“What was he—”
“No,” he said. “Don’t make me tell you. Please. We’ve had enough today” He let the silence fall for a moment before he continued. “I’m not sorry I killed him. I’m just sorry that I let him walk away when I was eighteen. It would have saved lives if I hadn’t been … weak.” He smiled, but it looked painful and false. “My mother was already gone by then. My father passed on soon after that, thinking I was a murderer. Thinking that I’d set Jamie up and killed him in cold blood. I was written out of the estate, of course. I didn’t really mind.”
Bryn thought about her own family, with all its problems and squabbles; she might not totally love many of her siblings, but at least they weren’t sociopaths. And, although he wasn’t saying it outright, murderers. It brought back the haunting question of what had happened to Sharon, all those years ago. Maybe she ran into another McCallister. The wrong McCallister.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for making you tell me that.”
“No,” he said. “No, you needed to hear it. And I guess I needed to say it, too. It’s all right. Now it’s done.”
McCallister drove in silence the rest of the way, parked the van, and walked with her into the mortuary through the back entrance. He kept his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. It was as much cover as possible, but she still felt an uncomfortable, probably imaginary weight of eyes on them until they were safely inside.
Joe and Doreen weren’t back yet from the hospital run, so Bryn took McCallister directly to her office, locked the door, and opened up a locked drawer in her desk. She set up six miniature bottles of liquor: Scotch for McCallister, vodka for herself.
“Did you raid the minibar somewhere?” he asked, but didn’t turn down the tiny servings. He unscrewed the first and downed it in two gulps, then opened the second.
“Certainly not at the Hallmark Motor Court Inn.”
That got her a shadow of a smile. He saluted her with the bottle, downed it, and sat down. She concentrated on the soothing fire of her vodka as it slipped over her tongue, down her throat, clearing away the taste of rot and despair. Somehow, she managed to drink her third before McCallister had properly started his, but then, as he hadn’t quite said, she’d been holding the saw.
“So,” she said, and leaned her head back against the leather of the chair. “Did you sleep with your boss?” Silence. She opened her eyes just a slit. McCallister continued sipping his Scotch without comment. “You’re really not going to tell me.”
“Is this the question that comes to your mind right now?”
“Evidently it is.” She was starting to feel numbed again, but in a slightly better way.
“Do you have any more of these?” He held up the liquor mini. She opened the drawer, pulled out two more, and pitched him one. “This is bourbon.”
“You’re really going to complain?”
He upended it while she sucked down her fourth vodka. This one was lemon-flavored. Nice. “If I say yes, what does it matter to you?”
“It doesn’t.” It did. It did, and he knew it, the bastard. Why it mattered to her was a mystery she didn’t care to explore at the moment; her emotions were confused, raw, and horribly tangled. “Was it good?”
“With her? Not likely.”
She almost choked on her drink. “So you did do it.”
“I didn’t say I did. If such a thing had happened, for which there is no evidence and no admission, now or ever, then it would not have been a good time. Just … maintenance.”
“Of your low reputation and your alibi.”
His lips twisted into a brief, unhappy grimace. “Something like that.” McCallister got weirdly funny and precise when he drank. If he felt anything like Bryn, he had to be at least slightly tipsy. Overcompensating, probably. “It’s not all fun and games in my business.”
She had a nauseating flashback, and suddenly she realized that she reeked of dead flesh; it had soaked into her clothes, her skin, her hair. The whole office stank with it.
Fun and games.
Violetta Sammons’s disconnected head rolling free.
The rasp of the saw vibrating in her hand.
The vodka rushed up on her, and Bryn barely made it to her trash can before she threw up. Between the convulsions, she gasped for breath and sobbed, and McCallister came around the desk and silently handed her tissues, then helped her back into her chair as she covered her face and tried to muffle her wild, uncontrollable sobs.
He stroked her hair, very softly. He didn’t say a thing.
Finally, she was able to shut it off, just enough to gather her voice together. “I have to shower,” she said. Her voice was uneven and broken, but he nodded as he looked down at her. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I’ll be there after you’re done.”
She grabbed another set of clothes and went into the locker room at the end of the hall; Riley was in there, changing into jeans and a comfortable sweatshirt with her hair still clinging damply to her face. She looked up, surprised, as Bryn dumped her stuff on the bench.
“Everything okay?”
Bryn didn’t want to talk, but she had to try. “Bad one,” she managed to say. “Major decomposition.”
Riley nodded and opened her locker. She tossed Bryn a bottle. “Try this,” she said. “Best I’ve found. Use it four times, you should be okay.”
Bryn didn’t even wait to thank her. The urge to get clean was so overpowering that even after she was standing in the hot spray, soaping herself from head to toe, she couldn’t stop gasping and shaking from the pressure. Two passes with the shampoo and she still felt filthy. By the third she was calming down, and by the fourth she felt almost normal. Her skin tingled from the scrubbing, but that was a good thing; the greasy, horrible stench seemed to have finally rubbed off.
Bryn threw her old clothes into the incineration biohazard bag and dressed in the clean ones, dried her hair, and was just finishing when there was a knock on the locker room door, and McCallister looked in.
He looked rough—pallid, with dark circles beneath his eyes. He’d stripped off his coat and tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. “All right if I come in?” he asked, and she suddenly felt very selfish for taking up the shower for so long.
“It’s all yours,” she said.
He nodded thanks and opened a locker—Joe Fideli’s—and took out a pair of blue jeans and a clean white T-shirt. “We’re about the same size,” he said. “At least I won’t look like I’m going for gangster style.”
She passed him Riley’s shampoo. “Four passes,” she said. “It works.”
He smiled, faintly, and said, “Good.”
He was already stripping off his clothes before she closed the door, and in those fast, ruthless motions, she sensed that McCallister, too, was on the edge of losing control.
She let him do it in private.
Back in her office, Bryn turned on music, something soft and soothing, and nibbled some crackers to settle her still-restless stomach. Her skin and clothes smelled clean and fresh, but it was hard not to imagine the ghost of that stench still hanging around. She cleaned out the trash can, then used disinfectant spray around her chair and on her shoes. Probably too much.
Finally, she sat down and closed her eyes.
A soft chime made her open them again.