Blood Groove

by Alex Bledsoe

  Newlin knew this corridor far too well. A fifteen-year veteran of the Memphis police force, he’d suffered through the awful events surrounding the death of Dr. King, where for a few hours it seemed as if the race war many whites feared was about to erupt. He knew that the truth had not come out in the Ray trial, and probably never would: too many reputations at stake, and too many appalling lapses of judgment and decency. But compared to that hellish period, a regular investigation, even one as quirky as this one, was a cakewalk. After all, once the body was identified and claimed, this case was closed.

  Newlin frowned as they approached the door to the autopsy room. Danielle stood outside it, arms crossed. She was dressed impeccably, her short hair styled and makeup neatly applied. It made her look a little like a small girl imitating her mother, but the glare in her eyes was all adult, and all aimed at Newlin. She managed a sincere-looking smile for the parents.

  “Detective Newlin,” she said as he approached. She turned to the others. “And you must be Mr. and Mrs. Crealey. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  They were certainly of a piece, Danielle thought. Mr. Crealey looked a lot like his son, down to the old-fashioned crew cut. His skin was tanned, with a red flush along his neck and the tops of his unprotected ears. The tan ended, she bet, just above his elbows and just below his collar. The rest of his skin would be pasty white, never seen in the light of day except in the privacy of his bedroom. The slight bulge in one side of his lip showed where his tobacco chaw usually nested, and the network of reddish veins on the end of his nose betrayed his drinking habits.

  Mrs. Crealey had a beehive hairdo that made her almost as tall as her husband. She was round in every direction, and wore a flower-patterned dress with white lace at the too-tight collar. She carried a small purse daintily in both hands, from which she withdrew a crumpled tissue to wipe her eyes. She’d eschewed mascara, which was good. If only she’d done the same for her eye shadow. There was enough blue paint under her eyebrows to redo the dented fender on Danielle’s old Malibu.

  “I’m Dr. Roseberry, assistant head coroner,” Danielle said politely. “I wanted to be here to answer any questions you might have.”

  “That’s mighty kind of you,” Mrs. Crealey said between sniffles. Mr. Crealey nodded.

  “Isn’t it, though?” Newlin said, glaring at Danielle. He knew exactly why she was here; normally this kind of duty was delegated to someone like Skitch, since it could become uncomfortably emotional. “Well, Doctor Roseberry, would you please get on with it?”

  She led them into the morgue, where their son’s body lay on a gurney, covered by a sheet. Mrs. Crealey moved close to her husband, who put one arm across her shoulders. His face was impassive.

  “I should warn you,” Newlin said, “that the body’s condition might surprise you.”

  “Is he all tore up?” the father asked. It was the first time he’d spoken, and his voice was raw.

  “The exact opposite,” Danielle said, and pulled back the sheet.

  Even though she expected it and was braced for it, the caterwauling wail that burst from Mrs. Crealey made Danielle jump. The woman’s knees buckled, and her husband had to grab her under the arms to keep her from falling to the floor. “That’s my baby!” she wailed. “My baby!”

  Newlin again glared at Danielle. The woman’s pain was so genuine it should make them both feel like intruders, but Newlin suspected that, deep down, Danielle felt little or no real sympathy. She merely waited for the right moment to ask her questions, to solve this abstract puzzle. It was a contradictory aspect of her personality usually masked by her prim, proper surface. Even though he often felt paternal toward her, and occasionally lustful, at the moment Newlin considered Danielle just as thoroughly creepy as any other coroner he’d known.

  “Why?” the mother wailed. “Why?”

  “Is that your son, Mr. Crealey?” Newlin asked sympathetically. The man nodded. Newlin pulled the sheet back over the body. “Well, then, we can go.”

  “Excuse me,” Danielle said, sliding smoothly in front of Newlin. “Mr. and Mrs. Crealey, did your son have any unusual medical conditions?”

  Mrs. Crealey shook her head. “No, ma’am, he was as healthy as a horse all his life. All his life . . .” She let out another wail and clung to her husband.

  Newlin physically shoved Danielle aside. “That’s all we have time for, Dr. Roseberry. Thank you for joining us.” When she started to speak again, he glared at her with all his considerable authority. She bit back her comments and, fuming with frustration, watched him escort the parents out.

  Then she was alone again with Todd Crealey. Echoes of his mother’s wails continued for several moments.

  She drew back the sheet and stared at him. His handsome face seemed to mock her with its inscrutable peace. “You pissant bastard son of a bitch,” she said. “You will not outsmart me, no matter what.” He neither reacted nor responded.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE BELL OVER the bait-shop door rang as Gwinny entered. “Hey, Mark-o Polo, you around?”

  Mark looked up from behind the counter, where he’d just finished cutting fresh apple slices for the cricket box. It was 2:00 A.M. “Hey, Gwinny. What’s up?”

  “Nothing’s up for me, white boy. I’m going home to a cold bed,” she said as she wiped her forehead. “Three more weeks and I’m supposed to go to first shift. ’Bout damn time.”

  “I’ll sure miss you,” Mark said genuinely.

  “Aw, I think you mean it,” she teased as she leaned meaty forearms on the counter.

  “I do,” he said. With his hands clutched over his heart he said in mock seriousness, “You make the night shift bright as day.”

  She laughed, big and hearty. “Brought you today’s paper,” she said, and used it to swat a fly on the counter; it made a loud smack. “So how you making it with that poem book I gave you?”

  Mark smiled. Tonight Gwinny smelled like pastries, not fried chicken, which meant she’d changed duties again. He preferred this one; the aura of fried anything reminded him too much of the smell of burning flesh, and that made him think of Praline. “It’s pretty good. I dig that one poem, ‘How Long.’ Lot of righteousness in it.”

  “Damn straight.” She patted the paper. “Every time I read in the news about some more kids getting wasted out of their lives, I ask myself that question.” She mimicked his pose, hands over her heart. “ ‘How long, O gracious God, how long / Shall power lord it over right?’ It takes on a whole new meaning when you got your own to look after.”

  Mark nodded. “And I keep thinking of the line from ‘The Misanthropist,’ where he says, ‘From earliest youth my path has been / Cast in life’s darkest, deepest shade.’ ”

  She looked at him skeptically. “Now what’s so hard about your life, Polo? You a nice-looking, polite white boy. You could always go to college and then get a job where you don’t have to spend all night tending to worms and bugs. You just here because you either want to be, or you think you don’t deserve any better. Every time I see you, I try to figure which it is.”

  “Now, Gwinny, you know I work here just for the chance to discuss literature with you, don’t you?” He winked. She’d never know how true that really was.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Polo, how come you always changing the subject whenever I ask how you ended up here?”

  “Because half of romance is mystery, you know.”

  “Romance,” she snorted. “One time I’m gonna come over that counter and show you romance. Then maybe I’ll get some straight answers.”

  “You betcha,” he said, imitating her accent and head bob. “Hard and straight.”

  She laughed, a loud bark of surprise and amusement. “You too full of it, Polo. See you later.”

  Mark checked the security mirrors to verify that the store was currently empty, and placed the newspaper neatly on the counter, front page first. He read every word of every story methodically, and so it was thirty minutes before he reached the s
econd page of section B, Local News, and found the story of Toddy’s body discovered downtown three days previously and claimed by his parents yesterday.

  Danielle sat on her couch and drank her third Michelob as the TV droned on in the background. It was Friday night, she was a little drunk, a lot perplexed, and wished there were more than three TV stations in Memphis to choose from. PBS didn’t count; all frilly collars and snooty accents.

  In the time since Todd Crealey’s parents picked up his body, she’d autopsied seven victims of violent or untimely ends, whether they needed her expert attention or not. In each case she’d pinpointed the cause of death precisely, to the point of being able to make an accurate educated guess about either the caliber or dosage involved before the lab results came back. To all outward appearances her whiz-kid reputation was secure, and her coworkers went to great lengths to let her know they considered the Crealey thing a fluke. Hell, sooner or later everyone ran up on something they couldn’t explain, right? The Grand Unification Theory eluded Einstein, and nobody thought any less of him. And nobody would think any less of Danielle Roseberry because of one fluky case.

  Right.

  She reached under her shirt and unsnapped her bra. With a deep sigh, she slipped off her shoes and knee-high stockings and stretched out on the couch. She’d been a practicing coroner for six years now, but she still felt the same rush when she took her first look at a new body, a delicious puzzle waiting to be solved. She liked dealing with the dead, morbid though it was, because of that beautiful consistency. Corpses weren’t like living people: they died from one cause, and that didn’t change by the next day. Sick people were always changing, and too many of them changed beyond anyone’s ability to help.

  She’d embarrassed many of her elder colleagues on her way up the department ladder, but their resentment and attempts to sabotage her career couldn’t overcome the fact that she was just a whole lot better than they were. Even Dr. Francisco, the head medical examiner, had to grit his teeth and smile when she diplomatically pointed out errors in some of his work. As the cops who worked directly with her rose within the police force, they assisted her rise to assistant head coroner. Prosecutors loved putting her on the stand, and she secretly enjoyed the attention.

  She had no desire to move up any higher, because the top spot was mainly an administrative one, and Francisco filled it admirably, always ready to answer the media’s insistent questions. She lacked the patience for such nonsense, something she and everyone else in the department knew full well. She liked it in the trenches, liked being the expert, liked the way people came to her to solve the enigmas when everyone else had failed, and really liked the way respect lit up in their eyes when she did it.

  And now this damn twenty-seven-year-old-who-looked-seventeen crew-cut bozo was going to destroy all that.

  It’d be a subtle change, she knew. The admiring looks wouldn’t be as intense, and no matter how many times she got it right after this, she’d always be less than perfect. Eventually, some new hotshot would come along, blithely solve the old case (probably known by then as “Roseberry’s Folly”), and replace her as the department golden child. It would probably be a man, able to navigate the good-ole-boys network and advance far more rapidly than she’d done. God, what would she do then?

  She took another drink. It was the weekend, she was alone thinking of dead people, and it felt perfectly normal. On TV, part-mechanical Lee Majors applied his bionic charms to a California lovely; was Danielle’s life missing something? She hadn’t had sex in a year and half, but she hadn’t really missed it, either. She’d never had what she would call “good” sex, the kind she’d read about where you writhe and scream and sweat. She was no women’s-libber interested in one-night stands for the fun of it to prove her equality with men. And she was so settled now, she couldn’t see rearranging her whole life just so some guy could spend fifteen minutes on pointless copulation.

  No, as weird as it would sound to anyone else, she knew the truth. Her work was her life, the autopsy was her sex, and the moment when she pinpointed the cause of death was her climax. If it was a simple matter, like a bullet wound to the head, it was a quick and insignificant one; if it was more complicated, then there was the exquisite buildup, the total submergence in the act to the exclusion of all else, and then the gorgeous release when it all became clear. It was odd, but it was her.

  And suddenly she sat up straight. She knew, in a flash of scary personal insight, why Todd Crealey’s death gnawed at her. She was horny for it. This was the ultimate fuck for her, the one with a buildup so prolonged, so sweetly torturous that it was as much agony as pleasure. And, waiting at the end along with Todd Crealey’s cause of death, was the sweetest professional orgasm ever. It was, as Skitch would say, motherfucking necrophilia, plain and simple.

  She fell back against the cushions and laughed. God Almighty, what would her coworkers think of that? She knew they considered her quiet, virginal, the spinster librarian of the M.E. world; could they imagine her dripping with lust, sweaty and trembling with desire? Did any of them harbor desires as dark as her own, needs they could barely fathom and never articulate?

  The beer spread its wooziness through her. Fine, she thought. She’d find out what had killed the little bastard, all right. And then she’d lay back, smoke a cigarette, and mutter to the corpse, “Was it good for you, too?”

  CHAPTER 7

  TWO HOURS BEFORE dawn, Mark twisted the padlock off the warehouse door. The protesting metal echoed his own simmering fury. Then he shoved the door aside so hard it flew off the end of the sliding track, balanced for a moment, then hit the floor. Birds in the rafters, startled awake, chirped and fluttered about to new roosts. Rats and other vermin scurried in fright.

  “Goddam, boy, what’s the matter with you?” Leonardo called from the darkness.

  Mark lifted the door and slammed it back into place, bending the track so that it was jammed shut; he’d fix it later. “Where’s Fauvette?”

  Leonardo dropped from the shadows near the ceiling, stroking a rat held in his fist. He wore an orange Tennessee Volunteers jersey and blue jeans, and might’ve been any athletic black boy from any Memphis neighborhood. He was the oldest of the warehouse vampires, born around 1900, but he’d never been more specific and it was against Mark’s nature to pry. At least Leonardo took care of himself and made a serious effort to pass when he went onto the streets. “You make a lot of noise.”

  “Where . . . is . . . Fauvette?” Mark said through his teeth.

  “Whoa, honky bro. The walking ant farm is down in her box, far as I know.” He grinned. “Damn if that don’t rhyme.”

  Mark pulled the clipping about Toddy from his pocket and pressed it into Leonardo’s free hand, then went toward the door marked BOILER ROOM—CAUTION. He slammed the door behind him just as he heard Leonardo exclaim, “Aw, man, no way!”

  Debris, including some old office furniture they’d found in the weeds out back, filled the stairwell to the boiler room where Fauvette, Toddy, and Leonardo kept their coffins. Passage would be monumentally difficult without a vampire’s natural grace and strength, and stealth would be impossible. The drawback, and the reason neither Mark nor Olive slept down there, was the lack of any rear exit. Mark’s reasoning was practical: he didn’t want to be pinned in, like Praline had been. Olive had never shared her reason.

  The boiler room was a large, dark cavern of broken pipes, wiring, and concrete. Mark’s vampire eyes saw it clearly, though, and again he was astounded at just how immature creatures could be that had existed for half a century. Leonardo’s coffin was shiny and black, lined with red silk. A Tennessee Vols sticker decorated one end, and a poster of Donna Summer, with vampire fangs added, hung to greet him upon awakening. Two dozen sports-related T-shirts lay neatly arranged on a horizontal pipe, and his sports card collection filled three narrow white boxes. Given how long he’d been collecting them, they probably were pretty valuable.

  Still, his little nest wa
s a model of maturity next to Toddy’s. The sides of his simple pine box were painted with the Confederate battle flag. Clothes stolen from Laundromats were piled on the floor, and three sets of army boots waited for feet that would never return. Worst was the severed lower leg of his former girlfriend, hung by the ankle above the coffin and currently home to half the Southeast’s maggot population. The toenails were still painted sky blue.

  Fauvette had found the warehouse, so she had the best spot, inside the shell of the old boiler. Her coffin was simple brown mahogany that was once very expensive, but had dried and mildewed over years of neglect. The metal strips peeled away at the corners, and the lid was no longer attached. It lay askew, covering Fauvette’s face but exposing her legs from knees to toes. Around the coffin, shoved into the holes where pipes once carried steam from the boiler, were the shreds of her clothing.

  Fauvette had once been a beauty, and when Mark first moved into the warehouse she enjoyed parading as a princess of the night, enticing only the most beautiful boys (never any girls, to Mark’s knowledge) to their doom. But sometime during the last two years she had lost the drive, the desire to feed, and lately had become, as Leonardo said, “a walking ant farm.” That is, when she bothered to walk at all.

  Mark tried valiantly to control his fury, but he knocked the lid from Fauvette’s rickety coffin out the door and halfway across the boiler room. She lay on her back, naked, her skin drawn so tight that her ribs and hip bones were plain. Her closed eyes were sunk deep into their sockets, and her lips were drawn back from her teeth as if the skin had shrunk away. For a moment he actually thought she was really dead. Then she turned her head slightly, a roach scurried from her ear, and she opened her eyes a slit. “What?” she rasped.

  Annoyed that he’d been concerned even momentarily, Mark kicked the coffin. “Get up,” he snarled.