“Are you assuming they’re related?” I asked.
“I can’t assume anything, but it’s an interesting theory, isn’t it?”
Rico had paperwork to finish and I had a shower calling my name. We went our separate ways and agreed to meet back at the safe house at noon.
On the ride home, my mind kept spinning. There wasn’t an obvious connection between the events, but the timing was bizarre. Were they related? And if so, how?
There was a certain hinkiness to my house when I walked inside.
Kulu had replaced his typical greeting, “Hi, dumbass,” with “Buongiorno, mamma.”
I froze in place, eyes scanning left to right, and back again, searching for the intruder who stole my snarky feather duster and replaced her with a sweet, gentle birdie.
Kulu, bird of prey, stood atop her perch, wings unfolded, head held high, clearly impressed with herself.
I let Headbutt out the door and listened for the daily war of the rosebushes to begin. Hearing nothing, I glanced out the window, past the tool shed, to find Headbutt hiking his leg across the yard, on the opposite fence post.
That would be where the Winstel’s vining Wisteria bloomed. An amazing victory for Nonnie’s roses—and yet, a new-found problem for another day.
Mrs. Nussbaum opened her screen door and called, “Buongiorno, Mrs. Nighthawk!”
I nodded back. “Yes, good morning. And thanks for pet-sitting. I noticed Kulu’s already picking up…more appropriate words, and Headbutt’s peeing on the Winstel’s flowers instead. Progress. Very nice,” I said with a big smile. “You’re coming back today around 11:30, right?”
“Of course! And I’ll have a little something for your friend David to nosh on.”
“That’s really not necessary, Mrs. Nussbaum.”
“Call me Nonnie, dearie. Is no problem. See you soon.” She ducked her head back inside.
I took my shower, swept up the birdseed and dog hair, and started an emergency load of laundry. That’s what happens when you have no clean underwear left.
Within minutes, Nonnie returned, carrying a piping-hot, homemade lasagna. It smelled heavenly.
“For your friend David,” she said, beaming. “He is only a friend, Mrs. Nighthawk. Is that right?”
God help me. Little red hearts were flying out of her eyes. Nonnie was on the prowl, a little long in the tooth to be a cougar, and stalking Leo, no less.
“Yes, David is only a friend. And please, call me Allie,” I said, walking out the door.
She shuffled to the porch to see me off. “Wonderful, Miss Allie. Tell David I said hello.”
“Will do.” I strapped the lasagna onto my bike. “Thanks for your help. You’re the best, Mrs. Nuss…Nonnie. I’ll be back a little after midnight.”
Nonnie waved goodbye, with Headbutt at her feet, and Kulu watching me through the living room picture window.
You’re the best, Nonnie? Wow. Maybe Leo had it right after all. Necessity does make for strange bedfellows.
8
The Damned ACLU
Within seconds of walking through the kitchen door of the safe house and unzipping the casserole carrier filled with Nonnie’s lasagna, I was surrounded by Leo and Officers Greg Powell and Danny Ortega. The lasagna, still steaming, wafted the heavenly combination of beef, cheeses, tomatoes and herbs through the air.
Despite their shift having ended, Powell and Ortega announced they weren’t going anywhere without lunch. By the time Rico walked through the door, ten minutes later, half the casserole was gone. He filled a plate and joined in.
“You didn’t tell me your neighbor could cook like this,” Leo said. “We need her on retainer over here. No offense to Ricardo’s, but even great pizza is just pizza. This,” he said, shoveling in a mouthful, “Is the food of my people. Mangia! Molte grazie la mia bella, Nonnie.”
Leo had met Mrs. Nussbaum once and was already on a first-name basis with her. I’d known her all my life, and had just gotten permission to call her Nonnie that very morning.
“For some reason, she’s into you, Leo,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s an old woman. I saw you hitting on her. That’s pathetic, you little sleazeball. Stop it.”
Leo sat back in his chair and let his Italian temper fly. “What the hell, Nighthawk? So what if she’s old? She’s still a woman. You think it don’t make her feel good when a young stud throws a wink her way? What’s the matter with you? You’ve got no…what do you call it…no empathy.”
I laughed so hard, I almost choked on my lasagna. “Young stud? That’s how you think of yourself?”
Rico and the other guys howled.
“I’m young compared to her, damn it!” He refilled his plate and carried it into the living room. “You really are a ballbuster, aren’t you? I can’t even enjoy my lunch without you giving me an enema. Screw you.”
The rest of us finished our meals at the table, after which, Powell and Ortega took off. Rico checked his messages, while I covered the leftover lasagna and put it in the fridge. Then, I carried the dishes to the sink. That was the extent of my domestic assistance. Rico and Leo could wash and dry them.
I walked into to the living room and asked Leo if he was finished with his plate.
He ignored me and turned up the TV.
What a girl.
“Leo,” I said, choosing my words as if they might explode, “I didn’t mean anything by that stud crack. It was just a joke.”
“Yeah? Well you’re always dumping on me, calling me a sleazeball, or a weasel, or a whatever. You don’t have to be such a hardcore bitch all the time.”
He wasn’t going to make this easy.
“Okay,” I said, “Fair enough. And you don’t have to hit on Nonnie.”
“Jesus, Nighthawk. It’s not like I was trying to do her. I was flirting. You know, winking, giving her a reason to smile. I wasn’t gonna take advantage of her, for chrissake. What do you think I am? She’s a nice, lonely old woman who baked me a lasagna. She ever bake you a lasagna? Huh? Didn’t think so. That’s because you don’t know how to be nice. Now, leave me alone.”
“Sorry.” Damn, if that word didn’t stick in my throat like a fishbone. “I guess in some…weird Leo way…you were being nice. I get it. Are we good?”
“Whatever. It wouldn’t kill you to be nice once in a while.”
“Yeah. Okay,” I said, taking a deep cleansing breath. “Leo, will you please give me your empty pla… Hell, don’t make me do this. Give me the damn plate before I have an aneurysm, moron.”
“You know what?” he screamed, throwing the plate at me. “You’re a fucking onion, Nighthawk. From one layer to the next. You’re a bitter, raw, tear-inducing onion.”
I ducked and watched the plate shatter as it slammed into the wall. Finally, Leo and I understood each other. That had been harder than pulling teeth.
He flipped through the three local TV stations, the only ones we could get without cable or Dish.
“Who doesn’t have cable?” he whined. “No ESPN! Who the hell doesn’t get ESPN?”
Rico strolled in from the kitchen with a shit-eating grin. “The FBI, right?”
He sat in one of the chairs and plunked his big-ass size thirteens on the laminate coffee table. “You must have some juicy information for the FBI to be footing the bill for your medical treatment. What do you know, anyway?”
Leo smirked and leaned back on the couch. “I know it all, baby. It’s all up here,” he said, pointing to his head. “I owe the Family a lot, but I ain’t dying any faster than I have to. Between my brain and the Family’s books, I can bury everybody on the Giordano payroll. Twenty-five years’ worth of names, dates, amounts, anything you want to know, including what the payments were for. Extortion, murder, you name it. That’s the part that’s in my noggin.”
“No wonder the DA’s hiding you,” I said.
Then the sad but real truth ran through my mind. No wonder they want you to testify before your brain turns to mush.
The doorbell rang and Leo jumped. “Who is it?” he whispered. “Is it them? Ah, God, I knew they’d find me. Shit! And all I got is you guys? Jesus. This is it.”
I peeked out the window and frowned. “It’s Weston. What’s he doing here?”
Bill Weston was one of the shields out of the 51st.
Rico got up to answer the door. “He’s running the investigation into Miriam’s death, since I’m stuck here like a potted plant with Leo.”
“Again, why is he here?” I asked.
“You heard Cap. He said to coordinate the investigation. Bill’s doing the leg work and I’m calling the shots. I went through the Academy with him. He’s a stand-up guy.”
I rolled my eyes. “So much for a secret safe house.”
“Consider him vouched for. I’d trust this guy with my life,” Rico snapped, as he opened the door.
“You just did,” I mumbled.
“Hey, dude.” Bill nodded at Rico as he walked in and sat on the couch next to Leo. “Something smells awesome. I’ve been working all morning. Any leftovers?”
Bill was everything Leo wasn’t. Tall, blue-eyed, and built like a fortress.
“No,” Leo lied. “Not even a crumb.”
“What you got for me, Bill?” Rico asked, returning to his chair.
“We got Miriam’s cell phone records. She got a call about six-fifteen last night. We ran the number. It was from a burner phone that made three more calls, two to another burner phone in Orlando, and one to a phone number registered to Excelsior Moving and Storage.”
“That’s a front company for the Giordano’s,” Leo said.
Rico nodded at Bill. “Find out who our perp called and why.”
“Sure thing, boss. Miriam’s phone pinged about eight last night in OTR.”
Over-the-Rhine was an area just north of town.
“We showed her picture around,” Weston said. “Got a hit on it at Rhinegeist Brewery. A waitress there served Miriam last night. Some guy came in and plopped into the booth next to her. She said Miriam looked a little nervous.”
Rico leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Any surveillance video?”
“I’m way ahead of you, boss. We pulled the tape. It was Miriam, all right. We got a still shot of the guy’s face. It’s in your email.”
Rico pulled up the picture on his phone. “You ever see this guy before?”
Bill shook his head, and then I took a look. He wasn’t familiar to me, either.
Rico started to put his phone away when Leo yelled, “Hello! Am I invisible? I have connections. I know some people. Let me see that thing.”
He ripped the phone out of Rico’s hand and then handed it back. “Nope. He doesn’t work with the Family.”
Rico glared at Leo, then turned back to Weston. “Put out a BOLO on the guy. Make sure to include his picture.”
“Already done, dude. We’ve got the jump on him. He’s as good as caught.” Weston walked toward the door, but stopped short. “Oh, yeah. We did a sweep of Miriam’s apartment. It was trashed big time. Who knows what they were looking for or if they found it. We dusted for prints. Didn’t find any.”
Rico whistled. “Trashed. Wow. Good work. You guys were all over this. I’ll let Cap know. Stay in touch.”
He closed the door behind Weston and looked at me. “There goes my mugging theory.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe, since the mugger stole her purse, he went inside her apartment, and helped himself to whatever he could find.”
Rico’s phone rang. He picked it up on the second ring. “Hey, Cap. Perfect timi—”
He stopped mid-sentence, furrowed his brow, and then walked into the kitchen. Clearly, he was doing the listening. He’d walked far enough around the corner that I couldn’t hear much, even when he got a word in edgewise.
Leo got up to change the channel on the TV. As he darted across the room, I noticed sweat beading on his forehead.
“When’s the last time you took your medicine?”
“I’ve been on time since that episode the other day. But about an hour before I’m due for the next dose, I start sweating like a whore in church.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He looked away. “Maybe I don’t like thinking about it.”
“You need to tell me these things,” I said. “I have to talk to my guy in Sweden today anyway. Maybe we need to up your dosage.”
Leo lowered himself slowly to the couch. “Listen up. I’m only going to say this once. Most of my time is spent trying to forget that someday this shit is going to kill me. I spend the rest of my time scared shitless that I’m going to turn into one of those damn…abominations. Some mindless walking corpse, rotting on my feet, stinking worse than a dead deer on a highway. It’s in my agreement, when the time comes, somebody’ll put me down. I’d like that to be you.”
He swiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Just make sure they plant me within twenty-four hours and...and...say Kaddish, and all the rest of that shit.”
“Say what?”
“I’m an Italian Jew. One of the few, the proud.”
I bit my lip and shrugged.
“Jesus, Nighthawk. Just get Nonnie Nussbaum to help you plan my service. I know it’s asking a lot, but I trust you. If you tell me you’ll do it, I’ll believe you.”
Poor guy. It would have likely been me putting him down anyway. Thank God, Nonnie was Jewish. I didn’t know Kaddish from Kosher.
“Sure, if that’s the way you want it, Leo. I’d be honored.”
We sat in silence, digesting the moment, then he snickered and shook his head. “Honored? You’ll be honored to scramble my brains? Jesus.”
“Hey. You asked me to.”
The mood in the room lightened, but not for long.
Rico entered the doorway with a scowl on his face. “Cap got an envelope in the mail today, postmarked from Miriam last night. There were pictures of her niece enclosed, along with a note that said Miriam had twenty-four hours to provide Leo’s location, or her niece would disappear. Miriam tried to call Cap, and when she couldn’t reach him, she left him a message that they needed to talk first thing this morning. Then she got to feeling hinky, like maybe she wasn’t safe, so she mailed copies of everything to Cap just in case.”
“Smart lady,” I said.
My ring tone blared Don’t Fear the Reaper. It was the M.E.’s office. “Nighthawk here.”
“Doc Blanchard. We’ve completed the prelim on Miriam Miller. Your vic may not have died from the stab wound to her chest. She had an injection site behind her right ear. We took some blood samples and sent them to toxicology. We’ll know more when the results come back.”
An injection site? The brain bitch started River Dancing in my head. “What are you saying, Doc?”
“Until her tox screen comes in, I can’t determine the actual cause of her death. Normally, we wouldn’t get those results back for weeks, but I know someone who can push them through.”
“I got a bad feeling about this, Doc. You’d better destroy her brain stem now, just in case.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Who knows what she was injected with? It could be anything. What if it’s the Z-virus?”
Doc snorted “It can’t be. It’s not transmitted intravenously.”
“It’s never been before, but something’s happening with this virus, Doc. We can’t know for sure what that is, until the tissue results from Sweden come back. It’s best to destroy her brain stem now—just in case.”
“I don’t have the authority to do that. And I won’t. Not on the wild supposition that she was injected with the Z-virus, as opposed to any of the hundreds of other known toxins. Nobody’s going to charge me with desecration of a corpse.”
Damned ACLU.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll come down and do it myself.”
“Not on my watch, you won’t.”
Jesus.
“Then you’d better strap her down good. T
russ her up tight as a Thanksgiving turkey inside a cold storage drawer. If she still hasn’t turned by morning, it’s probably safe to say that either she wasn’t injected with the Z-virus, or if she was, she doesn’t have the marker and can be released for burial. If she does turn, give me a call. I’ll put her down myself.”
“If that makes you feel better, Nighthawk, sure, I’ll strap her down.”
“Thanks, Doc.” I hung up and looked at Rico, but couldn’t bring myself to speak.
What the hell was going on? Sighted deadheads? It would be a serious stretch to think that could be caused by some organic mutation. And if she had been injected with the virus, there wasn’t a damn thing organic about it.
There were only a handful of people in the world who could manipulate that virus, and fewer still who would intentionally make it worse. Little Allie kept chanting one name, over and over again, in my brain.
Sweet Jesus, I thought. Please let her be wrong.
9
Everyone Always Wants Something
I came home from the safe house to find Nonnie asleep on the couch, with Headbutt curled at her feet and Kulu perched affectionately, head beneath wing, on Nonnie’s shoulder. Someone creative might have snapped a pic on their phone and made a poignant meme out of that precious moment, but it was more cuteness than I could handle after a twelve-hour plus day.
So, I thumped my holster onto the kitchen table and intentionally woke Nonnie up. She halfway opened her eyes and sleepwalked across the lawn to her house, while the troublemakers and I settled in for a good night’s sleep.
I hadn’t even finished my first cup of coffee the next morning when the phone rang.
It was Doc Blanchard. “You need to get over here now.”
I could barely hear him over all the crashing and banging in the background.
“Miriam turned overnight,” he said. “She broke out of the cold storage drawer and she’s tearing up my morgue.”
The Corpse Whisperer Page 8
