It's A Wonderfully Sexy Life (4 page)

Stationed near the door in case the bell rang again, she felt someone watching her. Afraid it might be her old boyfriend, Lenny, she quickly looked up, relieved to see not Lenny but her mother marching across the packed living room toward her.

Materializing at her side, she gestured to the untouched food languishing on the paper plate in Mandy’s hand, a frown lining her high forehead. “You’ve been carrying that plate around for the past hour like it was luggage. You on one of your crazy diets again or what?”

“Nah, Ma. I’m just not hungry.”

“Not hungry!” In the Delinski household, lack of appetite counted as an eighth Deadly Sin. One of the hazards of being born into a family for which eating was the antidote to every ill was that nearly all Mandy’s relatives were stout as barrels. “But it’s Christmas. After morning mass, what is there to do but eat?”

Mandy could think of a few other things to do, several of them fairly aerobic and all involving getting a certain blue-eyed, blond-haired hunk naked and horizontal. Feeling her face heat, she ducked her head and forked up a bite of stuffed cabbage.

Predictably, her mother relaxed. “That’s better. I’ll thank you to remember you’re an attractive Polish girl with a beautiful full figure and you ought to be proud. Not everybody likes skinny-skinny, you know. Lenny, for one, appreciates a girl with a healthy appetite.” She nodded toward the far side of the living room to where Lenny Borkowski hunched over his plate, shoveling food into his mouth.

Skinny as the proverbial rail, Lenny could never seem to get enough to eat—especially if the meal was free. If he was the type of man her full figure attracted, Mandy had better start on a juice fast straightaway.

Catching her eye, he smiled over at her, food rimming his front teeth and red sauce dribbling his chin. Disgusted that she’d been desperate enough to date him even after the investment fiasco, Mandy sent him a halfhearted nod and turned back to her mother. “That’s because he eats like a pig and looks like Ichabod Crane.”

One eye monitoring the food table, no doubt to determine if replenishments were required, her mother asked, “Who?”

“You know, Ma, the skinny schoolmaster who got his head lopped off by the Headless Horseman.”

Her mother drew back, expression horrified. “Really, Amanda, I’ll thank you to remember it’s Christmas. Can’t you keep from bringing your violent work home with you one day out of the year?”

Mandy started to explain that Ichabod Crane was a fictional character from Washington Irving’s Halloween classic,
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
but then thought better of it. Why waste her breath? Besides, it was the wrong holiday.

Apparently the food supplies were holding steady because her mother turned back to her. Casting a significant glance across the room, she leaned closer and confided, “Lenny wants to get back with you. He told your brother Jimmy so just before you came downstairs. And I hear his business has picked up. Rumor has it he’s doing very well for himself now.”

Mandy set down her plastic fork on the plate’s edge, well and truly finished with her food. Lenny was from the neighborhood, which meant he was Catholic and Polish. They’d both been raised in traditional blue-collar families but beyond being still single and thirty, they had absolutely nothing in common.

Holding firm, she said, “Great, then he can pay me back the money of mine he lost. And frankly I don’t care if he’s suddenly Donald Trump, because I have absolutely no interest in getting back together with him, not now and not ever.”

Not only was Lenny physically unappealing with no apparent head for finance, but worst of all, he was a deadbeat. The last time they’d gone out, he’d made a big deal of impressing her parents by taking her to dinner at Tio Peppe, one of the city’s priciest restaurants. He’d ordered the most expensive items on the menu, including a bottle of Dom Perignon, and ended the night with one of the restaurant’s signature flaming desserts. But when the bill arrived, he announced he’d forgotten his wallet. Fortunately she’d had her credit card with her, not that he’d ever paid her back for even his share of the meal. That little encounter had set her dream of home ownership back by several hundred dollars.

Her mother’s gaze lifted to the velvet painting of the Virgin and Child hanging over the living room couch. “You got somebody better on the string, then?”

Here we go—again
. Mandy paused. Part of her wanted to shout out that
yes, yes
she did if only to get her mother off her back, but superstition held her back. Ridiculous as it was, she didn’t want to risk jinxing her chances of Josh calling her by mentioning him too soon to her well-meaning but nosy family. Besides, the first questions they’d ask were what he did for a living and who his parents were. If she had to admit he was a bartender and that she didn’t even know his last name, all hell would break loose. And by keeping mum, if he didn’t call, at least she’d be spared rehashing the episode around the dinner table for the next ten years.

Arms folded across her full bosom, her mother demanded, “Well, do you or don’t you? Which is it?”

Mandy’s pager went off, saving her from answering. Seeing her mother’s scowl return, she shrugged and said, “It’s the job, Ma.” Actually, she hoped it was Josh. Her pager number was part of her contact information on the card she’d given him.

Please, let it be him, let it be him, let it be…

Heart racing, she handed her mother the sagging paper ware. “Gotta go.”

Before her mother could answer her back, she turned and cut through the living room packed with siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins including Mikey, the family’s official black sheep, nieces and nephews, and assorted neighbors and friends to the stairway.

Upstairs, she headed for her bedroom—and sweet privacy. Pulling the door closed against the clamor, she felt calm washing over her. It could be years yet before she was able to afford a house of her own, but in the meantime she’d turned her bedroom into a haven, a space she felt good about coming home to at night. She’d spent the past weeks stripping away most of the girlish vestiges of her teen years, including changing the wall color from the Pepto-Bismol pink she’d picked out as a thirteen-year-old to a soft sage green. She’d put on the final coat of paint this morning, her Christmas present to herself.

Hands shaking, she sat on the edge of her bed and pushed the pager’s call-back number. Her heart plummeted when she saw it was the switchboard number for the precinct, not a personal call. No Josh calling to wish her Merry Christmas or to set up another date or even just to say “Hi, I’m thinking about you.”

Swallowing her disappointment, she picked up her cell and called back. “Delinski here. You paged me?”

The shift commander on the other end of the line didn’t bother with “Merry Christmas” or other festive preamble. “You’re needed down at the morgue, pronto. Homicide. It’s a federal case, so get a move on, okay?”

A federal case! Could this be her long-awaited “red ball,” the high-profile, career breakout case she’d been hoping for? Balancing the cell in the curve of her shoulder, she was already reaching for the locked drawer that held her badge and gun. “Don’t worry, Sarge. I’m as good as there.”

Not really sure what to do with self at this point but one thing’s for certain: no longer in position of having to wait and wonder whether or not he’ll call. No call’s coming now. Not now, not ever…

The agent with the salt-and-pepper hair reached out to shake her hand. “I’m Special Agent Walker.” He inclined his head to the younger man flanking his side. “And this is my colleague, Special Agent McKinney.”

With his cropped hair and flawlessly symmetrical features, McKinney reminded Mandy of the Ken doll she’d got for Christmas one year as a kid—plastically perfect to the point of blandness. “I’m afraid you’ve left your family on Christmas for no reason, officer. In fact, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Leave, my ass
. Digging in her heels, Mandy braced herself for a battle. Unfortunately turf wars were part and parcel of the landscape of modern day law enforcement. Rather than combining their resources and skills to bring closure to a case, more often than not federal and local authorities spent a ridiculous amount of time, energy and even taxpayers’ money butting heads over jurisdiction. It was too bad, really. The FBI might have the fancy crime lab and National Crime Information Center database for tracking fugitives, but no one had a better handle on the terrain of the city, including its criminal culture, than the street cops and detectives who knew just about every drug dealer, thief and snitch by face and name.

Pulling back her shoulders, Mandy looked the fed straight in the eye. “With all due respect, the murder occurred in the southeast precinct of Baltimore City. By definition, the BCPD’s already involved.”

“You misunderstand me. If Baltimore City Police wants to ride our coattails on this one, it’s fine by me. It’s not your precinct’s involvement we object to but yours.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t follow you.”

“This is a federal case, Officer Delinski, and your card on the victim’s body makes you part of the investigation. I don’t know whose call it was to send you down here, but your presence could compromise the evidence.”

A sinking feeling hit her squarely in the stomach, making her glad she’d eaten lightly. “Hold up,
my
card turned up on the vic?”

Both feds nodded. Mouth pulled into a grim line, McKinney advanced on her, and she had to resist the instinct to back up. “Yes,
officer,
but surely that’s no surprise to you. You must have given it to him.”

His accusatory tone had her mentally reviewing her work activities over the previous week. She’d given out her contact information to any number of individuals, including a pimp claiming to have inside information on a drug deal about to go down. It certainly wasn’t unheard of for an informant to turn up dead, but she didn’t see why the feds would involve themselves in a local homicide case.

Walker laid a hand on the young hotshot’s shoulder. “Let her stay. As long as she’s not left alone with any evidence, there shouldn’t be a problem. Besides, we need her to go on record as identifying the body.”

The body
. No matter how many years Mandy logged in on the force, that phrase would never lose its ominous sound.

The attendant on duty, a gaunt young man with dark-circled eyes and a head of curly black hair, stepped inside. Hands stuffed into the pockets of his stained lab coat, he said, “Dr. Matthews, the M.E. on duty, is waiting for you in the crypt. I’ll show you to the elevator.”

They filed out into the hallway, a stark affair of linoleum floors and gray-white walls, to the bank of elevators. The attendant punched the down arrow button, and the metal doors opened at once. The three of them stepped on, the federal agents holding back for Mandy to enter first. Gaze fixed on the light bar registering the descending floors as they dropped downward, Mandy considered that so far no one had mentioned the victim’s name, only his gender. Not knowing who he was—or rather, had been—only that he was someone with whom she’d interacted recently was a lot more anxiety-provoking than dealing with the bad news upfront.

Stepping out into the basement hallway awash in bluish neon, she felt as if she were in Batman’s fictional Gotham City rather than Baltimore City.
Quiet as a tomb,
she almost blurted out to break the tension, but glancing between the agents’ stern, square-jawed profiles, she decided neither was likely to appreciate the stab at humor.

A short, balding man dressed in a white lab coat and green surgical scrubs met them at the door. “I’m Dr. Matthews. You’re here for the Thorner case?”

Walker answered, “Yes, Doctor, that’s correct. Only the last name is Thornton.”

Dr. Matthews hesitated, and then nodded. “Very well, then. If you’ll follow me…”

They stepped inside the crypt—the climate-controlled chamber where bodies awaiting autopsy or identification were stored until claimed by relatives or otherwise disposed of. Mandy had pulled morgue duty a few times before, but if she lived to be a hundred, she’d never forget the signature smell. The close air was rank with formaldehyde, Lysol and alcohol, the windowless room flanked on three of its four sides by floor-to-ceiling metal drawers that held the remains of those who had experienced their last earthly Christmas.

The M.E. snapped on a pair of latex gloves and reached for the handle on one of the midlevel drawers. The slab slid out almost soundlessly, the victim’s body enclosed in a plastic body bag. He unzipped the bag, and Mandy braced herself. Whomever that drawer contained would be someone she knew, someone with whom she’d shared anywhere from a passing word to a relationship of days, months, or even years. Even with five years as a beat cop under her belt, she’d never gotten used to this part of the job, not entirely, and a part of her hoped she never did. No matter how many corpses she came across—and she’d seen her share—she couldn’t look down on a victim’s bloodless face and unblinking gaze without wondering about favorite colors and favorite foods, secrets fears and passions, victories celebrated and losses mourned—all the trappings of a life, a
human
life, cut short by senseless violence.

Moment of truth time, Delinski. No guts, no glory.

Mandy dropped her gaze—and froze.

Oh, God, no. Please…no.

The face was waxen, the chiseled features frozen stiff rather than mobile and yet there was no mistaking the dead man’s identity. He was Josh,
her
Josh, or at least she might have had the chance to make him hers if he’d lived. Josh of the laughing blue eyes, sexy smile and strong, knowing hands. When she’d stepped out of his arms last night to go home, she’d never guessed their next date would be at the morgue.

“Officer Delinski, do you know this man?” McKinney, impatience sharpening his voice, hovered over her.

The plummeting sensation in her stomach reminded her of riding the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror attraction at Disney’s MGM Studios theme park as a kid—a drop of thirteen gut-wrenching stories experienced again and again. Fighting the urge to be sick over the tops of her polished shoes, Mandy considered the question. Had she known Josh? In one sense, she hadn’t known him at all, not even his last name let alone why he’d left his home in Boston. In another sense, though, she’d known him well indeed—his favorite ice cream flavor, his favorite movies, how he liked to be kissed, held, touched.

“Officer Delinski, please answer the question. Do you or do you not recognize this man?” McKinney again, louder this time, as though she were deaf instead of stunned to speechlessness from looking on at a lost life—a life that had touched hers intensely albeit briefly.

Slowly, like a coma victim coming into consciousness, she nodded. “He introduced himself as Josh. I never knew his last name. We met last night at an event at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I was working an overtime security detail, and he was tending bar.”

“I see.” McKinney’s gaze honed in on her, and Mandy felt a blush creeping up her throat.

A horde of heated memories rushed her, an oddity in this cold, cold place—the melting stares coming across the atrium from a pair of blue bedroom eyes; the way he’d swiped away the whipped cream smudge below her mouth and pronounced her, not it, to be delicious; that ready hard cock rubbing against her, driving her crazy, until she hadn’t known what she wanted to do more, spread her legs and take him inside her in a single, satisfying thrust or open her mouth and spend the time to taste and suck and savor.

She heard the M.E.’s voice as if it came from the opposite end of a tunnel. “Cause of death was a gunshot wound to the back of the head, a classic execution-style hit.” He slid an arm beneath the victim’s head, Josh’s head, turning the body onto its side to reveal the wound. “We dug out a .22-caliber slug from the left occipital lobe. The bullet transected the bone and lodged in the soft tissue, so there was no exit wound. The mechanism of death was massive traumatic hemorrhage of the brain.”

Forcing the cop part of her brain to kick in, Mandy focused on the facts of the case. A .22-caliber pistol was frequently the firearm of choice among mob enforcers for practical reason. Because of its small size, the bullet lacked the velocity to penetrate the skull a second time; instead ricocheting around inside and bringing about massive brain hemorrhage and death. With a clean, close shot, victim fatality was virtually guaranteed.

Sounding like a museum docent reciting the details of a particular piece, the M.E. continued, “Note the ragged, star-shaped wound. That tells us that the weapon was fired at close range, likely with the barrel pressed directly against the skin. The gases shoot under the skin, expand, and the explosion of expanding gas causes the tissue to split.”

Walker spoke up, “We’ll need to rule out suicide. If there’s a murder trial, the defense may try to con the jury into thinking Thornton could have just as easily shot himself as been murdered. Any chance the physical evidence could be construed as indicative of a self-inflicted wound?”

Reclaiming his arm, the M.E. shook his balding head. “Suicide shots are almost always to the temple, through the mouth or into the front of the chest. In this case, the angle of the bullet, the degree of gunpowder tattooing on the skin around the wound, the absence of any trace residue on the victim’s hands, and the fact that no weapon was found at the scene all rule out suicide. No, gentlemen…pardon me, I meant to say
lady
and gentlemen—” He cast an apologetic look at Mandy before continuing, “Joshua Thornton was murdered. I’d stake my professional reputation on it.”

For the first time since she’d met him, Mandy saw McKinney break into a semi-smile. “Good to know, Doc, because you may have to do just that. When we collar the bastard who carried out the hit, I’ll be calling on you to testify as an expert witness—unless he flips, of course, in which case we’ll offer to cut a deal in exchange for the name of his boss. The trigger man is just a hired gun, after all.”

Swallowing against the sourness coating her throat, Mandy interrupted to ask, “So that means he didn’t suffer, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“Josh…I mean the vic, he didn’t feel any pain, did he?”

The three men turned to look at her as though she were newly landed from Mars. Beyond providing physical clues to closing the case, the victim’s suffering was considered inconsequential at this point. It didn’t matter to the white-lab-coated medical examiner or the two dark-suited FBI agents whether Josh had died instantly or languished for hours, but it mattered to Mandy. It mattered enormously.

“There were no other marks found on the body to indicate torture or even a struggle. In all likelihood, death would have been instantaneous.”

Mandy let out the breath she’d been unconsciously holding back. As far as homicide went, a clean shot was a relatively humane death. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but it was all she had to hold on to.

Expression grim, McKinney shook his head. “When he didn’t check in this morning, I paged him, but he didn’t respond. I knew then they must have gotten to him. It’s a damn shame, too. He was almost to home base. The case was scheduled to come to trial the day after New Year’s Day. If only he could have held out just a little longer.”

Josh’s words came back to her.
“I have a hunch this New Year’s is going to be the start of something wonderful, a fresh start in more ways than one.”

Agent Walker added, “If my twenty-five years with the Bureau have taught me anything, it’s that the last week is critical. When we lose them, typically the hit goes down within the last seven days. We tell them to lay low and for a while they do, but then they’re almost to the finish line, and something or someone comes along and they get careless or antsy or just plain bored and they slip up.”

Something or
someone
comes along. Mandy clamped her mouth closed against the bile burning up the back of her throat.
One more week, Josh. You probably would have made it, too, if I hadn’t come along and screwed everything up for you
. If only she’d turned down that offer of coffee. If only she hadn’t kept him hanging around on the deserted street waiting for her to start her car. If only she hadn’t been such a prude and had gone back with him to his apartment.
If, if, if…

“Wait a minute, are you saying Josh, I mean Mr. Thornton, was a federally protected witness? But why would the mob take a contract out on a bartender?”

“Joshua Thornton is, or rather was, no bartender. That was just his relocation cover. He was heir to Thornton Enterprises, one of this country’s largest telecommunications firms.”

Josh’s words, which she hadn’t thought much about at the time, came back to her as vividly as if he were standing beside her, whispering clues in her ear.
If you ever consider reinvesting, you might think about diversifying your portfolio to include telecommunication technologies. WiFi networks are literally the wave of the future….