I’d never been so sure of anything in my entire life. “I’m afraid so,” I told him.
“I’d really like to see you again. Can I give you a call sometime?”
I would have rather stabbed myself blind with a dull fork and was tempted to say so when Izzy, who is only five feet tall and dressed tonight as the Keebler Elf, tapped me on the shoulder.
Aside from being my date rescue, Izzy is my neighbor, my landlord, and my boss. He is also the anti-me: dark where I’m light, short where I’m tall, and male to my female. We do have three things in common however: fat-hoarding metabolisms, fondness for men, and jobs that require the removal of human organs. Izzy removes organs because he’s the county’s Medical Examiner. I used to remove organs, or at least assist in the process, inside a hospital operating room, which is where my soon-to-be-ex-husband, David, works as a surgeon. But after catching a coworker named Karen Owenby playing with a certain private organ on David, I ditched both him and the job. Now I work with Izzy in the M. E.’s office and while I still assist with organ removal, the goods aren’t as fresh as they used to be.
“Mattie? You ready?” Izzy asked as William-not-Bill pouted like a child.
“Absolutely.” I got up from the table and beat a hasty exit—not an easy task given the wide girth of my gown, the two-foot wand I was carrying, and the crown that kept sliding off my head. I left Izzy, whose legs are only a third the length of mine, behind in my wake, along with several broken drink glasses my skirt knocked from tables as I passed. By the time Izzy caught up to me I was standing next to his car in the parking lot, tapping my foot impatiently.
“What’s the rush?” he asked. “Afraid a house might drop on you?”
“I’m Glinda, the good witch,” I reminded him. “Houses don’t fall on Glinda.”
“Then why the big hurry? I haven’t seen you run that fast for anything other than ice cream in a long time.”
“Very funny,” I said, giving him a dirty look. “I didn’t want to give Dracula a chance to ask for my number again. Though I have to admit his costume was perfect. He spent the last two hours sucking the life out of me.” I shook my head woefully. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into dating that bozo. He has a comb-over for Christ’s sake. His only saving grace is that he’s tall.” This is actually an important asset for me. I hit the six-foot mark at the age of sixteen, which made me a good foot taller than all of the boys for most of my high school years. That, combined with my ample bosom, made me very popular during the slow songs at school dances.
Izzy opened his door, got in the car, and reached over to unlock my side. The car is a fully restored Impala from the sixties. No such thing as automatic locks. Unfortunately, there are no bucket seats either, which means I have to pretzel six feet of me into the same amount of space Izzy uses.
I ripped the crown from my head and threw it and my wand into the back seat. Then I tried unsuccessfully to stuff the skirt of my gown down around me. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I imagined it must look like a giant puff ball was sitting in the passenger seat.
“Give William a break,” Izzy said as I spat taffeta. “So he’s got a touch of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. What’s the big deal? It’s his attention to detail that makes him such an ace accountant.”
“A touch of OCD? I’ll have you know he shot his cuffs at least fifty times, straightened the tablecloth a dozen times, and counted how many people were at the party every ten minutes. I can’t guess how many times he cleaned all the silverware at the table. And don’t even get me started on the fangs.”
Izzy conceded with a sigh. “Okay, maybe he’s a little anal retentive.”
“Doubt it,” I snapped back. “He’s got his head so far up his ass there isn’t room there for anything else. And just how old is he, anyway?”
“Late forties, maybe early fifties.”
“That’s a bit of a spread, don’t you think? He’s got to be at least fifteen years older than me.”
“I’m twelve years older than Dom.”
“That’s different. You’re gay.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Izzy laughed. “Besides, it’s not like you were looking for a serious date. You just wanted someone to tote along to make Hurley jealous.”
This was true. Steve Hurley is a tall, dark, and blissfully blue-eyed homicide detective that I’ve known for all of three weeks, ever since I became Izzy’s assistant. For me it was lust at first sight, which unfortunately occurred over Karen Owenby’s freshly murdered body. Things kind of went downhill from there, particularly after I became a suspect in the case.
“Clearly it was a wasted effort,” I pouted.
“Hey, it’s not my fault Hurley didn’t show up at the party.”
With that one sentence, Izzy shot straight to the heart of my misery. I sulked for the remainder of the journey, which was all of three minutes since Sorenson isn’t a very big town. When we arrived at our destination, I unfolded myself from Izzy’s car like a performer in Cirque du Soleil and stood a moment to let the blood flow back into my legs. Then I reached into the back seat and took out my processing kit.
That’s how I ended up here on the edges of suburbia, surrounded by bodies on a Saturday night, dressed like a white witch carrying a large tackle box.
Chapter 2
Izzy and I pause long enough to don gloves and shoe covers. With that done, he grabs his camera while I take out the digital recorder he gave me a couple of weeks ago for documenting scene observations. I turn the recorder on and put it in voice activation mode. After trying to find a place on my outfit to clip it, I settle for sticking it down inside my cleavage, or what a boy in my high school geography class once dubbed the “hot-and-gentle divide.”
Despite the darkness outside, the yard is brightly lit thanks to Halloween spotlights and the flashing bars atop the cop cars parked in the driveway. At the foot of a huge oak tree off to my right, a man sits strapped into a large wooden chair. On his head is something that looks like an old-fashioned electrocution helmet. Nailed to the tree a foot above his head is a large board that has the words ON and OFF painted on it with a fork-shaped lever clearly placed in the ON position. Wires are running from the lever to the helmet and the clothes on the man appear to be singed.
On closer inspection I see that the helmet is actually a metal mixing bowl turned upside down and the handle on the board is made out of tin foil, but the effect is realistic enough to make me shiver.
On the opposite side of the tree is another body, this one hanging from a thick rope, its face painted a ghastly blue color, the body swinging slightly in the night breeze. A third body is half buried in a makeshift grave, its hands and feet protruding from the freshly-turned soil. At its head is a gravestone that bears the inscription: Who turned out the lights?
Four more bodies are strewn about, all of them wearing blood-soaked clothes: one has a large butcher knife protruding from its chest; another has its head lying a conspicuous distance from its body. The third one is missing its arms and legs, though they are lying nearby, and the fourth one is splayed halfway down the steps of the front porch, a glistening trail of blood marking its journey from the front door.
This last body is the one I zero in on since there is a trio of police officers—two in uniform, one in plainclothes—grouped around it. I know most of the cops in town either because they’re Sorenson lifers like me, or because we became acquainted years ago when I worked in the ER. I even dated one of them briefly, a sweet guy named Larry Johnson who is the plainclothes officer in tonight’s group. I never felt any reciprocal attraction to Larry, but if I had it would have died some time ago when he came into the hospital for hemorrhoid surgery. I was the scrub nurse on the case and the sight of Larry’s jingleberries hanging above his dingleberries would have put a definite damper on future intimacies.