In the place of honor, dead center of the display wall, hang two poster-sized prints of a naked girl, front and back. She is young. No longer a child, but still in her teens by my best guess. Her hair is buzzed short, little more than dark stubble over a well-shaped skull. Her face is beautiful, with lovely bones that might have been carved from flawless marble by a master hand. High cheekbones, lips full but not pouty, eyes spaced just wide enough for interest with an upturned slant that hints at a Eurasian heritage. Even in death her skin looks airbrushed and seems to glow from within.
But from the jawline down she is covered in tattoos; part artist’s canvas, part mystery.
A world tree sprouts from her navel, the trunk running up the center of her torso. Branches spread outward, twining up onto her shoulders and down her arms. Flowers and birds are woven into the branches. On her back is the mirror image. Roots trace the length of her thighs and calves, tiny earth dwelling creatures cradled among them.
“Now what is our World Tree Girl doing here?” Jake’s thoughts echo my own. He takes the camera from me and snaps pictures of the wall, close-up and from a distance.
Nearly a month ago, these very same pictures were brought to our attention by Sophronia, the undertaker’s daughter, after they surfaced on a blog she follows called Underground Weird. The blog listed autopsy findings so bizarre they could be easily dismissed as sensational fiction. A bloodless body. Veins filled with a gelatinous substance of unknown composition. No apparent cause of death.
I have reason to know that this isn’t fiction. There is one paranormal who kills like this, a creature nicknamed the Medusa, thanks to the clear jelly she injects into the veins of her victims. She is also the one paranormal I’ve encountered that I don’t know how to kill.
Jake and I, along with Sophronia, the undertaker’s daughter, and Matt, the cook at the Manor, have done our best to track down the identity of the dead girl and the host of Underground Weird. Between the four of us, we have access to multiple law enforcement and FBI databases and cutting-edge technological know-how, and yet all our efforts so far have yielded nothing.
“Maybe we’ve finally found our blogger,” Jake says, now.
“If so, somebody found him first.”
By common consent, we turn to examine the body.
Dason sits in an office chair, slumped forward, left hand resting in his lap, right dangling down to the floor. Beside the chair, directly beneath his limp, blood-blackened fingers, rests a small handgun.
His head is bent forward onto his chest. On the right-hand side of his skull, where the bullet entered, there’s only a small hole. It’s the left side that’s ruined, where the hollow point did the most damage on exit. His eye is missing, the socket shattered. His face, what’s left of it, is smooth-shaven and soft. He’s neither lean nor gone to fat, like his mother. He is neatly dressed, nothing fancy, but the blue jeans and button-up shirt look clean in the spaces unmarked by blood.
On the desk is a laptop, closed, plugged into the charger.
“Hell,” Jake says. “Not much of a life. Work sucks, boss is riding him, and he can never quite get away from all this. That Hemsley woman is probably right about suicide.”
“Why would he come back here to do that? Revenge against mommy and a disgusting childhood?”
“He could have killed the girl and then himself out of remorse.” Jake stalks across the room, careful to avoid stepping on blood spatter or disturbing the scene.
I stay where I am, thinking.
“She’s a lot younger than he is,” Jake says. “Maybe he seduced her, had sex with her, then killed her out of guilt.”
“If he felt guilty about killing her, he wouldn’t have put her pictures up on the blog.”
“We don’t know that he did that,” Jake protests. “Evidence, Maureen. Somebody else could have done the blog. Whatever the reason, there’s no reason to think this is murder.”
“Evidence is for court. He’s our blogger and somebody killed him.”
“Oh, come on, Maureen. Gun’s right there. Look around the room—he never moved on from adolescence. Probably hasn’t ever had a girlfriend. And he obviously had a sick fascination with death.”
I can’t argue with any of this, but at the same time I can’t help seeing the photographs as something beautiful, not the product of a sick mind. And something else about this scene is bothering me, though I can’t put my finger on what. “I don’t see a suicide note, do you?”
“Most people don’t bother to write one. Especially this kid. Who’s going to read it?”
But even as he says this, he picks his way around the edge of the room to get a look at the desk. “Nothing here.”
“Maybe it’s in the laptop.”
Jake’s eyes narrow and I keep my own face innocent and open. “He was a geek. And a millennial. Everything’s electronic for them.”
Jake starts taking pictures again, making a photographic record. The position of the body. The laptop. The gun. Details of the kid’s face and hands. And then he puts on a pair of gloves and gingerly opens the laptop, careful not to disturb its placement on the desk.
The laptop must have been closed when Dason died. The only blood on the screen is from drops that seeped in around the edges, forming a macabre picture frame around a whole lot of nothing.
The only icons are for basic, run-of-the-mill software. Not a single window is open. Jake closes the lid and glances in my direction. “What?”
“I never said anything.”
“You don’t have to. You’re thinking very loudly.”
“Well, first off, I think it’s weird that not only are all the windows closed, he’s exited all the programs.”
“He was finished with everything. Done. He liked things neat and tidy, you can see that.”
“But wouldn’t he want to have a connection to somebody or something? A last Facebook post, a goodbye of some kind?”
He fixes me with a withering glare. “The laptop is evidence. And you are not on the evidence team.”
“So, deputize me.”
“It was a suicide, Maureen. Evidence is going to bear that out.”
“Bets?”
He sighs. “Everything is not some elaborate FBI setup. This is a small town. People kill themselves. Especially young white males afflicted with parental units like Geneva.”
“You’re not even going to investigate?”
“It’s the coroner’s call. Speak of the devil,” he says, as heavy booted footsteps reverberate on the stairs. A large man in biker leathers and a red bandanna blocks the doorway.
“Tell me you haven’t moved that body.” His voice positively booms into the room, a deep basso profundo that vibrates down into my toes. In my experience, a voice like that is usually incongruously connected to some skinny sapling that looks like I could snap him in half with my bare hands. Not this time. This guy is at least six foot four and built like a linebacker. Straight black hair in a braid, brown eyes, skin the color of mahogany. A small tattoo marks the angle of his jaw, but I can’t make out what it is from here.
“We’re just looking,” Jake says, evenly. “Not touching. How’s it going, Mac?”
The man stays planted in the doorway, eyes probing into every nook, corner, and cranny of the room. “Eh, it’s been better, it’s been worse. I want to take some pictures. Without you in them.”
He’s got a professional grade camera slung around his neck, and carries what looks like a toolbox in his right hand. He sets this down in a blood-free space and gets to work. I watch with approval as he pulls out plastic numbers and sets them up around the room, marking the obvious evidence. Looks like he’s going to do this right.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Jake says. “We’ll go have another chat with the mother.”
“Good luck with that one. If Geneva’s got two brain cells left to rub together after all the years of booze, I’ll be a ballerina. Not that she had a lot to start with.”
“You know
her then?” I ask.
The gaze that turns on me is intense and scrutinizing. “Not well, but it’s a small county. You, I don’t know at all.”
“She’s with me,” Jake says. “Mac, this is Maureen. Maureen, meet our new coroner.”
Mac grunts, his face revealing nothing, then turns his back and takes another photo. Definitely a professional upgrade from our last coroner, who was a curvy, giggly blonde. She also murdered my former partner, Phil, and then ran off to Europe.
“This isn’t suicide,” I say.
Mac lowers the camera with exaggerated slowness and turns to glare at me. “Evidence first. Go theorize elsewhere.”
Chapter Three
Elsewhere leads me back upstairs, where Geneva sits, unmoving, a steaming mug in her hands.
“Drink up, dear. It’s chamomile. It will help to relax you.” Mrs. Hemsley sinks down beside her and puts a comforting arm around her shoulders.
Geneva moves like a wound-up automaton, taking a sip on command. She lowers the cup in the same mechanical fashion, staring into the depths of the beverage as if she has no idea what it is or why she is holding it.
“Maybe something a little stronger?” she asks. “To take the edge off.”
The older woman stiffens. “Alcohol is not the solution. This is the time to turn to the good Lord—”
“Listen here, Evelyn Hemsley, when your son is dead in your basement, feel free to preach to me. I want a drink. Don’t you think about throwing it away. I know how you are.”
“I’m just trying to help. Bending over backward. Don’t you think—”
“Ladies, please.” Jake lifts a pile of unfolded laundry out of the chair across from Geneva, uprooting something small and black from the tangle of clothes that scuttles across the seat and disappears over the side.
He sits down. I stay on my feet.
“Now. I need a little bit of information from you, okay?” Jake’s tone is gentle.
Geneva’s eyes are blank, but she nods. His voice brings her back enough that she remembers the cup and takes a small sip of the tea.
“That’s the ticket,” Jake says, nodding approvingly. “Now, did Dason still live with you?”
“He’s got an apartment in Spokane. Just came home for…” Her voice quivers. She takes a deep breath. “He got fired. That bitch let him go.”
Her face crumples. When her hands start shaking, Mrs. Hemsley takes the cup from her.
“Need a smoke. Just a sec.” Geneva fumbles a cigarette out of the package. Jake lights it for her. The smoke wreathes up around her head.
“Okay. Dason’s boss let him go,” Jake says, ever patient. “He came home when?”
“I was away. For the weekend. Sister bought tickets to Vegas.”
My imagination tries to capture this wreckage of a woman on a plane, in a casino. Well, that part fits. I can picture her, cigarette in one hand, the other pulling the slots, and all the while sonny boy is lying dead in the basement at home.
“Loved his job, although I can’t say why. Called me to say she’d let him go, and some upset he was by that. I should have been here for him. And maybe he wouldn’t have…”
The grief breaks through with the sudden violence of a wrecking ball. Great wrenching sobs suck all the oxygen out of the room. She drops the cigarette, lit, on top of a newspaper and tears at her hair, wailing loudly.
A flicker of bright flame erupts from the edge of the paper. Mrs. Hemsley jerks it onto the floor, where it ignites a fabric softener sheet and a candy wrapper. I stomp the fire out with both feet, feeling a squish and a small pop of something buried beneath the litter.
Jake grabs the still smoldering cigarette and stabs it out in an overflowing ashtray. I stamp on the paper one more time, just to be sure. Mrs. Hemsley pats the mother’s shoulder and makes little clucking noises.
When the wails ease to sobs, Jake leans forward and takes one of Geneva’s hands.
“Bear with me a little bit. Just a few more questions, okay?”
She nods, gulping in air and making a little whimpering sound.
“Where did he work? I’d like to talk to his former boss, maybe his coworkers.”
Her brow draws down so low it nearly obscures her eyes. Her fists clench. “I’ll kill the bitch if I ever get my hands on her.”
This is too much for Mrs. Hemsley. “Now, now, Geneva dear. Forgiveness is of the Lord.”
“Fuck that,” Geneva says. “She killed my baby, sure as she murdered him with her own hands.”
“I’ll look into that for you,” Jake says. “I promise. But you have to tell me who she is.”
“She deserves the chair. I want to hear her flesh sizzle.” Geneva leans forward, her fleshy face wobbling, tears and snot dripping. “Her name is Kate something or other. She’s the ME at the city morgue in Spokane.”
Jake’s body goes tense, although to his credit the expression on his face doesn’t change. “What is it about her that is so evil? Apart from the fact that she fired Dason?”
“She was always on his case. A few little photographs of dead bodies and you’d think he killed somebody. What do dead people need with privacy? He wasn’t hurting a soul.”
“So the posters in his room,” I ask her, “he took those?”
“Walmart wouldn’t let him print them posters at their store. Like it’s any of their business, you know? He had to send away to get them posters made. He was an artist. Nobody understood him.”
“So he’d have been upset about getting fired then.”
Geneva shakes her head. “I expected that. He loved that job. But he said he was onto something big and it didn’t matter. Somebody wanted to buy his pictures, he said. He was all full of himself with that. ‘How’d you like to move into a real house, Mom?’ And now he’s…” She can’t bring herself to say the word and reaches for the cigarette pack instead.
Jake sighs, pushes back his chair, and gets to his feet.
“We are going to do a full investigation,” he says, not looking at me. “There’s going to be a crime scene team coming in.”
“Like CSI?”
“Sort of. It’s very important that you stay out of the basement.”
Both women shiver, as if on cue. Geneva starts crying again.
“Is that really necessary?” Mrs. Hemsley asks. “I mean, it seems quite clear what happened. Not that I looked very closely, of course, it’s all so terribly gruesome and sad.” Her voice drifts away, and she sniffs and digs in a capacious purse for a tissue.
“Do you know if anybody came to the house while you were away?” Jake asks. “Mailman, neighbors, anybody at all?”
“No reason for anybody to come up here, is there?” Geneva replies. “I mean, Evelyn stopped by to check on things, but that’s all.”
“Did you see anything suspicious while Geneva was away?”
“Nothing,” Mrs. Hemsley answers. “But I must confess I didn’t come in. Let’s be honest, it’s not the most comfortable environment. And then I saw that Dason’s truck was here, so I saw no point in checking again. If only I had come in sooner, maybe everything would have been different.”
There’s nothing to be said in response to that. I get up and follow Jake out the door, the sound of weeping loud in my ears even after we’re in the car and driving away.
• • •
We drive for a good fifteen minutes before we say a word to each other. Jake calls in details to dispatch and asks for the crime scene unit. I watch the trees go by, and wait, letting him bring up the issue that hangs heavy between us.
“We have to follow protocols,” he says, finally. “You know this.”
“They’ll rule it a suicide.”
“Maybe it is.” But he sounds less certain than he did a while ago.
“And if the ME is involved? You going to send the body up to her for an autopsy?”
“What do you expect me to do? Spirit away the body and the evidence? Pretend it didn’t happen? Dispatch knows I went to th
e scene. Once she gets over the shock, Geneva is going to blab all over the community. She’s the sort of woman who will embrace grief as a status changer. As for the Hemsley person, she’s probably already notified the prayer chain. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. Can’t you do something? What about your people?”
Jake means the super-secret X-files-type FBI unit I used to work for.
Before a paranormal damn near killed me during a stake-out. Before I was too old and damaged to be of value. Before the Medusa surfaced and I became a liability because I knew too much about their involvement in her origins.
I stare at him in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? ‘My people’ took out a hit on me, in case that has slipped your mind. Dason was going to sell pictures of the World Tree Girl. If we’re right in guessing the Medusa killed her, then my people are at the top of my suspect list.”
Jake swears a long, elaborate string of fluent curses that raises my spirits. In fact, I’m feeling better than I have in a good long while.
“So, about the ME—” I venture, when he stops to take a breath.
“I can’t do anything about that. I can hardly refuse to send the body to the ME in Spokane without making all kinds of wild accusations.”
“How well do you know the new coroner?”
“Mac? Seems like a pretty solid guy, as far as his community reputation goes. He grew up in this area, but I don’t know him personally.”
“And Charlene was a well-respected physician. Look how that ended up.”
Jake shrugs. “Every man—or woman—has a price, I suppose.”
“Maybe we should hold the body here, at the funeral parlor. Set a deputy to watch it.”
“If I do that, am I putting my people at risk?”
World Tree Girl Page 2
