"Hello."
"Good morning. It's Ric."
Number two. Not bad.
"Ye-es?" I'd never turned one word into two with that little purring note in my voice. Get it together, girl! Irma nagged me.
"I'm back in the park." And he gave great phone voice.
"Oh." Was it going to be their place?
"I wondered if you could come over before noon."
Hmm. Charming hot-dog-stand lunch in the park. Feeding bun breadcrumbs to the ducks. Settling down at "their" picnic table. Arranging something more formal. Dinner perhaps. Plus I could keep an eye on Hector's place and maybe figure out how to storm the palace somehow.
"Sure."
No, girlfriend! Hard to get.
Too late.
That is no way you play a hot guy, a fashion stud right out of GQ, honey.
I gagged my inner girlfriend. Sometimes she is way too shallow.
Ric seemed a serious guy underneath the high-end accessories. He obviously believed he could dowse for water, and…maybe he could. I have an open mind. But maybe I'd better consider wearing a Lite Days pad if we're rendezvousing in the park again. Those dowsing rod visions seemed to have touched something in me nothing, or no one, ever had before.
Still, visions of sedate sugarplums danced in my convent-bred head. A stroll, maybe an ice cream cone for dessert in the desert. Something sweet, mundane, and old-fashioned. Pure Kansas corn.
I parked Dolly in a lot off Sunset Road and walked back to the area where I'd met Ric. It's a huge park, with tennis and golfing areas, but I kept bearing west until I spied Kon Tiki (my nickname for Mr. Easter Island head). He got me near where I needed to be.
I stop, bemused. There is a dreamlike quality to the scene I walk into slowly. Time slows down like lazy molasses.
The park right here is teeming with busy men in suits and buff uniformed cops in buff-colored uniforms: Bermuda shorts and short-sleeved shirts that showcase tanned biceps and quads. The air buzzes with walkie-talkie communications. Chrome yellow Crime Scene: do not cross tape wraps several of the dead-dedicated trees, cordoning off a pizza-pie-shaped slice of the open ground.
A chill runs up my spine when I triangulate between the reeds on the west, Kon Tiki's dour face on the lake's central island, and Sunset Road. This is "our" place and suddenly, this summer, it is verboten to anyone not among the city's law enforcement crowd.
'"Scuse me, miss." Officer Buff is looming beside me. "This area is off-limits to the public."
Luckily I'm stunned into silence long enough for an equally authoritative voice behind me to announce, " Miss Street is with me."
Ric Montoya is standing behind me. As has become usual for us. His designer sunglasses with their titanium frames only enhance his strong cheekbones, aristocratic nose, knife-edge jaw. He is still just as good-looking, just as professional, and he is eyeing me like I am a ten of clubs in a game of Twenty-One. Keep or fold?
"What's going on here?" I ask when Officer Buff has withdrawn in a state of high grouch. I know his type. Works out, hits the tanning beds, and thinks he's the cat's pajamas. Likes to pull over helpless women on a pretext, and if they're young and alone, screw them.
"Something I thought you should see," Ric says.
I eye the Crime Scene tape. I've been here before, at crime scenes in Kansas, with a camera crew. But not after melting down the previous evening on this very spot.
"I know it'll be hard." Ric is standing very close to me, face-to-face this time, his fingertips on my elbows. He has excellent fingertip technique no matter the occasion. "I know you saw something…awful. I felt that too. You need to see what's really there."
"I do?"
He leans away, stung. "No, you're right. I do. Maybe we do. I won't let go of you."
How many women have dreamed of hearing that from the right guy? But I know how he means it. Literally. He won't let go of me. We'll be linked. In touch. And he knows what this is about.
I nod. I'm a tough girl. I've seen dead people before.
Ric leads us to the tape, where we're questioned again. Ric flashes an ID. "The captain okayed it."
"You maybe. Her too?"
"A new associate, Miss Street."
The middle-aged officer is all on-duty starch. I could be a naked Madonna impersonator and he wouldn’t blink an eye. "Go ahead."
We duck under the familiar yellow plastic ribbon, not attached to an old oak tree but to small pine and ash trees. Out-of-the-blue songs are running through my mind, the windmills in my mind. Interior distraction for what I might be seeing all too soon.
Ric leads me to where we stood together only last twilight. There is now an actual pit, larger than a bread box; say the size of a grave site, all the better to accommodate the CSI crew kneeling around the revealed centerpiece. This is a pair of interlocked skeletons lying in a tomb of desiccated limestone. A hard night's digging work. Someone really wanted them six feet under.
The skeletons seem blissful, even rapturous, unaware of their gruesome state, or even of when death came. Grinning skulls face each other in profile, all the teeth in place, as clean and even as pearl bangles. The spines and ribs are collapsed, but the arm bones intertwine, and the large leg bones tangle with each other forming a horizontal ladder. It's hard for a civilian like me to discern the finger and foot bones, but something about the pair's cuddling position, now eternal, screams young lovers.
When you're about to faint it's just like in those movie special-effects sequences. You stay fixed in place and the foreground is rushing away from your senses as if you were on a departing French super-train. Zoom.
Because I now find myself hit with a rerun of the exact visceral blend of high-impact sex and death I'd felt yesterday afternoon. These dry bones, so sedate now, are the writhing, naked, ultimately blood-soaked limbs of the coupling couple of my vision.
"Male and female," I mutter at Ric.
"Good. What else?"
"Passion and death."
"Is it ever different?"
I ignore his cynicism, too busy tapping my own.
"Murder."
His hands tighten on my upper arms.
I frown. "Old."
"Old? Who?"
"Old. Just old. Believe me, I know old!"
He stands behind me like a wall, his fingertips reading the tremors of my nerves and skin.
"Thanks," Ric says. "Don't say anything. The lead detective is coming. He'll be a pain. Let me answer."
"I speak for myself."
"When you know the ground."
"These are my…corpses."
"Mine too. Shhh. Delilah." He whispers in my ear. Touches it with the tip of his tongue.
Well, that worked. I am pretty much speechless. How did he know my first name? How did he know how to shut me up?
The plainclothes man swaggers over, dripping dislike. I can see why. He is short, squat, vampire-pale without any of the mystique that goes with a professional bloodsucker.
"If it ain’t the Cadaver Kid again," he says to Ric. "I heard you were nosing around. Montoya." The voice is grating, egotistical, and, my very favorite thing to go after with a nail file, bullying.
"Detective Haskell." Ric's voice sounds icy but I can sense he is super hot under that cool white collar. I'm suddenly very attuned to what's under that cool white collar. "The captain likes me to eyeball these crime scenes. And I did call it in."
"You. Not your little casino luck-piece tootsie."
I stiffen as much as Ric had done on me yesterday. His hands clamp like handcuffs on my arms, a dislocated gag, but I get the message.
" Miss Street is a fellow professional," he says, smooth as variated tinted glass in a 24-carat gold-accented frame. "An associate."
"And what's your specialty, sister? Knee-work?"