Silent Doll

by Sonnet O'Dell

  “Unfinished business?”

  “Sort of. A lot of murder victims, for instance, become tethered to their death site; they rarely become tethered to their murderer. If they did, that would make catching them so much easier.”

  “Mediums and psychics, right. Like those ones on TV, bringing them closure.”

  “Yeah, something like that, but I wouldn’t take the word of some TV show as gospel.”

  “Okay. So, how is magic different?”

  “It creates an artificial bond. Your mom is some kind of practitioner, right?” Trinket nodded. I guessed from her tight mouth that was another thing she was forbidden to talk about. “Her magic holds you here. That’s why she can tell you what to do, why you can’t disobey. It’s a complicated idea if I go into it in detail. The existence of someone like you is only theoretical in most books. There was probably blood involved at some point — her blood.”

  Trinket put her hand to her heart again and made an intense study of her fingernails.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That if I try, I could break the bond between you and your mother. I’m pretty strong and if I kept at it, it would probably give, as it’s not a natural bond.”

  “But…”

  “You’d cease to exist. Your connection to your body, to this plane of existence, would be gone.”

  “I’d be dead.”

  “For all intents and purposes, without a bond, without her, you’ll be lost.”

  There was silence while she took that in. I made my own intense study of my shoes and, as the silence continued, the floor around it.

  “Couldn’t I still haunt my body?” she asked at last.

  I shook my head. “I’ve only witnessed a handful of possessions, and without a bond they can’t hold onto it for very long. No offense, but your body is an object, not a person or a place. I don’t know how haunting places works, but a haunting where a ghost is attached to a person means that it is feeding off that person’s energy.”

  “Like a leech.”

  “Only not sucking blood, sucking energy. If a ghost tries to actually possess the person, it can end up killing them. One energy is not compatible with another. Having two in the same body blows a circuit.”

  “It’s no wonder people find dying such a scary thought. Does it scare you?”

  I tucked hair behind my ear, stalling, then said, “It used to.”

  “But it doesn’t anymore?”

  “I’m not going to die anymore. Well, I’m sure there is a way for me to die, because you can kill anything if you try long enough or look hard enough, but that could be…” I stopped. Trinket’s mouth was hanging open.

  “You can’t die?” she asked.

  I shrugged with a tiny sad smile on my lips. “I keep forgetting that it’s not common knowledge—I’m not human, Trinket, some of the rules don’t apply anymore.”

  It looked like she was thinking about that revelation very hard. She said, “You have morals, right, like regular people?”

  I bit my lip so as not to let out a sarcastic bark of laughter. I wasn’t regular people anymore. I never really had been. “Yeah, I have things like everyone else that I will not do. I know the world isn’t such a straight line that you can put good things on one side and bad things on another.”

  “If I asked you to cut my…”

  “No,” I said firmly, cutting her off. “I will not kill you, Trinket.”

  “I don’t think, by definition, that I’m technically alive.”

  “Bullshit! You think and you feel, you may not have a heartbeat, but you’re alive as anything. I won’t end your life.”

  Trinket stood up; I had to stand up and turn to face her. She glared down at me, thunderously angry.

  “You don’t understand. It’s not like the idea really appeals to me, but if it’s the only way, it’s for the best!”

  “No!” I said, crossing my arms to show I could be just as stubborn. “I will not end your life for you, Trinket. I’m saying no and sticking to it!” What could be so awful that she would rather die?

  “Not good enough! According to you, sooner or later, if she commands it, I’ll have to do what she says, and I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to…”

  Her voice caught in her throat, her lips slammed shut. She looked as though she was screaming inside, but none of it came out. She stomped off the stage like a sullen three year old.

  “Trinket,” I called after her. “Trinket!”

  She didn’t come back. I was about to mount the stage and go after her when I heard the door to my right open and a pair of heels came clicking in. I turned to look at a straight haired blonde doll hefting a large Prada tote on her shoulder. It was beautiful, quilted red with a diamanté P dangling from the gold clasp. She stared at me, and I noticed that her expression was a lot blander than Trinket’s. Perhaps she was an earlier model.

  “I’m sorry, Miss, but we’re closed,” she said in a stilted, tinny voice. “What are you doing down here?”

  I didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention Trinket, so I lied. “Excuse me! I did see the closed sign, but I was looking for your box office. A friend of mine was raving about this show.”

  “Oh,” she said. Her lips slowly moved up into a gracious smile. “We only send tickets out to VIP guests; you can just come by tomorrow night and pay the cover charge.”

  I began winding my way back through the tables.

  “Well, thank you, that’s great. Can’t wait.”

  I smiled brightly—and falsely—at the girl. She had to be one of the seasons; Winter, I thought, from the delicate gold W that hung on a chain around her neck. When I got close enough, I saw a splotch on her bag.

  “Oh, my,” I said, pointing. “Looks like you’ve had a spill.”

  Her smile vanished a lot quicker than it had appeared.

  “Ketchup. It’ll come right off. If you’ll excuse me, I’m sure you can find the way.”

  I nodded and headed up the stairs, emerging out into the night air. Something about the splotch bothered me, but my phone rang, driving the matter from my mind. This time I picked up.

  “Crematorium, you kill ’em we grill ’em.”

  “Considering what I’m calling about, that’s really not funny,” Ro said.

  “Ro! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Hamilton tried to call you, but you didn’t pick up. He figured you were watching for his number, so he asked me to call. We have another body.”

  I sighed. “Where?”

  “It’s in my lab. Can you meet me here?”

  “Sure thing.” I hung up and steeled my stomach to look at yet another dead person.

  Chapter Twenty

  When I arrived at the police station, it was very quiet. It was the late shift, so most departments were down to the bare essentials. It meant I could go right down to Ro’s lab without having to flash my ID once. When I got to the door, I heard her talking on the phone. I paused with my hand on the door, holding it open slightly, listening to her side of the conversation and waiting for a good moment to interrupt.

  “November isn’t alone, she’s with my mother. She’s asleep, anyway. Why do you think I work the graveyard shift? For the kicks?”

  I pushed the door a little wider and poked my head inside.

  “She’ll be starting school in the fall. You think now is a good time to just step in? Oh, don’t you dare…”

  Ro’s dark, pixie-cut hair nearly vibrated with tension as she stomped from one side of the room to the other. As she turned, she saw me peeking in.

  “I’ve got work. We’ll discuss this later.” She hung up and tossed the phone angrily onto her desk. “You can come in, but keep your hands where I can see them at all times.”

  I slipped into the room and held my hands up in mock surrender, a “nothing up my sleeves” gesture. The last time I was in Ro’s lab I borrowed—without permission—a toe bone to use in a magic spell to catch a child killing witch. My inte
ntions were good, but you know what they say about good intentions. Ro gave me a slap on the wrist—or a smack around the head, as the case had been. She’d made me promise to never do it again, and I’d agreed while surreptitiously crossing my fingers behind my back.

  “I come in peace. You want to tell me about it?” I indicated the phone with my finger; I figured some of her ire was being redirected at me.

  “It’s a Nokia,” she said dryly.

  “Not what I meant.”

  She flopped into her desk chair, letting out a deep sigh, rubbing at her temples and making colorful uses of the rudest words in the English language. I sat on the edge of her desk and waited.

  “It’s Munkey’s dad. He suddenly wants to be involved in her life. Now that all the hard stuff is over, the diaper changing, the sleepless nights, the five a.m. feedings, he wants in.”

  I crossed my legs and wondered what he was up to now. I’d known that Ro and November’s—aka Munkey, her daughter—father were not together, but I’d never heard the story of why. So I asked.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “We met my last year of university. I was the punk scholarship student, he was the son of a rich lawyer. We met at a party and he had a very easy kind of charm. We holed up in a room for about a week having wild adventurous sex.” I motioned with my hand that she could skip over that part, which earned me a wry smile. “I was taking antibiotics, which killed my pill and I got pregnant. He freaked out. Of course he blamed me.”

  “Typical man.”

  “Yeah, then he turned round and told me he was engaged to some socialite princess and that I had to get rid of it. I refused and he said he wouldn’t help, he would deny it was his, he would drag my name through the mud before he would let me ruin his future.”

  “Rat bastard,” I said with real feeling. Ro nodded.

  “I rarely heard from him until a couple of months ago. He and his shrew of a wife were living the dream until she went in for a routine medical and found she couldn’t have kids. So he wants in on November’s life, now that he’s ready, going on about his parental rights and questioning my fitness as a mother.”

  “Well, fuck him,” I growled angrily.

  She sighed, putting her hand to her forehead as if shielding her eyes from the glare of an over bright light.

  “That’s how I got in this mess in the first place.”

  I bit my lip but couldn’t hold in a snicker. She stared at me and that only made it worse, I burst out full on laughing and after a minute she joined me.

  “Damn it; it isn’t funny.”

  I held my fingers apart to measure this much humor. She snorted.

  “Hey, you said it, not me. Don’t worry about him. You’ve got a ton of people who will stand up and tell him how fantastic a mother you are.” She smiled at me. “If that doesn’t work I can always hex him.”

  “Thanks, Cassandra.” She drew herself out of her slouch and put her hands on her knees. “Now let’s move onto what you came here for.”

  “Decent tunes and that tub of chocolate brownie fudge I know you keep in the back of the freezer unit.”

  She kicked playfully at my swinging feet, grabbed the remote from her desk and cranked up the music. I smiled and hopped down.

  “After you,” I said with a flourish and a bow. She got up and I followed after her. The electric doors of the exam room swished open at the flash of her ID card on the sensor. I washed my hands quickly in the little sink by the door and leapt through before the doors could close on me.

  Lying on the table was another girl. This girl had short black hair, cut in sort of a Dutchboy bob. She could have been Chinese or maybe Thai; the kind of girl you saw every day with a mask over her face, working in one of those nail bars that seem to pop up all over the place. Like sweat shops for beauticians. A sheet covered her from the waist down, leaving the wound in her chest visible. I tried not to fixate on it.

  “This is Melanie Yung.”

  “If you know who she is, what is it Hamilton wants me to do exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “He just said you’d want to see her.”

  I grumbled and rubbed my guts, attempting to settle the sudden roiling. I should have eaten more than a pop tart. “Hamilton doesn’t have the slightest idea what I’d want. I used to be able to count the bodies I’d seen on one hand, now I need a bloody abacus.”

  Ro smirked at me. “Try a calculator, it’s quicker. Let me just run through the basics. I won’t be slicing this one, as cause of death is pretty damn evident. We only have her until morning, then she’ll be off to the coroner’s to wait for her family to claim her.”

  I swallowed bile. The girl would sit in one of the cold drawers waiting for her family to come claim her, like a lost item of luggage. I had always believed there had to be a better way to treat the dead. However, I was thankful I wasn’t going to have to watch an autopsy. I think that might have been a bit too much for me.

  Ro pulled a pair of the rubber latex gloves from a box and handed another pair to me. I put them on slowly and carefully, trying to lessen the snap back.

  “I really should just get my own pack of these and stop leeching off the police budget.”

  Ro shrugged again. “We buy in bulk, so we get a discount.” Her fingers started to explore the edges of the wound. It oozed and—I swear it did—gurgled. I bit down on my tongue to control my gag reflex. I took a couple of deep breaths through my nose and made my spine stiffen.

  “That looks more like the wound on the first one I saw.”

  “Yes, it’s back to the right hand again. It’s got Rourke thinking partners, but Hamilton is sticking to your coven theory.”

  “Well, the majority of the populace are right handed, so that doesn’t narrow it down. There is no way to tell whether it’s the same right hand as the last right-handed one. Did that make any sense?”

  “It was a little convoluted, but I get your point. Without the murder weapon, we can’t tell for sure whether it’s one ambidextrous person, one righty and one lefty, or several right-handed people with a southpaw mixed in just to throw us. We need fingerprints.”

  “Wasn’t there anything on the purse I recovered for you guys?”

  She pointed me toward a shelf a little further down the far wall. I picked up the evidence bag and looked at the writing on the label.

  “Inconclusive? What does that mean?”

  “No ridge detail,” she said. She ran a comb through the dead girl’s hair, carefully catching anything that fell out on a piece of paper.

  “Excuse me when I say, huh?”

  “There were prints, five of them, but they come up as just big splotches. No details, no way to identify and match them to a suspect.”

  “They wiped the purse down.”

  “I would say yes, except that the prints were perfect. No smudging, just no detail, almost like…”

  “Almost like they didn’t have any fingerprints.”

  Ro looked up at me, then put her attention to knocking her collected goodies into a trace envelope. “Exactly. And that’s weird, right? I don’t know of any humanoid that doesn’t have prints. If they have fingers, they should have prints, shouldn’t they?”

  “Unless the Men in Black killed her.” I put the purse back down on the shelf and walked back up the room on the opposite side of the table. I looked down at the corpse’s hand; it was balled in a tight fist. I pointed this out to Ro.

  “Mmm. She must have had it clenched when she died. It’ll be stuck like that for a little while. Maybe she took a swing at her attacker. I hope so. I hope you hurt them, dear,” she said addressing her last remark to the body.

  I lifted the hand up and tinged a little energy into the stiff muscles. The fingers uncurled, the sudden shock jerking the entire arm; Ro stepped back hastily.

  “Jesus, don’t do shit like that to me.”

  “That a medical term, doc?” I said, ignoring her reply. Something had dropped from of the g
irl’s hand to the sheet: a few strands of red hair.

  “Cassandra, are you okay?”

  I looked up at Ro, standing beside me now; she’d obviously kept talking at me and was worried by my lack of response. I’d been too focused on my discovery.

  “Sorry, yeah, just something there,” I stroked my finger in the air above the strands. “I think it was trapped in her hand.” Ro picked up the hairs with a pair of tweezers and carried them down to the table at the other end. Once the sample was between two slides, she snapped it under the microscope for a closer look.

  “Odd,” she said, beckoning me over, keeping her eyes down the scope the entire time.

  “What is it?”

  She rolled her chair aside. “Take a look and tell me what you see.”

  I peered down the microscope. The magnification was quite high, so that the strand could be more clearly identified. “It’s a hair, isn’t it?” I squinted at it again, then yelped as she yanked a hair from my scalp. She made up a slide and pushed it under the scope.

  “Look again.”

  I glared at her and waited until she raised her hands in an “I won’t touch you again” gesture. I turned my eyes back to the scope. My hair was smooth, sleek and natural.

  “Let me see the other one again.”

  There was a click and the image changed. I examined the red hair more carefully.

  “This one isn’t human. Is it some kind of synthetic?”

  “I think it’s horse hair.” I straightened.

  “Are we looking at a wig?” I leaned against the desk with a sigh. “I’m having a Roal Dahl flashback.”

  Ro rubbed her eyes and stretched. “It certainly throws us for a loop. Are they bald or just trying not to be recognized?”

  “I don’t know.” I tried to think: there was something, a thought forming just out of my reach. Every time I tried to grasp at it, it slipped away.

  “I need coffee,” Ro said, dragging herself to her feet.

  “I need to eat. Pop tarts are not part of a balanced diet.”

  Ro rolled her eyes at me. “You’re an adult, you should know better. Go get something proper to eat, don’t make me call your Momma.”