by Alex Bledsoe
After sixty years, forty of those with his immortality reasonably certain, Mark assumed he’d develop some sort of calm center; but despite all that time, people who weren’t where they were supposed to be still made him crazy. Of the five vampires who used the warehouse, he was the only one who made any effort to pass in the real world. He held a job and paid his taxes. He had a checking account. And he tried to teach the others how to blend in, not stand out. It wasn’t altruism; he remembered the death Praline had suffered at the hands of that Oklahoma mob, and knew that if any vampire drew attention, all vampires would be in danger.
So he got a phone, and at first it worked. Leonardo, Olive, and even Toddy picked up faithfully. But lately, no one answered. He knew Fauvette was there—she hadn’t hunted in months, and the strain was starting to show on her, but that was her business. He just wished she’d answer the phone.
Toddy was the one that worried him, though. The little bozo would go out in public clad in nothing but that stupid trench coat, and would actually give people his real name when he met them. He was known among the street people and the really dangerous downtown gangs as a psycho because he’d demonstrated his strength by lifting the front end of a car one-handed. He also once tried to have a mortal girlfriend, but it only lasted a week; the police investigation lasted much longer, until most of the body parts were found.
Mark sighed, ran hands through his short brown hair, and closed his eyes. After a half century, he was really tired of his existence, not because it was hard, but because it was complicated. He never asked to be den father, especially to loonies like Toddy or Quaalude cases like Fauvette; he just wanted to quietly exist at the fringe of the mortal world, exploring and taking as he needed. But he was the one the others looked to for guidance, for leadership, and it wore him down. Sometimes he wished he’d just crumble to dust and blow away, embraced by the death he consciously abandoned at the height of the Dust Bowl. He almost felt the wind blow through him, carrying him away, spreading him thin . . .
He opened his eyes and, by coincidence, saw himself in the curved shoplifting mirror.
He was transparent.
It was only for an instant, but he knew he had seen it, the floor and the wall behind him visible through his Happy Days Fonzie T-shirt, as if for just a moment the wind had blown part of him away. Then he blinked, and everything appeared normal again.
What the hell—
“Hey, Mark-o Polo,” Gwinny called as she came through the door. “How’s business?”
“It’s Friday night in a dang bait shop,” he said easily; luckily he had a knack for appearing nonchalant. “How much business do you think we’re getting?”
“Hey, where’s that tall hunk of man who belongs to that Cadillac out front? He looked good in those pants, I tell you what.” Gwinny was a big-breasted black woman with two children, and so full of life that at times she felt to Mark like a giant blood-filled carrot dangled before him. But she also worked in the fast-food drive-through across the road from Mr. Wiggly’s, and had been seen talking to him many times. So he kept himself under tight control around her, and tried to seem like just another down-and-out white boy with a crummy job in a bad part of town.
And now he felt particularly dumb, since he’d completely blanked on the dead man’s car. Maybe he deserved a stake through the heart for stupidity. “Don’t know, he just looked around and then left.”
“Oh, well, his loss. Might’ve missed out on a trip to Gwinnytown.” She winked and tossed him a paperback book. “And thanks, by the way. Great book, even if he does call us ‘niggers.’ ”
“I warned you about that.”
“Yeah. And I didn’t get the ending.”
This was the other reason Mark never turned Gwinny into dinner. “What about it?”
“Well, why did Marlowe tell the chick that Kurtz said her name when he died?”
“I guess—and this is my own opinion, you know—that maybe, thanks to Kurtz, Marlowe had looked into his own heart of darkness, saw it for what it was, and was able to lie knowing he was doing the right thing.”
“You mean, like, total honesty might do more damage than a lie that made people happy?”
He grinned. “Kind of, yeah.”
“Well, I figured he just didn’t want to, like, dishonor the memory of what ol’ Mistah Kurtz had shown him.”
Mark blinked in surprise. “Hell, Gwinny, I never thought of that.”
“Got a lotta time to think standin’ over the deep fryer. Well, it’s about time for the bus. See you later, Polo.”
Mark was so surprised by Gwinny’s literary insight that he forgot about the car outside, the phone, and the moment he thought he saw through himself.
CHAPTER 5
SKITCH MUELLER, THE newest forensics resident at the Shelby County Coroner’s Office, sauntered into the staff break room. His hair feathered over his ears and hung outside his collar in the back. “Hey, Danielle, you hear about Patricia yet?”
Assistant Head Coroner Danielle Roseberry looked up from the Commercial Appeal newspaper. She let smoke trail out her nostrils as she spoke. “Patricia who?”
“Patricia Johnson over at the college. Black doctor, remember? Taught medical forensics? Somebody killed her last night.”
Danielle blinked in surprise. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, right in the morgue. Their morgue. Cut out her heart, stuck a probe through her neck, and sliced off her freakin’ toes. Made a huge mess; blood everywhere.”
“Cut off her toes?” Danielle repeated. She wasn’t close friends with Patricia Johnson, but the Memphis forensics community was pretty small, and Patricia had been its only black member. Danielle had even spoken to her classes a few times. “Shit,” she said in disbelief. “Do they know who did it?”
“Yep. Satanists.”
“ ‘Satanists’?”
“Yeah. They also stole some exhumed body she was examining for the museum. Cops figure she caught ’em at it and they went a little nuts.” He mimed taking a long hit off a joint. “Know what I mean?”
Skitch poured himself some coffee, then held the carafe out to Danielle; she shook her head. “They’re talking to all the leftover hippies and Jesus freaks in town,” he said.
“Wow,” Danielle said. “I mean . . .” She let the words trail off. She’d been offered Patricia Johnson’s job once, three years ago, and turned it down. If she’d taken it, would she now be a heartless, toeless corpse? “Wow.”
Skitch took a long, loud slurp of his coffee. “Oh, by the way, the cop that told me all this also brought us a new package.”
Danielle nodded, ground out her cigarette, and stood. She was a slender, tiny woman, a little over five feet tall, with short dark hair and a face that hadn’t aged appreciably since she was sixteen. As a result bartenders always, always carded her. But her professional reputation made sure she got the respect at work that her baby-faced demeanor denied her everywhere else.
Later, in fresh scrubs, Danielle and Skitch approached the sheet-covered form on the metal table. “So how’d the testifying go this morning?” Skitch asked.
“The same way it always goes,” Danielle said with a sigh. “Before anybody takes me seriously, I have to prove I’m not somebody’s little girl just playing at being a coroner.”
“What happened?”
“I gave my description of how the guy died, along with all the evidence for it. I used small words so the jurors would understand. So what’s the first thing the defense attorney asks me? ‘How old are you, Dr. Roseberry?’ ”
“You do look young.”
“I know that, believe me. So after I establish that I am a legal adult, and that I did, in fact, go to medical school, you know what he asks me then? ‘Do dead bodies give you nightmares?’ ”
“Boy, he doesn’t know you at all, does he?”
“Luckily even the judge got offended by that. But I couldn’t just let it go, you know?”
“What did you say?”
“I said no, I don’t get nightmares, because I have my defense attorney Ken doll to keep me company. And he’s anatomically correct . . . for a lawyer, that is.”
Skitch howled and had to sit down as Danielle started the Dictaphone recorder. She stated the date and time, then said, “Okay, hyena boy, what’ve we got here?”
Skitch wiped his eyes with his forearms, stood, and whipped the sheet back with a flourish. “Today’s mort de jour is one teenage boy, fourteen to seventeen years of age, found dead in a downtown alley wearing a long green trench coat and nothing else.”
“Kids these days,” Danielle muttered, then bent close and examined the inside of the nearest elbow for needle tracks. “You’re not supposed to be a flasher until you’re too old to be a rapist. Is he baked or fried?”
“Neither. No obvious signs of foul play or drug use. No trauma. No clear cause of death. That’s all we know now, and thank you for dining with morgue central.” He offered her a clipboard with the official police report attached.
Expertly, searching only for key words, Danielle verified the summary. She trusted Skitch, but she’d learned not to accept anything at face value. “Not hit by a car, huh?” she said as she gave him back the clipboard.
“Nope,” he confirmed. “Unless it was a little bitty one.”
“Name?”
“Albert, but everyone calls me Skitch.”
She smiled a little. The only reprimand in her file was for making “nonprofessional” comments on these official recordings, but she simply couldn’t maintain the stoic, vaguely sepulchral tone her superiors preferred. She understood why this bothered them, of course: she was the only doctor on staff who truly, genuinely enjoyed doing autopsies, and she simply couldn’t hide that. So she accepted the reprimand and changed nothing about her procedure, even if the tapes occasionally made for odd passages in the transcriptions. “No, his name.”
“No identification on the body. Waiting to hear from the fingerprints and dental records.”
“Little Johnny Doe, back with us again, huh?” A full third of the bodies that came through the city morgue were unidentified, at least at first. She pursed her lips thoughtfully and leaned over the body, examining the face. In the bright fluorescent light, the John Doe body looked as if it were made of gray crepe paper stretched over a skeleton. His cheekbones and ribs were plain, and there was a sickly pallor that had nothing to do with death about him. His musculature was prominent but undeveloped, the result of too little body fat instead of too much exercise.
Her eyes traveled up and down the naked body. The kid was thin, but his abdomen wasn’t distended like true starvation. And indeed, as Skitch had reported, there were no apparent marks indicating drug use or violent death. Actually, she realized, there were no bruises or contusions of any kind. That was really odd, since fragile, malnourished skin like this should have marked at the slightest bump.
She looked closely at the features. They were lean and angular, almost aristocratic; sharp nose, strong jaw, and lips that even in death held a slight puffiness, almost a sensuality. Even his crew cut, years out of style, did not diminish his appeal. In life, this boy was probably the one parents warned their teenage daughters about to no avail.
“Pretty boy, isn’t he?” Danielle murmured.
“Yeah,” Skitch agreed. “I used to hate those guys in school.”
“Jealous?”
“Hell, yeah.”
Danielle smiled. She may not have known this John Doe’s real name, but she knew him; she’d seen kids like this all over downtown, lurking in shadows and doorways, standing in huddled groups, walking aimlessly down the streets. They never did anything, though; they just stood there, watching life pass by with their dead shark eyes, like people watch fish in an aquarium. Many still sported flower power fashions in style during the late sixties, the typical fashion lag between Memphis and the rest of the world. They were dangerous, but it was such a vague danger it was hard to take them seriously. They all looked so weak, so fragile, that it seemed impossible they could actually do any damage. Until, she thought wryly, they start cutting off your toes.
And this one, lying naked in front of her, flat and flaccid, didn’t even look remotely dangerous now. Just sad, in a disgusting sort of way. The only menace he held was the negligible chance he might be able to hide his own cause of death from Danielle. She wasn’t worried, though. Far smarter corpses had tried that and failed.
“Well, we won’t learn anything just sitting here rehashing the obvious. Let’s go take a look.” She nodded at Skitch. “Show me your stuff. Start the blood work.”
“I would have,” Skitch said, “except . . . well . . .”
“What?”
“Well . . . and I swear I haven’t been watching those monster movies on Channel 3, but . . . there’s no blood.”
“Cause of death is blood loss?” homicide detective Lyman Newlin repeated.
“Severe blood loss,” Danielle said into her office phone. She sat with her shoes off, stocking feet propped on her overturned wastebasket. She was not looking forward to this conversation. “There’s a difference.”
A little whine of disbelief tinged Newlin’s voice. “I looked him over myself, you know. There wasn’t a mark on him.”
“Yep, we noticed that, too.”
“And no blood anywhere around him. So how exactly did he bleed to death?”
“Well, that’s the jive part of it. There are no injuries, no internal damage, nothing. The only breaks in the skin are the ones we made after we got him here, and even as overworked as we are lately, I’m pretty sure we didn’t just misplace all that blood.”
“Jeez, how much did he lose?”
Danielle paused before answering. Up until now it was an odd case, but not an exceptional one. Her answer to Newlin’s question would seriously up the ante, and Newlin and everyone else would expect her to solve the mystery. Once you got the reputation as a wonder woman, it never went away. She closed her eyes and said, “All of it.”
“ ‘All’?”
“Yep. Not a drop left in him.”
She heard Newlin slap one broad hand down on the surface of his desk. “Okay, Danielle, you’re the expert. What can do that?”
“I don’t know at this point. No injury, that’s for sure. Even a cut into a major artery couldn’t drain him this dry.”
“Must be some kinda new disease, then.”
“You the coroner now, Lyman?”
“Sure, I’ll be the coroner. How hard is it to go, ‘I dunno’?”
“Oh, kiss my ass, Lyman, I’m being serious.”
“Don’t get your blood-spattered apron in a wad. And I’m being serious, too. Could it be some kinda new disease?”
“Well, sure, it could be, if it’s one I’ve never heard of, and if this kid happens to be its very first recorded victim. And I’ve already checked with the CDC in Atlanta, by the way; they’ve got nothing like this.”
Newlin whistled. “This is weird.”
“Yeah.” She lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of her old one. “That’s the word of the day, all right.”
Newlin called her office the next day. “My turn to freak you out. We ID’d that kid.”
“Yeah?” Danielle said.
“Yeah. Name’s Todd Jonathan Crealey. Disappeared August 19, 1965, from Tupelo. Considered a runaway.”
“God, he must’ve been just a baby. Was he kidnapped?”
“Well . . . not exactly. Are you sitting down?”
“No, but I’m firmly leaned against a load-bearing wall, will that do?”
“We’ll see. According to the missing-persons report filed at the time, he was seventeen when he disappeared. He’d be in his mid-twenties now.”
“Then it’s the wrong kid,” Danielle said with certainty.
“Nope, checked and double-checked. One hundred percent certainty. ID’d by fingerprints, dental records, photo ID by family. It’s him.”
“Oh, come on, Lyman, this
kid’s not much more than sixteen or seventeen now. Believe me, I know what it’s like to look young for your age, but not that young.”
“I know. But it’s him. I spoke to the parents myself. They showed me a picture of him. He’d lost some weight, but otherwise he looks just like he did when he vanished. Even has the same haircut. Damnedest thing I ever saw.” He paused. “Are you sure the body was . . . fresh?”
“ ‘Fresh’?”
“Yeah, you know. Maybe he’d been stuck in somebody’s meat freezer all this time and just now thawed out?”
“He was fresh, Lyman,” she said in annoyance. “Look, there is no way that is the body of a twenty-seven-year-old man.”
“I believe you. I saw him myself. But there’s the truth.”
“Christ, Lyman.” She rubbed her temples with her free hand. “All right, I’ll go back and check—”
“Can’t. Parents are here to claim the body.”
“Don’t they think it’s weird? Don’t they want to know what happened to their son?”
“They think the Lord taketh away and the Lord giveth back, blessed is the name of the Lord, and don’t try to figure out His ways.”
“Oh, God,” Danielle said with disgust. “Baptists?”
“You know it.”
“Can’t you find some reason to hold the body?” She felt like a child trying to change a parent’s mind. “We have to be missing something important here.”
“Sorry. Dropping dead on the street ain’t a crime. I’d love to know, too, but we got to consider the family here. They’ve been waiting a long time to find out what happened to their boy.”
“Shit.” She hung up, shut her office door, then snapped every pencil on her desk in frustration.
Lyman Newlin opened the double door and led the couple down the tiled hall. The rooms, once painted a vivid lime green for some reason, were now faded and stained so that the passage gave a vague sense of nausea to outsiders. The antiseptic odor and cold air didn’t help. The summer sweat on his neck felt like it was freezing to his skin.
