Bare Bones

by Debra Dunbar

  Librarians, even Templar ones, took the preservation of the written word very seriously. Cracked spine aside, I was hoping that the spirit in the little fox could somehow manage to flip to the page I needed to read. If he could move the figurine around, I assumed turning pages wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

  Throwing on some clothes and yanking my hair back into a pony tail, I went to put on my sneakers and hesitated. What the heck had I stepped in? Or rather, what the heck had I kicked? I didn’t always look closely at my footwear, and these were a retired pair of running shoes, neon-bright in pink, blue, and yellow. Whatever I’d kicked had stained the blue toe to dark purple.

  Yuck. I slid on another pair, but took this shoe over to the sink. It could have been anything—pizza, car oil, barf.

  It was blood. I could tell from the red of the water, from the faint smell it gave off. My mind slid back into memories of a month ago, of me standing in the shower fully clothed as the water ran red down the drain.

  Get a grip. I hadn’t killed anything. I’d probably stubbed my shoe against some roadkill while walking. Yeah, because I wouldn’t notice almost stepping on a dead possum in a gutter. Whatever it was didn’t matter. The stain was coming off my shoe. The water was now running clean. No harm, no foul.

  I left the soggy shoe in the sink to dry and skipped out, grabbing one more cannoli for the road.

  It was a beautiful day, the sun beating down with a fierce intensity that belied the September date on the calendar. I headed west from my Fells Point apartment, swooping through the harbor area to swing by the bakery. I could have picked up cookies at Holy Grounds, the coffee shop where I worked, and taken a few moments to socialize and chat with co-workers unlucky enough to be working on this gorgeous day, but instead I kept going up the narrowing streets to the huge brick building that looked more like a turn of the century clothing factory than a bakery.

  Normally showing up at a bakery after nine o’clock in the morning meant you were left with whatever the morning crowd didn’t want. That usually included things like black olive bagels, anise flavored cookies, and those donuts with the jelly in them. That was not the situation at Dill’s. Even at this late hour of the morning the cases overflowed with a huge assortment of cookies, donuts, and pastries. Pies and cakes in their glass displays took up an entire wall of the shop. Three people were ahead of me to place their orders and two staff were on the phone, filling orders for delivery.

  In record time I was out of there and on my way to the station, a huge box of assorted cookies in the passenger seat. Tremelay had given me directions that led me through western Baltimore to a large industrial-looking brick building with rows of small, squinty windows and a huge white-columned entrance that looked like it should have been attached to a southern estate instead of this soulless edifice.

  No wonder the guy needed cookies. I’d need more than pastry coming here to work each day. Hard liquor, perhaps.

  I parked and trotted up the absurd white steps, sending my cookie box through the metal detector along with the contents of my pockets.

  The sword was in my car. Even the best crafted look-away spell wouldn’t keep the metal detector from going crazy at my weapon. I hated to leave it behind, but couldn’t exactly bring it into a police station. Besides, I was here to watch them conduct an informal interview with a museum employee, a mistaken victim of a serial killer. No need for a bastard sword when I was in a station full of armed officers better equipped to take down a human threat than I was.

  “Whoa! Dill’s!” Instead of greeting me, Tremelay snatched the box of cookies and caressed the lid. If only a man would show me that much affection.

  Before I could reply there was a crowd around the cookie box. “Any chocolate chip?” “Ones with pecans?” “How about cinnamon spice?”

  Tremelay wrapped his arms protectively around the box and glared at his co-workers.

  “I brought three dozen,” I told him. He might want to consider sharing. I heard things at the station could get pretty frosty when someone refused to share baked goods.

  “Afterward.” He shooed at the other cops, who tried to take advantage of his one armed hold on the box with attempts to grab it from his hands. “You guys make me drop these and I’m gonna have to discharge my service weapon.”

  We elbowed our way past the hungry cops and into a little room with a huge picture window. I’d seen these two-way mirror things in hundreds of movies. I’m pretty sure by this point none of the folks being interviewed were fooled by the mirror.

  At this moment, the room on the other side of the window was empty. Tremelay put the box of cookies down on the table and opened them, offering one to a guy who’d come into the room with us. He was less slovenly than Tremelay with a neat crease in his dark pants and starch in his white shirt. The two cops were about the same age, but this one had lost a good bit of his blond hair, the remaining amount trimmed short. In spite of the stereotypical affection toward donuts—and the verified fondness for cookies—this guy had managed to keep his midsection in the range of what I’d expect to see on a somewhat active middle-aged man.

  “Norwicki,” he announced, crumbs decorating his bottom lip.

  “Ainsworth,” I replied. No one had offered me a cookie yet, but since I’d bought the darned things, I went ahead and reached for one. I half expected Tremelay to slap my hand out of the way, but he generously allowed me to take a peanut butter.

  “You the Templar?” I nodded and he continued. “Where’s your sword?”

  “In the car.” Duh. Like they’d let me carry it around here.

  “Can I see it?”

  What was it about cops and my sword? I swear if there was a choice between seeing my boobs and my sword, they’d pick the sword.

  “Where is Huang?” Tremelay interrupted, looking at his watch. “If he’s a no show, we need to send someone around to his house to pick him up.”

  “Riiight,” Norwicki drawled, sneaking a hand into the cookie box. “The Lieutenant is never going to go for that. He’s obviously not our victim since he’s walking around alive with his skin still on. We can’t strong-arm a citizen just because there was a mistake coding his medical implant.”

  “Little too much of a coincidence in my opinion,” Tremelay replied, ignoring the cookie theft. “Guy works at a museum, is there on the day a body winds up in the museum broom closet, and happens to have a medical device registry number that shows up in the corpse.”

  Norwicki stuffed the whole cookie in his mouth, managing somehow to speak while chewing. “People do win the lottery. People do sometimes get hit by lightning. And people do sometimes work in a place where a dead guy is found with an implant that traces back to them. What are you saying, Tremelay? You think Huang switched knee implants with the victim, then skinned him and stuffed him in a back room at work? There’s nothing that points to him as the killer. Nothing. It was a freak chance thing that the dead man’s implant matched Huang’s.”

  He had a point. “Aren’t those devices shipped in batches?” I chimed in. “Hopkins probably does a ton of knee replacements. Heck, there are hundreds of joint replacement specialists in the Baltimore/D.C. area. It’s not that far of a stretch to think that Huang may have gotten his replacement from the same batch as the victim and the numbers were only one digit off. Someone does a typo and bingo—two guys in Baltimore with the same implant registration number.”

  Tremelay glared at me as if I were Judas. I felt suddenly guilty and pushed the box over toward him. Maybe another chocolate chip cookie would ease the pain of my betrayal.

  “Let it go, Tremelay,” the other detective said. “This is Baltimore. We’ve got enough to deal with without harassing some museum employee with a bad knee. The M.E. John Doe’d the vic. They’ll hold it longer than usual because of the circumstances of the murder. We’ll keep checking missing person’s reports and eventually we’ll get a hit.”

  The detective had a point. If my theory about the artificial join
t batches was correct, then the guy lived in the area at the time of the surgery. He was either visiting or he still lived here. Eventually someone would report his disappearance, and most likely sooner rather than later. I couldn’t see vagrants with expensive knee replacements, and nothing about the guy’s teeth—which were all frighteningly visible on his corpse—seemed to indicate long-term drug use or lack of annual dental care. Someone had to be missing this guy.

  At that moment the door opened to the interview room and we all snapped to attention. A uniformed officer escorted an Asian man in and motioned to the chair, asking him if he’d like water or coffee.

  “Coke? Orange if you have it.”

  The officer tilted his head, his expression confused. “Orange soda? We don’t have any of that but we do have the regular Coke.”

  Huang thanked him and the officer left. No one made a move to go into the room. Norwicki and Tremelay watched through the mirror, as did I. The man slumped in his chair, legs wide and hands shoved in his pockets in a stance that was at odds with what I’d expect from a forty-year-old museum employee.

  He looked like a nervous teenager, bouncing his knee and glancing around the room.

  “Rock, paper, scissors?” Norwicki asked.

  “Nah. I got it.” Tremelay closed the lid on the cookies and gave his partner a warning glare before leaving to enter the room with Huang. The man straightened up as the detective walked in, clasping his hands on top of the table, still bouncing his leg at a frantic pace.

  “Mr. Huang. Thank you so much for coming in today.” Tremelay put a folder on the table and sat across from the man. “I know we spoke to you about the body found at the Walters the other day, but some interesting facts have come to light.”

  Brian Huang fidgeted, picking at his nails. “Yeah?”

  Yeah? This was a man who had a Master’s degree and five years of employment at the museum as a curator.

  “The dead body has a knee replacement, and the serial number is registered to you.”

  Huang’s leg abruptly halted its frantic movement. “Well, I’m obviously still alive.”

  “I see that,” Tremelay smiled. “It’s quite the coincidence, though. A dead man at your place of employment has a medical device that links to you.”

  “What are you getting at?” Huang’s voice was squeaky, panicked. “Are you accusing me of something? You think I ripped out my knee and surgically implanted it in someone else before killing them?”

  “Of course not. I just need to follow up. I’m sure you understand.” The detective opened the folder and pulled out a picture, sliding it toward Huang. “Do you recognize him?”

  “No,” the man shrieked. “How the hell am I supposed to recognize him? He’s got no face.”

  Tremelay slid the photo back into the folder. “Where were you the evening before?”

  Huang took several deep breaths, his leg starting its bounce again. “I was at the museum from five to midnight. We had the exhibit to prep, plus there were some loaned artifacts coming in from a museum in South Carolina. Elsa Cartwright, the curator of the weapons exhibit, was there with me. We catalogued the loaned items and readied the displays. I went home at midnight and was back at the museum at eight to get things ready for the donor reception.”

  Thorough, and he had witnesses to his alibi. But there still was time after he’d left the museum to have killed and skinned the victim. I was assuming he had keys to the building, and that his wife might not notice that he’d arrived home closer to two than twelve thirty or one.

  Wait. He wasn’t a suspect. He was supposedly the victim by his knee replacement ID. The guy probably had nothing to do with this. Tremelay had him here just to gather information, not accuse the man. As Huang had said, he could hardly have removed his own implant and put it in the victim. This was just a bizarre coincidence.

  Tremelay obviously felt the same. He noted the man’s comments, then stood, thanking him for coming in. The detective was escorting him to the door just as the officer arrived with the man’s soda.

  Huang took it and nervously fiddled with the pull tab, then followed Tremelay out of the interview room.

  “What do you think?” Norwicki asked.

  I shrugged. “Someone screwed up coding the guy’s medical device. Probably someone getting a knee replacement the same week as our victim.”

  Norwicki nodded in agreement. “Try convincing Tremelay that. He’s gonna be a dog with a bone on this case, and the man doesn’t believe in coincidences.”

  The detective might not, but I couldn’t see how this was anything else. No other explanation made sense. We were looking for a psychotic killer who skinned his victim, and I truly doubted Brian Huang had anything to do with the murder, in spite of his eccentricities.

  Chapter 7

  NORWICKI AND I had reopened the cookie box and helped ourselves by the time Tremelay made it back in.

  “Hey,” he protested, shutting the lid after grabbing another chocolate chip for himself. “Well, Huang was a bust, and we’re back to square one. I still think something is fishy with that guy, though.”

  Norwicki gave me a knowing look reached for another cookie, jerking his hand back as two beeps went off. Like a synchronized water ballet, both detectives checked their cell phones and exchanged tired glances.

  “Got a murder, this one with her skin still on,” Norwicki announced as he stowed his cell phone in his pants pocket.

  “Yeah,” Tremelay grumbled, looking through the big glass window into the now-empty interview room. “Guess our John Doe has to step aside until we get another lead.” He looked over at me and smiled. “Wanna ride along, Ainsworth? I feel bad that this wasn’t more exciting.”

  I had nothing else to do today. “Sure. I think a dead woman is a fair trade for a couple dozen cookies.”

  At the mention of the baked goods, both detectives eyed the box. “We won’t be back for hours,” Tremelay announced. “I leave these at the station and there won’t be any left.”

  Oh for Pete’s sake. You’d think the guy never had a cookie before in his life. “Share, you selfish pig. You’re gonna get fat if you eat all those cookies yourself.”

  Tremelay and Norwicki both instinctively sucked in their stomachs and looked down. Vanity knew no age limit.

  “Oh all right.” Tremelay finally capitulated. They each took a few more cookies and deposited the nearly-empty box on a desk just outside the door to the interview room. Within seconds, other cops had descended on it like a pack of piranhas.

  We walked out to the unmarked car, Tremelay still chewing over the not-Huang case. “You know if it’s a serial killer, he’s going to kill again. It’s not like this guy wakes up one day and decides to peel the skin off someone then never do it again.”

  “Yeah.” Norwicki chimed in. “Even if it’s out of state, it’ll link in. It’s too weird of a murder not to. We’ll get him.”

  Tremelay sighed. “Yeah. I guess. I just hate having this one on the board as a John Doe with no leads at all.”

  We made our way through the parking lot and I saw Huang next to a car in the visitor space, talking to a young woman. Suddenly he reached out and grabbed her, the pair hugging each other like they had no one else in the world. Their shoulders shook and I realized they were both crying.

  His daughter? No, he wasn’t that old. The girl looked to be about sixteen, too young to be his wife. My stomach twisted at the thought that Huang could be involved with an underage girl, but their embrace, although emotional, didn’t seem passionate.

  “Coming Ainsworth?” Tremelay called, unlocking the door to the unmarked car.

  I turned but not before the couple broke apart from their embrace and I saw the girl’s face—the golden-brown hair with pink and blue streaks, the upturned nose, thick black eyeliner, and neon pink lipstick. It was the teenage girl from the Inner Harbor who’d been arguing with her brother outside the oyster shack.

  Brian Huang was about as far from a vampire as co
uld be. Either she’d changed her mind, and her gender preference, or they were an odd pair of friends. Suspicious, I grabbed my cell phone and snapped a quick picture of the two, jogging to catch up with Tremelay and Norwicki.

  The three of us were settled in the car, me in the backseat, before I remembered I’d left my sword in the trunk of my car. Not that I’d need it. We were heading off to see a routine murder. No need for Trusty there.

  “So what’s up with this case?” I asked, breaking the silence and putting the thought of a forty-year-old man and a sixteen-year-old girl out of my mind.

  “Amanda Lewis,” Tremelay said. “Twenty-eight. Made a bunch of money in short-sales when she was barely old enough to buy a beer. She’s a financial analyst, but does pretty well day trading, evidently.”

  Norwicki snorted. “I should be so lucky. My 401k looks like a kid’s lunch money.”

  Dead at twenty-eight didn’t sound so lucky to me. “So…? Jealous boyfriend goes homicidal? Robbery gone bad? She spend all that money on coke and tried to stiff her dealer?”

  Both detectives shrugged. “Boyfriend is the one that found her,” Tremelay said. “Judging from the hysteria on the 911 call, I’d say he’s not a suspect. He thinks it has something to do with her brother. Says he saw a man running from the scene, and is pretty sure it was him.”

  I looked out the window at the tightly spaced rows of narrow, tall houses, the shadows of the harbor in the distance. The container ships looked so small from here, the rows of gantry cranes at the port like bowlegged stick figures. We made a left, heading north and still east. This neighborhood looked vaguely familiar, but I hadn’t been paying attention early on and still wasn’t familiar enough with the city to know where I was.

  “Who knows,” Norwicki said. “Brother could have been in a gang. Maybe the sister saw something she shouldn’t have. Or maybe he had racked up debts and was robbing his sister when she came home early from work.”

  She was killed in her house. It seemed an odd place for a gang to do a hit. We were heading to the more affluent eastern neighborhoods. I couldn’t see a bunch of boyz-in-the-hood driving here and storming into a charming Cape Cod with guns blazing. Unless it was vampires. I shivered, hoping with all my might that vampires weren’t involved with this murder. Please Lord do not let me be on the opposite side of a murder from Dario. We’d just gotten back on good terms after the necromancer thing last month. I didn’t want our friendship—or whatever the heck we had—threatened by a dead day trader in Canton.