Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (3 page)

They gave me coffee from a thermos. Hot, strong,
and sugary, poured into a paper cup and pressed into my hand. A woman officer had come and asked me questions. I had no clue what I’d told her, save for one thing—I had not told her about the table in the back of the car.

In retrospect, this seems completely insane—and probably was—but all I could think about was that if I was going to find a corpse, and have to sit here, with E quiet and sullen in his seat, I was going to get a table out of it, damn it. It was, I think, my attempt at preserving a bare shred of rationality, as irrational as it might be. I had gone through this to get a table, and I was going to get that table.

After the officer left, I sat in my car, the door open and my legs hanging out, my feet in dirty tennis shoes resting on the black asphalt. E had gone very quiet except for the occasional, outraged “Phew.”

I sipped my refilled cup of coffee, trying to stretch it out before it became all cold and gross, because I’d rather smell the coffee than the body. I watched the officer who had interrogated me, because the most threatening thing
she was carrying was a clipboard. She wasn’t going near the body, and she wasn’t carrying any weird instruments.

Other people were doing scarier things—I was vaguely aware of them around the Dumpster. They were taking pictures and tagging all the trash. And two had climbed nimbly into the Dumpster, looking like they had gotten the secret handbook of Dumpster climbing that no one had bothered to share with me.

The officer who’d talked to me now approached the people near the Dumpster and presumably called to one of the men there, who took the clipboard from her. He was tall—as tall as Ben (which was saying a lot, because Ben was six-three easy), though, at least from this far, of a completely different type: dark haired, golden skinned. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, either, just a pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt. From the back, I thought, as I sipped my coffee and tried to breathe only the smell of coffee and not the smell of death all around, he didn’t look at all bad. Broad shoulders narrowing down the length of a well muscled body to a nicely trim waist. Long legs, which—though one thing had nothing to do with another—made me think he might be a runner.

He gestured broadly, and though I couldn’t quite hear what he said, I gathered the impression that he was giving orders to the swarm of people who were doing something I refused to look at out by the Dumpster. He nodded, which I thought was to the officer who’d interviewed me. I caught only the tail end of his words, carried on a sudden bit of breeze blowing my way: “Right there.”

But then he walked away toward a parked van at the end of the vast agglomerate of police vehicles on the other side of the parking lot from the Dumpster, which I took to mean that the
right there
he would presumably be right at was some distance away and required driving.

I watched the woman officer walk away from the Dumpster and go to another van and retrieve a couple of
heavy bags, presumably filled with equipment. I wondered when I’d be allowed to leave. Which didn’t at all prepare me for a silky smooth voice coming from my left. “Ms. Dare?”

I looked to the side. He was undeniably the guy I’d seen from the back before. From the front . . . my first reaction was that he was absolutely the ugliest man I’d ever seen. Not that there was anything exactly wrong with his looks. His face was well shaped, with strongly marked cheekbones and a square chin. His nose was aquiline and straight. His eyes, under dark eyebrows, were a stormy-sky gray, of the kind that looked like clouds might move across it at any minute. And though his mouth might be slightly too broad, it was not in any way misshapen or shapeless. It was more, I thought as I looked up at him, that his features didn’t seem to work together, like each was slightly at odds with the others.

And in that moment, as I thought that, something happened. In between one blink and the other, one breath and the next, the man I was looking at went from being the ugliest man I’d ever seen to being the best-looking.

Overwhelmingly handsome—beautiful really, with an almost inhuman beauty that couldn’t help but cause a reaction—just looking at him was kind of like being hit on the head with a mallet. All thought stopped, your mouth dropped open, and you couldn’t quite remember how to speak. A sentence that I thought was from the Bible, which Grandma used to read now and then, ran through my head:
beautiful and terrible like an army arrayed for combat
. I felt a blush climb up from under my T-shirt and coveralls and up my flaming cheeks in a tide of warmth.
The features don’t work together because each of them is so perfect
, I thought. At least I hope I thought it and didn’t say it, not that at that moment I could really have said much more than inarticulate syllables. I was reduced to cavewoman thinking.
Big man take me to cave and bring
much mammoth?
Only, truth be told, I hadn’t gotten as far as the mammoth.

He cleared his throat and looked slightly amused, and the heat on my face was in serious danger of causing my complete self-combustion. In confusion I looked at his T-shirt, which was just a little too tight—not as though it didn’t fit him, but as if it were the sort of clothes one wears around the house or while doing laundry. In paler blue, on the chest, it said,
Tell the Law Everything
.

On this I found my footing, because I’d be damned if I’d tell him about the table. Let him imagine I’d gotten it elsewhere, and it just happened to be in the back of the car. I sat up straight and looked back at him, and realized he was looking behind me at E, who in turn was sitting in his car seat, bending slightly forward.

“Your son?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s E.”

“He?”

“No, E. It’s his initial. It’s what I call him.”

He raised his eyebrows at me, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned to E. “Hey, E, would you like a Sprite?” he asked, in a soft voice but not, I noted with relief, the sort of voice that people who don’t know kids normally use.

I waited to see if his approach had worked, but it hadn’t. E remained silent, though his eyes were riveted to the Sprite can in the man’s right hand.

“He won’t talk,” I said, tiredly. Right then explaining E’s foibles seemed like rolling a particularly heavy stone uphill.

“He can’t talk yet?”

I shrugged. “He talks to me, but no one else. To me he even says sentences.”

This brought a delighted chuckle from the man, and at what must have been my look of total, bewildered surprise, he explained. “I did that to my mom till I was three.
People thought she was crazy. She recorded me speaking, and Dad said it was her doing voices.”

I groaned. I could imagine E doing this to me for another six months or more.

“Can he have the Sprite?”

“Sure,” I said, and he opened the can and gave it to E. Considering that E and I had mostly been drinking water with our pancakes, a Sprite was a rare treat and if E didn’t say thank you, he graced the policeman with a broad grin.

“So, you’re Ms. Dare?” he said, turning to me, after a final smile at my son.

“Dyce Dare,” I said.

“Like . . . playing dice?”

“No, like
Candyce
. With a
Y
. I was . . .” I was not about to tell a total stranger the story of my birth. “I was born in a candy store. Unexpected. Mom went into labor.” I wasn’t about to explain that Mom and Dad had had such a huge fight after the ultrasound showing I was a girl that Mom had left Dad and they were meeting in the candy store to discuss making up. Nor that the fight had been about names, because Mom wanted to call me Agatha and Dad wanted to call me Sherlockia. Nor would I, even under torture, reveal that my middle name was Chocolat. Only Ben knew that, and only because my mom had told him. “So Mom wanted to call me Candy, but Dad added the
C
and the
E
, and I go by Dyce.”

He made a face, half grimace, half grin. “My father called me Castor. I go by Cas.” He offered me a massive, square hand. “Cas Wolfe. I’m one of two senior serious-crimes investigators in Goldport.” He nodded toward the Dumpster. “We don’t get many of these. Not this bad.”

I shook his hand. It was hard and firm and squeezed enough to let me know he could crush my hand—without his actually doing it. “It is . . .” I said. “It is a murder, then?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It may very
well be just inappropriate disposal of a corpse, but when people go to this kind of trouble . . .” He shrugged.

I nodded. “Like those corpses thrown into the shark aquarium last year,” I said.

“Exactly like that,” he said.

“Turned out some woman was pushing guys she seduced into the tank, didn’t it?” I asked, dimly remembering the solution of the case that had kept the pages of the local paper full of lurid and unlikely pictures. I confess I always skimmed murder news, mostly because Mom and Dad discussed every case from the moment the first signs of crime were discovered. Normally I was tired of the whole thing long before the murderer was caught.

“Something like that,” Officer Wolfe said, with a sin-inducing grin. “Though my team wasn’t on that case.”

I became aware that he was almost bent over to talk to me—to keep his head at a level with mine. I gestured vaguely toward the passenger seat. “If you want to sit down.”

Once more I was graced with the expressive, mobile grin that made the blush start again, upward, on a path from my belly button to my cheeks.
Oh, pipe down, Dyce
, I told myself.
Man like that will be drowning in girls from the college every weekend—and maybe during the week, too. What would he want with the almost-thirty-year-old, divorced mother of one who is the queen of pancakes?

By the time I’d talked myself down—or a convincing counterfeit thereof—he had walked around the car, opened the passenger door, and gotten in. “Thank you,” he said. “Not that I have much more to go over.” He looked over the clipboard. “Officer Giles seems to have asked you all the relevant questions. You were . . . looking for furniture?” he said.

“It’s not illegal,” I said, defensively. “I refinish it. It’s what I do for a living.”

He shrugged. “I’m sure if I dug through the books I’d
find some ordinance against looking through Dumpsters for discarded furniture. Probably a public health measure. But the thing is that I have no interest in that. People rescue stuff out of Dumpsters, so much the better for . . . for landfills and all. You were . . . climbing the Dumpster?”

“Yeah,” I said, and was glad I was blushing anyway. I looked away. “I put my hand on a bag, and the whole thing fell.” I took a deep breath, which was a bad idea, because I got a big noseful of the smell. I swallowed hard and said, “And then I went to put them back and I saw . . . I saw . . .”

I became aware that my voice was shaking. He nodded. “The first one is always bad.” He shrugged. “Weirdly, this one is not
that
bad, because it doesn’t really look human. Or not at first glance.”

“No,” I said. I rubbed my nose because I felt like I was about to cry. “I thought it was a mannequin. I only knew it was human by the hair. And the top of the forehead, you know?”

He nodded. “Well, that’s about it,” he said. “You didn’t do anything else we need to know about, right? Removed something, or put something extra in the Dumpster?”

I shook my head. I was
not
going to tell him about the table, even if this had started to have the feel of when I went to explore the construction site without telling my parents. It was impossible that the table had anything to do with the body. The corpse hadn’t been bludgeoned with a table, and I was not about to lose my find for the sake of bureaucracy.

“And you gave us your address,” he said. “You’ll be at two-sixteen Quicksilver today?”

“I’m always there,” I said. “Well, unless I’m out, you know, delivering furniture or . . .” I shrugged. “You have my cell phone.”

“Right. And I’ll get back to you on this. Sorry you had such a shock. Try to take it easy today, okay? Have a quiet
day with the munchkin back there. Don’t think about any of this.”

A likely idea. First, the quiet day with the munchkin would get cut short, as I had to hand him back to All-ex tonight to stay till Tuesday evening at his dad’s place. Second . . . second—I thought of Ben’s messages on my phone, as yet unlistened to—this was not shaping up to be a quiet anything.

“Do you have any idea who she was?” I asked.

At first I got back a slight stare, then an intent frown. “She?” he asked.

“The . . . corpse . . .”

Suddenly the very hot guy with the laid-back manner was replaced by the eagle eye of the law. His eyebrows seemed to struggle to go up, while he kept them stubbornly on a level, and he spoke in a voice that was too deceptively calm. “How do you know if it’s a woman?”

“The hairstyle,” I said. “I’ve seen that short, blond, frosted hairstyle in magazines. Must be very expensive.” I sighed. “I could never afford it, and there’s no way I could do it to myself. The one time I tried to cut my hair . . .” I was not going to tell my life story to a stranger. “It didn’t end well.”

He looked curious, and something like a sparkle ran through the gray eyes, making them seem, momentarily, bluish. He seemed to be considering something. “I’ll try to give you a call later. To see how you’re holding up.”

Like that, he offered me his hand again, and I squeezed it. He wasn’t wearing gloves. That probably meant that he hadn’t been physically handling the body. For some reason that made me feel better.

He fished in the pocket of his pants and brought out a business card. “If you think of anything, or anything seems strange, give me a call, okay?” His business card read
Cas Wolfe, Goldport Police Department, Serious Crimes Unit
. “Call my cell phone. If you call the department
they’re as likely as not to put you through to the other investigator, Rafiel Trall, and he won’t know anything about this. At least not unless it gets really bad and we need to bring in every available person.”