It Never Rhines but It Pours (28 page)

I walked gingerly over the asphalt, grateful that my flip flops were protecting my feet from being burned by the heat I could feel pouring off the ground. That was when I took my first deep breath. Big mistake. Even
I
could smell rotting meat. Not a good smell. My slurpee began to sit a little uncomfortably in my stomach.

I ducked under the yellow crime scene tape that was circling the Checker’s parking lot and noticed that the Checker’s sign out front offered the store up for sale. I guess Patrick Schultz hadn’t been working here recently. Cecily’s info was a little off.

I headed towards a group of people standing by one of the outside tables. As I got closer I heard the sound of retching. Two of the cops were busy emptying their stomachs into plastic bags. This was getting better and better.

“What are you doing here?” a big man barked at me. He was dressed in lightweight khaki pants and a polo shirt. He flashed a detective badge at me, “No civilians allowed.”

“It’s okay,” I commanded with the Voice. “Tell me what’s going on.”

He instantly relaxed. “We got an anonymous tip reporting a disturbance at this location. When the uniforms got here …” He pointed towards the building’s windows. They were black and oddly moving. I could hear a buzzing sound that I couldn’t place.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Flies,” he grimaced. “Millions of them. Our first guess was that the previous owners failed to empty the freezers when they closed and the city shut off the electricity.”

I made a face, thinking of how many pounds of rotting meat would attract that number of flies. Then I realized that he had said “first guess.”

“What is it really?” I asked, not wanting to know.

“These two guys went in,” he said, pointing at the gagging officers. “They say there’s a body in the freezer.”

“A body?”

“Yup,” he rubbed his hands together. “The forensic investigator is in there now. We’ll have a better idea in a moment.”

“Okay.” I thought about turning tail and running for the car. I did not want to hear a more detailed report. But if I went back to the car Cecily would want to know more and would just send me right back over. I needed to conserve energy in this heat. I stayed put.

A small woman exited the building to an increase in sound from the flies. She was dressed, head to foot, in protective gear with a large mask covering her face. She made a beeline for the detective and stripped off her mask. Sweat had matted her hair down on her head and she wiped off drops that had formed on the end of her nose.

“You’ve got a dead one,” she said cheerfully.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” he said.

“Alright. Victim is male, approximately in his early twenties. Best guess at COD is strangulation. His throat was cut, post-mortem, and from the ligature marks on his ankles, also post-mortem, I’m guessing that he was hung upside down and drained of blood. I’ll have to get him into the lab to run some tests, but I’d put time of death at perhaps six weeks.”

“You can’t say closer than that?” the detective asked. I was personally amazed that she could tell that much from looking at a fly covered, decomposing body, in the sweltering heat.

She shrugged. “It appears that he was frozen directly after the blood draining, and without running tests, I can’t say any closer how long it would take his body to thaw and start to decompose. You might want to find out when the building had its electricity shut off. That would give us a more accurate timeline.” She looked back at the fly covered window. “Once again, I’m just guessing here, but I’d say from the rate of decomp, and the number of flies and larvae, that he’d been unfrozen for about four weeks. I can’t believe that no one called it in sooner.”

“Probably thought it was just left over humburger meat going bad,” the detective shrugged. “It’s happened before. No one wants to have to go in there and check it out.”

“Well, this time it’s definitely meat gone bad,” the forensic lady laughed, “just not the kind you’d want to eat!”

I suddenly wanted my own plastic bag to throw up in. Must be those pregnancy hormones kicking in. I had heard enough and was ready to be well away from this place. I just needed to know one more thing. “Do we have an ID?” I asked.

“The vic still had his personal possessions on him,” the lady said, pulling out a plastic evidence bag. “Or rather,” she laughed again, “inside him.”

“Inside him?”

“He’s decomposed enough that the contents of his pockets have sunk into his abdominal cavity.”

Oh. I really did not need to hear that. She pointed to a stained driver’s license. “This would seem to indicate that he was …” she peered through the plastic. “… Patrick Schultz, age twenty-five. Five-foot eleven inches, brown hair, brown eyes. Yeah, that seems about right. We won’t know for sure until we run teeth or DNA.”

“Thank you both very much,” I managed to say politely, and quickly headed back across the parking lot.

“Hey!” the big detective yelled after me. “Who did you say you were?”

“It’s not important,” I commanded and got out of there as fast as I could.

The cold air blasted past me as I opened the driver side door. I slid into the seat and slammed the door after me.

“Well?” Cecily asked.

“Not our guy,” I said grimly.

“Who’s not?”

“Patrick Schultz. He’s not our murderer.”

“How do you know?”

I gave her a look. “I don’t think he came back from the dead,” I checked the backseat to make sure that Harry was still engrossed in his movie. “Unless you can run around killing people after you have your throat slit and all the blood drained out of your body, I’d say he’s not the guy we’re looking for.”

“Oh,” Annabeth said, a shocked look on her face. I could tell she was beginning to regret wanting to hang out with us.

“How long has he been dead?” Cecily asked.

“Six weeks, give or take.”

“Right.” Cecily sighed. “Back to square one.”

“Expect this time we have no other suspects.”

“Right,” she said again. A coroner’s van pulled into the next parking lot. I hoped they brought some bug spray.

“We’re almost out of time,” I said to Cecily, not really knowing what I wanted her to do about it. Or even what she
could
do about it.

“I know,” she sounded blank. “I thought this was a good lead. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” I patted her knee. “We’ll think of something.”

“We could—” she started.

“No,” I cut her off. “We’re not killing an innocent person. No.”

Annabeth snorted. “You’d be doing the world a favor,” she said.

I slammed the car into reverse and backed out of my parking space. “This is not open for discussion.”

“Fine,” Cecily crossed her arms. “But eventually you will have to face facts.”

“What facts?”

“When someone is standing over your children, ready to cut off their heads, you will change your mind,” she said grimly.

“No, I won’t,” I said stubbornly. “Because it’s wrong. I can’t murder someone to save my life, or anyone else’s life.”

“What about that vampire you staked?” Cecily asked snidely.

“That was different!” I protested. “He was going to kill me. It was self-defense!”

“You staked a vampire?” Annabeth had awe in her voice and a little fear.

“It was a one-time thing,” I said. “And he didn’t die. So it’s not relevant.”

“It will be relevant,” Cecily said darkly.

“A life is a life,” I said. “You can’t say that one person’s life is more important than another’s just because you like that person! If that was the case, we’d have relatives of people needing organ transplants hunting down compatible donors and killing them for their organs!”

“That’s nice and idealistic,” Cecily replied. “But when it comes down to it, I’m betting you change your mind.”

“I might,” I said seriously. “But I’ll be wrong if I do. And I hope, by talking about it now, that I will have already decided what the right thing to do is, before I get in that situation. Most people have flexible ethics because they think, in the heat of the moment, that they’ll make the right choice. That’s letting your emotions decide, not your head. My emotions say, ‘kill Pravus.’ My head says it’s wrong. I hope it never comes down to it, but if it does, I want to go with my head.”

“Even at the expense of your children?” Annabeth asked.

I put a hand over my belly, where there might be a baby growing. “How can I truly say that I believe something if I’m
not
willing to risk everything for it? It’s not a preference, it’s not a ‘I’d
rather
not murder people, but if you push me …’ It’s a belief. Murder is wrong. I’m going to execute the person who murdered those students, because murder is wrong. I’m not going to murder someone myself to save anyone.” I took a deep breath. “Not even my daughters.”

“But isn’t killing the murderer, taking a life, just like the murderer did?” Annabeth protested.

Cecily leaned back in her seat, a gleam in her eyes. I could tell she was enjoying this exchange.

“If all life is precious, then there is only one penalty severe enough for taking a life. If you lock people away, or charge them money, you are saying that a human life can be bought. So much money, so much time in jail, and it’s okay to steal someone’s life. I believe in the death penalty because it’s the only punishment that makes sense. It’s the only punishment that says, ‘you took something that is irreplaceable,’ because they did. If I smash your car, or steal your TV, I can pay you back. But if I kill you, there’s no coming back from that.”

“For some of you,” Cecily said quietly with a smile.

“Vampires aside, dead is dead,” I smiled.

“Okay,” Annabeth said. “So what are you going to do now?” I wondered if she was worried that she would lose her place to stay if we were executed in the next forty-eight hours.

“I don’t know,” I sighed. “I don’t know.”

Chapter Twenty-nine:

Floyd Again

I invited everyone in for a late lunch when we got home. None of us had felt like eating after smelling and hearing about the gory demise of Patrick Schultz. I was kind of hoping that they would refuse, but I think that the safety of a human house trumped the dubious privacy of a vampire’s. Besides, I wouldn’t think a vampire would have much around the house that was edible. But Cecily did tend to eat like a farm-hand, even if she derived zero nutritional benefit from it and never gained an ounce.

I set out sandwich meat and condiments and popped open a new can of Pringles.

“Fat free?” Cecily asked.

“Yes,” I said shortly.

“These taste like cardboard.”

I glared. “No one said that you have to eat. In fact, one might even suggest that you are wasting resources by eating.”

She popped another chip in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Cardboard … and dirt. I’m definitely detecting a dirt taste.”

I snatched the can. “Then don’t eat them,” I said through clenched teeth.

She swiped the can back before I could even blink. It must be getting later in the day, her vamp reflexes were speeding up. “I didn’t say I didn’t like the taste,” she crunched another chip. “I just said it tasted like dirt.”

I gave her the evil eye and finished smearing fat free mayonnaise on my sandwich. Annabeth was quickly assembling a gigantic sandwich for herself and a much smaller one for Harry. She must have a really good metabolism too. Why was I the only person in the world with a slow metabolism?

Cecily eyed the mayo and opened her mouth. I waved the knife at her. “Don’t,” I said.

“Bu—”

“Don’t say it.”

“I was ju—”

“Ah, ah, ah!” I stopped her. “Either eat it or shut up. No more comments.”

She was just beginning to say something else, probably about how the mayo tasted like egg whites when there was a crash from the backyard. Annabeth’s hand flew to her throat in terror and Harry cringed in his chair. Cecily went streaking out the back door before I could tell her to wait. Vampires! I ran to the master closet to get my husband’s shotgun out of the gun safe. I knew that, by the time I chambered a few shells and made it out to the backyard, the excitement would be over. If Cecily was the victor, all well and good. But if not, I wanted to have a backup plan.

“Cecily?” I called cautiously, opening the screen door with one hand.

“Over here,” she answered, making me almost lightheaded with relief. Backup plans are good, but there’s a reason that they are the backup and not the main plan.

I turned the corner of the house to see Cecily yank someone up from the ground. Unfortunately for him, she had hold of his foot, not his arm. It took me several seconds to recognize Floyd, handing upside down in the air.

I flipped the safety back on and lowered the barrel on the shotgun.

“You can’t do this!” Floyd screamed, “I have rights!”

Cecily gave him a little shake and I imagined I could hear his teeth rattling.