Resurrection Blues

by James, Harper

  Five minutes later he heard the throaty rumble of the Corvette coming down the road. He glanced in the mirror, expecting it to pull to the curb behind her car. But instead of subsiding the big V8 engine roared as she blipped the throttle. A second later the car shot past his window, a grin big enough to eat the world plastered across her face, her hair dancing in the wind behind her.

  He hadn’t said anything about putting the roof down.

  He watched his car disappear down the street, her arm raised in a wave, fingers waggling. He heard her change down, saw a quick puff of smoke from the tires as she braked hard to make a fast right turn on two wheels. The engine growled as she hit the gas again, the sound disappearing into the distance. A couple minutes later she was back behind him again, the Corvette coming on fast, low and hugging the road. If he thought she was going to pull in and park behind him this time, he didn’t know the first thing about her. She flashed the lights at him and floored it again, arm in the air, to do another lap of the block.

  Five minutes later she pulled in behind him, gave the throttle one last loving blip and killed the engine. The street was suddenly quiet. He watched her unfold her legs and swing them out, then run her hand through the knots in her hair as she stood. He decided then that he’d propose to her if the opportunity presented itself.

  ‘What happened to having work to do?’ he said as she climbed into her own dull sedan. ‘And you owe me for the fifty bucks worth of rubber you left on the pavement.’

  She ignored both comments and dropped his laptop in his . . . lap.

  ‘Nice car,’ she said, her voice breathy, catching in her throat. He saw the steady rise and fall of her chest under her blouse as she rested against the headrest. ‘Far too powerful for you.’

  ‘Really? Those were police advanced driving maneuvers you were demonstrating, were they?’

  ‘Nope. They were growing up in a house with three brothers maneuvers. By the way, from the feel of the gas pedal, I don’t reckon you’ve ever pushed it more than half way. I reckon my apartment moves faster than when you drive it.’

  ‘Is that so? Maybe my thighs aren’t big and powerful enough.’

  As was often the case, the words were out before he could do anything about it. Didn’t matter, her grin just grew wider.

  ‘At least they’re good for something.’

  A few more things went through his mind but he kept them to himself. He wasn’t sure if the sparkle in her eyes was still from the fun she’d had in his car or because her mind was working along the same lines—like clamping his head between them.

  Without realizing it, he touched his ear, the one an adulterer with a grudge called Hugh McIntyre had bitten the top off after Evan caught him in flagrante delicto. It was what you’d call a Freudian hand gesture. She saw it and laughed out loud, a sound that made him think of cigarettes and booze, low lights and good music. He knew then their minds were indeed on the same track.

  ‘So, anything going on at the mall?’ he said to her openly grinning face.

  ‘Not really. There’s a security guard strutting his stuff like he’s been invited onto Oprah Winfrey to talk about how he saved the mall from a terrorist attack. Apparently, they’re looking for an ugly son-of-a-bitch in an old Chevy van.’

  He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead.

  ‘Thank God for that. I can relax. If you’d said they were after a good-looking guy . . .’

  That just got him a sad headshake.

  ‘C’mon, let’s see what you’ve got,’ she said.

  He powered up the laptop, then pulled the keyring from his pocket. He worked off the small plastic device he’d only seen at the very last moment, a fraction of a second after he let go the keys to drop them down the drain.

  ‘Moment of truth,’ she said as he held up a USB thumb drive.

  He inserted it and navigated to its contents, knew he’d hit paydirt when he saw a folder called Lauren. He opened it, felt his heart leap. The top two files practically jumped off the screen at him. Death Certificate and Autopsy Report.

  ‘Looks like she’s dead after all,’ she said, leaning across, her head resting briefly on his shoulder. Her hair smelled like fresh laundry drying in the sun. Stray hairs tickled the side of his face, a residual heat from her excitement radiating off her.

  ‘Or she faked it convincingly. That’s what Levi thinks.’

  She pulled her head away, looked at him for a moment, her eyes narrowed slightly. She didn’t pass comment. She was never one to jump to conclusions. That was his job, after all. He’d get the benefit of her opinion when she was good and ready.

  He clicked on the Death Certificate file, opening up a scanned copy of the original. It showed the date of death he was expecting—May 15, 2013—as well as her personal details. Cause of death was listed as carbon monoxide and cyanide poisoning, the most common cause of death in a fire. It was signed by George Ivanovsky, Deputy Chief Medical Examiner.

  ‘You recognize that name?’ he said, pointing to the name by the signature.

  She leaned in again to get a better look, her hair falling forward. He felt like running his fingers through it.

  ‘Yeah. I think he retired a couple years ago. Or quit. I don’t remember which.’

  ‘Was he any good?’

  She laughed at the strange question.

  ‘I’m pretty sure he was competent enough to recognize a dead body when he saw one if that’s what you mean.’

  He waved it off. It wasn’t a question of whether he recognized a dead body. It was a question of whether he correctly identified it.

  He didn’t open the autopsy report. It would run to a lot of pages. He’d read it later when he had more time. Not that it would make much difference. He’d achieved what he set out to do, established that Lauren had officially died in the first place.

  Now all he had to do was find out if she actually died. And, given the unhealthy interest of the men hunting her, which side of the actual grave she planned on staying.

  Chapter 17

  NEXT MORNING, EVAN SPENT an unpleasant half hour reading through the autopsy report. The majority of it was a mix of gruesome photographs that he tried not to look at, and dry, medical description that threatened to send him to sleep. But it wasn’t without its highlights. He’d only just begun reading when he got his first surprise. In a section that included mundane administrative details including the autopsy number, the date and time and who was present, he got a shock as violent as if he’d sat on a cattle prod. In the list of persons present, below the names of the pathologist and autopsy technician, the last name leapt off the page at him.

  Ryder.

  His nemesis, good ol’ Detective Donut had seen fit to attend the procedure. Something about the case had warranted a closer look. Trouble was, he’d go to his own grave voluntarily before he told Evan what it was.

  The means of identifying the body was also documented. It confirmed what Levi had already told him. Due to the disfiguration caused by the fire in which she died rendering her face unrecognizable, Lauren Stone had been identified by matching the teeth of the corpse to Lauren’s dental records.

  The section detailing the personal property found with the deceased was notable for its lack of contents. The fire had consumed most of the items you’d expect to see—money, credit cards and other documents that might have identified her. The only item listed was the bracelet that Levi now carried around with him. There was a photograph of it.

  Evan got out his phone and found the copies he’d taken of the photographs Levi showed him of Lauren with the mystery man, the ones supposedly taken recently. He compared the bracelet that he’d noticed on her arm with the one in the autopsy report. They looked the same to him. Then again, he wasn’t an expert on women’s bracelets. Maybe she simply bought another one.

  He skimmed the toxicology report. There was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in her system as Martina Perez, the traffic cop, had said. No evidence of mind-altering substanc
es that might explain why a person would sail off the edge of the road without any attempt to stop themselves.

  Down near the bottom he found the Case Summary and Comment. His interest perked up. This was where the pathologist explained in more detail what the circumstances were that caused it to be a case for the Medical Examiner’s office. But there was nothing there that he didn’t know already. There wasn’t even as much as Martina Perez had told him. The dull, typewritten report wasn’t nearly as easy on the eye as she was, either.

  He reached the end at last, the section that dealt with the cause and manner of death. The cause was the same as on the death certificate—carbon monoxide and cyanide poisoning. The manner of death gave him a moment’s pause. He’d seen enough autopsy reports to know there were five recognized options—natural, suicide, homicide, accident, and undetermined.

  In Lauren Stone’s case the Medical Examiner had settled on accident. Evan wasn’t an expert but you could have made a good case for undetermined. He made a note of the Medical Examiner’s name and opened a browser window.

  It didn’t take him long to find George Ivanovsky online. He’d enjoyed a long and distinguished career and was now retired as Guillory had said. Evan wasn’t sure what he wanted to achieve by talking to him. It would be a case of shaking the tree and seeing what fell out. And it would be interesting to get a feel for him, try to gauge if he was the kind of man who might participate in faking a person’s death. Besides, he only lived an hour away and the Corvette needed a run.

  It was on his to-do list to buy a small, cheap car, leaving the Corvette in his sister’s garage. He just hadn’t got around to it yet. But that wasn’t all. He was subconsciously avoiding her. He’d promised to lend her and her husband, Mitch, the money to remodel their house out of the bonus he received from his last case. There were a couple issues. The first was the concept of loan in Charlotte’s mind. It seemed to him that a Charlotte-style loan differed in a few fundamental ways from the sort the banks offered. There didn’t seem to be much mention of things like repayments, for one. The other thing was, every time he saw or spoke to her the budget seemed to have escalated. This, he realized, was a double-edged sword. The longer he left it, the more time she had to trawl through the magazines and add something else to her wish list or replace something already on it with a more expensive model.

  But she was his little sister, after all. He might as well just come out and ask her how much he owed her.

  In the meantime, it was good to get the roof down and take the Corvette for a run to blow the carbon out. If Guillory hadn’t been working, he’d have called, told her to put her hair in a ponytail, and taken her along for the ride—don’t forget the 1950’s-style, cat-eye sunglasses—and shown her how to really put the Corvette through its paces.

  A quick look at the road atlas—you can forget your GPS in a car like the Corvette—and he realized he had to drive the route Lauren would have taken on the day she died. So, he called Guillory anyway.

  She shot herself in the foot straight off.

  ‘What now? I’m up to my ears.’

  Her loss.

  He didn’t mention taking a drive, just asked her for the exact location of the crash. She dug the information out of the file and gave it to him. She was about to hang up when he caught her.

  ‘One more thing, Kate.’

  He reckoned if you found a way to harness the huff of breath that came out of her nose, you wouldn’t need to clutter the landscape with wind turbines.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I read the autopsy report this morning. Ryder was there. That kind of suggests there was something more to it. If you get the chance—’

  ‘Will do. Bye.’

  As it turned out, she wouldn’t have wanted to hear the way the conversation with Ivanovsky went anyway.

  Chapter 18

  A HALF-HOUR LATER, Evan pulled onto the shoulder where Lauren’s car went over the edge, just past a deceptive curve that tightened up as you drove through it. It was easy to imagine an unwary driver coming around too fast and seeing nothing but a wide expanse of blue sky in front of them. If he hadn’t been driving like the pussy Guillory had accused him of being the previous day he might have come unstuck himself. Anyone driving like she’d driven the Corvette would be in for a nasty surprise, that was for sure. And for some strange reason, there weren’t any crash barriers on this section of road. That made it very unfortunate for a careless driver—or very convenient for somebody looking to push a car over the edge as Martina Perez had insinuated.

  There wasn’t a lot to see after five years. He walked to the edge of the dirt shoulder and looked down. After this length of time, the tree the car hit and the surrounding undergrowth that had burned along with it had re-grown. He started down the steep slope anyway to take a closer look, slip-sliding sideways, grasping at bushes and saplings to slow his descent. He stumbled on a protruding rock twenty feet from the tree and half ran, half fell the rest of the way, using the scarred trunk to stop himself.

  He sat down, leaning against the tree and looked up at the sky, wondered if whoever had burned to death in this place, whether it was Lauren or some other, unidentified woman, really had been knocked mercifully unconscious first. He swallowed thickly, thinking that if it hadn’t been Lauren, her calculated choice of the means of her faked death—burning, with all its evidence-destroying advantages—made the pain of the people she left behind more intense as they imagined the horrors of death by fire.

  He shuffled around on his butt, studied the trunk of the tree, looking not for evidence somehow missed at the time, but for something he knew he’d find, something placed there afterwards. His chest tightened as he saw it immediately. A small metal plaque engraved with her name, Lauren Stone, nothing else. And it tightened again to the point where his breath wouldn’t come as he ran his finger over the name and wondered if one day he might nail a similar plaque to a tree somewhere, and if anyone would ever read it and feel like he felt now.

  He put his foot to the floor for the rest of the journey. He didn’t care if Lauren’s curve had a twin a mile further down the road, patiently waiting to catch drivers no longer paying attention as they congratulated themselves on cheating death on the previous one. He let the wind suck his mind clear of thoughts of death and little metal plaques, his recklessness spurred on by the image of Guillory’s hair dancing in the wind as she laid rubber on the pavement, eyes bright with the joy of abusing his car on a city street.

  He found Ivanovsky’s house easily enough. Ivanovsky reminded him of a younger version of Elwood Crow, the enigmatic investigator he’d come across on his last case. He was tall and slightly stooped, his head bald, a prominent nose taking pride of place on his thin face. He looked like you’d expect a person who’d spent his working life hunched over dead bodies in windowless basements, elbow deep in blood and body parts, to look—like an ageing vulture, basically.

  Evan was struck that people never seemed surprised that he should turn up unannounced on their doorstep after anything from five to fifty years. Ivanovsky was no different. He ushered Evan into a sitting room at the front of the house that didn’t smell or look as if it was used very often, the sort of room that was kept immaculate at all times in case the parish priest called unexpectedly. Evan could see his car through the window, gleaming in the sun. They both stood looking out at it after Evan declined the offer of refreshments.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you for the last five years,’ Ivanovsky said when Evan told him why he was there. ‘Not you personally, someone like you. But I was expecting a dull, middle-aged man in a cheap suit, not a young man in a classic sports car. It’s a ‘69 Corvette Stingray, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. But why—’

  ‘And you’re not from the insurance company, are you?’

  Evan shook his head, happy to let Ivanovsky talk.

  ‘I always got the impression they thought there was something suspicious about it. That it was an insurance scam that went
horribly wrong. So did the police.’

  ‘Who, the patrol officer? Martina Perez?’

  Ivanovsky’s brow furrowed, making him look even more like an ageing vulture.

  ‘Was that her name? No, not her. The other one, the fat one. The one who attended the autopsy.’

  ‘Ryder.’

  Ivanovsky nodded, his face clouding over like a man who’s been reminded of something unpleasant he’d only just managed to forget.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said with ill-concealed distaste. ‘I remember thinking at the time, if he didn’t lose some weight, I’d be seeing him again. On the slab.’

  ‘I saw his name on the autopsy report,’ Evan said, chewing the inside of his mouth to keep himself from grinning, hoping he’d remember Ivanovsky’s words.

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Not really, he—’

  ‘I didn’t like his attitude. What engine is in your car?’

  The abrupt change of tack took Evan by surprise for a second.

  ‘Three fifty cubic inch V8.’

  Ivanovsky nodded appreciatively.

  ‘Bet it goes like a bat out of hell, eh?’

  Evan smiled, thinking about Guillory’s teasing comments, about the pleasure on her face after she’d taken it around the block a couple times.

  ‘With the right driver behind the wheel, yeah. Getting back to the autopsy . . .’

  ‘Sorry. I get easily distracted as I get older.’

  It was a strange thing to say. Evan had only been talking to him for five minutes, but he could tell there was nothing wrong with Ivanovsky’s mind.

  ‘You put accident as the manner of death,’ Evan said.

  ‘Then that’s what it must have been.’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ Ivanovsky snapped. ‘I performed hundreds, maybe thousands, of autopsies during my career. I can’t possibly remember the details of them all.’