"Save me," I whispered. "Save me." I wasn't touching her anymore. Tolliver had his arms around me. Tears were streaming down my face.
I put my arms around Tolliver, too; a dangerous indulgence, but I needed him so much. I looked at the masked man in his medical scrubs. "You collected evidence from the body?" I asked.
"I was there," Dr. Hatton said guardedly.
"Did you find any threads in her nose and mouth? Blue, they would have been."
"Yes," he said, after a notable pause. "Yes, we did."
"Suffocated," I said. "But she fought all the way."
Dr. Hatton made a sudden movement with his hand, as if he was going to show me something, but then he stopped in mid-motion.
"What are you?" he asked, as if he was talking to some interesting hybrid.
"I'm just a woman who got hit by lightning," I said. "I wasn't born the way I am."
"Lightning either kills you or you get over it," Dr. Hatton said impatiently.
"I can tell you've never dealt with a live person who's had the experience," I said. "You get hit with a few thousand volts, a few months later you come talk to me about what your life is like."
"If that many volts hits you directly, you're dead," he said simply. "What people survive is the energy discharge from it hitting very nearby."
I couldn't believe this guy, arguing with me about what had happened to me while Tabitha's body was right here between us.
"Whatever," I said, and straightened up to show Tolliver I was ready to go. It was hard to pull my arms from around him, but I did it, and his arms loosened around me.
I went over to the second shape, the larger one. I closed my eyes and placed my hand over the body.
My eyes flew open and I glared at Dr. Hatton. "This isn't Clyde Nunley," I said. "This is some young man who died of knife wounds."
Dr. Hatton looked at me as though he were seeing a ghost. "You're right," he said, as if I weren't standing right there. "You're right, my God. Okay," he said, very carefully, as though I might pounce on him, "let me take you to Dr. Nunley."
Tolliver was furious with Lyle Hatton, and I wasn't far behind him in that. But I was determined to complete my errand. We followed the doctor down the hall to a larger room, a cold room, full of bodies. It was not orderly; the gurneys were not lined up in neat rows. Here and there a hand or foot protruded. The smell was unique, a bouquet de la mort. The vibrations in this place were overwhelming. All the dead waited for my attention, from an old woman who'd been murdered in her own home to a baby who'd died of SIDS. But I was only here to call on one corpse, and this time Lyle Hatton led me to him. I was dizzy from being surrounded with all the newly dead, and it took me a long minute to focus on Clyde; then I saw it all again: the surprise, the blow, the fall into the grave. I nodded sharply to Dr. Hatton when I was through, and I staggered as I turned away from my final contact with Dr. Clyde Nunley.
"You can walk?" Tolliver asked, very low.
"Yes," I said.
"Wait," Lyle Hatton said. I looked at him inquiringly. The overhead light winked on his gold-rimmed glasses. "Since you're here, can I ask you to do one more thing? You were right about the blue threads. You knew when I showed you the wrong body. Maybe you can help me with one more thing."
Everyone wants a freebie.
"What do you need?" I asked. I wasn't in the mood for finesse.
"This body here… I can't determine a cause of death for this woman. She was living at home with her son and daughter-in-law, and she developed stomach symptoms. She might have had any number of things wrong with her, but I've met the couple, and I suspect there's something hinky about her death. What do you think?"
Though Hatton was a jackass, I like to help the dead when I can.
"Tox screen didn't show anything, autopsy turned up nada," Hatton said coaxingly. "She lost a lot of weight and had various stomach symptoms before death—diarrhea, nausea, and so on—but she hated going to the doctor and she didn't turn up at a hospital until it was too late."
"This one?" I asked. I could see a pale hand, though it was not the right color a hand ought to be. I closed my eyes and touched her hand with my finger, a bare contact Hatton made no attempt to block.
"Don't try this on me," I said, feeling exhausted. "This is a young woman who died of aplastic anemia."
Dr. Hatton stared at me as if I'd grown another head. He checked the toe-tag. "I'm sorry," he said, sounding sincere. "I really thought that was her. This is." He double-checked the tag on the body next to the poor young woman.
I sighed heavily. I touched the plastic wrapped around this body. I narrowed my eyes. If he wanted to play, I was up to it.
"Cleona Chatsworth," I moaned, "Come forth!"
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Tolliver ducking his head to hide his smile. Dr. Hatton was growing even paler than he'd been before, almost to the point of matching one of his clients. He gasped. I'd heard the name right. Luckily for me, Cleona Chatsworth wanted someone to know what had happened to her, wanted it very badly.
"Cleona was poisoned," I whispered, my free hand moving in a circle over the corpse. I thought Hatton was going to faint.
"What do I look for?" he croaked.
"Someone gave it to her in salad dressing," I crooned. "The selenium."
I opened my eyes and said, "This lady was poisoned."
Lyle Hatton stared at me with glassy eyes.
"We're going now," I told Tolliver, who was glaring at the doctor, his hands curled into fists.
So we left the room, and we went back down the long hall. The young woman had waited down the hall for us, and as silently as she'd escorted us there, she led us back to the door to the outside. I was profoundly glad to step out into the cold gray day and take a deep breath of air untainted by death. Tolliver and I stood watching the heavy traffic on Madison for maybe five minutes, inhaling and exhaling, happy to be out of the building. The humming had seemed very intense before I'd entered, but it had only been a shadow of what I'd felt when I was actually within the walls.
When I felt more like myself, I said, "It wasn't Diane who killed her. Tabitha was wanting her mother."
He absorbed that. "That's good, then," he said. "One down."
"Don't laugh at me," I said, though his mouth hadn't twitched. "I think at least it's a start."
"Sure," he said. "And I'm not doing any laughing." He gripped my arm so I'd look at him. "I don't know how you do it and stay sane. I really, really admire you."
Now was so not the time for Tolliver to be all real and sympathetic.
"I want them to name the murderer." I began walking across the parking lot to our car. "Usually, I'm more or less accepting of the fact that people murder other people. That's just part of the world, I guess. But I'm really mad about this. I'm really, really angry."
"You've had children before," Tolliver said, meaning that I had read their deaths before.
"Oh, sure, I've done children. But this is different. I don't know why. Maybe it's the family, still waiting to find out what happened to her, figuring it's one of them who did it. This has just gotten to me."
"That's not good. It's tearing you up. I don't want this to happen to you."
"Well, me either. But I can't seem to stop it, and I can't tell who did it from touching her. And we can't leave for a while, I guess."
"Do you want to leave?"
I was buckling my seat belt. "What does that mean?" The tone of his voice had put me on guard.
"You usually can hardly wait to get out of town after we finish up with a client, but you haven't said anything about leaving for a day or two. You want to be here? What's the attraction? Manfred Bernardo? Or Joel Morgenstern? Or Seth Koenig?" He turned the key in the ignition with unnecessary force. He was definitely not looking at me.