I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (24 page)

My mind whirled back through yesterday’s
events.

Okay, I sent samples of Doe’s clothing to the
fiber experts, dumped the sweaty jumpsuit, sterilized the
medallion, stuck it in my pocket…

Oh my God! What the hell was I doing? I’d
just tampered with—I’d just stolen evidence from a murder case! I’d
robbed a corpse!

Breathing hard, I pulled open a kitchen
drawer with one hand. With the other, I moved to put the medallion
in the drawer.

The hand holding the medallion put the damned
thing back in my pocket.

I blinked. I took the medallion out, tried to
put the thing away, and a second time, into my pocket it went. The
little hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention as if
someone had just run their nails over a chalkboard.

Okay, now this was getting just plain
spooky.

I took the medallion out and examined it
again. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’d have blinked if
I’d seen the phrase
One Ring to rule them all, and in the
darkness bind them
stenciled on one side.

Instead, clear imprint of a horse’s hoof
dominated one face of the medallion. The strange lettering on the
other looked like a cross between Latin letters and Nordic runes.
My arms goose-pimpled as I considered what was going on here.

One, I could be losing it.

Two, something effing strange was going
on.

I didn’t believe in voodoo or witchcraft or
Wicca or any dopey new-age version of an Earth-Mother. Hell, I
didn’t even go to church on Sunday to partake in any of the local
religious denominations on order.

I went out the front door in a rush. Of
course, I’d completely forgotten that Deputy Chief McClatchy had
put me under surveillance for my own safety. I badly startled the
half-asleep pair of cops that had taken over for the Bears’
linebackers. I gave them an apologetic wave as I hopped into my car
and thanked whoever was pulling the strings upstairs that no one
had yet tried to take a potshot at me for my absent-minded spate of
stupidity.

I drove to the M.E.’s office at the sizzling
Southern California highway speed of twenty miles per hour in
bumper to bumper traffic. I didn’t mind this time. It let me think
more on the medallion. I could feel the cold lump of metal in my
pocket. Tugging at me like it had its own gravity field.

“Okay,” I said to myself, “John Doe didn’t
get shot with this little golden marker. So how did it get into his
chest wound?” The answer was obvious, and it almost made me miss
the highway off-ramp to the Medical Examiner’s headquarters.

It got into his chest wound because someone
planted it there.

Fair enough. Why would someone do that?
Knowing even the basics of forensic examinations meant that whoever
put the thing in the most obvious wound expected it to be found. In
other words, someone planted it there for a single reason.

Whoever it is
wanted
me to find
it.

With that happy thought dancing in my head, I
pulled in and parked in my assigned garage slot. My police escort
parked nearby, in a spot where they could watch the entrance.

The Office of the Medical Examiner was a
long, low-slung trapezoid of smoky black glass and long corridors
lined with gray carpet. Compared to the ‘well tended junkyard’ look
of a lot of labs I’d worked for, the high-tech look of the place
was a welcome change.

I clipped my badge identity card to my belt,
pushed through the lobby’s king-sized revolving glass door, went
through the security checkpoint’s metal detector, and then set off
down the long gray-shaded corridor for my office at a pace just
under a run.

“Dayna!” a familiar voice called, “Wait
up!”

A matronly woman with a frizz of hair the
color of weak tea and pince-nez glasses that would’ve warned a
librarian to keep quiet half-walked, half-ran to catch up with
me.

“I’m sorry, Shelly,” I said, as she puffed
her way over to my side. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“Figured that as soon as I saw you break the
new land-speed record through the door. Any faster, and you’d set
the carpet on fire,” she said. Her soft Texas drawl spun out her
last word into ‘fahr’.

Shelly Richardson and I had started out
together as junior medical examiners. I’d swapped the M.E.’s green
gown to move over to Crime Scene Analysis, but Shelly had stayed
and prospered over the last couple of years. Like me, she loved
pulling the bizarre and puzzling cases, the ones that could give
you a bad case of the shivers, or make you stay up late chewing on
your split ends in frustration.

“Maybe if I keep moving, I’ll be a more
difficult target.”

She made a disapproving
tsk
. We were
friends, but she didn’t always appreciate my dark sense of humor.
Shelly’s tastes ran more to reruns of
The Brady Bunch
and
comic strips involving cats who hated Mondays and loved
lasagna.

“News spreads quick,” she said. “Someone
gunning for you? Or was it just some punk who up-n-decided to take
a couple pot-shots at the cops?”

“It sure seemed like someone was aiming for
me,” I replied, as we started walking again. “But I can’t think of
anyone who’d want me dead.”

“No jealous ex-lovers? Boyfriends?”

I sighed and shook my head ‘no’. It’d been a
while since I’d been out with a man on an honest-to-goodness real
live date, but that didn’t stop Shelly from trying to get me
married off. We turned up a second corridor, one which bore a white
plaque with an arrow: Forensics Department. Some joker had taken a
marker and written
Labs n’ Slabs
on the plaque’s bottom
edge. Well, it was graffiti, but at least it was accurate
graffiti.

“I haven’t heard from McClatchy about an
arrest,” I added.

“Because there wasn’t one. I asked Esteban.
They swarmed the building the shots were fired from. The boys are
swearing on the Good Book that nobody could’ve slipped past, but
all they found was four spent rifle casings on the roof.”

“More good news,” I grumbled. “Well, I mostly
came to see what’s up with the John Doe we picked up downtown.”

“Oh, Connor McCloud? I worked it with the
tox-box folks last night. Hector sent me his photos, too.”

“
Connor McCloud?
We actually got a hit
on that goofball name?”

Shelly rolled her eyes. “That’s ‘McCloud’ as
in
Highlander
, dear. We’re calling him that ‘cause of that
little metal fragment you gave us.”

“You’re kidding me!” I exclaimed, as we
reached the glorified broom closet they’d repurposed as my
office.

“Read the reports for yourself. You’ll find
it right peculiar, I think.”

I turned the worn brass doorknob and pushed
my way inside. Dusty teak bookshelves fairly groaned under the
textbooks that took up the bulk of two walls, while the window on
the remaining one looked out over the grassy expanse of the
building’s rear lawn. The mess of paper on my desk was bad enough
so that a hamster would’ve considered the place in prime move-in
condition. But I kept a spot on the front left corner for a bright
red cookie jar that I always kept stuffed with fresh brown-sugar
ginger snaps. The picture on the front of the jar came from one of
my favorite Disney flicks. It showed the Mad Hatter and White
Rabbit at a tea party, holding up a wooden sign that proclaimed:
Have One!

I slid into my office chair with a creak of
dry springs and opened the first of the folders that lay atop the
pile of paper I’d been meaning to properly organize someday. Shelly
took the visitor’s chair, lifted the top of my jar, and grabbed one
of the cookies. I suppressed a grin. I didn’t actually like ginger
snaps that much, but their sweet-spicy scent gave me a nice tingle
in the nostrils. Not coincidentally, it also told me who’d been
visiting my office on any given day.

The reports were terse but clearly laid out.
No immediate hits on the fingerprints, but the FBI was checking
their database as well. ‘Connor’ had been in excellent health
before his death, about six hours before we’d found him. Clean
living, too. Zero hits for drugs from cocaine, heroin, aspirin, or
even aspartame in his body fluids, stomach contents, hair
follicles, and subcutaneous fat.

Findings like that are unusual. But Hector
Reyes’ photos moved the case from unusual to head-scratching. He
hadn’t found any shoe prints at all. But he’d seen the same curious
thing that I had—multiple blood trails leading to the body. He’d
systematically put together a montage of pictures from 360 degrees
around the body and then spliced it into a combined image. The
blood trails radiated out from the body in a perfectly symmetrical
pattern.

There were no traces of someone dragging or
carrying a body across the jumbled terrain of broken concrete to
leave him in the middle of the lot. None. That had to be wrong.
Connor would’ve been more than two hundred pounds of dead weight.
Hard for even a bodybuilder to handle. But Hector’s photos showed
that we weren’t looking at blood trails. We were looking at a
splatter pattern.

It was as if someone had simply dumped poor,
dead Connor from a platform ten feet in the air, let him fall
straight down, and then vanished. Taking the platform with them as
well, I might add.

Effing im-poss-i-ble.

And then the report got
really
interesting.

My office chair squeaked in protest as I
leaned forward. Shelly looked up expectantly as she popped the last
of the ginger snap in her mouth with a spicy-smelling
crunch
. I closed the report she’d done on the metal
fragment.

“Are you serious about what you found?” I
asked.

“As serious as a Baptist in church, hon.”

The metal chip from the massive shoulder
wound was a piece of medium-grade iron called ‘blister steel’. But
the tox guys had run the metal’s impurities against hundreds of
possible metal implements. Their conclusion: Connor had been
wounded by a genuine antique. The steel shard came from a sword
that could only have been manufactured during Europe’s High Middle
Ages.

“Okay,” I acknowledged, “at least I’m getting
the
Highlander
joke now, sort of. So our guy got attacked by
a nut with a medieval sword. Any recent thefts from museums,
private collections?”

“Nope.” Shelly leaned back in her chair to
give the hallway a long look in both directions. When she was sure
it was clear, she continued. “Let’s head on over to the slab, take
a gander at Mister McCloud. We need to talk. Private-like.”

I started to ask a question. Then shut my
mouth with a snap. I’d only seen Shelly get serious about stuff
like this once or twice, and when she said ‘we need to talk’, she
meant business.

We walked down to the chiller rooms, where we
actually kept the bodies. The cold chambers were windowless rooms
coated with cheery yellow-brick tiles that looked like they
belonged in Oz, not a morgue. The light came from a combination of
harsh fluorescent bulbs and a special kind of skylight that bounced
the sun down to us indirectly from a reflection panel on the roof.
Different kinds of light helped throw different kinds of dyes or
marks into sharper relief for us.

Shelly and I didn’t chit-chat as we did the
surgical hand-wash routine and gowned up in a matching pair of pale
green scrubs. A couple pieces of paperwork later, we rolled the
body out of the cold chamber. The gamy smell of rotting flesh was
muted here—the low temperature slowed decomposition—and there was a
background scent of formaldehyde that curled up in the nostrils and
plastered the back of the throat.

The man I now thought of as Connor—funny, how
easily we can attach names, even to dead things—didn’t appear to be
much worse for wear. Shelly had performed a modified Y-shaped
incision for the autopsy. Normally, we started the cut at the top
of each shoulder and ran down to the front of the chest, switching
over to shears or bone saws when we reached the sternum. Since our
boy’s sternum had been powdered, the cut continued around the wound
and down to the pubic bone. But Shelly didn’t pull the flaps back.
Instead, she directed me to Connor’s hands as she spoke.

“I’m wondering if our friend really
was
attacked by a medieval knight, or someone pretending to
be one. Because he might have been into the same game himself.” She
touched the man’s bare left hand with her gloved one, and then
looked questioningly at me.

“You’re right,” I acknowledged, looking at
the wound there and above, on his arm. “Classic defensive wounds.
Probably against the same weapon that cut his ear, his
shoulder.”

Shelly nodded. Next, she grasped Connor’s
right palm and turned it over. The inner side of the thumb,
fingers, and the palm itself showed callus buildup.