I picture Malone lounging in front of the TV in her scrubs after a long day’s work and a dinner that represents all the food groups. Our lives are so very different. It really is a wonder we get along.
“We were able to lift a blood sample off the shirt. Enough for DNA. When we ran it through the database, it was a familial match.”
“To me,” I say, nodding. I wish I’d paid someone in lock-up to spit on that swab for me. I hate the idea that my genetic code is sitting somewhere in the forensic databank, just waiting for my epithelial cells to rat on me.
“I’m sorry, Candace.”
“Why?” I ask. “Did you kill her?”
“I mean about your mother.”
I roll my eyes. Receiving condolences for a mother I hardly knew is like getting sent flowers after a Tinder hook-up. Awkward and completely unnecessary.
“I don’t think it’s my mother, anyway.”
“Neither do I.” The pathologist has joined us to stand over the body. He must have been wearing crepe-soled shoes for me not to have noticed him walking up. Or maybe I’m losing my touch. He’s got greasy grey hair in a comb-over, and dandruff clings to the red turtleneck he’s got on under his lab coat. He’s bent over a clipboard held in age-spotted hands. They must have pulled the old guy out of retirement to cover for the skinny chick I dealt with last time. Malone said she was away on stress leave. From what I remember of her skeletal frame, that woman needed a good meal way more than a holiday.
“What makes you think that?” Malone asks the pathologist. “You said the blood matched. And I thought you couldn’t do any further analysis until she, you know, warmed up.” Malone looks over at me, worried she’s being indelicate. But standing over a body in a morgue with its face peeled off isn’t any time to get dainty with the facts.
“I analyzed a hair sample taken from the scalp,” the old guy tells her. “I found traces of hair dye with 4-MMPD in it.”
“What the hell is that?”
“4-methoxy-m-phenylenediamine,” he says, consulting his clipboard with a pair of Mr. Magoo specs. “It’s a carcinogen. Linked to bladder cancer.”
“It doesn’t look like this one died in a hospice, Doc.”
“I agree,” he says. “Most likely the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the base of the skull.”
I’d noticed that. You don’t need a medical degree to see that most of the back of her head is missing.
“Then what’s the significance?” Malone asks him.
“4-MMPD was discontinued in the eighties in the United States. And in most countries not long after that. If this woman was using it to dye her hair, she must have died somewhere in that time frame. I’d say this body has been in situ for at least thirty years.”
Malone looks surprised, but she’s nodding, making some sort of connection that I’m not.
“What you’re saying is this body is too old to be Angela Starr,” she says.
“Hold on a second.” I turn to Malone. “You know my mother did a runner when I was a kid. If the body was dumped in the eighties that would actually make a lot a sense.” I often wondered if my mother’s complete lack of interest in me might have been because she was dead. It’s hard to send a birthday card when you’re stuck in a freezer. Maybe this is Angela and she’s just shrunk a bit from being in cold storage.
“Your mother didn’t die thirty years ago, Candace.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because she crossed the border into Detroit from Canada last month.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“We’ve kept tabs on her over the years, Candace. Law enforcement has a vested interest in the Scarpello family. You know that. And there’s something else. I wanted to talk to you about this earlier, but —”
“Are you telling me that you knew where my mother was all this time and you didn’t tell me?” I step closer to Malone, into her personal space. Because, shit, this is personal.
“Dammit, Candace. You told me you couldn’t care less where your mother was, remember?”
And I had. But I still can’t believe Malone didn’t tell me.
“I need to get the deceased back into refrigeration,” the pathologist says, interrupting our stand-off. “As I told you, Detective, the thawing process has to be strictly controlled.”
“Understood,” Malone says, stepping away from me, then lightly biting her lower lip. This means she’s thinking hard, probably trying to figure out what my mother’s blood is doing on the clothes of a woman who’s been dead for three decades. A question I’d like answered myself. Just then, the double doors of the examination room fly open, and a girl runs into the room. She’s chased by a flustered matron of a uniformed cop who looks remotely like my Aunt Charlotte.
The girl strides across the room on long legs, knocking the old pathologist out of the way to get a closer look at the body on the gurney. His glasses fall off his nose and onto the clipboard.
“I’m sorry, Detective Malone,” the uniformed cop says, leaning on her well-padded knees, out of breath. “I couldn’t stop her.”
Her is pretty tall. Almost my height, and whippet thin. She has a blunt ice-blonde pageboy without a trace of pigment in it, and a wicked widow’s peak. Huge round retro-seventies glasses take up only slightly more real estate on her face than her big brown eyes do. She looks like what might happen if Velma from Scooby Doo and Draco Malfoy had a baby. I always liked that nasty Slytherin kid more than Harry Potter. And this is a kid, I realize now, regardless of the height — early teens at best.
The girl walks around the gurney, inspecting the corpse from all sides. Once she does a full 360, she looks up at Malone, pushing her big-ass specs up her cute button nose.
“This is not my mom,” she says.
The pathologist covers the corpse with a sheet and starts wheeling it out of the examination room, faster than any old man ought to go.
Malone coughs before she speaks, clears her throat.
“I told you there was something else.”
CHAPTER 3
MALONE USHERS US INTO A ROOM that serves as a holding tank for the recently bereaved. There are purple and white plastic mums instead of poinsettias and two sofas set around a coffee table with a jumbo-sized Kleenex box in the centre. Airbrushed pictures of fields at sunset and ocean views are framed on the wall — the type that usually have sappy motivational messages written on them. Goals are just dreams with deadlines. Live, Laugh, Love! I guess someone decided those weren’t appropriate sentiments if you’d just finished identifying a grandmother who’d been run over in the bingo hall parking lot.
“Let me get this straight,” I say, still standing. “You’re telling me this is my sister?”
“Half-sister,” the girl with the pale blonde hair says, plunking herself down on the couch opposite the one Malone is sitting on. She looks down at her shoes, white high-tops with rainbow polka-dots. They’re Converse knockoffs but still pretty fly.
“I told you, Candace, the department has kept records on your mother over the years, due to her connection with certain organizations.”
“Mom was in the Mob,” the girl says, still fascinated with her high-tops. I notice that despite the Aryan Nations hair, her skin betrays a deeper, olive tone, much like my own.
I look over at Malone, wondering how much the kid knows, and how much she should know.
“Janet is familiar with her mother’s history,” Malone says. And by her mother she means mine, too. Janet doesn’t sound like a name Angela would pick. It’s way too traditional. I only got the name Candace because they misread her handwriting on the birth registration where she’d written Candida, like the yeast infection. My middle name is Paco, for fuck’s sake.
“Well, if Janet is so familiar, maybe you’d like to fill me in?” I tell her.
Malone outlines what my mother has been up to for the last three decades. Initially, she’d moved to a commune in California, but she got thrown out for attacking anot
her hippy during some sort of peyote enlightenment ceremony. After that, she drifted across the country, getting pinched for small-time thievery here and there. They’d lost track of her for years at a time, but she always popped up somewhere, doing something either illegal, crazy, or both. She never did any real time, though. That’s until she got nabbed for creating a disturbance in the middle of Macy’s in New York City. Apparently, Angela walked in off the street and started losing it on a saleswoman about an underwear purchase. An act that wouldn’t usually end up getting the attention of the police, but the saleswoman was a mannequin, and when it came to underwear, Mom wasn’t wearing any. She wasn’t wearing any clothes at all.
“They sent her to Bellevue,” Malone says.
“That’s where she met my dad,” Janet chimes in, her big brown eyes lighting up behind the owl glasses.
“That’s right,” Malone says, smiling back at her. “Your father was a nurse there and also a Canadian citizen. Once she’d been stabilized on medication, she moved with him to Canada. Not long after, you were born.”
Shit. My mother must have been hauling her bipolar ass around the country for a while before she settled down with her Canadian nurse. There had to be twenty years between this kid and me.
“How old are you?” I ask Janet.
“Thirteen,” she says. Angela was eighteen when she had me. I do the math in my head. That means she was thirty-nine when she had Janet. That’s pushing it on the viable childbearing years. But there are women freezing their eggs and not taking them out of cold storage until they’re practically on Social Security these days. The chilly subject of cryogenics gets me thinking about the Popsicle woman on the gurney.
“So, how do we explain my mother’s blood being on freezer girl’s shirt?”
“Our mother’s blood,” Janet corrects me. Not many people try to correct me, but given she might be family, I let it slide.
“I can’t explain it,” Malone says. “Maybe …” she starts, but doesn’t finish the thought.
“You think Mom had something to do with that woman’s death,” Janet says before I can. “My mom would never do something like that.” I wish I could be as sure as the kid is about what Angela might do.
“I didn’t say that, honey.” Malone adopts her social worker smile. It’s something they teach you in cop school when you’re dealing with vulnerable groups. That’s what Malone calls anyone under sixteen, as well as women who have been sexually assaulted. As if being jumped by a bunch of gangbangers rips away a better part of your maturity. But I guess it sort of does, and I guess I would know. It’s one of the reasons I drink.
“Listen, I’m not sure what this has to do with anything, anyway. That woman is not our mother.” Wow, does that possessive pronoun ever feel weird in my mouth. “And given that she’s been literally cooling her heels in a freezer since before this kid was born and when I was still eating paste in kindergarten, I doubt we can give you any information.”
This is not entirely true. I never went to kindergarten. Well, I did for one day, but got thrown out for thumping the teacher with a Tonka truck during circle time. Luckily, my dad and I lived with a retired librarian who had trouble paying his gambling debts at the time. The old guy never did learn to win at the ponies, but he taught me how to read before the truant officer hauled my ass back to school in first grade.
In any case, I’m done with being creeped out in this fucking morgue. I have no problem with dead bodies, but the idea that the girl sitting on the couch shares a mother with me is freaking me out. A mother who, unlike me, she actually got a chance to know. Enough to be sure even without a face that the body on the gurney wasn’t hers.
“Well, there are some other complications,” Malone says. Now she’s reserving her social worker smile for me. “It appears that Angela hasn’t been heard from since she crossed the border into the U.S. from Canada last month.”
Janet’s looking down at her high-tops again.
“We had some trouble even finding out where Janet was initially,” Malone adds.
“Wasn’t she with her dad?”
“My dad’s dead,” Janet says.
“Oh,” I say. “So is mine.” Another thing we share.
“Janet was staying with a family friend.”
“My Aunt Stacey,” Janet says. “But she’s not really my aunt.”
Holy shit, will the similarities never end? Soon I’ll find out this teenybopper knows how to snap a guy’s larynx and carries her own hip flask.
“Aunt Stacey drove me down here,” Janet says. “To see if it was Mom.”
“Which it isn’t,” I say, turning to Malone. “So, unless you’ve got something else. I’m thinking we’re done here.”
“We still don’t know where she is,” Janet says.
I feel for the kid, I really do. But it is not like Angela doesn’t have a history of taking off and leaving people behind. I don’t want to get involved.
“We’re working on finding her, Janet,” Malone says.
“How hard?” Janet asks. She stares Malone down from behind her big glasses, her mouth a taut line. She has spunk, I’ll give her that. But I can see the shadow of a tear forming behind the thick glasses. I turn away when I should probably offer her the Kleenex box. I never was any good with emotions. They’re a liability, just like getting to know this kid might be.
“We are doing everything we can, Janet,” Malone tells her. “We’re working with the Canadian authorities, as well. You need to be patient. When your Aunt Stacey comes back, we’ll talk more about what to do next.”
“When she comes back?” I ask Malone.
“Yes,” Malone says, clearing her throat. We’re having a little trouble locating her at the moment.”
“She dropped me off this morning, but she didn’t want to come in,” Janet explains.
“You’re kidding me?” What kind of fly-by-night fuck-up did Angela leave her daughter with? Who would drive off and leave a thirteen-year-old alone to identify the corpse of her own mother?
“I knew about you,” Janet says, changing the subject. “Mom told me.”
This surprises me. If I were Angela, I would have kept the fact that I’d abandoned my eldest daughter to myself. But then I remember the rumours about my mother’s loose lips.
“Really,” I say. “What did she tell you?”
“That you kill people.” Straight to the goddamn point. I like that.
“Did she tell you she left me practically as soon as I could walk?”
“Yes,” Janet says. “She was sorry about that.”
“Sorry, fucking sorry?”
“She wasn’t well. She had a mental illness.”
“She had a coke habit where her maternal instincts should’ve been.” I am making this part up. I don’t know why Angela was such a lousy mother to me, or whether she had any addictions to blame it on. I also don’t know why I’m taking it all out on this pale-haired girl, with her big brown eyes. Or maybe I do, but I’m not proud of it. Jealousy is another emotion fraught with liabilities.
Malone steps in. “I’m sure both your Aunt Stacey and your mother will turn up soon, Janet,” she says. “In the meantime, I’ve talked to Social Services. And they’ve got a place for you until we locate one or both of them.”
Social Services. The bogeyman of my childhood. My father generally managed to stay one step ahead of them. Every time some well-meaning woman with a battered briefcase and an ill-fitting pantsuit showed up at the door, he’d make sure to turn on the charm, convince them he was providing a home life conducive to raising a child. Which he did, in his own way. He loved me and looked out for me, and that’s about as conducive as you can get given our special circumstances.
But there was the one time when he got held for a week of questioning on a hit they wanted him for. I was ten years old, and they knew I was home alone. At first, I thought it might be fun, staying in a group home with a bunch of other kids. Most of my childhood had been spent around adult
s. I couldn’t exactly bring friends over when there might be some guy tied up in the basement. But the first night in my bunk bed, a fifteen-year-old boy crawled in under the Hello Kitty sheets with me. He only touched himself, but he made noises worse than the pigeons on my E-Zee Market apartment roof. I grabbed my things the next morning and spent the rest of my father’s detention sleeping inside a Salvation Army box.
“Can I talk to you, Malone?” I say. “Outside.”
I open the door to the hallway.
“We’ll be back in a minute, Janet,” Malone says before she follows me into the hall. When she shuts the door behind us, I let her have it.
“How could you know about this kid and not tell me?”
“I only just found out about Janet, Candace. It’s not like your mother was part of my usual caseload. When we got the DNA hit, I looked up her file. I’m as surprised as you.”
“You can’t send the kid to a group home,” I say.
“I don’t have a hell of a lot of choice, Candace. Stacey Bunnaman dropped Janet off at the door and didn’t even say where she was going.”
“Don’t you have a phone number or something?”
“Only for her place back in Canada, and there’s no answer there. Like I said, we’re working with the local police, but there’s a lot of hoops to jump through with the international component.”
“Canada is not fucking international. It’s like the fifty-first state, for God’s sake. Can’t you just drive her up there and find a real family member to take her?” The father is dead, but he must have relatives. Not everyone is like me, alone in the world when it comes to relations. Well, I guess I’m not exactly alone anymore.
“It’s not that easy, Candace. The father died a few years back. Cancer. Surveillance didn’t focus too much on him. It’ll take a while to track whether he has any family members willing to foster Janet. It could take weeks.”
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