Chapter 11 #2
“What makes them think it was carbon monoxide?” I ask with Dr. Mohr-like curiosity.
“You’ll see,” is her answer as we walk toward the living room where Aaron McEwan’s body is sprawled on an easy chair near the fireplace.
“Whoa.” McEwan wasn’t dead when I left, and his postmortem appearance is… different.
“You good?” She slides her eyes over to me, concern on her face. “Is this your first time seeing a body?”
I clamp down on the manic laugh threatening to slip free. “No. I, uh… I’ve seen…” I let my voice trail off so I’m not tempted to give her the precise number and gesture at McEwan’s body. “I’ve just never seen…”
“The hot-pink skin?”
I nod and try to seem queasy instead of interested. McEwan looks like he nodded off after swimming in a vat of cherry Kool-Aid. “I knew it was a sign of carbon monoxide poisoning, but I didn’t know it’d be that pink.”
A gentle pressure on my arm has me glancing down to see that Rue’s peeled back the top of her glove so she can half pat, half stroke me with the exposed section of her wrist.
“Keeping my gloves clean,” she says with a “you can do it, li’l buddy” smile as she makes another pass down my forearm with the back of her wrist. “I know coming face-to-face with death can be a lot. Maybe it’d help if I explained the science behind it?”
This is a first. Someone’s co-regulating me. Hand on the arm, name the distress, give the nervous system something to hold—and it’s Rue doing it while offering to perform serial-killer audio erotica.
Hell yes, touch my arm while you shape your pretty pink lips around each word explaining the science behind my kill so I can remember it when I’m alone in bed tonight, picturing that same mouth just a few feet away from me while I—
“So the skin color is from elevated carboxyhemoglobin in the blood,” she says, oblivious to the stirrings of my cock as she walks me through my own kill. “This kind of death is pretty common, unfortunately. Especially as the weather gets colder and people fire up their gas-powered heaters.”
Having comforted me without contaminating her glove, she uses the tip of her pinkie to position it back in place and starts moving around the chair to take photos of the dead man from every angle.
“Aaron McEwan.” One of the uniformed police officers on the scene looks up from the stack of mail he’s been sorting through. “Isn’t that the landlord with the dead tenants?”
“Yes.” Rue and I answer in unison, then look at each other in surprise. It makes sense that she’d be up on McEwan’s history given her job, but I spoke without thinking. Being near Rue is making me sloppy.
“He’d been blowing off maintenance on the furnace at one of his properties,” she says. “A family of three died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning when the venting failed last winter.”
The young officer raises his brows. “Well, that’s ironic.”
Hell yeah, it is, although Rue’s the one who responds, murmuring, “A little too ironic.”
I look up in alarm.
“Wait,” I say over my jack-rabbiting heart. “Are you saying this was foul play?”
She laughs. “‘Foul play.’ You sound like an SVU rerun.” She takes another picture before shaking her head. “I don’t think anything yet, although all signs point to an accidental death. It’s just that my… my mom liked Alanis Morissette, so I hear that song in my head when anyone says ‘ironic.’”
She blinks away to stare at the camera clutched in her hands.
I, meanwhile, have just been handed the first-ever clue about Rue’s family.
My research turned up zilch about any parents, grandparents, siblings, or fourth cousins twice removed, so this is a revelation—particularly because it’s clearly one she didn’t intend to share.
I should feel bad about her discomfort, but I’m starving for details about her that I don’t already know.
While I was being greedy, she was gathering her composure, and she looks up at me now with the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “It’s one of the few good memories I have of her.”
She lifts her camera again but doesn’t get back to taking pictures.
“A little too ironic?” I say, trying to pull her back to me. “Yeah, I really do think.”
She blinks at me in surprise, and I shrug. “One of my nannies was a big Lilith Fair fan.”
It works to ground her. “One of?” She rocks back on her bootied heels. “Hugo Mohr, were you a rich kid?”
I shift uneasily. “Money, yes. Affection, not so much.”
It’s more than I meant to say, but I’m not mad at myself when her face twists in sympathy and a trace of understanding.
“Oh no,” I murmur, nodding my chin at her glove. “Are you going to do the wrist thing again?”
This earns me a laugh. “Not many men get two strokes a day from me.”
I choke. Her face turns scarlet. Bart, who’s been leaning against the wall watching his partner work, sighs from the very bottom of his soul.
“Oh my god! I’ll just…” Her voice trails off as she casts her eyes around the room, looking for a change of subject. They settle on the small sprig of silvery-green leaves on the recliner next to McEwan’s body.
Oh fuck. She found it.
I’m watching her find my love letter in real time.
She pinches the stem between her gloved fingers, looking around to see where it might have come from. I, meanwhile, can’t look away, caught between agony and ecstasy over whether she’ll recognize the waxy, oblong leaves as coming from my backyard.
“What do you have?” I ask with what I hope sounds like casual curiosity.
“Not sure.” She holds up the clipping to squint at it. “It does look a little familiar. Hey, Bart?”
The older man ambles over.
“Do you think this is the same plant we found at the scene when that bank manager fell off a ladder in his garage?”
Bart pulls out a pair of reading glasses to peer at the cutting in her hand. “Looks like it. We didn’t bag it since it was clearly an accident.” He glares at her over his glasses. “Which is the case here too, yes? Don’t go making extra work for us.”
She absently nods as my heart threatens to pound out of my chest. She’s never been in my backyard, and thanks to the fence separating her half of the property from mine, she’s never gotten a close look at the things I grow there. She can’t possibly connect this to me.
“Interesting.” She tilts her head as she studies it, then slides a glance toward me. “Any idea what—”
“Am I clear to check out the fireplace?” one of the uniformed officers calls.
She curls her fingers around the cutting and turns to answer.
“You’re good,” she says. “I’ll want to get started collecting evidence from the body, but I’ll stay out of your way.”
When she’s facing me again, she frowns. “Hey, are you still doing okay?” She edges closer and speaks under her breath. “Not everybody does well at a death scene.”
Oh, you know, just a mild bit of hyperventilating over you holding the strongest piece of evidence connecting me to this murder.
“I’m fine,” I say in as neutral a tone as I can manage. “Are you going to bag that up?” I point to the cutting in her hand, which is already starting to turn brown and curl at the edges.
“Oh.” She glances down at it, likely confused by my abrupt question. “No. Like Bart said, it’s not necessary.”
She looks at it for another beat before moving to McEwan’s body and bending over as if she’s examining it. But her focus isn’t on the pink corpse as she slides the little sprig between the cushion and the arm.
Her action looked casual enough to anyone buzzing around the room with a job to do, but my only job right now is to watch her, and I saw how carefully she placed it so it’s just out of sight.
A woman not wanting to fill out a form in triplicate would have put it back where she found it and declared it irrelevant.
But she protected the little scrap from my yard without a flicker of an eyelash or a word to her partner.
Why? And what has she done with the other cuttings I’ve left for her as a sign of my quiet devotion? I’m sure she overlooked some and brushed others aside, but this one she sheltered, possibly for the first time. And I watched her do it.
I may never recover from this.
Rue, meanwhile, straightens with a soft curse. “Damn. I left my evidence kit in my bag.” She turns to me with a coaxing smile, waving her gloved fingers at me. “Would you grab it from the porch? It’s the black zippered pouch.”
My answering nod probably looks manic, but fuck, I’d cheerfully remove the spleens of her enemies with a ballpoint pen and a couple of rubber bands. Of course I don’t mind grabbing her evidence kit.
On my way back to her, the lead detective steps into my path, having finally noticed there’s an interloper on the scene.
“Excuse me,” the woman says. “You are…?”
Oh, you know. Just the killer returning to the scene of his crime.
“Sorry.” I hold my hand out to shake. “Hugo Mohr.”
She’s even shorter than Rue, her close-cropped curly hair more gray than black, and she ignores my extended hand with the brusqueness of a veteran detective who’s seen too much to put up with my shit.
“And you’re at my crime scene because…?” Her already cool gaze turns downright chilly.
“Because Dr. Mohr responded to the MCRT call of a child in distress,” Rue says, appearing next to me.
The smell of her hair invades my lungs, helping ratchet down the tension building in my neck and shoulders over every decision I’ve made in the past fifteen minutes and maybe also the past fifteen years.
“He’s the best clinical psychologist in the city. ”
A second compliment from Rue. All of a sudden, there’s an entirely new tension gathering in my lower body. As a bonus, her words chase the suspicious expression off the other woman’s face.