Dead Ringer

by Annelise Ryan

  “Hello, Joseph,” I say.

  He squints at me through the haze of smoke and sets the cigar down in an ashtray. As soon as he recognizes me, he rolls his eyes heavenward. “Oh, great, you again. Are you looking for dead bodies or killers this time?”

  “Neither. I’m bringing you some business,” I say, nodding toward Todd.

  Joseph shifts his puffy-eyed gaze to Todd, giving him a once-over. “I hope you don’t spend time around dead bodies.”

  Todd looks at me and says, “I thought you said this guy was a friend of yours.”

  “No,” I say with a smile. “I said I know him. Joseph doesn’t have any friends.” I turn my smile back toward Joseph. “Do you, Joseph?” Before he can answer, not that he would anyway, I add, “Doesn’t look like you have much in the way of business, either.”

  Joseph scowls at me before turning to Todd and asking, “How many nights?”

  “Just one for now,” Todd says.

  Joseph tilts his head to the side and sighs. “Does that mean you might be staying a second night?”

  “I don’t know,” Todd says. “Does it matter?”

  Joseph raises his eyebrows and looks at Todd like he’s the dumbest human being on earth. “Son, it matters to me. I can’t promise you I’ll have a room for a second night if you don’t book it now.”

  “He’s bluffing,” I say to Todd.

  “Am I?” Joseph says, yanking his glare back to me. “I’ll have you know that there’s a group of gnome painters coming to the Dells this weekend for a mini convention and I typically get overflow guests here.”

  “Gnome painters?” I echo skeptically.

  “That’s right,” Joseph says with a pugnacious thrust of his jaw.

  “You know what,” I say. “You should remember that I have access to dead bodies. Lots of them. And if one was to mysteriously show up here one of these days, that wouldn’t be very good for business, would it? Heck, you might even end up in prison.”

  Joseph narrows his eyes at me. “Don’t threaten me, missy,” he grumbles. “I’m over seventy and don’t have a pension. Do you think life in prison is a big deterrent for me?”

  “Tell you what,” Todd says, eyeing us both warily. “I’ve got off until Monday, so let’s go ahead and book for two nights.”

  Joseph gives me a smug look and then turns to Todd. “That’ll be fifty a night.”

  “That’s for one of the end suites with a kitchenette, right?” I say.

  “Hell no,” Joseph grumbles. “Those go for sixty-five a night.”

  “You only charged me fifty a night.”

  “That was three years ago, missy. Ever heard of a little thing called inflation?”

  “Can’t you give him a break, since I brought you the business?”

  Todd starts to say something, but Joseph beats him to it. “No, but I’ll return the favor. You’ll be the first person I call if a dead body does show up in one of my rooms,” he counters. “Tit for tat, right?”

  I let my head loll back and look at the ceiling. It’s covered with cobwebs. “I give up,” I say. “It’s up to you, Todd.”

  He chuckles and says, “I’ll take two nights in a suite.” He digs his wallet out and slides a credit card across the counter to Joseph.

  Five minutes later, we are back outside and Todd is laughing. “He’s quite the character,” he says.

  “Quite the curmudgeon, you mean,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t know how the old coot stays in business.”

  “Speaking of motel rooms,” Todd says, “you mentioned earlier today that you have pictures of the room your victim was staying in, the place where you think she was killed.”

  “I do. They’re on our server.”

  “I meant to look at them before we left and print some copies, so I could study them tonight. I’ve taken several specialized classes in blood spatter evidence and maybe I can come up with something. Can you log into your file system at work from a remote computer?”

  “I can.”

  “Would you mind doing so on my laptop, so I can print some photos?”

  I wince. “I don’t think the Wi-Fi here is secure.”

  “My cell phone has the ability to provide a secure Wi-Fi hotspot and my laptop is one my job provides for me. It comes with some serious virus protection and blocking software. I promise you it will be safe.”

  “Okay,” I say after a moment’s thought.

  We drive both cars down to the end of the building where Todd’s suite is located, and I help him haul his stuff inside. He carries in a small overnight bag, a laptop bag, and a portable printer he has stashed in the cargo area, while I grab the bags from his grocery store haul. While he sets up the laptop and printer on a table in the corner and attempts to log onto the Internet, I scan the suite. It hasn’t changed a whit since I stayed in it for a week some three years ago.

  “Okay, I have it up and running,” Todd says, getting out of his seat. “Can you access the photos?”

  I sit down in front of his computer and start typing. Once I’ve accessed our office server, Todd politely looks away as I type in the password. I locate the appropriate folder, open it, and start clicking through the pictures as Todd watches over my shoulder.

  Over the next ten minutes or so, I print the photos Todd requests. The portable printer cranks the pictures out slowly, but in full color and with surprisingly good detail.

  “I’m impressed,” I tell Todd, looking at the first picture to come off the printer. It’s a side shot of the bed in the Troll Nook room showing the headboard, the wall behind it, and a portion of the floor beside the bed. The room is dark, and there are spots of greenish-white glowing light where the luminol has highlighted the blood spatter.

  Todd takes the picture from me and adds it to another that has just printed, a view of the ceiling over the bed. “This is the perfect starting point,” he says. “With the angles and height of the spatter on the wall, ceiling, and headboard, we can tell what position the killer and the victim were in. I might even be able to tell you how tall your killer is.”

  “Really?” I’m intrigued.

  “Well, the position thing for sure,” Todd says. “Think about it a minute. Your first assumption when you look at the bed as the scene of the crime is that the victim was on it with her head and feet where they would be if someone was sleeping. But that wasn’t the case here. She was lying sideways with her feet toward your camera, here on the side of the bed.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “Look at the patterns on the wall and ceiling. Then think about where the killer would have to be to create those patterns.”

  I try to envision what he’s saying, but my brain is having trouble picturing it.

  Apparently, Todd can tell this, because he says, “Okay, I’ve got an idea.”

  He takes a bottle of red wine from one of his grocery bags and opens it. It has a screw top—good thing, as I’m betting there isn’t a corkscrew in the room. Todd pours some of the wine into a motel glass and looks toward the kitchenette area.

  I get what he’s thinking and walk over to one of the drawers there. “Will this do?” I ask, pulling out a butter knife.

  “It will,” Todd says with a grin. He takes the knife from me and drops the handle end of it into the glass of wine.

  I’m puzzled as to why he put the knife in this way and it must show on my face.

  “Safety,” he says with a smile. “We’re going to act this out, and while this is only a butter knife, the business end of it could still injure, so we’ll play it safe and use the other end. It won’t be exact anyway, because the wine is a lot thinner than blood would be, but it will do to demonstrate the point.” He eyes my clothes. “I want you to play the victim, but it means I’m going to get wine on your clothes. I can’t promise it will wash out.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “This is an old blouse and my slacks are black, so it won’t show even if it doesn’t all wash out.”

  “Okay
, then. Go and lie sideways on the bed.”

  I walk over to the bed and lie across it on my back, midway between the head and foot, my left side toward the headboard, my feet dangling over the side far enough to touch the floor. “I’m taller than our victim was,” I point out.

  “That’s okay. You’re fine like that.”

  Todd walks over and stands with his legs between my knees, the glass with the knife in his left hand. Then he takes the knife in his right hand, wine dripping off it, and places it against my slacks, just above my symphysis pubis.

  “This was likely the first wound made, so it will have less castoff than the others,” Todd says.

  He raises his arm up quickly and wine flies off the knife and onto the ceiling. Then he makes a stabbing motion toward my belly, stopping just shy of where the edge of my liver would be. He dips the knife in the wine, and then raises his hand up and brings it down again on the other side of my belly, closer to where the spleen and pancreas are located.

  He dips again, positions his hand, and raises it once more, coming down this time just above my right breast. One more dip in the wine, and he repeats the arm motions one last time, this time delivering the deathblow just above my left breast. This last stabbing motion leaves a few small spatters of wine on the headboard and the wall above it. It also leaves wine stains all over my blouse.

  Todd puts the knife back in the glass and moves away from me, looking up at the ceiling. A fine mist of wine has spattered there, a pattern I’ve already seen from my position on the bed. The wine pattern on our ceiling is eerily close to the blood spatter pattern we found in the ceiling of the cabin at Troll Nook.

  “Joseph will never let me stay here again,” I say, staring at the ceiling. Todd laughs and that starts me laughing.

  “It’s for a good cause,” Todd says, still chuckling. “And given the state of the décor and the cobwebs in this place, I don’t think Joseph will even notice. But let’s be kind and clean up.” I sit up as he walks into the bathroom and returns carrying an armful of hand towels and washcloths. He wets the washcloths and tosses one to me. I start swiping at the wine stains on my clothes, while Todd climbs onto the bed beside me, standing, his legs wobbling with his unsteady footing. He tries to wipe at the wine drops on the ceiling, but he can’t quite reach them, so he starts jumping and swiping, jumping and swiping. I climb up on the mattress and start doing the same thing beside him, the two of us laughing like kids.

  When we are done with the ceiling, we carefully move to the head of the bed, stifling our giggles and trying not to jiggle the mattress too much, our footing wobbly. We each take one half of the headboard and the wall behind it, and ten minutes later, we’ve done such a good job with the cleanup that there is no evidence of red wine anywhere. Unfortunately, there is evidence of our cleaning. The places on the walls and the ceiling where we scrubbed are noticeably whiter than the surrounding wall or ceiling. It seems the Sorenson Motel isn’t quite as clean as I thought it was.

  We climb down off the bed and I walk over to the kitchenette sink and wet a towel to dab at my wine stains some more. When I’m done and turn around, I find Todd standing there with two glasses in his hands, each one filled with red wine.

  “We should celebrate,” he says. “It’s not the best stuff, but I’ve had worse. Cheers!” He hands me one of the glasses.

  I take it and we clink the glasses together. The wine doesn’t taste as bad as I thought it might, considering, but ever mindful of my new pregnant status, I take a few sips and then set it down. “I really need to get home,” I say. “But we can start back up in the morning.”

  “What time will you get to the office, do you think?”

  “Let’s shoot for eight,” I say. “Can you find your way back there okay?”

  “Piece of cake,” Todd says with a dismissive wave and a smile.

  I grab my jacket, put it on, and head out the door. Todd walks with me to the hearse, and as I’m about to open the door, he says, “Thanks for your help with the groceries and the motel room.”

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t much help with the latter,” I say. “Joseph is getting quite stubborn in his old age.”

  I turn to insert my key in the car door and feel Todd’s hand on my shoulder. When I look back at him, he takes hold of my other shoulder and turns me around to face him. Then he kisses me.

  It happens so fast that my brain can barely comprehend what’s going on and I do nothing at first. Then my lips move on instinct, pursing to return what I stupidly think at first is an overexuberant expression of friendship. But then I feel the tip of Todd’s tongue probe my lips and panicked realization washes over me. I turn my head and push him away from me.

  “What the hell, Todd?” I say, trying to step back away from him. But I’m pinned between him and the hearse.

  Todd gives me a look of patient tolerance. “I’m sorry, the impulse just got the better of me.” He smiles, but he doesn’t back off.

  “That was totally inappropriate,” I say, stepping sideways to slide from between him and the car. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  He cocks his head, looking confused. “I thought we were hitting it off, having a good time,” he says. “Like we were that night at the conference.”

  “I’m a married woman,” I say. “A married woman who loves her husband and isn’t interested in any other relationships.”

  Todd’s face pales and he looks shocked. “You’re married?” Now he steps back.

  “Of course I am,” I say irritably, though as soon as the words leave my mouth, I flash back on the time I spent with Todd, both in Eau Claire and in my office today. Did the subject ever come up? I realize with horror that it didn’t.

  “I thought you said you were divorced,” Todd says, his voice sounding wounded and betrayed.

  “I am, but I remarried.”

  His eyes glance at my hands. “You don’t wear a wedding ring?”

  Oh, God. No wonder the poor guy thought I might be single. “I normally do wear a ring,” I explain to him, “but it doesn’t fit right now and I need to get it resized. I assumed you knew that Hurley and I were married.”

  “Hur-Hurley?” he stammers, looking horrified. “You’re married to the cop?” His face flushes red and he takes several steps back, raking a hand through his hair. Then he drops his arms to his sides, his expression goes blank, and in a tone of somber resignation, he says, “I’m a dead man.”

  For some reason, this strikes me as hysterically funny. A giggle bubbles up, and then the giggle builds into a chuckle, and then the chuckle blossoms into a full-blown laugh that continues to grow until I sound like the Joker’s crazier big sister.

  Todd is staring at me with wide-eyed fascination. Or maybe horror, I can’t be sure. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” he says. “I . . . You . . . Apparently, I completely misread the situation.” He shoves a hand through his hair again and looks heavenward. “Man, you must think I’m a total ass,” he says, punctuating it with a humorless laugh.

  I get my maniacal laugh under control and give Todd an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, too. I see how easy it was to misinterpret things. I didn’t mean to mislead you in any way.”

  He shoves his hands in his pants pockets, stares at the ground, and does an aw-shucks shuffle of his feet in the parking-lot gravel. “Can we start over?” he says to the ground. “I really do want to work this case with you and I don’t want my, well, what just happened to get in the way.”

  I consider this. His knowledge of the Ulrich case could prove invaluable, and despite recent events, I really do like the guy, just not in the way he thought. Would it be stupid of me to try to continue in any kind of relationship with him, even just a professional one? It should be fine, now that we know where things stand. And I can be careful to avoid being alone with him in the future, to avoid any other misunderstandings or gossip.

  He finally looks up from the ground, a sheepish expression on his still-reddened face. My gut tells me I can trust hi
m. “Okay, let’s start over.”

  He breathes a huge sigh of relief and squeezes his eyes closed. “Thank you.” He opens his eyes and smiles gratefully. “I promise you I’ll be a good boy. See you in the morning.” He spins on his heel, hightails back into his motel room, and shuts the door.

  On the drive home, I keep replaying the past few days over and over again in my mind, trying to find some point, some event, where my marital status came up in conversation. But I come up empty. Combine my story of divorce, which Todd knew from the conference night months ago, with the lack of any wedding ring, the different last names, and the fact that Hurley and I try to keep our personal relationship out of all our professional dealings, and it’s easy to see how Todd got the idea he did.

  I’m minutes away from home when I notice a dark SUV-shaped vehicle behind me. It follows me along the country road to the base of my driveway, staying far enough back that I can’t make out any detail. I half expect it to turn into the driveway behind me, but it drives on by instead.

  I shake my head and laugh at myself. “You’re getting paranoid, girl,” I say aloud. And then I remember that I thought that the last time I was being followed.

  CHAPTER 20

  I find my family gathered in the kitchen. Emily and Matthew are seated at the table in the breakfast nook area, with coloring books and crayons, while Hurley is busy at the stove cooking something that smells delicious. I’m glad to see my son is wearing “normal” clothing and wonder what he’s done with his “futility belt.”

  “Where have you been?” Hurley asks me when I enter the room. His tone is one of mild curiosity and yet I sense an undercurrent to the question.

  “Working on our case,” I say. I slip off my jacket and hang it on the back of one of the stools lining the kitchen island. Then I walk over and kiss both Matthew and Emily on top of their heads. Next I walk over to the stove and snake my arms around Hurley’s waist, pressing the side of my face against the back of his shoulder.

  “Smells yummy,” I say. “What are you making?”

  “Goulash.”