The Countertenor Wore Garlic (The Liturgical Mysteries) (17 page)

I gave him the hands-up shrug and offered a thin smile.

He put down his forceps or retractors or whatever he was using and asked, "You want a drink?"

"It's ten in the morning, Kent. Of course I want a drink. Just one, though."

"You'll love this new port I just got in." He smacked his lips in appreciation. "I like to think of it as the new breakfast food."

Kent was decked out on this Monday the same as he was every day that I'd ever seen him—old tweed jacket and matching vest, tie, and a battered pair of canvas trousers. His pipe was stuck in the breast pocket of his coat and, strangely, seemed to be lit. Under a rather unkempt shock of graying hair, he looked about ten years older than his fifty-six years, this likely due to his job, genetics, and his penchant for early morning imbibing.

"Breakfast food, eh?" I pointed to the wisp of smoke coming out of his pocket. "You know your pipe's still lit, right?"

"Oh, sure," said Kent, patting his pocket. "Don't worry about it. Tweed hardly ever bursts into flame."

"Thanks for the baby squirrels, by the way. Archimedes thanks you as well."

"No problem. It's a pleasure to order something from that company besides dissecting needles, double-prong flesh hooks, and body fluid scoops. They're starting to take me for granted."

I shuddered in spite of myself.

"Got anything on the victim?" I asked, gesturing to the body lying on the table.

Kent picked up a clipboard, scanned it quickly, then tossed it aside onto a nearby shelf. It clattered noisily on the metal surface.

"Female. Probably in her late twenties. Brown hair...."

"We know who she is, Kent. Flori Cabbage, aged twenty-eight."

"So, I was right on all three counts," said Kent smugly, taking a sip of his new favorite morning beverage.

"Yes, you were. I don't know how you do it," I said with not a little sarcasm. "However, the question remains as to the fashion of her demise. That is, assuming that it wasn't of natural causes."

Kent furrowed his brow and looked thoughtful, even serious. "There was a lot of pumpkin pulp on her head," he said. "I washed it off, but it was pumpkin, sure enough."

"Yeah. When we found her, her head was stuffed into a jack-o-lantern."

"Postmortem, I'd say," said Kent. "She was dead by then."

"How do you know?"

"If she'd been alive, the cause of death would have been asphyxiation," explained Kent. "There was no petechial hemorrhaging that I could find, and she has none of that pulp in her lungs. If she had either of those things, it would be an indicator of premortem jack-o-lantern insertion." He chewed on his lip for a moment. "Sometimes those hemorrhages are tough to spot, but I'm fairly sure she doesn't have any."

"Huh," I said. "I've seen the crime shows, but give me a refresher on petechial hemorrhages."

"Well, as you know from watching 'CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, CSI: Las Vegas, CSI: Slicklizzard, Alabama...'"

"I missed that last one," I said.

"A petechial hemorrhage can range from a tiny pinpoint red mark all the way to significant blotting that shows up in the eyes when some external means obstructs the airways." Kent took the pipe out of his pocket, put it between his lips, and puffed away. Still smoldering, it responded with a glow and a trail of white smoke.

"These hemorrhages occur," he continued, "when blood leaks from the tiny capillaries in the eyeballs, which can rupture due to increased pressure on the veins in the head. When they happen in the eyes, they're easy to spot, but they may also be found elsewhere on the skin of the head and face. Those are harder to find. The mucous membrane inside the lips, for instance, or under the eyelids, or even behind the ears."

"It's your professional and sober opinion then that she was dead when the pumpkin was stuck on her head."

"I don't know about sober," said Kent, "but yes, that's my opinion and there are many crime shows that will back me up."

"We put the time of death at around 5:30 or six on Saturday evening. That sound about right?"

Kent checked his notes. "The boys took a liver temp at the scene. She'd been dead about three hours, maybe four. What time did you find her?"

"Around 9:30."

"So you're right in the ball park. Here's something interesting." He motioned me closer to the table, pushed some of her hair aside with his fountain pen, then used the nib to point to two punctures on her neck.

"Fang marks?" I said. "How did those get there?"

"Most likely a vampire attack," said Kent, managing to keep a straight face for a moment, but then breaking into a broad grin. "Seriously, I have no idea. They were hidden in all the pulpy mess. There was some significant bleeding, but these punctures came nowhere near the jugular or the carotid. She didn't bleed out and there wasn't any foreign substance around the wounds that I could find. I'll run a tox-screen, but even if she was injected with something, many poisons are undetectable unless we know exactly what we're looking for. Obviously those aren't needle marks on her neck. Those punctures were made by something much larger, perhaps two millimeters in diameter. They're not big, mind you, but certainly bigger than a needle would make. Sort of... teeth sized."

"So what's your best guess as to cause of death? Vampire bite?"

"As strange as it seems, the official report will have to say that she died of a myocardial infarction. Certainly, there is evidence of a massive heart attack. Now something may have caused it, and if so, I do not yet, nor may ever, know what that something was, but as it stands now—heart attack."

"I don't buy it. She's only twenty-eight." I studied the body on the table. "She looks to be in good shape. She was a granolly, for heaven's sake. Probably did a lot of hiking, backpacking, that sort of thing. Sheesh! What kind of granolly has a heart attack at twenty-eight?"

"How about one that was scared to death?"

***

"I went through Ian Burch's phone," Nancy said as I walked into the station. "There was some pretty kinky stuff, but nothing that pertained to this case that I could tell. I won't even go into the pictures that were on there. There was more to Flori Cabbage than met the eye. Luckily, Ian Burch, PhD, was camera shy or I would have had to wash my eyes out with lye or something."

"I'd like to take a look," said Dave. "In the interest of our investigation. You might have missed a clue."

"In your dreams," said Nancy. "Anyway, everything's now on the phone. I downloaded his whole account from the server. Texts, voice mails, pictures, calls... everything."

"Let's keep it 'til we figure this out," I said. "I doubt he'll complain too loudly, and if he needs a cell phone, he can go get a new one. Any word from Bud?"

"Nope," said Dave. "Ardine hasn't seen him and his fall break is over. I called his dorm at the college and spoke with the Dean of Students. They're keeping an eye out for him, although he didn't show up for his first two classes this morning."

"Elphina?" I asked.

"She's not answering her cell phone," said Nancy. "I dropped by her house on the way into work and she's not there. Her mother hasn't seen her, but that's no surprise. Toy Lumpkin probably hasn't even talked to her for weeks and they live in the same house."

"Does her cell phone have a GPS?" I asked.

"Nope. I checked. It's one of those pay-as-you-go deals from Walmart."

"Bud's?"

"Same thing. He was paying for it himself, I guess. Ardine certainly isn't going to have a cell phone plan for her kids."

"So," I said, "we might presume that Elphina, aka Mary Edith Lumpkin, and Bud are together."

"We might presume that," agreed Nancy.

"So why'd they take off?" Dave asked. "That doesn't seem like something Bud would do. I don't know about Elphina."

"Hmm," I said, thoughtfully taking a donut out of the white cardboard box on the counter, a chocolate one, with Halloween sprinkles. "No, it's not like Bud at all."

"They were scared?" suggested Nancy. "One of them saw something?"

I shook my head. "I don't think so. Bud would have come and told me. No, after the movie, he ran into the crowd of zombies because he was scared for Elphina. She was, on the other hand, supposed to be at the bookstore, safely in the bosom of the rest of the dental undead."

"What's the correct term for a group of vampires, anyway?" asked Dave. "Is there a name for it?"

"Coven, maybe?" I said. "Clan?"

"I believe it's called a 'sipping of vampires,'" said Nancy. "A sipping of vampires and a necropolis of zombies."

I watched Dave write it down on a pad covered with doodles, then took a bite of my donut and wiped some sprinkles from my chin with the back of my coat sleeve. "Anyway," I said, "Elphina was out of harm's way at Eden Books."

"Unless she wasn't," said Nancy.

"Unless she wasn't."

***

I filled Dave and Nancy in on Kent Murphee's findings, but, except for the ziplock bag of freeze-dried chipmunks he'd sent home with me for Archimedes, we had nothing.

Chapter 13

St. Sanguine's in the Swale was a spookhouse of a Catholic basilica, a Gothic grotesque that looked as though it had been designed by the architectural firm of Karloff, Karloff, and Lugosi, then built by two guys with a gargoyle fetish. I'd been to mass here a couple of times. The choir was good. Very good. Almost too good for a Catholic church. It didn't register at the time, but now as we walked into the vestibule and heard the limpid sounds of Hildegard's "Missa di Stigmata," the realization hit me like a nun with a yardstick. These weren't Catholics, at least not like the Roman Catholics I knew. Where were the guitars? Where were the Jesus-fish-shaped tambourines? A Catholic church without its "icons of the faith" was as unnatural as a bald televangelist. The thought made my belly hair stand on end.

"I sense the beginnings of a plot," said Meg, after I'd read her my latest installment with artful and thespianic declamation.

"Perhaps," I said, "but not having one has certainly never stopped me before. We'll just have to see where this goes."

The night outside had turned cold and we were in for a hard freeze if the forecast could be believed. I had stacked a load of split oak by the fireplace, then built a fire, and turned my attention toward more literary pursuits. Baxter was currently enjoying the blaze, having eaten a hearty supper before plopping down on his stomach in front of the hearth. Meg was sitting on the leather couch, her feet tucked under her and her new iPad, opened to Bill Bryson's latest book,
At Home
, in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Archimedes was in the den as well, but since Meg didn't like to give him baby squirrels in the house (he tended to leave the tails strewn on the floor), he rested, unfed, one yellow eye open, on the head of the stuffed buffalo. Earlier in the evening, I'd offered him a treat at the kitchen window, but he seemed to prefer the warmth of the house to the mousey morsel. He ignored my offering, made a beeline for the buffalo, and settled onto his spot for the evening.

The opening strains of
The Lark Ascending
came out of the surround sound speakers and all was right with the world.

"I love that," said Meg, looking up from her book. "
The Lark Ascending
by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Written in 1914, I believe. Did you know that the work was written for and dedicated to the English violinist Marie Hall, who gave the first performance with piano accompaniment?"

I looked up from my typewriter, suddenly sensing an aberration in the cosmos. "Wait just one cotton-pickin' second!" I said. "That's just too weird. Now, fess up! How're you doing it?"

Meg laughed and pointed to the CD changer. "Your new stereo is too fancy for your own good. Look," she said. "When the music begins, the title scrolls across the display. Then, just now, I looked it up on my iPad and got the tidbit about Marie Hall."

"Whew!" I said, relaxing. "That's better. The universe makes sense once more."

"But I
could
learn all that stuff," said Meg, giving me a smile over her glass of wine. "If I wanted to. Just so you know."