Dancing With Werewolves (30 page)

Chapter Fifty-One

As usual, Snow had implied more than he gave away.

The next day I looked up the address of the coroner’s office. Most municipalities had medical examiners nowadays, but Vegas still called its head man for dealing with dead bodies a coroner.

An online map site showed the Clark County Coroner’s office located on a two-block-long street north of busy Charleston Boulevard, the east-west street that also featured a lot of vintage shops, I noticed as Dolly and I cruised along Charleston with the top down.

I figured I’d need fresh air coming back from the county morgue.

Pinto Lane was not far from Our Lady of Las Vegas Convent school. I was reminded of poor Father Black. Imagine if he saw me driving Miss Dolly these days! My vintage Caddy was as long and black as a hearse, but the red interior and white ragtop gave her a jaunty rather than a funereal look. Still, I could smuggle a few dead bodies in her huge trunk, if I wanted to.

Smuggling dead bodies made me think of Ric. I didn’t know if he’d be proud or annoyed that I was taking the investigation by the horns and waltzing right over to interrogate the coroner himself. Having been a reporter gave me the nerve to ask anybody anything, but without official credentials, I wasn’t sure that nerve alone would work.

The low-profile morgue building had sculptural brushed aluminum lettering on the outside. I made out the name, Grady Bahr, Coroner.

Dolly dwarfed the other cars and vans in the lot. I slammed the door with a satisfying thump and went in through the glass door into a lobby that looked like a dentist’s office waiting room.

A young woman at the walk-up window eyed my blue suit and hot pink pumps. I figured Business Brazen would work on coroners as well as rock stars.

“Delilah Street, PI,” I said. “I’d like to see Dr. Bahr.”

Darn, I needed to run some pro-looking business cards on the enchanted cottage computer. Maybe pixies would do the graphics for me.

“You don’t have an appointment.”

“Like death, investigative matters have a way of just cropping up.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Street, but the coroner is a busy official. You can’t see the coroner without an appointment.”

The bland blond wood door to my left opened. A guy who had enough rusty-gray eyebrow hair to go to Halloween parties as a caterpillar couple peeped through.

“Fortunately, Miss Street, I can see
you
via the lobby surveillance camera.” The sharp pale hazel eyes behind half-glasses eyed my shoes, and then my calves, including the sweet silver ankle bracelet of dangling . . . skulls.
Oh, Snow.
“Come right in. I have a few moments. It’s fine, Stephanie.”

Stephanie rolled her eyes at having her pronouncements ignored, but I was through the door.

Dr. Bahr was a big, vital man in the expected white lab coat; he bustled me to an empty conference room.

“I don’t get a chance to see many attractive
live
young women,” he said, collapsing into a wheeled leather chair. “What totally inappropriate information did you want from me?”

“No more than you want from me,” I grinned back.

We grinned at each other like a pair of jolly death heads. I’d run into his type before: late middle-aged authority figure who liked to ogle the ladies but meant no harm.

He was pleased that I recognized we could deal.

“I need information on the old murder in Sunset Park.”

“
Hmm.
Now that’s a sensitive case.”

“I helped find the bodies.”

“You?” He was looking suspicious for the first time.

“And Ric Montoya.”

The eyebrows reached for the sky. “So you’re an associate of the Cadaver Kid? Why isn’t he here?”

“We’re not married, Dr. Bahr,” I said coyly. “He’s been in Mexico a lot lately.”

“What else is new?” His mouth seesawed left and right with indecision, then the flat of his hand slapped the bare conference table. “All right. I’ll answer what I can, but if one word appears in or on the media—”

“Off the record, I swear.”

“Can’t be too careful. We had to shield all our windows from paparazzi and morgue-robbers. You from Vegas?”

I shook my head. “Kansas.”

“You’d be amazed what folks in this town would do to get a hold of a piece of celebrity bodies.”

“Nothing amazes me, but the truth.”

“Ah. One of those. All right. Ask away.”

“The age of the skeletons—”

“Dead and buried and left alone for sixty-five years or so. That’s a good record for undisturbed graves in Vegas, especially now that all the supernaturals are coming out of the closet.”

“Their age at death, I meant.”

“Young. She was about seventeen. He maybe twenty.”

Her Romeo and Juliet, yes!

“And they weren’t killed the same way.”

Bahr herded his caterpillars into a unibrow frown. “No. Now how did you know to ask that?”

“Just a suspicion.”

“You have good suspicions, Miss Street, is it?” He leaned around the conference table corner to eye my ankles again. “And a rather grisly taste in jewelry.”

“I thought grisly was up your alley.”

“And down my Street, maybe,” he quipped, laughing. “Okay, since you suspect so darn much I’m gonna make it easy for you. Normally I’d take you on a tour of the facility first. We have an outstanding decaying corpse room, and a state of the art body parts storage system.”

“I don’t have time for the Grand Tour. Maybe another day. I want to know about the thirty pieces of silver, the gambling chip, and the causes of death.”

“You
were
there.” He was impressed. “That’s all top secret. But there were twenty-nine pieces of silver scattered over the bodies.”

“Twenty-nine? Was the gaming chip supposed to be thirty?”

“Or thirty-four pieces of silver if you count the pancaked bullets.”

“Silver bullets?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He leaned close to whisper. “You don’t seem too surprised.”

“Her. The bullets were for her.”

He nodded.

“And the man?”

“Too young to be considered a man. The bone growth showed him to be twenty, but the age of the bone would have better come from a catacomb.”

I felt a chill in the super-cool air-conditioning. For the first time I detected a fruity scent of decay overlaid by a wave of bitter orange.

“What killed him?”

“Not who?”

“That’s for me and Ric to find out.”

“‘What’ may describe it better. There were thirty pieces of silver. Silver dollars. You were right. But only twenty-nine in the grave. The last one was in the jaws of the man, and he was killed with an axe. Spinal cord severed at the neck.”

Now I frowned, and Bahr leaned close again. “One old world method of laying a vampire to rest forever. Coin in the mouth; head cut off, buried for eternity. Except you and Ric came along. You have the Kid’s same . . . knack?”

“No,” I said, a bit stunned by my instincts turning out to be true.

“Good. I find it rather creepy.”

I sat stunned, then laughed! Trust a coroner to find dowsing for the dead “creepy.” He was first and foremost a doctor, a scientist.

“We work together,” he added. “He had to tell me how; otherwise, it would have hampered my reports. I’m surprised he let you in on his facility.”

“You let me into yours.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “Anything else?”

“It was suggested to me that Ric’s wooden dowsing rods could act as a sort of psychic stake.”

“You mean kill, as well as find?”

I nodded.

“Interesting theory, but I doubt it.”

“What do the police know?”

“Shot and axed. That’s all they want to know at the moment. These Millennium Revelation changes have freaked out the criminal justice system. It’s just been a few years; the laws are a patchwork that’s being fought out in the courts. I hope I’ve been of service.”

I stood. “Very much so, Dr. Bahr.” I held out my hand for a shake and he took it in his big paw.

“Call me Grisly. All my friends do. Not that there are very many of them in my line of work.”

I worked it through. Grisly/Grizzly Bahr. “Black humor gets us all through.”

“You sound like you know a little of what I’m about, Miss Street.”

I nodded.

“Bring Ric the next time you come. Not that I’m eager to share the riches, but he’s spending too much time in Juarez. He needs a social life and less morbid atmosphere.”

And then he laughed.

So did I, so I left.

                                                                                          * * * *

Driving Dolly home from Pinto Lane, I had the white top down so the wind would freshen my hair and dispel the orange-scented decay of the coroner’s facility.

That’s when I noticed a huge billboard above the Strip advertising Madrigal’s show at the Gehenna.

I’d seen lots of photos of the Strip featuring similarly huge billboards of Siegfried and Roy and one of their white tigers before Roy’s tragic accident shortly after the Millennium Revelation. (White tigers are magnificent creatures but they don’t hold the same allure for me now that I’ve seen Snow’s shape-shifting bodyguard-cum-personal assistant, Grizelle.)

I’d probably driven by this and matching billboards a dozen times since coming to Vegas, never noticing the striking image of Madrigal posed with a delicate and fey familiar assistant on each brawny bare shoulder. What almost made me make Dolly shriek to a sudden stop was the image of my own airbrushed face behind the trio. And the words:
Night
ly: Miss Maggie, dead and alive, only at the Gehenna.

The frenetic Strip traffic flow doesn’t allow for gawking,

so I drove on, stewing. Why not paste up a giant
Wanted: Dead or Alive!
poster of me all over town? Every Maggie freak around would be hunting me everywhere. The Rococo lettering style actually read “Margie,” but you had to look really hard to see that. I was sure Nightwine’s non-CinSim lawyers would make hash of that dodge, but legal action could take years.

So it was up to me to provide some illegal action. I had to get that semi-CinSim of myself off the stage and the billboards and out of the Gehenna for good. Pronto! I gunned Dolly onto a side street and headed us overland to Nightwine’s place. My place.

When I got there, Quicksilver was out and Ric still wasn’t answering his cell phone. I’d tried calling repeatedly to tell him the news from the coroner’s office.

I left a message that I had business at the Gehenna. That worried me a little, both of them being out of touch, but I faced a bigger worry: Margie at the Gehenna. There was a slice of me still there and I had to get her out somehow. Right now!

While I paced the cottage living area, I noticed how sparkling clean everything was. I never caught my cleaning crew in action. The place was indeed enchanted, as Godfrey had said. I could use some enchanted good ideas about now.

Only one idea occurred. Could I sneak into the Gehenna’s theater before tonight’s first show, avoid Madrigal and his creepy-crawly assistants, and do something about Margie?

I went upstairs to change into black cat-burglar clothing, just in case.

I headed down the upstairs hall and turned off into my bedroom.

I stopped.

Walked back into the hall.

It was always in shadow, being an interior passage with no strong lighting source, so the mirror at the end of the hall was always murky, useless for checking how you really looked. You’d only get an approximation.

Only now I got . . . nothing. No image. No reflection. Nothing.

For a moment I stood frozen. I hadn’t reflected in the silver tray at Snow’s, either. The old legends said vampires couldn’t reflect in a mirror, but that was then and the Millennium Revelation had rewritten the rules. I hoped so, because I definitely didn’t want to be a vampire. Anything but that! Well, anything but a werewolf.

I went to the kitchen, got my flashlight, and returned to the hall. I turned on the strong beam and walked toward the eerily empty mirror. The flashlight reflected like the one-eyed headlight of a locomotive rushing toward a film camera.

But
I
didn’t move a muscle, according to the mirror.
I
was invisible. Not there. At all.

I think my heart stopped at what that meant. Was I now locked out of my own medium, the silver-backed mercurial magic of a mirror?

Oh, my.

I’d come up nose-to-nose with the glass. It wasn’t the front-surface mirror Madrigal had showed me, the mirror that I’d been able to walk through with the assistance of his magical powers. Yet I couldn’t
see
that this wasn’t that kind of mirror, because no matter how close I came, I saw nothing of myself. No reflection.

Because I had been separated from my reflection.
My reflection remained behind at the Gehenna, just barely a material girl, a . . . zombie animated by Madrigal. My God, maybe that was my soul! It was
me
. . . certainly, a part of me.

I shuddered at the implications: yet another me out there, to be used and manipulated.

No way.

My fingertips felt the cold smooth surface of the mirror, even if the mirror didn’t trouble to reflect them back. This was an enchanted cottage. The mirror must be enchanted too. Maybe I could use it.

I pressed my hot, anxious cheek to the icy surface. It was there. Only I wasn’t. Jeannie hid somewhere behind it. Margie could be there too, especially since she was a part of me.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the realest of them all?

“You,”
a voice whispered back to my unspoken question.

I stood there, shocked. Maybe I was hallucinating. The word conveyed no particular gender, and it sounded so distant that it echoed a bit.

I swallowed, playing this by ear, by my ear pressed to the cold glass. I thought I could feel a slight pulse, like a heart beating. Weird.

I pulled back. “Then let me see myself,” I said aloud.

No answer, but my fingertips felt the icy glass warm beneath them. First fingerprints formed where I’d touched the surface, blackened whorls that looked like they’d been inked by an old-fashioned police process.