angles. Plastic. A low chair that looked as if no little old lady who wasn’t also a gymnast would ever be able to escape it. An abstract clock on the wall.
“Meet George Jetson,” Gabe muttered, which wasn’t far wrong. Colin was reminded of the spidery building in the middle of LAX that had been planned as the control tower but ended up as a restaurant that didn’t do much business because it was so hard to get to. That pieces of concrete started falling off it a few years before the eruption didn’t help, either.
One of the uniformed cops came back into the living room. She looked green around the gills. Who would blame her? That smell was stronger in here. And she’d just been with what caused it. She managed a nod. “Lieutenant. Sergeant. She’s. . back here.” A gulp punctuated the short sentence.
“Thanks, Jodie,” Colin said, as gently as he could.
The hallway between the living room and the bedroom had dozens of pictures on the wall: Mrs. Mandelbaum and her children and grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren. There were even a couple of old black-and- whites showing somebody who’d likely been Mr. Mandelbaum.
In the bedroom lay the old woman’s earthly remains. Near them stood the other officer from the black-and- white, a strapping ex-Marine named Albert. Strapping ex-Marine or not, he looked greener than Jodie had. He managed the pale ghost of a smile, almost as if he were the sun outside. “Sorry to bring you out for another one, Lieutenant. If it is, I mean.”
“Oh, it is,” Colin said. “Or else it’s a copycat, which would be about as bad-or a little worse, depending on how you look at things.” His hands folded into fists. “Maybe he slipped up this time. Maybe we catch a break.”
How often had he said something like that? As often as the Strangler murdered someone in San Atanasio, plus a few more times when he was talking about dead old ladies in other South Bay towns. How many times had he been right? The next would be the first.
Out in the living room, Jodie started talking to somebody. Colin spun on his heel and hurried up that icon-filled hallway. If Oscar Flores had got snoopy, tearing him a new asshole would make Colin feel a little better. It was the one thing he could think of that might.
Only it wasn’t the neighbor who’d worried about poor Mrs. Mandelbaum. It was Dr. Ishikawa and Mike Pitcavage, with a DNA technician trailing the coroner. Nodding towards Ishikawa, Pitcavage said, “I hitched a ride on the ambulance. When I heard it might be another Strangler case, I wanted to see it for myself as soon as I could.”
“Okay,” Colin said: more an acknowledgment than anything resembling thanks. That the police chief rode in the ambulance and not in his own car spoke unhappy volumes about what the supervolcano eruption had done to fuel supplies and San Atanasio’s sorry economy.
Pointing back to the hallway, Jodie said, “This woman had a lot of family. They’ll be screaming when they find out.”
Chief Pitcavage’s mouth twisted. “Why didn’t they call her and notice she didn’t call back, then? How much do they care?”
“We’ll find out when we get in touch with them,” Colin said. “Chances are, we’ll find out in stereo.” Notifying next of kin might have been the part of the job he disliked most.
“Let’s have a look at the body and see if we can determine whether it is a Strangler case,” Dr. Ishikawa said. “The media will be most interested in learning about that. Of course, Lucy is the one who will make absolutely certain.”
Lucy Chen, the DNA tech, reminded Colin of a Chinese version of his wife. They were about the same age, and they both had the same air of unhurried competence. But Lucy was an expert on the double helix, not on the behavior and misbehavior of magma.
“Happy day,” Colin said. Lucy’s presence, and Jodie’s, kept him from adding some stronger opinions. As far as he was concerned, the one good thing about the eternal-seeming power and gas shortages was that the blow-dried dimbulbs with the expensive clothes took longer to get to a crime scene. If they wouldn’t have shown up at all, that would have pleased him even more. Some things, though, were too much to hope for.
“It’ll be back here, I bet. I’ll follow my nose,” Mike Pitcavage said. He found Mrs. Mandelbaum’s bedroom with no trouble at all. He was younger than Colin, but he’d been a cop even longer because he hadn’t gone into the service before putting on the blue uniform. How many tract homes had he walked through? Enough so, dozens of different floor plans seemed as familiar as the house he lived in, no doubt.
The coroner squatted by the corpse. His nose wrinkled; the smell in the bedroom was pretty bad, all right. “What do you think?” Colin asked, keeping his voice as neutral as he could. He knew what
“If the DNA does not show this to be a Strangler case, I will be very much surprised,” Ishikawa replied. Lucy Chen nodded. After a pause for breath (and after his face announced how much he wished he didn’t need to breathe in there), the coroner added, “Most of the victims are discovered in a less advanced state of putrefaction.”
“You got that right, Doc,” Pitcavage said. “I just hope the stink comes out of my suit.” Colin hadn’t worried about that. Like most people, he wore more wool than he had before the eruption. It was warmer than the synthetics. But the chief, also in wool, remembered that it also trapped odors better.
Albert stuck his head into the bedroom. “Sorry to bother you, sir,” he said, addressing his words to Chief Pitcavage, “but the first news truck just pulled up.”
Oh, well. The vultures hadn’t taken
Then Pitcavage said, “I think I’ll duck out the back door. Colin, you can handle the ghouls today.” Colin’s face might have been something-all the cops, Lucy, and even the staid Dr. Ishikawa started laughing. The chief thumped him on the shoulder. “I’m kidding. I really am.”
“You’d better be.” By the way Colin said it, everybody else thought the joke was a hell of a lot funnier than he did. He said it that way because that was how he felt.
“I am. I’m here. I’m stuck with it. I’ll deal with them.” Pitcavage walked out to face the reporters. Christians might have gone to face lions with that same exalted determination. But dealing with the media was more like getting trampled by a herd with mad cow disease. Colin thought so, anyhow. Suddenly, calling the next of kin didn’t seem half bad.
* * *
Oklahoma City reminded Vanessa Ferguson of Schrodinger’s cat. Even the locals seemed unsure about whether their town was dead or alive.
Denver, now, Denver was definitively deceased. Same with Salt Lake City. But both those places were only a few hundred miles from what had been Yellowstone National Park in happier times and was currently the world’s biggest red-hot hole in the ground.
There were something like 1,200 miles between the supervolcano caldera and Oklahoma City. That didn’t mean ashfall hadn’t reached the city. Oh, no. Oklahoma City, in fact, had taken a bigger hit than places like Los Angeles, if not so bad as the towns and farms up in Kansas where Vanessa had been excavating. As with the Kansas prairies, prevailing winds had dumped lots of ash and dust on Oklahoma City’s head.
The eruption had been a while ago. To Vanessa’s way of thinking, Oklahoma City should have picked itself up, dusted itself off-literally and metaphorically-and got on with its life. Maybe it should have, but it hadn’t. Little by little, she started to see why. The countryside was in worse shape than the town.
None of that was her worry, though. She’d made it to Oklahoma City. She’d escaped from the grave-robbing crew that was picking through the mortal remains of Kansas. She’s had as much of that as she could take, and more besides. She wasn’t supposed to be in Oklahoma City right now. She was supposed to be back with the crew. Had she been in the Army, they would have called it going AWOL. She wasn’t in the Army, no matter how hard they tried to make her feel as if she were. As far as she was concerned, she’d informally resigned.
She had cash in the pockets of her jeans, too. Some of it came from what they’d paid her to make like a ghoul. That was a startling wad, at least by pre-eruption standards. It wasn’t as if she’d had anything to spend it on while she was scavenging. Too damn bad the galloping inflation made it worth so much less than it would have been before things hit the fan.
The same sadly held true for the greenbacks she’d come by in unofficial ways. She felt guilty about that
