Postmortem

Chapter 15

Marino dropped the morning newspaper on top of the conference table with a loud slap that sent pages fluttering and inserts sliding out.

"What the hell is this?"

His face was an angry red and he needed a shave. "Je-sus Christ!"

Wesley's reply was to calmly kick out a chair, inviting him to sit.

Thursday's story was front-page, above the fold, with the banner headline: DNA, NEW EVIDENCE RAISE POSSIBILITY STRANGLER HAS GENETIC DEFECT Abby's byline was nowhere to be found. The account was written by a reporter who usually covered the court beat.

There was a sidebar about DNA profiling, including an artist's sketch of the DNA "fingerprinting" process. I wondered about the killer, imagined him reading and rereading the paper in a rage. My guest was wherever he worked, he called in sick today.

"What I want to know is how come I wasn't told any of this?"

Marino glared at me. "I turn in the jumpsuit. Do my job. Next thing, I'm reading this crap! What defect? Some DNA reports just come in some asshole's already leaked, or what?"

I didn't say anything.

Wesley replied levelly, "It doesn't matter, Pete. The newspaper story isn't our concern. Consider it a blessing. We know the killer's got a strange body odor, or at least it seems likely he does. He thinks Kay's office is on to something, maybe he makes a stupid move."

He looked at me. "Anything?"

I shook my head. So far there'd been no attempts at breaking into the OCME computer. Had either man come into the conference room twenty minutes earlier, he would have found me ankle-deep in paper.

It was no wonder Margaret had been hesitant last night when I asked her to print out the flat file. It included about three thousand statewide cases through the month of May, or a run of green striped paper that stretched practically the length of the building.

What was worse, the data were compressed in a format not meant to be readable. It was like fishing for complete sentences in a bowl of alphabet soup.

It took me well over an hour to find Brenda Steppe's case number. I don't know if I felt thrilled or horrified-maybe it was both-when I discovered the listing under "Clothing, Personal Effects": "Pair of nude pantyhose around neck."

There was no mention of a tan cloth belt anywhere. None of my clerks remembered changing the entry or updating the case after it was entered. The data had been altered. It was altered by someone other than my staff.

"What about this mental impairment stuff?"

Marino rudely shoved the newspaper my way. "You find out something in this DNA hocus-pocus to make you think he ain't operating on all cylinders?"

"No," I honestly replied. "I think the point of the story is some metabolic disorders can cause problems like that. But I have come up with no evidence to suggest such a thing."

"Well, it sure as hell ain't my opinion the guy's got brain rot. Me, I'm hearing the same garbage again. The squirrel's stupid, nothing more than a lowlife. Probably works in a car wash, cleans out the city sewers or something… " Wesley was beginning to register impatience. "Give it a rest, Pete. "

"I'm supposed to be in charge of this investigation and I gotta read the damn newspaper to know what the hell's going on…"

"We've got a bigger problem, all right?" Wesley snapped.

"Well, what?" Marino asked.

So we told him.

We told him about my telephone conversation with Cecile Tyler's sister.

He listened, the anger in his eyes retreating. He looked baffled.

We told him all five women definitely had one thing in common. Their voices.

I reminded him of Matt Petersen's interview. "As I recall, he said something about the first time he met Lori. At a party, I believe. He talked about her voice. He said she had the sort of voice that caught people's attention, a very pleasant contralto voice. What we're considering is the link connecting these five murders is voice. Perhaps the killer didn't see them. He heard them."

"It never occurred to us," Wesley added. "When we think of stalkers, we think of psychopaths who see the victim at some point. In a shopping mall, out jogging, or through a window in the apartment or house. As a rule, the telephone, if it figures in at all, comes after the initial contact. He sees her. Maybe he calls her later, just dials her number to hear her voice so he can fantasize. What we're considering now is far more frightening, Pete. This killer may have some occupation that involves his calling women he doesn't know. He has access to their numbers and addresses. He calls. If her voice sets him off, he selects her."

"Like this really narrows it down," Marino complained. "Now we got to find out if all these women was listed in the city directory. Next we got to consider occupation possibilities. I mean, not a week goes by the missus don't get a call. Some drone selling brooms, light bulbs, condos. Then there's the pollsters. The let-me-ask-you-fifty-questions type. They want to know if you're married, single, how much money you earn. Whether you put your pants on one leg at 9 time and floss after brushing."

"You're getting the picture," Wesley muttered.

Marino went on without pause, "So you got some guy who's into rape and murder. He could get paid eight bucks an hour to sit on his ass at home and run through the phone book or city directory. Some woman tells him she's single, earns twenty g's a year. So I ask you. How the hell we going to find him?"

We didn't know.

The possible voice connection didn't narrow it down. Marino was right. In fact, it made our job more difficult instead of easier. We might be able to determine who a victim saw on any given day. But it was unlikely we could find every person she talked to on the phone. The victim might not even know, were she alive to tell. Telephone solicitors, pollsters and people who dial wrong numbers rarely identify themselves. All of us get multiple calls day and night we neither process nor remember.

I said, "The pattern of when he hits makes me wonder if he has a job outside of the home, if he goes to work somewhere Monday through Friday. Throughout the week his stress builds. Late Friday night or after midnight, he hits. If he's using a borax soap twenty times a day, then it isn't likely this is something he has in his household bathroom. Hand soaps you buy at your local grocery store don't contain borax, to my knowledge. If he's washing up with borax soap, I suspect he's doing so at work."

"We're sure it's borax?" Wesley asked.

"The labs determined it through ion chromatography. The glittery residue we've been finding on the bodies contains borax. Definitely."

Wesley considered this for a moment. "If he's using borax soap on the job and gets home at five, it's not likely he'd have such a buildup of this glittery residue at one o'clock in the morning. He may work an evening shift. There's borax soap in the men's room. He gets off sometime before midnight, one A.M., and goes straight to the victim's residence."

The scenario was more than plausible, I explained. If the killer worked at night, this gave him ample opportunity during the day while the rest of the world was at work to cruise through the neighborhood of his next victim and look over the area. He could drive by again late, maybe after midnight, to take another look. The victims were either out or asleep, as were most of their neighbors. He wasn't going to be seen.

What night jobs involve the telephone? We batted that around for a while.

"Most telephone solicitors call right in the middle of the dinner hour," Wesley said. "It seems to me it's unusual for them to call much later than nine."

We agreed.

"Pizza deliverers," Marino proposed. "They're out all hours. Could be it's the drone who takes the call. You dial up and the first thing the operator asks is your phone number. If you've ever called before, your address pops up on the computer screen. Thirty minutes later some squirrel's at your door with a pepperoni-hold-the-onions. It could be the delivery guy who figures out in a hurry he's got some woman who lives alone. Maybe it's the operator. He likes her voice, knows her address."

"Check it," Wesley said. "Get a couple of guys to go around to the various pizza delivery places pronto."

Tomorrow was Friday! "See if there's any one pizza place all five women called from time to time. It should be in the computer, easy to track."

Marino left for a moment, returning with the Yellow Pages. He found the pizza section and started scribbling down names and addresses.

We kept coming up with more and more possible occupations. Switchboard operators for hospitals and telephone companies were up all hours answering calls. Fund-raisers didn't hesitate to interrupt your favorite television program as late as ten P.M. Then there was always the possibility of someone playing roulette with the city directory or telephone book-a security guard with nothing better to do while he's sitting inside the lobby of the Federal Reserve, or a gas station attendant bored late at night during the slow hours.

I was getting more confused. I couldn't sort through it all.

Yet there was something bothering me.

You're making it too complicated, my inner voice was telling me. You're getting farther and farther removed from what you actually know.

I looked at Marino's damp, meaty face, at his eyes shifting here and there. He was tired, stressed. He was still nursing a deep-seated anger. Why was he so touchy? What was it he said about the way the killer would think, something about him not liking professional women because they're snooty? Every time I tried to get hold of him, he was "on the street."

He'd been to every strangling scene.

At Lori Petersen's scene he was wide-awake. Had he even been to bed that night? Wasn't it a little odd he was so rabid in trying to pin the murders on Matt Petersen? Marino's age doesn't profile right, I told myself.

He spends most of his time in his car and doesn't answer the phone for a living, so I can't see the connection between him and the women.

Most important, he doesn't have a peculiar body odor, and if the jumpsuit found in the Dumpster was his, why would he bring it in to the lab? Unless, I thought, he's turning the system inside out, playing it against itself because he knows so much. He is, after all, an expert, in charge of the investigation and experienced enough to be a savior or a satan.

I suppose all along I'd been harboring the fear that the killer might be a cop.

Marino didn't fit. But the killer might be someone he'd worked around for months, someone who bought navy blue jumpsuits at the various uniform stores around the city, someone who washed his hands with the Borawash soap dispensed in the department's men's rooms, someone who knew enough about forensics and criminal investigation to be able to outsmart his brothers and me. A cop gone bad. Or someone drawn to law enforcement because this is often a very attractive profession to psychopaths.

We'd tracked down the squads that responded to the homicide scenes. What we'd never thought to do was to track down the uniformed men who responded when the bodies were discovered.

Maybe some cop was thumbing through the telephone or city directory during his shift or after hours. Maybe his first contact with the victims was voice. Their voices set him off. He murdered them and made sure he was on the street or near a scanner when each body was found.

"Our best bet is Matt Petersen," Wesley was saying to Marino. "He still in town?"

"Yeah. Last I heard."

"I think you'd better go see him, find out if his wife ever mentioned anything about telephone soliciting, about someone calling up to say she'd won a contest, someone taking a poll. Anything involving the phone."

Marino pushed back his chair.

I hedged. I didn't come right out and say what I was thinking.

Instead, I asked, "How tough would it be to get printouts or tape recordings of the calls made to the police when the bodies were found? I want to see the exact times the homicides were called in, what time the police arrived, especially in Lori Petersen's case. Time of death may be very important in helping us determine what time the killer gets off work, assuming he works at night."

"No problem," Marino replied abstractedly. "You can come along with me. After we hit Petersen, we'll swing by the radio room."

We didn't find Matt Petersen at home. Marino left his card under the brass knocker of his apartment.

"I don't expect him to return my call," he mumbled as he crept back out into traffic.

"Why not?"

"When I dropped by the other day he didn't invite me in. Just stood in the doorway like a damn barricade. Was big enough to sniff the jumpsuit before basically telling me to buzz off, practically slammed the door in my face, said in the future to talk to his lawyer. Petersen said the polygraph cleared him, said I was harassing him."

"You probably were," I commented dryly.

He glanced at me and almost smiled.

We left the West End and headed back downtown.

"You said some ion test came up with borax."

He changed the subject. "This mean you didn't get squat on the greasepaint?"

"No borax," I replied. "Something called 'Sun Blush' reacted to the laser. But it doesn't contain borax, and it seems quite likely the prints Petersen left on his wife's body were the result of his touching her while he had some of this 'Sun Blush' on his hands."

"What about the glittery stuff on the knife?"

"The trace amounts were too small to test. But I don't think the residue is 'Sun Blush.'"

"Why not?"

"It isn't a granular powder. It's a cream base - you remember the big white jar of dark pink cream you brought into the lab?"

He nodded.

"That was 'Sun Blush.'

Whatever the ingredient is that makes it sparkle in the laser, it's not going to accumulate all over the place the way borax soap does. The creamy base of the cosmetic is more likely to result in high concentrations of sparkles left in discrete smudges, wherever the person's fingertips come in firm contact with some surface."

"Like over Lori's collarbone," he supposed.

"Yes. And over Petersen's ten-print card, the areas of the paper his fingertips actually were pressed against. There were no random sparkles anywhere else on the card, only over the inky ridges. The sparkles on the handle of the survivor knife were not clustered in a pattern like this. They were random, scattered, in very much the same way the sparkles were scattered over the women's bodies. "

"You're saying if Petersen had this 'Sun Blush' on his hands and took hold of the knife, there'd be glittery smudges versus individual little sparkles here and there."

"That's what I'm saying."

"Well, what about the glitter you found on the bodies, on the ligatures and so on?"

"There were high-enough concentrations in the areas of Lori's wrists for testing. It came up as borax."

He turned his mirrored eyes toward me. "Two different types of glittery stuff, after all, then."

"That's right."

"Hmm."

Like most city and state buildings in Richmond, Police Headquarters is built of stucco that is almost indistinguishable from the concrete in the sidewalks. Pale and pasty, its ugly blandness is broken only by the vibrant colors of the state and American flags fluttering against the blue sky over the roof. Pulling around in back, Marino swung into a line of unmarked police cars.

We went into the lobby and walked past the glass-enclosed information desk. Officers in dark blue grinned at Marino and said, "Hi, Doc," to me. I glanced down at my suit jacket, relieved I'd remembered to take off my lab coat. I was so used to wearing it, sometimes I forgot. When I accidentally wore it outside of my building, I felt as if I were in my pajamas.

We passed bulletin boards plastered with composite sketches of child molesters, flimflam artists, basic garden variety thugs. There were mug shots of Richmond's Ten Most Wanted robbers, rapists and murderers. Some of them were actually smiling into the camera. They'd made the city's hall of fame.

I followed Marino down a dim stairwell, the sound of our feet a hollow echo against metal. We stopped before a door where he peered through a small glass window and gave somebody the high sign.

The door unlocked electronically.

It was the radio room, a subterranean cubicle filled with desks and computer terminals hooked up to telephone consoles. Through a wall of glass was another room of dispatchers for whom the entire city was a video game; 911 operators glanced curiously at us. Some of them were busy with calls, others were idly chatting or smoking, their headphones down around their necks.

Marino took me around to a corner where there were shelves jammed with boxes of large reel-to-reel tapes. Each box was labeled by a date. He walked his fingers down the rows and slipped out one after another, five in all, each one spanning the period of one week.

Loading them in my arms, he drawled, "Merry Christmas."

"What?"

I looked at him as if he'd lost his mind.

"Hey."

He got out his cigarettes. "Me, I got pizza joints to hit. There's a tape machine over there."

He jerked his thumb toward the dispatcher's room beyond the glass. "Either listen up in there, or take 'em back to your office. Now if it was me, I'd take them the hell outa this animal house, but I didn't tell you that, all right? They ain't supposed to leave the premises. Just hand 'em back over when you're through, to me personally."

I was getting a headache.

Next he took me into a small room where a laser printer was sweeping out miles of green-striped paper. The stack of paper on the floor was already two feet high.

"I buzzed the boys down here before we left your office," he laconically explained. "Had 'em print out everything from the computer for the last two months."

Oh, God.

"So the addresses and everything are there."

His flat brown eyes glanced at me. "You'll have to look at the hard copies to see what came up on the screen when the calls was made. Without the addresses, you won't know which call's what."

"Can't we just pull up exactly what we want to know on the computer?" I broke out in exasperation.

"You know anything about mainframes?"

Of course I didn't.

He looked around. "Nobody in this joint knows squat about the mainframe. We got one computer person upstairs. Just so happens he's at the beach right now. Only way to get in an expert is if there's a crash. Then they call DP and the department gets knocked up for seventy bucks an hour. Even if the department's willing to cooperate with you, those DP dipsticks are as slow coming around as payday. The guy's going to get around to it late tomorrow, Monday, sometime next week, and that's if Lady Luck's on your side, Doc. Fact is, you was lucky I could find somebody smart enough to hit a Print button."

We stood in the room for thirty minutes. Finally, the printer stopped and Marino ripped off the paper. The stack was close to three feet high. He put it inside an empty printer-paper box he found somewhere and hoisted it up with a grunt.

As I followed him back out of the radio room, he tossed over his shoulder to a young, nice-looking black communications officer, "If you see Cork, I gotta message for him."

"Shoot," the officer said with a yawn.

"Tell him he ain't driving no eighteen-wheeler rig no more and this ain't Smokey and the Bandit."

The officer laughed. He sounded exactly like Eddie Murphy.

For the next day and a half I didn't even get dressed but was sequestered inside my home wearing a nylon warm-up suit and headphones.

Bertha was an angel and took Lucy on an all-day outing.

I was avoiding my downtown office, where I was sure to be interrupted every five minutes. I was racing against time, praying I came up with something before Friday dissolved into the first few hours of Saturday morning. I was convinced he would be out there again.

I'd already checked in with Rose twice. She said Amburgey's office had tried to get me four times since I drove off with Marino. The commissioner was demanding I come see him immediately, demanding I provide him with an explanation of yesterday morning's front-page story, of "this latest and most outrageous leak," in his words. He wanted the DNA report. He wanted the report on this "latest evidence" turned in. He was so furious he actually got on the phone himself threatening Rose, who had plenty of thorns.

"What did you say to him?" I asked her in amazement.

"I told him I'd leave the message on your desk. When he threatened to have me fired if I didn't hook him up with you immediately, I told him that was fine. I've never sued anybody before…"

"You didn't."

"I most certainly did. If the little jerk had another brain it would rattle."

My answering machine was on. If Amburgey tried to call me at home he was only going to get my mechanical ear.

It was the stuff of nightmares. Each tape covered seven twenty four-hour days. Of course, the tapes weren't that many hours long because often there were only three or four two-minute calls per hour. It simply depended on how busy the 911 room was on any given shift. My problem was finding the exact time period when I thought one of the homicides was called in. If I got impatient, I might whiz right on by and have to back up. Then I lost my place. It was awful.

Also, it was as depressing as hell. Emergency calls ranged from the mentally disenfranchised whose bodies were being invaded by aliens, to people roaring drunk, to poor men and women whose spouses had just keeled over from a heart attack or a stroke. There were a lot of automobile accidents, suicide threats, prowlers, barking dogs, stereos up too loud and firecrackers and car backfires that came in as shootings.

I was skipping around. So far I had managed to find three of the calls I was looking for. Brenda's, Henna's and, just now, Lori's. I backed up the tape until I found the aborted 911 call Lori apparently made to the police right before she was murdered. The call came in at exactly 12:49 A.M., Saturday, June 7, and all that was on the tape was the operator picking up the line and crisply saying, "911."

I folded back sheet after sheet of continuous paper until I found the corresponding printout. Lori's address appeared on the 911 screen, her residence listed in the name of L. A. Petersen. Giving the call a priority four, the operator shipped it out to the dispatcher behind the wall of glass. Thirty-nine minutes later patrol unit 211 finally got the call. Six minutes after this he cruised past her house, then sped off on a domestic call.

The Petersen address came up again exactly sixty-eight minutes after the aborted 911 call, at 1: 57 A.M., when Matt Petersen found his wife's body. If only he hadn't had dress rehearsal that night, I thought. If only he'd gotten home an hour, an hour and a half earlier…

The tape clicked.

"911."

Heavy breathing. "My wife!"

In panic. "Somebody killed my wife! Please hurry!"

Screaming. "Oh, God! Somebody killed her! Please hurry!"

I was paralyzed by the hysterical voice. Petersen couldn't speak in coherent sentences or remember his address when the operator asked if the address on his screen was correct.

I stopped the tape and did some quick calculations. Petersen arrived home twenty-nine minutes after the first responding officer shone his light over the front of the house and reported everything looked "secure."

The aborted 911 call came in at 12:49 A.m. The officer finally arrived at 1:34 A.M.

Forty-five minutes had elapsed. The killer was with Lori no longer than that.

By 1:34 A.M., the killer was gone. The bedroom light was out. Had he still been inside the bedroom, the light would have been on. I was sure of it. I couldn't believe he could see well enough to find electrical cords and tie elaborate knots in the dark.

He was a sadist. He would want the victim to see his face, especially if it were masked. He would want his victim to see everything he did. He would want her to anticipate in unthinkable terror every horrendous thing he planned to do… as he looked around, as he cut the cords, as he began to bind her…

When it was over, he calmly flicked off the bedroom light and climbed back out the bathroom window, probably minutes before the patrol car cruised by and less than half an hour before Petersen walked in. The peculiar body odor lingered like the stench of garbage.

So far I'd found no common patrol unit that had responded to Brenda, Lori and Henna's scenes. My disappointment was robbing me of the energy to go on.

I took a break when I heard the front door open. Bertha and Lucy were back. They gave me a full account and I did my best to smile and listen. Lucy was exhausted.

"My stomach hurts," she complained.

"It's no wonder," Bertha started in. "I told you not to eat all that trash. Cotton candy, corn dogs…"

Shaking her head.

I fixed Lucy chicken broth and put her to bed.

Returning to my office, I reluctantly slipped the headphones on again.

I lost track of the time as though I were in suspended animation.

"911."

"911."

Over and over again it played in my head.

Shortly after ten I was so weary I could barely think. I dully rewound a tape trying to find the call made when Patty Lewis's body was discovered. As I listened, my eyes drifted over pages of the computer printout unfolded in my lap.

What I saw didn't make sense.

Cecile Tyler's address was printed halfway down the page and dated May 12, at 21:23 hours, or 9:23 P.m.

That couldn't be right.

She wasn't murdered until May 31.

Her address shouldn't have been listed on this portion of the printout. It shouldn't be on this tape! I fast-forwarded, stopping every few seconds. It took me twenty minutes to find it. I played the segment three times trying to figure out what it meant.

At exactly 9:23 a male voice answered, "911."

A soft, cultured female voice said in surprise, after a pause, "Oh, dear. I'm sorry."

"Is there a problem, ma'am?"

An embarrassed laugh. "I meant to dial Information. I'm sorry."

Another laugh. "I guess I hit a nine instead of a four."

"Hey, no problem, that's good, always glad when there's no problem."

Adding jauntily, "You have a nice evening."

Silence. A click, and the tape went on.

On the printout the slain black woman's address was listed, simply, under her name: Cecile Tyler.

Suddenly I knew. "Jesus. Dear Jesus," I muttered, momentarily sick to my stomach.

Brenda Steppe had called the police when she had her automobile accident. Lori Petersen had called the police, according to her husband, when she thought she heard a prowler that turned out to be a cat getting into the garbage cans. Abby Turnbull had called the police when the man in the black Cougar followed her. Cecile Tyler had called the police by mistake - it was a wrong number.

She dialed 911 instead of 411.

A wrong number! Four of the five women. All of the calls were made from their homes. Each address immediately flashed on the 911 computer screen. If the residences were in the women's names, the operator knew they probably lived alone.

I ran into the kitchen. I don't know why. There was a telephone in my office.

I frantically stabbed out the number for the detective division.

Marino wasn't in.

"I need his home number."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, we're not allowed to give those out."

"Goddam it! This is Dr. Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner! Give me his goddam home phone number!"

A startled pause. The officer, whoever he was, began apologizing profusely. He gave me the number.

I dialed again.

"Thank God," I gushed when Marino answered.

"No shit?" he said after my breathless explanation. "Sure, I'll look into it, Doc."

"Don't you think you'd better get down to the radio room to see if the bastard's there?" I practically screamed.

"So, what'd the guy say? You recognize the voice?"

"Of course I didn't recognize the voice."

"Like what exactly did he say to this Tyler lady?"

"I'll let you hear it."

I ran back into the office and picked up that extension. Rewinding the tape, I unplugged the headphones and turned the volume up high.

"You recognize it?"

I was back on the line.

Marino didn't reply.

"Are you there?"

I exclaimed.

"Hey. Chill out for a while, Doc. It's been a rough day, right? Just leave it to yours truly here. I promise I'll look into it."

He hung up.

I sat staring at the receiver in my hand. I sat without moving until the loud dial tone went dead and a mechanical voice began to complain, "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again…"

I checked the front door, made sure the burglar alarm was set and went upstairs. My bedroom was at the end of the hall and overlooked the woods in back. Fireflies winked in the inky blackness beyond the glass, and I nervously yanked the blinds shut.

Bertha had this irrational idea sunlight ought to stream into rooms whether anyone was inside them or not. "Kills germs, Dr. Kay," she would say.

"Fades the rugs and the upholstery," I would counter.

But she was set in her ways. I hated it when I came upstairs after dark and found the blinds open. I'd shut them before turning on the light to make sure nobody could see me, if there was anybody out there. But I'd forgotten tonight. I didn't bother to take off my warm-up suit. It would do for pajamas.

Stepping up on a footstool I kept inside the closet, I slid out the Rockport shoe box and opened the lid. I tucked the.38 under my pillow.

I was sick with the worry the telephone would ring and I'd be summoned out into the black morning and have to say to Marino, "I told you so, you stupid bastard! I told you so!"

What was the big lug doing right now, anyway? I flicked off the lamp and pulled the covers up to my ears. He was probably drinking beer and watching television.

I sat up and flicked the lamp back on. The telephone on the bedside table taunted me. There was no one else I could call. If I called Wesley, he would call Marino. If I called the detective division, whoever listened to what I had to sayprovided he took me seriously-would call Marino.

Marino. He was in charge of this damn investigation. All roads led to Rome.

Switching off the lamp again, I stared up into the darkness.

"911." "911."

I kept hearing the voice as I tossed on my bed.

It was past midnight when I crept back down the stairs and found the bottle of cognac in the bar. Lucy hadn't stirred since I had tucked her in hours ago. She was out cold. I wished I could say the same for me. Downing two shots like cough medicine, I miserably returned to my bedroom and switched off the lamp again. I could hear the minutes go by on the digital clock.

Click.

Click.

Seeping in and out of consciousness, I fitfully tossed.

"… So what exactly did he say to this Tyler woman?"

Click. The tape went on.

"I'm sorry."

An embarrassed laugh. "I guess I hit a nine instead of a four…"

"Hey, no problem,… You have a nice evening."

Click.

"… I hit a nine instead of a four…

"911."

"Hey… He's a good-looking guy. He don't need to slip a lady a mickey to get her to give u? the goods "He's scum!"

"… Because he's out of town right now, Lucy. Mr. Boltz went on vacation."

"Oh."

Eyes filled with infinite sadness. "When's he coming back?"

"Not until July."

"Oh. Why couldn't we go with him, Auntie Kay? Did he go to the beach?"

"… You routinely lie by omission about us."

His face shimmered behind the veil of rising heat and smoke, his hair gold in the sun.

"911."

I was inside my mother's house and she was saying something to me.

A bird was circling lazily overhead as I rode in a van with someone I neither knew nor could see. Palm trees flowed by. Long-necked white egrets were sticking up like porcelain periscopes in the Everglades. The white heads turned as we passed. Watching us. Watching me.

Turning over, I tried to get more comfortable by resting on my back.

My father sat up in bed and watched me as I told him about my day at school. His face was ashen. His eyes didn't blink and I couldn't hear what I was saying to him. He didn't respond but continued to stare. Fear was constricting my heart. His white face stared. The empty eyes stared.

He was dead.

"Daddddyyyyy!"

My nostrils were filled with a sick, stale sweatiness as I buried my face in his neck…

The inside of my brain went black.

I surfaced into consciousness like a bubble floating up from the deep. I was aware. I could feel my heart beating.

The smell.

Was it real or was I dreaming? The putrid smell! Was I dreaming? An alarm was going off inside my head and slamming my heart against my ribs.

As the foul air stirred and something brushed against the bed.