“Give William a break,” Izzy said as I spat taffeta. “So he’s got a touch of OCD. What’s the big deal? It’s his attention to detail that makes him such an ace accountant.”
“A
Izzy conceded with a sigh. “Okay, maybe he’s a little anal retentive.”
“Doubt it,” I snapped back. “He’s got his head so far up his ass there isn’t room there for anything else. And just how old is he, anyway?”
“Late forties, maybe early fifties.”
“That’s a bit of a spread, don’t you think? He’s got to be at least fifteen years older than me.”
“I’m twelve years older than Dom.”
“That’s different. You’re gay.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Izzy laughed. “Besides, it’s not like you were looking for a serious date. You just wanted someone to tote along to make Hurley jealous.”
This was true. Steve Hurley is a tall, dark, and blissfully blue-eyed homicide detective that I’ve known for all of three weeks, ever since I became Izzy’s assistant. For me it was lust at first sight, which unfortunately occurred over Karen Owenby’s freshly murdered body. Things kind of went downhill from there, particularly after I became a suspect in the case.
“Clearly it was a wasted effort,” I pouted.
“Hey, it’s not my fault Hurley didn’t show up at the party.”
With that one sentence, Izzy shot straight to the heart of my misery. I sulked for the remainder of the journey, which was all of three minutes since Sorenson isn’t a very big town. When we arrived at our destination, I unfolded myself from Izzy’s car like a performer in Cirque du Soleil and stood a moment to let the blood flow back into my legs. Then I reached into the back seat and took out my processing kit.
That’s how I ended up here on the edges of suburbia, surrounded by bodies on a Saturday night, dressed like a white witch carrying a large tackle box.
Chapter 2
Izzy and I pause long enough to don gloves and shoe covers. With that done, he grabs his camera while I take out the digital recorder he gave me a couple of weeks ago for documenting scene observations. I turn the recorder on and put it in voice activation mode. After trying to find a place on my outfit to clip it, I settle for sticking it down inside my cleavage, or what a boy in my high school geography class once dubbed the “hot-and-gentle divide.”
Despite the darkness outside, the yard is brightly lit thanks to Halloween spotlights and the flashing bars atop the cop cars parked in the driveway. At the foot of a huge oak tree off to my right, a man sits strapped into a large wooden chair. On his head is something that looks like an old-fashioned electrocution helmet. Nailed to the tree a foot above his head is a large board that has the words ON and OFF painted on it with a fork-shaped lever clearly placed in the ON position. Wires are running from the lever to the helmet and the clothes on the man appear to be singed.
On closer inspection I see that the helmet is actually a metal mixing bowl turned upside down and the handle on the board is made out of tin foil, but the effect is realistic enough to make me shiver.
On the opposite side of the tree is another body, this one hanging from a thick rope, its face painted a ghastly blue, the body swinging slightly in the night breeze. A third body is half buried in a makeshift grave, its hands and feet protruding from the freshly turned soil. At its head is a gravestone that bears the inscription: WHO TURNED OUT THE LIGHTS?
Four more bodies are strewn about, all of them wearing blood-soaked clothes. One has a large butcher knife protruding from its chest; another has its head lying a conspicuous distance from its body. The third one is missing its arms and legs, though they are lying nearby, and the fourth one is splayed halfway down the steps of the front porch, a glistening trail of blood marking its journey from the front door.
This last body is the one I zero in on since there is a trio of police officers—two in uniform, one in plainclothes—grouped around it. I know most of the cops in town either because they’re Sorenson lifers like me, or because we became acquainted years ago when I worked in the ER. I even dated one of them briefly, a sweet guy named Larry Johnson who is the plainclothes officer in tonight’s group. I never felt any reciprocal attraction to Larry, but if I had it would have died some time ago when he came into the hospital for hemorrhoid surgery. I was the scrub nurse on the case, and the sight of Larry’s jingleberries hanging above his dingle-berries would have put a definite damper on future intimacies.
One of the uniforms in tonight’s group is a guy named Al who I’ve known for a decade or so, but the second uniform is new to me, and he looks like he’s twelve. The one face conspicuously absent from the group is Steve Hurley’s.
“Hey, where are Sleepy, Sneezy, and Dopey?” Larry yells as Izzy and I approach. Al and the new guy snigger. I realize they have misinterpreted our costumes, mistaking me for Snow White and Izzy for one of my dwarfs.
“I don’t know,” I say, setting down my scene kit and glancing around the yard. “Where are the real cops?”
“Ouch,” says Larry as the other two groan. “Okay, truce.”
I turn my attention to the body on the stairs and wrinkle my nose. There is a faint odor in the air, one that tells me this body has been here a while. The weather over the past week or so has been uncharacteristically warm for late October in Wisconsin, with temperatures in the high seventies during the day and the low sixties at night. Normally we’d expect highs in the fifties with frost or snow warnings at night, but this year October decided to go out on a high note. This last gasp of summer proved a delightful treat here in a state where snowblowers are considered a necessity five months out of the year, but it also allowed putrefaction to set in a little sooner than it otherwise would have.
“Do you know who she is?” Izzy asks, using his camera to shoot pictures and video of both the body and our immediate surroundings.
“We’re pretty certain it’s Shannon Tolliver,” Larry says.
One of the advantages of living in a small town is that eventually you get to know almost everyone, if not by name, then at least by face. Here the six degrees of separation are often narrowed down to one or two. I’m at a slight disadvantage because of my last job. Even though working as a nurse in the operating room of the town’s hospital allowed me to cross paths with a lot of people, most of them were draped, gowned, bonneted, and drugged into oblivion. As a result, I’m quicker to recognize some people by their navels or knees as opposed to their faces.
Tonight’s victim is someone I do know by face, though it’s hard to be sure it’s her. The body is lying on its back with the feet at the top of the stairs and the head at the bottom. Gravity has done its job. What little blood is left in the body has settled in the head and face, causing gross discoloration and swelling.
“Who found her?” I ask.
Al says, “A couple of trick-or-treaters who got the scare of their life when their parents drove them to this house. The parents rounded the kids up and then called it in on a cell phone.”
I grimace. Kids traipsing near our corpse and running hell-bent through the yard means contamination of our scene.
I note two holes in Shannon’s torso that appear to be bullet entry wounds, both of them surrounded by the blood-soaked cloth of her blouse. Years of working as a nurse have gifted me with the rather dubious talent of being able to estimate blood loss with a reasonable degree of accuracy. A quick estimate of the dried pool beneath Shannon’s body and the trail leading back from it to the house tells me there’s a good chance she bled to death.
Squealing wheels sound behind us and, as I turn to see a familiar black car pull up, my heart quickens and a different kind of shiver goes through me.
