CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Now what exactly are we going to do?” I asked.
Dixie grinned. “When we’re not shooting with Lauren, Bill’s gonna sneak his camera out of the supply room at the office and follow us while we go around askin’ questions about Otto’s death.”
“Everyone knows everyone else’s business in this town. How are we going to keep it a secret from Lauren?”
“Nobody likes that Yankee,” she said with a snort. “They won’t tell her out of spite.”
“If Lauren finds out . . .”
“She won’t. And just think how satisfying it would be to find out who killed Otto and shove it in that deputy’s face.”
“True . . .”
“But to find out who killed Otto, we need to find out how he died, and I know his body is in the morgue.”
I sucked in a breath. “You better not be thinkin’ what I think you’re thinkin’.”
“I’m not suggestin’ we go do the autopsy ourselves.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
“We should go down there and see if we can find the report.”
“I don’t do dead people, Dixie.”
“No crap. You passed out when you found Otto.”
“I passed out because someone whacked me in the head.” I rubbed my scalp for emphasis.
“Look, I’m not asking you to start readin’ toe tags,” she said. “But if we go down to the morgue, we might stumble upon the report.”
“Because you think it will just be lyin’ around?” I asked in disbelief.
She shrugged. “You never know. This is Sweet Briar.”
Unfortunately, she had a point.
“You don’t even have to go in,” she said with a cajoling look on her face. “But if I push you in a wheelchair, we can say we were wanderin’ around because you were feelin’ cooped up in your room. Easy enough to pretend we got lost.”
“Dammit,” I grumbled. She was right. It was the perfect excuse. “I really hate dead people, Dixie.”
“You already said that, and you already met your dead-person quota for the day. You just sit in the chair and film me while I’m snoopin’.”
“Film you?”
“Yeah.” She reached into her oversize purse and pulled out a small video camera. “Bill gave me this to use when he’s not with us.”
I gave her a stare of disbelief, which strained my eyes and made my head hurt worse. “I’m gonna film us in the morgue? Breakin’ the rules?”
“See, that’s your problem,” Dixie said, touching the tip of my nose with the end of her index finger. “You’re too much of a stickler for the rules. Sometimes you’ve gotta break ’em.”
“I guess you would know,” I said, then instantly regretted it. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, trying to look like it didn’t bother her, but her smile slightly fell.
Part of me wondered if she had a point. Scott Schapiro had called me boring and vanilla. Dixie was right—I did follow the rules. I’d already started shaking things up. Maybe it was time to ratchet it up to an earthquake.
“Okay.”
Her mouth formed an O. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll get a wheelchair.” Then she ran out the door.
She was back within a few minutes, pushing the chair into the room. “I told the nurses I was takin’ you for a spin.” She helped me get situated in the chair with the stupid hospital gown I was wearing. I was still hooked up to the IV, so she unhooked the bag and attached it to the pole on the chair. After she grabbed a blanket from the cabinet and spread it over my lap and legs, she handed me the video camera.
“You can hide it under the blanket.”
“Good idea.”
She walked over to the bed tray and scooped another huge bite of pie, popped it in her mouth, then said with a full mouth, “Let’s go.”
She pushed me past the two nurses who were waving at us from the nurses’ station.
“If she starts to feel nauseated, bring her right back,” said the nurse who’d checked on me earlier.
“No worries there,” Dixie laughed. “I heard all about what happened earlier, and I want no part of that.”
I scowled. “Hey. I couldn’t help it.”
I’d been in the Sweet Briar Hospital a few times when I was younger, but I wasn’t familiar with the layout. Dixie, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly where she was going. She headed straight for the elevator and pushed the button marked “B.”
The hospital was two stories, with the patient beds on the second floor and the ER and a bunch of doctors’ offices on the first floor. I had no idea what was in the basement, but I imagined it was a good place for a morgue.
Once we were enclosed in the elevator, I said, “How do you know the autopsy will be done? Or that there will be a report? On TV, those things take weeks.”
“I suspect it won’t be totally done, but rumor has it that Doc Bailey likes to get the jump on things, and he does everything the old-fashioned way—by hand. He refuses to use computers. He’s probably jotted down notes somewhere.”
“Wouldn’t those be in his office?” I asked in a worried tone.
“It’s next to the morgue.”
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened to a dim hallway. We faced a dingy gray wall and a linoleum floor that looked like it was white under a decade’s worth of grime.
“I’m having second thoughts,” I said. “This place is giving me the creeps.”
“Don’t be such a baby.” She pushed me out of the elevator into the hall, which got even darker.
“Dixie . . .”
“Got it covered. Hold this.” A beam of light shone over my shoulder, and she handed me a flashlight.
“Why not just turn on the lights?”
“Rumor has it they don’t work.” She found a switch on the wall, and nothing happened. “See? Aren’t you happy I came prepared? Besides, we don’t want anyone seein’ us.”
There was little worry of that from what I was seeing. The hall was a graveyard of hospital beds and wheelchairs, which somehow didn’t make me feel better about this whole enterprise.
“Shine the light down the hall,” she said. “The morgue’s at the end.”
“Do I want to know how you know that?” I asked, but I did as she said, and the flashlight beam illuminated the curve of the shadowy hallway.
She was quiet for a moment. “It’s where I saw Momma and Daddy.”
I gasped in horror. “They made you identify their bodies?” I couldn’t imagine any fifteen-year-old kid mature enough to handle such a thing.
“No,” she answered in a raspy voice. “I snuck in to see them.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t believe it was true . . . that they were really dead, but no one would let me see them. They said I just had to trust that they were gone. I couldn’t do that. I had to see for myself.”
“Why wouldn’t they let you see them?”
She paused. “Because they were unrecognizable. From the fire.”
I jerked around to look up at her, an action that the pain shooting through my head made me instantly regret. “Oh, Dixie.” Pain for my cousin filled my voice.
“It’s okay. But I know where it is, and I know how to get in.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked softly.
“Yes.” Her voice was hard, and it brooked no argument.
I considered arguing with her anyway, but from the determination on her face, I wondered if maybe she needed to do this for her own reasons. “Okay.”
“You should start filming,” she said. “Maybe film yourself first, then turn it around to show what I’m doing.”
“I’m sure I look like crap.” I hadn’t looked in a mirror since this whole ordeal had begun.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Makes it look more authentic, don’t ya think? Less Hollywood and more like a real PI.”
A soft grin lifted the corners of my mouth as I pulled the camera out from under the blanket. “Yeah. You’re right.”
“I know a thing or two.”
I suspected Dixie wasn’t used to people finding merit in her ideas. “You know more than a thing or two.” After a few seconds of fumbling, I turned on the camera and flipped the viewfinder so I could center the frame on my face. Thankfully, I didn’t look as bad as I’d expected, but Karen would no doubt be thrilled by the large bruise surfacing on the right side of my forehead.
“Three, two, one,” I said, then launched into my reporting. “It’s rumored that Otto Olson died from alcohol poisoning, but a few things aren’t adding up. One, the sheriff’s department thinks his body was moved. If he died from alcohol poisoning, who moved him and why? That’s what my partner Dixie and I are trying to find out, and since I’m currently a patient in the Sweet Briar Hospital, we decided to take a ride down to the basement, which happens to house the morgue, in the hopes of finding someone who can give us a few answers.”
I stopped the recording. “Dixie, we can’t show us sneaking into the morgue. We could get charged with breaking and entering, along with a bunch of other charges I’m sure Luke would love to throw at me.”
“Fine, but let’s still record it all and figure out what to keep or delete later.”
I wasn’t sure that was so smart, but it might be good to have something to review later, especially since my head was still fuzzy. “Okay.”
She stopped in front of a door with the numbers 0134 engraved on a plague. “This is it.”
“It doesn’t say morgue.”
“It doesn’t have to. Besides, no need to advertise it.” She moved in front of me and pulled two hairpins from her pocket. After a few seconds, I heard the lock click and she opened the door.
“I’m scared to ask why you know how to do that.”
“And yet it’s a valuable life skill,” she said with a grin as she pocketed the pins. “It’s gotten me out of a few jams.”
“Or into them,” I teased.
She laughed. “Your brain damage must be improving.”
My answering grin slipped away the moment she pushed the door open more and flicked on the lights. There was a sheet-covered body on a metal cart in the middle of the white sterile room, but we’d expected that. I’d forgotten about the other body, but of course it would still be in here. There it was on a gurney on the opposite side of the room, covered with another sheet, thank God.
I covered my stomach with my hand. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
Dixie turned around and bent at the knees to look in my eyes. “Oh, no, you don’t! No barfin’ and leavin’ evidence that we were here.”
I couldn’t promise anything, so I said, “Just find what you’re lookin’ for, and let’s go.”
“It’s probably in Doc Bailey’s office, which is on the other side of the room.”
I shuddered. “I’ll wait here.”
“Summer.”
“No. No way. I’m not goin’ in there. I’m not maneuvering a wheelchair in there.” I shuddered.
She pushed out a massive sigh and tried to open the door on the other side, then pulled out her pins again. This lock seemed to take longer, but she finally got it open, and I was surprised to see there was a light already on in the room She came back, grabbed the camera, and started filming as she walked toward the door.
My eyes kept drifting to the dead bodies, and my stomach twisted more and more, making me regret my attempt to eat that cardboard meat loaf—but not the strawberry pie . . . never regret pie. I closed my eyes, which proved a mistake because the smells hit me. Nearly a minute later, I was thinking about telling Dixie I was going to wait by the elevators when I heard it ding.
Shit.
Voices filtered down the hall.
“. . . nothing unusual, Luke,” I heard an older man say.
Double shit. There was a sound of banging metal down the hall, immediately followed by Luke’s cursing. “Why don’t you get the damn lights fixed, Doc?”
“It saves the hospital money,” he grunted.
I had a sudden appreciation that the lights were out.
But I couldn’t stay here or we’d be found out—and now that we were down here, it was painfully obvious we couldn’t explain away our break-in as some sort of demented stroll. I got to my feet, flipped off the morgue light, and pushed the wheelchair close to the wall, letting it join the ranks of the other abandoned chairs. Where was I going to hide? My sole option wasn’t a great one—I’d have to make a beeline through the damn morgue to join Dixie in the office. Our only real hope was if there was somewhere to hide in there. Or that they never went in.
I suspected my luck wasn’t that good.
But I had another, more immediate issue—I still had an IV, and the bag was currently attached to the pole on the chair. I stood on my tiptoes to pull it off the hook, but I couldn’t see what I was doing, and the voices were getting louder.
“It was all pretty cut-and-dried,” the doctor said.
“Humor me,” Luke said.
I jerked the bag again, to no avail, and I realized I had two options—stand there and be prepared to come up with some wacky explanation, or jerk out my IV and run into the morgue.
Not a fan of self-inflicted pain, I was tempted to go with the first, but where would that leave Dixie? I gave the bag one last try. It came unhooked this time, but the tubing of my IV got caught on the wheelchair handle, jerking the needle out of my hand.
I bit my lip in an effort to not cry out, already running across the hall into the morgue while clutching my now-useless IV bag. I shut the door behind me and had the sense to lock it, even though I was locking myself into a room with two dead men.
A soft glow still emanated from the cracked door through which Dixie had disappeared, so I hurried toward it, bumping into the wall as a wave of vertigo hit me. I’d just gotten into the office and shut the door when I heard the men’s voices in the other room.
I glanced behind me and realized I wasn’t in an office after all—I was in a lab, and the counters were lined with lots of buckets and plastic bags filled with what looked like body parts steeped in fluid.
I was definitely going to be sick.
No. No, I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.
There was no sign of Dixie, but I still had my phone in my hand, so I sent her a text that I was in the lab hiding from Luke and Doc Bailey.
Seconds later, she appeared in a doorway on the other side of the big room. She moved closer, and I held my finger to my lips and pointed to the door, then pressed my ear to the wood. It was a risk, but something told me we had to hear what they were saying.
Dixie stood next to me and did the same.
“No sign of trauma,” the doctor said. “But here’s the interesting part—you said he hadn’t been seen since Sunday, right?”
“Yeah.”
“He hasn’t been dead for that long. My best guess is that he died sometime last night.”
“Then where’s he been?” Luke asked.
The doctor chuckled. “That falls under your job description.”
“There wasn’t anything on him that gave any hints as to where he’d been?”
“Nothing I can see, but I’m waiting to see if you want to send him to Montgomery for a forensic autopsy.”
“I take it you ran a blood alcohol?”
“Yep. Three-point-one.”
Luke was silent for a moment. “Otto was a drunk, but never that drunk.”
“His tolerance was probably built up. But I can tell you that I’m ninety-nine percent certain he died from alcohol poisoning.”
“But how did he get moved, and why?”
“That falls under your job description too,” the doctor said with a grin in his voice. “Do you think it was Summer?”
“She can’t weigh one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet,” he said. “She would have needed help.”
One hundred and twenty pounds!
“You think her cousin helped her? She tends to be on the wild side.”
“I don’t know . . . ,” he said. “My gut tells me no, but . . .”
“You’re worried your past with Summer is clouding your judgment?”
“Yeah. And Dixie.”
What did that mean? I shot a glance at Dixie. I couldn’t make out her face very well, but I felt her body tense. I reached out and squeezed her hand. She squeezed back.
“Anything I don’t already know about the other guy?” Luke said.
“Gunshot wound to the head from close range. Entry through the forehead and the exit wound out the back of the skull. Pretty clear-cut cause of death.”
Luke sighed. “Now I just have to find out who killed him.”
“Glad that’s your job,” the doctor said. “Still not ready to release his name?”
“He doesn’t have any family here. We’re trying to track someone down first. The guy he’s known to hang out with is currently missing.”
“You think his friend killed him and ditched town?”
“It’s a working theory.”
“Maybe Maybelline could ask about the friend on her Facebook page,” the doctor said.
“Since when do you use Facebook?” Luke asked.
“I don’t, but I know half this damn town does. They rely on it more than they do the newspapers.”
“Can’t do it,” Luke groaned. “It’s poor taste, Doc. Besides, as nosy as this town is, half of them will be callin’ Amber to speculate about him being the murder victim. The town’s in enough chaos with that film crew muckin’ around.”
“Nevertheless . . .”
“No,” Luke barked. “I’ll figure out another way.” Then his tone softened. “I’m done here. Thanks for meetin’ me so late.”
“Whatever I can do to help, Luke.”
They had been silent for a moment when Luke said, “Why are there blood drops on the floor? You and your staff are meticulous for cleaning up, and this is fresh.” His voice sounded strained.
“Good question.”
“Shit,” Luke said. “Do you think someone was down here tampering with the bodies?”
“The morgue door was locked,” the doctor said. “And the bodies were undisturbed.”
“What about the blood specimens?” Luke asked. “What if they were after them?”
“Why would they be? I could get new samples.”
Luke was quiet for a moment. “Humor me and check anyway.”
That was our cue to hide.
Dixie grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the door on the other side of the lab, which turned out to be a small hallway. She darted into the first door to the right—a small supply closet—tugging me in with her and carefully shutting the door.
We heard the two men walk into the lab a few feet away.
“There’s blood in here,” Luke said. “By the door, and it stops in front of the evidence fridge. Shit.”
“It doesn’t look tampered with,” the doctor said.
“You got a pair of gloves I can use so I don’t get prints on the fridge?”
“Sure,” he said, but he sounded like he was placating him. We heard the jangle of keys, and a few seconds later the doctor said, “See. It’s all accounted for.”
“So how do you explain the blood?”
“We have a new lab tech, and he’s been known to be a little sloppy. I’ll give him a talkin’-to tomorrow. Now let’s get out of here. I’m gonna miss Law and Order.”
“You can DVR that, Doc.”
“All those letters. VHS. DVR. CD-ROM. A bunch of alphabet soup.” Their voices grew fainter, and I heard the door close in the other room.
Dixie and I waited for a good half minute before we opened the supply closet.
“Well, the good news is that Luke doesn’t suspect you,” Dixie said.
“That’s true,” I said. “And we know what killed Otto.”
“Not necessarily. Luke’s right. Otto was never shit-faced drunk. He always seemed to have a good buzz, and that was about it.”
“So how do you explain his blood alcohol level?”
“I dunno,” she said. “But if he drank himself dead on his own, how do you explain the Jim Beam? Or that he was moved? Where did he die?”
I sighed. “So basically we still know nothing.”
“We’ll start lookin’ for more clues tomorrow,” Dixie said as we walked into the morgue and shut the door behind us, plunging us into darkness. She flipped on the flashlight beam and started for the door—then stopped. “I want to see him.”
“Who? Otto?”
“Nope. The mystery guy. I want to see if I know who he is.”
“No. No way. He’s got a bullet hole in his forehead.”
She ignored my protests and walked around the center table to the one against the wall. Grabbing the sheet with one hand and holding the flashlight on the body with the other, she paused and then gave a good yank.
I inched closer and stood next to the side of the gurney, staring down at his face. I swallowed hard when I saw the red circle on his forehead. I’d seen him before.
He was the man who’d been talking to Mayor Sterling in the alley the day before. “I know him.”
But Dixie was as stiff as a statue as she stared down at him, her face nearly the color of the off-white sheet covering his body.
“Dixie? Do you know him?” From the way she was staring at him, I was pretty sure she didn’t just know him—she knew him well. “Dixie. Who is he?”
“Ryker Pelletier. My ex-boyfriend.”