Dead of Winter Read online

  And I have less than a week to do it. No pressure. No pressure at all.

  CHAPTER 6

  The trip-hammer beat of my heart as I struggle to deal with the birthday gift issue seems trivial when I look over at the bagged body of Liesel Paulsen. I feel instantly ashamed and self-absorbed, and I vow to refocus my angst on things that truly matter, like a young girl whose life has been cut way too short, and the sister whose life I might yet be able to play a part in saving.

  I hear a door open and see Arnie Toffer, our office’s lab rat, enter the hallway, and this, too, helps me refocus. “Whatcha got?” he asks, eyeing the stretcher on the scale.

  “A sad one,” I tell him. “But it’s also one I think you’ll find interesting.” My implication that the sad death of Liesel Paulsen might be something intriguing to Arnie could sound harsh or uncaring to the average person, but I don’t mean it that way. Arnie is a die-hard conspiracy theorist, and the possibility of investigating a human-trafficking ring is something I know he’ll enjoy sinking his conspiratorial teeth into. And it might keep him occupied long enough to get him off some of the other, more far-fetched ideas he’s following of late, such as the relatively harmless hobby of searching for sightings of cryptozoic creatures like yetis, Nessies, and such, or the more worrisome theories, such as the idea that there is a secret underground city built beneath the Denver International Airport that is designed to serve as home to the New World Order. Crazy as most of these theories sound, Arnie and others of his ilk can put forth arguments in support of them that tend to give one pause, no matter how absurd the original premise seems. And every so often, Arnie’s suspicious, conspiratorial mind has proven helpful in solving a case. Because of that, and the sheer entertainment value of hearing him spout his theories and rationale, I not only tolerate Arnie’s conspiracy leanings, I occasionally encourage them.

  “We have an eighteen-year-old girl who was dropped off in the ER by a mystery man, who then disappeared. Her injuries suggest she was abused and beaten to death, though the story the man gave was that she fell out of a moving car. And to add to the puzzle, one of the last things she said was that she wanted us to help her sister, implying that the man who brought her in had her, too, and it wasn’t a friendly arrangement.”

  “Human trafficking?” Arnie says, his eyes growing wide.

  “Possibly,” I say, not surprised he made the leap. “Her description fits that of a girl who went missing six months ago. And her younger sister went missing a few weeks after that.”

  “Wow,” Arnie says. “Any leads?”

  “Not much, other than the words of the dying girl. She said something about a ‘lost group,’ which might mean that there are a lot more victims out there to be found.”

  “I’m sure there are,” Arnie says. “These guys prey on young girls and boys—runaways, kids who are estranged or angry with their families, or who have parents who don’t give a crap. They befriend them, offer to help them, promise them a better life, lure them in with gifts and money, and then get them hooked on drugs. If the kids wise up and try to leave, the kidnappers threaten them with injury or death, or threaten to kill their family members. Once they have them securely in their grasp, they start farming them out to sexual deviants, drugging them into oblivion, and taking whatever money they can get for them.” Arnie frowns and shakes his head sadly. “Most of them end up dead, either from abuse, by their own hand, or from a drug overdose.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this,” I say.

  Arnie shrugs. “I saw a lot of it when I was working in LA. There are so many young people who go out there hoping to make it big in Hollyweird, and then the harsh realities hit. They’re prime pickings for the type of parasites who engage in human trafficking. I know some guys who track this kind of stuff on the Internet and try to rescue some of the kids, sometimes with the help of the authorities and sometimes not. Either way, it isn’t easy. The people who traffic in humans are, understandably, not a very trusting group.”

  “Scary to think there are people like that out there,” I say, imagining Emily, our teenage daughter, or Erika, my sister’s teenage daughter, falling into the hands of people like this.

  “Have any trace for me to work on?” Arnie asks.

  “Not yet. Do you have any online connections who might know anything about human trafficking in this area?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Before he can expound on whatever conspiracies are current on the matter, the door at the end of the hall opens and Izzy walks in.

  “Is this our ER victim?” he asks.

  I nod, heartened by Izzy’s appearance. He had a heart attack last summer that left him pale, shaky, and a little less confident and assured than the Izzy I’ve known for the past several years. But he’s been doing well lately, and today he looks good. His swarthy coloring is back, there is a definite spring to his step, and his hair, which is normally a ragged tonsorial gathering of black tufts heavily tinged with silver, is neatly trimmed and—amazingly—completely lacking in gray.

  “Are you dyeing your hair?” I ask.

  He blushes and brushes a hand over one side of his head. “Yeah, Dom talked me into it. Does it look ridiculous?”

  “No,” Arnie and I both say at the same time.

  “It makes you look younger,” I tell him. “And it’s a good dye job, not one of those cheapo ones. Very nice.”

  Izzy smiles self-consciously. “I let Barbara do it.”

  “Really?” I say, a little surprised.

  Barbara is a mortuary cosmetologist, though she prefers to refer to herself as a funereal aesthetician. She does makeup and hair for the dead, and works out of the basement of a local funeral home that is the Johnson family’s primary competition.

  The Keller Funeral Home is run by Irene Keller, an elderly woman who bears a striking resemblance to many of her clients. No one knows for sure how old Irene is, but her paper-tissue skin, age-spotted hands, and dowager-humped back suggest she is older than Tutankhamun. She insists on wearing lots of makeup, but her foundation is always patchy, her eyeliner is often running up her lid or down the side of her face, and her lipstick looks like it was applied in clown school. I’m guessing this is because her eyesight is mostly gone. I don’t know why she hasn’t had her license taken away yet, but at least she drives slowly. Really slowly. I’ve seen pedestrians walk the blocks downtown faster than Irene drives them.

  Despite her seeming frailty, she is still kicking, and doing so quite well, if recent rumors can be believed. There’s a story going around about how she recently bloodied the shins and lower lip on some kid who tried to steal her wallet out of her purse at the local grocery store. Apparently, she fell asleep in the little cart she rides in, and the kid thought she was dead and, therefore, easy pickings.

  “Have you been to Barbara before?” I ask Izzy. I’m curious for two reasons. The first one is that it was Izzy who first turned me on to Barbara, making a not-so-subtle suggestion that I was long overdue for a makeover, back when I first started working for him and was still reeling from David’s betrayal. I was skeptical when he said he knew someone who was very talented with hair and makeup, given that he’s basically bald on top with a tonsorial fringe that circles his head like some sort of Star Trek alien communication device. My skepticism about his recommendation only grew when he dropped me off in front of a funeral home. I almost blew it off, but then decided to go ahead and give Barbara a try.

  My first appointment with her was definitely a memorable one. The girl is a magician, a wizard, a master, when it comes to fashioning hair and applying makeup. But her methods take a bit of getting used to, and this leads me to the second reason I’m curious if Izzy has been to Barbara before.

  “No,” Izzy says, rolling his eyes. “It was my first time.” A shudder shakes him. “I knew what to expect, but I have to admit the actual experience was far more disconcerting than I anticipated. Despite working with dead bodies and the equipment that goes with them on a regular basis, lyin
g down on an embalming table was quite uncomfortable. And I’m not just talking about physical discomfort.”

  “It does take some getting used to,” I agree. “When Barbara told me I was going to have to lie on one of those tables for her to work on me, I nearly walked out. She basically shamed me into it, called me a ‘wuss,’ or something like that.” Both Izzy and Arnie chuckle. “Anyway, once I committed, it wasn’t that bad. In fact, Barbara helped me plan out my entire funeral while I was there. She let me look at myself in a mirror while she set different-colored satin pillows beneath my head so I could see what I’d look like when I’m dead. We settled on this lovely pale blue that really sets off my eyes.”

  Arnie scoffs. “What good is that if you’re dead?” he says. “Your eyes are going to be closed.”

  I stare at him, realizing he’s right. This is a little upsetting. What is even more upsetting is the realization that I never figured that out for myself.

  Seeming to sense my dismay, Arnie offers up a compromise. “Of course, you could paint blue eyes on some stones and have them set on top of your eyelids.”

  “You mean like Joffrey on Game of Thrones?” I say, wincing. “That’s creepy on so many levels.”

  “It was a common thing to do back in medieval times,” Izzy says. “It started with coins, which served both a mythical and a practical purpose. The practical part was that the coins kept the deceased person’s eyes closed. The mythical part was that the coins also served as a fare for Charon when he ferries the dead down the River Styx. I think the stones came into play because they could actually be inserted into the body’s eye orbits, thereby maintaining a more normal shape since the eyeballs tend to wither quickly.”

  I shudder. Even though I deal with death on a daily basis, I can still be creeped out. And the eyes have it, so to speak. One of the tasks involved in my job that I dread the most is the drawing off of vitreous fluid, the liquid part of the eye. It’s a highly useful sampling because the fluid can provide all sorts of interesting details regarding both the timing and, on occasion, even the means of death. But sticking needles into eyeballs gives me the willies.

  “In some ancient cultures, it was also common to put stones in people’s mouths when they die,” Arnie says, adding his two cents’ worth. “Some think it was because it was believed to prevent the spread of plague, while others think it was a vampire deterrent.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, holding up one hand. “While that’s all very fascinating, I don’t need any more death trivia today. The two of you can go on and on with this subject for hours, and right now I want to focus fully on our victim. If we can figure out how she ended up here, we might be able to save the life of her younger sister.”

  This gets Izzy’s attention, not an easy thing to do when a discussion revolves around death trivia. Izzy is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to death and the many rituals that go with it. He’s given lectures on the subject. And while Arnie is not as well versed as Izzy—at least in real-world applications—he is very well versed on death scandals, rumors, and conspiracies, both modern day and ancient.

  “You are absolutely right,” Izzy says, all business now. “Let’s get to it.”

  “I need to get her X-rays done, and then I’ll bring her into the autopsy suite for you.” I reach into the satchel I carried with me to the hospital and pull out a manila folder. It contains several pages and a copy of Liesel Paulsen’s DMV photo, which Richmond had printed out at the hospital once he came up with a possible identification for our Jane Doe. I hand the folder to Izzy. “Here’s a printout of her medical record. Bob Richmond is heading up the case, but he said he probably won’t be here for the autopsy. I haven’t downloaded my photos yet, but I will as soon as I finish up the X-rays.”

  Izzy nods, his expression grim as he studies the smiling picture of Liesel Paulsen. “What’s the basic story?” he asks.

  I tell him how Liesel came to the ER, how her male companion left in a hurry, and the theory that she, and her younger sister, were both victims of human trafficking. Then I tell him about the girls’ father. When I get to the part about how Liesel’s final words were a plea to us to help her sister, Lily, both Arnie and Izzy take on a new sense of urgency.

  Izzy says, “I’ll be dressed and ready to go in a few minutes. Meet you at the table.”

  Arnie spins on his heel and heads toward the stairs to his lab/office area. The stairwell, like the elevator, requires an ID badge for access. “Let me see what I can dig up from my guys online,” he says over his shoulder.

  While I wince at his use of the term “dig up,” I am heartened by his determination and zeal on the matter. Maybe we can save a life for a change.

  CHAPTER 7

  I get Liesel’s body X-rayed and then wheel her into the autopsy suite ten minutes later. I’m able to move her onto the autopsy table by myself, given how light and small she is, and by the time I’m done, Izzy has arrived, dressed in his gear and ready to go.

  “Give me a couple minutes to get into my scrubs,” I tell him, wheeling the stretcher away. “And then I need to download my photos. I shouldn’t be long.”

  Famous last words. There are days when it feels like the world is conspiring against me with everything I do. Today is turning into one of those days. My first clue is when I go to grab a set of scrubs from the locker room so I can change out of my street clothes, and the only sizes I can find on the shelves are smalls and mediums. Our scrubs are laundered by an outside service, and a change in ownership for that service has given us reasons to rethink this arrangement. Izzy is barely five feet tall, and he’s a bit on the portly side. Since his heart attack, he has lost some weight, thanks to his partner Dom’s watchful eye and skillful cooking, but he’s still not what anyone would call slender, or even normal. Since I stand six feet tall, Izzy and I make a comical visual duo when we work together. Ironically, we both wear the same size in scrub pants: extra large. Izzy has to roll up the pants legs several times, whereas I often find that they hit above my ankles. And while the XL tops fit Izzy, my generously endowed bust leaves my tops straining at the seams unless I wear a 2XL.

  Izzy has cut back his hours to part-time since the heart attack, and we have another medical examiner named Otto Morton, who fills in on Izzy’s days off. Otto is not a small man. In fact, he bears a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. He wears 2XL scrub pants and top. I job share with our newest employee, Christopher Malone; he’s just under six feet tall and broad-shouldered, and wears the XLs.

  Arnie is only about five-eight, and his slim build fits into the mediums. But Arnie rarely wears scrubs, since he spends most of his time in his upstairs lab, wearing a lab coat over his street clothes. We also have a part-time evidence technician named Laura Kingston, whom we share with the police department. Like Arnie, she rarely wears scrubs—though she will don them on occasion, if she is invited out to help us process a messy scene—and she wears a medium as well. Our only other employee is Cass—short for Cassandra, for sure, in this case—our receptionist/secretary/file clerk, and she is the only person in the office who would wear a small, though I’ve never seen her wear scrubs.

  I try to squeeze my way into a medium-sized top, and end up nearly choking to death when I try to maneuver one arm into a sleeve. Then I find myself struggling to get out of the thing, trapped with my head and part of one arm protruding, while the remainder of the top has me wrapped up like Houdini. As I struggle, I hear a seam rip and finally work my way loose. I toss the top aside, hold up the medium pants for a second, and after realizing I’ll never get them past my knees—assuming I could get my snowshoe-sized feet through the pants legs—I toss them aside as well. Resigned to wearing my street clothes, I grab my camera and head for my computer.

  My office isn’t really an office. I have a desk located in our library, a room that also houses our conference table. There is a second desk in the room, and this one belongs to Christopher. The two of us split our hours much in the same way Otto and Izzy
do. Chris is not only a nice guy who bears all the necessary qualifications for the job, he is reliable, funny, and flexible when it comes to scheduling—something I greatly appreciate. But he has a trait that has haunted him in the past, and haunts us in the present. He has some sort of digestive disorder that causes him to produce huge amounts of flatus, which he releases on a regular basis. And it isn’t your ordinary, everyday kind of gas. These emissions are the most foul-smelling clouds of noxious odor I have ever experienced, and given that I sometimes work with rotting bodies, that’s saying a lot. Arnie once commented that if Christopher had been older, he’d suspect his farts were behind the Bhopal disaster of 1984.

  Chris’s interview gave us a hint of what was to come, and given that he once filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination against a police department he worked for—a lawsuit he won—we are determined to make the best of the situation. It isn’t always easy. We found an underwear product that contains activated charcoal in the lining, and that has helped some. And the library is always filled with a variety of air fresheners that make the room smell like a funeral parlor . . . ironic in a way. But there are still times when it can be quite a challenge to work with Chris, something I fortunately only have to do one or two days a week when our schedules overlap.

  Those of us who work with Chris have become proficient at developing euphemisms for his emissions, things like “stepping on a frog,” “airbrushing,” “cheek flapping,” “hummerhoids,” “knicker-rippers,” and the more delicate “panty whisper.” We’ve even been known to rate them, using what we’ve dubbed the “sphincter scale.” A ten on the sphincter scale will clear a room in five seconds flat.