“Okay,” Lucien says. “Because you’re family I’ll talk to the guy and look at the case against him, but I’m not making any promises yet.”
“That’s fine. Let me know what you think after you do.”
“Will do, Sweet Cheeks.”
“Thanks, Lucien.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he cautions. “I’m not promising to take the case, and even if I do, you don’t know what I might ask for as a return favor.”
The possibilities are frightening.
“I’m sure we can work something out,” I say warily.
“Oh, yes,” Lucien says, as I suppress a shudder. “I’m sure we can.”
Chapter 13
I stop at home long enough to check on my kitten, Rubbish. He is glad to see me and mews cutely as he runs figure eights around my feet, darn near tripping me up. After a few minutes of kitty nuzzling, I get a call on my cell from the office. It’s Cass, our receptionist/file clerk/secretary. As an amateur thespian, Cass likes to dress up and play her roles on a 24-7 basis. As a result, in the month or so I’ve worked there I’ve seen her come to work dressed as a sixties-era hippie, Little Orphan Annie, a pregnant yuppie mom, an old woman, and a Goth queen. Her makeup, hair, clothing, and body language are usually so well done that if it wasn’t for her voice, I wouldn’t know it was Cass most of the time. She’s good enough with accents that even the voice isn’t a guarantee. I wonder what she looks like today.
“I have some work for you, Mattie,” she says when I answer. “Izzy is getting his annual physical and he’s close to being done but needs a little more time. So he wants you and Arnie to go to the site and get things started.”
“Where and what?” I ask.
“It’s two bodies from some kind of car accident.”
“Okay,” I tell her, mentally rearranging my day. This kind of unpredictability might throw some people off but I thrive on it. That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to the ER, where Murphy’s Law always seems to rule. If there is a snowy field surrounded by barbed wire, some drunken yahoo is going to go flying across it on a snowmobile in the middle of the night. If there’s a major trauma case coming in, that’s when the X-ray machine always breaks. If someone mentions how quiet the shift is, you’ll have a Smurf—someone in severe respiratory distress—appear within seconds. And heaven help you if you decide to order food delivered for your shift meal. As soon as the order is placed, everyone in town will flock to the ER. Most ER nurses excel at eating on the run and in some very strange places. I just excel at eating.
“Is Arnie in the office?” I ask Cass.
“He is.”
“Tell him I’ll be there in about five minutes.”
“Will do. And . . . um . . . Mattie?” There’s a short pause before she adds, “There’s one other thing Izzy wanted me to tell you.”
Based on her hesitation, I suspect it won’t be good news. “Go ahead.”
“The car was pretty well hidden in the trees so these bodies have been out there a while, most likely for the whole two weeks they’ve been missing.”
“Oh.” I swallow hard. “I see.”
Bodies that are weeks old mean serious decay, and I haven’t yet done a bad decomp. But Izzy, who has referred to such bodies as “bloaters” and “slippers,” has talked about them enough that I know I’m in for a challenge. Rotting bodies don’t look or smell very good, and while I feel pretty comfortable dealing with blood, guts, and ghastly wounds, I’ve never seen or smelled a rotting corpse. This is virgin territory for me.
“Hold on a sec,” Cass says. “Izzy wanted me to call him on his cell and conference with you.”
I wait nervously, wondering just how awful this is going to be. A minute or so goes by and then I hear Izzy’s voice on my phone.
“Mattie, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Cass filled you in on the situation?”
“She did.”
I am about to elaborate when I hear a male voice in the background speaking to Izzy. “Do you want to bend over now or should I wait until you’re done on the phone?” Izzy tells me to hold on a second and I hear his muffled voice as he answers, though I can’t make out any of the words.
“Mattie?” he says, returning to the phone. “I should only be here another half hour or so. You and Arnie snap some photos, get what info you can from the cops, and do your basic scene sketches. But wait until I get there to do anything with the bodies.”
“Okay.”
“This will be your first experience with serious decomp. Are you okay with that?”
“I’ll be fine,” I tell him with far more conviction than I feel.
“All right then. Go ahead, but take it slow.” I’m about to ask him another question when I hear him suck in his breath and yelp, “Damn it, Adam! I was talking to her, not you,” followed by the doctor’s hasty apology.
I can’t help but giggle and when Izzy hears me he says, “Knock it off or I’ll start revealing your real name to everyone.”
“My lips are sealed,” I say, suddenly serious. Other than Izzy, no one outside of my family knows my real name. I’ve always assumed my mother was on some really good drugs when she gave it to me. Fortunately, the only place it can be found is on my birth certificate. Mother apparently took pity on me afterward and nicknamed me Mattie. It’s the only name anyone has ever used since.
“See you out there, Izzy,” I say, and then I disconnect before I can hear anything else.
Five minutes later I’m at the office, changed into a pair of scrubs, and on my way upstairs to Arnie’s lab. I’m still trying to shake off the mental image of Izzy bent over an exam table getting his where-the-sun-don’t-shine probe, and I’m almost looking forward to the distraction of badly decomposed bodies.
Arnie spends most of his time entrenched in his second-floor lab. Our facilities are well equipped and larger than one might expect to find in a town of this size because the ME’s office covers not just Sorenson, but the entire county, even overlapping into adjacent counties at times. When Izzy took the ME’s position seven years ago, he was pretty aggressive in securing some of the very best and latest equipment for the office. As a result, we now process some of our own evidence whereas in years past it was all sent to Madison, a practice that led to increased expenses and considerable delays. But our machinery capabilities are far greater than our manpower. As our only lab tech, Arnie does on-call time twenty-four-seven and typically puts in sixty-plus hours a week, a situation that is beginning to wear on him. Izzy has hinted that he would like me to take some classes and become certified to work as Arnie’s assistant but he hasn’t pushed it too hard yet, given that I’m still learning what I need to know to function as Izzy’s assistant.
In the meantime, Arnie manages what he can and ships the rest off to the Madison lab. He hates sending anything out and would prefer to keep it all in-house, but as a one-man department, his abilities are limited.
Before coming to work with Izzy, Arnie was as an evidence technician for the L.A. Coroner’s office. I’m not sure why he left there or how he ended up in Podunk, Wisconsin, and when I’ve tried to ask him or Izzy about it, they always skirt around the issue. I suspect it might have something to do with Arnie’s fixation on conspiracy theories. He believes there are eyes in the sky watching our every move, spies circulating among us disguised as homeless people, and that the moon landing was faked but aliens really did crash in Roswell. Despite his paranoia and my suspicion that most of his friends wear aluminum foil hats, I like Arnie.
I find him in his lab, his head bent over a microscope, and he hails me by name without looking up, before I
