ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I must thank my conscientious and devoted editor, Anne Sowards, and my massively supportive and understanding agent, Martha Millard. My writers’ group, the Wyrdsmiths, helped tremendously, including newest member Adam Stemple, whose suggestions made me angry, but were ultimately worthwhile. Another Wyrdsmith I must pick out to honor is Kelly McCullough, who graciously allowed an homage to one of his Urbana critters, the “skitter.” Also, speaking of such matters, I must thank Rachel Gold for letting me “steal” her tough-guy fairy idea, as well as a lot of the brainstorming that went into this novel.
Naomi Kritzer and Eleanor Arnason get my gratitude not only for their work in the writers’ group, but also for their friendship and the lifeline that is our Wednesday Women of Wyrdsmiths gathering. Sean M. Murphy, also, for all his last-minute critiquing, even though this time he didn’t get much of a chance to do so.
My family, Shawn and Mason Rounds, are my biggest fans, best supporters, and, in the case of Shawn, co-conspirators. This time, however, it was my mother, Rita Morehouse, who gets the honor of Muse, since she told me, “Why not just go for it?” and I did. My father, Mort Morehouse, spent much of the writing of this book sidelined, but happily will return to his duties as “stage mom” now.
ONE
I never dreamed of being a coroner. No, when I was a little girl, I wanted to grow up to be a fairy princess or maybe a dragon-riding warrior queen. Turns out, however, there’s not a lot of call for either in the real world.
So how did I end up in Pierre working with dead people? As the newspaper’s headline read on the day I was elected: “Double-Dare You: Alexandra Connor Wins Coroner Position on a Bet.”
That pretty much sums it up.
Several months ago, after too many beers, my roommate, Robert, told me that the solution to my financial woes was in the newspaper. I thought perhaps he’d found me work as a cashier or something, but he pointed to the upcoming spring election roster where the position of coroner was listed.
Despite seeing it in black-and-white, I didn’t even believe that you could run for such an office. We Googled it. Turns out in some states, including South Dakota, you campaign for the position, like you would city council.
Robert and I also discovered online there weren’t a lot of requirements. Almost zero medical expertise was required for the job. I already had a degree in forensic science and had started medical school. Though I’d been on a, shall we say, “extended hiatus” from school due to a health crisis…of the mental kind.
I guess I never quite let go of that fairy princess thing. Let’s just say the real world isn’t always my best friend.
At any rate, Robert and I had laughed all night about the idea of me becoming county coroner. At some point he said he’d put down twenty bucks if I’d actually put my name in the hat for the job. I almost gave him his money back the next morning. Yet when I woke up, deeply hungover, the idea was still stuck in my head, bouncing around, making more and more sense, at least financially. The position paid nearly sixty thousand dollars a year. No small potatoes and one hundred percent better than the negative numbers I was pulling between my lack of employment, student loans, and, er, those medical bills.
Thus, two weeks later, completely sober, I filed paperwork and took Robert’s twenty.
Afterward, I promptly forgot about it. I mean, it wasn’t like I was going to campaign. I couldn’t just go knocking on my neighbors’ doors and say, “Hi, I’m Alex Connor, and I want to cut up bodies for the county. Please vote for me next Tuesday!”
But, I won. I fucking won the election.
Who knew that the previous coroner was completely corrupt? Not me. But apparently plenty of the voters who’d shown up that Tuesday had at least heard the rumors involving that secretary and all the cases that just happened to favor the chief of police. The guy was a dirty old man on the take and, despite being a lifelong politician who ought to have known better, he’d managed to piss off more than his share of regular voters.
It was insane, but here I was, standing in a morgue waiting for my first case.
I’d been really rather hoping to go the whole year without one. Sixty thou for doing nothing would be a pretty good gig. And, totally possible; there aren’t a lot of suspicious deaths in Pierre. In fact, in the last two years there were exactly zero homicides.
The lack of action might explain why the morgue wasn’t very spacious or fancy.
The thing that dominated the area, to which most people’s eyes were instantly drawn, was the stainless steel table. There were holes and drains and faucets that tended to fascinate and horrify any visitor to the morgue. Mostly, that was all anyone ever noticed about the place. After a good, long look at that table and even the tiniest bit of imagination, they wanted to flee.
A stalwart visitor might next see the nearby double-basin sink area. It was polished steel as well, with a few cabinets above and a counter big enough to set out all the equipment needed to perform an autopsy. Right now, laid out on a sterile white towel were a pair of dissecting scissors that looked far too much like pruning shears for most people’s comfort; surgical knives; a gallstone scoop; a cavity mirror; a few probes; and a number of double-prong flesh hooks.
If the visitor had not yet run screaming in abject horror, they might spot the wall of body freezers against the far end of the room.
No one would ever detect the cozy corner that I’d made into my makeshift office. It had been a workstation with the barest minimum equipment: a phone, space for a laptop, a chipped and rotten corkboard full of outdated safety warnings and office memorandums. I’d brought in a little, cheery area rug to go over the painted concrete floor, a spider plant, and a cheap poster of Monet’s water lilies. It was nearly comfy. I even had a chair for someone else to sit in.
Not that I got a lot of visitors.
The only other body in the morgue besides my own belonged to poor Mrs. Finnegan, who’d died peacefully in her sleep of old age. She took up one drawer in the row, waiting for her family in Minnesota to get the paperwork together to transfer her remains. She’d been fine company, not bothering me in the least, just cooling her heels patiently.
I’d been left alone here for almost three weeks, drawing pay and doing a lot of dusting and rearranging. My easy days were about to come to a bitter end, however.
I was going to miss the quiet, too. I’d needed this time alone, honestly. The last year had been so hard. My doctors told me that the best thing I could do was leave Chicago, sever all my ties to my past, tell no one where I was going, and start over somewhere new. Quit “old people, places, and things,” like Alcoholics Anonymous preached. It sounded like good advice, but I missed him…I missed Valentine.
My psychologist told me I would, but that it was a crutch. He was bad for me. He enabled my sickness.
I took a deep breath and tried to do what my therapist always said I should. Focus on the present. Focus on what was real.
I checked my watch. Where was everyone? I was supposed to have an assistant, though I had yet to really meet her. We’d pressed palms briefly at my orientation/welcome party. I had a vague memory of a fortyish brunette in a black dress with a sloshing glass of wine in one hand. She’d been the one to perform all the autopsies for my politician predecessor, and I’d hoped she’d walk me through this one.
Her loyalties had been pretty obvious at the party, the way she stage-whispered drunkenly that I looked “awfully young and inexperienced,” and, given my weird haircut, probably a lesbian.
I guess it wasn’t a really big surprise she was AWOL this morning.
Luckily, I’d enjoyed doing autopsies in med school. Most of my colleagues freaked out about touching dead people, but I found them to be like Mrs. Fi
nnegan—uncomplaining and patient. Besides, there were worse things than being dead.
I wasn’t supposed to think about those options anymore, though, was I?
Outside the door, I heard the squeak of wheels. I pushed open the double swinging doors to look down the hall. The walls that formed the entry to my cave were unadorned plaster. Bare bulbs surrounded by safety cages ran down the center of the ceiling. The wires were exposed. It was ugly, but it was honest.
Two cops wheeled the sheet-covered cart down the hall. The pair seemed like the classic odd couple. He was shorter and lither, and probably in his mid-forties. She was taller, but built more like a rectangle, and looked younger, though I couldn’t say why. In fact, if it wasn’t for the messy ponytail, I might have mistaken her for a man. I couldn’t distinguish their words in the echo chamber, but the guy seemed to be telling some wild tale, punctuated by a lot of chuckles.
Typical cops, in other words.
Frankly, I preferred corpses.
I steeled myself for the inevitable interaction as they came within range.
“Where’s the coroner?” the guy cop asked, looking around me as if hoping for someone more impressive.
No one expected a petite, twenty-six-year-old to be in charge of anything, much less the county’s morgue. This was heightened by the fact that I was in the process of growing out a very punk hairstyle, and still had spikes and a streak or two of blue. I also tended to dress in clothes that could get dirty, so I had on blue jeans and a cotton T-shirt. Knowing I was going to have company, however, I’d tossed a white lab coat on for that extra air of authority. I pointed to myself and tried to sound confident as I said, “That would be me, Alex Connor.”
“Oh, Alex, as in short for Alexandra or something,” he said, squinting at my shaggy hair. “I thought you’d be a dude.”
And, yet, somehow I knew you’d be an asshole, I managed not to say. Instead, I murmured, “Uh-huh.” I looked down at the outline of the figure underneath the white sheet. There was a manila folder on his chest. “Anything you want to tell me that’s not in this?” I picked up the file to show them.
When he didn’t answer right away, I set the folder back down and glanced up. The guy cop had his arms crossed in front of his chest, an almost defensive posture, and was looking to his partner. So, I glanced over at her as well.
She was the flintiest woman I’d ever seen. I suspected a smile might actually crack that stern face of hers. Generally, she was built like a block. Everything about her was very squared away, too. Well, except her hair. Wild, dark curls sprung out in every direction underneath her cap, defying the ponytail, and completely covering her forehead and ears. She just stared at me with an unreadable face.
Even her name was solid. The embroidered name under the badge said, simply: STONE.
“You guys have some information, right?” I prompted when neither of them said anything. “I know my predecessor was a crook, but, you know, we’re on the same team here.”
“Are we?” the guy cop asked. I noticed his name was Jones, and he didn’t look at me when he asked the question, so I wondered if he was really quizzing his partner about her loyalty for some reason.
“We should tell her,” Stone said in a voice very much like the rest of her: solid and deliberate.
“Yeah, you really should,” I agreed.
“You tell her,” Jones said gruffly.
To my surprise, he turned and walked away. His boots clomped in the corridor. The door at the far end of the hall squeaked when he pulled it open, and slammed shut hollowly, as he left.
Okay, this was getting very strange, very quickly.
I scanned the remaining cop’s face for some clue. What the hell was going on with the corpse that this Jones guy just recused himself from discussing it?
When the silence had stretched to an almost unbearable length, Stone finally asked me in a serious voice, “Do you believe in magic?”
Oh, shit. Of all things to ask…when I’d just been thinking about Valentine, too.
Breath caught in my throat so suddenly I nearly choked. All the blood drained from my face to collect in my hammering heart.
“I’ve had a…complicated relationship with magic.”
I’m not sure why I even admitted that much, but it seemed to be the answer she was looking for. The corners of her lips turned up slightly, and her eyes softened a tiny amount. “Good. Then I must tell you to be careful with this body,” she said, matter-of-factly. “There’s magic in it. Do you understand?”
“No,” I admitted, my voice little more than a hoarse rasp. I was having trouble remembering to breathe. “Not in the least.”
“We suspect this man was a necromancer. A bad magician.” She spoke slowly, carefully, very coplike, as if explaining the situation to a frightened child. I had to admit that wasn’t too far from the truth, given how small I felt and how much my body was shaking. “Someone who uses the dead for rituals.”
I nodded, despite myself. I did know what a necromancer was, even if I wasn’t ready to talk about it.
She continued, “There may be a booby trap, a spell inside him that might—”
At the word spell, I held up my hand. “Stop.”
She waited while I tried to compose myself. It wasn’t easy. My entire body quivered with each heartbeat.
Finally, I was able to muster enough righteous indignation to sputter, “Spell, huh? Now I know what’s going on.”
“I don’t under—”
I grabbed the gurney from her with a violent jerk. “I know what you’re doing,” I said more firmly than I felt. “This is some sort of cruel joke and I’m not falling for it. I don’t know how you found out about my problems, but it’s not cool to poke at…sick people, okay?”
“I’m not—”
“Shut up,” I snapped, which surprised even me. I wasn’t usually in the habit of disrespecting the uniform, but she’d really pushed my buttons. “You are making fun of my illness, and I would appreciate it if you and your partner, Jones, or whatever his name was, would knock it off. I’m sure it’s all over the department by now, but you can just let everyone know that I am perfectly fine these days and haven’t seen a fairy in months.”
“Actually, you just—”
“I don’t want to know,” I cut her off quickly, and put my hand up again. I wheeled the stretcher around and turned my back on her.
“Just don’t crack the rib cage,” Stone shouted.
Oh, like I could perform an autopsy any other way. “I’ll take that under advisement,” I said over my shoulder as the doors slammed behind me.
Once I could no longer hear the sound of footfalls in the hall, I leaned on the cart, breathing hard.
What I couldn’t understand was how anyone had found out such specific details of my delusions. What the hell happened to doctor-patient confidentiality?
Oh, crap, the court case. Of course the police would have access to all my insane ramblings from Valentine’s trial, when I tried to convince the world that his aggravated assault on my stepmother was justifiable because she was an evil demon who’d cast spells on me.
Not one of my finer moments.
With my luck, they probably had the court transcripts super-sized and posted on the bulletin board in the staff lounge for everyone’s edification and amusement.
Fuck.
So much for starting over fresh.
I hugged myself and wished it was Valentine’s arms around me. Which I supposed was a foolish thought, given that he was part of the problem. Or so all the doctors told me.
Why did I still miss him so much, I wondered.
Letting myself go, I blew out a steadying breath. Well, what did all those group therapy sessions teach me? One thing at a time.
I had a body to deal with. That was the first order of business. I took what comfort I could in the cold metal and simple, rough furnishings of the morgue. I moved one of the adjustable floor lamps off to the side and wheeled the body next to the m
ortician’s table.
I stared at the sheet-covered corpse. The police file on his chest had his mug shot paper clipped to the outside, so I checked it out.
What had Stone said? He was supposed to be some kind of a necromancer? That was clearly a joke. The guy looked like a hippy Jesus. Hell, he’d even smiled pleasantly for the camera—not in a serial-killer creepy off-kilter way, either, just nicely, as if happy to oblige. Blond and Vikingesque, this necromancer of Stone’s looked like half the guys I went to college with at the University of Minnesota.
Thumbing through the file also revealed that he was just under six foot and a hundred and ninety-odd pounds.
There was no way in hell I’d be able to move the body off the stretcher without help.
I looked around the empty space again.
Where was my assistant? I shook my head in frustration. I was going to fire her if she ever showed up for work.
Returning my attention to the dead man, I asked, “So, what’s your story? Your real story?”
I thumbed through his file. There were a lot of reports of domestic squabbles. A woman with the same last name had briefly had some sort of restraining order against him. It wasn’t just his wife or whoever that he liked to threaten, though: He seemed to love a good brawl. If there was a bar fight on any given night, it seemed my friend here had been pulled out of it and set to cool his heels in the city jail.
On paper, he seemed like a pretty bad guy: violent, destructive, and dangerous.
But I knew all about labels, and how they could stick to you, even when you didn’t deserve them. Somewhere in a precinct in Chicago there was a file like this on Valentine. It only told half the story.
So what was the rest of this guy’s?
My iPhone beeped. I fished it out of my pocket to see a text from someone named Boyd with a Pierre Police Department address informing me a preliminary report was ready for me to look at. I left the body where it was for a moment, and went over to my little office space to fire up my laptop. I opened the e-mail. This was what I needed.
Precinct 13 Page 1
