The next morning was Monday. Temple awoke with Midnight Louie sprawling across her stomach. He felt like a very bad hangover.
“Louie!”
One lazy green eye slitted open. He deigned to regard her, then shut the eye again.
“Louie! You are an avalanche and I am an innocent Swiss village. Move! Off!”
He responded as all cats do to vocal commands. He didn’t even bat an eyelash. And he had them. A lush line of jet-black a Supermodel would give her cheekbones for.
Not even a wink.
“Louie! I had a very big weekend. I don’t have to go to work today, it’s true, but I have a lot to catch up on.”
Louie yawned and allowed himself to roll over. In so doing, he rolled right off the minor hump Temple’s body made in the covers and onto unoccupied comforter.
She polished his head with her palm. “Sony, boy. I overslept. I need to be up and doing!”
He yawned his response to that declaration and shut his eyes again.
Temple twisted herself into a pretzel trying to exit the bed without disturbing a hair on Louie’s Olympic-broadjump-length body.
“Ow!” Temple complained when she had kinked her feet onto the floor in a position preparatory to rising and shining.
She really didn’t want to get up any more than Louie did, but … she had people to rouse and perpetrators to pursue.
The ring winked at the morning, catching her eye. She’d have to be careful to wear it for herself alone. In the daylight it looked so … tawdry. Maybe dreams deferred were tawdry.
Her tote bag sagged against the wall by the bedroom door. She remembered the cute little box the saleswoman had given her for the ring. Time to put the things of a child away. She’d inter the ring in the box and bury it at the back of a dresser drawer, where all tarnished memories dwell.
Temple dredged her tote bag and all its ill-gotten gains from the floor and probed its chaos with her right hand. Her fingers finally curled around a tubular object. Either a freebie lipstick or the box in question.
Tiffany it wasn’t. Temple stuck in her thumb and pulled out a plum-blossom special, a lurid taffeta-wrapped box looking super-tawdry in broad daylight.
She opened it to reveal a cheap foam pillow pierced by a horizontal slit.
Only this hole-in-one was already occupied. By a ring. An ersatz gold ring, very large and very plain, of a snake … or a worm, or an eel, or something else icky … biting its own tail.
Was there a message there? Hmmph. Free box and free ring. Bingo. Goodie.
The new ring was way too big to fit even Temple’s thumb—she tried—and it didn’t sport the slightest dusting of rhinestones to give it star quality.
For a moment she wondered if the saleswoman had lost a valuable item. Naw. Like the ring Temple had bought on a whim and a prayer, this ring was also, utterly … worthless.
She set both rings away in the bottom dresser drawer, under the scarves she had bought and been given over the years—and had kept because it seemed rude and even cruel not to—and had never used.
Because she never had, and never would, learn to tie a knot worth letting anyone actually see.
Chapter 40
Dead Certain
“You’ve never been in an autopsy room before?”
Matt stared at Molina. “You mean when I was a priest? No. Nothing happened in my parish that called for that.”
“Yeah, visiting the morgue is pretty uncalled for, isn’t it?”
She flashed him a wry smile, as if they were in this together.
And they were, in a sense.
“Now,” Molina said, holding the steel-and-glass entry door open for him, like a good hostess. “It looks pretty regular up front. Reception desk, chairs, etcetera etcetera. Just brace yourself. Every step farther in gets more like a new TV show hybrid: ER blended with The Twilight Zone, if you remember that golden oldie.”
“Reruns,” Matt pointed out. “Who could forget Rod Serling and his spooky series?”
“This place isn’t exactly ‘spooky,’ ” Molina paused to tell him. “It’s way too clinical. That’s what’ll get to you. The utter ordinariness of dead and dismembered bodies.
Not like a crime scene, which is a sort of origami nightmare you have to figure out. Here, it’s all clear. Dead and about to be buried. Think you can handle it?”
“I’ve done funerals in my time, Lieutenant.”
She regarded him with a gaze as icy as a vodka gimlet. “You identified your stepfather’s body here. I remember that. No gentle remote viewing booth for this one. You’ll see her on cold stainless steel and she won’t be prettied up.”
“Why? Why did Effinger get the opening-night curtain presentation and why does Kathleen O’Connor get none of the frills?”
“Body’s too fresh. No time. Besides, we know there are no relatives to find. When I asked, not even your friend Bucek could come up with anything on her through the FBI. Don’t let Grizzly Bahr ghoul you out. He’s just a sawbones. Literally.”
Matt then followed her to the reception window, where a perky young thing with highlighted hair shaven to look as if crop circles had set up permanent residence on her scalp handed them clip-on VISITORS tags.
Matt pinched a bit of cotton knit with the alligator clip, also stainless steel. He hated to tell Molina, but he was ready to see Kitty O’Connor, mistress of the edged razor blade, laid out on another metal surface.
Mercy?
He only had to think of Vassar, and he felt none. He was as cold as dry ice.
They went through doors and down hallways. They passed people in lab coats with matching tags, only these bore names.
“I nicknamed him ‘Grizzly,’ ” Molina said abruptly, “because it fit his last name and his attitude. All MEs are weird. Death is their daily bread. Maybe they’re reincarnated hyenas, but they laugh about it a lot. Don’t be put off. Bahr knows his stiffs.”
“Why are you worrying about me?”
She stopped. Fixed him with a Blue Dahlia gaze only she could level. “Sometimes you wish someone dead. Usually you have reason. Sometimes you get your wish. Don’t freak on me.”
“I never wished Kitty O’Connor dead.”
She resumed walking through the bland, confusing halls.
He could pick it up now, the faint … unpleasant . smell. Death with an orange twist. Vaguely kitchen, vaguely crematorium.
“I didn’t,” Matt said, his stride lengthening to keep up with the tall lieutenant. “I wanted to talk to her more than anyone, I think.”
Molina turned, vertical forefinger pressed warningly against her lips. “The Iceman cometh.”
Matt stopped to look around.
A pair of double doors burst apart to birth a form as forceful and burly as John Madden commenting on a football game. The vaunted “Grizzly” he presumed.
Grizzled was right. Bristling gray eyebrows, piercing gray eyes driving a physique once powerful and now larded with midlife excess.
The old lion. Still clawed. Not sleeping tonight, not an instant.
“Who’s Dr. Kildare, the intern?” he growled at Molina. “He may be able to identify the body.”
“Will he pass out?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Shall we find out?”
“Let’s.” He lifted a clipboard and ran his restless gaze down it. “This is the easy rider organ donor, right? Unusual it’s a woman. Motorcycles! Might as well take arsenic as an appetizer. If I had a thousand dollars for every dead Marlon Brando–wannabe that came through here, I’d be retired in Tahiti.”
“Brando made it there,” Matt put in.
Bahr stopped, turned on him, quieted like a rearing black bear in a Grizzly Adams movie.
“I don’t want to be where Brando is. It’s a saturated-fat paradise. Me, I’m all muscle. Come along, son, and see the bifurcated lady. She’s a sight. Must have been onewhile alive, but now she’s autopsy Annie. Follow me.”
He blasted through another pair of double doors, and by now Matt couldn’t escape the pervasive odor of the working environment: decay.