While I was still debating, I caught a glimpse of yellow through the rain on my windshield. Sam was standing by the Dumpster, which was conveniently placed between the kitchen door and the employee entrance. He was wearing a yellow plastic rain poncho, one he kept hanging in his office for such occasions. At first, I was so relieved to see him I didn’t absorb the message in his body language. He was standing, frozen and stiff, with a bag of garbage in his left hand. He’d shoved the sliding Dumpster lid aside with his right. He was looking into the Dumpster, all his attention focused on something inside.
I had that sinking feeling. You know, the one you get when you realize your whole day has just turned south. “Sam?” I opened my umbrella and hurried over to him. “What’s wrong?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t twitch; it’s hard to surprise a shapeshifter. He also didn’t speak.
There was more odor than usual coming from the Dumpster.
I choked, but made myself look into the hot metal confines, half-full with bagged garbage.
Arlene wasn’t in a bag. She was lying on top. The bugs and the heat had already started to work on her, and now the rain was falling on her swollen, discolored face.
Sam dropped the garbage bag to the ground. With obvious reluctance, he bent forward to touch his fingers to Arlene’s neck. He knew as well as I that she was dead. There was nothing in her brain for me to register, and any shifter could smell death.
I said a very bad word. Then I repeated it a few times.
After a moment Sam said, “I never heard you say that out loud.”
“I don’t even think it that often.” I hated to enlarge on this particular piece of bad news, but I had to. “She was just here yesterday, Sam. In your office. Talking to me.”
By silent mutual consent, we moved over to the shelter of the oak tree in Sam’s yard. He’d left the Dumpster open, but the raindrops would not hurt Arlene. Sam didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I guess lots of people saw her?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t call it lots of people. We didn’t have that many customers. But whoever was in the bar had to have seen her, because she must have come through the front door.” I thought for a second. “Yeah, I didn’t hear the back door open. She came back to your office while I was working on the mail, and she talked to me for maybe five or ten minutes. It seemed like forever.”
“Why would she come to Merlotte’s?” Sam looked at me, baffled.
“She said she wanted her job back.”
Sam closed his eyes for a long moment. “Like that was going to happen.” And he opened them, looking right into mine. “I am so tempted to take her body out of here and dump it somewhere else.” He was asking me a question; though I was shocked for a split second, I understood his feelings very well.
“We could do that,” I said quietly. “It would sure . . .” Save us a lot of trouble. Be a terrible thing to do. Take the focus of any investigation away from Merlotte’s. “Be messy,” I concluded. “But doable.”
Sam put an arm around my shoulders and tried to smile. “They say your best friend will help you move a body,” he said. “You must be my best friend.”
“I am,” I said. “I’ll help you move Arlene in a New York minute—if we really decide that’s the right thing to do.”
“Oh, it isn’t,” Sam said heavily. “I know it’s not. And you know it’s not. But I hate the thought of the bar being involved in another police investigation . . . not only the bar, but us personally. We have enough to heal from already. I know you didn’t kill Arlene, and you know I didn’t. But I don’t know if the police will believe that.”
“We could put her in the trunk of my car,” I said, but I didn’t even convince myself that we were going to act on that. I could feel the impulse dying away. To my surprise, Sam hugged me, and we stood in the shade of the tree for a long moment, water dripping down on us as the rain died away to a light drizzle. I’m not sure what Sam was thinking exactly, and I was glad of that; but I could read enough from his head to know that we were sharing a reluctance to start the next phase of today.
After a while, we released each other. Sam said, “Hell. Okay, call the cops.”
With no enthusiasm, I called 911.
While we waited, we sat on the steps of Sam’s porch. The sun popped out as though it had been cued, and the moisture in the air turned to steam. This was as much fun as sitting in a sauna with clothes on. I felt sweat trickle down my back.
“Do you have any idea what happened to her, what killed her?” I asked. “I didn’t look that close.”
“I think she was strangled,” Sam said. “I’m not sure, she was so bloated, but I believe something is still around her neck. Maybe if I’d watched more episodes of CSI . . .”
I snorted. “Poor Arlene,” I said, but I didn’t sound too grieved.
Sam shrugged. “I don’t get to pick who lives and who dies, but Arlene wouldn’t have topped my list of people I’d ask mercy for.”
“Since she tried to have me killed.”
“And not just killed quick,” Sam said. “Killed slow and awful. Taking all that into consideration, if there had to be a body in my garbage, I’m not too sorry it’s hers.”
“Too bad for the kids, though,” I said, suddenly realizing there were two people who would miss Arlene for the rest of their lives.
Sam shook his head silently. He was sympathetic to the kids’ plight, but Arlene had been transforming into a less-than-stellar mom, and she would have warped them right along with herself. Arlene’s adopted brand of extreme intolerance was as bad for children as radiation.
I heard a siren, and as it got louder, my eyes met Sam’s in resignation.
What a mess the next two hours were.
Both Andy Bellefleur and Alcee Beck arrived. I tried to stifle a groan. I was friends with Andy’s wife, Halleigh, which made this situation doubly awkward . . . though at the moment, social awkwardness was not on the top of my list of worries, and it was preferable to dealing with Alcee Beck, who simply didn’t like me. At least the two patrol officers doing the actual evidence gathering were familiar to us; Kevin and Kenya had both graduated from the training course for collecting and processing evidence.
That must have been some course, because the Ks sure seemed to know what they were doing. Despite the smothering heat (the rain didn’t seem to have worked in the cooling-down department), the two went about their jobs with careful efficiency. Andy and Alcee took turns helping them and asking us questions, most of which we couldn’t answer.
When the coroner came to pick up the body, I heard him remark to Kenya that he figured Arlene had been strangled. I wondered if the pathologist who did the autopsy would reach the same conclusion.
We should have gone inside Sam’s trailer, where it was cool, but when I suggested it, Sam said he wanted to keep an eye on what the police were doing. With a long sigh, I pulled my knees up to my chin to get my legs in the shade. I propped my back against the door of the trailer, and after a moment Sam propped his against the rails around the little porch. He’d long since discarded the plastic poncho, and I’d pulled up my hair on top of my head. Sam went in the trailer and came out with two glasses of iced tea. I drank mine in three big gulps and held the cold glass to my forehead.
I was sweaty and gloomy and scared, but at least I wasn’t alone.
After Arlene’s body had been tagged and bagged and started its pathetic journey to the nearest state medical examiner, Andy came over to talk to us. Kenya and Kevin were now searching the Dumpster, which had to be one of the world’s worst tasks—definitely worthy of Dirty Jobs. They were both sweating like pigs, and from time to time they’d vent their feelings verbally. Andy was moving slowly and wearily, and I could tell the heat was getting him down.