You and I, Me and You (3 page)

Cadence's baker boy had come back when George shrieked. “Shiro!” He put his arms around me, and I allowed it. I liked Cadence's baker boy, not least because he could tell me apart from my sisters. Many cannot, which only proves the general sinking of IQs. “Just like you to show up after all the heavy lifting is done.”

“Indeed. I am sorry to leave before doing my share.”

“I was only teasing,” he said. He raised my hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles. “Sure you really want to go?”

“It is not a question of want,” I told him with real regret.

My dog, Olive, heard my voice and came running outside, frisking about my ankles as I knelt and petted her. “New house,” I told her as she looked up at me with unconditional adoration, “same rules. Off the furniture, Olive.” I was not sure why I was compelled to waste my breath in this matter: Cadence called our dog Pearl and let her on the couch, Patrick let her on the
beds,
and Adrienne … I shuddered to think.

“That poor fucked-up dog,” George observed, shaking his head. It wasn't often he could sit in moral judgment of us so was unable to keep his mouth shut. “Different names and different rules.… Olive/Pearl/Dawg doesn't have a chance. Also, Dawg? Dumbest name ever.”

“We didn't give it to her,” I replied, annoyed. Her cretin former owner had referred to his dog as Dawg. You could hear the
w
. “And your shrill harping only shows your limited knowledge regarding all things canine.” I straightened up from petting her. She had a small, white, olive-shaped patch of fur on her black head: Olive. “Shall we go?”

“You could kill George,” Patrick wheedled, “and, while you disposed of the body and flawlessly covered up the crime, I could make you some hot chocolate.”

“You are Satan himself, tempting me with two of my fondest desires.” Cadence's baker made what he called “Flanders cocoa.” With real chunks of real chocolate. Real milk (whole). No powder and no water; he was not a barbarian. Sipping his concoctions was like drinking chocolaty velvet. Alas …

“Can we please go look at a corpse now?” George whined, then added in a mutter, “I'd like to have one Friday in my life where I don't say that. Not too goddamned much to ask, right?”

“Yes indeed,” I replied. I spared a last look at Cadence's Band-Aid, the house painted in what George had perfectly described as thundercloud colors. From the outside it looked like a house anyone would want: two stories, the garage and main building shaped like barns, a housing trend I feared would never fall out of favor. Two-car garage, the second door twice as wide as the one on the right. Small sidewalk running beside the driveway to the wooden front porch and the cloud-purple door. It looked like normal people lived there. Perhaps were even happy there.

Was it any wonder my poor sister, who could be as deluded and psychotic as our sister Adrienne, wanted it so badly?

 

chapter seven

“You've scarred me
for life, you horrible bitch.” George drove one-handed while he rubbed his ear with the other.

“Yes, but that was years ago.” Unmoved by George's sweaty whining, I stared out the car window and tried not to feel like his car was digesting me. “Tell me.”

“Well, here's the recap: horrible bitch, I hate you, my ear feels hot and cold at the same time, Cadence is an idiot, her house is stupid—”

“About the murders, you tongue-flapping imbecile.”

“Ooh!” The strangest things delighted this man. “That's a good one. I'm putting that one in my blog and
you
won't get
any
of the
credit
. And it's another Sue Suicide. Which I'm now gonna start calling Sussudio, because Phil Collins is a living god and, also, is old enough to almost
be
God.”

Ah. “Sue Suicide” was George's pet phrase for pseudo suicide. The victims—this would be number three—were killed by a person or persons unknown who made the scenes look like assisted suicides. It was a new one for both of us, and several of BOFFO's in-house psychiatrists and profilers were nearly in ecstasy at the chance to interview such a killer. If we caught him/her/them, they would likely black out from joy.

But first we had to catch him/her/them, and so far we had not. Not only was the person or persons unknown still killing, we had no idea who or where or why.
When
was a little easier, thanks to current forensic methods. I would have traded a
when
for a
who
in a cold moment.

George brought us to Wentworth Apartments, a large, neatly kept three-story apartment building in West St. Paul. The neighborhood was doubtless rather peaceful when there weren't multiple police units parked haphazardly in the parking lot, and several police officers, ME staff, and paramedics walking briskly back and forth across the wide expanse of lawn in front of the building. The victim had no use for paramedics, of course, but policy was policy; if the body had been pronounced, they would be leaving soon. The ambulance must needs make way for the ME's car: the circle of life. Or, ah, death.

Though it was winter, several of the people on the scene wore only light coats, and not just because it had been the mildest of seasons thus far. The adrenaline kept one warm, even if all one did was observe the crime scene. It sounds odd, but it's true.

“All locals, I see.” I said this in a neutral tone, but George knew what I was pondering.

“Yeah, lucky us … the first Feds out here. Don't sweat a thing, Shiro, I'm super-duper sure they'll play nice.”

I snorted but made no comment. As I escaped from George's car, I saw a young couple—she as dark as he was blond—who had been on their way to the rental office. They stood still and made no sound, hands clasped like an adult version of Hansel and Gretel as they took in the choreographed chaos, but their big eyes told the story, and as one, they turned and hurried back to their car.

I did not judge. Although I would not let proximity to a murder dissuade me from renting in the suburbs (once I ascertained the mechanics of the crime and whether it affected rental rates), I did not expect average citizens (as if there were such things) to feel the way I did.

“Another apartment.” George, who had escaped his car just behind me, was looking over the building. “Again with this guy. He's got the luck of a pro athlete dodging rape charges.”

“He does,” I agreed.

“Ah! But! The dream team of Pinkman and That Crazy Lady are on the case, and the bad guys are doomed to sooner or later be arrested and run over. Maybe even in that order this time.”

I had to laugh. He was exasperating and awful, but so amusing when he wished to be.

We found and introduced ourselves to the OIC and made our presence known to various other law-enforcement types. Officer Lynn Rivers, an almost-friend who knew there were three people in our body, saw us and hurried over. “You lost the coin toss?”

“Her entire life,” George agreed. “What's up, Rivers?”

Lynn blinked, momentarily hypnotized by George's wretched tie
du jour
: bees bleeding out their eyes against a bright-green background. Then she managed to snap back to the crime scene. Because that's how dreadful George's ties were; the scene of a homicide is easier to bear. “More of the same, I'm sorry to say.” Lynn had half a dozen years of law enforcement experience and was known to pray wife-beaters would resist arrest, but her bright-blue eyes were dull with apprehension as she jerked her head toward the building. “You've got a secret FBI-sanctioned plan, right? What with all the evidence from the other murders?”

“All
what
evid—” George began, but my elbow-jab to his side made him hush. “Argh! Ribs!” Or at least talk about something else.

Lynn ignored our lack of professionalism, thank goodness. “And you're mere hours from closing in on the killers but can't tell us because we're locals and you're Feds, right? All part of your secret plan, though, so there's nothing to worry about? Right?”

“Yes indeed,” I said at the same time George said, “You bet.”

She found a smile from somewhere. When Officer Rivers wasn't fretting over serial killers in the neighborhood, she was quite a lovely young woman, a Minnesota stereotype with long legs, shaggy blond hair, the complexion of an eighteenth-century dairymaid, and of course lively blue eyes, the finest feature in a host of them. Some of her prettiness came back as she cheered herself up—you could actually see her making herself be less glum. It was interesting, and a talent I lacked.

“Golly. I feel safer already. You guys won't believe this; this time our guy—”

“Shhhh!” George held a finger in front of his lips, smiling. That simple motion and sound and expression drew attention to his long fingers, clear green eyes, and psychosis (not that pure sociopaths were psychotic, technically speaking). No psychologically intact human looked and sounded so anticipatory on the way to see something ghastly. “Don't spoil the surprise.”

“You're scaring the lady,” I said mildly.

Lynn shook her head. “You guys. I'd be horrified right now, George, and pulling you aside to ask you when you're gonna break your partner's neck, Shiro, except I think you're our best chance at getting this fuck-o.”

Hmm. Officer Rivers tended to go with “weirdo” or “nutjob” or “wife-beating jerkoff.” “Fuck-o” was new, and it told me all I needed to know about what had happened at Wentworth Apartments that day.

Officer Rivers turned and led us to apartment 4A, which, if law-enforcement officers were ever encouraged to use their imaginations, should also be known in all paperwork, reports, and various memorandum as Where the Ghastly Thing Happened.

Perhaps it was just as well that such hyperbole was discouraged.

 

chapter eight

We walked through
a neatly kept lobby and took the (
NEW IN 2011!!!
, the sign advised in hysterical type) elevator to the second floor, then walked down a hallway painted Boring Buff (also known as Does Not Show Dirt Too Badly), on a carpet that stood out in no way, through the door leading to 4A.

A digression: I liked Cadence's baker for getting us out of apartments. I was never meant to be a wasp in a hive, and that is how I thought of apartment buildings. Every corridor the same, every door. Every wall and elevator and stairwell. Every apartment (and never mind the inane yammer—“But this is a
two
-bedroom!”—they were all the same, the same, the same). It was a hive, another anonymous hive in a city full of them, and sometimes when I stood back and looked at an apartment building, I could almost see the residents crawling around in their little honeycomb cells, thinking everything they did mattered, while suspecting that in the long run it did not.

This put me in an acceptable frame of mind to examine a crime scene. And what a scene it was. Even if we had been civilians, had never been near a homicide, it would have been easy to find. Follow the milling uniforms and the smell of adrenaline and coffee. And blood, of course. Must not forget the blood. Even rookies recognized that scent—our long-buried prehistoric sensibilities knew what it was, which was why we tried to fluff up fur we no longer had in an attempt to make ourselves look bigger. See: “made my skin crawl” and “raised the hair on the nape of my neck” and “I just want to get the fuck
out
of here.”

We paused long enough to bootee our feet and pull on gloves, then we followed Lynn into an apartment that was almost preternaturally tidy. Focused on seeing the victim, I nevertheless felt something give me an internal nudge, what Cadence called tickling our brain. Something about the apartment being so clean bothered me; I made a mental note to give that further thought at another time.

The victim was in the living room, one bare of any proof of “living” save for a glass coffee table, a dark-green couch, and a gray easy chair. Nothing on the coffee table, no crumbs on the couch or chair—too neat, too clean.

Our victim was stretched out on the shower curtain the killer had thoughtfully brought in from the bathroom. There were signs of a struggle. There were also signs that the victim had lost the struggle; to wit, the corpse.

The man, a white male in his late twenties

(Problem. Big problem. The other vics were a white female age 47, an African-American female age 24, and a white male age 32.)

was pale in death, with a surprised expression:
how did it come to this?

“Now that's classy,” George said admiringly, hands on his hips as he surveyed the bleak scene. “After we nail this guy and beat him to death, I'm gonna shake his hand.”

“You are crude and horrid.”

“Yep.”

“And somewhat correct.”

“Which is what you
really
hate.”

I gave him a sour smile; like little George Washington in the fable, I could not tell a lie (this inspirational adage could never be proven and is considered apocryphal). It was the most original MO we'd seen in our careers,

(and lives)

filled with death and blood and loss. I could acknowledge the killer's originality without giving him or her or them kudos, something George could not.

“Cause of death,” Lynn began, pointing. The victim was wearing swim trunks

(Is that supposed to be a joke? Whose?)

and nothing else, making it easy to see the nick in his thigh. The killer had clipped the femoral artery. Death would not have taken long.

“Not fucking around,” George said. “Not this guy. See? Cut's at an angle, not straight across.”

Lynn blinked, but she wouldn't give George the satisfaction.

“Arteries are sphinctoral—they are designed to close off if damaged in a certain way.” I mimed a straight slash, then an angled cut. “The killer made an angular slash, which would have prevented it from closing off.”