Pulling the zipper closed, I glanced up in time to see Marianne headed my way, pulled along by a very eager dog.
“You must be Angel,” the petite woman said breathlessly as the dog stopped in front of me. “Ed and Marcus have told me about you. So nice to finally meet you!”
I straightened and gave her a smile. “Hi, yeah, I’m Angel. You’re Marianne, right?”
She bobbed her head in a yes, then dipped her chin toward the dog who was sitting and staring at me intently. “And this here is Kudzu.” She frowned at the dog, then rolled her eyes. “Oh, you silly mutt. She’s not a corpse.”
I could feel the blood drain from my face, but thankfully Marianne kept right on talking and didn’t seem to notice. “She’s a cadaver dog, see? And she’s smelling the body you have in the bag, and probably your clothes as well since you wear them in the morgue, right?” I nodded but she kept on going. Damn good thing since I wasn’t quite sure if I’d recovered the ability to speak yet. “We came out to see if we could find this poor guy’s head, but instead we stumbled across a little campsite where he’s probably been living.” She shook her head. “What an awful, awful thing.” She tugged at the leash and the dog obediently returned to her side.
Well, now I knew where Zeke had been staying. Not that it mattered anymore. “Yeah, I think the cops are freaking out a bit,” I said, relieved that my voice didn’t show any of my earlier shock. “I guess they’re thinking it’s a serial killer.”
Marianne rubbed her arms. “I’ve been making Ed stay at my place every night ever since the last body was found so close to where I live.” Then she grinned. “Though that’s not much of a change from the usual. He has a nice enough apartment over in Longville, but it’s furnished like a dorm room. Whereas I actually have silly things like beds and chairs and couches.”
“And hopefully a large refrigerator, too,” I said, thinking of his incredible appetite, then felt silly for saying it since she’d probably have no idea what I meant by that.
To my relief, she let out a peal of laughter, though she quickly covered her mouth and looked around guiltily. “Oh, gawd, look at me giggling over a dead body. People will start thinking I’m horrible and cold. But, yes, I have a large fridge. That man goes through groceries like nobody’s business! If I ate the way he did, I’d weigh about a thousand pounds!”
Someone called her name, and she whipped her head around. I followed her gaze to see Ed at the top of the berm. He gave me a wave, and I lifted my hand in reply.
“Speak of the devil!” she said. “He’s going to help me take Kudzu on a long run around this area. It always helps to have someone else with me.” She looked back to me. “It was so great meeting you. You’ll have to come over the next time we have a get-together! We have a fish fry or a barbecue at least every other weekend. I’ll make sure Ed or Marcus gives you a call! ” Then she was trotting off with Kudzu before I could do more than give a weak smile in return.
I let out a long breath. One thing was for sure—I needed to stay the hell away from that dog.
To my shock and surprise, Ben and Mike both helped Derrel and me carry the body bag back to the road. Most of the ranking officers had left which meant I could get the van up close so that we didn’t have to haul the damn thing down the road as well. I gave both detectives super nice smiles in thanks, even though Ben was the one who’d stepped up to help and had then guilted Mike into taking another strap. I wasn’t going to bitch. Sure, I could carry it myself, but why burn up the brains if I didn’t have to?
As I closed the back of the van I saw Marcus out on the street talking on his phone, but I didn’t have a chance to do more than give him a little nod and smile. His expression remained fairly grim, though he returned the nod, and I felt instantly silly for being all smiley and cheerful on such a gruesome murder scene. At least Marianne had caught herself and realized how awful it was to laugh at a death scene. Me, I didn’t even think about it. I’d become totally jaded already. I barely thought of dead bodies as former people anymore.
The thought left me cold. Was that part of the zombie insanity? Maybe it had nothing to do with hunger. Maybe it was part of this virus or whatever, and the longer it was in me the less I’d think of people as people, and it would eventually seem natural to want to bash their heads in.
No, I was being completely stupid. I mean, Kang was still pretty normal, and he was old.
Still, it continued to bother me throughout the day—enough for Dr. Leblanc to notice how quiet I was.
“Something bugging you, Angel?”
I looked up from the computer and began to give a general No, I’m fine denial, then paused. “Well, sort of, but I’m afraid you’ll, um, think I’m weird.”
His eyes flashed with kind humor. “Weirder, you mean?”
I gave a weak laugh. “Yeah, more than usual.”
“What’s up?”
I took a deep breath as I tried to figure out how to say it without sounding like a freak. I really liked Dr. Leblanc—not in a sexy way or anything. Ew! But simply as a nice person who seemed to be willing to try and understand me. I trusted him, and even I could admit that I wasn’t the type to trust many people. I could do that bit of analysis on myself just fine.
“Well, I think I’m becoming kinda cold,” I said. “I mean, I pick up these bodies, and I don’t even think about the fact they were once living people. It doesn’t bug me, and I think it should.” I met his eyes. “Shouldn’t it?”
He patted my shoulder. “Angel, you have a tough and crusty exterior, but you have the kindest, mushiest heart I’ve ever seen. You’re not cold. Thinking of the bodies as non-people is simply a defense mechanism your brain engages to protect you from the horribleness of what we have to do. We all do it.” The smile he gave me was warm and gentle. “We crack jokes and we’re terribly inappropriate because, if we focus on the loss, we’ll lose our minds and won’t be able to do what needs to be done.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Besides, I know you’re not cold.”
“How do you know?” I challenged.
“Because you cry when we get kids through here,” he stated. “No one jokes about the kids. Those are the ones that get to us the most.”
I felt a knot form in my throat. “Yeah,” I said, voice suddenly hoarse.
“You’re human, Angel. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have you here if you weren’t.” He turned and walked away as I stared after him in surprise.
So maybe there were different degrees of monster. I was a monster with a mushy heart.
Chapter 25
I finished up my paperwork, then checked the computer to see if there were any bodies scheduled to be picked up by a funeral home today. None were, but I frowned when I saw that the body of the pizza guy was still in our cooler. It had been almost two weeks. Surely some next of kin had been found by now?
I went looking for Derrel and found him hunched behind the desk in the investigator’s office, his eyes flicking between the screen and the keyboard as he painstakingly pecked out letters.
“Hey, Derrel, ya got a sec?”
He looked up with an almost grateful expression. “If it keeps me from having to fight my way through writing this report, sure.”
I laughed and plopped into the chair in front of the desk. “I’ll try. What’s the deal with the pizza guy? Still no next of kin?”
A grimace flickered across his face. “Well, we’re not sure. There’s some sort of screw-up.”
“Like how?”
He sighed and sat back. “We ran his prints and it came back to a Peter Plescia.”
I nodded. “Right. The pizza guy. So what’s the deal?”
Derrel lifted his broad shoulders in a shrug. “The problem is that Peter Plescia is eighty-seven. That is, he would be if he wasn’t supposedly already dead.”
I felt as if a cold wind dove down my spine. And Kang looks like he’s my age. . . .“What do you mean?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“I mean,” he said, lea
ning forward again, “that the records must be screwed up somewhere along the line. It happens with identity theft, sometimes. The pizza guy is probably someone who stole the real Mr. Plescia’s identity. Pizza guy’s real name is probably buried somewhere. Since his fingerprints match the fingerprint records that come up for the original Mr. Plescia, that means he was never fingerprinted while the fake one was—while using Plescia’s stolen identity. We may never know who pizza guy really is.”
“Wow.” I paused as I tried to get my jumbled thoughts in order “But how do you know that this isn’t the real Peter Plescia? Maybe he faked his own death or something.”
“The age,” Derrel replied. “The people at Pizza Plaza said he was only in his thirties or so, plus Dr. Leblanc says there’s no way that the guy was in his late eighties. He can tell by looking at the bones and that sort of thing.” Then he chuckled. “Besides, I can’t see an eighty-seven year old delivering pizzas.”
He could if he was a zombie. So he wasn’t killed by a rogue—at least not for his brains. An eighty-seven-year-old zombie. Holy shit. The brains healed me of any injury and made me feel like a million bucks. It made sense that brains would somehow heal the stuff that made us get old. Kang was probably close to seventy and sure as hell didn’t look it. An odd chill skimmed over me. I’d realized he was old, but the full impact of it hadn’t hit me until now. Had Kang been forced to fake his death at some point? Did he have to move before people got suspicious? And how long would it be before people noticed I wasn’t aging? And how long did it last? Would the virus or parasite eventually die off on its own? Great . . . I wasn’t really alive, but the good news was that I could be that way for a really long time.
“So, what will you do now?” I asked, masking my inner turmoil as much as I could. “Check into this old guy’s death? Maybe the imposter was a friend or the real Peter Plescia’s kid or something.”
He gave me a nod and a smile. “You’d be good at this. That’s exactly what I’m doing now. The original Peter Plescia lived in Littleton, Colorado. I called the Coroner’s Office over there yesterday and asked if they could pull any records and get copies to me. They should be faxing it all this afternoon. But unfortunately that doesn’t necessarily give us any info on the guy in our cooler.”
“What about getting information on the pizza guy . . . like where he’s been living,” I suggested. “Even though the name might not be his”—which I figured it probably was, but I wasn’t going to argue that point—“there should be info in Lexis Nexis under that name, right? So maybe you could at least track down possible acquaintances or stuff like that, find someone who knew him and might know more about the real him.”
His smile widened. “Damn, Angel, you should be a cop!”
I gave a casual shrug that didn’t feel terribly casual. “Can’t. Convicted felon, remember?”
Derrel looked briefly abashed. “Sorry.” Then he gave me a wink. “Well, that means we get to keep you.”
A warm flush spread through me as I tried not to show how much the comment meant to me. “You mean, you’re stuck with me!” I teased.
“Either works.” He tugged the keyboard toward him. “But I still like your idea about Lexis Nexis.” He fell silent while he did the hunt and peck thing again. A part of me wanted to yank the keyboard away from him and do it myself, but the more rational part pointed out that I sucked at typing even worse, and it wouldn’t speed things up at all.
“You have good ideas,” he said after a moment. “The original Peter Plescia died in 1988 and this one showed up here in 1990.” He clicked a few more keys. “Lived at various apartment complexes.”
“Is there a way to find out where he worked?” I leaned forward eagerly. “I mean, other than Pizza Plaza.” If he’d ever worked in a morgue or funeral home, that would clinch my theory that he was a zombie. Plus that would surely make it easier to fake his death.
Derrel gave me a funny look but didn’t question my interest. “Not on here. The system we use tells us stuff like residence history, possible relatives, phone numbers, that sort of thing. Basically, anything available in a public record search. That’s pretty much all we need, since the main reason we use it is for locating next of kin.”
I sat back and nodded. “Okay, that’s cool.” It didn’t matter anyway. I was pretty damn positive that the dude was a zombie. “What about the guy we picked up this morning? Has the ID on him been confirmed yet? Was it Zeke Lyons?”
“Yep. That came through about an hour ago. Zeke Lyons, forty-three years old, white male. No hiccups with that one at least.”
Okay, so he wasn’t an old zombie. I had no idea if he’d really looked forty-three, since I’d never seen him at his “best.”
“How ’bout the guy from Sweet Bayou Road?” I pressed. “And the two guys this week who died of head injuries?” I asked. “Was there anything strange about them?”
This time he gave me a funny look. “You’re stretching now, girl,” he said, though with enough of a smile to take any sting out of it. “The victim from Sweet Bayou was Adam Campbell, fifty-three years old, and no apparent anomalies there either. But as far as the other two—totally different means of death with those.”
“But—” I stopped myself before saying anything about the missing brains, took a deep breath instead, and made myself nod. “Yeah, I guess.”
“However, to answer your question, no. Nothing weird about those two. No connection or similarities. Families were notified. All the usual stuff.”
They were within a few miles of each other. But for the first time I had to wonder if I was seeing something that wasn’t there. Squished-head guy’s brains might have been picked up by a damn dog for all I knew. And decomp drug dealer dude . . . well, his brains could have liquefied and leaked out by the time we arrived.
Damn it. I’d been so certain that Zeke had killed those two. Was I missing something obvious? But even if those deaths really had been accidental, there sure as shit wasn’t anything accidental about Zeke and Peter and Adam getting their heads whacked off.
“All right,” I said. “Well I figured it was worth thinking about.”
“Keep it up and you’ll get promoted to Investigator,” Derrel said. Then his eyes flashed with amusement. “And we all know how much that would piss Nick off.”
“Ooh, something to shoot for!” I said, laughing.
I’d lost track of time and had to run back to the morgue to get everything set up for the autopsy before Dr. Leblanc got there.
I hadn’t assisted at the autopsy of the other headless body, and I felt kind of useless without a head to deal with. Usually as soon as Dr. Leblanc finished his removal of the organs, I’d start on the head while he did the more meticulous examinations and dissections. But since there was no head, I pretty much stood there and watched, all the time feeling as if I was forgetting to do something.
“So it’s pretty obvious it’s a serial killer, right?” I asked Dr. Leblanc.
He glanced up, scalpel poised above a kidney. “Why do you say that? Do you think it is?”
I was starting to get used to Dr. Leblanc and his way of answering questions with questions of his own. Derrel had told me a while back that Dr. Leblanc was a fan of the Socratic Method, which made absolutely zero sense to me at the time. In fact, I didn’t even realize he’d said “Socratic” and thought he’d said “secreting,” which had me just as confused. It wasn’t until I said something about “the secreting method” that Derrel explained—after laughing his ass off at me first—that the Socratic Method was a way of teaching by using questions. I didn’t understand the whole thing, but there were times when I really wished Dr. Leblanc would give me a straight answer.
However, I was willing to go along with it for the moment. “Well, sure. I mean, in the last couple of months we’ve had three people with heads cut off and two others who died of pretty major head injuries.”
He lowered the scalpel and regarded me. “Three,” he said after a few sec
onds.
“Three what?”
“Three who died of major head injuries,” he said. “Right before you were hired we had an MVA fatality where cause of death was multiple traumatic injuries, most notably decapitation.”
A bizarre chill walked down my spine at this for no reason I could understand. “Okay,” I said, shaking it off. “So. Six total.”
He didn’t lift his scalpel again and continued to look at me. “But what makes you think any of the accidental deaths could be related to the decapitations?”
I sighed and shrugged. “Never mind. I’m being silly.”
A smile flickered across his mouth. “I’m not going to let you off that easily. You think there might be a connection. What led you to that theory?”
I fidgeted. I could hardly say that my zombie super-sense told me that there were brains missing from squished-head guy and decomposed-guy. “Okay, um, the three men who got decapitated. Not the one from the car wreck—” Memory flickered but was gone before I could focus on it. “—but the pizza guy, Sweet Bayou guy, and this one are connected because the heads were chopped off.”
Dr. Leblanc gave me an approving nod. “That is definitely a telling detail. And I believe the fine folks at the Sheriff’s Office are quite inclined to agree with you.” But he still made no move to begin the dissection of the kidney. “Now what leads you to believe that the other three deaths are connected?”
All I could do was shrug helplessly. “I got nuthin’,” I said. “Just seemed weird, so many guys with their brains falling out.”
He smiled and began his cut. “It’s funny how sometimes things seem to have an odd synchronicity.” At my blank look he explained, “Those times when the same word or phrase or incident seem to repeat. Most of the time a closer examination reveals little more than coincidence. And, of course, decapitation is such an unusual and shocking way to die, that when such occurs, it tends to stick in our memory.” A thoughtful expression came over his face. “In fact, about ten years ago or so, a couple of skeletons were found out in the swamp. The skulls were missing, and there was trauma to the spinal column that indicated they’d been decapitated with several blows to the back of the neck.” He shook his head. “It caused a huge stir, obviously, but the case went nowhere. Theories ranged from a psychopath haunting the swamp and collecting heads, to an especially gruesome mob hit.”