Play Dead

Chapter 22

A little after midnight mortician Benjamin Ming arrived for work and unlocked the delivery door of the Hartzell, Tate, and Hartzell Funeral Home. He reached around the corner and flipped on the overhead lights while allowing the heavy door to close and lock behind him.

He went straight to his desk to look over his shift orders. Old man Hartzell had already called to fill him in, but Ben always double-checked.

Two bodies.

One straightforward embalming, one just a basic sprucing up.

Gary Turello. The guy who'd been exhumed.

Ben had heard about him on the news. He was being reburied, and Hartzell, Tate, and Hartzell had donated a marble headstone. It was advertising, but still a nice gesture, Ben conceded.

The embalming order was a thirty-two-year-old woman who'd died of cancer.

Ben wheeled her from the cooler and began preparations. He undressed the body, then gently stretched

and massaged the limbs in order to limber them up. After the body was washed, he sliced open an artery in the groin and one in the neck. While the blood drained into the table gutters, he returned to the walk-in cooler to retrieve Mr. Turello.

"Finch. Austin. Johnson," he said, checking the toe tags.

He straightened, hands on his waist, and perused the small room.

Hmm.

He rechecked the tags.

He lifted the sheets.

Old lady.

Middle-aged lady.

Fifty-something man.

All fresh. The women were scheduled for cremation after their funeral service; the guy was to be done tomorrow.

Where was Turello?

Ben's heart started to slam in alarm.

Had Hartzell, Tate, and Hartzell lost a body?

The soles of David's running shoes pounded against the sidewalk as he ran a familiar route through town.

There were three reasons he was running at four a.m.

One, he couldn't sleep.

Two, he hadn't had a chance to run for several days.

Three, he thought the odd jogging time might help him avoid Flora-who suddenly seemed to think she owned him because she'd convinced herself that she'd saved his life the other night.

She stopped by too often. She left messages on his cell phone.

David found her company easy. And certainly a distraction… but was she good for him? Was he good for her? Or were they just two smart but extremely messed-up people clinging to each other for comfort?

Yep.

As he neared Mary of the Angels, he slowed to a walk and cut to the left, stepping off the sidewalk and into the shadows of a magnolia tree. Keeping to the edges of the darkness, he stealthily approached his apartment, scanning the area for any sign of Flora.

He caught a shifting of shadows beneath the overhang at the front door.

Damn.

He glanced up the side of the building, to his room, where a dim light burned, and briefly considered trying to scale the stones and crawl in the window. That idea was quickly but reluctantly tossed out due to its lack of cool and a slant toward the juvenile.

He stepped from the shadows and approached the ivy-wrapped building. "What'll it be?" he asked. "Sex or conversation?"

Someone emerged from the recesses.

Dark, straight hair. Dark eyes. Pale skin.

Elise.

"I'm guessing you were expecting someone else."

"Forget what I said. Just an old Yankee idiom." He waved his hand in insignificance. "Roughly translated, it means 'Who goes there?'"

He wiped an arm across his sweaty forehead. "Now that I know the who answer to that question, what about the what? As in what are you doing here?"

"We've had another interesting development. Come on." She nodded her head toward the building. "Let's talk inside."

He unlocked the door with a key that was heavy and worn smooth. Side by side, they hurried up the marble steps and down the hall to his third-floor apartment.

Once inside with the door shut, she turned and faced him, her arms crossed.

"Remember how Gary Turello was supposed to be taken to a local funeral home?"

"If you're going to tell me Turello woke up in the morgue, I will then know that this is all a madman's dream, and that Mary of the Angels is really a mental institute."

Isobel came strutting from the bedroom, trying to appear casual while at the same time extremely interested in their guest.

"Turello didn't wake up, but he disappeared from the funeral home."

David tugged his sweat-soaked T-shirt over his head and used it to wipe his neck and chest. "You think he may have been accidentally cremated?"

"Seems logical, doesn't it?"

Isobel circled Elise's legs. She bent to pet her.

She was doing it wrong. Isobel didn't like to be lightly stroked down the middle of the back.

"Since when has anything about this case been logical?" He headed for the shower. "Give me five minutes," he said over his shoulder. "You can entertain Isobel. She likes to be scratched on the stomach."

"Yankee idiom, my ass," Elise said once she and Isobel were alone.

Had he been lying about the stomach petting too? Elise was a little afraid to try it. Every cat she knew clawed the hell out of you if you touched its stomach.

She scratched Isobel's chin.

Liked that.

Behind the ear.

Didn't much like that.

Down the spine.

Seemed to hate that.

Stomach.

Isobel dropped heavily to the floor, purring and stretching for more.

The cat was every bit as strange as its owner.

"It's not safe to jog in the middle of the night," Elise told David when he returned from the shower, his hair wet. "Your being a cop doesn't mean anything. A jogger, male or female, alone at night is a tar-get."

He ignored her and looked down, buttoning his shirt. "What'd I tell you?" He pointed to Isobel, who was purring madly. "She likes it on the stomach."

Elise straightened away from the cat. " Savannah is a port city. It has a long history of street crimes against the unwary and the foolish, going back to pirate days. Are you listening to me?"

He tucked his shirttail into his pants. "I'm listening."

"I don't want you jogging at night anymore." It wasn't an order; it was a plea.

"I won't promise you that."

"Why do you do it? You have to know it's dangerous. Do you get some kind of thrill out of it? Or do you just not care about yourself?"

For an instant, something seemed to fall away from him. She saw a bleakness in his eyes, and despair.

Then it was gone.

"I have trouble sleeping," he said, sitting down on the couch, pulling on socks and shoes. "Running helps."

"How long have you had this sleeping problem?"

He tied his shoes and stood up. "Ever since I got here, but it's been a lot worse lately."

"How many nights a week?"

"Every night."

He grabbed his apartment key and stuck it in his pocket. He shrugged into his black jacket. "All night." Before she could respond, he pushed the conversation away.

"Come on," he said. "We can talk about this later."

The streets were deserted, and it took Elise and David only a few minutes to get from his apartment to the funeral home. When they arrived, two police cars were parked in front of the green, arched awning above a wide walkway.

Officer Eve Salazar was guarding the door.

"What's the story?" Elise asked.

"The guy who does the embalming came in to get the body ready for the service. I guess dress it and stuff." She pressed her lips together and fatalistically shook her head. "Couldn't find the body."

"Any sign of a break-in?" David asked.

"Nope. The building has a top-of-the-line security alarm that wasn't tripped. No sign of anything. Nothing knocked over. Nothing out of place. Just a missing dead guy."

"What about the crime scene team?"

"We're holding off." She leaned closer. "Until you verify that a crime has been committed and we're not dealing with just a misplaced body."

"Good call."

"Everybody else is downstairs where they keep the bodies."

Officer Salazar pointed across a deep red carpet. "Take the steps to the basement. Then make a right. You can't miss it."

"These places certainly have a distinctive odor, don't they?" David whispered as they headed downstairs. "Kind of heavy. Kind of sweet."

"Like a rich dessert, only deader?" Elise asked.

"Exactly."

There were three uniformed police officers in the room, along with the owner of the funeral home and the mortician who'd alerted everyone to the missing body. The funeral director, a man named Simms, had managed to throw on the obligatory dark suit.

The partners introduced themselves.

"I can't explain it." The director's frantic gaze went from Elise to David, and back again.

The detectives perused the room. "Anything out of place?" Elise asked.

"Nothing."

They interviewed the mortician, an earnest little man named Benjamin Ming. He didn't have much to tell them that they didn't already know.

Elise strolled into the adjoining crematorium. David and the director followed.

The room temperature was cool. She examined the heat gauges on the machine.

Nothing registered anything.

"How long does it take for the oven to cool down after use?"

"Hours," the director told her. "The oven hasn't been used in days. The police officers already asked me about it. Why are you trying to point the finger at me? Ever since the ugly business with the funeral home that had uncremated bodies stuck in every corner, we're all suspect. I resent it. I'm the one who's the victim here. Along with poor Mr. Turello."

"Nobody's trying to accuse you of anything," David said. "We have to consider every angle so we know what to rule out. Once we've eliminated accidental cremation, then we can focus our investigation on other possible scenarios."

The director grabbed a tissue from a nearby box and wiped it down both sides of his face. "Sorry. We pride ourselves in having an impeccable reputation. I'm the third generation in this establishment, and we've never had this kind of thing happen. Ever."

Elise felt sorry for him. Normally he was the one who remained calm and collected, who soothed the upset patrons. "Mr. Simms," she said in a voice that was soft and serious, "have you ever had any employees who seemed particularly…fond of the dead?"

He frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"We're talking about necrophilia," David said. "Being in this line of business, you've surely heard of it."

"Of course." The director was flustered. Angry. "But I'm here to emphatically tell you that no one- NO ONE-in my employ has ever…" His words trailed off. He seemed unable to continue.

"We will need a list of everyone who now works for you," David said. "Plus everyone who's worked here in the past three years. Cleaning people. Lawn care. Everybody."

Elise called in a crime scene team to collect evidence, then moved on to the more traditional questions.

Anybody suspicious around?

Anybody who might be doing it to make Hartzell, Tate, and Hartzell look bad?

That was followed by an exchange of cards and phone numbers. "Call us if you think of anything," Elise told Simms. "We'll be checking back."

"You know what people are going to be saying about this, don't you?" David asked once they were outside, both of them squinting and flinching like vampires against the bright morning sunlight.

"That Gary Turello got up and walked out of there all by himself?" Elise asked.

"You got it."

"We need to talk to Strata Luna again," she said. "Find out if she knew Turello. My guess is she did."

"Go ahead. Give her a call." David pulled a pair of dark glasses from his jacket pocket and slipped them on. "But this time I'm coming along."