Ravenscroft leaned over so that their heads almost collided. “You’re right,” said the medical examiner. She stood upright and tilted her head back, with nostrils flared, gazing slowly around the room. “How very strange. There’s still a bit lingering in the air.”
“Did you wash her down?”
“Not the parts you’re sniffing.” The ME pulled the sheet back all the way. Her normally animated features congealed into a mask of stunned disbelief. “Apparently someone has given her a right good clean-up.”
“Is that possible?”
“It’s ridiculous. An embarrassing, offensive, outrageous, ridiculous comical absurdity. Oh God, I’ll have to get to the bottom of this. When I left her last night she was scented with money, the way the good Lord intended. And I was the first in, this morning. The universe is not unfolding as it should, David, no one breaks into a morgue.”
Morgan was aware she had used his first name. The only person to use his first name had been his wife of brief duration — and occasionally Miranda, but only in exceptional circumstances. “Someone apparently did,” he said. “Unlikely as it seems. Security’s light.”
“That’s an explanation, not an excuse.” Ellen Ravenscroft drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Damn it! Damn it, I was pretty much done with the autopsy part, moving on to analysis. So, God damn it, I don’t think anything’s been compromised except my dignity. And hers, of course.” She took in another deep breath and exhaled with a warming smile, searching for equilibrium in morbid good humour. “Bloody ghouls, if you ask me. Necrophiles. Hapless vampires — the blood’s already been drained. Necromancers, social pariahs, royal creeps. Generally the dead don’t make very good company, you know. Well, they do, sometimes. But they don’t issue invitations.”
“Invited or not, she had visitors. So why is she here?”
“She’s dead. Oh, you mean why is she dead?” Ellen Ravenscroft grimaced. “From causes yet to be determined. I’d say what killed her was generalized hypoxia brought on by acute respiratory distress. She died from asphyxiation. Exactly what caused the asphyxia, I just don’t know.”
“She could have been smothered. I don’t see any strangulation marks.”
“There aren’t any. It might be self-induced hypocapnia.”
“Suicide?”
“Death by hyperventilation, which could be a possible response to the symptoms of hypothermia. A side effect from exposure.”
“In the middle of summer.”
“It’s August, Morgan. The nights are cold.”
“Cool.”
“It doesn’t have to be freezing for hypothermia. And she had a fair bit of alcohol in her system. French champagne, I believe. And not much on in the way of clothes.”
“Can you check out the champagne for me?”
“Yes, of course. And before you say it, I know French champagne is redundant. If it’s real champagne, it’s French, n’est ce pas?”
“Could someone else have done it?”
“Exposed her, yes — misadventure, or at the worst, manslaughter. Asphyxiated her, yes, but damned if I know how. I’ll keep trying. No evidence of a man lurking about down there in the nether region. Maybe a bit of messing about, but gently, perhaps on her own. I’ll let you know. I’d say the bikini top was put on by a man post-mortem — he cupped her breasts in it, before struggling to secure the clasp. Left a few abrasions. A woman would have done it up at her waist, then slid it around.”
“Her husband did it.”
“That’s quite a revelation! He’s confessed, has he?”
“To covering her breasts, not to murder. Bared breasts may be commonplace these days, but not at the RTYC.”
“You think it’s about owning her boobies, Morgan?” She looked down at the body and smiled capriciously. “He doesn’t own them anymore.”
“Yeah, he does. He’ll be along to collect the remains. Don’t let her go?”
“What?”
“Her body, don’t let her go.”
“Of course not. Her remains remain.”
“Good. Now all we have to figure out is why her husband wants a murder investigation, what nefarious crimes is he trying to obscure through misdirection? And what’s with the perfume?”
She looked up at him. “Listen to you,” she said. “Morgan, you need me. Without your partner, you’ve got no one to talk to.”
“I’ll manage.”
“Off you go, then, love. I’ve got work to do.” She did her best in the circumstances to shrug coquettishly, then turned back to peruse the exposed corpse. “I’ll call if the lady reveals anything more.”
Morgan edged back into the shadows that circled the autopsy tables, casting each in a separate cone of light. “Yeah,” he said in a casual voice as he turned and sauntered out the door, irritated that she might be right. About Miranda.
She would be in the air over the Pacific by now, landing about the same time as he reached headquarters if he walked slowly and didn’t stop along the way.
* * *
Hanga Roa, the only community on Rapa Nui, surprised Miranda. She had expected something more exotic. This was a small town not unlike Waldron, the village where she had grown up, an hour west of Toronto on the banks of the Grand River. There were a few streets, mostly unpaved, a few palm trees, a scattering of shops and restaurants nestled casually among stucco and cinderblock houses, an open-walled market and a closed-in market, two scuba-dive shops in the tiny open harbour, and there was one bank. There was an imposing church, fronted by carvings of saints with bird heads. The people seemed to be a mixture of Spanish and Polynesian. Teenage boys rode island horses among occasional taxis and the odd delivery van. Girls wore full skirts or school uniforms. Tourists were few, and stood out as much for their vaguely furtive demeanour as for their wash-and-wear clothes. Dogs and chickens ranged freely along the sidewalks, haphazardly chasing each other.
It’s nothing at all like home, she thought, changing her mind as the taxi pulled up a gentle incline to the Hotel Victoria. While she unpacked in the simple room with white plaster walls and a window opening west toward Tahiti and New Zealand, she wondered where such a notion had come from. Perhaps the island was not lush like the background in a Gauguin painting, nor wondrously strange, despite the giant statues for which it is known throughout the world, but it was definitely alien territory.
Miranda realized she was standing by the open window, staring into the empty distance, thinking about times lost and about home, feeling lonely.
There was a faint knock on the door.
“Come in,” she said, assuming it was the elderly gentleman who had let her the room.
She turned as the door swung open, but no one was there.
