The Corpse Wore Stilettos Read online

  “Fire is very bad for your skin,” I said, holding in a laugh.

  “When Bradley’s done, you can bring him to the ops center and walk him through the background reports on the other morgue employees. Maybe try to get a sketch of the man who took the body,” Burns said.

  I could have sworn I heard a groan from Neutron.

  “Background reports? Burns, we seriously have to talk about gettin’ me a new ID if I’m gonna be identifying corpse-napping murderers.” As Neutron tried to push him toward the door, DC grabbed Burns’s arm to show him how seriously he’d taken the morning’s events.

  “Go with Neutron, DC. I promise we’ll talk later.”

  Neutron lured DC out of the office by asking him about what he wanted to change into. He must have known DC had a fashionista streak. As the door shut, DC’s voice could still be heard, harassing Neutron about available attire.

  Finally, we were alone. With DC gone, Burns’s full attention fell on me. His dark eyes locked onto me like missile-tracking devices. I reminded myself that I was here because he’d lied. Feeling my anger rise, I met his stare with what I hoped was my own glare. “You got me put on probation. I’m going to lose my job.”

  “I’m sorry, but there weren’t a lot of good alternatives.”

  “How about telling the truth?”

  “I could have told them I was there because DC and I have an arrangement where he lets me see bodies of dead prostitutes, but I’m betting you wouldn’t want DC to be the one on probation.”

  He was right. I wouldn’t. Still, I said, “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know you’ve left a fairly prestigious life to come back here and take care of your mom and sick grandmother, under some less than optimal circumstances. I admire that kind of loyalty.”

  I must have looked surprised.

  “I own a security firm, remember? Look, Kat,” he said, stepping around the table toward me, his voice softening as he got closer, “I’m just saying that given how protective you seem of the people you care about”—his body moved within inches of mine—“how protective we both are”—he reached his hand toward my hair—“I assume we agree that getting DC in trouble is not on the option list.” He pulled some Plexiglas out of my hair, brushing his fingers lightly across my cheek with the softness of fluttering butterfly wings.

  We stayed like that for a moment, me taking in the contradiction between his authoritative manner and his soft actions. Finally, I nodded.

  “Good,” he said, putting his hand down. “I’m glad I have your support. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said as if turning to go, looking casual again, almost dismissive.

  “What?” I was taken aback. A minute ago I was almost yelling at him. I would not be manipulated. I would get control of the conversation and squish him like a bug.

  “I have some meetings to attend to. I’ll call Bradley to—”

  “Oh no,” I said, my voice rising. “We are not done here. I’ve been suspended and shot at, and I’m sleep deprived. Just when I thought my life was on an upswing, you show up, that beautiful girl is stolen from me, and my life is back to ground zero. Here I am, soon to be jobless and worrying sick about how my family will cope. You are not going to dismiss me like I’m one of your blond, Bumpit-wearing, Stepford secretaries who does whatever you say.” I was exasperated and flailing my hands.

  Burns paused. Phone in hand, he stood there as if waiting for me to finish.

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t want DC to get in trouble. He’s been a great friend since I moved here. But I only have to look around to know you’re a smart guy. You could have made up a reason for being there that would have kept everyone out of trouble.”

  “Like what?”

  “You could have told them you were in the hospital visiting a sick friend.”

  “And what would I have said when they asked me who that was?”

  “You could have told them you were there for the ice cream. All right, that’s ridiculous,” I said, calming down to a more reflective tone. I knew I was reaching, but I also knew I wasn’t wrong, despite how Burns was making me feel. That was the thing, though—I shouldn’t have been feeling bad. None of us should have. DC didn’t want to look at the body. Burns did.

  “Why did you have to tell them anything at all? You didn’t have to mention DC to tell them that you were there trying to get a look at the body. Maybe you’re a body groupie.” I had him finally. We both knew it. He put down the phone. “But you didn’t want to tell them that, did you. Because then you would be the one in trouble instead of me.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he answered honestly, shocking me.

  “Okay, then.”

  “Telling the police why I was really at the morgue would have created a complicated situation that I’m not prepared to handle right now.” He said it softly, that haunting look coming back to his face.

  “Because you want to know who killed Gillian Mathers?”

  He looked surprised at my question.

  “I have my sources too.”

  “Your source has a flair for drama, and he talks too much,” he replied, smiling.

  “Yes, but he’s very charming.” I smiled back at him.

  “Kat,” he said, his tone more serious, “six women are dead. I don’t think for a minute that this guy is done. Potentially more women’s lives are at stake. At the very least, a murderer is wandering around free because the police have been unable to find who killed these women and my friend. If they aren’t going to do their jobs, I need them out of my hair so that I can do it for them.”

  He was trying to appeal to my compassionate side now, and it was working. I couldn’t decide what to do about this mess we both seemed to be in. Instead, I pulled my list from my purse, sat down at the little conference table, and began writing.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Updating my list.” I said it as though it was a normal occurrence and he was the weird one for questioning it.

  “Your list?”

  “Yes. Rule number eight. If there’s something to be figured out, it requires a list for fact gathering and puzzling. Although, I don’t think that’s really a rule. I think my mom made it up to help me cope with my anxiety.”

  “Okay. And has your list helped you figure out who was following you?” he asked and sat down next to me.

  “No, I don’t know who’s been following me, besides your men, that is.” I wrote that down, that Burns’s men were following me.

  “I wasn’t sure that you weren’t involved yet. I wanted to keep tabs on you until I figured out you weren’t in on taking the body. Your dad’s in prison for working with the mob. For all I know, you could have been connected.”

  “Why does everyone think I’m some kind of mob princess?”

  “Princess, maybe.” He grinned. “Between that sexy brain and killer smile, you don’t give much of a mob vibe, though.”

  I looked up at him. “Thank you.”

  “But the newspaper articles about your family aren’t helping,” he added.

  “No. They aren’t, but you say ‘racketeering’ and everyone jumps to ‘mob.’ It gets a bad rap. Racketeering is one of the smallest federal crime categories, representing less than one percent of all arrests and increasingly involving white-collar crimes. It’s like winning the crime lotto.”

  “Of course you’d know that.” He smirked and leaned against his desk, his look turning contemplative. “Do you know what’s going on with your dad?”

  “Not really. He keeps saying it’s all some big misunderstanding. If you think I’m low on mob vibe, you should meet my dad. Everything happened so fast, before I could get back here. By the time I arrived, the house was empty, Dad was in prison, and no one would talk to us.”

  “Appearances aren’t always what they seem. Especially when people are close to us, we can have a hard time seeing what’s going on.” I felt like we weren’t talking about me anymore. Burns became distant, and I was getting un
comfortable.

  “So do you know who was following me?” I asked.

  “Not yet. But if you weren’t in on the body snatching, I thought you might need some protection. Then you showed up at DC’s, and I had a double incentive. I’m very fond of him and would hate to see anything happen to him.”

  “Funny, I was thinking something similar. DC’s the only reason I have to trust you at all.”

  “At least we can both agree that we have excellent taste in friends. Hey, it may not seem like it, but I am genuinely sorry for the trouble you’re in. It’s a tough situation all around. Can you think of any reason someone would tell the police you were involved?”

  “Honestly, at first, I thought it might be you. But there are only so many people who had the access to know I was working instead of DC. My whole life is upside down now.” I turned back to my list.

  Burns looked at me with sympathy and was quiet for a moment. We sat there in a surprisingly comfortable silence, me looking through my list, Burns apparently lost in his own thoughts.

  Finally, he said, “Will you come with me? I want to show you something.”

  I looked at him warily.

  “Please? In the interest of us getting off on a better foot,” he added.

  I nodded. He led me out of his office, past the auto-bot workers, and into a stairwell. He key carded us into another door and into another hallway, where he put his hand into a fingerprint reader. The door made a humming noise then clicked open.

  Chapter 6

  In front of us was a large room. Giant televisions flanked one of the walls, displaying security camera footage. Pictures of my morgue colleagues were pinned on the adjacent wall, and underneath was scribbling I couldn’t make out. My morgue ID picture was in the center of the photos. That was not a good hair day for me.

  Two rows of long, curving desks covered in computer equipment sat in the middle of the room, facing the televisions. On the far wall were pictures of girls, one of whom I recognized as reporter Gillian Mathers. In the same grouping, strings with pushpins connected various people I couldn’t make out. It looked like something out of the CIA or police central.

  “Welcome to the war room,” Neutron said, looking up from one of the computer stations. DC sat next to him.

  “Hey, Kat. It’s like the Batcave, isn’t it?” DC asked as Burns and I moved into the space.

  “It had to be one of them.” I crossed over to the wall with the pictures of my coworkers. “There were only a handful of people who knew I would be at the morgue last night instead of DC. Someone with Dr. Hawthorne’s direct number.” I stared at the collection of misfits. “Why are there only a handful of people’s pictures on the wall? There are at least twenty people on the morgue staff.”

  “These are the people whose alibis we weren’t able to corroborate. You weren’t on there until last night.”

  I squared my hips and looked at Burns, wondering whether he was serious. “I have an excellent alibi for last night. You should ask the owner of this security firm what I was doing when the Russian stole the body.”

  His eyes brightened, and a smirk came to the corner of his mouth, but he didn’t respond.

  “Why is Dr. Hawthorne up there? Surely you can’t think he’s involved in any of this. He’s a nice old grandpa.”

  “No, I don’t think he’s involved. He’s squeaky clean. Boring life. Goes to the same barber twice a month. Belongs to the Elks. Nothing unusual in his finances other than he pays too much for haircuts.” He walked across the room toward me, staring at the board as he did. “What do you know about the rest of them?” Burns stopped next to me and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

  I moved toward the board and cleared my throat, pointing at one of the pictures of a baby-faced guy, more boy than man, with feathery brown hair and a sky-blue shirt. “Henry is an Autumn. He really shouldn’t wear blue. It washes him out.”

  “I’ll pass that along the next time I see him.”

  “Well, it’s not like we’re all besties. These people work at a morgue. They aren’t exactly known for their outgoing social skills.”

  He cocked his head and looked at me sideways. “You work at a morgue.”

  “Not on purpose.”

  “DC works at a morgue.”

  “Exactly. He’s not quite what you would term mainstream.” I turned toward him and folded my arms across my chest. “Why do you care about any of them, anyway? What is all of this?” I searched for an answer in his eyes, taken in by their intensity.

  He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “This isn’t the first problem we’ve had with the morgue staff.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After Gillian’s murder, some of the key forensic information in her case went missing.”

  “Missing?” I looked at the board and tried to decide if one of them could have been involved in all of this. They all looked like such misfits. For one of them to be so calculating seemed improbable.

  “Yes. Dr. Hawthorne claimed it was a clerical error. He believes the evidence is still at the warehouse, just misfiled.”

  “But you think that’s too convenient?”

  “Kind of like the daughter of an accused mobster being implicated in a body snatching of our only lead in months.”

  “Thanks for that, I guess.” I reached up and took one of the pictures off the board. “This is Meg.” The picture was of a cheery-looking brunette in a bright-green blouse. Although I could see the resemblance, the person in the picture didn’t much resemble the woman I worked with. In real life, Meg had a pierced eyebrow, wore heavy black eye makeup, and wouldn’t be caught dead in bright green. I moved her picture next to Henry’s. “She has the hots for Henry, but I’m not sure either of them realize it.”

  “Really?” Burns brought his hand to his chin and rubbed it.

  “Totally. I have a nose for this. I have to say, though, they both seem as harmless as hamsters.”

  He pointed at the picture of Meg. “She has a bit of a checkered past. Juvie stay. And he has interesting sums of money moving in and out of his bank account. Sums a morgue worker shouldn’t have.”

  “If you want motive, Marshall here has it in spades.” I pointed at the picture of Marshall Traupe, a round man with greasy, curly hair.

  “What do you mean? We didn’t find any reason to think Marshall is involved. Like a lot of the others, he just couldn’t be ruled out.”

  “If there’s something illegal going on at the morgue, I guarantee Marshall both knows about it and has found a way to profit from it. If I were looking for information on people in the morgue, Marshall there would be my first stop. But bring cash.”

  “Interesting.” Burns rubbed his chin.

  “Why is Dr. Jaffe on the board?” I moved to look at Dr. Jaffe’s hospital employee mug shot. He had large bags under his eyes and needed a haircut. “He doesn’t work at the morgue.”

  “No, but he was the attending physician the night Gillian’s forensics went missing, and he’s massively in debt.”

  “Money troubles would fit. He’s very grumpy. He could use a couple of sessions with my yogi master, Tahkaswami. Plus, he really doesn’t like me.”

  “How come?”

  “I have no idea. I always try to bring cheer to the autopsy room whenever we work together. He’s very unappreciative.”

  “I think you’re cheery.” Burns grinned. He pointed at the picture of a man with a biker jacket and a blue cross tattoo that stood out against the tan skin of his neck. “What about him?”

  “Sam? He looks dangerous from afar, but his fondue is way too good for him to be a crook.”

  He took the picture of Sam off the board and studied it. “Sam Allen Winston, despite his fondue, has a rap sheet a mile long. You said a minute ago, ‘when the Russian stole the body.’ How’d you know he was Russian?” He looked up at me.

  “Like I told the detectives, he had Russian mobster shoes.”

  “I didn’t realize there we
re specific shoes for Russian mobsters.”

  “That’s why it’s important to have someone around you who knows fashion. But why does that matter?”

  “Sam here, with the killer fondue”—he turned Sam’s picture toward me—“did time in his youth for boosting cars for a Russian chop shop.”

  “We have to tell the detectives all of this. It could help clear me.” I reached for my cell phone.

  “I wouldn’t advise that, given the situation.” He took the phone out of my hand. “The last prostitute who went to the police ended up dead.” He slid the phone into my bag. “Your best bet at this point is to lay low.”

  “Lay low?”

  “No offense, but look at you.” He stopped and looked me up and down and slid his hands into his suit pockets.

  After my internal morning debate, I had dressed in a short, fluttery black skirt over black leggings, with a turquoise sweater capped by a lovely jewel-toned scarf. I’d gone with matching turquoise wedges.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I said, looking myself up and down. Besides being a bit mussed from the shooting and running, I thought I was well within body-chasing fashion etiquette.

  “Nothing’s wrong with you. Far from it. You’re gorgeous and smarter than the average bear, but I’m pretty certain you have about as much experience with hardened criminals as a Brownie troop. Heck, I’m surprised you didn’t break your neck running in those heels.”

  “They’re wedges, not heels. I ran perfectly fine in them, thank you. I must have missed the fashion chapter in the handbook for body chasers.”

  “Have you ever shot a gun?”

  “Besides in a video game?”

  “Kat, I don’t know what’s going on here, why someone has chosen to involve you in this, but after today’s shooting, you should realize that it’s dangerous. Let more-serious people handle it.”

  “So, I’m not serious now?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I like you. I want you safe.”