The Countertenor Wore Garlic (The Liturgical Mysteries)

by Mark Schweizer

  "Not the wine," argued Meg. "The priest always finishes the wine."

  "Not always," I said as I finished the last of my dessert. "There are provisions. Depends on the priest. What if he's an alcoholic? What if he has apple pie in the back?"

  "Harumph!" answered Meg.

  "Since he's not going to be at St. Barnabas during the week," I explained to Pete and Cynthia, "the congregation is going to have to step up and do the visiting as well as home communion. They're not used to that."

  "Anyway," said Meg, "church wasn't much fun. Then, to top it all off, he didn't even show up for coffee time. It was his first Sunday. He should at least stick around to meet people."

  "I sure wish I could serve beer," said Pete, looking around at the dwindling crowd. "The Bear and Brew is killing me on Sunday afternoons. Beer and football. Tough combination to beat."

  "Why don't you come up with a new angle? Maybe some advertising?" said Meg.

  "There's no advertising budget," said Pete. "Maybe Cynthia could belly dance in the window."

  "Oh, brother!" said Cynthia.

  "How 'bout High Tea," said Noylene as she filled our coffee cups. "You could advertise High Tea. With some strumpets and such."

  "Or crumpets," I said. "Although I wouldn't mind having tea with some strumpets."

  "I do like a nice, hot-buttered strumpet," agreed Pete.

  The cowbell jangled against the glass of the front door and we looked over to see Nancy come in, followed closely by Dave. Nancy had her iPad in her hand. She pulled a chair up to the table and sat down next to me. Dave looked over her shoulder.

  "Wait 'til you all see this," she said. "You aren't going to believe it."

  The rest of the group, curious, gathered around her screen and she opened up a YouTube video.

  "This is some video shot by Salena Mercer's publicist. She took it during the zombie attack on the vampires waiting outside the bookstore."

  "It was hardly an attack," I said.

  "It was an attack, all right," said Pete. "I was there."

  Nancy shushed us and turned up the volume. "This was posted on Salena Mercer's website this morning. Georgia called the station and told me about it. The publicist apparently thought it was great footage."

  "That's an iPad?" said Meg. "This is so cool. I am definitely getting one of those!"

  The movie started, shot from the vantage point of inside the store looking out through the plate glass window, and we watched the hoard of zombies shuffle across the park right toward us. Nancy, Pete, and I strolled into the picture and set up facing the mob, our backs to the camera. Vampires milled about, sometimes looking into the store to check on the line, but mainly keeping an eye on the zombies.

  "Wow," said Pete. "Is my butt that big? I've gotta go on a diet."

  "I'm sure it's not, honey," said Cynthia. "Maybe the window sort of bends the reflection. You know, like a fun house mirror."

  "Yeah," said Pete. "That's probably it."

  The publicist had moved to the door and panned the camera down the sidewalk where the vampires were in their queue. Now we had a good view of the girls waiting in line.

  "Look at the third girl," said Nancy. She paused the YouTube video, put her fingers on the screen and enlarged the image. We looked and saw a skinny girl with short, dark purple hair, multiple ear and lip piercings, black lipstick, and some sort of neck tattoo. She looked to be wearing a tight, black leather dress, six inch heels, and a necklace adorned with a silver bat.

  "What about her?" I said.

  "Look closely," said Dave. Nancy enlarged the picture even more, bringing the girl's face into focus.

  "I know that face," said Pete. "Who...?"

  "Holy smokes!" said Cynthia. "That's Collette!"

  ***

  Collette Bowers hadn't been seen in St. Germaine for almost three years. She'd been a waitress at the Slab and engaged to Dave before their memorable breakup. Nancy might have been somewhat to blame. She'd been Dave's heartthrob from the time she had joined the force, and they'd had an ill-advised fling during his and Collette's engagement. When Collette found out, she was not amused. So "not amused" was she that she destroyed the interior of the Slab Café in a fit of pique (and by "pique," I mean "berserk rage") and almost killed her soon-to-be-ex-fiancé with a sugar shaker.

  Being a joiner, and in need of a support system, she'd found a fundamentalist church willing to mentor her through her time of trial and after they'd pointed out that she was allowed, under biblical principles, to "name it" and "claim it," she'd decided to name Dave and claim him as her rightful helpmeet. It was God's plan for her and Dave to be together after all. She moved back to St. Germaine, got her old job back from Pete, and was well on her way to getting shot by an increasingly irritated Nancy when St. Barnabas caught on fire. Collette was last seen running into the burning building and, since we never found her body in the ruins of the church, we'd all assumed she'd gotten out safely and left town.

  Now, there she was on Nancy's iPad, dressed in Vampire Gothic, chomping on a piece of gum, and waiting for Selena Mercer to sign her copy of Swollen Nimbus.

  "That's quite a change," Meg said. "Christian fundamentalist to vampire. I would never have recognized her."

  "I would have," snarled Nancy.

  "I think she looks kind of hot," said Dave. Nancy punched him in the arm.

  "Could be a cult-follower thing," said Cynthia. "Swapping one group for another. It's a personality type. I saw something about it on The Learning Channel."

  "Maybe," I said. "Still, it could just be a coincidence. She could just be one of the four hundred girls that showed up to get their books signed."

  "On the same day that Flori Cabbage was killed," added Nancy. "I don't know if I buy it."

  "You think they have some kind of connection?" asked Meg.

  "Be good to find out," I said.

  "This isn't the only thing we have," said Dave. "It's been a full morning of police work."

  "Right," said Nancy. "Flori Cabbage's apartment was ransacked."

  "Turned upside down," said Dave. "The lock was broken. Not only broken, it was altogether missing. The door had been kicked in."

  "Really?" Meg said. "Did anyone hear anything?"

  "Hardly any chance of that," said Nancy. "She had a room over a garage on Pecan Drive. There's no one in that house. It's been vacant and for sale since March. Apparently Flori was getting a break on the rent for looking after the place."

  "Kathleen and Bill's house?" said Pete. "I didn't know that Flori Cabbage was staying there."

  "Could you tell what might be missing?" I asked.

  "Looks like her laptop is gone," said Nancy. "There's an ethernet cable hooked to a modem, but no computer. There's no way of telling what else was taken. The place was a wreck."

  "You guys dust for prints?"

  "Not yet. I'll do it, but I kind of doubt that there will be any that we can use. There weren't any on the pumpkin. I checked that early this morning. One other thing," added Nancy. "I almost forgot. Bud's missing."

  "What do you mean, 'Bud's missing?'" I said.

  "Ardine called this morning. She's at her sister's house in Anderson. Bud's home for the week and he was supposed to check in every evening. He didn't and she got worried."

  "Is Bud supposed to be watching Moosey?"

  "Nope. Moosey's staying with..." Nancy pulled out her notebook, flipped it open, and read the name. "The Kentons, Monica and Julian. They've got a kid the same age. Bernadette."

  "Yeah," I said. "I know them."

  "Pauli Girl's home. I called up to the house and she answered. She hasn't seen him."

  "I saw him run into the zombie crowd after the movie," I said. "He was worried about Elphina." I pointed to Nancy's iPad. "Anything else on that video?"

  "I don't think so," said Nancy. "It's twelve minutes long. I'll look at it again to make sure. There were a few boys in the line, but I didn't see Bud."

  Chapter 12

  The f
our of us exited Buxtehooters to an en chamade flourish, and skipped, hand-in-hand, down the street.

  "Where are we going?" asked Tessie, probably feeling like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, except instead of the Tin Woodsman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow, she was accompanied by a countertenor with homicidal tendencies, a shoefly with lust in his heart, and a Romanian lawyer who kept eyeing her assets like she was liquidating under Chapter 14: Moral Bankruptcy, so not really.

  "The crypt, Sweet-knees," I said. "The undercroft of St. Sanguine's in the Swale."

  Lapke Baklava sniffed Tessie like a dog sniffing another more attractive dog, but slightly higher up, which was good, because I didn't want to have to shoot him right there on the sidewalk.

  "I think there will be some necking wery soon," he whispered, almost to himself. "And wery wigerously."

  "Keep your dirty talk to yourself," said Pedro, "or I'll smack you so hard you'll think the werewolves have come out to play."

  "I am not afraid of your werewolves," Lapke snapped.

  "I am," said Tessie, suddenly grabbing onto Lapke's arm like remora onto a shark, or a soon-to-be-unemployed weather girl onto a rich lawyer: same thing, really. "I'm very afraid, but I can't run away." She fluttered her eyelashes like they were hummingbird wings, or maybe bumblebee wings since many physicists maintain that bumblebees are aerodynamically incapable of flight and so, apparently, was Tessie. "You'll protect me, won't you?"

  Lapke oozed some oil. "I will protect you, my wiwacious little wixen." He exuded a few more splotches, then blotted the slick from his forehead with a purple silk handkerchief. "And I shall have my rewenge," he muttered ominously and forebodingly.

  ***

  Dr. Kent Murphee was a first-rate coroner and he often proved how good he was by performing autopsies one-handed. During these examinations, his other hand was generally holding a tumbler of bourbon, or, as was the case this morning, a glass of twenty-year-old tawny port. The patient rarely complained.

  "Another body from St. Germaine," he said when he saw me come into the autopsy room. "Why am I not surprised?" He filled his glass from the open bottle sitting on the instrument table.

  I gave him the hands-up shrug and offered a thin smile.

  He put down his forceps or retractors or whatever he was using and asked, "You want a drink?"

  "It's ten in the morning, Kent. Of course I want a drink. Just one, though."

  "You'll love this new port I just got in." He smacked his lips in appreciation. "I like to think of it as the new breakfast food."

  Kent was decked out on this Monday the same as he was every day that I'd ever seen him—old tweed jacket and matching vest, tie, and a battered pair of canvas trousers. His pipe was stuck in the breast pocket of his coat and, strangely, seemed to be lit. Under a rather unkempt shock of graying hair, he looked about ten years older than his fifty-six years, this likely due to his job, genetics, and his penchant for early morning imbibing.

  "Breakfast food, eh?" I pointed to the wisp of smoke coming out of his pocket. "You know your pipe's still lit, right?"

  "Oh, sure," said Kent, patting his pocket. "Don't worry about it. Tweed hardly ever bursts into flame."

  "Thanks for the baby squirrels, by the way. Archimedes thanks you as well."

  "No problem. It's a pleasure to order something from that company besides dissecting needles, double-prong flesh hooks, and body fluid scoops. They're starting to take me for granted."

  I shuddered in spite of myself.

  "Got anything on the victim?" I asked, gesturing to the body lying on the table.

  Kent picked up a clipboard, scanned it quickly, then tossed it aside onto a nearby shelf. It clattered noisily on the metal surface.

  "Female. Probably in her late twenties. Brown hair...."

  "We know who she is, Kent. Flori Cabbage, aged twenty-eight."

  "So, I was right on all three counts," said Kent smugly, taking a sip of his new favorite morning beverage.

  "Yes, you were. I don't know how you do it," I said with not a little sarcasm. "However, the question remains as to the fashion of her demise. That is, assuming that it wasn't of natural causes."

  Kent furrowed his brow and looked thoughtful, even serious. "There was a lot of pumpkin pulp on her head," he said. "I washed it off, but it was pumpkin, sure enough."

  "Yeah. When we found her, her head was stuffed into a jack-o-lantern."

  "Postmortem, I'd say," said Kent. "She was dead by then."

  "How do you know?"

  "If she'd been alive, the cause of death would have been asphyxiation," explained Kent. "There was no petechial hemorrhaging that I could find, and she has none of that pulp in her lungs. If she had either of those things, it would be an indicator of premortem jack-o-lantern insertion." He chewed on his lip for a moment. "Sometimes those hemorrhages are tough to spot, but I'm fairly sure she doesn't have any."

  "Huh," I said. "I've seen the crime shows, but give me a refresher on petechial hemorrhages."

  "Well, as you know from watching 'CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, CSI: Las Vegas, CSI: Slicklizzard, Alabama...'"

  "I missed that last one," I said.

  "A petechial hemorrhage can range from a tiny pinpoint red mark all the way to significant blotting that shows up in the eyes when some external means obstructs the airways." Kent took the pipe out of his pocket, put it between his lips, and puffed away. Still smoldering, it responded with a glow and a trail of white smoke.

  "These hemorrhages occur," he continued, "when blood leaks from the tiny capillaries in the eyeballs, which can rupture due to increased pressure on the veins in the head. When they happen in the eyes, they're easy to spot, but they may also be found elsewhere on the skin of the head and face. Those are harder to find. The mucous membrane inside the lips, for instance, or under the eyelids, or even behind the ears."

  "It's your professional and sober opinion then that she was dead when the pumpkin was stuck on her head."

  "I don't know about sober," said Kent, "but yes, that's my opinion and there are many crime shows that will back me up."

  "We put the time of death at around 5:30 or six on Saturday evening. That sound about right?"

  Kent checked his notes. "The boys took a liver temp at the scene. She'd been dead about three hours, maybe four. What time did you find her?"

  "Around 9:30."

  "So you're right in the ball park. Here's something interesting." He motioned me closer to the table, pushed some of her hair aside with his fountain pen, then used the nib to point to two punctures on her neck.

  "Fang marks?" I said. "How did those get there?"

  "Most likely a vampire attack," said Kent, managing to keep a straight face for a moment, but then breaking into a broad grin. "Seriously, I have no idea. They were hidden in all the pulpy mess. There was some significant bleeding, but these punctures came nowhere near the jugular or the carotid. She didn't bleed out and there wasn't any foreign substance around the wounds that I could find. I'll run a tox-screen, but even if she was injected with something, many poisons are undetectable unless we know exactly what we're looking for. Obviously those aren't needle marks on her neck. Those punctures were made by something much larger, perhaps two millimeters in diameter. They're not big, mind you, but certainly bigger than a needle would make. Sort of... teeth sized."

  "So what's your best guess as to cause of death? Vampire bite?"

  "As strange as it seems, the official report will have to say that she died of a myocardial infarction. Certainly, there is evidence of a massive heart attack. Now something may have caused it, and if so, I do not yet, nor may ever, know what that something was, but as it stands now—heart attack."

  "I don't buy it. She's only twenty-eight." I studied the body on the table. "She looks to be in good shape. She was a granolly, for heaven's sake. Probably did a lot of hiking, backpacking, that sort of thing. Sheesh! What kind of granolly has a heart attack at twenty-eight?"

  "How about one that
was scared to death?"

  ***

  "I went through Ian Burch's phone," Nancy said as I walked into the station. "There was some pretty kinky stuff, but nothing that pertained to this case that I could tell. I won't even go into the pictures that were on there. There was more to Flori Cabbage than met the eye. Luckily, Ian Burch, PhD, was camera shy or I would have had to wash my eyes out with lye or something."

  "I'd like to take a look," said Dave. "In the interest of our investigation. You might have missed a clue."

  "In your dreams," said Nancy. "Anyway, everything's now on the phone. I downloaded his whole account from the server. Texts, voice mails, pictures, calls... everything."

  "Let's keep it 'til we figure this out," I said. "I doubt he'll complain too loudly, and if he needs a cell phone, he can go get a new one. Any word from Bud?"

  "Nope," said Dave. "Ardine hasn't seen him and his fall break is over. I called his dorm at the college and spoke with the Dean of Students. They're keeping an eye out for him, although he didn't show up for his first two classes this morning."

  "Elphina?" I asked.

  "She's not answering her cell phone," said Nancy. "I dropped by her house on the way into work and she's not there. Her mother hasn't seen her, but that's no surprise. Toy Lumpkin probably hasn't even talked to her for weeks and they live in the same house."

  "Does her cell phone have a GPS?" I asked.

  "Nope. I checked. It's one of those pay-as-you-go deals from Walmart."

  "Bud's?"

  "Same thing. He was paying for it himself, I guess. Ardine certainly isn't going to have a cell phone plan for her kids."

  "So," I said, "we might presume that Elphina, aka Mary Edith Lumpkin, and Bud are together."

  "We might presume that," agreed Nancy.

  "So why'd they take off?" Dave asked. "That doesn't seem like something Bud would do. I don't know about Elphina."

  "Hmm," I said, thoughtfully taking a donut out of the white cardboard box on the counter, a chocolate one, with Halloween sprinkles. "No, it's not like Bud at all."