“Stuff like what?”
“It’s like someone having AIDS or something. It ought to be told up front. Especially now.”
“It’s unlikely this woman has AIDS or -”
“I should have been told. Before I touched her.”
“Susan -”
“I went to school with a girl who was a witch.”
I stopped what I was doing. Susan was rigid against the wall, hands pressed against her belly.
“Her name was Doreen. She belonged to a coven and our senior year she put a curse on my twin sister, Judy. Judy was killed in a car wreck two weeks before graduation.”
Bewildered, I stared at her.
“You know how occult stuff creeps me out! Like that cow’s tongue with needles stuck in it that the cops brought in a couple of months ago. The one wrapped up in a list of dead people’s names. It was left on a grave.”
“It was a prank,” I reminded her calmly.”
The tongue came from a grocery store, and the names were meaningless, copied from headstones in the cemetery.”
“You shouldn’t tamper with the satanic, prank or not.” Her voice trembled. “I take evil just as seriously as God.”
Susan was the daughter of a minister and had abandoned religion long ago. I’d never heard her so much as allude to Satan or mention God unless it was profanely. I’d never known her to be the least bit superstitious or unnerved by anything. She was about to cry.
“Tell you what,” I said quietly. “Since it appears I’m going to be short-staffed today, if you’ll answer the phones upstairs, I’ll take care of things down here.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and I immediately went to her.
“It’s okay.”
Putting my arm around her, I walked her out of the room. “Come on,” I said gently as she leaned against me, sobbing. “You want Ben to take you home?”
She nodded, whispering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“All you need is a little rest.”
I sat her in a chair inside the morgue office and reached for the phone.
Jennifer Deighton had inhaled no carbon monoxide or soot because by the time she had been placed inside her car she was no longer breathing. Her death was a homicide, an obvious one, and throughout the afternoon I impatiently left messages for Marino to call me. Several times I tried to check on Susan but her phone just rang and rang.
“I’m concerned,” I said to Ben Stevens. “Susan’s not answering her phone. When you drove her home, did she mention that she was planning to go somewhere?”
“She told me she was going to bed.”
He was sitting at his desk, going through reams of computer printouts. Rock and roll played quietly from the radio on a bookcase, and he was drinking tangerine flavored mineral water. Stevens was young, smart, and boyishly good looking. He worked hard, and played hard in singles bars, so I had been UK. I was quite certain his job as my administrator would prove to be a short step on his way to someplace better.
“Maybe she unplugged her phone so she could sleep,” he said, turning on his adding machine.
“Maybe that’s it.”
He launched into an update on our budget woes.
Late afternoon when it was beginning to get dark out, Stevens buzzed my line.
“Susan called. She ill she won’t be in tomorrow. And I’ve got a John Deighton on hold. Says he’s Jennifer Deighton’s brother.” Stevens transferred the call.
“Hello. They said you did my sister’s autopsy,” a man mumbled. “Uh, Jennifer Deighton’s my sister.”
“Your name, please?”
“John Deighton. I live in Columbia, South Carolina.”
I glanced up as Marino appeared in my office doorway, and motioned forhim to take a chair.
“They said she hooked up a hose to her car and killed herself.”
“Who said that” I asked. “And could you speak up, please?”
He hesitated. “I don’t remember the name, should’ve wrote it down but I was too shocked.”
The man didn’t sound shocked. His voice was so muffled I barely could hear what he was saying.
“Mr. Deighton, I’m very sorry,” I said. “But you will have to request any information regarding her death in writing. I will also need, included with your written request, some verification that you are next of kin.”