The Girl In the Morgue

by D. D. VanDyke

  “So it puts you square on the suspect list, but you can clear everything up right now. Can you tell me where you were at the time?”

  Brook shook her head. “I was at home. Sleeping. I had work the next day, like I normally do. I can’t go gallivanting around all over town. I need my beauty sleep.” She made a finger-circle around her pretty face.

  “The homicide took place around nine or ten at night. That’s not terribly late. You were home alone?”

  “Just me and my cats, yes. But you can talk to my boss. She’ll confirm I was at work the next day, just like always.”

  “Where do you work?”

  Brook described a job at a marketing firm. A normal, nine-to-five day job. She, at least, was not up at all hours like the rest of the people in the case seemed to be.

  “When was the last time you saw Jenna?”

  “I would guess…Sunday. At church.”

  “Church? What kind of church?”

  Brook raised her brows. “Catholic church. We go to Saint Paul’s. Back when Jenna was on the streets, it was a Catholic mission that saved her, pulled her out of the mire. She converted. But Randy didn’t share that, and she fell away for a while. When she felt like coming back, she…needed someone to help fill that space in her life. That was me. I’m Catholic, so it worked. At first we were just friends. Then it became more later.”

  “Doesn’t the Catholic church frown on…”

  “Same-sex relationships? Officially, sure, but unofficially…well, they can hardly point fingers, what with all the pedophile priest problems, eh? And this is San Francisco. When in Rome…”

  “Be a Roman Catholic? Point taken. Did Randy know the two of you were going to church together?”

  “Sure. We didn’t hide that. As we got to know each other better through the Society…we just got closer, and we started to do things together. Randy knew that.”

  “But I take it he didn’t know that the two of you were…intimate. At least not at first.”

  Brook’s lips twitched. “No. Men tend to be pretty blind that way. It always takes them by surprise. It’s probably because women can be sisterly and hold hands and hug in public and things like that without people thinking…you know.”

  “I can see how that would be.” Cal had a hard time picturing Jenna with her tough, biker-chick look and medieval knight persona paired with delicate Brook outside of a Renfaire. Then again, maybe Brook dressed Goth or something. Apparently, there was lots of crossover among various parts of geek culture. Yet, despite their overlapping backgrounds, the two women seemed worlds apart. “So how did Randy feel when he found out?”

  Brook wasn’t going to be fooled that easily. She stared Cal down. “He never found out. He still doesn’t know.”

  “As far as you know, you mean. Others in your circles knew. Randy might have heard about it from another member.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Cal shrugged. “Okay, fine. Jenna had started wearing a crucifix lately.”

  “Again,” Brook said. “She started wearing one again. When she started going back to church, Randy wasn’t too keen on it, but what business was it of his?”

  “When he called you to tell you about what happened to Jenna, what was his purpose? Why would he tell you about it?”

  “He called Jenna’s friends. I was her best friend. Why wouldn’t he?”

  Sure, why wouldn’t he? Yet, if Cal had just shot and killed someone, the last thing she’d want was to call the best friend and confess to doing it.

  Cal decided to change tactics. “Jenna’s ex, Cruiser, says that she’d had a boost in her income in the last few months. He doesn’t know where the money was coming from. Do you know anything about that?”

  Brook considered, shaking her head slowly. “No…maybe she got a promotion at her job. That bar with the Russian name. She busted her butt at that place; maybe the smelly old guy finally decided to pay her more.”

  “It wasn’t from the job at Vyazma,” Cal said, trying to keep from reacting to the slur. “I interviewed that ‘smelly old guy’ already. He was talking about promoting her, but he didn’t yet. It had to be from somewhere else. You don’t know where the money came from?”

  “No. She didn’t say anything to me about it. What made Cruiser think Jenna was making more money?”

  “She was spending more on therapies for her son, and on new gear.”

  “I didn’t notice any changes. Maybe he’s just trying to throw you off.”

  “I’d agree,” Cal said, drumming her fingers on the table. “Except that Cruiser has an alibi for the time of Jenna’s death. Both his roommates and his employer’s computer logs say that he was home writing programs, or whatever it is he does.”

  “Then I don’t know.” Brook emphasized with a dramatic shrug and a sigh.

  Cal sat back in her chair, examining Brook for anything out of place. While Brook might have the same reason to kill Jenna as Randy or Pat did—jealousy—she couldn’t see why Randy would have to cover for her if she did, and that would take her out of the running. “How did Randy and Jenna get along? Did they fight a lot?”

  “They fought. A lot of couples fight. It’s normal not to agree on everything.”

  “Did they get physical?”

  “Not seriously. If anything, though, Jenna would have been the aggressor. She had a temper.”

  “What did they disagree about?”

  “About her going to church too much, and about trying to get him to go too. About too much time spent with Alan, or because of Alan. About money.”

  “Randy never knew about you, and Jenna never knew about Pat?”

  “Pat? As friends with benefits?” Brook chuckled and dropped her gaze to her painted nails. Fake ones, but good quality. “Sometimes people don’t see what’s right in front of their own noses. They were both too busy sneaking around to notice the signs.”

  “Did you know Cruiser thought Randy might be abusing Alan?”

  “She told me.” Brook’s shoulders lifted in an unconcerned shrug. “Normal drama between parents with sharing a kid. They both want full custody, they want to hurt the other, so they throw around accusations. You can bet that if Cruiser had proof, he’d have used it.”

  Cal thought. “I agree with that.”

  Brook slid back her sleeve and looked down at her decidedly modern watch. “Unfortunately, I have other places I need to be. Good luck with your investigation.”

  “What’s that?” Cal pointed at Brook’s corded wrist.

  “Oh, cat scratches from my fur-babies. I see you have one yourself.”

  Cal looked at the back of her hand. “Oh, I do, don’t I.” She hardly even noticed the scratches anymore, just occasional love swipes from Snowflake’s protests when she rubbed his belly too long.

  Brook stood up, and then paused. “You may not want to believe it was Randy…but honestly, who else would it be? Maybe it didn’t happen exactly the way he says it did. He did drugs too sometimes. Maybe they were both snorting some crank, he threatened her with a gun, she picked up a knife, it got out of hand. He’d want to show himself in the best light he could and call it self-defense. But he was the one who was there. He’s the only one who knows what happened.”

  “No.” Cal shook her head. “I don’t believe that, and I’m going to find out who else knows something. Thanks for your time, Miss Dancer. I hope you’ve told me everything you know.”

  “I have. Now please leave me alone.” Brook turned away, smiling and fluttering her small hands at acquaintances as she left.

  Small hands…too small to hold that forty-five and fire it accurately eight times? Maybe, maybe not. Cal had small hands herself, which was why she favored a Glock with a low-recoil nine-millimeter self-defense round, not a hand cannon. Not conclusive, but still…she didn’t think Brook did it.

  Not personally, anyway.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Cal approached San Francisco early that evening, she called Stone. All through the lon
g drive back up, her mind whirled like a hamster wheel about motives, alibis, and who Randy had reason to cover up for.

  She’d also been thinking about symbols and markings. Jenna’s missing necklace, her tattoos, and the odd crosshatched skin bruising. And the strange pairings in the case. Scraggly Randy and the gorgeous Pat. Biker-look Jenna with China-doll Brook. Was it a case of opposites attracting? Or of them both going out to find something that was missing in their current mate? Or merely indefinable chemistry?

  The phone rang quite a few times before Stone answered, but that wasn’t unexpected. If he was in the middle of a postmortem and there was no one else to answer the phone, he would have to carefully lay down whatever instruments or organs he was holding, move out of the autopsy room, remove his gloves, and pick up the phone. If he were too involved in what he was doing to take a break, she would have to leave a message.

  “Stone here.”

  “Hey, RJ. It’s Cal.”

  He made a noise between a chuckle and a snort. “How did I know it was going to be you? I’m having an interesting time with your body.”

  “Hey, it’s not my body,” Cal protested. “Hopefully, you won’t ever have mine on your slab. But if you do, no messing around, you got it? You find out who killed me and how.”

  “I do my job.” Stone sounded affronted. “I don’t mess around with any bodies. Believe me, if you were on my table here, I’d be doing my darnedest to find out what happened.”

  “Sorry, just a joke, Stone. Bad taste.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Cal sighed. Apparently she’d touched a nerve. “You’ve never been anything but professional as far as I’m concerned. So…what’s been ‘interesting’ about Jenna’s body?”

  “Are you coming in?”

  Cal glanced at the dashboard clock. She was tired, but if he stuck around for another hour anyway, she’d do well to pay him a visit. Nothing beat the personal touch for information. “I can. You’ll be there?”

  “Yeah. Come on by. All’s quiet on the western front, and I can show you what I’ve found so far.”

  Cal wasn’t sure what kind of peace offering to bring along with her for Stone. He’d gone for the donuts on her previous visit, which confirmed that he still had a sweet tooth. She considered taking him one of the big fancy coffees he favored, but it was late in the day and if he didn’t plan to stay up all night, a jumbo java was probably not the best choice. And liquor on the job was a big no-no.

  Eventually, she settled on sushi, hoping that the raw-fish smell wasn’t too reminiscent of human flesh. Stone eyed the bag after letting her in.

  “Not donuts this time,” Cal said, unrolling the top. “I didn’t want to sabotage Cynthia’s diet too much.” She pulled out a tray of nori rolls.

  “Excellent!” Stone immediately helped himself to a couple. “Let’s leave them out here. No one else around to steal them and I don’t want them in autopsy.”

  Cal followed him to the lab, where he pulled out his file on Jenna Duncan. He put up the X-rays again, showing the bullets and other fragments of metal.

  “So it took us quite a while to figure out what the foreign bits of metal were,” he said. “These little bits of wire that some of the bullets picked up and took with them into the wound tract.”

  “There were some at the scene as well,” Cal said. “I wasn’t sure what they were to start with, but…”

  “Well, it took some doing, but what we eventually figured out was that they were—”

  “Chainmail,” Cal finished the sentence with him.

  Stone stared at her. “You’re holding back on me! You knew what it was?”

  “I just got back from a Renaissance Faire,” Cal said, “but it wasn’t until just now that I figured it out.”

  “It would have been a lot more obvious if her chainmail hadn’t been removed before she was brought here. It wasn’t logged into evidence.”

  “There was a lot of medieval gear at the scene. I don’t remember specifically seeing any chainmail, but I might have missed it.”

  “That’s what caused the bruising around the bullet holes. The pattern is from the bullets punching through her mail, and pieces were carried inside her.”

  “Did the mail slow the bullets down at all?”

  “Yes, but not enough to protect her. Only two of the rounds exited her body, which is a little less surprising now that I know they were slowed already. The ones that I recovered show a little more deformation than you would expect even in a hollowpoint.”

  Cal absentmindedly rubbed her neck scars. “So she was wearing mail when she was shot. She could have been coming back from an SCA event. But I thought she was wearing a t-shirt and jeans? She had chainmail over that?”

  “If she were dressing as a knight, she’d have armor on the outside. You wouldn’t be able to see that she was wearing t-shirt and jeans underneath.”

  “Right…though these people try to make everything historically accurate, everything in period right down to their unmentionables. And from what I saw, fighters usually wear thick padding under the chainmail…but that would have eliminated the bruising. So she was wearing the mail by itself, no padding, over street clothes.” Cal sighed. “Doesn’t add up.”

  Stone nodded distractedly. “From your investigation, how much time did she spend fighting and dressing up? Every day? Once a week? How into it was she?”

  Cal considered. “She had a regular job, and these fairs and tournaments are mostly held on weekends. From their website, it seems like they have meetings once a week for each subject, but only fighting practice would mean wearing armor. Why?”

  He scowled and shook his head. “I don’t know.” He flipped through pictures on the file, and then turned a couple to Cal, showing Jenna’s bare shoulders and neck. “This is one of the things that tipped us off that she was wearing mail.”

  Cal held the photo close to her face, squinting and holding it so that the glare of the overhead lights didn’t reflect off the surface. “Chafing from the mail?”

  “Not just chafing. She was actually developing calluses, which suggests she wore it a lot.”

  “Often enough to start building up calluses. You think she was wearing it daily?”

  “Pretty regularly. Maybe not every day, but…” He put his thumbnail over one of the red marks on her shoulders. “Often enough.”

  Cal tried to figure out what that meant. Was Jenna getting together with more than one SCA group? Doing role-play or practice with Randy or Brook when she wasn’t working at Vyazma? Becoming unhealthily obsessed with dressing up like a knight? “I don’t know what to think about that.”

  “Like I said, she’s given us some challenges. Funny quirks I haven’t seen in other cases.”

  Cal looked at the tattoos in the picture. “Do you have pictures of all of her ink?”

  “Sure, of course. We have to document everything. Why?”

  “You never know what you might learn from someone’s tattoos.” Cal flipped through the pictures Stone pulled out for her. No mushy love tattoos memorializing Randy, Brook, or Cruiser, but there was a rainbow-colored lemniscate—what people usually called an infinity symbol, like a sideways figure-eight—that Cal recognized as associated with autism awareness.

  Jenna also had a few decorative pieces: roses with thorns, various kinds of blades, a medieval-style cross that supported Brook’s assertion that Jenna attending church was a return to religion rather than a new conversion.

  “The cross: for sure not new?”

  AJ looked at it. “No. A few years old. There’s some stretching. She was probably a young teen when she got that one.”

  Cal was reminded that she didn’t really know much about Jenna’s life history, other than Brook’s reference to a street mission—which might imply being homeless, maybe a runaway. Cal had been looking into everyone Jenna associated with in the present, but she knew nothing about where the girl had come from, and Mickey hadn’t turned up any family.

&nb
sp; “What can you tell me about her past?” she asked Stone, passing the photos back to him. “I know she had a child, I don’t know what kind of a life she led when she was younger. Did she grow up in an abusive home? Do drugs? What does her body tell you? One person I spoke with said she lived on the street.”

  “That fits. She has old needle scars, but nothing recent. She’s been clean for years. Probably before pregnancy, and before most of the tattoos. No prison tats. Nothing cheap or homemade.”

  “Old broken bones? Missing teeth?”

  “Her broken bones are more recent, probably from this knight stuff, right? I didn’t see anything from when she was a child.”

  “But that doesn’t mean there was no abuse.”

  “No. But I don’t see any scars or breaks that would lead me to believe she was abused. No missing teeth, but a lot of fillings over the past few years. Might mean she went through a period where she didn’t have dental care, and a lot of meth-heads get bad teeth from the sugar cravings. Or it might just mean that she inherited thin enamel. You can’t read too much into it.”

  “She came from somewhere. I wonder if root causes of her death are deeper in her past. Thanks, RJ.” She looked at the clock on the wall. “Time for us both to be getting home.”

  Stone just shrugged and gave her a wan smile. “I still have a lot to do.”

  “Let me look at her for a little while. I won’t touch.”

  Stone drew on the drawer handle and rolled her out of the refrigerated wall section. “Push her back in when you’re done. I’ll be in my office.”

  “Sure.” Cal flipped down the sheet so she could look the dead woman in the face.

  Jenna, Jenna, Jenna. Who did this to you, and why? What were you into, and why did it get you killed? What was worth the risk of dying for?

  Her eyes kept returning to the cross.

  Outside, Cal hung up her cell phone and looked at the time. While it was late enough in the evening she was willing to hit the sack after a long day, it was prime time for Mickey. But he wasn’t answering his phone. It was possible he wasn’t there, but he usually preferred hanging out in his office with the high-end computer she’d paid for to being at home with his unpleasant mother. She dialed again, counting the rings and waiting for the machine to pick up.