“Not yet. The lab work wasn’t in when I left headquarters.”
“How about a description?”
“Young.”
Jesse looked at Frank questioningly.
“Pretty,” Frank added.
“Oh, yeah,” Jesse said. “She’s just come down to us.” He looked at a large open accountant’s book. “Laura Angelica Devereaux,” he repeated, “Number Fifteen.” He looked quickly toward Karen. “You with him?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” Jesse said softly and with a hint of surprise.
“Miss Devereaux’s sister,” Frank explained.
Jesse smiled quietly. “Sorry, ma’am. She looked like a nice young girl.”
Angelica was the sort who didn’t fit the morgue’s usual cast of characters, and Frank could see Jesse’s curiosity as clearly as if questions were written on his forehead. How had she been caught up in the general web? How did her body end up drenched in a light which usually swept down upon the poor, the deranged, the ones for whom the last wound was very much like the first?
Jesse shifted slightly in his chair. “Anyway, she’s in Number Fifteen. I guess you’ll be going with her, Frank?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, then,” Jesse said quietly. “You know where it is. Last door on your right.”
“Thanks, Jesse,” Frank said. He stepped around the desk and glanced back toward Karen. “This way.”
She followed him immediately, keeping to his pace.
Frank opened the door and walked to the wall of refrigerated units which stood at the rear of the room. They were made of stainless steel, and he could see Karen’s face reflected in the door of Number Fifteen as he placed his hand on the latch.
“Sometimes, they look a little different,” he warned.
“Open it,” Karen said.
The latch clicked sharply as Frank drew open the door, and he noticed that Karen’s body stiffened at the sound, then held that stiffness as he pulled out the long, metal carriage which held Angelica’s body.
“I am sorry,” Frank whispered as he drew down the zipper and exposed Angelica’s upturned face. It was bloodlessly white, except for the purplish lips.
Karen drew her eyes slowly down to her sister’s face. She held them there for a long time, as if trying to explain some facet of it, the long, graceful arch of her eyebrows, the smooth line of her nose, the large, slightly oval eyes.
“She was so beautiful,” Karen said softly. She continued to gaze at Angelica’s face. “So beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“At every moment beautiful. A beautiful baby. A beautiful child.”
Frank nodded.
“A beautiful woman,” Karen said. She looked at Frank. “There’s nothing more powerful than that.”
Frank closed the black plastic bag over Angelica’s face. “I have to ask you. It’s a technical thing. Is this your sister?”
“Yes.”
“We can go now,” Frank said. He pushed the carriage back into the wall and closed the door.
Karen did not move. She continued to look at the closed door, as if studying her own marred reflection.
“Miss Devereaux,” Frank repeated. “We can go now.”
She shook her head. “Not yet,” she whispered. Her eyes remained on the stainless steel door, but it was as if they were passing through it, were still in the dark cold vault gazing at Angelica’s face. “Sparks flew from her,” she said. “My father used to pick her up in his arms and laugh. ‘Sparks fly from you,’ he’d say.” Her eyes remained on the closed door, but Frank could tell that her mind was somewhere else, and that everything in her life was passing through the dark funnel of this moment. Her body grew even more rigid, and slowly her hand lifted toward the latch.
Frank took it quickly. “No,” he said, then released it. It fell limply to her side.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because it won’t help anything.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been here before.”
“All right,” Karen said. She turned slowly and walked straight down the corridor.
“Just go on out to the car,” Frank told her, once they were back at the entrance. “I want to talk to Jesse for a minute.”
She was standing beside the car smoking a cigarette when he joined her a few minutes later.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he told her.
“What did you talk to him about?” she asked.
“A few things. Technical.”
“What? I want to know, exactly.”
Frank took out his notebook and flipped to his last entries. “Well, the body came down about a half-hour ago. The lab report should be on my desk by now.” He turned the page. “No outside inquiries about her.”
“Do you keep everything in that book?” Karen asked.
“It helps my memory,” Frank said. He closed the book. “You took it well, Miss Devereaux.”
A slender black eyebrow crawled upward. “Did I?”
“Better than most.”
“With less feeling, you mean?”
“With less show of feeling.”
“Is there a difference?”
“I think so,” Frank said. He opened the car door. “Come, I’ll take you home.”
It was late afternoon, and the traffic had begun to build steadily toward its rush-hour snarl. Frank knew that it would be a long tangled line from downtown to West Paces Ferry, and given what Karen had just been through, it seemed unnecessarily brutal to add at least an hour of stop-and-go traffic to the day’s ordeal.
“We could stop somewhere if you like,” he said.
She looked at him curiously. “Stop somewhere?”
“And let the traffic die down a little,” Frank explained.
“All right.”
A few minutes later, Frank pulled into a small tavern on Peachtree Street. He felt the need for a drink, but he felt even more that he needed a dark, quiet room, a place away from the heat and traffic.
“We can talk about anything you want,” he said, after they’d ordered their drinks. “I mean, you don’t have to …”
“Was she murdered?” Karen asked immediately.
“Probably. We don’t know.”
“But wouldn’t it be easy to tell?”
“If she were shot or strangled, yes, it would be easier to tell. As it is, any number of things could have happened to her—some sort of accident maybe, hell, even a heart attack, I don’t know. If someone was with her at the time, and that someone panicked, didn’t know what to do, finally just brought her to that lot and left her there —well, it wouldn’t be murder. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.”
“Her body then, it wasn’t …?”
“There were no signs of a struggle,” Frank said, putting it as mildly as he knew how. “And she was fully clothed when we found her.” He shrugged. “Except for a shoe.”
“A shoe?”
“We found it a few feet away,” Frank said.
The drinks came and Frank looked at his, but did not taste it. “Look,” he said, “we don’t know exactly how Angelica died. We only know that certain common things didn’t happen to her.”
Karen watched him from over the rim of her glass. “Common things?”
