by Nina Post
"Oh, Shawn." Exasperated. "Aren't you always?"
"It's my job," he pointed out with a seasoned sense of futility. He had to get the hell out of here. Out of this party. Out of Erie. Maybe he should cross an ocean.
His mother turned over to a group standing by the window. "Melly! Your brother's here!"
"Is Dad here?" Shawn didn't see him.
"He's around here somewhere." His mother sniffed. "What's that smell?" Shawn knew exactly what it was -- his suit, post-autopsy -- but he just smiled and shrugged. His mother gave him a look and drifted away. "Great to see you too," he said under his breath.
Melly walked over, and he noticed the look his mother gave her as they passed each other, that 'He's giving me the usual bullshit' look. He could recognize it with just a glimpse of her profile.
"Congratulations, Melly." He handed her the envelope and she slit it open with her nail.
"Thanks." She barely looked at it. "I thought you weren't going to come."
"I can only stay for a few minutes. But I wanted to stop by and give you that."
"Let me guess," she put a finger on her chin in feigned surprise. "There's a killer on the loose." Did they think he just made it up? Did he need to bring his captain around next time so he could verify his employment?
"Actually, yes."
"And you're the only detective in the city." She curled her lip. "What's that awful smell?"
"Autopsy," he said, a bit too cheerfully.
"Oh, gross," she said, and left in a hurry, giving him an out.
He was getting closer to making a decision. Did he think he needed to test himself with them? They were toxic, and he shouldn't be this close to them. He hoped the Erie PD had a murder police exchange program with some of their sister cities.
***
As reluctant as he was to leave his sister's party, especially before talking to his father, Shawn was eager to do some shopping. After Jasper's autopsy, he knew what he was looking for, but needed to narrow it down.
He started at a sporting goods store, where he bought several models of steel tent stakes, icepicks ("sailors buy them," an employee told him), hammers, and rubber mallets. No one even raised a brow at his purchase of Homicidal Maniac Variety Pack - As Seen On TV.
Next, he went to a housewares store and purchased a few different ice picks, along with some ice buckets and cocktail shakers so his shopping basket wouldn't look exceedingly suspicious. Then, he stopped by a gardening store and purchased a couple more objects with pointed ends.
His last stop was at an art store, where he bought sculptor's tools: a lump hammer with a soft steel head, a few hardened steel chisels for marble and a softer stone, a carbide-tipped point chisel, and a three-pound hammer. The purple-haired cashier looked over his purchase with a critical eye and he was relieved that he'd finally found someone suspicious. Until the cashier said, "With hammers this size, you're going to need a big tarp."
"Good idea. Where can I find those?"
"Aisle two."
Shawn hurried over to aisle two and grabbed a few tarps. When he came back, the cashier said, "You know, you really shouldn't use a hardened hammer with a hardened steel chisel end."
That may have been sound advice for sculpting with stone, but Shawn just wanted to make sure he had every possible tool that could match Jasper's skull wounds. "Oh, I'm just testing something." He imagined the cashier getting on the phone after he was gone; 'Yes, FBI? I work in an art store and this weird guy came in and bought…' But his experience so far indicated he could have thrown in some knives and bottles of bleach without so much as a furrowed brow.
What he needed now was something to test them on -- ideally something made of clay or porcelain and roughly the size and shape of the human head.
He needed a potter.
***
Shawn located a potter who worked forty minutes outside of Erie. It was more time than he wanted to spend away from the immediate vicinity of his work, but he liked how she sounded on the phone and valued chemistry as well as time when he needed to work with people.
The GPS led him on a two-lane road where logging trucks bore down west toward the lumber yards. If you wanted to turn, and one of those was behind you, you signaled early, then hurried the hell up. Thankful he wasn't in Sarah's diminutive car -- which he always pictured huffing and bouncing along the road, a nervous smile on its front bumper -- he made a hasty turn onto a grass and dirt road that led a few yards down to a house. It had an adjacent structure that looked like a barn, with a sign for "Gem City Pottery."
He passed through the open double doors to a gallery where finished pottery lined shelves around the room and dotted tables. "Hello?"
"In here! Just come on back. Unless you're an ex-husband or here to rob me, then I'd prefer if you stayed in the gallery until I can get my 10-gauge."
The voice came through a single open door at the rear right, in a studio where a woman was elbow deep in mud. The room had an earthy smell with a slight undertone of chemicals, and the floor felt different. He looked down and scuffed the dirt surface with his shoe. To his left was a pottery wheel, and behind that were more shelves covered with pots and clay hand prints. Everything in the room including the wheel, the well-organized tools, and the light switches was coated with a fine dusting of clay.
"Lieutenant Danger. We spoke earlier."
"Yes, I remember. It's good to have a visitor. And that shotgun's registered." The potter glanced up from the wheel with a friendly smile, her eyes bright with enthusiasm. "I'm Nelda. I'd shake your hand, but I doubt you'd want that at the moment, not with that nice suit."
Nelda's hair was carelessly gathered in a topknot and she was wearing a worn and faded Kane High School athletics t-shirt, faded jeans and worn boots, all covered in the same dusting of clay that coated the room. Clay fingerprints smudged the frame and lenses of her red glasses and there was a blurred mark on her forehead.
"Gem City Pottery," Shawn said. "Did you start your business in downtown Erie?"
She lifted a brow and grinned. "I did. Moved out here a year ago, kept the name. So tell me more about your project."
"I need a dozen round pots roughly the size of a human skull."
"Oh sure. I get that request all the time."
"Really," Shawn said.
"Actually, I get asked to make some pretty weird things. When do you need them?"
"As soon as you can make them."
She wrinkled her brow in thought. "Well, let's see. The clay would have to be weighed out and wedged to remove the air. Twelve pieces weighed and wedged would take about thirty, forty-five minutes. Each skull-sized pot would require roughly four pounds of clay and twenty minutes on the wheel. Then they'd need at least a day or two to dry before they could go through an initial fire."
"And how long does the initial fire take?"
"A bisque firing in a electric kiln? About nine hours. And then a final glaze fire would take twelve, give or take."
He winced. She said, "If you're time-crunched, there are things we can do to decrease the dry time. There are lower firing times depending on the purpose of the pot, and the higher the temperature fired the more durable the pot is. It depends on what you want."
He couldn't spare that much time. While he thought about it, the phone rang. Nelda blew a lock of hair from in front of her eyes. "I swear it only rings when I'm covered in mud."
"I've got the same problem."
She snorted a laugh and glanced around for a towel. "It's a rule of the universe."
"Do you want to get that?" Shawn asked.
"Would you?"
Shawn answered the phone. "Gem City Pottery, how can I help you?"
Nelda winked.
"Where's Nelda?" demanded the caller.
"She's not available right now, but I'd be happy to take a message for you." Shawn Danger, secretary.
The caller harrumphed with displeasure. "Well, tell her that Eloise finally got her kidney stones back from the hospit
al."
Shawn relayed the message to Nelda with his palm over the receiver, then picked up the phone again. "Nelda says she's glad to hear that you're doing better."
"That's not why I'm calling," the woman continued. "What I need from Nelda is a good recipe for a kidney stone glaze. Can you ask her to call me back once she finds one?"
"I will."
"I should hope so." The caller hung up.
Shawn set down the phone, perplexed. "It sounds like she wants you to help her find a recipe for a glaze that she can put her kidney stones into." He paused a beat. "I've seen some pretty twisted stuff over the years, but I think I'll add your friend to my watch list."
Nelda laughed. "She's a loose cannon. I'll call her back once I'm no longer covered in clay."
"I wanted to -- " he thought for a second, then indicated the open door to another room behind the studio. "What's back there?"
"That's where I keep the bodies." She laughed hard at his expression. "Pulling your leg, Lieutenant. That's my kiln room."
"Do you mind if I take a look?"
"Not at all."
He took a step into the room. The floor might have been wood underneath the thick layer of dust. Ahead of him were bottles, different-sized white pots, and almost a dozen five-gallon buckets filled with something he couldn't identify. Dominating the area were two big octagon-shaped kilns with hinged lids, about four feet tall and five feet in diameter.
Shawn looked over his shoulder from the doorway. "What do you keep in the buckets? And the bottles?"
"Blood."
She chuckled at his expression. "Those are glazes. I like to experiment. The bottles, those are wet chemicals."
Along the right wall were large, fifty-plus pound bags that looked like grain sacks. "What's in the bags?" he asked. "Wait, let me guess: lye."
"Dry chemicals," she called out.
"What do you do in here, exactly?"
She gave him a coy look behind a loose strand of hair. "Am I under arrest for committing pottery, Detective?"
"Just curious. I've never been in a pottery studio before. And honestly, it's a nice change from the autopsy room. Both have chemical smells, but this one's a lot better." He didn't mention that the decomp smell at a homicide could be a lot worse than the smell at a morgue.
"Well, the kiln room is where I sand the pots and clean them with an air compressor before I load them into the kiln."
He went back into the studio. "I notice you have a lot of pieces in various stages of completion. Maybe I could use a few of those in the meantime?"
"Sure, that's an option. You want to test them here?"
He thought about it. He did have the tools with him.
"As you've probably noticed," Nelda said, "I have all kinds of pots sitting around. Some are green, some are fired to bisque, and some have been final fired but the glaze just didn't do right. You can have your pick of those. But for what you want, I don't think a final fired piece would be useful due to the vitrified state and how it would react to blunt force."
"Maybe I should test them here," Shawn said.
"I break pottery all the time -- pieces that didn't turn out just right. Sometimes a little tap of a hammer does the trick, and other times, safety glasses and a hard beating is required. Heck, I've flung pots onto the concrete and had them bounce off with nothing more than a chip to show for it. It really varies."
Shawn considered his schedule. He had a little time. "Are you sure that you're comfortable with me running the tests here?"
"Oh, absolutely! I love a new project!"
"I'll get the tools from my car," he said, and returned with them a couple of minutes later. Nelda cleaned up then gave him a full-body smock that he tied at the back of his neck and around his waist. When it was tied, she handed him a pair of safety glasses. Shawn held up the glasses. "Funny, I must have walked past these several times in the store, but I was so focused on the tools that I forgot to buy them," he said.
"I've got plenty." Nelda found several pots and set them up at the other end of the studio. In what was the most fun Shawn ever had on the job, at least when Sarah wasn't there, they took turns driving tent stakes and steel chisels and ice picks (ones he'd bought and the two he'd taken from Brower's old house) into the pots with mallets and hammers. Less fun was the part where he mentally compared each "wound" to Jasper's and Paul's.
"Are we reenacting Trotsky's murder?" she asked.
Shawn chuckled. "Funny, someone mentioned Trotsky before I came here." He hit a pick with a mallet. "Is it wrong to say that this is fun?"
"This is the most fun I've had in weeks," Nelda said.
But multiple pots later, he still didn't have a match. Shawn got a sinking feeling that what little he had to go on was going nowhere. He reminded himself that sometimes all it took was one tiny notch in a cliff face that could keep him from plummeting to the ground, if he held on. One dubious quasi-lead could give him something slightly bigger, let him grab a bigger notch, move his position.
"What about porcelain? Would that be more similar?"
"I haven't done porcelain in a while but if a final firing is done, the porcelain will vitrify and melt with the glass of the glaze, then shatter like glass."
That wouldn't work, and nothing they had tried produced a hole that matched the stab wounds closely enough.
"Not the results you were hoping for?" Nelda asked.
"It's hard to say."
"You certainly have a nice selection of tools here." She held up a finger. "I've got one more for you."
He hoped those weren't the last words he'd ever hear. Nelda reached up to her top-knot and took out a long hairpin. "Why don't we try this, too?" She selected another pot. "This one is what potters call bone dry."
"May I?" Shawn held out his hand. After she put the pin across his hand, he positioned it on the pot and hit the end of it with a wide-end mallet. The resulting hole seemed similar enough, though there was no way they could precisely duplicate the thinness of the temporal and occipital regions, or the exact tools, to name two of the variables. But something about Nelda's hair pin was pulling at his attention, like when Comet snagged a claw in his pant leg.
When he left Nelda's studio, she gave him a few spare pots, a blue glazed coffee mug, and a large slice of rhubarb cobbler. He left her with a studio that could have gone through an earthquake, and an Erie police patch.
***
Tuesday afternoon
After he got back to the station, Shawn parked his car and walked over to Lola's Bakery, just five blocks away. Outside, it was crisp and clear, less windy, and in the low 60s, which was good for the cake and for a walk.
A married couple ran the bakery. The Mr. was the pastry chef and the Mrs. handled the business. Though he missed the convenience of Holt's Bakery back in Allegheny County, which sold both pastries and tools, Lola's was the best in Erie, period: their cakes were rich and popped with flavor, and made you grateful you were alive to enjoy it.
The cake, of course, was for Sarah. But she'd share it. He hoped.
Shawn entered the bakery, bells tinkling on the door. The shop was small and smelled like vanilla and spices. He greeted the couple and waited behind one person. When it was his turn, he told them, "I'm here to pick up a cake. The name is Shawn Danger." He shouldn't have put it like that. When you have a name like Danger, you have to be careful with how you said it.
The Mrs. gave him a big smile. "Pear and maple, right?"
He smiled. "Right."
She showed him the cake, small, round, and tall, with maple frosting. "We don't get many requests for those. Actually, there's another customer who likes pear… " She pursed her lips in thought.
"The councilwoman," her husband said from the back.
The wife snapped her fingers. "Yes! She sneaks in here for cake -- "
"They sell ice cream cakes at that chain she runs," the husband said as he rolled out dough.
"But she likes ours, too."
Darcy?
"She has good taste," the husband said.
"She's asked for pear flavor before," the wife said, "but usually she gets chocolate."
"Darcy Kehoe?" Shawn asked.
"Yeah, that sounds right," the husband said, as he shaped the dough with his hands. "She does a lot of fundraising. We're just trying to keep our heads above water, pay the bills."
"Was she ever with anyone?" Shawn took out photos of both Jasper and Paul. "Either one of these people?"
The wife leaned forward, raised her hand and circled her finger before tapping Jasper's photo once. "This guy, two or three weeks ago."
"Two weeks ago," the husband said. "Because Krista quit that day, remember? Moved to Pittsburgh with her boyfriend." And he was still pissed about it, Shawn could tell.
"It's so much work to hire someone," the husband added, shaking his head.
The wife gave him a small smile as thought to say He's under a lot of pressure. "I think I saw her talking with this guy." She tapped the photo of Paul, "but outside the door."
Darcy was talking to Paul, too?
"Has something happened to her?"
"I hope not."
"Me too."
"And may I have two slices of your coconut cake to go, please?" he asked.
Shawn strolled out of the shop and down the sidewalk with the cake box and a bag with his two slices. He was walking toward the police station when he heard a loud crash behind him. At first he thought it was a car accident, but there wasn't a collision or ripping or metal, just glass. Shawn whipped around and saw that a car had driven right through the plate glass window of an Erie Insurance office.
He carefully hurried across the street, though some vehicles had come to a stunned standstill anyway, and then down the opposite sidewalk, sidestepping people who had froze and were looking back. He called the station as the banner fell onto the crashed car, which had driven two-thirds of the way into the office. One end of a long vinyl banner promoting the office's sponsorship of Slammiversary hung across the interior of the window, and the other end covered the top of the car.
A skinny, goofy-looking man in his thirties dressed in jeans and a purple canvas jacket got out of the car with a look on his face Shawn recognized instantly as that frustrated, manic Howard Beale-like determination to get a message out. Dazed people inside the office had no idea what to do, so they just stared, dumbfounded, as the skinny man waved his arms and yelled "We're in the wrong multiverse!"
