Angel of Death

by Ferguson, Alane

  “Hey, Cameryn,” Adam said. “How goes it?”

  “Well, to be honest, I’ve been better.”

  “So you’re back on ghoul patrol. Is it true that Oakes sort of . . . exploded?”

  “Don’t be insensitive,” Lyric chided. “You didn’t have Mr. Oakes, but I did and so did Cameryn. You know ever since I found out I’ve been crying my eyes out.”

  “‘Crying your eyes out’ is a poor choice of words,” Adam replied blandly. “Under the circumstances.”

  “Shut up!” Lyric demanded. “This isn’t funny.”

  “Okay, okay!” He held up his hands, his fingernails tipped in black, saying, “I was just trying to lighten the mood. Sorry if it was too much. Hey, come here,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.” Adam pulled Lyric close while she went limp against his shoulder. They were an odd pair, Cameryn thought—Lyric, with her ample frame, next to Adam, who was thin and sunken-chested, pale as milk. And yet they’d found each other, which meant that now Cameryn had to learn how to share her best friend. Ducking beneath the tape, she reached out and hugged Lyric until Adam stepped away.

  “What happened to Mr. Oakes?” Lyric wailed. “How did he die?”

  “We’re not sure. No one really knows anything yet. I was just interviewing Kyle O’Neil—”

  “Kyle?” Lyric blinked back tears. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Kyle’s the one who found Mr. Oakes. Look, I know you want answers, but at this point we haven’t got a clue what went on in that house. I promise, though, we’ll find out.”

  “It’s all so horrible. I mean with the eyes—”

  “I know,” she agreed. “But Lyric, I’ve got to get back inside. I’m actually getting paid, and I’ve got work to do, and I don’t want anyone to get upset with me. Are you okay now?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” Lyric snuffled loudly while Adam dropped his cigarette and crushed it beneath his heel. He was giving Lyric a strange look.

  “Come on, Lyric,” he said. “Why don’t you tell her so Cammie can get back to work and we can go home?”

  “That’s right,” Cameryn said. “Justin told me you had a message for me. What’s up?”

  Lyric hesitated. She rubbed the palm of her hand across the apple of her cheek and blinked hard. It didn’t look as though she’d washed her hair that morning, so it lay flat against her skull, which made it appear as if blue fingers clutched her head.

  “I don’t know if now is the time,” she began. “With all the other stuff going on.” She shot Adam a worried glance, then began. “I went back to the Grand to hang out with Adam while he was bussing tables, and then the phone rang. Adam gave the phone to me . . .” Her voice drifted off.

  Cameryn urged her, “Just tell me. They need me inside.” At that moment her father appeared at the door, instructing Cameryn to bring in the gurney. Lyric waited patiently until Patrick was safely inside before speaking. “It was your mom again.”

  Cameryn froze. “Hannah?”

  Lyric nodded. “She thought you might be back. You’re supposed to be working. So she gave me the message instead.”

  “What did she say?” Cameryn asked. She could feel her eyes going wide and scared.

  “Hannah said to tell you . . .” Lyric hesitated.

  With a quick backward glance, Cameryn put her arm around her friend and leaned her ear close to Lyric’s mouth. “Tell me,” she said softly. Cameryn’s entire head had begun to hum, as though a tuning fork had been placed beside her bones. Or maybe it was just the sound of her pulse.

  “She bought a car, Cam. She’s left New York.”

  Another twang of the fork. Cameryn’s thoughts began to vibrate, louder.

  “Hannah called it a pilgrimage. She said it might take a few days if she drove fast—a week at the most.”

  “I—I don’t understand,” she stammered.

  “Cammie, Hannah’s coming here. To meet you. She’s coming to Silverton. And she’s already on her way.”

  Chapter Six

  “SO I THINK the plan is for Sheriff Jacobs to marry Justin Crowley,” her father told her. “They’ve asked me to be the bridesmaid. I said I would do it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cameryn replied absently. She was staring out the window as they drove through downtown Durango, their station wagon making slow, steady progress through narrow streets jammed with cars. Banners sporting cornucopias and turkeys hung along Main Street, proclaiming the approach of the Thanksgiving holiday, while retail stores hopscotched past Thanksgiving directly to Christmas. On either side of the street, motorized Santas waved, reindeer nodded illuminated heads, lights festooned every shop window so that they glowed like a mini Las Vegas, and yet Cameryn registered none of it. Not even the body of her teacher, gently rocking in the back with every jolt of the car, could pull her from her thoughts. Hannah was coming to Silverton, and Cameryn’s mind could only repeat that fact, again and again.

  “Did you know we Mahoneys come from a line of leprechauns that goes all the way back to the Druids?” Patrick asked. They were stopped at a light, and his hand gently touched her shoulder, startling her. Blinking, Cameryn stared at her father.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”

  “I’ve been giving you a bit of the blarney, not that you’d notice. Where’s your head?” When he turned to look at her, his black knit turtleneck caught the hairs on the back of his neck.

  “I’m just thinking.”

  “About your teacher, Mr. Oakes.” Her father didn’t frame this as a question, so Cameryn nodded in agreement.

  “About the autopsy,” he added.

  She nodded again.

  Patrick’s pale blue eyes became anxious, flicked toward her, then darted to the body bag in the station wagon’s bay before returning to her face. She could see him trying to work things out. As his fingers drummed the steering wheel, he mentally put the pieces together, adding up the numbers and getting the sum wrong. He thought she was upset by the body stiffening up behind her, thought she was grieving over her teacher. Well, let him put two and two together and get five, she decided. I don’t need questions right now.

  “Listen to me, Cammie: There’s no shame in backing out of an autopsy. I’ve told you before, if you’re going to be able to handle the slice-and-dice, you’ve got to detach.”

  Funny, Cameryn thought. That’s exactly what I’m doing. Another click inside, and she separated herself again, as though she were a mirror that could be split into smaller and smaller pieces, each bit able to refract an ever-shrinking image. A part of her worried that she might become too fractured to ever be whole again, that her emotions were shards that would have to be reassembled later.

  “It’s out of the ordinary for Moore to do the autopsy on a Saturday,” her father was saying, shifting gears. “When I called him he said, ‘Fascinating case, Patrick. Bring the remains down and I’ll get right on it.’ It’s amazing he’s agreed to work on his day off, but I guess the MEs do that sometimes.”

  “Bet he’ll bill Durango double for working on Saturday, ” Cameryn said, relieved the conversation was going in a different direction.

  “No doubt.” Patrick cleared his throat and shot her a sideways glance. “Try not to antagonize him this time, okay?”

  Cameryn felt her eyes go wide. “I won’t! I didn’t! ” “Ah, but you know that’s not true,” he countered. “If you recall, the good doctor threw you out of the last autopsy—”

  “Okay, maybe I was a bit . . . aggressive . . . but I was right, wasn’t I?” She remembered the detail she’d discovered, and Moore’s violent reaction over Cameryn being the one to discover it. She remembered him swelling with rage and how he’d ordered her out of the room. But she also remembered that he’d helped, too, later, when it really counted. Dr. Moore was an enigma.

  “All I’m saying is that sometimes life requires diplomacy . Moore can be an egomaniacal windbag, but he’s a great medical examiner and he’s going the extra mile with this case. Let�
�s not have any trouble today.”

  “Whatever you say. Boss.” She flashed him a smile, a compensatory tactic that she hoped would calm him. It seemed to work. His features softened, especially his eyes, ice-blue and ringed in laugh lines that sprayed from the corners.

  “That’s right. I’m senior management. Try not to forget it, kid.”

  “As long as I’ve got management’s ear, I’d like to put in for a raise.”

  “Solve this case and we’ll talk.”

  It felt good to be back in their rhythm, their father/ daughter banter. Even if they both knew it was forced.

  The smile on her father’s face barely covered the worry that flowed beneath it, like a stream gurgling beneath the ice. The Mahoneys knew how to keep up appearances.

  They had pulled into the back alley now, where the flat-roofed building squatted bleakly behind Mercy Medical Center. It was a structure so unremarkable it seemed impossible from its exterior to divine its real purpose— dissecting the dead and reading their entrails like the ancient oracles Mr. Oakes had told them about in class. The alleyway led to two metal doors, which rolled open when her father tapped his horn. Ben, the diener, waved his thickly muscled arms in the air, welcoming them inside. He wore faded green scrubs and running shoes spattered in what looked like dried blood. Cameryn noticed that he’d shaved his head so smooth his scalp gleamed, dark as chocolate.

  “I was hoping Ben would be on duty today,” her father said.

  The diener assisted the medical examiner in the most grisly jobs, including sewing the corpse back together after autopsy when the dissection was done. Her father told her Ben was the best diener he’d ever seen, because in all the cases he’d worked on, Ben had never once lost his composure. “Even if he’s plucking maggots from someone’s mouth, he keeps his cool,” her father once told her.

  Craning over his shoulder, Patrick backed the station wagon into the garage. After the two of them hopped out, Ben unlatched the hatch and lifted it. Then, with an expert motion, he tugged the gurney as the wheels unfolded and banged onto the cement floor. The blue body bag remained perched atop it, misshapen because of the position of Mr. Oakes’s arms and legs. It seemed as though they had bagged a prizefighter who was trying to punch his way out.

  “Hey there, Pat,” Ben said. “Cammie. Long time no see. So this vic’s got no eyeballs, eh? No wonder Moore called us in—we got us a bona fide mystery here!” Then he added, “I thought you might have had enough of us the last time, girlfriend. You a glutton for punishment?”

  “Mr. Oakes was my teacher.”

  “Your teacher, huh?” Ben’s head dipped down as he began to push the gurney. “Sorry for your loss.” He didn’t try to say anything more, didn’t parrot words to make her feel better. His “sorry,” delivered in his deep baritone, was enough.

  “Does Dr. Moore know I’m here?” She felt a flutter when she asked this.

  “Oh, yeah, the dragon master mentioned you by name,” said Ben. “The weird thing is, I think Moore has actually taken a shine to you. If the man shines on anyone besides himself, that is.”

  Ben and her father moved the gurney up a concrete ramp, and with his backside Ben hit the door so that it swung open.

  “What do you mean ‘shine’?” Cameryn asked as she fell in step with them. She had to walk double-time to keep up. “Are you implying Moore actually likes me now?”

  “Tolerates. In my opinion he’s up to simple toleration. He respects what you did to help catch the Christopher Killer, but he’s not convinced that wasn’t a flash in the pan. And before you go getting discouraged,” Ben told her, “remember this: when you’re rating Moore’s opinions, simple toleration’s a good thing.”

  Patrick, his hand on the end of the gurney, helped steer the corpse down the narrow hallway. They pushed the gurney beneath the ceiling’s round lights, which reminded Cameryn of the ones in an operating room, the kind women gave birth under. But these had an entirely different purpose. These were birthing lights in reverse. She noticed, too, that in their glow, her skin took on a green cast.

  She’d been here before, and she remembered the used, hand-me-down feel of the place. Its brown carpet was worn in the center, like thinning hair, and the walls had been painted a flat, lifeless beige. There were several small rooms on both her right and her left, their doors ajar. As she sped past them, she got just a flash of what lay inside: feeble plants expiring, some wilting on shelves, others dying in corners, and plain chairs with metal legs.

  It was the smell, however, that let visitors know exactly what kind of building this was. It wasn’t a strong odor, but more like a hint in the air, wafting just beneath the scent of disinfectant. The charnel smell had fused into the paint, the walls, even into the very plants themselves, as though the corpses passing through had left a whisper of themselves behind, a scent that said, My body was here.

  “Are we taking him to X-ray first?” she asked Ben.

  “Uh-huh. I’ll pop him in for a quick film. The dragon master’s talking with the deputy and the sheriff in the autopsy suite, so you two go on ahead. Last I saw, they were into it pretty deep, trying to figure out what in the world could cause eyes to blow.”

  “Justin’s already here?” Cameryn asked, surprised that he’d made it ahead of them.

  “So it’s Justin now, is it?” Ben’s dark eyes twinkled.

  “Last time you were here it was ‘Deputy.’ Um-mm-mm. First time I saw the two of you together I thought I sensed something. Today Justin barely cleared the door when he asked, ‘Is Cameryn here?’ He looked mighty disappointed when I told him you weren’t. What has been goin’ on in Silverton, is what I want to know.”

  Her father stiffened. His white hair, still under the gel’s control, seemed to bristle with indignation as he growled, “My daughter is only seventeen. The man’s a deputy.”

  Ben smiled tolerantly. “Sorry. I was just making conversation. ”

  It seemed best to keep quiet, so Cameryn gave the gurney a hard push, as if she and Mr. Oakes alone were streaking for the finish line.

  “Slow down, Cammie,” her father called after her. “This isn’t a race!”

  She pretended not to hear, stopping so suddenly outside the X-ray room that Mr. Oakes’s body shifted forward; she had to place her hand on what she guessed was his knee to steady him.

  Opening the door to X-ray, she saw that the place was no bigger than a walk-in closet. A large white machine with a movable arm stood at the ready. Behind it, a revolving door led to the darkroom, painted black. Ben stepped neatly around her, his white shoes, mottled with red, squeaking on the tile. He pulled a heavy apron from a hook and shrugged it on, telling them to leave the room, please, because of radiation. “You two go on into the autopsy suite,” he instructed. “I’ll bring the decedent down in two minutes. You remember the way—first door on the right past the drinking fountain. You can’t miss it.”

  Back outside Cameryn heard a woman’s laughter echoing down the hallway, ending in an abrupt, “No way!” followed by a disembodied, “Are you serious?” Life went on, even in the morgue.

  “Cammie, wait,” her father said, hurrying beside her. He was panting a little, and his face looked flushed. “I hope you aren’t upset with me.”

  “About what?”

  “The crack I made about Justin. About you being too young for him and him being too old for you—which he is, by the way.”

  “Forget it.”