I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (23 page)

Actually, the extra security proved a pain in
the neck. I refused to leave the crime scene until they’d lifted
some prints and bagged the corpse. McClatchy practically had me
clapped in irons and shanghaied back to the Medical Examiner’s
office in the company of two beat cops who looked like they’d been
kicked off the Chicago Bears for steroid abuse.

The day hadn’t been a total loss, but at
times it teetered right on the effin’ edge. The bagging people
unceremoniously dumped the John Doe on my examination table without
so much as a thank-you-ma’am. I swabbed the surfaces of the metal
chunk I’d taken out of the body’s shoulder, the gold medallion, and
the inside of that odd chest wound and sent the samples off to the
tox-box experts.

Then I sent samples of Doe’s clothing to the
fiber experts, sterilized the medallion, stuck it in my pocket,
dumped the jumpsuit, left a note for Hector to email me his crime
scene photos, pulled the Pentax’s memory card, and had just started
prepping for Doe’s autopsy when something went
sproing
, and
all the adrenaline I’d been running on petered out and left me
feeling like I’d taken a swan dive off the edge of a cliff.

The two guys from the Bears’ defensive line
escorted me home and parked across the street from my house. I
thanked them and walked unsteadily up the long, freshly paved
asphalt driveway. I live on the north side of Los Angeles, up near
Griffith Park. It’s a tony neighborhood stuffed to the gills with
pretty, upscale homes, but my place wasn’t among them.

Think of a Santa Fe themed shoebox. Surround
it with a lawn that looks more like a well-tended sand dune, and
you’ve got it. I’ve got a brown thumb powerful enough to kill
anything with leaves and roots at up to thirty paces.

I fished the door key out of my purse,
stumbled my way inside, and began pulling down all of the blinds.
Security or no, I didn’t like the idea of anyone watching me in my
own home. I left only one window alone—the backyard view that ran
right up to the edge of the park. Perched at the top of the highest
ridge was the Art Deco dome of Griffith Observatory.

My fingers begin to shake. I started to run a
warm bath for myself, and then dug around in the cabinet below the
sink for some bath salts. Of course, right when Dayna Chrissie
needs something, that’s when she runs out. Calgon wasn’t going to
be taking me away tonight.

So I did the next best thing. I turned the
shower to
hot
, scrubbed myself down with a pair of
exfoliating gloves until my skin turned bright pink, swaddled
myself in the vast white folds of my oversized Egyptian cotton
bathrobe, and padded over to the kitchen freezer.

I pushed aside the frozen cauliflower, the
rainy-day pack of microwave taquitos, and dove for the pint-size
container of my favorite ice cream—a milkfat-laced smart bomb of a
dessert called Chunky Chocolate Coma. I curled up in a corner of my
beat-up leather couch and proceeded to do the windmill thing with
my spoon through the layers of chocolate-coated almonds and soft
brownie chunks until I scraped the bottom of the carton.

My fingers began to quiver again. I flung the
empty container and the spoon away with a clatter. They bounced off
the wall and left me a pair of brown chocolate streaks to clean up
later.

I felt a wracking, chest-tingling cry finally
break loose inside like an iceberg calving off from a glacier. I
buried my face in my hands and just sobbed, sobbed with relief that
I was alive—
alive
, dammit!—and that I was going to see
another sunrise.

It felt heavenly. It felt as if a rubber band
had snapped inside of me.

I’d always been so good, so damned good at
holding everything back. Everything that would’ve marked Miss Dayna
Chrissie as someone who just wasn’t professional enough to be in
forensics. Someone who couldn’t control their emotions, who
couldn’t stay detached, who couldn’t be trusted to run an
investigation. Who knew if the
girl
might break down on the
stand, when some hotshot defense attorney focused all of his powers
on wrecking her carefully built case?

But I’d held it together today. Even had to
remind myself to thank the guy who’d put himself in harm’s way to
keep me safe.

It made me feel good.

So good, it almost made me forget that
someone had tried to kill me.

Almost.

I didn’t make it to bed. I stayed curled up
on the couch like a lanky, black-haired, green-eyed cat. A cat that
someone had stuffed with ice cream and then wrapped in an oversize
bathrobe, to be precise. I watched the evening turn into night. The
city had lit up the road to the observatory tonight, so that if you
squinted, you could imagine James Dean, clad head to toe in shiny
black biker leather, gunning his motorcycle up the steep asphalt
slope and up to the tinted spotlights that gave the observatory
dome the gentle amber shade of a Malibu sunset.

My weary, drowsy brain settled on the round
spotlights. Then the lights changed, became darker and more ragged
at the edges as I felt my eyelids grow as heavy as marble slabs. I
thought of the crime scene today. The drops of red at the scene
near the body.

Splashes of blood on concrete.

That’s when my mind spiraled back to
something I call ‘The Dream’. It’s a recurring vision-memory thing
that comes back to me at the oddest times. To be honest, it took
place so long ago, that I wasn’t sure if it was real, or if it had
been some awful fever dream brought on by eating too many slices of
holiday fruitcake.

Yeah, someone was definitely being a
fruitcake here.

My eyes closed and the vision of the dusty
gray concrete softened and turned white. It was a frigid December
in the woods of Pike County, Illinois.

I’d just turned seven.

The blood trail stood out in a pattern of
scarlet splashes against the snow. Cold wind bit at me with wolves’
teeth and made a low-pitched howl through icicle-coated branches.
It raised goosebumps on my arms, even through the fleece of my
ballet-slipper pink jacket and mittens. The bare trunks of the
birch and hickory trees around me jutted out of the ankle-deep snow
like picked-over bones.

I wasn’t scared. Not much, anyway. If I
squinted through the withered remains of the underbrush, I could
still make out the red-green glow of the Christmas lights that
rambled along our front porch as if it were some strange, wintery
vine. The scent of a wood fire billowed out of our house’s skinny
brick chimney and skimmed past my nose like a passing phantom.

Curious, I decided to follow the blood
trail.

The line of droplets meandered drunkenly
between the trees. Dark, heavy shade of red, like fistfuls of ripe
chokeberries. My little wigwam boots sank into the snow’s icy
surface with the crunch of someone biting into stale crusts of
bread. Once, the droplets became a splatter, and off to the left,
at the level of my head, was a bright gash against the papery-thin
bark of a sugar maple tree. Then the trail of blood drops changed
direction.

Now it headed towards the house.

I walked faster, let my breath fog up against
my eyelashes. I brushed the wetness aside with one pink sleeve and
saw the blood trail run up along the side of our driveway, past
where Daddy’s beat-up station wagon sat like a wood-paneled display
of dents ringed with rust. I followed the trail up to the garage’s
side door. It was wide, built to swallow furniture and auto parts
and maybe little girls.

Lime-green flecks of paint clung to the
door’s wooden surface by faith as much as anything else. The blood
pointed the way. Inside. One circular drop lay smeared halfway
under the door’s bottom edge as if it had tried and failed to
squeeze under the worn gray weather stripping.

My breath echoed hollow and empty in the
recesses of my hood. The noises from inside the garage were soft
but unmistakably clear. The scrape of flesh on concrete, a grunt,
as if someone was lifting a heavy object, something falling with a
thud against metal. Then the blubbery, snot-choked sounds of
sobbing.

I grasped the doorknob, turned it, pushed
in.

The all-weather bulb inside the garage hung
from the rafters by a single paint-spattered cord. Daddy’s orange
hunting vest was streaked with red. Dark, chokeberry red. An iron
smell rolled off him and filled the room. His rifle lay propped up
against the wall. Something that looked like a grayish-white nub of
bone jutted out of the darkness of the garage chest freezer. Daddy
knelt before the white, coffin-shaped chamber, shaking his head as
he cried. A single tear hit the side of the freezer and slithered
down over the raised silver letters on the side:
KELVINATOR
.

“Oh, God, forgive me, forgive me,” Daddy
sobbed. He clasped his hands together clumsily, trying to pray.

I stepped forward into the garage. Daddy
hadn’t noticed me yet, he was still talking to God. Now I was
worried. What could be causing him such pain?

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I killed her.
Dear God, I
murdered
her.”

Whatever Daddy was concerned about, it had to
do with whatever was in the chest freezer. The lid lay open, but
the lip of the freezer was high up for my seven-year old frame. I
stood on tiptoe, grabbed the top edge, and gazed down into the
Kelvinator’s depths.

My eyes went wide at what lay at the
bottom.

I woke with a start. The gray light of dawn
came streaming through the window. No fog on the horizon, meaning
that it was going to be hot enough to do a sidewalk pizza bake in
downtown Los Angeles. I let the coffee brew while I showered again,
and then dug into my closet for a not-too-badly ironed pair of Ann
Taylor pants, a violet top, and some shoes in a color that wouldn’t
clash. I considered for a moment, and then pulled out my favorite
long-sleeved open cardigan. It was going to be a scorcher today,
but I planned to work inside.

Winter lives in the morgue.

I poured myself a cup of Colombia’s finest
and inhaled the blessedly caffeine-infused steam that curled up
from my cup. I eyed the cordless phone on the kitchen counter,
fingers itching to pick up the receiver. To give Daddy a call, ask
him what he remembered about that day, that strange wintery day
when I found him in the garage, bawling his eyes out.

I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Like I
said, it was a long, long time ago. Maybe I even dreamt that he’d
been wearing a hunting outfit. We’d moved to the Chicago area when
I was eight or nine. I never saw him express the slightest interest
in sport hunting once we’d settled into our new home.

I mean, for chrissake, he’d been an on-again,
off-again vegan since I’d been in grade school. Why would he even
want
to go hunting? He had lots of other hobbies to occupy
his time. Maybe I had dreamt all of it, the entire thing, out of
whole cloth. I took a sip of coffee, determined to enjoy the rich
burnt-umber flavor of the freshly ground beans.

Then my mind did that weird
clicking
thing again, like it was some kind of spongy telephone switchboard
that took its own sweet time connecting things together. Lots of
hobbies to take up one’s time. The John Doe’s scale-patterned skin,
which looked as if it belonged to Persephone, my roommate’s albino
king snake.

My roommate—whose name, I recalled, with a
tingle of satisfaction, was ‘Joan’—had several hobbies. But her
favorite one involved dressing up as a ‘wench’ for some medieval
historical society. She hung out with the folks who ran the
Renaissance Faires off the college campus.

It wasn’t exactly my kind of crowd—give me
modern dental care and indoor plumbing any day over Ye Olde Middle
Ages—but I did enjoy the few times I went to their events.
Jousting, carousing, medieval swordplay done by the men to impress
the women. While I got a lot of attention from the guys, I lost
interest. I think that happened around the time when I realized it
was against the rules to get men to fight to the death for my
favor.

But here’s the deal: the makeshift knights
didn’t go in for the museum-piece plate armor suits. They went for
body-length chain mail, or vests and a kind of metal skirt. Mail
was cheaper, easier to move in, breathed, and since it was just
clothing made up of little metal rings, it was lighter as well.

I was willing to bet a year’s salary that at
the time of his death, John Doe had been wearing chain mail.

Okay, but did that get me anywhere? Again, it
looked like I just replaced one mystery with another. I paced the
length of the kitchen and stuck my hands in my pockets. Something
cold tingled against my index finger.

To my horror, I pulled John Doe’s damned gold
medallion out of my pocket.