Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (24 page)

Well, it could come from walking in on him in the music room with the student council president, but I wasn’t
going to rat out Ben or a poor man who had never done anything to me just to shut Mom up. I was used to this lecture, after all. “Mom . . .”

“No, listen, Candy, I just talked to Ben and he said that he would be willing . . . that is, that he hopes some day you will see how much he loves you!”

“Uh,” I said. “He said that?” Because there was a better-than-even chance he’d simply nodded at the wrong time.

“He said that he hopes for the day when you’ll realize how pure and true his love is,” Mom said triumphantly.

And unfortunately, I was almost sure that she was quoting Ben there. Because that was just the sort of thing he would say. True and pure indeed. The rat fink.

“I see,” I said. And in fact I did. I saw that Ben had gotten rid of Mom by sending her to me. Which meant he completely deserved what he had coming to him. “I’ll think about it, Mom. I’m really tired now, though. So, if I could sleep . . .”

She took the hint and left, carrying the empty plate and the cup. I went down to the powder room to brush my teeth. Of course, one way to get back at Ben was to tell Mom that I was more than willing to marry him, and that he was the one who had failed to ask me, after all. But that was a dangerous game, because Mom was getting old and desperate to see her pet plan succeed. She was quite likely to book a justice of the peace and get a license and then haul us up in front of him. As amusing as the game was, being married to Ben would be kind of like being married to an older sister, and about as much fun.

By the time I got back to my bedroom, I’d decided on the perfect plan, though. Unless I was badly, completely wrong, Ben was sticking to me like glue on orders from Cas Wolfe. Not just tonight, but from first meeting him. This meant that he would probably find some excuse not to go to work tomorrow, and try to stick to me throughout the day.

First, I had no intention at all of being followed around by the world’s most burly advertisement for skin care products, and second . . . and second, he so deserved to be stuck with my parents over breakfast. If he was lucky—very, very lucky—he’d manage to run off before noon. But I doubted it.

I had an alarm clock on one of the bookcases along the wall, next to the bed. I hadn’t used it since high school, but it seemed to be in perfect working order. I set it for six a.m., secure in the knowledge that no one else in the house would be up at that hour. Hell, though Ben was an early riser, my parents’ nightly plot discussion was likely to keep him up till well past midnight. So at six, he would still be completely passed out. Good. Because I was going to need to steal his car keys.

CHAPTER 16

Dipped

I woke in gray dawn. The light filtering through the
window had the peculiar colorless quality of a world not fully awake. I tiptoed out of bed and considered leaving the house without showering, but if I did that, I’d feel like I had bugs crawling all over me all day.

Look, I know it’s psychological. People didn’t use to wash that often or that well. It was all about washing once or twice in their lives. And they didn’t die and their skin didn’t flake off. But I’d been conditioned to shower every day, and if I didn’t, I felt like I was going to get the black plague or something.

So I showered quickly, taking my clothes with me and changing into them in the bathroom. Before leaving that floor, I tiptoed into Ben’s room and noted that Ben still slept like a mummy.

It is inexplicable to me, though I first noted it when I’d gone to wake him in order to go somewhere when we were both very young. Ben rolled himself up in a blanket at night and woke up still rolled in the blanket, perfectly still, face up. There was something vaguely creepy about
it, though his mom—who told me that he went to bed like that—seemed to find it endearing.

He was asleep, face up, completely rolled in the upper sheet and blankets. He looked either dead or like he was faking sleep, and I half-expected him to sit up and go,
Got you!
But he didn’t. I grabbed the keys he’d put on the bedside table and tiptoed down the stairs. In the garage, I opened the back of his car, took the table, and put it in the back of my car.

Then I tiptoed back into the house, left the keys on the bedside table where he’d left them, went upstairs to grab my own purse and keys, then went back to my car and made my getaway.

I giggled softly to myself while imagining Ben sitting at breakfast with my parents, wondering when I was going to come down. I imagined him having to debate the merits of cozies versus hard-boileds. Unlike All-ex he read mysteries, but he was far more interested in science fiction of the hard science kind. So most of what he would do is make polite noises at Dad until he managed to get away and go wake me up. And when he found I was gone, it would totally serve him right.

Very happy with myself, and very eager to work on the table, I was nonetheless incredibly hungry. I stopped at Good Morning Doughnuts around the corner. There was a police car parked up front, but alas, it was not Cas Wolfe behind the wheel but a blond man with an unruly mane of hair, eating a cruller and drinking a massive cup of coffee. Just as well. Cas Wolfe might be rather upset that I’d given Ben the slip.

I got a chocolate doughnut with Boston cream filling and a cup of hot chocolate. I still had most of both by the time I got home.

To my relief the house looked intact, with no signs of further break-ins. Someone—and I had no idea who—had covered the
Bitch
in a white paint that I assumed to be
primer. I didn’t think the police would have done that, but perhaps Cas Wolfe had called the landlords. Who knew?

Inside, the writing on the walls had been covered, too. I vaguely remembered the policemen doing that while Ben and I were putting stuff back in my bedroom. I was fairly sure that this wasn’t a normal service offered by the law, and wondered if Officer Wolfe had made them do it, and if they’d run down to Shorty Drugs for the paint.

Other than the obvious signs of last night’s intrusions, including the unwashed coffee and tea cups in the sink, the house looked perfectly normal, and I started to feel silly for going to spend the night at Mom’s. I brought the little table in, locked the door, washed the cups, and put them upside down on a tea towel to dry. Then, carrying the table, I headed out back.

And noticed that something was wrong. Outside the back door, I looked at the shed and saw that the lock I kept on the door was hanging funny, and that the door seemed to be partially open. I had a moment of wondering whether the police had left it unlocked when they’d checked on the shed last night.

Because those little cheap locks weren’t exactly hard to open, after all. But I put the table inside, by the back door, just in case. And I grabbed my broom. Then, holding it like a samurai sword, I headed toward the shed.

Closer, I gripped the broomstick tighter, because I could see that the lock was not unlocked but cut through, like with bolt cutters. This was not good. Perhaps someone was looking for the little table.

I pushed the door open with my foot while holding the broomstick at the ready.

My workshop looked empty, and everything seemed to be where it was supposed to, except that there was a funny smell and something felt not right.

I looked around my worktable and saw what looked like a virulently green bundle of rags on the floor. But it
wasn’t a bundle of rags—it was a human body covered by a hooded green robe that had been thrown over the body. And the body itself, at least the parts of it that I could see, had the same gelatinous look as the one I’d found in the Dumpster.

I think I beat all speed records running back into the house. I don’t remember calling Ben’s cell phone. I don’t remember waiting for him to arrive. I do remember throwing up. And I remember Ben coming into the house—in a suit, for crying out loud—and holding my head as I finished getting rid of the last of the hot chocolate.

I sort of regained my senses sitting at my table as he slid a cup of tea in front of me. He looked stern and serious, and I fully expected him to tell me that was a very stupid thing I’d done, returning to the house without him. I expected him to tell me it could be me out there, dipped in lye and not looking human at all.

Instead, he said, “I’ve called Officer Wolfe. He’s on his way.”

“Uh.”

“With the body-processing crew.”

I took a sip of tea. “I figured,” I said, not sure why my voice came out sounding disappointed.

“I’m sure he would come anyway, if he knew you were in distress,” Ben said. I gave him a dubious look. I wasn’t sure I was in distress. I was, however, sure that Ben, subtly or not, was yanking my chain.

Moments later Officer Wolfe arrived, with his crew, and this time it was hard to even imagine the man had ever taken me to dinner or kissed me. He was very serious, very focused, and almost antagonistic. He asked me again, this time on record, about lye, whether I had access to a lye vat. He asked me about poor Inobart and whether I’d ever felt threatened by him. Threatened. This from the man who had tried to make me feel scared of Inobart. Honestly.

I told him about coming to the house early and why. He gave Ben a narrowed-eye look. “At what time did she leave her parents’?”

Ben shrugged. “I have no idea. Couldn’t have been last night, though, because they were awake and discussing who might have killed the . . . er . . . who killed the cop in some mystery or other, until four in the morning.”

Four in the morning. I looked at the circles under Ben’s eyes and felt strangely guilty.

I wondered if it made any difference and found myself very much hoping that Inobart had died before four in the morning.

“Your neighbors saw someone carrying a bundle to your shed, shortly after we left, they said. Well, your upstairs neighbor. He said he was up and saw some movement in the back of the shed. He was curious, because you’d had police over earlier. Anyway, until we do further exams, we assume that this was when the body was dumped.”

“Dumped?”

“Well, there is no lye vat in your shed, so it’s unlikely he was immersed right there.” He looked like someone with a really bad toothache, I realized. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

I shook my head. There were, of course, a lot of things I’d never told him, including about the table in the Dumpster. Oh, and the phone call to Rocky’s. But if I started now, he would only get very upset with me.

He dropped into a chair, looking at me from a closer level, instead of towering over me asking questions. It should have been reassuring, only it wasn’t. Somehow, seeing his gray eyes up close and personal made him all the more intimidating. “Listen, what I can’t understand is why the killer would put the body here. Do you have any explanation for me? If you’re not the killer and someone else is . . .” He paused for a moment. “Then what rationale
is there to dumping the body in your shed? We’ve been going on the assumption that you have nothing to do with this, beyond finding that first body in the Dumpster, but now we can’t be absolutely sure. You mentioned that Inobart had been harassing a woman, Nell Gwen. Did you know her?”

Rocky’s ex-wife? I supposed I did know her. I’d met her, I was sure, at some place or another. Flea market or supplies store or something . . . I squinched my forehead. The problem was that if I had E with me, I was pretty much blinded to everyone around, by the necessity of keeping an eye on my son. Also, frankly, I had a lousy memory for faces, particularly the faces of well-dressed, seemingly successful females. Okay, it was petty of me, but I did tend to make value judgments about people based on that sort of thing. And that kind of female reminded me too much of all the girls in high school who hadn’t thought me fashionable enough or composed enough or whatever to be one of them. Which was the impression Nell Gwen projected, at least if she was the person I remembered.

“I met her,” I said. “Why? Do you think because Inobart stalked her, he stalked me, too? I’m not the type guys stalk.”

Something flashed in his eyes, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something rude, but then he clenched his teeth together, and when he unclenched them it was to say, “No, because she is our first victim. She was the woman found in the Dumpster.”

“Oh.” The vague memory of an overconfident—pushy—female got overlaid with the image of the body in the Dumpster, and I thought I was going to be sick again, only there was nothing left in my stomach to throw up. I covered my mouth with my hands. For just a moment there was something like pity—or worry—in Cas Wolfe’s eyes, but then Officer Wolfe looked stern and serious
again, “Look,” he said. “You see why I need to know what is going on, and what other contacts you might have had with . . . furniture refinishers. Whatever you want to call them.”

I sighed. I didn’t want to tell him. But in the game of secrets I was keeping, giving that away was far less important than giving away that I had a table stolen from the scene where the first body was found. A table that, almost for sure, had the handwriting of the first victim on the bottom. A table that might, somehow, be connected to the crime. I shuddered. Fortunately, shuddering was perfectly acceptable in my present circumstances, and I decided I would have to sacrifice my secret phone call. “Well,” I said. And sniffled. I hadn’t meant to sniffle, but I felt as if my nose were about to drip. “Yesterday, I called Rocky’s workshop.”