Bad Hair Day, page 4
part #2 of Kate Grable Series
“Mr. Dryer!” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet. I would have said more, but Kiki grabbed my arm and squeezed.
“We understand,” she said, her fingers wrapped around my forearm. “And we didn’t mean to damage school property. If we find the person who threw the books at us, would you reconsider the punishment?”
He made a big show of considering this, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “I’ll give due consideration to any evidence, Miss Carlyle.”
“Thank you.” She tugged me toward the door.
I kicked the wall after we got outside. Not hard enough to hurt anything, but I figured if I was going to get detention for damaging school property, I might as well earn it.
Kiki took off toward the secretaries to get a hall pass, so I had to scramble to catch up. “Did that really happen?” I asked. “Because it all feels like a bad dream.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you what happened.” She rubbed the back of her head, and now she really looked mad. “I think I caught a glimpse of the guy before he creamed me with that dictionary, and he’s going to find out that nobody messes with me. Or my friends.”
She got out her cell, flipped the keypad open, and started typing furiously.
“What are you doing?” I hissed, moving in front of her to hide the illegal phone use.
“Sending out an alert to the squad,” she said. “By the end of next period, I’ll have a list of guys with brown facial hair”
“Was that brown blur a beard? It was hard for me to tell without the glasses.”
Kiki nodded. “We can go over the list of suspects in detention.”
“And when we find out who attacked us,” I said, “he’s going to wish he hadn’t.”
“Oh, he’s going to wish he was dead,” she said. By the look on her face, she was only half joking.
By the time I plopped down in front of the television that night with a grilled cheese and a Coke, I was exhausted. I’d managed to get through a few calculus assignments in detention, but otherwise the whole thing was a wash. Kiki’s cheerleading spies had only located two guys in the entire school with enough facial hair to be suspect—Mr. Lutner, who had been teaching Spanish conjugations fifth period, and Jacob Kleinfelter, who had been verified as present in shop class. Mindi Skibinski checked the visitor’s log for us while she was volunteering in the office, and the only visitor signed in at that time was named Gertrude. I was willing to bet she wasn’t bearded.
The obvious conclusion was that the beard must have been a disguise. This left us with no way to identify the guy. If it really had been a guy.
I’d been obsessing over it for hours without any results, so I finally gave up. I turned on a CSI rerun and took my frustrations out on my sandwich.
“Whatcha watching?”
My dad brushed crumbs off the floral couch fabric and plopped down next to me.
I glanced up at the screen, which was filled with a montage of techies hard at work in various laboratory settings. “CSI.” I shrugged.
“You’re frustrated,” he said.
I swallowed. “How can you tell?”
“I’ve never seen you scowl at a guy in a lab coat before. Anything I can help with?”
“Well … you could sign this form from school. Somebody chucked a bunch of books at me and Kiki, and then he ran off, and they’re blaming us for the mess. I got detention. You’ve got to sign off to prove that I told you I’m a delinquent.” The corners of my mouth turned down uncontrollably. I felt like I’d crack if one more thing went wrong.
“You did what?” His eyebrows jumped so far up his forehead that I thought they might pop off and run for cover.
I told him all about it, dwelling extensively on the part where Kiki was knocked unconscious by volume 13 of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He cut me off somewhere around the part where I was heroically shielding her defenseless body with my own.
“Well, that sucks,” he said. “So will you still be able to come pick Mom up from the airport on Thursday?”
“Yeah, if you pick me up at school. Her plane gets in at six, right?”
He nodded. “Good. And it sounds like you made the right choice, regardless of what that idiot vice principal thinks. Detention isn’t the end of the world, so long as you don’t make a habit of it. I once got detention for toilet-papering the school.”
His voice got all dreamy, like flinging rolls of double ply was one of the highlights of his high school experience, and I braced myself for a long and drawn-out story about the good old days. I wished I’d brought down my copy of Crime and Punishment, because I had to finish it for Lit and it would have made a great excuse. But I hadn’t.
When the doorbell rang, I nearly applauded.
“Sorry, Dad,” I said. “I think Jonah’s still at his gaming thing, so I better get that.”
He leaned back and cleaned his glasses on the edge of his sweater. “I’ll be here.”
I opened the door to see Detective Despain on my front step, and my heart sank. Her lips were pressed into a flat line that I remembered all too well; they didn’t seem to fit on her china-doll face. Despain had been my main contact at the police department after the whole zombie thing went down. I liked her. She treated me like a real person instead of just a teenager.
“Kate,” she said gently. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“What’s wrong?” I gasped, bracing myself against the doorframe. “Who’s hurt?”
“It’s okay.” Dad came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. I imagined the worst. Mom’s plane had crashed. One of Jonah’s stupid friends had driven off the road and the car blew up. Something horrible. “I would have called, but I wasn’t sure if you were home, Phil, and I know Kate still doesn’t have her license back yet. I knew she would want to come.”
“Come where?” I asked.
“The conference center. Jonah found a murder victim, and he’s a little shaken up.”
“Another one?” I said.
She nodded. From the wide-eyed expression on her face, I could tell that Jonah wasn’t the only one who was shaken.
Dad and I followed Despain’s police cruiser to the convention center. On one hand, she’d repeatedly reassured us that Jonah was fine while we threw on coats and hunted for our gloves. On the other, she drove with the flashers on. So I wasn’t sure how worried I should be, and I white-knuckled it the whole way.
Our so-called convention center really wasn’t all that impressive. Bayview had one hotel right off the highway; it had a convention wing with a couple of small meeting rooms and a ballroom. Any school dance that wasn’t held in the gym ended up there by default. In a small town like ours, they didn’t get a lot of business, so when the local role-playing club requested permission to hold a gaming night there on Tuesdays, they’d said yes.
When we got there, Despain bypassed the main hotel entrance, but I could see the lobby as we followed her around to the side of the building. It was full of teenagers and college students sporting latex elf ears, pointy wizard hats, and chain-mail bikinis. The thought alone made me chafe.
Yellow crime scene tape blocked off the twin glass doors that led into the convention center. It fluttered in the stiff wind, one end working its way loose and waving toward us like a monstrous Day-Glo tentacle. But maybe that was just my hyperactive imagination at work.
Despain ducked the tape and held the door open for us. I walked in without pausing; I knew the layout pretty well already. Before I’d lost my driving privileges, I’d had to pick Jonah up here a few times. Large events like the live-action role-playing were in the ballroom, smaller ones like tabletop and miniature games in the conference rooms. The first door on the left led to the ballroom; I looked inside and saw a couple of cops questioning a tired-looking guy in jeans, a T-shirt, and full Klingon makeup. I didn’t get the appeal of the bulgy forehead, but then again, I went squealy over viral cultures. I couldn’t exactly make accusations of weirdness.
“Jonah’s in the second room. The body’s in the third.” Despain pointed toward one of the larger conference rooms, which was hung with banners proclaiming it the MEDIEVAL JOUSTING ARENA. “Have you eaten recently, Kate? If it’s okay with your dad, I’d like you to take a look at the deceased for me. I need a future-professional opinion.”
Dad nodded absentmindedly, but I didn’t think he’d heard a thing she said after my brother’s name. He made a beeline for the second conference room. When he went through the door, Jonah immediately started shouting so loud you could probably have heard him from space. “Dad, you should have seen it! That was so wicked!”
I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding. I should have known he’d be fine; he actually enjoyed stuff like this. He’d gotten so excited about the zombies that he’d nearly peed himself.
Despain was waiting for me outside the yellow-taped murder scene. “You want me to look at the murder victim?” I asked. I couldn’t decide whether to feel flattered or sick. “He’s not a zombie, is he?”
“No. But it’s … weird. And with that mess last fall, you’ve shown that you can think outside the box. I know it’s a lot to ask, and I’d probably get into big trouble if my boss found out about this, but …” She swallowed, and again I saw that tight-eyed expression. I didn’t like it. “This guy is killing kids, Kate. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to catch the bastard.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” I said. “I want to help.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Let me introduce you to our victim.”
She led me into the so-called jousting room. The body was impossible to miss, because it was smeared across most of the floor. One look and my stomach threatened to rebel. Yeah, I’d seen dead bodies before, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
Maybe it would be best to ease into this. I let my eyes roam the floor. There was plenty of blood and yuck, which didn’t exactly surprise me. But the tile was also dotted with chunks of white … something. Lots of it. My curiosity won out over my gag reflex, and I knelt down to get a closer look.
“What’s this white stuff?” I asked, pointing.
“Coconut.”
I must have looked at her like she was crazy; she pointed over my shoulder. I turned to see a row of potted palms dripping with coconuts.
“What the …?” I said.
“What?” Despain was instantly at my side. “Does that mean something to you?”
“No. But I’d sure like to know what kind of idiot thinks coconuts are native to medieval Europe. This is supposed to be the jousting room, after all.”
“That is weird.” She sat back on her heels. “Particularly since I think a coconut was the murder weapon.”
I stood in the middle of a crime scene, contemplating a deadly coconut. Of all the things I’d expected to see today, lethal fruit wasn’t one of them.
“Well,” I said slowly, “I guess we can rule out premeditated murder.”
“Why do you say that?” Detective Despain asked.
“Can you imagine someone lugging a coconut around intending to bludgeon someone with it? If I intend to kill somebody, I’m going to grab a knife or a gun. Not a fuzzy fruit that people use to make tropical drinks.”
She nodded. “I came to the same conclusion.”
I felt a swell of pride but immediately pushed it away. I’d let my ego blind me during the whole zombie thing; I sure as heck wasn’t going to do it again.
“All right,” I said. “I’m ready to look at the victim now.”
Despain took me by the elbow. She wasn’t exactly dragging me, just applying a firm pressure that made me feel a little steadier. Like she knew this would be hard and she had my back. I appreciated the support. But still? I was so not prepared for the condition of the body.
I saw the face first. Completely unmarked. Well, except for the fancy tattoos like scrollwork around the eyes. She had pointy elf ears and purple hair. My stomach sank; she was definitely a gamer. I just hoped Jonah didn’t know her; his part in the zombie annihilation squad had made him strangely popular with the geek-girl crowd. I didn’t want to be the one to tell him one of his groupies had been murdered. But thankfully, he didn’t seem to have recognized her.
Unfortunately, the rest of the body wasn’t so pristine. From the neck down, there was an explosion of gore and coconut bits. I was never buying an Almond Joy again.
The right side of her torso was caved in, the ribs broken and sticking out through the skin. Her limbs were twisted in unnatural directions. Her right arm looked like a big question mark, which would have been funny if it wasn’t, you know, an arm. I couldn’t imagine anyone strong enough, not to mention insane enough, to do this.
“What do you think?” Despain gave my arm a squeeze. “Coconuts, right?”
I swallowed with difficulty. Of course it figured that my med-geek tendencies would desert me at a time like this. Despain actually wanted my professional opinion, and all I could think of was that the victim wasn’t much older than me.
“Kate?” Despain tugged on my sleeve. “Maybe this was a mistake.”
“I can do this.” I shook her off irritably. “You asked for my help, let me give it.”
She backed off. I should have probably felt guilty over snapping at her, but I was pretty sure she already understood I was just angry at whoever had done this.
I turned back to the body. Her getup was so darned distracting. She had this huge medallion at her throat covered in red and yellow gems too bright to be anything other than painted glass. That wasn’t so bad. But the hints of unmarked skin were painted, or maybe tattooed, in a scale pattern. I couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to be. A dragon elf lady? Then again, I couldn’t understand a lot of things. Like reality TV. And most teenage boys.
“I’m not so sure, Detective Despain. You see that … gouge there?” I asked, pointing. “And there? A coconut’s fairly flat. But this looks like she was stabbed, or …” I gulped. I didn’t want to say this out loud.
“Or what?”
“I think those might be claw marks.”
“And then they beat her with the coconut to obscure the damage?”
All of a sudden, I didn’t want to look at her anymore. “Maybe.” My hands were shaking. “Can we go out in the hall now?”
*
I slid down the wall to sit on the floor with my legs stretched halfway across the hallway. Despain hadn’t wanted to leave me, but she had a job to do. Right now, she was checking to see if there were any witnesses other than Jonah. I needed the time to get a hold of myself anyway. Maybe the killer would happen to run out this way and I’d trip him, and then it would all be over. Since I was wishing for things, I wanted a new med kit too. And maybe a pony.
But the only person who came out was Jonah. His narrow face was flushed with excitement, and his hair stuck out over his elf ears. For god’s sake, the guy was wearing a pair of tights under his tunic. As if he didn’t look geeky enough already. One look at him and people wanted to stick his head into toilets. Most people, anyway.
“Kate,” he said solemnly, “I have had another brush with death, and it was awesome.”
“I’m glad you’re okay.” I sounded just as weary as I felt. “But I don’t think some girl getting killed is particularly awesome. It could have been you.”
He sank down next to me, his shoulder touching mine. And yeah, he was swirly-compatible, but he’d also stood with me against some tough odds before. It felt better just having him there, although I would have vehemently denied it in public.
“You don’t need to worry about me, Kate. But yeah, it’s sad about Holly.”
“Did you know her?” I sat up straighter. “Who did she hang out with? Did she have any enemies? When was she last seen alive?”
“Slow down!” he said, waving his hands at me. “I didn’t know her very well. She was the priestess of the Clan of Awesome. I run Nightdark Clan. We run in totally different circles, but if you hang around here long enough, you learn most people’s names.”
I slumped back down in defeat. Man, nothing was going my way.
A door slammed somewhere down the hallway. I was more than a little jumpy, what with the whole dead-body-in-the-other-room thing, and I barely restrained myself from leaping to my feet with my arms held up like I knew kung fu, which I most certainly did not. My neck prickled; my hands trembled with the adrenaline rush. Stupid, really, because it was probably just another cop. Or a Klingon. Someone like that. They’d turn the corner any second now, and then I’d berate myself for stupidity.
It wasn’t another cop.
It was a tiny old woman in a navy blue suit. Her skin was the approximate color and texture of beef jerky. Normal people don’t look like that; I had an immediate, intense zombie flashback. At least this one was kind of small.
“Jonah.” I elbowed him, pointing toward the undead creature shambling toward us.
“What?” He blinked, looking down the hall. “Aw, crap. Another one?”
“Hey, guys,” I cupped my hand in front of my mouth, calling toward the ballroom. “We got a Grable’s case out here.”
One of the cops would come and neutralize her, but I didn’t want to wait. Bite marks really itch when they’re healing, and I had had enough of them on my arms and legs to last the rest of my life.
We scrambled to our feet. As we backed away, I looked around desperately for some kind of protective weapon. Unfortunately, weaponry is a little scarce in the middle of a convention center hallway.
“Here!” Jonah hissed, pointing toward a door marked with a gold plaque—SUPPLY CLOSET.
I followed him inside as the zombie advanced toward us. It was one of the creepier ones I’d seen. She looked like one of Santa’s elves after it got left under the broiler just a little too long.
The door slammed behind us, leaving us in pitch-blackness. “Weapons,” I muttered, groping around for something defensive. My hand searched the shelves to my right. Toilet paper. Lots of it. Something told me it wouldn’t do much good to pelt the zombie with rolls of Angel Soft. I heard a clatter and a muffled “Crap,” from Jonah. He evidently wasn’t having much better luck than I was.
