded pissed off all over again, which was fine with Ellery.
“Yes,” Ellery said crisply, snapping his glove. “Now stand still and tell me what you were going to tell me tonight.”
“No!” Jackson argued—but he did stand still. “I’m not talking about that now, because I’m about to go in and look at a dead body, and I’m telling you, I’ve got enough of those on my conscience.”
Ellery paused and then continued to dump disinfectant on a cotton ball. “Oh,” he said softly. “I wondered when that would hit you.”
“Oh my God. Stop reading my mind!”
“Then stop being a decent human being with perfectly predictable emotional reactions!” Ellery blew out an exasperated breath and moved the cotton ball to the cut on Jackson’s cheek. His movements were as gentle as he could make them, because he knew Jackson had scrubbed excessively hard. “Jackson, of course you’re having problems. What you had to do down south, that wasn’t easy.” Two men. Jackson had killed two men in Ellery’s defense, one of them up close and personal. With him standing shirtless, Ellery could have felt every scar on his body, the old and the new. For the new, he would trace the scar from left collarbone to right nipple, where Jackson had been sliced open and needed stitches. Below the nipple, Ellery could see the horrific network of scars where the scalpel had been turned on his vital organs, nicking his liver and sending him into emergency surgery. Ellery had been helpless, lying drugged after his own gunshot wound, and Jackson had killed a man in close quarters to protect him. Ellery had known, at the very least, that this would need to be dealt with.
Because Jackson could never give himself a break.
“Why do you think you keep ending up with bad guys and knives?” Ellery pondered, mostly to lighten the heavy silence.
“Because the ones with guns almost always win,” Jackson muttered. They were standing close enough to feel each other’s breath, and Ellery could tell by the hoarse note in Jackson’s voice that he was not unaffected. But Jackson was going to go confront death at its grisliest in a few moments, and Ellery didn’t want to strip him so emotionally naked he couldn’t do that.
“I’m sure that’s it.” Ellery reached for the butterfly bandage he’d left on the shelf above the sink and turned back, wobbling a little from standing quite so close. Jackson’s hands on his hips were intimate and reassuring.
“Careful, Counselor,” Jackson said dryly.
“With you, Detective, always.”
Neither of them said much as Ellery finished his doctoring, but after he rinsed off Jackson’s neck and shoulders, just to get rid of the dust, Jackson turned around and gave him a short, hard kiss on the mouth.
“Thanks for the fixing up,” he said, grabbing the shirt Toby had given him and pulling it overhead.
“Anytime.” Ellery stepped back and let Jackson drop his cargo shorts, swearing when they both heard his keys and phone and wallet jingle. “Leave it—I’ll get them. Get dressed and go look at what Toby has ready for you. Then I can take you home.
”
Jackson grimaced. “Really? That late?”
“Yup.” Ellery grinned. “Aren’t you glad to finally have a case?”
Jackson laughed throatily as he finished, and they walked out of the bathroom.
HALF AN hour later, as Ellery sat in Toby’s office and clicked desultorily through Martin Sampson’s financials, Jackson and Henry walked out of the cold room of the morgue in a less jovial mood.
“You swear,” Jackson asked seriously, and Henry nodded.
“It wasn’t an old puncture wound. I’ve seen addicts—there’s a surprising number of them at the VA—”
“I’m not surprised,” Toe-Tag interrupted. “Many doctors would rather prescribe opioids instead of rest or mental health measures. And many patients are less afraid of physical pain than emotional. You’ve seen the news. It’s literally a crisis!”
Ellery watched with bland amusement as both Henry and Jackson shifted from foot to foot.
“Apparently that’s because nobody’s prescribed a good old-fashioned fistfight as therapy,” Ellery said dryly. “Now are we going to share with the class?”
“He had an injection site on his hip. Brand-new—immediately perimortem,” Jackson said without preamble, pulling off the plastic gown he’d put on over his scrubs and throwing it in a hamper in the corner of Toby’s office. Henry did the same, and Ellery tried not to search Jackson’s face too closely for signs of trauma or stress.
Jackson looked pale—but composed—and Ellery took a deep breath. Jackson was right. They weren’t in November. They might even have been all the way to February. Either way, they were most definitely not at last August, when Jackson wouldn’t even admit to needing any help at all, much less Ellery’s.
“But I thought he sold drugs. Why are you surprised?” Ellery closed his laptop with a snap. He’d had Jade ask Crystal nicely for the financials, and right now they told the story of a rich kid who got regular installments of Daddy’s money—and who knew how to spend accordingly. Ellery wasn’t seeing any cash infusions from drug sales, but that kind of thing tended to get tucked under a mattress or put in a gun safe or something, and he wasn’t seeing any debt either.
“He did!” Henry was excited, for once, and not defensive. “He tried to sell to my guys, like I told you!”
“And he definitely sold to John.” Jackson frowned. “But he sold different drugs.”
Ellery’s eyebrows went up. “So….”
“He went from coke—by the rock, from what John was saying—to little packets of pills in plastic bags. But that’s the thing. His liver was shot—”
“So. Bad.” Toby confirmed it. “Fifty-year-old drinking-Jack-for-breakfast bad.”
“So we know he’d been doing product. But he hadn’t been shooting it.”
“His septum was almost completely gone.” Toby nodded. “But the damage looked as though it had been repaired and was healing. So doing lines was no longer his thing. Eating pills was.”
Henry shuddered. “He… he didn’t look that fucked-up when I met him,” he said. “I mean, he must have been, if his liver and stuff…. It’s just… he seemed so normal.”
Jackson met Ellery’s eyes grimly. “Kid,” he said to Henry, “I get that you may not have had many of these, but ships passing in the night don’t really know each other. And that’s okay. His corroded liver and shitty life were not your fault. As long as you used a rubber—”
“And PrEP protocol.” Henry nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Safety first.”
“Good. You both got off—the end. That’s all it needed to be.”
“Or would have been,” Henry said glumly. “If, you know….”
“If your luck hadn’t been that shitty.” Jackson rolled his eyes, and Ellery had to laugh. So this afternoon they’d been fighting, and now Jackson was trying to big brother their hostile little wildcat out of a tree. How very typical.
“Truth.” Henry blew out a breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So he had a puncture wound—and we’re pretty sure he didn’t shoot up. What does that mean?”
Jackson looked at Toe-Tag. “It means we’re going to need a copy of his tox screen, and one needs to be ready when the cops come in.” Cops had many cases and a chain of command. Jackson and Ellery just had one client, so they got there first.
Toby nodded. “It does indeed. I should have the results tomorrow morning.” He grimaced. “I was off tomorrow, but given that this is Robert Sampson’s son….”
“Big shot gets big-shot treatment,” Jackson said. “He’s on the board of trustees here?”
“The very same.” Toby’s expression was as sour as a kid’s candy. “But notice how he is not in the morgue even for his own son.”
“I do now.” Jackson gave a quiet little chin bob to Ellery, who took the handoff.
“Not a helicopter parent?” Ellery asked smoothly.
Toby raised an eyebrow. “When this kid was sixteen—still old enough to be saved, I’d wager—he threw one of those epic parties. You know, the ones that make the papers, where the damage done to the house is more than most people make in a year?”
“Aw, the childhood years,” Jackson said cynically. “So what did Daddy do?”
“He blamed it on another kid. Martin’s best buddy, Jimmy. And in spite of the fact that Martin told the cops—in no uncertain terms—that it was his fault, Jimmy did two years in juvenile hall.”
Jackson grimaced. “I don’t remember that. If he was twenty-nine now, I was barely out of high school myself.”
“God, you’re young,” Toby chided. “But see? That’s the complete lack of accountability we’re talking about. So yeah, Martin was doing all the drugs with all the wrong people, but you won’t see the grieving family here to ask about his tox screen. His mother’s living somewhere back East, from what I hear, but there’s been no word of her coming out. It’s damned suspicious. The guy’s liver was pretty seasoned. It would take a lot to put him under, but that’s what it looks like happened. Someone drugged him and cracked his skull from the front and back and left him to bleed out and die, which he did.”
“But the body was moved,” Jackson said. “We established that.”
“Yes. By the time he was found in the dumpster, rigor had come and gone. Given the heat, even at night, that could have taken four hours or so. But because of that, I’m not sure if he was moved perimortem or postmortem or even if he died during transit. But there were carpet fibers in the wound that I have to send to CSI. The point is, if he has the kind of drugs I’m thinking he did in his system, the head trauma would have done it.”
“Was there any insect activity?” Ellery asked, because that was often a marker to help establish time of death.
“Not much,” Toby said and then looked at Henry. “Unless someone scraped him for maggots, I saw relatively few eggs.”
“There were flies gathering,” Henry said thoughtfully, “but they weren’t a swarm yet.”
Jackson blew out a breath. “So he was killed, held or moved for we don’t know how long, and dumped maybe half an hour before Henry would have been dumping trash. Henry, how much a creature of habit are you?”
“Clockwork,” Henry replied reluctantly. “Trash out, eight thirty, every morning.”
Jackson grunted. “I have no way of getting into the CSI lab,” he muttered. “None. Ellery, can you subpoena the reports on what was in the trash can, as well as the carpet fibers in the vic’s head? Henry doesn’t remember a carpet—just the vic on top of the trash. If there were carpet fibers in the wound….”
“Somebody’s running around with a bloody carpet that needs to be disposed of,” Ellery said, surprised. “Why would they do that?”
Jackson cocked his head. “That is a very good question, Counselor. In fact, I think we’ve got a lot of questions here and no answers.”
“So when can I expect the cops at my door?” Henry asked quietly.
“Mm….” Jackson looked at Ellery. “Two days, would you say?”
Ellery nodded. “Two days. Henry, given that we know the body was dumped about a half hour before you got out to the trash can, do you think you can come up with an alibi for that night?”
To Ellery’s surprise—and Jackson’s amusement—the kid turned a brilliant shade of magenta as they watched.
“No,” he lied.
Jackson tagged him on the back of the head. “Try again, asshole!”
“Ouch!” Henry rubbed his head but didn’t make eye contact either.
“Oh my God! Kid, were you getting laid again?”
“No!” Henry protested. “No, I was not getting laid! I was… I was talking to a… one of the guys at the flophouse. He’s a… a friend, I guess. We were talking. All night—which was dumb because he had class in the morning, and I kept him up and….” He shook his head. “Just… it was private.”
“Yeah, well, you’re in the flophouse with what? Five other guys. How private could it be?”
Henry let out a small laugh. “Well, since we were in the living room on the couch and one of them was asleep on the air mattress on the floor in front of us, not very, I guess.”
Ellery cocked his head. “Then why that spectacular flush?”
Henry’s flush—which had been receding—heated up again to an even deeper purple at the question. “I don’t know,” he muttered, obviously mortified. “It’s just… it just felt important, I guess. I don’t know. I can give you his Johnnies name. I… I haven’t asked his real name yet.” He looked at his feet and all but twisted his toe against the tile. “I feel like I should know his real name.”
“Intimate,” Jackson said, and Ellery raised his eyebrows in surprise. Of course, that was it. God, for guys like Jackson and Henry, a conversation—a real one—would be considered more intimate than sex. “You had a moment of intimacy, and you don’t want to make it public.”
Henry covered his eyes with his hand. “None of this is making me feel less stupid.”
“Henry, it’s practically the most adult thing you’ve said today. Tell this guy that when the cops ask, you guys were bullshitting on the couch. Use that exact word. They’ll know the truth, but they won’t know what it means to you. Nobody needs to know but you and…?”
