Chapter 62
Rigor mortis had begun by the time we opened the pantry door.
After two and half hours, the stiffness was still proximal—eyelids, neck, lower jaw, chest—but more than I’d expected.
I turned off the space heater. The air in the pantry felt like a desert and smelled like piss.
“Why did you keep the body warm?”
Sebastian pulled on plastic gloves. “To throw things off. Make it look like she died later, after dark.”
I gently tried to rotate the neck—it was stuck fast.
“Right, but the heat’s sped up rigor. The body temp won’t match. They’ll know it was kept someplace warm, then dumped.”
He sighed. “It’s been ages since Uncle Orrin’s thanatology lessons.”
“We never had a body this fresh,” I said.
As kids, we worked with corpses in the Barrow Marsh. But those had been transported to the estate after assignments, for purposes of education and disposal, arriving many hours later.
We were trained to perform our own forensics—recording pallor, rectal temperature, blood pooling, all the indicators of time and position of death.
How would you know this body has been moved?
What could’ve prevented you from knowing?
“It’s cold and raining,” I said. “By morning it won’t matter.”
Sebastian took another photo. “As long as we get the position right.”
“Ugh,” said Faraday. “Is that smell going away? Or will my snickerdoodles taste like piss from now on?”
“It’s just ammonia,” Sebastian said. “The Romans used to clean with it.”
“Oh, great: Romans. The people who puked at dinner breaks.”
“Misnomer,” Sebastian said. “A vomitorium was more like a fire exit. We don’t have a plastic tarp, do we?”
Getting the body into Dutton’s car was slow, careful work. We waited till dark and pulled onto the back lawn, right up to the kitchen door.
I took the bulk of the body’s weight, Faraday held the feet, and Sebastian, with his surgeon’s touch, kept the neck steady so the rigor didn’t break. The corpse was wrapped in a midcentury quilt from Faraday’s sitting room, which grew heavy in the driving rain.
The windows of the nearest house were lit up, which meant we’d see a silhouette if someone looked out at us. No one did.
Sebastian arranged the body on the back seat, matching its position in the narrow pantry.
“Where am I supposed to sit?” Faraday asked as Sebastian and I got in the front.
“You’re not coming,” he said. “You have to take India and Dutton to the Banner party.”
She huffed a little sigh. “While you’re having all the fun?”
Sebastian looked at me. Faraday was mine, after all.
“We handle the crime parts,” I said firmly.
“But you didn’t handle it. This problem of yours turned up on my doorstep…after she talked to you.”
I held up my hands. “This is all on me. But we’ve got it now. Go inside, get rid of that sweatshirt, and show up at the party. We’ll meet you there.”
Faraday stared at the body again, as if reluctant to let it go. I wondered if she was feeling the elation I had after Peter’s fall.
“Good work, everyone,” she singsonged and went back into the kitchen.
The rain was torrential now, and the tires on Dutton’s car were bald. At first we were silent, Sebastian concentrating on the road.
But I had to say something. “ ‘Bazzy’? Really?”
“Cohabitation creates familiarity,” he said. “You should know that, dear.”
“You killed her, didn’t you? Crystal was breathing when you got there, but you fixed it.”
He didn’t answer for a moment, negotiating a turn. We were taking a serpentine route to the Motorway Inn, along unlit back streets.
“Remind me, Jess—what was my other choice?”
There hadn’t been one. From the moment Faraday had assaulted Crystal, only this path remained.
“Does Faraday know you did it?”
“No, but that’s for the best. She’s proud of herself. You did a good job, incorporating her. She won’t crack.”
“I won’t either,” I said. The moment Sebastian told me there was a body, I’d turned into my old self. Competent, forceful, certain. Put a knife in my hand, adrenaline in my veins, and I was still that robot made of dangerous parts.
It felt good here with Sebastian, doing what we were raised to do. This was everything that connected us—two prodigies improvising, untroubled by blood, unfazed by chaos.
Erasing Hiromi. With no family, all she had were friends to remember her. Now she had one less.
“This works for us,” Sebastian said. “We’ll tell the family Crystal showed up asking questions, and we dealt with it. That’ll put a stopper in their doubts about you.”
I found myself nodding. Those old reflexes again. “And we leave Faraday out of our report.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “You know we can’t lie to them.”
I stared at him. “They won’t trust her to keep quiet about a murder. They already think she’s a loose cannon!”
“Which she is.”
“You know what they’ll tell me to do,” I said.
“Yes. Another chance to prove yourself.”
By erasing her too.
Those four years of calling each other dear. Of gifts to her family, visits to Boston, cocktails—all of it had led to this. What she’d done to Crystal.
Faraday was my creation.
“When do we stop killing people, cousin?”
“This part of our career has barely started,” he said. “Who knows?”
I knew. We’d been trained for so many particulars, but always with the same result. We were hammers in search of nails.
“I can’t.”
“If Elizabeth finds out we’ve covered up for some useless incorporated brat, what happens next?”
I could barely answer. “She’ll wonder what else we’re hiding.”
He reached out and touched my wet cheek. “And you can’t even hide your tears. She’ll wring everything out of you and kill every one of us.”
I stared at the blur of rain through the windshield, wondering when I’d started crying. “Cousin, I don’t know how I got this way. But it’s not something I chose. I woke up in the hospital, and it was a different world.”
“Sacrificing Faraday keeps the rest of us alive.”
“I know, but what if too much triage turns me back?”
We reached the next stoplight, and Sebastian turned to look at me—hard, the way Frankie did at poker games, trying to see inside. Trying to judge how far he could push me.
I looked back at him, not trying to hide.
When the light changed, he said, “Okay. We lie to the family.”
A mortal Morton sin.
“Thank you,” I said.
We drove in silence until the neon glare of the Motorway Inn appeared in the pulsing blur of the windshield. He drove past the entrance, pulling the car to the side of the road.
“How’d you know she was staying here?”
“No driver’s license.” Then it hit me. “Fuck—I asked the old guy at the front desk.”
Sebastian turned in the seat to face me. “Really, Jess?”
“I was wearing a KN-95 mask, a hat. I wasn’t planning on killing her!”
But killing was always in the cards. Blood was the mother of history.
“Well, if the police think it’s an accident, they won’t care that someone came looking for her.”
I nodded, and didn’t tell him about the $100 bill.
“One more thing,” he said. “What if this goes wrong?”
If a guest came out of their room and saw a body being dumped, it was run or kill them. And I was done with murder.
“We run,” I said. “Till we get somewhere the family can’t find us.”
“Yes.” He pulled a key from his pocket and placed it in my hand. “In case we get split up.”
I stared at it. “Where?”
He gave me the address—a small town on the other side of Albany.
“Five hundred a month, skimmed from my summer boss’s slush fund. A safe house just for us.”
He’d planned this back in summer. Maybe longer.
“A revolution of two,” I said, leaning across to kiss him, shivering from the rain, the cold, and the body in the back seat under the wet quilt. His lips, the only warmth in the car.
The rest was easy.
We didn’t drive into the parking lot, but eased the car along the access road beside the highway barrier. Our headlights picked out trash and plastic squares of rat poison, a few needles sparkling in the mud.
We carried the body through the darkness, and placed it in the shadows beside the stairs, like she’d slipped on a slick metal step and gone under the banister. Someone coming down in the rain might not see it there, not till morning light.
I wrapped myself in the wet quilt, keeping watch while Sebastian compared the body to his photos from the pantry, arranging it so the blood would pool in the same spots.
Then we went back across the lot, scraping away everything that looked like a footprint in the mud.
No one came out of their room at the wrong moment, and no cars passed us on the access road. As we drove away, I kept one hand wrapped around the key in my pocket.
I would wear it on my silver chain.