Tonight is no exception, but my glowing sense of satiety turns to a stomach-curdling anxiety when Izzy fills me in on some of the findings from Karen Owenby’s autopsy. He’s been hinting all through dinner that he has some news, but he waits until Dom clears the table and disappears into the kitchen to tell me what it is. Then he just spits it out, as if it’s a piece of gristle.
“Karen Owenby was pregnant.”
My jaw drops. “Pregnant? How pregnant?”
“Around twelve weeks.”
I quickly do the math in my head; it doesn’t take me long. “Shit. You don’t suppose—”
“That it’s David’s?” He shrugs. “No way to know for sure unless we do DNA testing and we send that to Madison. So even if David is willing to volunteer a blood sample, it will take at least a week to get the results back. And that’s if I put a rush on it. Normally it’s more like three weeks.”
“Shit.”
“There’s something else,” Izzy says, leaning back in his chair and looking smug. “Karen Owenby isn’t really Karen Owenby.”
I stare at him, confused. “Come again?”
“I said that Karen Owenby isn’t really Karen Owenby. The fingerprints of the woman in the morgue don’t match those on the nursing license application for Karen Owenby. What’s more, Arnie did a computer search and turned up a ten-year-old death certificate for one Karen Owenby, an RN in Kentucky. She died of massive head trauma following a car accident.”
My mind struggles to wrap itself around this information, but it is boggled beyond belief. “Are you telling me that the woman we know as Karen Owenby was some sort of impostor?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. The woman who took her state boards and applied for a nursing license under the name Karen Owenby is not the same woman I autopsied this morning.”
“Wow.” I sit back and try to digest Izzy’s revelations while my stomach struggles to digest a couple of pounds of mozzarella, ricotta, sausage, and pasta. “Does the hospital know this yet?”
“I doubt it. I haven’t released the results. At least not officially.”
“Unofficially?”
“Unofficially I filled Steve Hurley in on what I found out.”
“Including the pregnancy?”
Izzy nods.
“When? When did you fill him in?”
“I don’t know. It was toward the end of the day but I’m not sure of the exact time. Why?”
“I just wonder if he knew all this when we talked earlier. If he did, he didn’t let on.”
“You’re too new for Hurley to trust you yet. And while I’m confident you didn’t kill Karen Owenby, or at least the woman we thought was Karen Owenby, Hurley’s not so sure. So don’t expect him to be too forthcoming with any information.”
I smile, but on the inside I’m seething. Not at Izzy, but at David…and at Hurley and his suspicious mind…and at myself for caring a fig about either one of them.
“I consider myself a pretty good judge of character,” Izzy goes on. “And you’re not the killing type, at least not in reality. What you conjure up in your mind is another matter all together.”
He knows me too well. And his unwavering faith strikes a chord of guilt. I am afraid his trust in me will have the life span of an orgasm once I finish sharing the revelations I now feel inclined to get off my chest.
“There’s something I should probably tell you, Izzy. I haven’t said anything to anybody about this yet, but I need to tell someone, to make sure I’m handling things the right way.” I then tell him about my nocturnal spy mission and the fight I witnessed between David and Karen.
“You haven’t told Hurley this?” he says when I’m finished.
“Not exactly,” I confess, giving him a sheepish look. “I admitted to spying on David and seeing him with Karen, but I sort of implied that all they were doing was talking.”
Izzy shakes his head. “Mattie, you have to tell Hurley what you saw. Jesus, you could be protecting a killer. Do you realize that?”
“I can’t believe David is a killer.”
“Can’t or don’t want to?”
“Come on, Izzy. Is David a total bastard for sleeping with Karen? Absolutely. But a killer? No.” I punctuate my declaration by folding my arms firmly over my chest, thereby indicating the matter is closed to discussion as far as I’m concerned.
Izzy leans toward me, concern marking his face. “Think about this, Mattie. Are you sure enough about your faith in David to stake your life on it? Because that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
His words hit right where he intends and I can’t deny that I have some doubt. Not much, but enough. “Damn,” I mutter.
“Promise me you’ll tell Hurley that Karen and David were fighting.”
I nod, trying to look properly chastised while I secretly hope Izzy isn’t going to attach a time limit to the promise. A quick change of subject is called for.
“Um, there is something else I need to tell you. Something about the murder scene and the evidence we collected there.”
Izzy sighs. “What now?” He looks at me in a way he never has before, as if he is only now seeing a side of me he didn’t know existed.
“Do you remember the underwear Hurley found under the chair in Karen’s living room?”
He nods.
“They’re mine.”
His eyebrows shoot up, two wooly caterpillars racing toward the peak of his bald head. “Yours?”
“Um, yeah. Do you remember rousting me out of bed that night?”
“How could I forget? The memory of it is burned into my brain, catalogued right beside my other all-time horrid memories, like the time I saw my grandmother naked.”
“Gee, thanks. Well, if you hadn’t been so damned determined to drag me out of the sack in a big hurry, I might have had time to realize that my underwear was stuck inside the leg of my pants.”
Izzy stares at me a minute, his expression puzzled. Then light dawns and his face splits into an ear-to-ear grin. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No.”
He laughs and I lean back in my chair, scowling. “What’s so damned funny?”
“This is,” he cackles. “Hey, Dom! Come here. You’re not going to believe this one.”
“Noooo,” I whine. But it is too late. Dom breezes into the room, a dishtowel draped over one arm, his eyes bright, his face eager.
“What?” he says, eyeing Izzy and breaking into a huge grin. “Oh, it’s a good one, isn’t it?”
“It is that.”
Dom claps his hands with glee and sidles into his chair. “Dish it. And hurry up. The suspense is killing me.”
“You’re not going to believe what Nancy Drew here did during her first on-site investigation of a homicide.”
Dom leans forward eagerly, his elbows on the table. His eyes dart back and forth, from my miserable, angry face to Izzy’s bemused one.
“She contaminated the scene with a pair of her own underwear,” Izzy tells him while I silently wish him tortured, castrated, drawn and quartered. “Had them stuck inside her pant leg and didn’t know it until they fell out at the scene.”
“Oh, no,” Dom giggles.
“Wait, it gets better.” Izzy is crying now, he’s laughing so hard. “Hurley got a hold of them and had them bagged as evidence.”
Dom looks at me, his mouth hanging open with wonderment for a second before he, too, bursts into laughter. “Oh…my…God, girlfriend.” He snorts. “Were they clean at least? And were they good ones? Lacy and frilly and sexy? Or were they the cotton white ones with the worn elastic?”
I pout and scowl and otherwise try to shut Izzy and Dom down with scathing looks, but it only makes them laugh that much harder, leaving me to wonder how Dom knows so damned much about the state of my underwear.