by Jason Dias
“Any complaints about him?” Ay asked.
“Nope.” Rick.
“Not that I’ve heard,” Barbara confirmed. “Pretty quiet. Contemplative. I figured him for semi-retired.”
“Here it is,” Rick said, coming up with a slender file. “Looks like his background check came back clean, but the higher ups nixed him without comment.”
“OK, thanks for your help,” Ay said, and we headed back out. By the big steel door, she said, “What’s this door about? Doesn’t seem very welcoming.”
I’d worked the scene here, ten years ago. Some things stick with you. “Before your time, Ay. Some young guy feels rejected by the congregation. Seems justified in the feeling. They weren’t kind to him when he needed it, but he also made it really hard for them to try. Know what I mean? Well, his wife ditches him because of his drinking, and he’s popped for DUI on the way to divorce court one day, and the guy just snaps. Comes up here with a Smith and Wesson double-action forty-five and starts banging away at people during mass. Took out two mothers, a homeless guy who was a regular, and a nine year old girl. Security shot him right there, where that door is now. Brains all over the wall. So they put in a big door.”
We were at the car now, looking at one another over the roof. “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah.”
“And you saw all that? The… the aftermath?”
“Yeah.” I climbed into the car. My turn to drive.
“That’s…” She couldn’t seem to find a word.
“It was extremely disturbing. I didn’t sleep for weeks after that. More than that: it shook my faith.”
Ay put on her seatbelt and I got the car rolling. “I didn’t know you were a person of faith.”
“Not my faith in God or some church. Something more basic.” I remembered what Doc Daniels had said a few days back. “My faith in people, maybe, or my sense that I could trust things to make sense. I’ve been around a while now, but that was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Worse than the current case?”
“Yeah. You know, I saw Sidney and Marie in the light of the church shooting. I was pre-hardened. Or something. No matter what else I see, maybe that will always be the worst thing. And maybe that’s no good.”
“I get it.” She sat quietly for a few miles, hands in her lap. No phone, no tablet, no questions.
I chewed on my feelings. In the brightness of the aging day, I dread or phantom anxiety left me untroubled. But I remembered the disjointed feeling of that day. The call-out. The high-speed drive up the highway, high on adrenaline, the miles passing in subjective seconds. When I arrived I didn’t remember how. A miracle I didn’t kill anyone on the freeway. Then approaching the scene, hand on my service piece. Cops everywhere, calm on the outside but charged, jumpy to anyone with the eyes to see. Everyone had hands near weapons. The scene had been clear well before I showed up but it still crackled with electric energy.
Then the gore. And, behind makeshift barriers and stern cops with thousand-yard stares, churchgoers crying. Some sobbed, some dabbed at the corners of their eyes. A few just stood there. Silent, still, distant stares like the cops holding the line.
Not much to investigate. Open and shut. We took samples, measured distances as a matter of course. Took tapes – in those days literally video cassettes. People came forward with the dead perp’s motives later, a video message on MySpace his suicide note.
My hands shook the whole time. My throat clamped down on the urge to vomit. Not only did I not sleep, I didn’t eat, either.
Lots of people didn’t. Shook up the whole town for weeks. Everyone on edge, security everywhere, sort of a mass case of post-traumatic stress. PTS embedded in local culture. That’s what scared me about the Vampire Killer: re-opening old wounds.
“Dominque?”
“Huh?”
“You were wool-gathering. Missed the exit.”
“Oh.” I took stock of our position. We’d just take the next exit and loop up through town. “Sorry. Fatigue setting in. It’s always this way when there’s a murder.” I changed course suddenly, zipping across two lanes to hit the exit.
“What’s up?” Calm.
“A whim, say. Don’t want to explain it at the station house. Going to the funeral home off Union. You know the one?”
“Yeah. Why?”
I didn’t want to tell her why. “Witness says our favorite emo suspect bunks there days.”
“What? Like, in a coffin and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“I was just kidding about the vampire, Dominique. Is this a cop thing right now? No joke is ever good enough until we take it too far?”
“I hope so.”
We rolled up on the place. It had a weird roof with wood shingles that looked kind of like a sombrero. I parked in back. We walked around through an empty parking lot. Employees had their own lot further back, screened by trees. Across one road, the cemetery; across the other, a vendor selling memorial stones. Samples lined the street. One old Hearse sat halfway behind the funeral home building, unobtrusive. It had been out in the elements a long time; this would not be the car that moved bodies around.
Inside, the shape of the roof made sense. Stained glass windows bathed the interior in rosy pink glow. The double doors clunked shut behind us and the funeral home director appeared like magic.
She was a healthy-looking sixty-year-old woman, round-featured and pink, in a nice charcoal suit. “Officers. How can I help you?”
Ay looked at me and kept her mouth shut. “Looking for someone,” I said.
The woman’s eyes flicked left and her tongue touched her lower lip, slipped back in her mouth like an ambivalent eel.
“You might know her. She’s… unusual. Fancy dress, appears to be her only clothing article. Petite. French accent.”
“And you’re here because…?” The way she asked the question, her body language ought to have been defiant. Hands on hips, maybe. Shoulders square. But her body signaled something else. She crossed her arms and dropped her shoulders – defensive but defeated. Like a dog cringing before a harsh master.
“Witness,” I said. “You seen her?” She shook her head. “Mind if we look around?”
“I… I don’t know. There’s a client in the viewing room, and another in the, uh, clean-up area downstairs.”
I nodded and headed for the viewing room. Unfortunately, I knew the way. “That’s all right. I’ve seen dead people before, and the dead have no right to privacy. Thanks for your consideration.”
Flowers filled the viewing room. Somebody liked pink carnations. There were a thousand of them, filling the air with sick perfume. It reminded me of walking into a department store twenty years ago at Christmastime. All those women in tight black skirts waiting to spritz you with their products. A coffin occupied the middle of the semicircular back wall, along a walkway oppressed by flowers. The coffin, as yet unopened, looked like an old man’s classy black Lincoln.
I took hold of a chrome handle. Ay hissed in a breath: surprise or outrage or maybe both. Didn’t stop me. Just a quick peek inside to make sure the right tenant was in residence. Old guy; matched the manifest.
The stairs down were harder to find. Through a back door marked “Private: Employee’s Only”. The apostrophe should have been a prosecutable offense. Narrow stairs. There must also have been a lift someplace for the customers. No way they hauled loaded coffins up and down this flight. Turning on the light did little to illuminate the basement. Concrete walls, whitewashed. Bare floor with a drain in the middle. The prep room: table, cabinet full of make-up and hair-styling products, foam rubber blocks the mortician could cut to bolster the slack faces of the dead. Another door in back led to a room full of boxes.
Pine, cedar, steel, brass. Take your pick. Go out in style or in a more modest receptacle. They were mostly stacked, one on the other, seemingly careless.
“She’s not here.” The manager had found her way down and discovered the strength to confront us. “I l
et her in early in the morning, before sunrise. Well before sunrise. Sometimes I don’t want to. I just want to sleep. But there are dreams. I wake up and I come here, not even always realizing it.” She paused. She’d blurted out everything in a monotone, feelingless yet still urgent. Her tongue moistened her lips once more. “I let her in. She comes down here. Lays in the coffin. The oak, there, on top. Stays all day. Leaves after sundown. I see her go out. Winter. Sundown is in business hours in winter. She just walks through the lobby, past anybody waiting, out into the street.”
“Where is she now?” I said, ready to pop open the oak coffin I had taken to be a child’s piece. In the dim storeroom light, it was mostly just a shadow among shadows.
“She comes in.” She crossed her arms and backed away. “She goes in there. Sometimes I work up the courage to open it, look inside. But she’s not there. She goes in and… and… Just dirt. If I think about cleaning up the dirt, I get a headache. Bad. Punishing. And nightmares like… I can’t tell you.” She started to sob now. Ay watched with her mouth hanging open. I knew how she felt.
The coffin opened easily. Air whiffed inside with a tiny sound. As promised, nothing but a little dirt around where the customer’s feet would go.
“She goes in, she doesn’t come out,” I said. “That it?”
The woman just stood, arms crossed, feet shuffling.
“Are you in danger?”
Ay moved closer. The manager’s eyes, already on her feet, seemed to lower more.
“Officer Watanabe, we’re going to take her out of here. First as a material witness. Depending what she says, maybe into protective custody. Okay?”
Ay put her hand on the woman’s arm. She shrugged it off. “I’m not leaving here.”
“Why not?” Ay said.
She tried to back away but Ay stayed with her. “Because she will punish me.”
“We’ll protect you,” I said.
“You can’t. You can’t stop the nightmares. You can’t make my mind work again. You can’t stop me from being thirsty.”
Ay mouthed some words under her breath. I’m not great at lip reading but I picked them up: “Psych hold?”
I shook my head fractionally. “Miss, please come with us. We’ll talk more about this at the station, under some bright lights, with cameras rolling. Watanabe makes a mean cup of chocolate. All right?”
She didn’t seem pleased, with her knuckles tight as her brow, but let herself be led away, one of us on either side. When we came to those narrow stairs, I went up first, the funeral home manager behind me, Watanabe last.
Halfway to the station house, Watanabe told me, “Her name is Peterson. Diane Peterson. She’s fifty-eight years old. Been in business since eighty-eight. That all correct, Diana?”
Diana proved she was not imaginary by gripping the mesh between us. I found more reassurance of her actuality by glancing at her in the rearview. Her eyes darted around and she licked her lips. “She made me a promise.”
“Yeah?”
“She promised I could be young again. When she goes, she’s going to take me with her. You have to take me back.”
“Maybe a ten-ninety-six after all, Ay.” That softly. Louder: “Where’s she going, Diana?”
“Follow the trail. The blood trail. She told me about it. The blood speaks. She said she would show me.”
“Okay. That’s good. Watanabe, send some uniforms out to the site to lock it up. Not a crime scene at this time; no evidence of any crimes.” She gave me the high sign and I buried the thought tickling the lower regions of my brain. The insane plan to discover an insane truth. “When this case is up, I’m surrendering myself for a full psych evaluation. Another one.”
Ay kept quiet, too busy to respond. I drove the car.
Once at the station, we stashed Diana securely in a holding cell. I didn’t feel good about interview; she was increasingly erratic and unstable. The holding cells were designed for psych cases because not everyone we needed to hold was a suspect. Diana had a tiny bed built into one wall, about four feet of ground to pace on with nice, soft carpeting, and a padded bench patched with red duct tape. I shut the plexiglass door behind her. We took everything from her that might be used for self-harm. Her belt. Shoelaces. Keys.
Eleven a.m.. Five hours and change until dark.
Love
Diana said little, less of any value. I went up to Doc Daniels’ office, next door to Captain Daniels’ office (no relation). The door, ajar, suggested he didn’t have any clients. I could hear him talking. Probably the phone. I stuck my head in and made eye contact. Doc held up one finger: wait a second. I cooled my heels in the hallway.
He said my name a few minutes later and I went in. “Sorry. What can I help you with?”
“Got a witness down in holding. She’s not right and she’s getting worse. Held it together when we showed up but is loopier by the minute. I want to know what she knows, and we still have to do diligence to her health.”
“You want me to check in on her. No problem. Any doubts, though, I’m shipping her out. All right?”
“Yep.” I led the way. Doc moved slowly. I could feel time draining away towards dusk. “Here she is. Diana, this is Doctor Daniels. He’s going to ask you some questions.”
He threw out some basic mental status questions. I could have done that – inside, I facepalmed myself. Not that it mattered. Her lunacy seemed pretty plain. She failed every question by not bothering to answer them.
“She’s unresponsive,” Daniels said. “Clearly conscious. Selective mutism. That’s when you choose not to speak.”
“I got that, Doc. Any other ideas?”
“She needs a tox screen. Could be something in her blood. Really need to put her in an ambulance, I think.”
But she quit pretending docility. At the word ‘blood,’ she leaped up off the little bed and pounded on the Plexi. It thumped like a big drum under water. Her screams, unintelligible word salad, were slightly muted by the wall between us.
“I guess that settles it,” I said.
“Yeah. I’ll make the call. She looks pretty safe in there. I’ll tell them it’s not an emergency. If you want to listen to her ranting in case there’s something of value in there, you have a little time.”
I took a seat and observed. Diana slowly calmed. She didn’t seem to notice me. She backed away, back to the bed, and curled up like a baby. “You promised,” she said.
She might have meant that I promised to protect her, but I didn’t seem to be part of her reality right now. That left Ysabeau. “What did she promise you?”
No answer.
“Did she promise you blood?”
Her eyes came up to meet mine.
“That’s it, isn’t it? She promised you blood. Her blood? Like a vampire?” That Tom Cruise movie went through my head. The novels it was based on. Sharing blood, making vampires out of humans.
“Washed in the blood. Awash in the blood.”
“What?” That sounded like liturgy. Or a riff on it.
“The blood is the life.” Mumbling.
Dracula? The movie from ninety-two with Winona Ryder? I stashed it away for later.
Something else, under her breath.
“I’m going to go back to the funeral home. When the sun is going down. I will ask her if I see her. Ask her if she is going to keep her promise to you. OK? Can you tell me anything else?”
Nothing.
Out of ideas. Time crept along. Eventually, EMS showed up. Black pants and white shirts. As much blood as they dealt with, they must have gone through those shirts. A man and a woman, neither very young, both pretty fit. “This our girl?” the woman said.
I’d seen her before. “Sandy, right? Yes, this is Diana. She’s having some problems.”
“Mandy, actually. You want to pop the door?”
I did. Key code on the wall. The door clicked open, maglock in the ceiling letting go. Diana stood up. Mandy invited her out of the room and she came, shuffling. Just outsi
de the doorway, she wailed, slashed at the other EMT with fingers curled into claws. He was ready. He stepped back, out of reach, then back in. The two quickly wrapped Diana up, each of them taking an arm. The man stuck her with a needle. Smooth, easy. She slumped.
“Ativan,” he said. “She’s going to take a little nap now. Want us to call you when she’s awake?”
“If you could. Actually, call Officer Watanabe. I’ll give you her card in a second.” They dragged Diana away. I strode up to the office and grabbed Ay. “Run out front and give those EMTs your card, all right? I’m heading out.”
“Where?”
“Stakeout.”
I made it back at the funeral home in less than fifteen minutes. The sun still rode the horizon. I stared at it for a few seconds until my eyes watered. Then I shut them and just stood in its warmth. Right then, I felt determined. Strong and loose. Daylight provided reassurance and courage. As the sun slowly set, though, I could feel low-grade terror creeping up from my guts into my chest.
Palms sweaty, I pulled Diana’s keys out of my pants pocket and went around to the back door. Let myself in. I turned on every light in the place, upstairs, then down. That storeroom in the basement lacked adequate lighting. It felt gloomy. My hands shook as I stood in front of the coffin. The blonde one with dirt in it. It sat atop two other caskets, putting it in easy reach, lid closed.
My tablet chimed. Four fifty-two p.m.. Sundown.
I cracked the lid.
Empty.
Outside, the sun slid down another subjective millimeter. Dusk turned into gloaming: the magic moments when the sun is down but still paints the horizon with yellow light. The hour of bats and mosquitos. Coyotes.
Another minute and another and I began to feel foolish but also glad. I would rather be insane than live in a world where –
Mist. White, vaguely luminescent, sparkling in the dim overhead light. It coalesced. Thickened like my fear. Took shape.
Her. In repose, slumbering, a sleepy smile on her face. Beatific, perhaps even beautiful. And as she formed there in that coffin in the basement of the funeral home, my world diffused like the mist that had formed her.
