Board Stiff (Mattie Winston Mysteries) (10 page)

“No problem. I’m happy to help.” I cast a glance at Izzy, who nods in agreement.

Hurley glances at his watch. “I’ll schedule a planning session over at the police station for an hour from now. Let’s say three-thirty. We’ll have the extra help there and we can divvy up the tasks to make sure we get it all done. I’ll work on the search warrant in the meantime. Izzy, let me know if you come across any other good information that might be helpful.”

“I will, but I’m essentially done with the autopsy at this point so I don’t anticipate anything more here. We’ll let you know when we get the results of the tox screen back.”

I follow Hurley out of the autopsy suite, and as we pass the men’s bathroom in the hallway, he grabs my arm and drags me inside before I know what he’s doing. Then he pulls me to him so that we are in full frontal contact.

“Hurley, are you crazy? I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do this.”

“Do what?” Hurley whispers and then his lips descend upon mine before I have a chance to answer.

I give in to the sensations for several delicious seconds before reality brings me back to earth. “This is too public,” I gasp. “Someone could come in. If we get caught, it will ruin everything.”

“I can’t help it. I miss you. I want you,” he says, his voice deep and exciting.

“We shouldn’t.”

Hurley lays down a line of light butterfly kisses along the side of my neck. His hand snakes its way under my shirt and suddenly I’m very certain we should. “I think I want to create my own nipple incident since you won’t tell me about the first one,” he says.

I try one last protest. “It’s not safe. Someone will catch us.” Even as I say this, the idea of getting caught ramps up my hormones.

“Who’s going to come in?” Hurley whispers. “Izzy and Arnie are tied up in the autopsy suite, Emily is occupied in the library, and the only other employee who might be here is Cass, and I don’t think she’ll use the men’s room no matter what disguise she might happen to be in today.”

I struggle to come up with another objection to Hurley’s advances, but the sensations coursing through my body muddle my mind. Once again, I’m a goner.

T
en very hectic but satisfying minutes later, Hurley and I exit the men’s room. Hurley goes first to make sure no one is in the hallway outside the bathroom, and as soon as he determines the coast is clear, he signals for me to come out. We pull ourselves together, straighten our clothing and hair, and mutter something about never doing that again. After a quick discussion, Hurley heads for the police station while I make my way to the library and Emily, who I had temporarily forgotten about. I find her seated at the table where we left her, engrossed in a book. She looks up and smiles at me when I enter.

“What are you reading?” I ask.

She lifts the book and lets me see the cover. I’m a little surprised by her choice. While I expected her to be more drawn to the medicolegal textbooks that discuss and depict dead bodies and the steps necessary to determine how they got that way, she has chosen a book on facial recognition. She has it open to a page highlighting clay sculpture.

“Does that interest you?” I ask.

“It does. I had no idea how scientific this was. I saw a show on TV once that talked about how a scientist identified a body using clay sculpture, but I thought her primary expertise was artistic. Now I see that it’s as much science as it is art.”

“Very much so. Researchers spent a lot of time, study, and years figuring out the various skin and tissue depths as it relates to bone structure for different races of people. They have compiled all that data, and the artists who do facial recognition, whether it be through clay sculpture, drawing, or computer graphics, have to know how to apply it.”

“I like to draw,” Emily says. “I made a little money last year at school drawing portraits of some of my classmates and selling them. I was hoping to make enough to help Mom be able to keep the house, but that didn’t happen. Maybe if I’d gone to school with a bunch of rich kids it would have been different. But most of the kids at that school weren’t any better off than I was. So even though I was able to sell the pictures, I didn’t sell them for much.”

“If you were able to sell the pictures at all you must be quite good. In fact, if you were able to sell to people who didn’t have much money, you must be really good.”

Emily shrugs. “My mom thinks I’m good. She wanted to send me to art school but we couldn’t afford it.”

“Are you taking any art classes at school here?”

“Yeah, but it’s pretty basic stuff.”

“Maybe once you and your mom get back on your feet, art school can be an option for you again.”

“I doubt it,” Emily says with a weary smile. She sounds defeated and depressed and I find myself wondering just how awful her life was in Chicago.

“Hurley and I need to head up a strategy session over at the police station. He’s calling in recruits to help because we have a lot of territory to cover and a lot of suspects to work through in the case we have.”

“So was your victim murdered?”

“It appears so.”

“Is the victim a man or a woman?”

“Man.”

“How did he die?”

“We’re not sure yet. Some kind of poison or medication we think.”

“Why do you have so many suspects? Did a lot of people hate the guy?”

“Possibly.” I don’t want to say too much more given that it’s an ongoing investigation. I could always tell Emily to keep what I tell her a secret, but if there is one thing I’ve learned from living in a small town, it’s that the only secret you can guarantee will stay that way is the one you never share. “Would you like Hurley to take you home?”

“If it’s okay with you, I’d like to stay here and finish reading this. It’s kind of fun.”

“I think that will be okay. Can I get you a snack of some sort?”

“No thanks. I’m fine.”

“We should be done with our meeting around four I think. Do you know Hurley’s cell number?”

She shakes her head, so I look it up on my cell and write it down for her. “If you need anything, just use the phone in here to call Hurley.”

“Is that what you call him all the time?”

“Who? What? You mean Hurley?”

She nods.

“Yeah, I guess I do, though I’m not sure why.”

“You like him, don’t you?”

“Sure. He’s a great guy and a good detective.”

“No, I mean you
like
him. In a lovey-dovey way.”

I hesitate to answer her, because I’m not sure how honest I should be. I know I can’t be totally honest. The little sessions Hurley and I had today must stay secret if I’m to keep my job. In a way it’s a shame since I’m pretty sure they’d count toward my exercise totals in the diary Gunther wants me to keep. But I also don’t want to lie too openly to Emily. She already knows Hurley and I had something going on when she and her mom showed up. So I decide to go with half-truths for now.

“I had feelings for Hurley, yes,” I say. “And maybe if things had worked out differently, it could have led to something. But it seems it wasn’t meant to be. Everything has worked against the two of us ending up together. My office has been assigned oversight duties with the police department, and they’ve been assigned the same thing with us. That means each of us is policing the other to make sure everything is done right. In order for us to work together, we can’t have a conflict of interest that might keep either of us from being totally honest in our scrutiny of the other. A romantic relationship qualifies as a conflict of interest.”

“So quit your job,” Emily says with a shrug, as if the answer is so obvious any idiot could figure it out. I envy her naïveté.

“I did. But the new job I thought I had fell through, and you and your mom showed up, and it just seemed like it wasn’t meant to be. So now I’m back at this job, which I love by the way. And Hurley and I are partners and nothing more.”

“Things don’t always work out the way we want them to, do they?” Her tone is one of resigned acceptance.

“No, they don’t. It must be hard for you, all this change.”

She shrugs again, her expression an attempt at indifference that I don’t buy. “You go with the flow.”

I reach over and give her arm a gentle squeeze. The gesture seems to embarrass her and she suddenly becomes engrossed in her book again.

“I’ll be back in a little while. Call if you need anything.” I leave her in the library and head back to the autopsy suite. Bernie has been sewn back up and Arnie and Izzy are cleaning the room. I poke my head in and even though I know the answer, I ask, “Anything new?”

Izzy, as expected, shakes his head.

Arnie, however, surprises me. “Yeah, I had a thought. We should get a list of all the recent deaths at that nursing home and look at their records to see if there is anything suspicious. Just to see if maybe this guy really was killing people off.” His face lights up as he speaks. This is what Arnie lives for, a real live conspiracy right here at home. “We might need to do some exhumations and autopsy any of the ones that look suspicious.”

Izzy says, “That’s assuming the bodies are still available. These days people are as likely to be cremated as they are buried. Plus I’m not sure the DA would be willing to spend the money necessary to do all that, especially if the perpetrator is already dead.”

“Besides, the autopsies might not help,” I say. “Irene told me she thought Bernard was varying his methods to avoid anyone catching on.”

Arnie isn’t going to give up that easily. I know he’s hoping to uncover some sort of plot here, because being able to verify even one real conspiracy lends a level of validation to all the others. “We should at least look at the death rates and compare them to other facilities. If the Twilight Home’s numbers are way out of line, that would mean something, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Izzy says. “It sounds like a lot of overwrought paranoia to me. I think we’ll be looking for something that isn’t there.”

“But what does it hurt to look?” Arnie argues.

I think Izzy senses that Arnie is too excited to let the matter go, so he tries changing the subject. “How did it go with Bernard’s wife? Did you get a sense that she might have wanted him dead?”

“Oh, I don’t think she’ll miss him. They were in the process of splitting up from what she told us. But Hurley doesn’t think she would have killed him and I’m inclined to agree with him. The woman is a bit of a whack job, but she doesn’t strike me as a killer.”

“If you’re right, that narrows it down to a few dozen patients and employees as suspects,” Izzy jokes. “It sounds like you’re going to have a busy weekend.”

“I don’t mind.” Truth is, I’m delighted. I’m hoping that staying busy will help keep my mind off the casino. “It will probably be a late night tonight and an early start tomorrow. Do you want me to check in with you tomorrow morning before I hook up with Hurley?”

“I wouldn’t mind an update,” Izzy says. “But it doesn’t have to be in the morning. If you hit on something big let me know, otherwise just check in with me at some point tomorrow. At this point, the main focus has to be on the investigation and narrowing down suspects, so the best use of your time will be to assist Hurley in the investigation.”

I wonder if he would still feel that way if he knew what Hurley and I had just done in the men’s room. I promise myself to be stronger, and to draw a line with Hurley. But first I have to figure out a way to keep him from ever touching me again, because that touch does evil things to me.

Izzy throws Arnie a bone. “Arnie, you can assist Mattie and Hurley if you want. Given the amount of work that’s involved with this case, and the fact that Jonas’s last allergy attack was so severe he’s still in the hospital, I imagine the police could use some help with the evidence collection, searches, and interviews.”

“Seriously?” Arnie says, his eyes big with excitement.

“Why not?” Izzy says. “If you want, I can start the tox screen for you and process our samples here. It’s been awhile, but I think I remember how to do it. That way you can spend some time in the field.”

“Thanks, Izzy.” Arnie looks over at me. “If it’s okay with you, Mattie.”

“Of course it is. I’m happy to have you.”

“Just keep track of your hours for comp time,” Izzy tells us.

Arnie and I mumble agreements even though we know the whole comp time thing is a joke. Our positions are salaried, based on an eight-to-five schedule with an hour taken out for lunch. We get paid for eight hours a day, forty hours a week, no matter how many hours we work. Because we have to put in call time and frequently end up working in the evenings, the middle of the night, or on the weekends, we are supposed to keep track of these off hours and then compensate for them by taking time off during our regular eight-hour day. The theory is that we never end up working more than those paid forty hours. The reality is we always seem to end up working way more than those forty hours and our schedules rarely resemble that eight-to-five ideal. Trying to make up comp time is a Sisyphean task. When I quit my job two months ago, I had almost a hundred hours of comp time banked, and I’d only been on the job for three months. I imagine Arnie and Izzy would both have thousands of comp time hours if it wasn’t for the fact that it resets to zero every year. It wouldn’t be too bad if we could cash that comp time in somehow, but it’s a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.

It’s easy to see how the time builds up. I started back at my job on Thursday so I’ve been at it for three days. I put in my eight hours on Thursday and Friday, and by the time the weekend is over, I will probably have twelve to sixteen more hours of time in. If I can find a way to use it during the week and work some short days, or even take a whole day off, it would help. But that rarely happens. There’s always something that needs to be done: autopsies, results follow-ups, investigations, research, studying, and paperwork . . . tons and tons of paperwork.

Still, a day off during the week would allow me to hit up the casino, assuming I wasn’t on call. Dr. Maggie pops into my head with a
tsk-tsk
, and I can see her writing
addict
on that damned notepad of hers. I mentally gag her and tie her down, a process that apparently puts a smile on my face.

“What’s so funny?” Izzy asks me.

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m just so happy to be back on the job.”