Dead Body Language (34 page)

I
may be deaf but I ain’t dumb.

I hate those women in movies who suspect there’s something down in the dark basement and go investigate when they know there’s a serial killer loose in the neighborhood.

I refuse to be that stupid.

I don’t go places where I think murderers might be lurking—at least not without telling someone first. And I try to make sure backup is right behind me.

Only this time, there must have been a slip-up.

“Where the hell have you been?!” I flung the words out between gasps. “I was about to end up on display at the next funeral party!” Puff, puff. “I thought you were right behind me!” Wheeze.

“I lost you!” Dan said, throwing his arms in the air. “When you and Mickey—”

In the corner of my eye I caught Sheriff Mercer’s car approaching up the road. I turned to flag him down, losing the rest of Dan’s explanation. Breathlessly I explained to the sheriff what happened and told him to send for an ambulance for Celeste—and Mickey. I watched him pull
out the car radio as he sped up the driveway. Dan and I followed him on foot.

“So, where in God’s name were you?” I said, remembering my irritation as we approached the sheriff’s car. “I was all alone up there! He was going to kill me and make it look like Celeste did it, then do her in a fake suicide. You were supposed to be right there!”

Dan looked helpless and a little frantic. “I don’t know! You two must have left the café right after I placed that call to the deputy. I waited outside for a while but you never came out. When I finally looked inside, you were gone, and nobody could tell me where you went. So I went looking for you—not an easy task.”

When I had stopped by earlier in the evening, just before going to the café with Mickey, I had told Dan about my plan; for several reasons, I was fairly certain the deputy was the one who killed Lacy, as well as the guy at the bed-and-breakfast inn. Dan had helped me make a copy of Lacy’s voice taken from her telephone answering machine. Miah had spliced it together with his recording equipment—he’s got all the latest stuff that young guys have to have these days just to get by: CD player, boom box, double cassette recorders, digital sound, speakers the size of small apartment buildings. We had him doctor the tape to say: “This is Lacy Penzance. I’d like to talk with you. It’s important.”

Apparently the quality wasn’t bad. When Dan called the café and played the tape over the phone for Mickey, the result was just what I’d hoped for: panic. Of course, Mickey’s no dummy, either. I don’t imagine he thought for one moment that Lacy had risen from the grave. But he knew that someone was onto him. He just didn’t know who.

“You didn’t hear me screaming?”

“Not until you got to the street. I’d already been to the sheriff’s office, your office, Mickey’s place, and back to the café. I didn’t know where to go next.”

Outside the mortuary we found the sheriff’s abandoned car, lights flashing, door open, exhaust spewing
from the tailpipe. Dan stopped a few feet from the mortuary door and turned to face me.

“Are you all right?” Dan took my still shaking hands into his own. “Your hands are trembling,” he said, caressing them lightly. If he didn’t stop, my hands might never stop shaking.

Still wired from the excitement, I pulled my hands from his and searched the visible parts of my body for new bruises, peering through torn and disheveled clothing. I counted four major injuries: One on each shin where I’d bumped into Celeste’s desk on my way out the door. One on my arm where Mickey had held me a little too tightly. And I felt one on my temple where he’d slammed me to the floor. I also had a skin burn, some fingernail scratches on my ankle, a bloody ear, and a lump on the top of my head where I’d hit the desk. I was actually kind of proud of all my injuries. They beat that wimpy old poison oak.

“I’m fine, really. Just a little shaky. A few nicks here and there. I guess things didn’t go exactly as I planned.”

“No kidding,” Dan agreed, taking my hands again and massaging them gently.

“God, when you called Mickey at the café and played that tape of Lacy’s voice, he completely freaked.”

Dan grinned. “So the phone call worked?”

“I guess hearing her voice disoriented him enough to make him scramble for the journal he’d hidden at home. He had it with him when he arrived here at the mortuary.”

“Did you see anything at his house?” Dan asked.

“Only what I could see from the window: a bunch of police fanatic stuff. But he had this massive brass ring, loaded with all kinds of keys.” My forehead ached. The rest of my bruises began to throb in support.

An ambulance drove up and parked next to the sheriff’s car. The two paramedics I’d seen hoisting Sluice out of the open grave ran past us with medical bags and a stretcher.

“There’s a woman in there. I don’t know if she’s—”

“We better keep out of the way,” Dan said, pulling me aside as I started to follow them in. He was right.

“God, Celeste—”

“You said you thought Mickey probably got Lacy’s keys when her purse fell open, that day they crashed into each other at the Nugget. Do you think he planned that little encounter?” Dan asked, distracting me from my frustration at not being able to do anything more.

“It’s possible. It’s also possible he already had copies of her keys. Making copies of everyone’s keys was part of his master plan to clean up the neighborhood.”

“What about your keys? How did he get hold of them? He
was
the one creeping around your house, wasn’t he?”

“He could have taken them from my purse any time he visited my office. Maybe when I was next door with you, even. He probably had them copied at the hardware store and returned them before I knew they were missing.”

Mickey came stumbling out of the mortuary doors, shackled in handcuffs, his wounded bloody hand bandaged by the paramedics. The sheriff was right behind him, rubbing his head in disbelief as his deputy resolutely entered the patrol car, this time as a backseat passenger. I went over to the car window and bent down to talk to him.

“Why, Mickey?” I asked. “All this, just to be Super Cop?”

He gave a small laugh, as if I would never understand him. He was right.

The sheriff got into the driver’s side and closed the door. He leaned over toward the front passenger window to make sure I could read his lips.

“Don’t touch anything, Connor! Don’t even go in there! I’m going to run him to lockup, then I’ll be back to check the place out. The EMT’s are taking care of Celeste, so stay out of their way, Connor. Goddammit, I mean it! You hear me?”

Nope, I thought, and waved him off as he drove out of sight. Then I turned toward the mortuary and practically ran inside. The emergency medical technicians in the hallway were wheeling Celeste out on a stretcher. She was hooked up to oxygen, an IV, and a monitor.

“Is she—”

The paramedic cut me off. “Please clear the way. She’ll be at Pioneer Hospital over in Whiskey Slide.”

“Nice place,” Dan said, following me into Mickey’s front room. “If you’re a cop fanatic.”

After a thorough but unobtrusive search of the mortuary, Dan and I had decided to check out Mickey’s place, to see if we could find a link to Boone. We stopped by the hotel building and picked up the Bronco.

Ironic, I thought. In his hurry, Mickey hadn’t bothered to lock up his own home. We had come by for a quick look around but I still had to promise Dan, ever the ex-cop, that I wouldn’t touch anything. Ha.

We found the bedroom in chaos. Clothes were strewn about, a chair had been upturned, and most of the contents of Mickey’s closet had been tossed out on the floor.

Peeking inside the closet, I found a key-making machine and a sheet of plywood covered with small hooks. Dozens of keys hung from the board, each labeled with a name. Celeste. French. Jilda. Beau’s keys were there. Lacy’s, of course. And mine.

I bent down to check out the cache in Mickey’s closet. Lying on the floor was the pink journal I had given him at the office. The lavender one, the volume that had been missing from Lacy’s collection in her bedroom, was now in Dan’s car. I had picked it up at the mortuary after the EMT’s rushed out. A page had been torn out from the blank ones at the end. I felt sure it was the sheet Mickey had used for the fake suicide note.

Why had Mickey tried to make Lacy’s death look like a suicide? He must have known her body would be examined and the trocar wound discovered.

“Look at this.” Dan came up beside me. He had been searching Mickey’s drawers. In his palm he held a tiny gold earring. The one missing from Lacy Penzance at the crime scene?

“I thought you said not to touch anything.”

He ignored me. “Check out this scrapbook,” he said, holding up a leather-bound album. “Guess who’s the star?”

I took it from him and lifted the cover. Taped to the front page was the first edition of the
Eureka!
My name had been highlighted in yellow felt-tip pen.

I turned the page and found a letter from my ex-boyfriend. I opened the envelope and read the contents, a bunch of ramblings about how sorry he was and would I please call. It had once been tucked away in my top drawer—right next to my underwear.

The next page held a Polaroid picture of me sitting at the Miwok Reservoir eating lunch. The next, one of me riding my bike down Main Street. And another taken from behind as I walked toward my office building. I frowned at that one.

“I should never wear stripes,” I said.

“I think you look great,” Dan replied.

The next page featured the cover of one of my comic books, a
Heckle and Jeckle
that had been missing for a couple of months. Then came a ticket stub from the night Mickey took me to the pasta festival in Rough & Ready, a photocopy of my driver’s license, a computer printout of my driving record—two parking tickets and an unfair violation for driving fifty in a thirty-five zone.

Bits of my first six months in Flat Skunk were spread out before me via the scrapbook; every third or fourth page featured one of my mystery puzzles from the
Eureka!
The last filled page contained the missing napkin with the unfinished puzzle.

“I think he’s hot for you,” Dan said, holding a pair of lace panties I’d been missing for some time. I thought they’d been sacrificed to the Dryer God, the one who collects single socks. I could feel the heat fill my chest and neck as I ripped the panties from his fingers and stuffed them in my pocket.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Dan said, wagging a finger. “Sheriff will need that for evidence.”

He put out his hand. I slapped it.

“Not a chance in hell,” I said.

D
an drove us to the sheriff’s office by way of the late-night drugstore so I could patch myself together. There wasn’t much I could do with the clawed ankle except put some disinfectant on it, but my left earlobe required a major bandage where the whizzing scalpel had kissed it.

Dan picked out some cartoon Band-Aids and stuck them all over me, everywhere he saw a mark, cut, or scratch. The box was empty in a matter of moments and I soon looked like a kid who’d sneaked into the medicine cabinet. The hurt from ripping them off later would probably exceed the good they were doing me now, but the attention was kind of nice.

I waved to the sheriff, as we walked into his office. He was filling out paper work at his desk.

“Can I see him?” I asked hesitantly.

The sheriff gave a single nod. “But I want to talk with you, Connor. He’s confessed, but there are some holes I need filled. Deep holes.”

Dan pulled up a chair from the sheriff’s desk and sat down. “You go ahead, Connor. I want to talk to the sheriff a few minutes.”

I nodded and headed down the hall.

Mickey sat in the cell at the back of the sheriff’s office, his head in his hands. When he saw me, he wiped his nose with the back of his uniform sleeve, stained dark red from the nosebleed I’d given him earlier.

I sat down on the floor across from the bars so I could be at eye level. “Mickey, tell me why?”

He didn’t look up.

“Mickey, did you take Lacy’s keys when she dropped her purse that day in the café?”

No answer.

“Did you plan to kill everyone on that board of keys?”

He finally looked up angrily. “I didn’t plan to kill anyone! I just wanted to see Lacy’s place, find out if she … had any secrets. Everybody has secrets, you know. Especially the ones who look so perfect.”

“So you got her keys and …”

“I figured I’d find something there if I looked hard enough. I borrowed her keys, made copies, then went back when I knew she wasn’t at home and had a look around.”

“What did you expect to find?”

He shrugged. “I’m a cop—it’s my business to know if people are breaking the law or up to no good. The police can’t do everything by the book, you know. Our hands are tied most of the time. I had to bend the rules now and then, for the good of the town.”

“So you helped yourself to everyone’s keys to unlock their secrets.”

Mickey swiped away something from under his eye. “Yeah. And I’m glad I did. That’s how I found out the Penryn brothers were growing smoke in their bathroom. And old man Cabrai was skimming off the accounts at the post office.”