For his little investigation or for himself.
Twenty-One
He got to work early, and before logging in went downstairs to the morgue where he spoke to the tech on staff, who escorted him to the drawer in which Cynthia’s body was kept. The better part of a week had passed since her death, and she looked worse than she had on the slab that horrible morning. Deader, Izzy thought.
Her skin was a bluish tint from the cold. Her eyes had been completely closed, unlike the narrow stare she’d had during the examination. The hollows of her clavicles seemed deeper, her ribs more pronounced. The tech stood by, waiting, while Izzy stared at her small, narrow face. The tech cleared his throat.
Izzy collected himself, put the gloves on, set out his kit, and withdrew a clean buccal swab. Gritting his teeth, he used both hands to open Cynthia’s mouth, careful not to pull too hard. Her tongue lolled at the back of her mouth, filling her throat. Izzy felt his chest constrict. He ignored it and started to probe the opening.
Under Forbes’ direction and Dalecki’s observation, Izzy had been thorough in the sexual assault examination, which brooked no evidence or presumptive results. But the mouth had been largely ignored, apart from a cursory look. Nothing was lodged in the airway or imminently visible by way of obstruction or damage. Now, Izzy swiped the swab along the roof her mouth, snipped the end off into an airtight plastic vial, and with a fresh swab worked on the sublingual tissue beneath the tongue. This too he preserved.
The tech yawned.
Izzy looked up at him, then back to Cynthia. He knew what Forbes must have been thinking when he suggested this—that there was virtually no possibility of anything useful inside Cynthia’s mouth. DNA did not transmit well in saliva, and even if she’d kissed a hundred people in the twenty-four hours before her death, he was not likely to yield much if anything in the way of biological material sufficient for a profile.
Still, he kept at it.
Izzy next ran a swab along the backs of Cynthia’s bottom teeth, beginning with her molars and moving forward to the incisors. He used two on each row, one for either side, and on the fourth rotation felt an almost imperceptible tug behind a lateral incisor on the top row. Here he stopped, and again looked up at the morgue tech.
“Do you have a pen light?” he asked.
The tech snapped to attention as though suddenly wakened.
He said, “Actually, yeah. Hold on a sec.”
After rummaging through a desk drawer in the outer office, the tech returned clicking the light on and off. He gave it to Izzy and said, “Find something?”
“Maybe,” Izzy said, and bent down to pull Cynthia’s lower law open a little wider. He craned his neck and peered closely into her mouth, slowly arcing the light inside and up at the roof and top incisors. “What I really need is a dental mirror. I can’t see a thing.”
“Got that, too,” said the tech, this time retreating to the tools and equipment arranged neatly beyond the second table in the back of the morgue.
Izzy thanked him and reassumed the awkward position, shining the light with one hand and positioning the small mirror behind the teeth with the other. The light reflected off the mirror and shot back out of Cynthia’s mouth—a bizarre, dreamlike vision. Izzy blinked his eyes, repositioned again, and at length said, “There.”
On the back side of her front, upper teeth, he saw in the mirror a small particle of pinkish-white matter.
The tech looked on, fascinated. Izzy set the penlight and dental mirror down beside the kit and withdrew another clean swab. Resting the fingers of his left hand over her nose and upper lip, he inserted the swab into her mouth and carefully flicked his wrist, digging at the matter lodged between the two incisors and the gum line.
“What is it?” asked the tech.
“Not sure. Food, maybe. Trying to get it out.”
The matter resisted, so Izzy clipped the cotton tip from the swab and used the rigid stem instead. Now he successfully dislodged the substance and slowly pulled the swab stem back out with the tiny blob stuck to the tip. He inspected it briefly, but it didn’t look like much to his naked eye.
“Lot of work for that little thing,” the tech said, “whatever it is.”
“Seems to be the name of my game these days,” Izzy said. “A lot of work with little to no results.”
He deposited it into a vial, which he flushed with a squirt of saline and sealed up. Next he wrote out a small label, dated it, and adhered it to the outside of the vial, which went into the kit with the rest of the items. The penlight and dental mirror he returned to the tech.
“Is that it?”
“That’s it,” Izzy said. He grabbed the drawer handle and held it still for a few minutes, looking down at Cynthia. Her mouth still hung open. He gave her chin a slight push, closing it nearly all the way again, and said, “I’m trying, Cynthia.”
And he pushed the drawer shut.
The night dragged on. Shannon Delfry was off, leaving Izzy to work with a newer nurse he did not know as well, a smarmy cowboy wannabe named Chad, as well as Dr. Jarvis. As they went, it was a slow night in the Stonebridge ER with little but the requisite drunks, frequent fliers, panic attacks taken for cardiac arrest, and minor injuries to while away the time. Chad flirted openly with a few of the more attractive female patients, receiving only disapproving looks from Jarvis for the behavior. Izzy made regular trips to the nurse’s lounge to refill his Styrofoam cup with the worst coffee that side of an oil spill. A little after two AM he noticed his hands shaking as he was suturing a laceration above a college kid’s eyebrow, the result of losing a fight over a minor league baseball game. The kid was too inebriated to notice. Izzy slowed down on the coffee.
By five o’clock it had gotten so slow that Jarvis told Chad he could go home. Izzy stayed behind, catching up on charting and patient information, lab results and supply restocking, or just staring at the clock on the wall. Jarvis retreated to his office. A drunk slept it off in one of the bays, the curtains drawn closed around him. Izzy yawned and thought about the evidence he’d left in Forbes’ office, violating and annihilating any reasonable chain of custody.
Probably just food, he thought. He was chasing shadows, growing more desperate and determined every day this went on. But not getting any closer to anything approaching satisfaction. The simplest conclusion still loomed large before him, that every tiny thing he dragged out to contradict the obvious story was merely circumstantial, a hopeless attempt to rewrite history, reality. That Deacon’s body was only further proof of what really happened, and what happened to hundreds of thousands of the hurt, abused, forgotten people. Broken people. They shut down, erected walls, insulated themselves with misanthropy and mistrust and poor coping strategies—like drugs. It wasn’t just possible, it was common. The likeliest scenario.
I just don’t want you to get hurt, he’d said to her.
Hadn’t she smiled then? Sadly. Sardonically.
It’s much too late for that, Isaiah.
At the end of her tether. At the end of hope.
At a quarter to seven the drunk in the curtained bay awoke and started to cry. He kept at it for fifteen minutes, when the morning shift of two chubby nurses arrived, drowning him out with their giggling. They went together to stow their bags in the lockers, plunging the ER into silence.
Twenty-Two
Izzy checked out of the hotel after gathering his belongings from the room. There was no police car out front when he got back, and none when he left for the last time. He threw everything into the Mazda’s backseat and headed south, no destination in mind.
Part of him wanted to blast the radio, tune out, and keep driving until he hit the border or ran out of gas, whichever came first. He wondered if he was burning out, like Forbes had warned.
Just south of the lake Izzy turned off the interstate and looped around to 5th, following it up past Lamar into downtown Austin. Traffic was thick with rush hour commuters. At least a third of the cars caught up in the grid
lock had out of state plates. Izzy recalled reading that Austin was getting as many as three hundred new residents daily, skyrocketing the population and, gradually but inevitably, increasing the crime stats that had remained so low for so long. From where he sat, the Austin skyline practically sat on top of him, reminding him of when the iceberg-like Frost Tower was so new and strange, before the condominiums started to pop up like mushrooms. Looking from one driver to another and yet another, all he could see was tired faces, nine-to-fivers frustrated with the traffic but in no particular hurry to start their slog to the end of the shift. All of the city’s newest criminals, Izzy surmised, were still in bed.
He sat through two red lights at La Vaca and managed to squeeze through before the third. A few blocks up at Congress Avenue, he decided he was crazier than he thought schlepping through this when he didn’t have to, and angled to turn right so he could head back on 6th. The nice thing about 6th Street at eight in the morning was its stark, nearly apocalyptic emptiness—this was a nighttime district, and it headed away from downtown. Izzy had fairly smooth sailing from there.
Police Department sawhorses were stacked up against the exteriors of bars at every intersection, awaiting their nightly use to corral the binge drinkers, career alcoholics, petty thieves, and panhandlers that filled the street on foot. All the bars were closed down, the sidewalks in front of them littered with garbage and sticky, murky pools of spilled drinks and vomit. The street itself, open to cars in the daylight, was scattered with horse droppings from the mounted cops that patrolled night after night. After a couple of blocks Izzy quit trying to avoid them. It was a losing game that early in the morning.
At the outer limit of downtown proper, Izzy returned to Lamar where the massive Whole Foods headquarters appeared on his left. Shoppers streamed in and out of the store, and they sat around at tables or on steps sipping lattes and munching on breakfast croissants. At the top of the steps Izzy spied a dense collection of colorful balloons swaying gently in the warm breeze. Just beneath them, a curly, bright red mop of hair—a fright wig of some sort. He rolled the window down for a better look and heard children squealing close by. Izzy lowered one eyebrow and flicked on his turn signal to pull into the parking garage behind the store.
The clown was tall and thin, his reedy frame ridiculous in the baggy red and yellow one-piece costume he wore. His face was painted white with cherry-red outlines around his eyes and mouth. He wore no false nose, but had painted it yellow. Atop his head was a curly red wig.
He stationed himself at a series of outdoor tables that were staggered out from the front of the store. All around him were small children, somewhere between two and six. Some of the kids watched transfixed, while others fussed or ran wild. Izzy counted seven parents watching over them, six women and one bored-looking man.
The clown was twisting balloons into the shape of a dachshund for an astounded little girl with enormous brown eyes. To his side stood a fold-out table, like a TV tray, from which the balloons Izzy saw from the road were anchored.
As Izzy climbed the steps up to the tables, he ruminated on the wisdom of holding a children’s birthday party at a trendy organic grocery store, but concluded they weren’t his kids so he didn’t really have an opinion one way or another. His interest wasn’t in the party or the kids, anyway. He wanted to talk to the clown.
The dachshund finished, the little girl threw up her hands to receive to prize and shrieked with delight. She tottered back to her mother, a long-haired blonde with enormous glasses subsuming half her face, and the clown said, “Who’s next?”
Izzy went tentatively toward him, made a noise in his throat, and said, “Excuse me, can I ask you something?”
“C’mon, bud,” the clown said. “I’m working here.”
The children yelped and wailed, each of them hoping to be the next recipient of a balloon animal. The clown gave Izzy an exasperated look.
Izzy said, “I can wait.”
“Do you just want my card?”
“I just need to ask you a question.”
The clown sighed.
“I’ll be done in fifteen, twenty minutes,” he said, and returned to his routine.
Izzy wandered off a ways, keeping enough distance to avoid looking too weird, and waited. After a while, he ducked inside for the air conditioning and bought an iced coffee and an assortment of Texas wildflowers wrapped in green plastic. When he reemerged, the party was breaking up and the clown passed the remaining balloons out to the kids.
“What you see is what you get,” the clown told him, collapsing the table and swiping the wig from his sweaty bald pate. “I don’t do magic. I don’t sing. Just basic stuff, fifteen an hour.”
“Actually,” Izzy said, “I want to know about your helium tank there.”
The clown leaned the table against a square-cut shrub, examined Izzy’s scrubs and said, “You a doctor or something?”
“Do you own it?” Izzy asked. “Is it refillable or do you have to get a new one?”
“I rent it. I only do this on the side. I’m a friggin’ geometry teacher, if you can believe that.”
“Where do you rent it from?”
“Partytown up on Research Boulevard. But you can get them all over town. Smaller ones are on sale all kinds of places, even online. I’m not sure about buying a big professional one like this outright,” he said, patting the gray metal tank, “but I can’t imagine it’s that difficult. It’s not like they’re regulated or anything.”
“Thanks for your help,” Izzy said, and started back for the steps down to the 6th Street sidewalk.
The clown shouted after him, “I bring my own, though—just look me up on the web. Name’s Chippo, bud. Chippo!”
Twenty-Three
“You’re getting to be a regular visitor,” Sandy said as Izzy rose from the waiting room chair. There were only four of them and they were all ratty. The crisis center needed funds, but funds were hard to come by and decent furniture low on the list of priorities. “Who’re the flowers for?”
“Your new man,” Izzy said abashedly. “I think I gave him a lot more than he bargained for yesterday.”
“I should say so. I don’t recall you mentioning breaking and entering or dead bodies when you asked for help, though I am a skosh absent-minded from time to time.”
“Is he around?”
“He will be by nine-thirty,” Sandy said, checking her watch. “Come on in, have a seat. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
“Questioning Chippo the Geometry Clown most recently,” Izzy said. He laid the flowers on Sandy’s desk and sat down.
“Forget I asked.”
“Pursuing a dead end,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“You know,” Sandy said, popping a breath mint into her mouth, “you do a lot of good for a lot of people, Iz. In the ER, when you volunteer here. You’ve got years of that ahead of you, and once you’ve made FN, you’ll do more good still. I’m proud to know you, and I like to think you’re a friend.”
“That’s…thank you, Sandy. I appreciate that, but—”
“I’ve been director here for a little over three years now,” she went on, cutting him off. “In that time, I’ve worked with hundreds of people. Survivors. A lot of them, most of them respond well and take control of their healing process. No one just gets over trauma, but I like to think the preponderance of them do get on with their lives.
“But some don’t. You know how that goes as well as I do. It doesn’t make them weak or not worth saving, but as often as we hear it and tell it to ourselves—”
“We can’t save everyone,” Izzy said.
“That’s right.”
“That’s done and gone, though. Cynthia is past saving.”
“Unfortunately, that’s true,” Sandy said. “So what are you doing? When you could be helping someone who isn’t?”
“Perhaps I am.”
Cynthia locked eyes with him and passed a sharp breath through her nose. Neither said a word
until the front door creaked open in the waiting area.
“That’s probably Noah,” Sandy said.
Izzy grabbed the flowers from the desk and stood up. Sandy grinned and slipped out the side door to the meeting room.
“Hey,” he said, “where are you going?”
The door clicked shut and Noah walked into the office, startled to see Izzy standing there with a bouquet in his hand and a stupid look on his face. The morning light slanted in through the blinds, illuminating a cluster of bluebells so they showed a brilliant color. Izzy looked at them, and then at Noah. He thrust them out and said, “These are for you.”
“Okay,” Noah said, reluctantly accepting them. “Why?”
“For yesterday. I didn’t expect things to turn out that way, and I’m sorry I dragged you into all of that.”
“I see. They’re—nice.”
“Wildflowers.”
“I can see that.”
“I thought roses would be too…”
“They would, yes.”
“Anyway,” Izzy said, his mouth hanging onto the vowel.
“Yeah,” Noah said. “Anyway.”
Izzy forced the fakest laugh of his life and beelined for the hallway. He said, “See you.” And picked up the pace to the front door, anxious to get out of there.
“Wait,” Noah called after him.
Izzy froze with his hand on the door handle. Almost.
He turned as Noah came out of the hall, the bouquet still in hand.
He said, “It’s just that I didn’t think you were…”
“I’m not,” Izzy said.
“Oh.”
“How about dinner tonight?”
The question passed his lips before his brain had sufficient time to vet it for approval. Suddenly his mouth felt dry, his palms clammy and cold.
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 11
