by Sara Reinke
Getting smaller every day, Paul thought.
* * *
They jogged together. Apparently, either he was leaving earlier than usual for his run, or she was taking off later, but somehow, they both shared this same daily routine, and yet had never bumped into one another before that morning. She was good company, he discovered; she chattered with the uninhibited exuberance of the young and unjaded, telling him about herself, how she and her brother, David, had grown up on a farm in Missouri.
“He moved out here three years ago,” she said. “Mom and Dad about had a fit when I told them I meant to come, too. He offered to let me move in with him―more to shut them up than anything, I think―but I said no. He’s moonlighting now, working at the station and doing asphalt work for some construction company, Milton Enterprises. Anyhow, he keeps really weird hours, and plus, I told him and Mom, I don’t need a babysitter. I’m twenty-three years old.”
Somehow, she was able to match Paul’s long-legged stride and still talk without losing her breath. He kept stealing sideways glances at her, noticing―despite himself―how a small triangle of dampness began to bloom on her T-shirt bosom, spreading upward toward her neck. Her perfect, twenty-three-year-old breasts bounced cheerily beneath the white cotton, and he found his mood lightening considerably the further they went.
“So I’m proving myself all over the place,” she continued. “First with my folks, and then with my brother, and now at the station, since I’m new―and because some of the other guys think I landed this gig on account of David. Which is just bullshit. I won the CAPA Award two years in a row at college in Chesterfield. You know what that is? The Communications Achievement in Photojournalism Award. They only offer it to twelve college students nationwide every year. And I won it twice.”
She glanced at him, her lovely face dewy with a light gloss of perspiration, her cheeks blooming with a combination of weary color and sudden embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Here I am, just babbling and babbling.”
“I don’t mind,” he told her, and it was the truth. It had been too long since anyone had confided much in him, and sure as hell not his daughters or wife.
My ex-wife, Vicki is my ex-wife.
Susan smiled. It was nice, this adorable fascination she apparently held for him…particularly since it was quickly developing into a mutual one of his own. She was a beautiful girl. Looking at her too long left his stomach in an aching, needful knot. He missed having a lover, having someone comfortable and familiar in his life. He missed having someone smile at him like that; having someone who wanted to babble and babble and babble at him.
They continued to run, their paces matching perfectly, and Paul said nothing. He simply enjoyed the sound of her voice.
* * *
“Paul, I need to talk to you,” Jason Stewart, his partner said, as Paul walked into the public affairs department. “There’s―”
“Not right now, Jason,” Paul replied, not slowing his gait in the least. He was in a damn fine mood, chipper in fact, the residual effects of having spent his morning in Susan Vey’s company. He wasn’t about to lose that pleasant little high over whatever whining bullshit Jason wanted to launch at his ear.
“But, Paul,” Jason said, rising to his feet, wide-eyed. “It’s important. There’s someone―”
Paul opened his office door and blinked in surprise to find Brenda Wheaton sitting in one of the upholstered leather chairs across from his desk. Suddenly, any thoughts of Susan were immediately flushed from his mind, and he found himself seized with an all-new, even more powerful warmth.
“―waiting to see you,” Jason finished from behind him.
“Yes, Jason, I’m aware of that,” Paul said dryly, awarding the younger man a withering glance over his shoulder. He swung the door shut smartly in Jason’s face. “Now.”
“Good morning, Paul,” Brenda said, rising to her feet. She wore a charcoal-grey pantsuit with a coral-colored blouse beneath, and her long, pale hair caught back in her customary ponytail. She smiled and offered her hand, as if they were little more than professional―and casual―acquaintances.
“Hey, Brenda,” he said, slipping her palm against his own. Christ, she smells good. “What brings you by this early? Did Jason offer you some coffee?”
He doubted Jason had the wherewithall, or common sense, to do much besides run around in circles, yapping and chasing his tail like a rat terrier, and was admittedly surprised when Brenda nodded, holding up a steaming, Styrofoam cup. “Yes, and a doughnut, too,” she said, sitting again. “He’s a sweetheart.”
There’s one word for it, Paul thought.
“I wanted to stop by and tell you we’ve got an I.D. on that Jane Doe from yesterday,” she said, watching as he shrugged his way out of his overcoat, draping it against the open hook on the back of his door. He turned, his brows raised in surprise and she nodded. “Yeah, so soon. It didn’t take anytime at all once we ran her through missing persons. Her name is Melanie Geary. She’s been missing for a little over a week now, last seen at a local nightspot called Snake Eyes. Her father is the head of the English department at Chesterfield College.”
“Chesterfield?” he asked. “What was she doing here?”
“She lived here,” Brenda replied. “For about a year now. Dan’s taken over the case in homicide. He’s going to investigate it as a hate crime.” When Paul glanced at her, surprised anew, she said, “She was a lesbian. Her girlfriend is the one who originally reported her missing.”
Paul shook his head, his brows furrowed. “It wasn’t a hate crime,” he murmured, his gaze growing distracted as he thought about his dream, the horrific things he’d witnessed night after night, the things he’d imagined doing to the girl, Melanie Geary. “Hate crimes are impulsive and sudden―violent, over and done with. This was methodical. Someone took their time with her. Burning her, sticking needles into her, the piano wire garrotte, severing her fingers… They wanted her to hurt. They wanted her to be afraid. It was personal.”
He stumbled, blinking owlishly, as if snapping from a reverie. He felt light-headed momentarily, as if he’d sat up too fast, and he turned, realizing that Brenda watched him, her expression suddenly curious and wary. “How did you know that?” she asked. “The burns, I mean. And the needles. I found cigarette burns and contact marks from the prongs of a stun gun, plus more than a hundred individual puncture marks from small-gauge needle insertions. It’s in my autopsy report.”
Which you haven’t seen, were the unspoken words she left implied clearly. And which you’re not supposed to see, because you’re not in homicide anymore. You’re McGruff the Crime Dog now.
Paul looked at her for a long, mute moment. What could he say that wouldn’t sound idiotic? “I…I heard Pierson mention it,” he said, taking a huge gamble. “I still go up there sometimes, you know. I miss the old times.”
She’d said Pierson had been assigned to the case, and he hoped that meant Pierson had already been able to review Brenda’s autopsy findings. There was always the chance that this is why she was in the building that morning―to deliver the results upstairs to the homicide division, but there was no other plausible explanation he could come up with off the top of his ass, so he hoped for the best. Plus, she’s dating Pierson, for whatever reason. She’s got to know how he runs his mouth―that if he’s seen the report, he’s been up there yapping about it to anyone who’d hold still long enough.
Apparently she did know, because she visibly relaxed and nodded. She smiled somewhat sadly. “I imagine they miss you, too, Paul,” she said. “You were a good detective. One of the best.” She rose to her feet, slipping her purse over her shoulder, and hefting the overstuffed briefcase that she’d set on the floor. “I just wanted to let you know. Yesterday, when you saw her picture, you seemed so upset, and I…” Her voice faded.
“It was fine,” Paul said. “She just…for a moment, she reminded me of my daughter, M.K. She’s sixteen, going on twenty-five, and she…” He
offered a feeble laugh. “I guess I’ve been away from it too long.”
It was what she wanted to hear, and he had no other explanation for his reaction the day before, so he said it. Brenda smiled again. “I can’t believe M.K. is sixteen already,” she remarked, and then laughed. “I can’t believe my son is going to be sixteen next month. My God, we’re old.”
“Old, unhip and out-of-touch,” Paul agreed as she walked toward the door. “That’s what M.K. keeps telling me, anyway.”
He didn’t add that M.K. only told him this anymore during her every-other-weekend visits, or the rare evenings in which he could catch her at home with a phone call. He imagined by the somewhat forlorn look that came over Brenda’s face as she mentioned her son that she would have understood this, however. He didn’t know if she had custody of the boy or not, but suspected the latter, given that momentary melancholy. Brenda worked long hours and her duties often forced her to travel across the state. He imagined her ex-husband would have pounced all over that instability in her homelife every bit as fervently as Vicki would have with him.
“I have to run,” Brenda said, offering her hand again in farewell. “I’ve got a nine o’clock meeting with the District Attorney over at the courthouse on a capital case.”
“Fun, fun,” he remarked, accepting her shake. To his surprise―and delight―she stepped against him, draping her free arm about him, thumping her briefcase briefly against his back. The wondrous fragrance of her perfume enveloped him and he closed his eyes, feeling the soft brush of her hair against his cheek.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”
She left him standing in the middle of his office, a sappy smile plastered on his face, and a whole new, warm, happy feeling spreading throughout him. For the rest of the day, all Paul had to do was draw the lapel of his blazer toward his face and breathe in the frangrance of her, a sweet and lingering reminder, and that sensation would immediately return.
* * *
“The Chief’s office just called,” Jason said as Paul walked past his desk to go outside and smoke. “They want a media statement this morning as soon as possible about―”
“Melanie Geary, I know,” Paul said, not slowing at all as he left the department. He grimaced at the quick patter of Jason’s feet behind him.
“Uh, no,” Jason said, looking bewildered. “Paul, they want us to issue a statement about the indictments issued against Milton Enterprises this morning.”
Paul paused, turning to him, his brow raised. “What?”
“It came in over the wire―a federal judge has issued indictments against Milton Enterprises for tax evasion. One of the historical groups protesting the Liberty Heights development must have clued them in on it. Who is Melanie Geary?”
Paul shook his head. “Never mind. Why in the hell do they want me to say anything about a federal case? That has nothing to do with us.”
“Yeah, but it’s going to delay the new construction out there even more―maybe permanently,” Jason said. “And John Milton, the CEO is a personal friend and major contributor to Mayor Allen’s campaign. They―”
“Christ,” Paul muttered, rolling his eyes. He turned and walked again, fishing out his cigarettes. “Forget it. You do the statements.”
“Paul―” Jason began, his voice strained as he hurried after him. He caught Paul’s sleeve, staying him. “Mayor Allen specifically requested that you make the statement. They faxed me an outline of what they’d like for you to―”
“I’m not the mayor’s goddamn monkey-boy,” Paul said, his brows furrowed as he leaned nearly nose to nose with Jason. “You don’t just wind up the nickelodeon and I start dancing for chump change. So you can specifically tell his office I said that, if you’d like. If he wants to stick up for his crooked buddies on the air, he can do it himself.”
He turned and stomped off again, his face blazing, his hands folded into fists. I’m a cop, he thought. Not that fat, fucking bastard of a mayor’s personal mouthpiece.
Only he was, and he knew it, and that pissed Paul off more than anything. I haven’t been a cop in over a year. Not a real one, anyone. Not since the Watcher.
“Hey, McGruff,” a detective said at the revolving glass doors. He didn’t mean any harm, just offering a passing greeting, but it was the wrong thing to say to Paul at the worst time imaginable. Because that’s what I am now, all I am―McGruff, the mayor’s goddamn Crime Dog.
“Fuck you, Sanders,” Paul snapped, shoving his way through the door and outside. He didn’t retreat to the corner of the entrance veranda, where he normally went on his cigarette breaks. Instead, he marched down the broad, granite steps of the municipal building and kept on going. He wasn’t sure where he was headed.
Anyplace but here.
* * *
He didn’t make it far, just to the building next door, and the medical examiner’s regional office in the basement. It had been several hours since Brenda Wheaton had come to visit, and he found her now in one of the autopsy bays, draped from head to toe, her hands gloved in overlapping layers of heavy latex, her pretty face all but hidden from view behind a paper mask and a plastic face shield strapped around her forehead. He could smell what she was working on from the doorway, a sweet, charred, stomach-churning stink.
“…subject’s stomach is of a size and condition not atypical or abnormal for age,” Brenda dictated into a microphone extending from a slender, metal boom from the ceiling. She was in the process of weighing what appeared to Paul to be a large, bluish grey globule of meat on a stainless steel scale, her gloved hands blood-smeared, the front of her white smock peppered. She glanced up as Paul walked across the other-wise empty room.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said. She squinted against the glare of a bright examination light aimed directly into her face. “This is a closed autopsy. There’s a sign on the door. Whoever you are, get out.”
“Hi, Brenda,” he said as he drew nearer. On the steel table before her, he saw a slender corpse, little more than a teen. Her torso had been opened in the standard autopsy Y incision, her chest cavity exposed. The body looked like it had been through a fire; most of the visible skin was blackened and seared, and her hair was gone, lending her the appearance of having been mummified in pitch. Another body on the neighboring table, awaiting autopsy, looked to be in no better condition.
“Paul?” she asked, the tension that had seized her body loosening. “Hey, hi. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”
“Still want me to leave?” he asked.
“Sure you want to see this?” she asked and when he nodded, she laughed, flapping her hand. “Okay, then. Let me take some dentals, and then I’ll call for Becky, let her handle the rest.”
He watched as Brenda poured a quick-drying plaster mix into a small, crescent-shaped metal cup. She pried the corpse’s mouth open and wriggled and wrestled the tray within, pressing it up against the charred upper palate. “Fire?” he asked. Christ, I miss this, he thought with a mixture of fascination and longing. I miss you, Brenda. I miss my goddamn life.
She nodded. “Car crash out in Crawford County,” she said, her voice a distracted murmur, her attention riveted on her work. “About two this morning. Car crossed the median, hit another head-on. Another got them from behind and the gas tank went.”
“Ouch,” Paul said, sucking in a sympathetic breath through his teeth.
She nodded again. He watched as she rocked the metal tray slightly back and forth, sliding her gloved index finger into the corpse’s mouth to try and loosen the vacuum grip against the teeth. He heard a soft pop as the plaster came free, and then Brenda withdrew the expertly cast molding. She set it on a table-top tray beside her, and began to mix a fresh batch of plaster with which to take impressions of the body’s bottom teeth.
“I’ve sent some tissue samples off to the lab,” she said. “Most of their fluids are pretty much boiled, but I think we can run a viable tox-screen off their stomach
and liver contents.”
“You think they were drunk?”
“I don’t know,” she said, slipping the dental tray into the corpse’s mouth. “It was late. The driver could have fallen asleep.” She nodded past his shoulder, to the other body. “But they were young, traveling at speeds I estimate in excess of eighty-five miles an hour. Statistically, it fits.” She sighed wearily. “I hate it when they bring me kids in here.”
When she was finished with the dental molds, she paged one of her assistants to finish up the routine postmortem examination. She shucked her smock and face gear, stripping her gloves last and scrubbing her hands in a large, industrial metal sink in the far corner of the room. “So what brings you to my neck of the woods?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder as she used a small brush to scrub beneath her fingernails. “You still haven’t told me, and I doubt it’s because you like the smell.”
He laughed. “I thought we could do lunch.”
She raised her brow and he felt color rise hotly in his face. “Well, I mean, I thought we could talk about the Geary case, too,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it. You could bring the file along…?”
Brenda laughed, shaking her head as she patted her hands dry on a paper towel. “I figured there was something else.”
She didn’t say no, however, or anything like That’s an open case, Paul―it’s Dan Pierson’s open case―and none of your business. He took that as a good sign and followed her out of the autopsy suite into the corridor, where the air was decidedly fresher. They walked down the hall to her office, and she unlocked the door.
“I’m not supposed to let you see that file, Paul,” she said, walking across the threshold and snapping on the bright, fluorescent lights overhead. Her office was small and cramped, her desk piled high with papers and files, her bookshelves overflowing. The walls were cinderblock, painted a sickly, industrial shade of light blue-green, the floor the same cracked linoleum tile as the rest of the basement.
“I know,” he replied. He lifted a framed photograph from her desk. “This is your son?”
