“While I slept. Oh, Jesus.”
“You were unconscious, you’ll need to be tested. Someone slipped you something. Given the outcome, I’m guessing it wasn’t Philip.”
Morgan’s cellphone buzzed. He flinched at the intrusiveness. The CSI woman and Ellen Ravenscroft approached Miranda and led her into the bathroom.
When Miranda walked past Philip, exposed on the bed with his guts looping out of his abdomen, she did not flinch. She had seen worse. The bathroom, she found more distressing. Blood on the walls, taunting with unrevealed meaning. The horror, she thought, the horror, and nothing else came to her mind.
“You sure you want me to do this?” asked Ellen.
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” said Miranda.
“Fully licensed, fifteen years this side of the pond, may the House of Windsor and my own dead mother forgive me.”
“So, help yourself,” said Miranda, sitting on the edge of the tub.
“You’ll have to drop your knickers, love.”
With an annoying air of solicitude the CSI woman helped Miranda back onto her feet. She closed her eyes tight, and then opened them slowly. Curiously, she felt little grief. Rage, fear, a sense of violation, of profound loss — it was not about Philip, it was the gaping hole his absence left inside her.
Although Miranda preferred skirts, anticipating the police she had put on slacks, feeling less vulnerable that way. The CSI woman held out a bath towel, and averting her eyes she wrapped it around Miranda, who stepped out of her slacks and underwear.
“You want me to assume the position?” Miranda asked, dubiously eyeing the bathmat on the floor. Instead, she sat down again on the edge of the tub.
“Okay, spread ’em,” said the M.E. “Let’s see what’s been happening in there.”
As Miranda leaned back to brace herself, Ellen Ravenscroft hunkered between her knees with a penlight in her mouth. Miranda flinched involuntarily as the M.E. reached in with a swab.
“You had a shower, right? But no douche?”
“No. Damnit. I don’t remember. Get the hell out of there.”
“Just a minute, love. Okay. I’d say you had a right good night of it. Well, until, you know —”
“That’s gratifying. Are we finished?”
Miranda closed her legs, stood up, and retrieved her clothes. The M.E. fell backwards on her bottom.
“Yes,” said Ellen as she unceremoniously struggled to her feet while the other two women watched. “We’re done.”
“How long have you been doing this?” Miranda asked as she slipped back into her clothes.
“With dead people? Seems forever. I actually trained as an OB/GYN. God only knows why. Staring into the gaping maws of womanhood day in, day out, it palls after a while. So I made a lateral move to the morgue.”
“You’d rather work with the dead?”
“Wouldn’t we all, dear. Look at the three of us.” Her glance included the CSI technician. “Women in our prime, the three witches of Caldor, whatever, guiding the departed into the underworld —”
“Is there anything else?” asked the CSI woman, edging toward the door, but instead of leaving she leaned against it as if she were afraid an intruder might overhear them.
Ravenscroft leaned close to Miranda and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Sorry about this, love.”
“Me too,” said Miranda.
“I’ll need a blood sample and a urine specimen, then we’re finished. You threw up, didn’t you, but we’re hoping for traces of a knock-out drug, maybe GHB or something more potent.”
“Hoping for?”
“Your alibi, love.”
The M.E. took blood and without a fanfare of modesty Miranda produced urine.
“Is that everything?” she asked, turning the vivid yellow vial over to Ellen.
“You’re dehydrated, dear girl. Have lots to drink, you’ll feel better.”
Miranda reached for the wall switch and turned on the heat-light with its rumbling fan, then switched off the main light, drenching the room in livid red. The exterior window had been painted over decades ago. The fires of Hell could not be more ominous, she thought. The three women whose life work was death stood perfectly still. She extinguished the red and they were again left in absolute darkness, except for the comical slit of illumination defining the bottom edge of the door.
She was more comfortable in the dark. Philip’s blood on the walls, it was the neatness that bothered her. There was no blood on the floor, and there had been no blood on the floor of her bedroom. The grotesque message scrawled with deliberate precision was intentionally obscure, she was certain of that — the meaning was in the way it was done.
“Thanks,” she said.
The other two women stepped back as she pulled open the bathroom door. Morgan was standing sentinel on the other side, facing away and framed by the busy glare in her bedroom. The body was covered with a clean sheet, like a rumpled bed.
2
The Message
Morgan and Miranda stood in the living room with Spivak and Eeyore Stritch. Morgan looked angry. Spivak seemed puzzled. He stared at Miranda with genuine concern, which was somewhat concealed behind his habitual scowl. His young partner seemed anxious.
“We’ve got a problem, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Your friend, they can’t find him.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, cocking her head toward the bedroom. “You can’t get more found than that.”
“Yeah, you can,” said Spivak.
“Someone’s in there,” Morgan said.
For a desperate moment she thought it was all a mistake, that it was someone else dead in her bed.
“His name is not Philip Carter. There was no Philip Carter at Ogilthorpe and Blackbourne, they’ve never heard of him.”
“Morgan, what are you talking about?”
“There’s no home in Oakville. No teenage daughters, no wife.”
For another weird moment, Miranda felt relieved; she would not have to bear the guilt for a widow’s grief or fatherless children.
“Your friend, he doesn’t seem to exist.”
“Is that an existential proclamation?”
“Listen
