The Undead Kama Sutra (6 page)

C
armen’s brisk, angry steps
churned the sand as we returned to her cabin.

“Fuck,” she kept repeating.

“You mean about the missing chalice or the deputy?” Deputy Johnson had told Carmen that she had to ride to Big Pine Key in his boat. We were on the way to her cabin to change clothes before we left.

“Both,” answered Carmen. “I was hoping to find her alive. She was a doll. Christ, now we got the goddamn authorities involved. What the hell happened to Marissa anyway?”

“Maybe it’s not her in the morgue.”

“Keep believing that, Felix. She’s been missing for three days and poof, this peckerwood comes around asking me to identify a body.”

We entered the cabin. Carmen plucked a sundress from a peg on the wall. “Naw.” She put the dress back on the peg and bent over to shift through a basket of laundry. She pulled out a tiny red tank top, whipped off her T-shirt, and stretched the tank over her head and torso. The tank looked as thin as a coat of paint. “How’s this?”

“I thought you didn’t want Johnson to stare.”

“The more he stares, the more that lech stays distracted.”

We put on our contacts. No telling how long we’d have to be among humans and we’d better take care to remain disguised. I got a T-shirt and boating mocs.

Carmen gathered her hair into a ponytail and pulled it through a scrunchie to hold it in place. She pushed her feet into a pair of flip-flops.

We rounded up her chalice Thorne. Poor guy had an ice pack on his crotch. Strapping or not, sex with Carmen had put his connecting unit through the wringer. The three of us returned to the dock. Johnson sat on a wharf piling. When he saw Carmen, he immediately stood at attention. His mouth gaped and his eyebrows arced over the top of his sunglasses. I expected his eyeballs would come flying through the lenses.

Carmen climbed aboard Johnson’s boat and Thorne and I got in the Bayliner. The two boats motored out of the bay and turned northeast from Snipe Keys. The sun hovered above us.

I went to the front of the Bayliner and stretched out on the deck. As a vampire, I never thought that I’d get a chance to work on my tan.

I watched Carmen and Johnson in his boat. They talked and he wrote on his memo pad, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I slipped off my contacts and read their auras. Carmen’s orange glow bristled with annoyance. Johnson’s red aura bubbled with lust, even though the conversation should have been about a dead body.

While I baked like a ham, I thought about what was happening around me. I came to Florida in search of the author of
The Undead Kama Sutra.
Then Odin’s mortally wounded alien impersonator hired me to find his killer and, in his dying breath, offered the name Goodman. And he added that little gem of needing to save the Earth women. Then the Araneum warned me about aliens and made a puzzling reference to a crashed charter airplane.

Next I found Carmen, leader of the Denver
nidus,
who turned out to be recreating this
Kama Sutra.
She’s also found the secret that keeps vampires from withering in the sun and she’s co-owner of a resort for vampires and their groupies. One of her chalices was missing. And now, Deputy Johnson asked us to identify a body.

I’m after the one who murdered Odin and within days a second corpse turns up. Suspicious? Definitely.

Because of my experience with psychic powers and the supernatural, I am aware of a grand cosmic design that binds our actions with what we call coincidences. In this case, what connected the many, many dots?

We continued east, parallel to the Keys. Dozens of boats cruised around us and we rocked over their wakes. Small airplanes droned overhead.

Our two boats approached a concrete pier, beyond which stood a jumble of nondescript, rectangular buildings on Big Pine Key. An American flag snapped from a pole erected on a lawn between the pier and the buildings. The Bayliner’s engine slowed to a putter.

We berthed alongside an assortment of boats representing the agencies working the Keys: Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, DEA, Department of Fisheries, and the Coast Guard.

We docked next to Johnson’s boat and, after I tossed the bowline to an attendant, Carmen and I disembarked and left the Bayliner in the care of her chalice.

Johnson saw that I followed him and he halted. “It won’t take two of you to make an ID.”

“I want Felix to keep me company,” Carmen said. “Or do the corpses complain about too many visitors?”

Johnson relented with a brisk wave of his hand. He led us around the largest building, past a parking lot, and through the entrance of the Medical Examiner’s Office.

Government buildings always gave me the willies. Everything seemed stamped with “official business” as the worker cogs turned on their petty duties and counted the days to retirement. It was like a treadmill in a mausoleum.

Johnson had us wait at a counter while he went ahead. The clerk behind the counter was a sad-faced, middle-aged woman. She did a double take at Carmen.

The clerk’s pale scalp showed from under wispy strands dyed henna-red, with silver roots. Ignoring us, she perked up and clicked a remote toward a television sitting beside a water cooler.

She increased the volume for a commercial of a product called NuGrumatex. Photos showed a man with a monk’s crown surrounding a bald pate smooth as a balloon. More photos and a video clip had the same man running and playing tennis—activities that demonstrated how his youthful vigor had been restored by the growth of new, thick hair. The next photos showed a woman suffering with bald patches where her head had been gnawed at by alopecia areata. She looked as miserable as a cold, wet dog, and wore a school-marmish blouse cinched tight against her throat. In her “after” photos, she had the luxurious curls of a forties cheesecake pinup with bare shoulders, inviting cleavage, and come-do-me-now smile.

The clerk nodded self-consciously and touched her thinning hair. The commercial segued into the usual rapid-fire disclaimers, which I tuned out, except for increased salivation and heightened libido. How wonderful. Thanks to modern pharmaceuticals, America could now be a nation of hairy, drooling, horny nimrods.

As the ad faded, it mentioned the Swiss conglomerate Rizè-Blu Pharmaceutique, Making Your Life Better Than Ever
^™
. I’d seen a rash of Rizè-Blu’s ads lately, as if their marketing department had gotten the hives.

Deputy Johnson returned. Maybe that pompadour of his was courtesy of NuGrumatex. But the only thing that made him drool now was Carmen.

Johnson had the desk clerk sign us in and issue visitors’ badges. He led us past one door, a turn, then to a steel door,
where we stopped beside a cart piled with paper face masks and disposable booties.

“Put these on,” he said. “For your protection.”

Carmen turned her back to Johnson and rolled her eyes.

Once we all put on masks and booties, Johnson swiped his ID badge through a reader on the wall. The lock on the steel door retracted with a snap.

We entered a morgue. The chilled air smelled of antibacterial cleaner and decaying human flesh. The door made another snap when it closed behind us.

At our end, with its collection of bottles and jars and the white decor, the room looked like a science lab.

Johnson introduced us to the medical examiner, a woman in her thirties, dressed in green scrubs, matching head cover, and a paper face mask. Because of the silver piercings in her ears and her trendy glasses, I would have expected to find her serving lattes instead of sawing through cadavers.

The morgue extended into an open examination area with a steel table in the center of a linoleum floor. A white sheet covered a corpse on a table. The examiner went to a computer monitor and tapped on the screen to bring up her files.

Johnson walked to the table and grasped a corner of the sheet. “We found Jane Doe this morning. Hopefully you can give us her real name.”

Carmen looked at the corpse. “Why are you asking me?”

“Just take a look,” he answered.

Carmen and I stood alongside the table directly opposite of Johnson.

He pulled back the sheet and uncovered Jane Doe’s head. The eyes were clouded marbles recessed into the dark, wrinkled pits of the eye sockets. A delicate nose pointed from a face molded of spotty, darkened flesh pressed against the skull. Black hair jutted from her scalp in matted tangles. As an amateur specialist in corpses, I guessed the woman had been dead three days. Too bad; alive she must have been a looker.

Something had left ragged edges at the lobes of Jane Doe’s ears and the loose skin of her throat.

I looked at Johnson.

“Crabs,” he said. “They had a munchfest.”

Carmen’s foot nudged against mine and pressed. The movement was deliberate yet secretive. What was she trying to signal?

Johnson leaned against a file cabinet and drummed his fingers. “Well?”

Carmen pulled her foot from mine. She returned Johnson’s gaze and shrugged. “Who is this?”

Johnson stopped drumming his fingers. His eyebrows slanted downward and wrinkled the skin over the bridge of his nose. “Your missing guest was Marissa Albert. This isn’t her?”

“Nope.”

Johnson pulled the sheet back but kept his attention on Carmen. “Are you sure?”

The knobs of Jane Doe’s shoulders were splayed back as rigor mortis had arched her spine upward. Her breasts lay flat against the rib cage like a pair of rotting apples. There
were more spots of hamburger lacerations where the crabs had fed.

“Holy shit,” Carmen pointed, “what happened there?”

In the center of the woman’s sternum was a deep, thumb-sized hole lined with charred flesh.

My fingers tingled as my vampire sense went on full alert. The wound was identical to Gilbert Odin’s. Jane Doe had been killed with an alien blaster.

T
he cold trail of
Odin’s killer had grown red-hot. The killer was here three days ago. Before that he had been in Sarasota. Where he was today was anybody’s guess.

My vampire sixth sense sounded a warning, and my fingers trembled against the edge of the table. A warning of what?

Johnson noticed my twitching fingers. “You’re going to toss your cookies?” I heard the sneer in his voice.

The medical examiner held up a paper barf bag. “Not on my floor, please.”

I took the bag to appease her. “Thanks.”

Carmen appeared puzzled at my reaction. A vampire getting queasy around a corpse? Her expression seemed to ask, What is it?

Johnson turned to Carmen. “Doesn’t seem to be affecting you.”

She shrugged. “I lived in Detroit. It’ll take more than this to shake me up.”

Johnson’s breath puffed against the inside of his paper mask. “You sure you don’t recognize her?”

“I’ve already told you that I didn’t.”

Johnson looked at me. “What about you?”

“She’s still Jane Doe.”

Carmen leaned over the corpse and studied the chest wound. “What killed her?”

“Don’t know yet,” the examiner said. “We wanted to ID the body before we started an autopsy.”

Carmen’s finger hovered over the wound. “I’ll bet it was this.”

The examiner narrowed her eyes.
Smart-ass.

Johnson was clearly furious that Carmen couldn’t identify the body. Why? My instinct was to remove my contacts to zap him and the examiner, and interrogate them both. Why was Johnson so upset? Wasn’t this just another Jane Doe? Why ask us?

Before I did anything drastic, I surveyed the morgue. Two security cameras watched; one covered the front door, the other the examination table.

We were being taped. Causing trouble might be too complicated to undo.

Johnson covered Jane Doe with the sheet. He acted like his disappointment was our fault.

Outside the morgue we took off the booties and masks and dumped them in a trash bin. Johnson took us back to the entrance desk, where we turned in our badges.

He offered Carmen a business card. “In case you need to chat.”

“About what?”

He gave her a final once-over. His frown morphed into a grin, quick as a chameleon changing colors. “Whatever.”

Carmen refused the card. “I know where to find you.”

Johnson tightened his lips in annoyance and acted like he wanted to shove the card against her face.

She gave him an innocent look. “Anything else, Deputy?”

His lips curled upward and he dropped his gaze to her chest. His eyes flicked left to right. He shook his head and cocked a thumb to the door.
Dismissed.

Carmen and I went out and headed to the dock.

“I’m surprised he remembered Marissa’s name,” Carmen said. “On the way over here Johnson did nothing but stare at my boobs. I feel I need to wash them. The next time I meet up with that bastard, I’ll drain every drop of his blood. Al dente.”

That meant fanging someone without secreting enzymes to deaden the victim’s pain. The agony was like having acid pumped through every blood vessel until the organs boiled. It was a ghastly death, usually reserved for the most vile of human enemies.

“He was setting me up.” Carmen stared ahead as we walked.

“How so?”

“Because Jane Doe was Marissa Albert.”

“She was? Why did you lie?” I asked.

“To give me time to figure out what Johnson is up to. They find Marissa’s body this morning and then he comes to
my
resort looking for someone to ID the body. There are hundreds of hotels, spas, hideaways all over the Keys. He knew who she was from the beginning. Otherwise, why did he come to my resort?”

“How do you figure into this?”

“My guess is that once I identify the body, then the investigation turns to the resort and me. What did I know about her? Why had she come here? It’s a matter of misdirection by Johnson.”

“Because he knew who killed her?” I asked. “If that’s the case, why recover the body?”

“Maybe the body wasn’t meant to be found.” Carmen quickened her pace. When we got to the dock, she gave Thorne the signal to start the engine. Carmen grasped my arm and turned me so our backs were to Thorne. As a chalice, Thorne could be trusted with any vampire secret, but we still took precautions.

She squinted at me. “That’s not all that bothers me. What shook you up in the morgue? Very unvampire-like behavior.”

Here goes. The Araneum told me to keep my investigation of the extraterrestrials confidential. Now I had to violate that trust to keep Carmen’s. Tell Carmen the truth and she’ll have a conniption fit over my not sharing what I’ve known. My dilemma fastened around me like a pair of pliers.

Carmen gestured impatiently. “Well?”

I felt the pliers squeeze. “Marissa was killed with an alien blaster.”

Carmen’s brow lowered. “How do you know?”

“I’ve seen those wounds before.”

“Where?” Her eyes narrowed and crinkled the center of her brow.

I confessed how I’d found the alien Gilbert Odin, the space blaster, and the delivery of his rotting corpse to the UFO. The more details I gave her, the more her eyes narrowed, until they looked like slits. Her nostrils flared and one corner of her mouth twitched. I thought she was going to lunge at me and bite.

Her eyes opened a bit and glistened like hot rivets. “When the hell were you going to tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Anything else?”

There was no point in holding the rest back. I told Carmen about the message from the Araneum.

Her expression turned from anger to worry. The glint in her eyes dimmed. “You were only doing what you were told. I would’ve done the same.”

“Before Gilbert Odin died, he told me, ‘Save the Earth women.’”

“And who’s supposed to save the Earth women?” Carmen’s voice sharpened with sarcasm. “You?”

“Very funny. But the point is that since we know Marissa was killed with an alien weapon, maybe she’s the first of these women that needed saving.”

Carmen cast a look past me and across the horizon, as if searching for the meaning of what I’d just shared. “Or the first that we know about.”

I added what I knew about the charter plane that had gone down.

Carmen remained quiet and her eyes focused back on me. “And the connection?”

The best I could do was shrug and say, “Don’t know.”

We started for the boat. Carmen’s arm moved in a blur and by the time I figured out what she was doing, she had already slugged my left shoulder.

I rubbed the spot where her punch had landed. “What did I do?”

“Besides bringing me all this goddamn trouble, I’m so goddamn jealous.”

“Of what?”

“Of what?” Her voice rose. She stopped, then moved close to whisper, “Isn’t it obvious? You’ve seen UFOs twice. Once at Rocky Flats and then here. I’d give my left testicle to see a UFO.”

“Carmen, you don’t have testicles.” Though I wasn’t really sure about that.

“And I haven’t seen a UFO either. What’s your point? I’m queen of the space cadets—and
nada.
You, on the other hand, practically get inside one. Probably a Class Three Sigma the way you described it. Tell me again about the blaster.”

Carmen watched my hands as I described the shape.

“Did you shoot it?”

“No. The UFO took it from me.”

“Using a tractor beam, right?”

“I guess.”

She hit me again. “You guess? You know jack shit about UFOs and it’s you the aliens come to see. Where’s the justice?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Maybe things aren’t so bleak,” Carmen said. “I’ll bet Deputy Johnson knows more than he lets on.”

“I can start with him,” I replied. “I’m going to stay behind and have a chat.”

“Keep him busy. I’ll come back tonight with Jolie and take Marissa’s corpse. I want her to stay missing for a while.”

“Careful, there was plenty of security back there. Lots of cameras.”

“Felix, the night I can’t sneak into a morgue and steal a corpse is the night I’ll start wearing a chastity belt.”

“What about the computer records?”

Carmen showed her fangs. She extended the talons from her index fingers and brought them together. A spark jumped from each tip. Zap. “Jane Doe? What Jane Doe?”

“How did you do that?”

“The answer will cost you, Felix. The poses on pages 29, 46, and 92 of my
Kama Sutra
manuscript.”

“I’m not that limber, Carmen.”

“Then sign up for Antoine’s yoga class.”

I undid the bowline and tossed it on the boat. Carmen hopped into the fantail. Thorne gunned the engine and the Bayliner rocked backward from the dock.

Carmen faced me and flashed a vampire’s smile of pointed teeth. She looked ready to meet Johnson again. Al dente.