Bad Hair Day, page 5
part #2 of Kate Grable Series
Finally, I found a broom and held it out in front of me in a pseudodefensive position.
The door swung open. I didn’t wait; I gave that crispy critter a face full of bristles. “Go away, zombie!” I yelled. Jonah had my back; he pelted her with rolls of paper towels. One bounced off her forehead. She yelped and backpedaled. Then I noticed the uniformed cop standing by her side. It was the same guy who’d asked for my autograph earlier.
“Stop that!” the zombie said irritably, trying to shove the broom away from her face.
Zombies don’t talk like normal people. It was hard to believe that this woman was a regular old human, but all evidence pointed in that direction. Unfortunately, Jonah had already launched another paper towel missile at her face. I swatted it away with my broom.
“Um, sorry,” I said. “We thought you were …”
“A zombie. Yes, I heard.” Her leathery face screwed up with distaste. “I’m the hotel manager. Is that why you’re ransacking my supply closet? I thought you were trying to loot us.”
“No, ma’am,” said Jonah, laying on what little charm he had. “We’re sorry, but it was an honest mistake. We’ll clean up the mess.”
“You’d better,” she said. “Or I’ll have you arrested. No one vandalizes my building while I’m on the job!” Then she lurched back down the hallway, muttering to herself.
The cop leaned against the doorframe and watched as we straightened all the shelves, chuckling the entire time. I wanted to pelt him with toilet paper, but with my luck, I’d probably get arrested, so I didn’t.
I showed up at the morgue the next day with circles under my eyes and a cup of coffee as big as my head. Sandi-with-an-i had tried to take the coffee away from me when I got on the bus, but one look at my face scared her off. I got way more satisfaction out of that than I should have.
One step through the door and I knew Dr. Burr hadn’t been released from jail yet. Sebastian sat in the middle of the tile floor, letting out little goatlike bleats of panic every five seconds. I felt a sudden wave of pity. Yeah, he was annoying, but his boss had been arrested for murder. I remembered how horrible it had felt when I’d learned that someone I respected had betrayed my trust.
So instead of biffing him on the head with a notebook and telling him to suck it up, I sat down cross-legged on the floor and chucked him on the shoulder.
“Come on,” I said gently. “It’ll be okay. We can handle things until someone shows up to help.”
“But there’s nobody to help! Dr. Grundleford-Pluta is unreachable, and Dr. Burr is gone, and we’ve got two murder victims, and three bodies from the hospital, and we’re going to run out of spaces in storage, and I don’t know what to do, and—”
I patted his back, maybe a little more forcefully than I should have, but the effort had to count for something.
“That stuff is out of our control. Let’s focus on what we can control.”
“I wish Dr. Burr were here.”
“Me too.” We sat in companionable silence for a minute. “So what’s it like working with him, anyway? He seems like such a gentle, patient guy.”
“He’s not a murderer, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Sebastian snapped, his panic morphing abruptly into anger. “It’s what you really want to know, isn’t it?”
“Chill, okay? I find it tough to believe too. He just doesn’t seem like the type.”
I used my nicest voice, but it didn’t have any effect on him. Sebastian had suddenly turned into a thug in geek’s clothing. It was almost laughable, except he seemed serious.
“Yeah, and I’m sure you’re an expert on crimes of passion,” he said, glowering.
“I’m agreeing with you, Sebastian. Why are you trying to pick a fight with me?”
This time, I went for logic; I was better at that than the touchy-feely garbage. It seemed to get through too. I watched all the fuss and bluster melt away. I could actually see him shrink back to normal size. Kinda like the Hulk, only less colorful.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “I’m sorry. I’m just … pissed, I guess.”
“Pissed why?”
“I like Dr. Burr. And I know for a fact he didn’t kill anyone.”
“For a fact?” I raised my eyebrows.
He looked down at his shoes. “Just a figure of speech. I’m not talking hard evidence.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. “Well, come on. Why don’t you get in touch with all the docs who sent us bodies from the hospital and let them know about our situation? I’ll handle the murder victims.”
“Okay.”
He picked up a few files and trudged to the middle office like I’d asked him to take on a monumental task. I didn’t really care as long as it got him out of the way so I could do a little investigating. As soon as the door closed behind him, I grabbed my phone and dashed for the cold room.
The room was pretty minimalistic; there was a long row of stainless steel cabinets and a gurney pushed against the wall with a full body bag on top. I knew who was in that bag, so I didn’t even bother looking. It was the guy they’d delivered yesterday, the one I’d signed for. The bag had a big bleachy-looking stain on the side, so it was pretty distinctive.
Another clipboard hung on the wall; it took only a few seconds to figure out where Holly was stored. I opened the door to her storage unit and slid her out. This time, it was easier to look at her. Somehow, seeing her in the lab setting made it feel … less real, maybe. But still, I felt almost reverent as I used my cell to take pictures of the scrollwork on her face; it was a little smudged on one side, probably from the bag rubbing up against it. I photographed her clothes. Her hands were bagged, and I wasn’t about to mess with that, so I contented myself with looking for any stray evidence. Coconut bits or something. But I didn’t see anything. At least the damage didn’t look quite as bad as it had before. Her arm was much less question-marky than I’d thought it was.
I reached out and put the tips of my fingers to her cheek. Her flesh was cold but pliant. It felt empty.
I’d seen a lot of corpses for a seventeen-year-old. Of course, some of them had gotten up and tried to eat me, but that was beside the point. Holly’s body was different somehow. Sometimes I got so busy geeking out that I forgot we were talking about people. This time I couldn’t forget. I looked at those ridiculous elf ears and I thought about my brother and how I would feel if he was the one stuffed into a bag in the cold room. My stomach lurched.
“Get a hold of yourself, Grable,” I muttered.
I needed a breath of fresh air and maybe a good slap in the face. Sympathy was a good thing, but I told myself I could sympathize all I wanted after I got my brain in gear and put the bad guy down. Still, somehow I couldn’t make myself put Holly back into that drawer, all alone in the dark. I wasn’t usually the hyperemotional type; I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me all of a sudden.
Finally, I made myself open the other storage container. This was the first murder victim, the one the police thought Dr. Burr had killed. He was young too, maybe midtwenties, with a high forehead and wide-set eyes. Something about his face looked vaguely familiar, and I stared at him for almost five minutes before I realized.
If you added a pair of elf ears and some fancy scrollwork around the eyes, he and Holly could be related. I looked back and forth between the two faces. Brother and sister, maybe? But the guy hadn’t had any identification, and no one had reported a missing person yet.
I opened his bag further, searching for what had killed him. That cop had said the body was really mangled. Dr. Burr couldn’t be under suspicion for both murders, since he’d been jailed when Holly was killed. If I could draw a parallel between the cases, it might clear his name. But there wasn’t a single mark on the John Doe.
The door behind me opened. Just in time too. I needed a second opinion.
“Hey, Sebastian.” I didn’t even bother turning around. “Come take a look at this. I think maybe these two corpses are related.”
He didn’t say anything. I was really starting to lose my patience when I saw the look on his face. Complete horror.
“Holly?” he whimpered. “Oh, crap.”
He ran out of the room. As the door swung closed behind him, I heard it. Puke makes a very distinctive sound when it splatters on floor tile.
*
It took me about fifteen minutes to put the bodies back after I took all my pictures, and Sebastian still hadn’t come back yet. After the pukearama, he’d locked himself in the men’s room across the hall. His vomit still decorated the floor in the main room; I sure hope he didn’t think I was going to clean it up. That wasn’t in my job description.
By then, I didn’t have much time left before I had to leave to catch the bus, and I wasn’t going to be late to school again. Mr. Dryer would probably force me into a life of indentured servitude in the cafeteria.
But before I left, Sebastian had some explaining to do. I found it mighty coincidental that he’d seemed to recognize the victim. Too coincidental, in fact. So I squared my shoulders, stepped over the puke, and prepared to extract the truth from him. By force, if necessary.
I tried the knob first, but the bathroom door was still locked. So I knocked.
“What?” he asked, his voice muffled.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. But I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me.”
“Are you sure?” I frowned. “I thought you recognized the victim.”
“I think it was the Hot Pocket I had for breakfast.”
“I swear you called her Holly. That’s her name.” There was a long pause. “Sebastian?” I prompted.
“Well, you were wrong. I said ‘Holy crap.’ ”
“But—”
“Or maybe I did say her name. I probably read it off the chart. Now leave me alone.”
Then he started making retching noises, but I was pretty sure he was acting. I would have called him on it, but I had to catch the bus. I’d beat the truth out of him later.
School, thankfully, was uneventful. I aced my Latin test and no one tried to bludgeon me with random reference materials. So I found myself walking into the basement classroom that housed our detention in a semi-good mood, which was immediately obliterated by the fact that it smelled like wet dog in there and made my allergies go haywire.
I started sneezing in the doorway and couldn’t stop. When I sat down next to Kiki, she offered me a tissue.
“Thanks.” I buried my nose and hoped it would help.
“You sick, Kate?” asked the pierced and studded burnout sitting next to me. “I got some Tylenol.”
I couldn’t decide what shocked me more: that he knew who I was or that he was talking to me like I wasn’t the class brain and he wasn’t carrying around enough metal to make him attractive to all magnets within a five-mile radius.
“Thanks, but it’s just allergies. I think they must spray this room with Eau de Canine just to make us extra miserable.”
He flashed me a grin. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Let me know if you change your mind.”
“Thanks again.”
I got out my bio book and started to work on my homework packet, but I didn’t get very far. Miss Lindsay was the detention proctor on Wednesdays, and she seemed to think that the word proctor was defined as “a person who stands out in the hallway, talking on her cell and not paying any attention whatsoever to what’s going on in the room.” The noise got so bad that after about five minutes of attempting to concentrate, I gave up.
“So what’re you doing tonight?” Kiki asked, drumming a pencil on the top of her desk.
I rubbed the side of my hand. I’m a lefty, so writing in spiral notebooks hurts sometimes. “On Wednesdays, Aaron and I usually double with Rocky and Bryan.”
“But not tonight?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, I’m really confused. Aaron and Trey got partnered with this girl from St. Michael’s, and she was throwing herself at Aaron all day yesterday. I don’t like that. So I tried to hook her up with Trey, because sometimes I think he’s flirting with me, and I don’t like that either. But he must be sick, because he wasn’t on the bus with us this morning, so now I don’t know what to do.”
“Wow.” She blinked. “But Aaron is trustworthy. It doesn’t matter how hard that girl throws herself at him.”
I put my head in my hands. “So am I just overreacting? I’ve never had a boyfriend before. I don’t know anything about relationships that isn’t in the Dummies’ Guide.”
“Maybe a little.” Kiki laughed. “I happen to know from when we dated that he hates when girls come on strong.”
“Right,” I said cautiously. They’d been totally over when Aaron and I got together, but I kind of hated to think of Kiki and Aaron as a couple. It gave me a serious inferiority complex.
“As for Trey … I don’t know. He was asking about you. Like where was your locker, and about your class schedule, and stuff like that. He said he had one of your books. Did he give it to you?”
I shook my head. “I’m not missing any books.”
“Well, maybe he was just fishing for info. Maybe he really is interested. He wouldn’t be the first guy who fell for his best friend’s girl, right?”
“Great,” I muttered. “That’s the last thing I need.”
“It’ll be okay.” She patted my hand. “If he really values Aaron’s friendship, he won’t make any moves. All you need to do is be sensitive to his feelings.”
“Sensitive. Right.”
I felt about as sensitive as a Mack truck. And my nose wouldn’t stop running. I honked into another tissue and tried to look confident. But the stress was getting to me. I just hoped I could hold on until the week was over without snapping.
Our standing double date was at my favorite diner. Its name wasn’t really Legs and Eggs, but the servers all wore super-tight shirts and microscopic shorts, so we’d renamed it. It was the kind of place I normally wouldn’t have set foot in except they had the best breakfast food in the known universe.
Aaron looked for a parking spot while I rushed inside. Not like I was in a huff or anything; I just needed to use the bathroom. It felt like my spleen was floating.
Rocky intercepted me at the scantily-clad-hostess station. She’d been hyperemotional lately because her boyfriend, Bryan, was getting ready to ship off to a military base in Idaho. Because really, if there was going to be an invasion, it would obviously begin in the land of the potato.
I couldn’t blame her for being upset, though; I would have felt the same way if Aaron had been about to up and leave the state. And to make matters worse, Rocky and I were both so busy that I hadn’t been able to do the supportive-best-friend thing as much as I wanted.
“Hey,” I said, but that was all I got out before she threw her arms around me and started sobbing on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m so pissed!” she wailed. For once, the patrons weren’t staring at the Legs or the Eggs. They were staring at us. “Bryan stood me up.”
I glanced over her shoulder and saw Elle in our usual booth. She tossed her hair and gestured us over, bouncing in her seat. Great. My weekly double date was being hijacked by a Barbie-brained bimbo.
We needed privacy. I tugged Rocky toward the girls’ room.
“We’ll be out in a second,” I said to Aaron, who’d just walked in.
He gave Rocky a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “I’ll get you a Coke.”
I got Rocky some toilet paper to wipe her eyes with and persuaded her to dislodge herself long enough for me to go potty all by myself. I felt like I deserved a sticker.
When I finished, she was still sniffling and shaking. I tried to stroke her arm comfortingly with my elbow while I washed my hands. I learned quickly that the elbow has negative comfort value, but it was the thought that counted.
“So what happened?” I leaned back against the sink and held my hands up like I was in a television medical drama. I wasn’t really that big of a geek; public restrooms just freaked me out. When my brother was little, he used to lick the sink porcelain, and I’d had a complex ever since.
“I don’t know,” she said between hitching breaths.
I handed her a paper towel. She buried her nose in it and honked.
“Well, you have to know something.”
“We got into a fight last night. He said … he wants me to go to Juilliard, and it seems silly to be together long-distance for a year and then break up because I’m going to be in New York and he’s going to be in Idaho protecting the potatoes from the forces of evil.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I thought the exact same thing. Really. Why Idaho?”
“But I said it was stupid to break up over something that might happen in the future, and as long as we’re happy now, we should enjoy it. So he says, well, I’ll think about it. He’ll freaking think about it. And then he doesn’t show up? He was supposed to be here twenty minutes ago; he won’t return my calls; he’s not at home. It’s like he’s totally avoiding me.”
Now she was angry. And when Rocky got angry, she paced. This was not a problem in a gymnasium or something equally spacious. It was a big problem when you were stuffed together into a public bathroom the size of a phone booth and you had a phobia of white porcelain.
“I mean, I’m a good girlfriend, right?” she said, throwing her hands around wildly. “It’s not like I’m smothering him. I just don’t understand what the heck he’s thinking.”
“I don’t get it either.”
“And what’s with that girl? Elle? She said Aaron invited her, and I didn’t know what to think.”
It took me a minute to catch up with the abrupt topic change, but then I figured she probably just wanted to get her mind off the whole Bryan thing. I couldn’t blame her.
“Her dad is Aaron’s mentor. And she doesn’t seem to know how to take no for an answer.” I shrugged. “I was pretty worked up over it, but I’ve got bigger things to worry about right now.”
