CHAPTER 40

      WHEN CARSON PICKED UP Michael at his apartment house, he got in the car, looked her over, and said, “Those are yesterday’s clothes.”

      “Suddenly you’re a fashion critic.”

      “You look … rumpled.”

      As she pulled away from the curb, she said, “Rumpled, my ass. I look like a cow pie in a bad wig.”

      “You didn’t get any sleep?”

      “Maybe I’m done with sleep forever.”

      “If you’ve been up more than twenty-four hours, you shouldn’t be driving,” he said.

      “Don’t worry about it, Mom.” She took a tall Starbucks cup from between her thighs, drank through a straw. “I’m so wired on caffeine, I’ve got the reflexes of a pit viper.”

      “Do pit vipers have quick reflexes?”

      “You want to get in a pit with one and see?”

      “You are wound tight. What’s happened?”

      “Saw a ghost. Scared the crap out of me.”

      “What’s the punch line?”

      What she hadn’t been able to say to Kathy Burke, she could say to Michael. In police work, partners were closer than mere friends. They had better be. They daily trusted each other with their lives.

      If you couldn’t share everything with your partner, you needed a new partner.

      Nevertheless, she hesitated before she said, “He seemed to walk out of walls, disappear into them. Big sucker, but he moves quicker than the eye.”

      “Who?”

      “You listening to anything I’m saying? The ghost, that’s who.”

      “You spiking that coffee with something?”

      “He said he’s made from pieces of criminals.”

      “Slow down. You’re driving too fast.”

      Carson accelerated. “The hands of a strangler, one heart from a mad arsonist, one from a child molester. His life force from a thunderstorm.”

      “I don’t get it.”

      “Neither do I.”

      BY THE TIME Carson parked in front of Fullbright’s Funeral Home, she had told Michael everything that happened in Allwine’s apartment.

      His face revealed no skepticism, but his tone of voice was the equivalent of raised eyebrows: “You were tired, in a weird place—”

      “He took a gun away from me,” she said, which might have been the essence of her astonishment, the one thing about the experience that had seemed the most supernatural. “No one takes a gun away from me, Michael. You want to try?”

      “No. I enjoy having testicles. All I’m saying is that he was dressed in black, the apartment is black, so the disappearing trick was probably just a trick.”

      “So maybe he manipulated me, and I saw what he wanted me to see. Is that it?”

      “Doesn’t that make more sense?”

      “Sure damn does. But if it was a trick, he should be headlining a magic act in Vegas.”

      Looking at the funeral home, Michael said, “Why’re we here?”

      “Maybe he didn’t really move faster than the eye, and maybe he didn’t in fact vanish into thin air, but he was dead-on when he said Allwine was in despair, wanted to die … but couldn’t kill himself.”

      From a pocket she withdrew the four memorial booklets and handed them to Michael.

      “Bobby had like a hundred of these,” she continued, “in a drawer of his nightstand. All from different funerals at this place. Death appealed to him.”

      She got out of the car, slammed the driver’s door, and met Michael on the sidewalk.

      He said, “‘Life force from a thunderstorm.’ What the hell does that mean?”

      “Sometimes like a soft lightning throbs through his eyes.”

      Hurrying at her side, Michael said, “You’ve always been stone solid until now, like Joe Friday with no Y chromosome. Now you’re Nancy Drew on a sugar rush.”

      Like so many things in New Orleans, the mortuary seemed as much a dream place as a reality. It had once been a Gothic Revival mansion and no doubt still served as the mortician’s residence as well as his place of business. The weight of the lavish rococo millwork must have been only a few pounds shy of the critical load needed to buckle the eaves, implode the walls, and collapse the roof.

      Live oaks dating to the plantation era shaded the house, while camellias, gardenias, mimosa, and tea roses cast a scene-saturating perfume. Bees buzzed lazily from bloom to bloom, too fat and happy to sting, besotted by rich nectar.

      At the front door, Carson rang the bell. “Michael, don’t you sometimes sense there’s more to life than the grind – some amazing secret you can almost see from the corner of your eye?” Before he could reply, she plunged on: “Last night I saw something amazing … something I can’t put into words. It’s almost like UFOs exist.”

      “You and me – we’ve put guys in psych wards who talk like that.”

      A bearish, dour-looking man answered the door and acknowledged in the most somber tones that he was indeed Taylor Fullbright.

      Flashing her police ID, Carson said, “Sir, I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead, but we’re here on a rather urgent matter.”

      Brightening at the discovery that they were not a bereaved couple in need of counseling, Fullbright revealed his true convivial nature. “Come in, come in! I was just cremating a customer.”