The woman in the oxford shirt stood and turned to face us. She had a round face, stringy gray hair, and held up her gloved hands like she was ready to do surgery. 'What do you want, Sergeant?' she asked, not acknowledging my presence.
Her gruff manner and the fact she was standing over a dead person made my shoulders tighten.
'Dr. Post, this is Abby Rose. She can possibly ID the victim,' Jeff said.
The woman smiled at me. Her teeth were yellowed and her eyes were sharp with interest. She refocused on Jeff. 'You found family without having any ID? You have skills I didn't know you possessed, Sergeant.'
'She's not family,' he answered.
'Oh.' The detached, cold expression returned.
'Well then, have a gander. I've cleaned off her face.' She waved a hand at the body.
At first I thought the body was covered with fire ant hills, but the smell told me different. They were coffee grounds.
I recognized Verna Mae, mostly because of her distinctive gray eyes. They were glassy and wide now, and her chubby face looked like she'd been hammered with a meat mallet. Her broken nose lay against one bruised and swollen cheek, and her bottom lip was split. Blood covered her teeth and chin.
I stepped back. Tried to swallow the hot, sour Diet Coke that rocketed into my mouth.
Jeff grabbed my elbow and pulled me back away from the body. Good thing, because I bent over and vomited everything but my toenails.
He rested a hand on my back as I rid myself of the last ounce of bile, then he put his mouth to my ear and whispered, 'You okay?'
I nodded, wiped my lips with the back of my hand.
When I was upright again, Jeff said, 'If you're not able to continue, Ms. Rose, we understand.' This formal attitude was apparently for the benefit of the doctor, who was again kneeling by the body.
I made myself take another good look, willing my stomach to behave. 'That's her. Verna Mae Olsen.'
Dr. Post looked over her shoulder at me. From her expression, pukers were obviously a pain in the ass. She dug into the pile of coffee grounds and lifted one of the dead woman's pudgy arms. Wet coffee clung to Verna Mae's skin like dirt. 'No rigor or lividity. This corpse is fresher than the grounds they dumped on top of her. Why do you think they did that, Sergeant?'
'Great way to hide a corpse,' Jeff said.
'Made a helluva mess,' she muttered. 'Murderer probably has the stuff all over their shoes. Forensics can probably even match coffee brands these days.'
'Yeah,' Jeff said. 'We bagged grounds already.'
'Good, Sergeant. Now, could you take your witness somewhere else? I've called the van to remove the body, and she'll be in the way. And get one of your police friends to clean up her vomit. I don't want me or my people to step in it.'
'I'm really sorry about getting sick,' I told Jeff as he guided me back up the incline and across the alley.
'No problem.' He used the walkie-talkie feature on his phone and said, 'Hey, Rick. There's vomit by the body.'
'You need me to collect it?' Rick responded.
'Don't bother. Not evidence. A witness lost it. Just wanted you to be aware if you happened to wander up that way again.'
'Gotcha,' the man answered.
Seems there was a little animosity between the ME and HPD, just as the press liked to speculate. As we arrived at the back entrance to the Last Drop, Jeff clipped his phone on his belt and held open the door for me. I went into a narrow hallway. By now, my shorts and white blouse were soaked, along with my sandaled feet, so the blast of air-conditioning had me shivering from bottom to top.
I noticed a restroom on the right and a storage area filled with huge, clear bags of coffee beans on our left. The aroma was unbelievably strong, and the room might as well have been a goat pasture—that's how pleasant the smell was to me at the moment. With gritty grounds between my toes and the churning in my gut, I wasn't sure I'd ever love coffee as much as I used to anymore.
Jeff rested his hands on my cold shoulders. 'You did good. Sorry you had to go through that, but you've really helped us out.'
'I feel so bad for her, Jeff. She must have been terrified before... before she died. What could she have possibly done to deserve that beating? She was just this oddball, small-town woman obsessed with a baby she found years ago.'
'Let's sit, talk a little more about what you know about her,' he said.
'Can I rinse my mouth first?'
'Sure. Want some gum, too?' He patted his shirt pocket where he kept his ever-present pack of Big Red.
'No. I don't want anything even marginally connected to the food pyramid.'
'Okay. I'll meet you up front.'
I stepped inside the lavatory, closed the door and leaned back, my hand on the knob. I closed my eyes, but that only made me see Verna Mae's battered face again, the face that had been so happy when I'd brought Will to see her.
I caught my reflection in the smudged oval mirror across from me and saw that my skin was the color of concrete and my hair so wet it looked black rather than auburn. I stepped over to a sink that resembled the bottom of a dirty coffeepot, turned on the faucet and splashed my face. After I rinsed away the taste of bile, I stared again in the mirror, ran my fingers through my hair and pushed back my bangs. I looked like I'd been through a car wash without a car, but this was as good as it was gonna get. I went back out into the hallway and walked the short distance into the coffee shop to give my statement, thinking about Verna Mae lying dead so close by and wondering if her death had some sad connection to my client.
I counted five cops besides Jeff, both uniformed and plainclothes. Three of them had taken advantage of the crime scene location and held steaming cups of coffee. Not the smallest size, either. Two others were interviewing a tattooed, fair-skinned Hispanic kid who couldn't have been more than twenty. His canvas apron bore the Last Drop's logo.
Jeff was seated at one of the half dozen small round tables lining the wall opposite the espresso bar. I took the bentwood kelly green chair across from him. He repositioned himself so his knee fit between both of mine and I mouthed a thank-you for the comfort he must have known this would provide.
'No coffee, I take it?' he asked.
'No,' I said emphatically.
'Can you give me the victim's address so I can get someone on this notification?'
I did, and he wrote this in his notebook.
'She was a widow,' I said. 'Lived alone. I'm not sure who they'll notify.'
'We'll contact the local cops for help. I've never heard of this town. What county are we talking about?'
'Liberty,' I said.
Jeff waved over a patrolman, tore off the address I'd given him and said, 'Get on this notification. Liberty County address.'
'Sure, Sarge,' he answered, and left for a more quiet corner of the cafe? to make the call.
Jeff refocused on me. His short blond hair glittered with rain, and the stubble on his chin looked more copper than golden in this light. He took two sticks of Big Red gum from his rain-dampened shirt, unwrapped them and folded them into his mouth. After he'd chewed a few seconds, he said, 'As I mentioned, this looks like assault and robbery. Do you know anything about the victim that would make me see this differently?'
'Not really, considering I only met her once. But I can tell you she was alive two hours ago.'
Jeff looked at his watch. 'Seven?'
I nodded, and he jotted this down. 'I take it you couldn't ID her because her purse was missing.' I said this more to myself than to him, feeling calm enough to think logically now. 'Where'd you find her phone?'
'In the alley. She must have dropped it.'
'You couldn't find out who she was from that?'
'Prepaid. Never been used. Didn't even know it was hers for sure until you called. And yes, her purse is
