“We’re on salad detail, Axelrod.” Kyle took a swig of beer and handed the rookie a paring knife. “And one more thing. Do not talk to the doctor while she’s cooking. I speak from experience.”
Sky poured herself some wine and lined up the ingredients for carbonara along the counter: a package of vermicelli, six eggs, a half pound of bacon, a wedge of aged parmesan, and a bunch of flat-leaf Italian parsley. She sipped from the goblet of merlot as she worked her way through the recipe. Timing counted, with carbonara.
The bacon she chopped into matchsticks and fried in a hot skillet. The eggs were cracked raw into a small mixing bowl, whipped to a lemon yellow, and topped with freshly ground black pepper. She grated the wedge of parmesan into a white mound and added a short cup of chopped parsley.
When the bacon was nearly done, Sky cooked and drained the vermicelli and poured it into a glass bowl. She added the bacon, eggs, grated cheese, and parsley to the steaming pasta, letting the heat from the vermicelli cook the eggs and cheese to the consistency of cream. A final grind of black pepper over the carbonara, and she invited the men to sit.
“Axelrod, you lucky bastard, you should count your blessings.” Kyle put a bowl of glistening greens on the table and pulled a chair out for Sky. “I didn’t get to taste the doctor’s cooking until well into our fifth investigation.”
Everyone piled their plates high. The detectives switched from beer to wine, and they all took turns ripping off chunks of the baguette, dredging the bread through a mixture of olive oil and grated garlic.
“Darling,” Kyle speared a cranberry on his fork. “Please marry me and save me from my ball-busting wife. Just look at us, interviewing suspects, chasing Lamborghinis, having a lovely meal.” He pulled a box of Crackerjacks from the pocket of his sport coat and tossed it on the table. “We could adopt Axelrod, be a happy little family.”
Sky giggled. Kyle proposed to her at least twice during every murder investigation, but adopting the rookie, that was a delectable embellishment. And didn’t Axelrod resemble the sailor boy on the Crackerjack box, just a little?
Sky was still laughing when Jake walked into the kitchen looking like he’d just put down his favorite horse. He studied the table for a few moments, taking in the remnants of pasta, the half-filled wine glasses, the beer bottles and bread crumbs. The blue delphinium quivered in its yellow vase.
“My grandmother’s carbonara.” It was an accusation. Jake seemed confused, as though he were witnessing an act beyond understanding.
Sky tried to dismiss the ripple of guilt she was feeling. Jake’s reaction might be understandable if he’d caught her in bed with a man. But a recipe, for God’s sake? She thought about the strange combination of loathing and attraction Zach Rosario harbored for Nicolette. Sky expected that kind of irrational mindset from a murder suspect. But here stood Detective Farrell, conflating food with love.
She tried to see things from Jake’s viewpoint: Axelrod munching Crackerjacks, Kyle eating pecans out of the salad bowl with his fingers. Kyle’s little joke about the happy family didn’t seem so funny now. And it was a Farrell family recipe. ‘Real carbonara,’ Jake’s grandmother had insisted, ‘like we ate in Tuscany when I was a girl. Not the phony stuff you get in restaurants.’
“Help yourself,” Sky shrugged.
Jake sat. “The dental records were a match. Victim’s mother and sister are flying into Boston tonight. From L.A..” Jake scraped a few bits of bacon from the bottom of the pasta bowl with the heel of the baguette and popped the bread in his mouth. “Thanks for the crumbs,” he said, fixing Sky with a stare.
Sky didn’t know if the beta blockers were still working, or maybe it was the wine, but she felt calm. In control. Not the panic she’d felt at the crime scene.
Calm was good.
She returned Jake’s stare and watched the pupils of his eyes grow large.
Axelrod stacked the dirty dishes in the sink and set three mugs of coffee on the table while Sky argued the strategic benefits of interviewing Ellery Templeton at Genuine John’s.
“I want to see him at work,” she insisted.
At play was more like it. Guitarists were such prima donnas. The old Dire Straits song ran through her head, Money For Nothing. Not much of an exaggeration, really. But Sky was fond of Ellery. She wondered if he still wore his hair long, pulled back in a pony tail. After she broke it off she quit going to see him perform, but he was a gifted guitar player. Was it his fault if everybody loved a musician?
“Take O’Toole and Axelrod with you,” Jake ordered. “I’m due at the morgue.”
“Give Vanessa my best.” Sky couldn’t help herself, the coroner grated on her nerves. She considered mentioning that Ellery was an old boyfriend, but immediately discarded the idea. No sense waving that red flag in front of Jake. Look how the man reacted to an innocent dinner.
“I’ll just go powder my nose.” Sky excused herself and headed for the bathroom. She loved that line, she’d copped it from an old movie, The Thin Man. Myrna Loy and William Powell played Nick and Nora Charles, a retired private eye and his wealthy socialite wife. During Sky’s engagement to Jake, he’d joked that they’d be the Lake’s Nick and Nora.
Jake loved old films. Such a charming eccentricity in someone so macho.
But that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
Sky frowned at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and splashed cold water on her face.
“No more wine,” she instructed herself out loud.
Sky sipped her coffee at the kitchen table and watched Axelrod dry the last of the dinner dishes while Jake paced back and forth, looking irritated. The rookie tossed the sodden tea towel on the counter and joined Sky and Kyle at the table.
“About time.” Jake sat down and turned to Sky. “So who was our victim? Give me Nicolette Mercer in ten words or less.”
“Bright. Ambitious," she said. "Beautiful. Manipulative.” Sky thought about the interviews with Jenna and Professor Fisk. “Teacher’s pet. Money problems. Girly-girl.” And a stuffed Dalmatian with a leather nose, she thought. How did you describe that?
“Wow.” Axelrod was counting on his fingers. “You actually did that in ten words.” He squinted at her. “What does ‘girly-girl’ mean?”
Sky rattled off a quick list of items from the victim’s bedroom. “Fingernail polish, lipstick, perfume, pink panties.”
Jake gave her an odd look.
“What?” Sky said.
“Lipstick. Perfume. Pink panties,” Jake’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “Reminds me of you, that’s all.”
“Sexy,” Kyle said. “Nicolette was sexy. Don’t forget that.”
“It wasn’t just about sex,” Sky insisted. “Nicolette was a romantic.”
She wondered how many times Nicolette had played that Titanic movie. About two hundred, by the looks of the battered DVD. Sky could even imagine Nicolette watching the movie by candlelight. Crying, at the end. Maybe crying all the way through.
“And there’s this.” Sky took the scrap of paper pulled from Nicolette’s book of magic spells and spread it out on the middle of the kitchen table.
A) TELL MR. VIPER NO – ERECTILE NORM ETC
“Who’s Mr. Viper?” Jake said.
“I don’t know.”
“Erectile – what’s that? Viagra? Is that what she was working on in that lab?”
Sky shook her head. “Nicolette was working with floetazine.”
“A drug for treating depression,” Kyle said. “Trade name is Primil.”
“Here’s some background from Professor Fisk,” Sky said, tossing Jake the packet of reprints.
He slid an article out of the envelope and read the title. “Antidepressant activity of floetazine in the rat forced swim test.”
The detectives exchanged bemused looks.
“Forced swim test?” Jake turned to Sky. “Translate, please.”
“Put a rat in a tub of water. He’ll swim hard for ten minutes before h
e gives up and floats,” Sky said. “You take him out of the tub. The next day, you put him back in the water, he swims hard, only this time he gives up fast, after about two minutes.”
“That,” she said, stressing the point, “is the critical question in all of these studies – the amount of time our rat spends immobile on day two.” Sky slipped a hand into her pocket and felt the baby sweater between her fingers. “It’s called behavioral despair. To be technical, it’s an animal model of depression.”
“How does it work?” asked Kyle, adjusting his wire rims.
“Simple. Give the rat some floetazine, and he keeps swimming on the second day. Behavioral despair is gone.”
“That’s it? A rat in a tub of water?” Jake seemed skeptical. “What the hell does that have to do with humans?”
“A legitimate question,” Sky agreed. “The forced swim test just happens to be selective for depression.”
“Huh?” Axelrod blinked at Sky with his owl eyes.
“Every known treatment for depression – all drugs, electroshock, transcranial magnetic stimulation – all of them have an immediate effect on the forced swim test. The rat always swims longer."
“Why?” Axelrod said.
“Floetazine changes your brain chemistry. It increases serotonin. Let me draw you a picture.” Sky pulled out the green golf pencil and drew a figure on the back of Professor Fisk’s article.
“Looks like a croquet mallet,” Axelrod said.
Sky corrected him. “This is a nerve cell in your brain. When you take floetazine, all of the serotonin in this nerve cell pours out.” Sky scribbled a dozen tiny globs along the outside rim of the mallet head.
“Floetazine increases serotonin activity by blocking reuptake. These globs stay here, in the synaptic cleft,” she pointed to the area around the mallet head, “instead of getting sucked back into the nerve cell.”
Kyle studied the primitive drawing. “Not enough serotonin? That’s why we get depressed?”
“It’s dated. But it’s still a popular theory.” Sky shrugged. “Very twentieth century.”
“Yeah?” Kyle gave her a pained look. “So what’s very twenty-first century?”
“There’s the link between depression and neurogenesis of the hippocampus.” Sky reached up and touched Kyle’s head, just behind his left ear. “This part of your brain. Critical for forming new memories. Some researchers are studying a class of proteins that help neurons grow and survive. Trophic factors, they're called. Chronic stress inhibits their release. Long story short, depression may be a function of atrophied brain cells.”
“Depression is a withered brain?” Kyle seemed doubtful.
“It’s a theory. Floetazine may work because it helps these cells recover their vigor, form new connections.” Sky pointed to the globs of serotonin in her drawing. “Floetazine increases your serotonin levels as soon as you begin taking it, but it takes four to six weeks before your depression starts to lift. The withered brain theory explains this latency.” Sky looked at each detective in turn. “In other words, no one really knows. Anyone who tells you they understand the biology of depression is full of shit. Count on it.”
Jake gave the drawing an indifferent wave. “Give me something I can use. Like a description of the killer.”
All three detectives leaned almost imperceptibly toward Sky.
“Heterosexual. Male. Caucasian. Physically strong. Educated. Socially facile.” Sky folded the note she’d found tucked in the book of magic spells. “A planner. A control freak, even.” She fastened Nicolette’s note in her journal with a paperclip. “He’s a collector,” she added, thinking about the patch of skin cut from the small of Nicolette’s back. “Something probably happened to him, just before he murdered Nicolette. Financial trouble, a problem at work, maybe. Some kind of stressor.” Sky listened to the clock ticking on the wall. “One more thing,” she said. “Bullough’s Pond, the morning of the Boston Marathon? That was a deliberate choice. It’s his sense of humor. He thinks leaving a dead body in the middle of town is clever.”
The detectives stared at her.
“He’s laughing at us,” she explained, “like we’re the village idiots.”
The men bristled visibly at this piece of analysis. Sky could almost smell the testosterone in the room.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Remind me, sugar. Why didn’t you marry me?”
Fresh from an aggressive performance of Hey Joe, the last song of his first set, Ellery Templeton stood in the basement office of Genuine John’s Tavern on Harvard Avenue, dressed in black leather, nursing a whiskey sour, eyeing Sky with undisguised delight.
Despite the intervening decade, Ellery seemed remarkably the same. Same guitar style, magically edgy, ornate and smooth all at once, Johnny Winter meets Stevie Ray Vaughan meets Eric Clapton. A bit fuller in the face, maybe. The only real change, Sky decided, was the hair. Ellery’s pony tail was gone, his head was completely shaved. Each ear lobe was circled with a gold hoop, giving him the exotic appearance of a pirate.
On Ellery, it looked good.
Ellery, for his part, was studying Sky the way a painter might study his model. “I guess you’re one of those women who just gets more beautiful.” His brow knotted, as though he did not quite approve of this state of affairs. “Heard you were dating a cop.”
Sky gave a noncommittal shrug.
“You still love champagne?” he asked.
“I do.”
“You still love Bach and the Beastie Boys?”
“Yes.”
“You still have that fairy on your shoulder blade?”
Sky nodded.
Ellery gave a lazy laugh and pulled a fresh pack of Camels from the pocket of his leather shirt. He rapped the pack against his palm, five sharp hits. It was an old habit, one Sky knew well.
“You still love the cop?” Ellery grinned.
Yes, Sky thought, Ellery really was the same. Same wicked guitar licks, same startling blue eyes, same superstar smile.
She decided to dispense with the small talk. “Nicolette Mercer’s dead body was found sixteen hours ago.”
The color drained from Ellery’s face and he gave Sky a helpless, drowning look. His blue eyes seemed, suddenly, to have infinite depth, as though Sky were looking into another dimension. She’d seen these eyes before, on other faces, other investigations. Death shock, Sky called it, this shattering effect that death inflicted on the living.
“Talk to me, Ellery.”
He slumped in a chair behind the desk. “I saw Nicolette Saturday night. Here. In Genuine John’s.” He drained his drink and called upstairs on the desk phone for another whiskey sour. “Make it a double.”
Ellery pulled a cigarette from the pack of Camels. “Nicolette came to the gig late that night, maybe one fifteen. Usually, she’s here for two or three sets, but Saturday she didn’t show until just before closing.”
He paused, like he was trying to get the details right.
“I saw her from the stage – that red hair made it easy – she stood at the bar, waiting while I finished the last set.” Ellery lit the cigarette and took a hit, holding it between thumb and index finger, like he was smoking a joint. Smoke streamed from one side of his mouth. “I packed up, talked to the owner for a few minutes about a Fourth of July booking.”
A rap sounded on the door and an efficient-looking brunette with bright orange lips swooped in carrying a highball and a cocktail napkin. She leaned across Sky and handed Ellery his double.
“You’re a doll,” he told her with conviction.
“My pleasure, Ellery.” The orange lips delivered the words with a predatory purr. “My number’s on the napkin.”
The flirtation hung in the air but Ellery was concentrating on his drink. The whiskey sour was gone in three gulps. Ellery wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Pursing her orange lips, the barmaid shot Sky a nasty look and slammed the door on her way out.
Ellery continued. “I pl
anned on driving to New York right after the gig, but Nicolette insisted I walk her home. Fine, I said. It’s a few blocks from here, there was a spectacular full moon that night. It was real cold. But you could smell spring coming. We were standing in front of Nicolette’s apartment, right there on Comm Ave, when she told me she didn’t want to see me anymore. Just like that. Out of the blue.”
“Did she say why?”
“Blamed it on her dissertation. Said she had to concentrate, finish her doctorate.” Ellery shrugged. “One of my weaknesses, I guess. Educated women.”
“How did you feel about the break-up?”
Ellery considered the question a few moments before answering. “Relieved.”
This was not the response Sky was expecting.
Ellery seemed to register her surprise. “Nicolette was needy. Always asking, Did I like her hair? Did I like her shoes?”
The two whiskey sours were having their effect. Ellery’s speech began to thicken, his motions grew exaggerated.
“She got clingy. It was a real bait and switch, Sky. We’d been going out for about a month when she started with the wild accusations, the temper tantrums. Accused me of sleeping with other women.”
“She was jealous?”
Ellery nodded. “I consider myself something of a connoisseur, when it comes to the ladies. I’ve known women all over this planet.” He pointed a heavily ringed finger at Sky. “There aren’t many like you." His blue eyes moved over her body. “So sure of yourself. So comfortable in your own skin. God, I miss that.”
“Focus, Ellery.”
“I didn’t kill Nicolette, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he insisted. “She was sweet. A little whacked, maybe. You know me, Sky. When it comes to women? I love ‘em all.” He gave a sheepish shrug. “I might as well confess. I’ve been seeing someone else, on the sly. A model. I met her in London last winter, on tour. Fiona Thatcher.”
Smoke drifted from his mouth as he spoke. “Fiona flew into town about four days ago, for a fall spread in Vogue, at Faneuil Hall. She’s crashing at my place.”
The Profiler's Daughter (Sky Stone Thriller Series) Page 10
