“Are you a hacker?”
While the rest of the house is all clean lines and clean living, the living room is littered with disemboweled motherboards and half-cannibalized hard drives. Two long fold-out tables run end to end on the far wall, each covered with laptops, all of them connected in some way to the high definition monitor sitting at its centre. Cables and wires sprout from the back of the screen in a chaotic but carefully mastered tangle. The combined set-up looks like it has the CPU power of NASA. Nobody needs that degree of hardware, unless they’re trying to get past firewalls meant to incinerate the average internet surfer on contact.
“I work for good, not evil,” Deep says, popping a piece of bacon into his mouth.
“What the hell does that mean?” I ask, taking a healthy bite of my own. The bacon has a faint maple taste to it. It reminds me of the fried bologna my dad used to make. A guy whose definition of good and evil depended on who was footing the bill.
“It means I help organizations find the holes in their security. Teach them how to keep the bad guys out.”
“Bad guys like me?” I ask, lifting one eyebrow. His accent is turning me on. I haven’t given up on the possibility of getting this code jockey back in the saddle, so I can have an experience I’ll remember this time.
But my phone on the table goes off, breaking the sexual tension with a shrieking moan that’s supposed to be whale song but sounds like a strangled fart. I set up the message notification when I was hammered, and I can’t seem to change it. I look over and see a text from Charlotte.
Don’t forget to call Detective Malone. Smiley face emoji.
I’m about to ignore it when the whale lets another one go.
It sounded really important. Chin in hand, thoughtful smiley face.
The Humpback strikes again.
I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble. Devil-horned, red-faced emoji.
She may be in another country, but Charlotte’s not going to leave me alone on this one.
“I gotta call someone,” I say, picking up my phone and making my way to the bedroom. I close the door and sit on the bed, which Deep has already made. Malone picks up on the first ring.
“Okay, what’s so fucking important you have to track me down via Newfoundland?” I ask her in lieu of a greeting.
“I’ve been trying to locate you for days,” she says. “Where the hell have you been? I went by the E-Zee Market and everything.”
Murder Ink had put me up for the weekend at the Delta. I’d been away since Thursday, convincing the hotel concierge to add an extra day to the booking at their expense, not one to waste the full potential of free room service. It’s Monday now, unless I’ve lost more time to the Scotch than I thought. I’m about to tell Malone that I’m not the kind of person to post an itinerary when she stops me cold in my indignant tracks.
“It’s about your mother, Candace,” Malone says. “We’ve found her.”
I pause for a second, at a rare loss for words. Then I let her have it.
“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, Malone, but I haven’t exactly been looking for my mother. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass where Angela is. She abandoned me, remember?”
But Malone’s serious sigh on the other end of the phone has a rare hook to it. After a while, I bite.
“Where is she then?” I finally ask, still pissed off.
“She’s here at the morgue, Candace,” Malone says. “You better come down.”
CHAPTER 2
I’VE GOT MY BACKPACK READY with all my stuff in it before Deep even has a chance to clean up the breakfast dishes. I insert my Ruger into the custom-made front holster beneath my boyfriend jeans before I grab my leather jacket off the back of the couch. When I was in the business, I never needed a weapon to get the job done. My dad taught me young how to a silence someone for good with only the use of my hands. But since I’ve gone civilian, I’ve got used to carrying a weapon for protection, like the rest of America.
“I’ll drive you,” Deep says, drying his hands on the holly dish towel before he drapes it over the gleaming oven handle.
“You bet your ass you will,” I say. How else did he think I was going to get back downtown from this backwater suburb? Deep’s place is one of those original homesteads set on a packet of land with its own woodlot, despite kissing the outskirts of the city. Some developer must be itching to get his hands on it. If this white-hat hacker owns the place, he’s sitting on a goddamn goldmine.
“No need to get testy,” he says, grabbing a Canada Goose parka from a hanger in the closet and a set of car keys from a hook next to the refrigerator.
“I’m not testy. I just have a lot of shit going on,” I tell him. He’s right, I’m being a bitch. But this news about my mother has me flustered for perhaps the first time in my cold and calculated life. I don’t like being dependent on Deep for a ride, but it’s because of him that I missed the hired car Murder Ink set up to take me home last night. Those little dweebs really did not spare any expense. I wonder where they get all the money. One half of them had been wearing bargain-bin sweaters covered in cat hair and the other half still lived with their parents.
Once we’re in the car, Deep makes sure I have my seatbelt on before he’ll even start the engine. His ride is pretty sweet — a late-model silver Toyota Celica with mag wheels. It puts to shame the shitbox hatchback that Charlotte gave me when she moved away to Newfoundland. I keep it in an alleyway out back of the E-Zee Market. You have to slam the passenger door to get the defogger to come on and the gas gauge doesn’t work. It probably wouldn’t have made it to the Murder Ink gig without puking up a spark plug.
“Where exactly are we going?” Deep asks as we make our way down the long gravel driveway.
“The city morgue,” I say, giving him the address. He does a quick double take, then stops the car and enters the address into Google Maps on his phone. The phone is strapped on the dash by a blue rubber stick man that cradles it in bendable plastic arms. I turn up the heat control on the dash. My leather jacket isn’t lined well enough for this time of year. I wish I had Deep’s parka. Or even his thick-soled hiking boots. When he put them on before we left, they almost made up for the fact he’s an inch or two shorter than me.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?” he asks once we’re on the main road, driving at a careful thirty-five miles per hour — the exact speed limit.
I consider not saying anything or telling him to mind his own business. But he is giving me a ride, and I don’t want to piss him off and end up left on the side of the road having to thumb it. Maybe it would even help to talk about it, instead of letting what Malone told me bounce off the insides of my brain until it hurts.
“They think they’ve found my mother,” I say, looking out the window at a car that’s passing us on the right-hand side, fed up with Deep’s grandpa driving.
“Angela?” he says. So, he was paying attention during the Murder Ink presentation on the Scarpellos, which makes sense since he was in charge of the PowerPoint. My mother had only been mentioned in passing in regard to the familial connection to me, their esteemed guest.
“Were you close?” Deep asks me, mistaking my silence for grief-stricken speechlessness.
“I haven’t seen her since I used a sippy cup for my vodka,” I tell him.
“Then I gather that would be a no.”
“Yes,” I tell him. “That would be a no.”
The car ahead of us has forgotten to turn his indicator off. The incessant red flicker of it, coupled with our slow progress is making me antsy, even though I tell myself we’re in no rush. My mother isn’t going to be any less dead if we get there quicker.
“Do you think the family had anything to do with it?” Deep asks, turning on the windshield wipers. It’s starting to rain, although a drop of a couple of degrees might turn it to snow.
At first, I think he means my Uncle Rod, who as discussed earlier is not really my family. But then I get who he means.
>
“The Scarpellos? What makes you think that?” I ask him. “I didn’t say she was murdered.”
“Was she murdered?”
“Shit, I don’t know.” Malone hadn’t said, but I’d wondered about it. My mother had been persona non grata with the Scarpellos for marrying outside of the Mob. Well, for that, and for being borderline batshit crazy if the rumours were true. Angela had been known to run her mouth off from time to time. That’s a serious liability for a tight-knit crime family. But you’d think they would’ve gotten rid of her a long time ago if she was really a threat.
“You don’t think the Scarpellos are involved?” Deep asks. Much like my Aunt Charlotte, he can’t let things go.
“Contrary to what those Murder Ink fuckwits might think, I don’t have an ‘in’ with the Scarpellos,” I tell him. “They cut off my mom when she got knocked up at eighteen by my Polack dad. And they never wanted anything to do with me.” I try not to sound too pissy about this, but I am. My extended Scarpello family’s rejection had stung almost as much as my mother’s. It’s not like I could have had any real power if I’d been a recognized relative. Only men get made in the Mob. But there were many times I’d wished I had access to all those Scarpello cash-cow connections. If I had, I might not be living above a convenience store frequented by meth heads.
“You’re getting testy again,” Deep says, his eyes still on the road.
“Listen, you lured me back to your hacker’s den last night. I missed my ride. And now I have a morgue run to do. So, I’d appreciate you cutting me a little goddamn slack.”
“Your nostrils are flaring,” he says. “It’s kind of cute.”
“Just drive, tech boy.”
I never was any good at conversation the morning after.
When we pull up in front of the morgue, we haven’t talked since the highway. Deep had put some acid jazz on the car radio, and after a while, we’d both relaxed into the steady backbeat and left the subject of my mother and the Scarpellos alone.
“Shall I pull into the carpark?” Deep asks.
“The what?” I say, reaching for my pack on the back seat. I know what he means, but I like to mess with people.
“The carpark,” he says again with that Idris Elba accent. Elba’s real accent, not the American one he faked on The Wire.
“Do you mean the parking lot?” I ask.
“Yeah, sure. We call it a carpark in England.”
“How long have you been in the States again?” I ask him.
“Since I got my scholarship to MIT.”
“Wow. You’d think they’d teach you what a parking lot is at a school like that.”
“It wasn’t on the curriculum,” Deep says, refusing to be insulted.
“Yeah, well,” I say, reaching for the door handle. “Thanks for the ride.”
He stops me before I can make my exit. “If you’re cross because you think I took advantage of you last night, Candace. I didn’t.”
I’m professionally offended at the suggestion that any man could take advantage of me. Deep mustn’t have gotten a good look at the stats on my trading card. But his sincerity trips me up. I stay in my seat.
“Then how come I woke up half-naked?” I counter.
“We started to, well, you know, take each other’s clothes off and everything,” Deep says, averting his liquid brown eyes. He fidgets with the blue rubber man holding his phone on the dash. “I couldn’t sort out your bra. Too many clasps.”
“A scholarship to MIT and you couldn’t figure out the mechanics of a Victoria’s Secret push up?”
He turns to me with a boyish grin. “Once again, not on the curriculum.”
“So, why didn’t you?” I ask.
“Why didn’t I what?”
“Take advantage of me?” I really want to know. Maybe I need to bathe more. I resist the urge to smell at one of my pits.
“You’d had a lot to drink. It didn’t seem right,” Deep says, tucking a piece of hair that’s escaped from his ponytail behind his ear.
I don’t have much experience with gentlemen, having never been much of a lady. I admire his firm grasp of the Me Too movement, but I doubt I’ll be seeing this guy again. His sweetness would be lost around a salt lick like me.
“Yeah, well, I really need to go.”
“I put my number in your phone,” he says as I’m getting out of the car. “Just in case you need anything.”
“Sure,” I say, closing the door, thinking I won’t. There’s not much I need from other people.
Standing on the sidewalk in front of the dull brick exterior of the city morgue, I hesitate. I can feel the wind race up the back of my leather jacket, and I resist the urge to shiver. Now that I’m here, I’m not sure whether I want to go inside. It would be so much easier to double back to my own neighbourhood, plunk myself down at The Goon Tavern across the street from the E-Zee Market and my apartment, and blow what’s left of my Murder Ink money. When I go to turn around, Deep is still sitting curbside in his Celica, waiting.
I shoot him a menacing look until he drives away, keeping watch until the Celica rounds the corner. Once he’s gone, I pull the hip flask out of my jacket, draining the last of the bourbon. It tastes watered down, possibly with my own backwash.
Then I march through the heavy double doors of the morgue and get ready to meet my mother.
The morgue is in a new location, moved since the time I helped Malone with her murder case. I have to stifle a sneeze from the drywall dust still left in the air from the reno. The waiting area has homey couches with dusky-rose upholstery and a neutral carpet the colour of day-old oatmeal. There are no Christmas decorations, thankfully, but the poinsettia to square foot ratio is way too high — possibly an attempt to disguise the smell. You can dress a place up like this all you want, but it still stinks of formaldehyde and lost souls.
Luckily, the woman at the receptionist desk is also new. The bitch I dealt with last time treated me too much like the white trash criminal that I am. But when I give this new woman my name, she is either too bored or too clueless to acknowledge what kind of person I am. Then again, she might just be nice. I have trouble telling the difference.
When Malone is buzzed through the locked glass doors, she walks over and gives me a hug. I try not to flinch. Like I said, she’s sort of a friend.
“We should go somewhere and talk,” she says. She’s changed her hair since I last saw her. Grown it out, so the dark strands with a hint of Celtic red in them brush her shapely shoulders. She’s got high heels on today. Italian leather, if I’m not mistaken. Not sure when she traded her black army boots in for Gucci. It must have to do with her promotion to Vice — a need to look the part. But even with the stilettos, I’m half a head taller than her.
“I’d rather just get this over with, Malone,” I say, shrugging my shoulders, still recovering from the hug. “I’m not sure how you expect me to identify the body, though. I hardly knew the woman.” I can’t remember my mother’s face, only her smell, a combination of Calvin Klein’s Obsession and toast. I’ve seen pictures, although my dad had tried to hide them from me. I found a set of Polaroids under his collection of brass knuckles once at the back of a drawer. They were pictures a daughter should never see of her mother and father. For most of them, her ass was to the camera, anyway.
“I really think we should talk first. There’s something I need to tell you —”
“I’ve spent the whole morning talking, Malone,” I say, interrupting her. “Let’s just get the show on the fucking road.” I walk over to the glass doors that lead to a long hallway. Malone watches me for a few moments, raising an eyebrow over one jade-green eye without a talon of a crow’s foot in sight. Maybe I should start using under-eye cream. You wouldn’t think I care about stuff like that, but I do. I’m as vain as the next statuesque bombshell. Malone sighs, like I’m a bratty kid she has to humour.
“Fine, Candace. Have it your way.”
With a nod from Malone, the receptionis
t buzzes us in.
My first thought as we stand over the corpse is that this woman is way too short. Even though the body is crouched in a fetal position, I can tell that much. I may not remember a lot about my mother, but I know that when I tried on a maxi dress of hers when I was twelve and almost six feet tall, the hem still pooled on the floor. Most people think I got to be six-foot-three from my dad’s genes, and I suppose he had something to do with it. But the Scarpellos are known for their height. If the family hadn’t hailed from Sicily, they might have gone into professional basketball instead of organized crime.
“What makes you think this is my mother?” I ask Malone. I assume they’d found some sort of ID on her, possibly a purse. But I’d heard Angela was a skilled pickpocket back in the day, and old habits die hard. Much like the body on the table has. The face has been peeled away and the fingers sliced off at the first joint. Somebody didn’t want anyone knowing what they’d done, or to who.
“See the blood on her clothes?”
“To be honest, it’s hard to tell where her clothes end and the rest of her begins,” I say. The woman’s skin is as dark and mottled as the dried blood on her shirt — a result of sub-zero temperatures. Freezer burn. As in, they had found her in an actual freezer. Malone said they couldn’t do a proper autopsy until she thawed. That had to be done slowly apparently, in a controlled environment. They’d been working on it since Wednesday night. That’s when they’d found her, in the basement of an empty warehouse after receiving an anonymous tip. The warehouse hadn’t been used in years, and the cops were still trying to figure out who owned it. But Malone said there were so many shell companies listed on the lease that it was like trying to get to the inside of a Russian doll.
“What’s she wearing, anyway?” I ask. The shirt is more of a smock, the pants have little ties at the ends, each done up in a double knot.
“Some sort of scrubs,” Malone says. “We’re trying to figure that one out, since your mom never worked in the medical field. But people wear those all the time, just as casual wear, or pyjamas. You can get them anywhere. I even have a pair.”
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