Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [8]
“Got a body for you to look at.”
“Now?” I made it a question.
“The ceremony is over, right? I didn’t call in the middle of it.”
“It’s over. I’m at the reception.”
“Then I need you here.”
“Where’s here?” I asked.
He told me.
“I know the strip club area across the river, but I’m not familiar with the club name.”
“You won’t be able to miss it,” he said, “it’ll be the only club with it’s own police escort.”
It took me a second to realize that he had made a joke. Dolph didn’t make jokes at murder scenes, ever. I opened my mouth to remark on it, but the phone was dead in my hand. Dolph never had been much for good-byes.
Detective Arnet leaned in, and asked, “Was that Lieutenant Storr?”
“Yeah,” I whispered, “murder scene, gotta run.”
She opened her mouth, as if she was going to say something else, but I was already moving up the table. I was going to give my apologies to Larry and Tammy, then go look at a body. I was sorry to miss the rest of the reception and all, but I had a murder scene to go to. Not only would I get away from Arnet’s questions, but I wouldn’t have to dance with Micah, or Nathaniel, or anybody. The night was looking up. I felt a little guilty, but I was glad somebody was dead.
3
STARING DOWN AT the dead woman, it was impossible to be glad. Guilty, maybe, but not glad. Guilty that even for a second I’d found the idea of someone’s death an escape from an uncomfortable social situation. I wasn’t a child. Surely, to God, I could have handled Jessica Arnet and her questions without hiding behind a murder. The fact that I was more comfortable here staring down at a corpse than at the head table at a wedding said something about me and my life. I wasn’t sure exactly what it said, or meant. Something I probably didn’t want to look at too closely, though. But, wait, we had a body to look at, a crime to solve, all the sticky personal stuff could wait. Had to wait. Yeah, sure.
The body was a pale glimpse of flesh between two Dumpsters in the parking lot. There was something almost ghostlike about that shining bit of flesh, like, if I blinked, it would vanish into the October night. Maybe it was the time of year, or the wedding scene I’d just left, but there was something unnerving about the way she’d been left. They’d stuffed the body behind the Dumpsters to hide it, then the black wool coat she wore had been opened around her almost naked body, so that you caught that gleam of pale flesh in the bright halogen lights of the parking lot. Why hide her, then do something to draw such attention to her? It made no sense. Of course, it may have made perfect sense to the people who killed her. Maybe.
I stood there, tugging my leather jacket around me. It wasn’t that cold. Cold enough for the jacket, but not enough to put the lining in it. I had my hands plunged into the pockets, the zipper all the way up, my shoulders hunched. But leather couldn’t help against the cold I was fighting. I stared at that pallid glimpse of death, and felt nothing. Nothing. Not pity. Not sickness. Nothing. Somehow that bothered me more than the woman being dead.
I made myself move forward. Made myself go see what there was to see and leave my worries about my moral decay for another time. Business, first.
I had to come to the far end of the right-hand Dumpster to see the spill of her yellow hair, like a bright exclamation point on the black pavement. Staring down at her, I could see how tiny she was. My size, or smaller. She lay on her back, the coat spread under her, still securely on her arms. But the cloth had been spread wide, folded under on the side nearest the parked cars, so that she could be seen by a customer walking out to his car. Her hair, too, had been pulled back, combed out. If she’d been taller, that, too, would have been visible from the parking lot—just a peek of bright yellow around the Dumpster. I looked down the line of her body and found the reason that someone had thought she was taller—clear plastic stilettos, at least five inches high. Lying down she lost the height. Her head