by C. E. Murphy
For the second time in a single evening, I slammed out of the realm of Other and back into my body, aching all over with pain and confusion.
Four
It took the better part of an hour to get Gary out of my apartment, which both made me feel better and worse. When he was gone I sat on the couch with a pillow hugged against my chest, staring blindly at nothing.
It was inconceivable to me that my mother had been some sort of mystic. The woman I'd known for a few scant months had held her cards close to the chest, always judging and never commenting. I'd spent four months with her and, when she died, felt as though I'd known nothing more about her than she liked Altoids. There'd been no real mourning, at least not on my part. Confusion, yes, and, not to be delicate about it, a whole lot of resentment. She'd disrupted a life in which I had not missed her to any noticeable degree in order to have me witness her death. She'd been young, only fifty-three, and in extremely good health. I'd been left with the impression that she was bored of life, and as such saw fit to leave it under her own power.
It appeared that the power in question was more literal than I'd thought. I mean, anybody who could will herself to death wasn't a person whose emotional state was one I wanted to tangle with. She might decide it was time for me to die, and I might not be tough enough to argue. I hadn't even tried arguing in favor of her life, which probably made me a very bad daughter.
Not that there was any really compelling reason to be a good daughter to the woman who'd abandoned me when I was a few months old. We hadn't liked each other as adults. I could only assume she hadn't much cared for me as a baby, either.
A fine thread of emptiness wove through me, an ache that I'd spent the better part of my life resolutely ignoring. I hadn't been given up for adoption by a mother who thought it was best for me. I'd been dumped on a father who hadn't known I existed until that moment, by a mother who evidently didn't like me very much. It was not something I enjoyed thinking about.
Especially as it reminded me, inevitably, of a boy growing up in North Carolina, whom I had known full well I couldn't properly mother. Not at fifteen. Not in the confusion of mourning the sister who'd been born with him, and who'd died just minutes later, too small to live.
I set my teeth together and put my forehead against the pillow, shoving away every thought of family ties that came haunting me. Introspection was not my strong suit. I didn't like to look back, and I wasn't prepared for the past, in the form of my dead mother, to come calling.
I fell asleep sometime after midnight, still wrapped around the scratchy couch pillow.
Monday March 21, 8:20 a.m.
There was a place on the other side of sleep that I'd been to, where I'd walked among the dead and spoken with them. The plan—a plan which I didn't have any intention of mentioning aloud, not even to myself—had been to whoosh through dreamtime, find the dead women and learn who'd killed them, then jaunt off to work like Don Juan triumphant.
Instead I woke up stiff and disoriented the next morning, curled up on the solitary couch cushion, without having had a single moment's otherworldly experience while I slept. An ache of uselessness welled up behind my eyes. Not only did I not understand what was going on, but the baser part of me didn't care. Having it all go away would have been far more within my comfort zone.
I had just used the phrase comfort zone with all due seriousness, right inside my own head. I clearly needed to get up, stick my head in a bowl of cold water, and drink a pot of strong coffee. Which I did, except it was a hot shower instead of a cold bowl, and I swear I didn't drink more than three cups of coffee. Honest.
I called a cab—not Gary; he knew too much about me and I wasn't up to facing that this morning—and went to work, my nose mashed against the window. I missed Petite. I wanted to be cozy and safe, driving her instead of taking a cab. I had a better relationship with my car than I had with most people.
With any people, a small and somewhat snide voice inside my head said. I told it to go away, paid the cabby, and stumped through the precinct building to find Billy.
Actually, I was looking for his desk, where I figured I could leave a note explaining my humiliating inability to find anything useful, and then run away before I had to confess my failure out loud. I'd come in early just to be sure I could pull that off.
Billy was earlier. He leaned on his elbow, big palm wrinkling the side of his face until his left eye had all but disappeared into the curves of flesh. He looked like he'd been up all night, which was not only possible, but likely. An attack of guilt grabbed me by the throat. I snuck back out of the precinct building and scurried down the street to the doughnut shop to get him a lemon-poppyseed muffin and an oversize mocha. His face actually lit up when I plopped them down on his desk several minutes later, which made me feel slightly less like a loser.
"You're a goddess." The side of his face was one big red mark from leaning on his hand too long. He unwrapped the muffin, took a slurp of coffee, and squinted up at me. "You didn't get anything about the murders, did you."
"Is it that obvious?" Back to Loserville.
"You look like a kicked puppy. But I'll forgive you anything for the next five minutes, because you brought me the manna of heaven."
"Damn." I looked at the muffin, impressed. "I shoulda gotten me one of those things."
Billy chuckled and sank back in his chair, its un-oiled hinge drawing out a creak that slowly lifted every individual hair from my fingertips to my nape. I wrapped my hands around his coffee cup for a few seconds, trying to chase the chill away. He ate half the muffin in one bite, then nodded at his computer screen, speaking around crumbs. "I'd forgive you anyway. I found some stuff out. Not about our dead girls. They all had ID, by the way. We're seeing if they've got anything in common, but so far they look random. Anyway, the murders."
Somehow I was able to understand every word he said. I usually couldn't understand most of what I said when my mouth was full. I twisted around to look at the computer screen. "Interpol?"
"Thought of it this morning. I remembered reading about some kind of ritual murders about thirty years ago—"
"You read them thirty years ago?" Billy wasn't more than ten years older than I was. He gave me a look that suggested I shut up. I pressed my lips together and widened my eyes, all innocence.
"The murders were about thirty years ago. I read about them a few years ago. Pedant."
"Because you what, read about ritual murders for fun?"
"Joanie," Billy said, annoyed. I lifted my hands in apology and tried to keep quiet. Billy glared at me until he was sure I wasn't going to interrupt again, then continued. "These women all had their intestines stretched out, connecting them with one another."
I suddenly wished I hadn't drunk a lot of acidic coffee for breakfast, and looked around for something neutral to eat. There was nothing handy except Billy's muffin, the second half of which he stuffed in his mouth, clearly suspecting that I was about to raid it. A burp rose up through the soured coffee in my stomach and I clamped my hand over my mouth, tasting coffee-flavored bile. Yuck.
"You've got a soft heart, Joanie." Billy gave me a very tiny smile that did a lot to make me feel better.
"I'm not a homicide detective."
"Mmm. Yeah. Anyway, so I remembered this morning reading about a murder like that over in Europe. It's not the kind of thing the authorities like to noise around."
"No kidding." My stomach was still bubbling with ook. "So we've got a copycat?"
"Either that or somebody's changed his hunting grounds. Anyway, the only case there was an eyewitness for was, like I said, about thirty years ago. A woman who was presumably supposed to be the last victim—there's never more than four—fought back and managed to escape. The Garda Síochána—"
"This was in Ireland?" I didn't mean to interrupt. It just popped out. Billy's ears moved back with surprise.
"Yeah. What, you had some run-ins with the cops while you were there?"
"No, I jus
t remember my mother talking about the Garda. She didn't call them the Síochána." I said the word carefully, SHE-a-CAWN-a. "I had to ask her what it meant."
"It means police," Billy said helpfully, then waved off my exasperated raspberry. "Yeah, you know that, right. Anyway, they weren't able to find the guy, and for a while the woman was under suspicion, but she got off when the marks on the victims' bodies had obviously been made by somebody a lot bigger than she was. They're usually strangled into semiconsciousness before the horrible stuff begins."
"Like being half-strangled isn't horrible." It had nothing on having your innards ripped out while you were still alive, and I lifted a hand to stop Billy's protestation. "I know. So what was her name? Maybe we can talk to her, get some kind of information about this psycho that might help us."
Billy leaned forward, chair shrieking protest again, to pull up a minimized screen. "That was my thought. She was from Mayo. I've got some people there looking to see if they can find her. Her name was—oops, wrong window." He pulled up another one, scrolling down. "Her name was—"
"Sheila MacNamarra," I finished, feeling light-headed.
The woman on the computer screen looked more like me than the one I'd known had. There was a ranginess to her that I shared, and our eyes were shaped more alike than I'd realized. I'd never seen a picture of my mother when she was young, and young she was: the photo showed her from the thighs up. She was obviously several months pregnant.
With me.
I closed my eyes, unable to think while looking at the photograph on the computer screen. "You won't—" I cleared my throat, trying to wash away the break I'd heard in my voice. "You won't find her. She's dead."
"Joanie?" Billy sounded bewildered. "You know this woman?"
"Yeah." I wished I was wearing my glasses so I could pull them off. Instead my hand wandered around my face like a bird looking for a resting space: my fingers pressed against my mouth, then spread out to cover the lower half of my face before curling in again. I couldn't stop the little actions, even when I tried. "She's my mother."
* * *
I wanted the next half hour or so to disappear into a jumble of confusion, but it adamantly refused to. It was all horribly clear, with an overwhelming babble of questions that I caught every syllable of and a host of concerned, confused, angry expressions that wouldn't let me back up and take stock of the situation. No one had known my mother's name, not any more than I knew Billy's mom's name. Everyone had known I'd gone to Ireland to meet her, and that she'd died, but nobody'd pried beyond that, which I'd been perfectly happy about.
Now, though, Morrison was standing over me—well, trying to. I was on my feet, too, unable to stay sitting while he demanded to know how it was I coincidentally had connections to this woman who'd been a suspect, albeit briefly, in a murder case that was nearly thirty years old. He went on for quite a while, during which Billy tried to be the voice of reason and I watched them both with growing incredulity. Finally I edged between them and said, "Captain," which brought Morrison up short. I rarely resorted to using his actual title.
"Look." This was my reasonable voice. I didn't have a lot of hope for it working on Morrison, but I'd never tried it before, and anything was worth trying once. "My mother obviously didn't kill those women. She wasn't big enough. The police reports cover all that. I guess I am big enough." I lifted one of my hands, with its long fingers, and shrugged. "And we have no idea when our women died, so—"
"Actually," Billy said. I winced and looked at him. He grimaced back apologetically and shrugged. "The first body has a fair amount of degradation. They figured she died about three weeks before it started getting cold enough to snow so much, probably around Christmas."
Morrison's cheeks went a dangerous dark florid purple. "You're telling me we had a body lying around Woodland Park for three weeks before it snowed and nobody noticed?"
"The good news," I said under his outrage, "is that I was in Ireland at a funeral on Christmas. Good alibi."
"How the hell," Morrison shouted, ignoring me, "did a body lie around in a public park for three weeks without anyone noticing?"
"I don't—" Billy began.
Morrison roared, "Find out!" and stalked into his office, slamming the door behind him. Everyone within forty feet flinched. I sucked my lower lip into my mouth and watched the venetian blinds inside the captain's office swing from the force of the door crashing shut.
"Do you think he does that for dramatic effect?" I didn't realize that was my outside voice until nervous laughter broke around me, then rolled over into outright good humor. Someone smacked me on the shoulder and the audience that had gathered for the drama broke up. It never failed to astonish me how there were always people around to watch tense moments unfold. You'd think none of us had jobs to do.
I followed Billy back to his desk, since I still wasn't on shift for another forty minutes. "I really hate to say this."
He eyed me, wary. "But?"
"But I'm pretty sure nobody was supposed to see that body. I don't think it was cosmic coincidence. I think there was…" My tongue seemed to be swelling up and choking my throat in order to prevent me from continuing my sentence. Part of me wished it would succeed. "Power." Power was easier to say than that other word, the five-letter one that began with m and ended with agic. "Involved."
"Yeah?" Billy's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. "Can you do that?"
"Billy, I can't even pick my nose without using a finger." Sometimes my mouth should stop and consult my brain before it says anything. Billy got this wide-eyed look of admiration that belonged on a nine-year-old boy. It said, Wow, that was really gross, and, more important, How come I didn't think of it? My mouth consulted my brain this time, and I asked, "I don't suppose you could just forget I said that?"
"No," Billy said, in a tone that matched the admiration still in his eyes. "I don't think I can. I'm going to have to tell that one to Robert."
"Melinda will kill you."
Billy's grin turned beatific. "Yeah," he said happily. "Girls don't get stuff like that. Except you," he added hastily. "But you're sort of not like a girl."
I stared at him. After a while he realized he might have said something wrong, and backed up hastily. "I mean, you are—of course, you're a girl, it's just, you know, you're one of the guys."
"Billy," I said. "Bear in mind that what you're saying is coming from a man who wears nail polish. I'm not sure it's helping."
"See, that's what I'm saying. Have you ever worn nail polish?"
"No," I said slowly. "I started to put some on once, but it made my fingers feel heavy and I hated it."
"Okay then. So what I'm saying is I bet more of the guys here have worn fingernail polish than you have."
"So I'm more like a guy than one of the guys." My tone was flat and dangerous. Well, I thought it was. Billy didn't seem to feel threatened.
"Kind of, yeah. You're like an überguy. You know everything about cars and you drink beer and shoot guns, only then you also clean up pretty good—"
"Billy." I was a hundred-percent cranky, and this time he heard it. He looked up, surprise lifting his eyebrows.
"Solve your own damned case." I turned on my heel and stalked away.
Five
I stomped all the way down to the garage beneath the precinct building and peeked around the stairwell wall. Peeking wasn't much in keeping with my stompy mood, but I wanted to see if my archnemesis, Thor the Thunder God, was in the garage before I went in.
He was, of course. I sat down in the shadow at the foot of the stairs—the last flourescent light in the row above the steps had never, to the best of my recollection, been functional—and wrapped my arms around my knees, watching the mechanics at work.
This was where I belonged. I'd gone to the academy because the department had paid my way, but I'd never wanted to be a cop. I was a mechanic and something of a computer geek. The two went hand in hand with modern cars, and I was happy with both labels. But my
mother had taken her time dying, they had hired Thor as my replacement, and now I was a cop.
His name wasn't really Thor. It was Ed or Ted or something of that nature. He just looked like Thor, big and blond with muscles on his muscles. He was working on Mark Rodriguez's car, which was forever having the wheels pulled out of alignment. I had a suspicion that Rodriguez went home and beat the axles with a hammer, but I couldn't prove it. Thor wasn't working on the wheels right now, though. He was under the hood, his convict-orange jumpsuit and blond hair bright against the shadows cast by the overhead lights. I put my chin on my knees, watching silently from the shadows. It wasn't as good as being up to my elbows in grease myself, but the smell of oil and gasoline was as soothing to me as mother's milk.
Not that anything about my mother was soothing. I stifled a groan and put my forehead against my knees, listening to the muffled cursing and good-natured banter that went on over the rumbles and squeaks of fixing cars. Tension ebbed out of my shoulders as the comfort sounds and smells vied with my mother's memory for priority in my thought process.
Sheila won out. The image of her pregnant kept invading the backs of my eyelids. She was prettier than I was, and looked serenely confident as she stared back at me from behind my eyes. I could all but see the wind picking up her hair, long black strands that whisked back from her face with a life of their own, but no matter how hard I tried to meet her eyes, I couldn't read any emotion in them. "Come on." I didn't think I was speaking aloud. I was talking to a memory of someone I'd never known. "Tell me what's going on, can't you? What's this guy want? You stopped him once, O Mystical Mother. Give me something to work with here."
She didn't. Evidently not even the memory of her responded well to sarcasm. I sighed and dropped my head farther against my knees. In the garage, metal bit into metal with a high-pitched squeal, a shriek that should have lifted hairs on my arms and made me shiver with discomfort. It had exactly the opposite effect, draining away tension from my neck and making my grip on my own arms slip a little, so that I slumped even more on the stairs. I'd spent far too much time in shops, listening to that sound, to find it uncomfortable. At least, not when I heard it someplace like the garage, where it belonged.
