Blood Wine (2 page)

The door rattled against knuckles. She stiffened and turned pale.

Morgan opened the door.

“Hello there,” said a woman of Miranda's age, poised to enter with a black satchel in one hand. She gazed into Morgan's eyes as if assessing an extravagant purchase, then past him at Miranda and back to Morgan.

“I'm looking for a murder.”

Morgan stepped to the side.

“This is it, then? Sorry, love.”

She moved around him and addressed Miranda.

“I was told there was a body in a detective's bed. Never dreamed it was yours. Nice place.”

She smiled at Morgan, leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek, hesitated and held out her hand, which he took momentarily before releasing his grip. Miranda did not look up; it was almost as if she were embarrassed.

“Ellen,” said Morgan, his tone formal. She was not here as Miranda's friend — if she was Miranda's friend. He wasn't sure.

Ellen Ravenscroft kneeled down to place herself in Miranda's line of vision. She reached out and touched Miranda's cheek. “You're cold, love.” Their eyes briefly connected. “Don't you worry. We'll get this all sorted out.”

She stood up and turned to Morgan. “Now where is the body? No, you stay with your partner. I'll look in myself.”

As Ellen Ravenscroft disappeared into the bedroom, a file of men and women came trooping through from the corridor. Miranda watched, and Morgan watched her watching them. Most were familiar, but each was now a stranger.

He assumed a position in front of her, a little to the side, slightly in everyone's way.

Miranda shut her eyes and it was like she was dreaming. She could hear the forensics team, medical examiners, and police personnel, but with her eyes closed they seemed a great distance away. She suppressed a rush of vertigo but refused to open her eyes, convinced that the jumble of images inside her head would reveal something, if only she could hold on. She was not trying to make a nightmare go away, she was struggling to bring it back. She wanted to be there again — inside whatever went on that she could not remember.

Morgan moved to the bedroom, but he was uncomfortable with his role as observer. The medical examiner, to the accompaniment of a photographer's flashing, in conjunction with the careful ministrations of a forensic specialist, meticulously raised the sheet covering the corpse and drew it aside, where it was folded and bagged. Even from Morgan's perspective near the door, he could see the gaping wound in the victim's gut, his innards extruding onto the bed.

“Nasty business,” said Ellen Ravenscroft as she stood up and moved close to him. “Nothing showed through the top sheet. He was over on his side. The disembowelling was done in the bed after he was dead.”

“Disembowelling? And the head wound.”

“Executed on the spot. Bullet's in the pillow. Another pillow kicked under the bed was used as a silencer. There was a kitchen knife under the bed as well, with blood on the blade. He wiped the handle clean.”

“He?”

“Whoever did this.”

“Ellen Ravenscroft …”

“Yes, love.”

“You're a good person.”

“And whatever makes you say that, Detective? I'm a regular bitch.”

“I'm sure you are. But you assume Miranda is innocent, even though she's the most logical suspect.”

“Hardly. I mean, who's innocent these days? But a suspect, no. Look, Detective, if you wanted to kill your lover, would you nail him, eviscerate him, and crawl in beside him? I can think of better ways to spend the night.”

“Yeah,” said a rumbling voice from just behind them. “That is exactly what you might do if you're a homicide detective and think sleeping in sludge will throw off the dogs.”

“Spivak,” said Morgan. “Welcome to the crime scene. This is Ellen Ravenscroft, she's the M.E.”

“Yeah,” said Spivak. “We've met.” He was a burly man with the parched eyes of an inveterate smoker.

Spivak moved around beside Morgan and acknowledged the coroner with a wet cough.

“You want to get that looked at, Detective. You'd do better spitting than swallowing.”

“You too,” he leered.

No one acknowledged the joke.
Sometimes
, thought Morgan,
there's no double in double entendre
.

“I'm not yours till I'm dead,” said Spivak, with the righteous sneer of the self-afflicted.

“I can hardly wait.”

Spivak relished being an unpleasant cliché. He had long since forgotten what he was really like.
At least Ravenscroft is ironic
, thought Morgan.
The stereotype she animates is intentional
.

“What're you doing here?” said Morgan.

“It's my case.”

Morgan said nothing. It had not occurred to him the case was not theirs.

“You have a problem with that?” asked Spivak. “Check it with Rufalo.”

Morgan shrugged. “Who are you working with?”

“Him,” he said, nodding in the direction of a gaunt young man Morgan had never seen before.

Spivak's last partner was killed in a car accident; a woman, a rookie, a high-speed chase. A lot of bad publicity, no liability. She was driving.

“He looks like a funeral director,” said Morgan.

“He's in the right place,” said Ellen Ravenscroft. “I think he's kind of distinguished.”

“Maybe where you come from,” said Spivak with a sneer.

Spivak is the perpetual immigrant,
thought Morgan.
Born in Toronto, grew up speaking English, his parents spoke none. By identifying others as outsiders he proclaims his own credentials as a native son.

“Yorkshire,” she said, paused, and added, “
love
.” Her tone made the word seem its opposite. “Now to business,” she continued. “We have a killer who was taking no chances. This fellow has been shot through the head, gutted, and for all we know asphyxiated and poisoned as well.”

“Check it all out,” said Spivak cheerfully, ingesting a massive wheeze.

“What do you make of this?” his funereal partner called from the bathroom doorway. Spivak and Morgan walked over to him while Ravenscroft rejoined the pathology team by the bed.

Morgan was startled when he entered the bathroom. The walls were smeared with swathes of blood that appeared to have been applied with deliberation, to deliver an indecipherable message.

“My goodness,” he said.

Morgan's habitual avoidance of obscenity and profanity was known through the department and sometimes ridiculed, but never to his face.

“My goodness!” Spivak repeated.

Morgan looked at him. Spivak's eyes flicked downwards in a brief acknowledgement of something unspoken between them. He was a crude man and hard as nails, but Morgan was alpha, something to do with quietude, with his intelligence. Men like Spivak invested stillness with menace and were grudgingly deferential.

“What's it saying to us, Morgan?” asked Spivak.

Morgan reached over and flicked off the overhead light. The room fell silent. He turned on the heater-light and the low rumble of the fan spread around them in the red gloom, the blood scrawlings on the wall disappearing, merging with the shadows. He turned on the overhead and the bloody scrawl returned.

“She wouldn't have seen it,” he said.

“Unless she did it herself.”

Morgan glared at the burly, unkempt man — Morgan was unkempt, Spivak was scruffy.

“It's her bed, her boyfriend, her gun. She's on suspension.”

“What?”

“It's automatic. And Rufalo says you're out of it, too. This is Igor, he's a mortician from Jamaica.”

“Don't you be saying to he such a terrible thing, I never been to Jamaica, man,” Spivak's new partner said in an exaggerated West Indian dialect. Then he turned to address Morgan. “Eeyore, not Igor,” he said, and shook hands, speaking with a crisp Toronto inflection. “We're working on racial sensitivity,” he continued. “So far, Spivak can't make the entry requirements for the program. I have heard a lot about you and your partner, mostly good things. My mother didn't realize Eeyore was an ass. Nice to meet you.”

He seemed a nice enough kid. Morgan walked back into the living room, where Miranda was sitting on the sofa, small and alone amidst the commotion.

“You all right?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“Did you see the stuff scrawled on the bathroom walls?”

She looked at him quizzically, cocking her head like a wounded animal.

“Hieroglyphs of some sort. Written in blood.”

“Philip's ...” she murmured, her voice trailing off.

A woman from the CSI unit kneeled in front of them.

“Detective Quin, I'm going to need some bits and pieces.”

Miranda held out her hands one at a time, and the woman pared residual matter from under her nails into a small plastic envelope.

“Did you wash?” she asked.

“Yeah, I had a shower. I flushed the toilet.” Miranda seemed almost embarrassed.

“That's okay. I need to check what I can.”

“There'll be powder under my nails,” said Miranda. “I was on the range yesterday.”

“With the murder weapon?”

“Pardon?”

“The murder weapon,” the woman repeated, nodding in the direction of the bedroom.

“I guess so. I don't know.” It seemed inconceivable he could have been killed with her own gun. And inevitable that he was.

“And we're going to need a vaginal scraping.”

“He was my lover, for God's sake.”

“Did you have sex last night?”

“I don't know.”

“We'll need to find out.”

“Yeah, okay. Where?”

“As soon as we can. We'll take you over to Women's.”

Morgan felt for her, but it was standard procedure.

“Can you do it here?” Miranda asked.

“I can't, but the M.E. could.”

“A coroner's pelvic — see if she's up for it.”

The woman went to find Ravenscroft. Morgan leaned over the sofa from behind, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.

“We'll have to go down to Headquarters,” he said. “Spivak and Eeyore, they'll want to talk.”

“How long?”

“What? Downtown —”

“No. How long's he been dead?” she asked.

“Five or six hours.”

“Is it bad?”

“He's dead.”

“Gruesome?”

“Yeah, very.”

“Disembowelled?”

“Eviscerated —”

“God!”

“Yeah.”

“While I slept. Oh
,
Jesus.”

“You were unconscious, you'll need to be tested. Someone slipped you something. Given the outcome, I'm guessing it wasn't Philip.”

Morgan's cellphone buzzed. He flinched at the intrusiveness. The CSI woman and Ellen Ravenscroft approached Miranda and led her into the bathroom.

When Miranda walked past Philip, exposed on the bed with his guts looping out of his abdomen, she did not flinch. She had seen worse. The bathroom, she found more distressing. Blood on the walls, taunting with unrevealed meaning.
The horror
, she thought,
the horror
, and nothing else came to her mind.

“You sure you want me to do this?” asked Ellen.

“You're a doctor, aren't you?” said Miranda.

“Fully licensed, fifteen years this side of the pond, may the House of Windsor and my own dead mother forgive me.”

“So, help yourself,” said Miranda, sitting on the edge of the tub.

“You'll have to drop your knickers, love.”

With an annoying air of solicitude the CSI woman helped Miranda back onto her feet. She closed her eyes tight, and then opened them slowly. Curiously, she felt little grief. Rage, fear, a sense of violation, of profound loss — it was not about Philip, it was the gaping hole his absence left inside her.

Although Miranda preferred skirts, anticipating the police she had put on slacks, feeling less vulnerable that way. The CSI woman held out a bath towel, and averting her eyes she wrapped it around Miranda, who stepped out of her slacks and underwear.

“You want me to assume the position?” Miranda asked, dubiously eyeing the bathmat on the floor. Instead, she sat down again on the edge of the tub.

“Okay, spread 'em,” said the M.E. “Let's see what's been happening in there.”

As Miranda leaned back to brace herself, Ellen Ravenscroft hunkered between her knees with a penlight in her mouth. Miranda flinched involuntarily as the M.E. reached in with a swab.

“You had a shower, right? But no douche?”

“No. Damnit. I don't remember. Get the hell out of there.”

“Just a minute, love. Okay. I'd say you had a right good night of it. Well, until, you know —”

“That's gratifying. Are we finished?”

Miranda closed her legs, stood up, and retrieved her clothes. The M.E. fell backwards on her bottom.

“Yes,” said Ellen as she unceremoniously struggled to her feet while the other two women watched. “We're done.”

“How long have you been doing this?” Miranda asked as she slipped back into her clothes.

“With dead people? Seems forever. I actually trained as an OB/GYN. God only knows why. Staring into the gaping maws of womanhood day in, day out, it palls after a while. So I made a lateral move to the morgue.”

“You'd rather work with the dead?”

“Wouldn't we all, dear. Look at the three of us.” Her glance included the CSI technician. “Women in our prime, the three witches of Caldor, whatever, guiding the departed into the underworld —”

“Is there anything else?” asked the CSI woman, edging toward the door, but instead of leaving she leaned against it as if she were afraid an intruder might overhear them.

Ravenscroft leaned close to Miranda and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Sorry about this, love.”