by Kit Frazier
Yeah, I thought. But they don’t know he’s leaving and they don’t know some homicidal bad-ass in Laredo thinks he’s dead.
Nevertheless, it was his “Hold on to me,” that I held on to.
#
“You’re awful quiet,” Logan said as he drove the big pickup, left-turning out of the Sentinel satellite parking lot and onto Ranch Road 620.
Marlowe sat between us on the console. The dog gave Logan a lap on the cheek, and then me, and then turned, facing the windshield and sat, grinning his doggie grin, happy as any mammal had a right to be.
I sighed. “Well, let’s see. We’re going to go see a dead guy for lunch and you just told me you’re leaving. Again,” I said.
Logan was quiet, and the dog stared straight through the windshield.
After a long moment, Logan said, “Tell me about the dead guy.”
I nodded, “Right. Subject change.” I said and sighed. “We’re going to go see a John Doe at the morgue.”
“Because you can’t write an obituary about a guy until he has a name?” he said. “You go to the morgue for every John Doe?”
I shook my head, looking out the side window. “This one’s different.”
Logan waited.
“Cantu called me this morning,” I said, turning in my seat so I could see him past Marlowe. “This guy busted up a convenience store robbery.”
“Cantu catch the call?”
“No. Sometimes he gives me a heads up when stuff goes on that might make a good story.”
“Hm,” Logan said, “he do that often?”
“He’s a very good friend of the family,” I said.
“More friendly to some in the family than others,” Logan said.
“It’s not like that,” I said, even though it kind of was.
“And…this guy died like your dad.” He left-turned into Highway 71 lunchtime traffic.
“You remembered,” I said, a note of surprise in my voice.
“Guy a cop like your dad, too?” He dodged into the left lane to miss chunks of gravel bouncing from the dump truck two cars up.
I shook my head. “The beat cop that caught the call onscene said he thought the guy was a dope dealer.”
“Right,” Logan said straightening the wheel. “A drug dealer who busted up an armed robbery?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” I said, staring out the window. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Logan maneuvered back into the right lane, avoiding last-minute Christmas shoppers, tourists and every other person in Central Texas with and, apparently, without, a driver’s license.
The streetlights were wreathed in shining opal-lit collars that cast soft light on the dismal, December-brown grass in the right-of-ways, and banners stretched over the highway insisting that we Have a Merry Christmas! and Remember the Reason for the Season! Ha. They obviously didn’t get the memo that Logan was leaving again.
“Take an hour to get to the lab, wanna eat on the way?”
I shook my head. Eat and ralph all over the Morgue floor? Now that would be professional.
Logan took that as a “no,” and headed past the glittering new Hill Country Galleria and the adjacent strip mall with the Lowes and Best Buy and other ubiquitous box stores, along with the requisite McMiddle Class Eateries built smack dab in the heart of where the Bohls Ranch was settled more than a hundred years ago.
Progress.
“Cauley,” Logan said after a long moment. “You ever been to the morgue?”
“I have lunch with Dr. M all the time,” I said.
“You have lunch in the morgue?”
“In the cafeteria,” I said. “And I’ve been back in the lab with Dr. Marshall a bunch of times.”
He looked over at me and smiled, and there was kindness in his dark eyes. “You’ve been in the cafeteria and in the Medical Examiner’s office up front. You been in the back in the actual autopsy rooms?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes, staring straight ahead.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
I was about to say something clever when the theme song from James Bond blasted from inside my big purse.
Logan chuckled and I turned ten shades of red, scrambling through various purse-type flotsam in search of my phone.
“Missed me, huh?” he said.
I started to make up some big fib about Mia changing my ring tone, but decided lying to a fed was not the best way to make it to the top of Santa’s Good Girl List, and certainly wouldn’t get me any closer to #4 on my own To Do List.
I wrinkled my nose at him, but the sound of his laughter, low and deep, took the sharpest edge off my unease.
I juggled the phone out and clicked the on button, and heard Mama’s voice calling, “Cauley? Cauley! Is that you? Who is that laughing? Is that your Agent Logan?”
I was about to say, “No,” and “He’s not my agent,” when Logan shouted, “Hello, Mizz MacKinnon! How can we help you?”
“Shh,” I hushed him, turning my shoulder away, trying to shield him from my mother as Marlowe yipped in delight at the sound of Mama’s voice, no doubt visions of holiday ham sandwiches dancing in his furry head.
“Agent Logan!” Mama cried, her voice trilled in delight.
“Merry Christmas, Miss Lily,” Logan called over the dog’s head toward the phone, and I glared at him.
“Oh, Agent Logan!” Mama caroled, “Cauley, put me on speaker phone.”
“Absolutely not,” I said, and Logan said, “That’s okay. I can hear you just fine from here, Mizz MacKinnon.”
“Oh, good!” Mama shouted, nearly poking a hole in my ear drum. “Cauley, you need to ask your agent to come over this evening for the Soiree!”
“Mama,” I growled. “He’s busy and he’s leaving tonight anyway.”
“Not until midnight, Miss Lily, and thank you, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Logan said loudly.
Great. I had roughly 18 hours with Logan before he left. In that time, I had to identify the Dead Guy, finish up my Christmas list, put the finishing touches on Mama’s Soiree, and make Agent Logan fall in love with me.
I groaned. All I needed was for Logan to see the MacKinnon clan and friends in full holiday regalia.
“Mother,” I snapped. “Did you need something?”
Other than another reason to embarrass me right into my grave?
“Yes,” she said, and to my horror, I heard paper rattling. “I have something to add to our list.”
Logan raised a brow, grinning as he listened.
Mama cleared her throat and said, “I need you to stop by the boys and pick up the rest of our costumes.”
Great. Just drive a big decorative icicle through my heart and end it all.
I rolled my eyes so hard I thought I’d fall over. But I fished the To Do List out of my purse and readied my pen for jotting whatever jolliness my mother had neglected on the first twenty drafts of The List.
“The boys?” Logan said, and Mama said, “Yes! Cauley’s friend Beckett did our costumes this year, and Jenks is finishing up our choreography!”
“I can’t wait,” Logan chuckled. He’d met my neighbors, Beckett and Jenks, who, despite the fact they’d been partners for more than a decade, had a minor crush on Logan.
“Why can’t the boys bring them?” I said.
“They’re here right now, helping finish up the decorations.”
“Aiding and abetting,” I grumbled, fishing a pen and the ever growing list from my purse.
“Are you there, Cauley?” Mama called, and I said shrugging the phone to my ear, pen ready, “Of course I’m here.”
“Get the costumes, and we’re also going to need two dozen pomegranates,” she said.
“Pomegranates,” I repeated, scribbling down the exotic fruit, not even bothering to ask why.
“Just don’t forget the shoes - the costumes won’t be complete without the shoes!” Mama said.
Logan peered over the dog
to get a gander at my list. “Costumes and shoes?” Logan said, grinning even wider.
“Don’t encourage her,” I hissed, reaching around the dog to smack him on the leg.
“It’s a big surprise,” Mama sing-songed loudly to Logan. “Even better than last year!”
Great.
“I’m going now, Mama,” I said, clicked off as she shrilled something about song sheets. I threw the phone back into my purse.
Logan was still chuckling.
“Your Christmas comes with costumes?” he said, eyes sparkling.
“Yes,” I grumbled. “And a chorus line from the ladies of the Charity League.”
Logan burst out laughing, the sound of Fort Worth deep in his voice.
“You just wait,” I warned. “You’ll never be the same - you’ll be scarred for life - The Charity League’s chorus line has been known to cause irreparable damage to the frontal lobe.”
I closed my eyes. I was drowning in a tinsel-trimmed bucket of my mother’s Christmas cheer.
“Irreparable damage, huh?” Logan chuckled, looking at me over Marlowe’s fuzzy head. He reached around the dog and took my hand. “For you, kid,” he said, “I’ll take my chances.”
Chapter Three
Logan parked in one of the Cops Only spots in the parking lot in front of the Medical Examiner’s Office, and opened the passenger door for me. Marlowe took the opportunity to use my lap as a springboard.
He bolted across the parking barricade and up to the glass door of the spanking new white lime stone three-story Morgue-a-torium, lit merrily in multicolor blinking lights. Even in death, apparently, Santa Claus is coming to town…
I looked down after the dog and was stumped by how to dismount. Jump? Slide? Stepping down in my skirt could have meant getting arrested in some jurisdictions. Logan stepped up, and placed his large hands around my waist, and I pushed out as he helped me down. When I landed his hands slid down over my hips before he stepped back.
“Did your hands just grab my ass?” I asked.
“It was an accident,” he lied and I grinned. His palms were warm and strong and sent a heat wave running up my spine.
Maybe we should skip the morgue…
“Thanks,” I muttered, tugging at my skirt.
This was so not how I’d planned to wow Logan with my feminine wiles.
Already at the front of the building Marlowe capered and woofed as Logan and I headed up the entryway. He opened the glass door for me, and the dog shot off like a bullet aimed at the chest of Detective Jim Cantu, who, at that moment had been talking on his cell phone, taking notes in a small black notebook.
“Marlowe, no!” I hollered, but I was too late.
Had Cantu not been a tallish, wiry, Latino Man of Steel, he might have fallen over backward under the weight and velocity of the dog.
“I’m sorry,” I grumbled, rushing through the entryway to pull the yippety dog off him.
Wiping dog spit from his face, Cantu grinned at me, and said into his phone, “I gotta go, Babe - I just got attacked by Hurricane Cauley.”
“Hurricane Marlowe,” I corrected, “and tell Arlene I said hello.”
But he’d already disconnected, and grinned down at me and the dog.
I rose to my tiptoes and kissed his cheek, and as I brushed the dog hair off his shirt, my heart always did the silly little squeeze it did when I saw him, like a good shot of hot apple cider, a byproduct of the crush I’d had on him when he was a beat cop and my dad was a detective. The sharp edges of the crush had softened, but he would always be the first love of my life.
To his left, an enormous artificial Christmas tree twinkled with equally artificial lights, but the jumble of gifts surrounding the tree were very real and held the charm of inexpert volunteer gift wrapping.
It was festive in a municipal-building sort of way, if you didn’t know there were a couple dozen bodies in various states of decomposition and dissection, stacked in refrigerated drawers at the back of the building.
To my left, a thick-necked uniformed sergeant was scooping gifts into several humongous burlap bags, and to my right, a young, freckle-faced cop manned the front desk.
“How’s Arlene?” I asked Cantu.
“She’s making tamales,” he said, and I said, “Ouch. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It’s the thought that counts.”
“Depends on the thought,” I said, and Cantu grinned.
His grin dissolved and his eyes hardened, and I followed his gaze.
He’d caught sight of Logan, who was standing behind me.
Cantu boosted his chin an inch and squared his shoulders, looping his thumbs in his webbed gun holster.
I took a step back as some powerful, man-thing bounced between them.
Behind me, I felt Logan stiffen, and I briefly thought I should hit the deck in case they started shooting for the hell of it.
Marlowe seemed oblivious, and pranced a circle around us around like a deranged reindeer.
“Thought you were dead,” Cantu said.
“Keeping tabs on me?” Logan said.
Cantu’s black eye narrowed. “We have a common interest.”
Common interest? I ground my back molars. I’m a common interest?
Tension strangled the air like the Grinch stealing Cindy-Lou Who’s Christmas tree, and my breath caught.
The cop-kid behind the desk swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple bounced.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” I grumbled, and stepped forward, grabbed Marlowe by the collar, dragging him away as he danced around Cantu. “We’re here to see the dead guy.”
The words came out fast and forced.
“Errr, ummm,” the kid at the desk cleared his throat. “Yeah, got an appointment for you right here…Obituary Babe to see the Queen of the Dead.”
We all turned and looked at him.
Cantu’s brow cocked. “Dr. M know you call her that?”
The kid moved his mouth but no words came out.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Cantu said. “She ready for us?”
“Uh-umm, yeah,” the kid stuttered. “She already started.”
“Take the dog to the cafeteria,” Cantu told the freckle-faced cop. “There’s an empanada in the fridge with his name on it.”
#
“You know you don’t have to do this,” Cantu said as he badged me and Logan through the security door, past the maze of offices where retired detectives, forensic geeks and the rest of the brain-bank of assorted experts searched for the “how” of death, leaving the “why” and “who” to other assorted experts still on the squad.
“I’ve worked at a vet clinic in college,” I said, but my voice was a little shaky. “I assisted on a whole bunch of surgeries. Even did some castrations myself.”
Logan flinched and Cantu chucked. “You used to castrate animals?”
“Mostly animals,” I said. “And who says I’ve stopped?”
Through the large viewing window, I could see Dr. Elizabeth Marshall, small in a sea of blue paper smock, her dark hair cut in a shiny, shoulder length black bob. With her slightly slanted olive-green eyes, she had a faint Egyptian aura.
Queen of the Dead indeed.
She stood at the center of the small, stark room at a stainless steel table, elbow deep in John Doe’s abdomen.
Cantu hit a buzzer beside the door, and Dr. M looked up and saw him through the door and smiled. She nodded for us to suit up in blue surgical scrubs, caps and masks before having her assistant let us in.
He was a tall man with no chin and black eyes, and as I followed Cantu into the room, I jarred to a dead stop. The smell of rubbing alcohol and death was laced with the faint, skunky smell of pot and it hit me like a punch in the gut.
“Thank you, Malcolm,” Dr. M said to her assistant, and she nodded hello to me as Cantu rounded the table to stand by her as she snipped something inside the dead guy.
I shivered.
“There’s Vicks over by the
sink,” she said without looking up from her work.
Logan went for the jar of mentholatum and scooped up a big dollop and dabbed it under my mask as Malcolm silently picked up a camcorder and continued recording the autopsy where he’d left off.
“And you must be Agent Logan.” Dr. M did look up then, and her green eyes sparkled, her mask down around her neck so she could read the odors of the body. “I’ve heard about you.”
“I deny all charges,” Logan said, a smile in his voice.
“Well that’s a shame,” she said, grinning. “I had such high hopes for our Cauley.”
They chatted like they were standing around an office water cooler, like there wasn’t a dead guy on a table between them, a blue surgical towel over his face, his ribcage cranked open revealing an empty cavity where his heart and lungs had been.
“You okay?” Logan said and I shook my head.
He took my elbow and guided me gently to stand next to Dr. M and Cantu near a chest-high stainless steel tray that held scissors, clamps, scalpels and a small digital scale.
I stared at the body, wondering who he was, how his family was going to go on without him and what led him to wind up naked, cut to pieces on an autopsy table.
His skin was waxy and pale in death, and on his left arm was some sort of tribal tattoo circling his bicep, with a strange looking shield with two lightning strikes running horizontally parallel. A sword with a snake making an “S” around it was inked into the middle of the shield.
“I’ve seen that tattoo, or something like it,” I said, looking more closely and trying not to gag at the smell of dead flesh and Vap-o-Rub.
The ink in the middle of the tattoo was much darker, like it was fairly recent. The inside was faded with a small circles, and the outer edges were sharp and dark. I frowned. “Is that a tattoo over a tattoo?”
Logan leaned in to look.
“Good eye,” Dr. M said. “We ran an ultraviolet but couldn’t make it out. I sent a shot of it up to the lab folks to take a look. You a tattoo expert now?”
I shook my head. “I know a girl who’s having some removed and redone,” I said, thinking of Faith Puckett, the songstress who’d been through hell and back and was trying to reclaim her life. And her skin.
Logan smiled. “How’s Faith doing?”
“You’ll find out, she’s coming to the Soiree,” I said.
