Centaur of the Crime: Book One of 'Fantasy and Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 1) (3 page)

Actually, the extra security proved a pain in the neck. I refused to leave the crime scene until they’d lifted some prints and bagged the corpse. McClatchy practically had me clapped in irons and shanghaied back to the Medical Examiner’s office in the company of two beat cops who looked like they’d been kicked off the Chicago Bears for steroid abuse.

The day hadn’t been a total loss, but at times it teetered right on the effin’ edge. The bagging people unceremoniously dumped the John Doe on my examination table without so much as a thank-you-ma’am. I swabbed the surfaces of the metal chunk I’d taken out of the body’s shoulder, the gold medallion, and the inside of that odd chest wound and sent the samples off to the tox-box experts.

Then I sent samples of Doe’s clothing to the fiber experts, sterilized the medallion, stuck it in my pocket, dumped the jumpsuit, left a note for Hector to email me his crime scene photos, pulled the Pentax’s memory card, and had just started prepping for Doe’s autopsy when something went
sproing
, and all the adrenaline I’d been running on petered out and left me feeling like I’d taken a swan dive off the edge of a cliff.

The two guys from the Bears’ defensive line escorted me home and parked across the street from my house. I thanked them and walked unsteadily up the long, freshly paved asphalt driveway. I live on the north side of Los Angeles, up near Griffith Park. It’s a tony neighborhood stuffed to the gills with pretty, upscale homes, but my place wasn’t among them.

Think of a Santa Fe themed shoebox. Surround it with a lawn that looks more like a well-tended sand dune, and you’ve got it. I’ve got a brown thumb powerful enough to kill anything with leaves and roots at up to thirty paces.

I fished the door key out of my purse, stumbled my way inside, and began pulling down all of the blinds. Security or no, I didn’t like the idea of anyone watching me in my own home. I left only one window alone—the backyard view that ran right up to the edge of the park. Perched at the top of the highest ridge was the Art Deco dome of Griffith Observatory.

My fingers began to shake. I started to run a warm bath for myself, and then dug around in the cabinet below the sink for some bath salts. Of course, right when Dayna Chrissie needs something, that’s when she runs out. Calgon wasn’t going to be taking me away tonight.

So I did the next best thing. I turned the shower to
hot
, scrubbed myself down with a pair of exfoliating gloves until my skin turned bright pink, swaddled myself in the vast white folds of my oversized Egyptian cotton bathrobe, and padded over to the kitchen freezer.

I pushed aside the frozen cauliflower, the rainy-day pack of microwave taquitos, and dove for the pint-size container of my favorite ice cream—a milkfat-laced smart bomb of a dessert called Chunky Chocolate Coma. I curled up in a corner of my beat-up leather couch and proceeded to do the windmill thing with my spoon through the layers of chocolate-coated almonds and soft brownie chunks until I scraped the bottom of the carton.

My fingers began to quiver again. I flung the empty container and the spoon away with a clatter. They bounced off the wall and left me a pair of brown chocolate streaks to clean up later.

I felt a wracking, chest-tingling cry finally break loose inside like an iceberg calving off from a glacier. I buried my face in my hands and just sobbed, sobbed with relief that I was alive—
alive
, dammit!—and that I was going to see another sunrise.

It felt heavenly. It felt as if a rubber band had snapped inside of me.

I’d always been so good, so damned good at holding everything back. Everything that would’ve marked Miss Dayna Chrissie as someone who just wasn’t professional enough to be in forensics. Someone who couldn’t control their emotions, who couldn’t stay detached, who couldn’t be trusted to run an investigation. Who knew if the
girl
might break down on the stand, when some hotshot defense attorney focused all of his powers on wrecking her carefully built case?

But I’d held it together today. Even had to remind myself to thank the guy who’d put himself in harm’s way to keep me safe.

It made me feel good.

So good, it almost made me forget that someone had tried to kill me.

Almost.

I didn’t make it to bed. I stayed curled up on the couch like a lanky, black-haired, green-eyed cat. A cat that someone had stuffed with ice cream and then wrapped in an oversize bathrobe, to be precise. I watched the evening turn into night. The city had lit up the road to the observatory tonight, so that if you squinted, you could imagine James Dean, clad head to toe in shiny black biker leather, gunning his motorcycle up the steep asphalt slope and up to the tinted spotlights that gave the observatory dome the gentle amber shade of a Malibu sunset.

My weary, drowsy brain settled on the round spotlights. Then the lights changed, became darker and more ragged at the edges as I felt my eyelids grow as heavy as marble slabs. I thought of the crime scene today. The drops of red at the scene near the body.

Splashes of blood on concrete.

That’s when my mind spiraled back to something I call ‘The Dream’. It’s a recurring vision-memory thing that comes back to me at the oddest times. To be honest, it took place so long ago, that I wasn’t sure if it was real, or if it had been some awful fever dream brought on by eating too many slices of holiday fruitcake.

Yeah, someone was definitely being a fruitcake here.

My eyes closed and the vision of the dusty gray concrete softened and turned white. It was a frigid December in the woods of Pike County, Illinois.

I’d just turned seven.

The blood trail stood out in a pattern of scarlet splashes against the snow. Cold wind bit at me with wolves’ teeth and made a low-pitched howl through icicle-coated branches. It raised goosebumps on my arms, even through the fleece of my ballet-slipper pink jacket and mittens. The bare trunks of the birch and hickory trees around me jutted out of the ankle-deep snow like picked-over bones.

I wasn’t scared. Not much, anyway. If I squinted through the withered remains of the underbrush, I could still make out the red-green glow of the Christmas lights that rambled along our front porch as if it were some strange, wintery vine. The scent of a wood fire billowed out of our house’s skinny brick chimney and skimmed past my nose like a passing phantom.

Curious, I decided to follow the blood trail.

The line of droplets meandered drunkenly between the trees. Dark, heavy shade of red, like fistfuls of ripe chokeberries. My little wigwam boots sank into the snow’s icy surface with the crunch of someone biting into stale crusts of bread. Once, the droplets became a splatter, and off to the left, at the level of my head, was a bright gash against the papery-thin bark of a sugar maple tree. Then the trail of blood drops changed direction.

Now it headed towards the house.

I walked faster, let my breath fog up against my eyelashes. I brushed the wetness aside with one pink sleeve and saw the blood trail run up along the side of our driveway, past where Daddy’s beat-up station wagon sat like a wood-paneled display of dents ringed with rust. I followed the trail up to the garage’s side door. It was wide, built to swallow furniture and auto parts and maybe little girls.

Lime-green flecks of paint clung to the door’s wooden surface by faith as much as anything else. The blood pointed the way. Inside. One circular drop lay smeared halfway under the door’s bottom edge as if it had tried and failed to squeeze under the worn gray weather stripping.

My breath echoed hollow and empty in the recesses of my hood. The noises from inside the garage were soft but unmistakably clear. The scrape of flesh on concrete, a grunt, as if someone was lifting a heavy object, something falling with a thud against metal. Then the blubbery, snot-choked sounds of sobbing.

I grasped the doorknob, turned it, pushed in.

The all-weather bulb inside the garage hung from the rafters by a single paint-spattered cord. Daddy’s orange hunting vest was streaked with red. Dark, chokeberry red. An iron smell rolled off him and filled the room. His rifle lay propped up against the wall. Something that looked like a grayish-white nub of bone jutted out of the darkness of the garage chest freezer. Daddy knelt before the white, coffin-shaped chamber, shaking his head as he cried. A single tear hit the side of the freezer and slithered down over the raised silver letters on the side:
KELVINATOR.

“Oh, God, forgive me, forgive me,” Daddy sobbed. He clasped his hands together clumsily, trying to pray.

I stepped forward into the garage. Daddy hadn’t noticed me yet, he was still talking to God. Now I was worried. What could be causing him such pain?

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I killed her. Dear God, I
murdered
her.”

Whatever Daddy was concerned about, it had to do with whatever was in the chest freezer. The lid lay open, but the lip of the freezer was high up for my seven-year old frame. I stood on tiptoe, grabbed the top edge, and gazed down into the Kelvinator’s depths.

My eyes went wide at what lay at the bottom.

Chapter Four

I woke with a start. The gray light of dawn came streaming through the window. No fog on the horizon, meaning that it was going to be hot enough to do a sidewalk pizza bake in downtown Los Angeles. I let the coffee brew while I showered again, and then dug into my closet for a not-too-badly ironed pair of Ann Taylor pants, a violet top, and some shoes in a color that wouldn’t clash. I considered for a moment, and then pulled out my favorite long-sleeved open cardigan. It was going to be a scorcher today, but I planned to work inside.

Winter lives in the morgue.

I poured myself a cup of Colombia’s finest and inhaled the blessedly caffeine-infused steam that curled up from my cup. I eyed the cordless phone on the kitchen counter, fingers itching to pick up the receiver. To give Daddy a call, ask him what he remembered about that day, that strange wintery day when I found him in the garage, bawling his eyes out.

I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Like I said, it was a long, long time ago. Maybe I even dreamt that he’d been wearing a hunting outfit. We’d moved to the Chicago area when I was eight or nine. I never saw him express the slightest interest in sport hunting once we’d settled into our new home.

I mean, for chrissake, he’d been an on-again, off-again vegan since I’d been in grade school. Why would he even
want
to go hunting? He had lots of other hobbies to occupy his time. Maybe I had dreamt all of it, the entire thing, out of whole cloth. I took a sip of coffee, determined to enjoy the rich burnt-umber flavor of the freshly ground beans.

Then my mind did that weird
clicking
thing again, like it was some kind of spongy telephone switchboard that took its own sweet time connecting things together. Lots of hobbies to take up one’s time. The John Doe’s scale-patterned skin, which looked as if it belonged to Persephone, my roommate’s albino king snake.

My roommate—whose name, I recalled, with a tingle of satisfaction, was ‘Joan’—had several hobbies. But her favorite one involved dressing up as a ‘wench’ for some medieval historical society. She hung out with the folks who ran the Renaissance Faires off the college campus.

It wasn’t exactly my kind of crowd—give me modern dental care and indoor plumbing any day over Ye Olde Middle Ages—but I did enjoy the few times I went to their events. Jousting, carousing, medieval swordplay done by the men to impress the women. While I got a lot of attention from the guys, I lost interest. I think that happened around the time when I realized it was against the rules to get men to fight to the death for my favor.