Blood Groove (6 page)

“I know. But it’s him. I spoke to the parents myself. They showed me a picture of him. He’d lost some weight, but otherwise he looks just like he did when he vanished. Even has the same haircut. Damnedest thing I ever saw.” He paused. “Are you sure the body was . . . fresh?”

“ ‘Fresh’?”

“Yeah, you know. Maybe he’d been stuck in somebody’s meat freezer all this time and just now thawed out?”

“He was fresh, Lyman,” she said in annoyance. “Look, there is
no way
that is the body of a twenty-seven-year-old man.”

“I believe you. I saw him myself. But there’s the truth.”

“Christ, Lyman.” She rubbed her temples with her free hand. “All right, I’ll go back and check—”

“Can’t. Parents are here to claim the body.”

“Don’t
they
think it’s weird? Don’t they want to know what happened to their son?”

“They think the Lord taketh away and the Lord giveth back, blessed is the name of the Lord, and don’t try to figure out His ways.”

“Oh, God,” Danielle said with disgust. “Baptists?”

“You know it.”

“Can’t you find some reason to hold the body?” She felt like a child trying to change a parent’s mind. “We have to be missing something important here.”

“Sorry. Dropping dead on the street ain’t a crime. I’d love to know, too, but we got to consider the family here. They’ve been waiting a long time to find out what happened to their boy.”

“Shit.” She hung up, shut her office door, then snapped every pencil on her desk in frustration.

   Lyman Newlin opened the double door and led the couple down the tiled hall. The rooms, once painted a vivid lime green for some reason, were now faded and stained so that the passage gave a vague sense of nausea to outsiders. The antiseptic odor and cold air didn’t help. The summer sweat on his neck felt like it was freezing to his skin.

Newlin knew this corridor far too well. A fifteen-year veteran of the Memphis police force, he’d suffered through the awful events surrounding the death of Dr. King, where for a few hours it seemed as if the race war many whites
feared was about to erupt. He knew that the truth had not come out in the Ray trial, and probably never would: too many reputations at stake, and too many appalling lapses of judgment and decency. But compared to that hellish period, a regular investigation, even one as quirky as this one, was a cakewalk. After all, once the body was identified and claimed, this case was closed.

Newlin frowned as they approached the door to the autopsy room. Danielle stood outside it, arms crossed. She was dressed impeccably, her short hair styled and makeup neatly applied. It made her look a little like a small girl imitating her mother, but the glare in her eyes was all adult, and all aimed at Newlin. She managed a sincere-looking smile for the parents.

“Detective Newlin,” she said as he approached. She turned to the others. “And you must be Mr. and Mrs. Crealey. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

They were certainly of a piece, Danielle thought. Mr. Crealey looked a lot like his son, down to the old-fashioned crew cut. His skin was tanned, with a red flush along his neck and the tops of his unprotected ears. The tan ended, she bet, just above his elbows and just below his collar. The rest of his skin would be pasty white, never seen in the light of day except in the privacy of his bedroom. The slight bulge in one side of his lip showed where his tobacco chaw usually nested, and the network of reddish veins on the end of his nose betrayed his drinking habits.

Mrs. Crealey had a beehive hairdo that made her almost as tall as her husband. She was round in every direction, and wore a flower-patterned dress with white lace at the too-tight collar. She carried a small purse daintily in both hands, from which she withdrew a crumpled tissue to wipe her eyes. She’d eschewed mascara, which was good. If only she’d done the same for her eye shadow. There was enough blue paint under her eyebrows to redo the dented fender on Danielle’s old Malibu.

“I’m Dr. Roseberry, assistant head coroner,” Danielle said politely. “I wanted to be here to answer any questions you might have.”

“That’s mighty kind of you,” Mrs. Crealey said between sniffles. Mr. Crealey nodded.

“Isn’t it, though?” Newlin said, glaring at Danielle. He knew exactly why she was here; normally this kind of duty was delegated to someone like Skitch, since it could become uncomfortably emotional. “Well,
Doctor
Roseberry, would you please get on with it?”

She led them into the morgue, where their son’s body lay on a gurney, covered by a sheet. Mrs. Crealey moved close to her husband, who put one arm across her shoulders. His face was impassive.

“I should warn you,” Newlin said, “that the body’s condition might surprise you.”

“Is he all tore up?” the father asked. It was the first time he’d spoken, and his voice was raw.

“The exact opposite,” Danielle said, and pulled back the sheet.

Even though she expected it and was braced for it, the caterwauling wail that burst from Mrs. Crealey made Danielle jump. The woman’s knees buckled, and her husband had to grab her under the arms to keep her from falling to the floor. “That’s my baby!” she wailed. “My baby!”

Newlin again glared at Danielle. The woman’s pain was so genuine it should make them both feel like intruders, but Newlin suspected that, deep down, Danielle felt little or no real sympathy. She merely waited for the right moment to ask her questions, to solve this abstract puzzle. It was a contradictory aspect of her personality usually masked by her prim, proper surface. Even though he often felt paternal toward her, and occasionally lustful, at the moment Newlin considered Danielle just as thoroughly creepy as any other coroner he’d known.

“Why?” the mother wailed.
“Why?”

“Is that your son, Mr. Crealey?” Newlin asked sympathetically. The man nodded. Newlin pulled the sheet back over the body. “Well, then, we can go.”

“Excuse me,” Danielle said, sliding smoothly in front of Newlin. “Mr. and Mrs. Crealey, did your son have any unusual medical conditions?”

Mrs. Crealey shook her head. “No, ma’am, he was as healthy as a horse all his life. All his life . . .” She let out another wail and clung to her husband.

Newlin physically shoved Danielle aside. “That’s all we have time for, Dr. Roseberry. Thank you for joining us.” When she started to speak again, he glared at her with all his considerable authority. She bit back her comments and, fuming with frustration, watched him escort the parents out.

Then she was alone again with Todd Crealey. Echoes of his mother’s wails continued for several moments.

She drew back the sheet and stared at him. His handsome face seemed to mock her with its inscrutable peace. “You pissant bastard son of a bitch,” she said. “You will
not
outsmart me, no matter what.” He neither reacted nor responded.

T
HE BELL OVER
the bait-shop door rang as Gwinny entered. “Hey, Mark-o Polo, you around?”

Mark looked up from behind the counter, where he’d just finished cutting fresh apple slices for the cricket box. It was 2:00
A.M.
“Hey, Gwinny. What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up for me, white boy. I’m going home to a cold bed,” she said as she wiped her forehead. “Three more weeks and I’m supposed to go to first shift. ’Bout damn time.”

“I’ll sure miss you,” Mark said genuinely.

“Aw, I think you mean it,” she teased as she leaned meaty forearms on the counter.

“I do,” he said. With his hands clutched over his heart he said in mock seriousness, “You make the night shift bright as day.”

She laughed, big and hearty. “Brought you today’s paper,” she said, and used it to swat a fly on the counter; it made a loud smack. “So how you making it with that poem book I gave you?”

Mark smiled. Tonight Gwinny smelled like pastries, not fried chicken, which meant she’d changed duties again. He preferred this one; the aura of fried anything reminded him
too much of the smell of burning flesh, and that made him think of Praline. “It’s pretty good. I dig that one poem, ‘How Long.’ Lot of righteousness in it.”

“Damn straight.” She patted the paper. “Every time I read in the news about some more kids getting wasted out of their lives, I ask myself that question.” She mimicked his pose, hands over her heart. “ ‘How long, O gracious God, how long / Shall power lord it over right?’ It takes on a whole new meaning when you got your own to look after.”

Mark nodded. “And I keep thinking of the line from ‘The Misanthropist,’ where he says, ‘From earliest youth my path has been / Cast in life’s darkest, deepest shade.’ ”

She looked at him skeptically. “Now what’s so hard about
your
life, Polo? You a nice-looking, polite white boy. You could always go to college and then get a job where you don’t have to spend all night tending to worms and bugs. You just here because you either want to be, or you think you don’t deserve any better. Every time I see you, I try to figure which it is.”

“Now, Gwinny, you know I work here just for the chance to discuss literature with you, don’t you?” He winked. She’d never know how true that really was.

She narrowed her eyes. “Polo, how come you always changing the subject whenever I ask how you ended up here?”

“Because half of romance is mystery, you know.”

“Romance,” she snorted. “One time I’m gonna come over that counter and show you romance. Then maybe I’ll get some straight answers.”

“You betcha,” he said, imitating her accent and head bob. “Hard and straight.”

She laughed, a loud bark of surprise and amusement. “You too full of it, Polo. See you later.”

Mark checked the security mirrors to verify that the store was currently empty, and placed the newspaper neatly
on the counter, front page first. He read every word of every story methodically, and so it was thirty minutes before he reached the second page of section B, Local News, and found the story of Toddy’s body discovered downtown three days previously and claimed by his parents yesterday.

   Danielle sat on her couch and drank her third Michelob as the TV droned on in the background. It was Friday night, she was a little drunk, a lot perplexed, and wished there were more than three TV stations in Memphis to choose from. PBS didn’t count; all frilly collars and snooty accents.

In the time since Todd Crealey’s parents picked up his body, she’d autopsied seven victims of violent or untimely ends, whether they needed her expert attention or not. In each case she’d pinpointed the cause of death precisely, to the point of being able to make an accurate educated guess about either the caliber or dosage involved before the lab results came back. To all outward appearances her whiz-kid reputation was secure, and her coworkers went to great lengths to let her know they considered the Crealey thing a fluke. Hell, sooner or later everyone ran up on something they couldn’t explain, right? The Grand Unification Theory eluded Einstein, and nobody thought any less of him. And nobody would think any less of Danielle Roseberry because of one fluky case.

Right.

She reached under her shirt and unsnapped her bra. With a deep sigh, she slipped off her shoes and knee-high stockings and stretched out on the couch. She’d been a practicing coroner for six years now, but she still felt the same rush when she took her first look at a new body, a delicious puzzle waiting to be solved. She liked dealing with the dead, morbid though it was, because of that beautiful consistency.
Corpses weren’t like living people: they died from one cause, and that didn’t change by the next day. Sick people were always changing, and too many of them changed beyond anyone’s ability to help.

She’d embarrassed many of her elder colleagues on her way up the department ladder, but their resentment and attempts to sabotage her career couldn’t overcome the fact that she was just a whole lot better than they were. Even Dr. Francisco, the head medical examiner, had to grit his teeth and smile when she diplomatically pointed out errors in some of his work. As the cops who worked directly with her rose within the police force, they assisted her rise to assistant head coroner. Prosecutors loved putting her on the stand, and she secretly enjoyed the attention.