Detective Defender. Marilyn Pappano
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Yellow-and-black crime scene tape draped limply from crypt to crypt, cordoning off the area where the body lay. Uniformed cops stood outside the perimeter, detectives and crime scene investigators inside. Between them, he caught a glimpse of legs, ankles showing between sodden pants hiked to the calves and canvas sneakers, the skin unusually colorless under the bright lights.
“Detectives.” A grim-faced patrolman lifted the tape so they could duck under, keeping his back to the scene. He looked so young that this was likely his first body, and he was doing his best to avoid it.
It was far from Jimmy’s first, and probably just as far from his last.
“What do we know?” he asked, shoving his hands into his coat pockets.
It was a uniform who answered. “Neighbor out with his dog saw suspicious activity by the angel.” He gestured behind him with one hand. “Myself and my partner didn’t see anything from the street, but when we walked over here, we found...” He gave the body a quick nod that prevented any details from registering.
Everyone under the canopy mimicked his look at the victim, then turned to the angel. It adorned a spire atop the crypt twenty feet away, its gray marble turned dingy by time and weather. Her face was tilted to the sky, her wings stretched out. In prayer? Pleading? The promise of protection?
Had the victim seen the angel? Had she had a chance to pray? Or had she already been dead when she was brought here?
“She has no ID,” Leland, the senior of the crime scene guys, said. He and Jimmy had started with the department at the same time, Jimmy an ambitious patrol officer, looking for arrests, wanting to make a meteoric rise through the ranks, and Leland a lab rat, perfectly content with handling corpses. The dead were so much less annoying than the living, he’d insisted. He’d risen through the ranks, too, to the point that he often had to deal with the living, as well. “No driver’s license, no credit card, no jewelry, nothing. Just two hundred bucks cash in her jacket pocket and the cell phone with its one call.”
“So it wasn’t a robbery.”
Jimmy didn’t notice who’d stated the obvious—not him, not Murphy. He studied the woman instead: wet hair of dirty blond or light brown. Thin face, sunken cheeks, deep shadows under her eyes. Lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, signs of worry or general unhappiness. Her T-shirt clung to her in wet folds, once white but now a vague shade of gray. She’d lost weight recently, judging from the long loop of drawstring that held her pants around her skinny hips and from the way her skin sat uncomfortably on her frame. Her clothes were cheap, maybe secondhand, but something about her didn’t strike him as a secondhand-clothes person. There was a line on her left index finger where she’d long worn a ring, not a tan but a bit of shiny skin where the ring had rubbed back and forth, and all ten of her nails were bitten to the quick.
What there wasn’t was an obvious cause of death. She didn’t look like she was just sleeping, though Jimmy had seen his share of dead people who did. No, it was apparent with the quickest of glances that this woman was dead. The lights were out; the soul wasn’t home.
Which meant the cause was on her back side. “Can you roll her over?” he asked, and the crime scene guys moved to comply. Something dark stained the back of her head. Blood, possibly from a blunt object, possibly the entry wound of a small-caliber bullet.
“There’s something under her shirt,” Leland said, and they returned her to her original position. He pulled up her T-shirt to reveal a large bandage, sticky clear film protecting some type of dressing. It was centered over her chest, crossing her breasts, extending above and below several inches.
“So she has surgery, someone kills her and dumps her in the cemetery?” It was the same voice that had stated the obvious earlier. This time Jimmy looked and identified its owner as one of the crime scene guys who’d so far managed to stay on the perimeter, not doing much of anything. Maybe one of their lab rats who’d thought working out in the field would be fun, or maybe a new guy who was destined to get on Jimmy’s last nerve pretty quickly.
Ignoring his coworker, Leland began peeling back the edge of the dressing. He worked it loose carefully, teasing the adhesive from the skin, as gentle as if his patient were alive and watching, then abruptly he stopped. He looked a moment, then folded back the flap of bandage as his distraught gaze met Jimmy’s. “I think we’ve found the cause of death.”
Jimmy and Murphy both leaned forward, concentrating on the small area of chest that had been revealed—not pale smooth skin but a wickedly ugly wound and, inside, emptiness. Not real emptiness, of course, but the essence of something missing. Something important.
“Damn.” Jimmy breathed the word the same time Murphy did, then looked to Leland for confirmation. Leland nodded.
“The killer removed her heart.”
* * *
After a restless night, Martine gave up any hope for peaceful sleep, pulled her robe on and shuffled to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. She’d had dreams all night—ugly, unsettling ones involving deep shadows, woods, birds screeching that had raised the hairs on her arms. If she were fanciful, she’d say the fog was keeping the happy dreams at bay. It didn’t want her nights to be any more cheerful than her days had become since it moved in.
“It’s just fog,” she groused, pouring cream and sugar into her coffee. “A cloud of tiny water droplets hovering above the earth. It doesn’t think or care or even know you exist, Tine.”
The old, almost forgotten nickname made her pause before taking the first sip of coffee. Where was Paulina this morning? Had she checked into a motel or crawled into a hole and pulled it in after her? Had she stayed safe last night? Had she gotten anything hot to eat?
Was she crazy?
Martine had tried to put all the memories behind her when she got back to the shop yesterday, a task made easier by an influx of tourists. They’d worn a variety of N’Awlins T-shirts, a few had sported Mardi Gras beads or feather boas around their necks, and they’d done their best to project the carefree, good-time-in-the-Big-Easy air that most tourists came by naturally, but it had been a struggle for this group. Even inside the brightly lit shop, they’d huddled together in small numbers, their voices muted, lamenting the lack of sunshine and the mild weather they’d expected. They’d been worried without knowing why, and they had cleaned the shelves of every single good luck charm and candle in sight before leaving the way they’d come.
After the shop was closed, after Martine had finished off a po’boy from down the street and locked herself inside her cozy apartment, the memories had come knocking again. A search of the internet had proved true one of Paulina’s claims: Callie Winchester had died three months ago in Seattle. The details reported by the news outlets were scarce, but the obituary confirmed it was their Callie. Her parents, who’d once lived two blocks from Martine’s family, were now in Florida, and her twin, Tallie, made her home in London.
Callie...dead. Though Martine hadn’t seen her in twenty-four years, though she hadn’t thought about her much in twenty of those years, it hurt her heart to know she was dead. Callie had always been so vibrant, full of humor and wild ideas that usually ended in trouble for all of them. She’d been beautiful, with sleek black hair that reached down her back, olive skin and gray eyes, and she’d done a perfect imitation of her posh mother’s British accent, but there had been nothing refined or elegant about her huge booming laugh. Tallie, identical in every way except the laugh, had compared it to a braying jackass, which merely made Callie laugh even harder.
And now she was gone. Someone had stolen her very life and discarded her for someone else to deal with, as if she were no more important than an empty burger wrapper.
That thought raised goose bumps on Martine’s arms and stirred an ache in her gut. She was browsing through the pantry, looking for something to settle it, when the doorbell rang, echoing through the floorboards.
The clock on the microwave showed the time was 7:23. No one came to visit her before nine, and rarely without a phone call to alert her. Maybe it