Her eyes smiled as she accepted the helmet. “You’re not as daring as you look.”
Strapping the helmet on, she got on the motorcycle behind him. She tucked her arms around the detective’s waist, lacing her fingers together, leaning in closer to keep from falling off.
Mike revved up his motor. Looking up, he saw Caleb exiting the building. The software tech looked in his direction and their eyes met. The expression on the other man’s face was decidedly envious. He pointed toward her and mouthed the words “That one.” Mike knew that he was asking to be introduced to Natalya.
Some people, he decided, were just incorrigible. They also never learned.
He figured Caleb wasn’t going to readily believe him when he got around to telling the man that the redhead leaning into him with her arms around his waist was not his date.
For a Friday evening, crosstown traffic was not as heavy as it could have been. Weaving his motorcycle in and out between lanes of cars with the ease of a tailor plying his needle, Mike managed to make amazing time. They reached the gallery in less than twenty minutes from the moment they left the curb.
The gallery was hardly more than a storefront. It was wedged in between a trendy restaurant and a store that sold overpriced shoes. There was a sign that proclaimed that there was more parking in the rear. Since both sides of the one-way street were filled to capacity, not even leaving space for a prayer, Mike had no choice. He followed the once white, now weather-beaten arrow halfway down the block, turned right and then snaked his way down a narrow passage that had been built before things such as SUVs had captured the country’s fancy.
When he pulled his motorbike into the lot, Mike looked around. The lot attendant was nowhere to be found. Never hesitating, Mike made his way into the heart of the semiempty lot, choosing a place that was close to the gallery’s rear door. As he waited for the woman behind him to release her hold and get off, Mike felt her body stiffen against his back. He heard a sharp, pained intake of breath behind him.
“What’s the matter?” Squinting, he looked around to see what had upset her.
Natalya didn’t answer. Instead, she jumped off the bike. Turning around, Mike saw her running to the other end of the lot.
A streetlamp in the middle of the block was casting an irregular pool of light just within the confines of the small lot.
“Doc?” he called after her.
Natalya heard a faint noise behind her, but she didn’t turn around to acknowledge it. She was completely focused on what she’d thought she saw several yards away.
Boots.
Boots sticking up from under the nose of a parked vehicle. She wouldn’t have noticed, except that the light from the streetlamp had caught just the tips and illuminated them.
White boots.
Like the kind Clancy liked to wear. It was a pair she’d given him for Christmas one year. White boots in lieu of a white hat. It was a reference to her calling him a good guy, like the kind who lived in old-fashioned Westerns and dressed all in white.
As she hurried to the site, Natalya prayed it was just her overwrought imagination, playing tricks on her eyes.
But even as she quickened her pace, she knew she wasn’t wrong.
And then she saw him. Wearing that silly tuxedo he liked to put on for openings. A tuxedo with white
boots. An outfit guaranteed to get him noticed. He was lying on the ground beside a car, a strange, strangled expression on his face.
“Clancy?” she cried out loud, then raised her voice, calling his name again, trying to rouse him. To get him to sit up and tell her everything was all right. That he’d just fainted, or gotten dizzy or even passed out, drunk. Except that Clancy didn’t drink.
But Clancy didn’t sit up, didn’t stir. He continued to lie motionless on the ground.
Sick to her stomach, Natalya dropped to her knees beside him just as Mike caught up to her. Frantically, she felt for Clancy’s pulse. First at his wrist, then at his throat.
There was none.
Horrified, she placed her hand less than half an inch from his nose. There wasn’t even the faintest indication of breath.
She felt a tightness in her chest, constricting it. With effort, she banked it down and immediately began to administer CPR. Tears began to sting her eyes but she didn’t stop to wipe them away. She couldn’t afford to. Every second counted.
“Dammit, Clancy,” Natalya cried angrily at the immobile figure on the ground before her. “What have you gotten yourself into this time?”
Standing over her, Mike had a better view of the situation. A better view of the ashen pallor of the man’s face. He knew that no matter what the extent
of her medical training was, it wouldn’t allow Natalya to bring her friend around.
The man was dead.
N
atalya remained kneeling by the body, holding Clancy’s lifeless hand until the ambulance arrived.
Mike had called for the ambulance rather than the coroner’s wagon because he wanted someone other than Natalya to pronounce her friend dead. When the two attendants prepared to place Clancy within the black body bag, he gently took hold of her shoulders and brought her to her feet.
Her face was almost as ashen as the face of the man being zipped into the bag.
“Why don’t I have someone take you home?” Mike said quietly.
The suggestion made Natalya come back to life.
She looked at him and shook her head. “No, I’m going with Clancy in the ambulance.” She looked beyond his head, toward where the attendants were placing the gurney in the van. Natalya moved to follow. “I don’t want him to go alone.”
Mike placed a hand on her shoulder, not so much to restrain her as to give her human contact. “He’s past knowing, Doc,” he told her gently.
She looked at him with eyes that held so much emotion, Mike found himself completely captivated by her.
“He’ll know,” she replied so softly, it would have been easy to miss the conviction had he not been straining to hear her.
After a beat, Mike nodded his approval to the attendant. The latter shrugged and made room for Natalya in the back beside the gurney.
Natalya got in, but before she sat down, she leaned forward and unzipped the bag just a little past Clancy’s clavicle.
About to climb into the front passenger seat, the attendant stopped and protested. “Hey.”
“Just until we get there,” she said.
Neither man could bring himself to argue with her. The attendant shrugged and got into the front of the vehicle.
After several minutes had passed and the silence within the enclosed space grew deafening, Mike finally spoke.
“You’re not going to ask to do the autopsy, are you?” Because if she was, that was one debate she wasn’t going to be allowed to win.
But if he was waiting for a protest, he didn’t receive one. Instead, Natalya looked away from the face of the man she’d befriended since childhood and shook her head.
“No. But I’d like to wait for the results if that’s all right.”
Mike looked at his watch. On a normal Friday, he would have been home hours ago. His own or whomever he’d gone out with that evening. But here it was, the evening creeping its way to midnight, and he was still technically on the job, debating whether or not he had a homicide on his hands.
Natalya saw him looking at his watch. “You don’t have to stay with me. I’ll be all right.”
He laughed. The woman was something else. “How long have you had this superwoman complex?”
“Most of my life,” she answered without missing a beat. And then her lips moved into a frown. “Some superwoman.” She laughed shortly. “I can’t even protect a friend.”
He wondered what made her feel as if she had to be the dead man’s keeper. He saved the question for another time as he pointed out the obvious.
“We don’t know yet that this was a homicide. There was no sign of any kind of actual struggle, no bruises or broken neck. Did he have a heart condition?”
She’d made Clancy get a checkup just six months ago, saying that everyone needed one every few years. Clancy had gone reluctantly, only as a favor to her. He’d been in perfect health.
“No.”
“Respiratory problems?” When she looked at him, he elaborated. “Like asthma, or allergies. Anaphylactic shock can—”
Natalya cut him short. “Clancy wasn’t allergic to anything. Not pollen, peanuts or shellfish. He hardly even ever got a cold.”
What he said next caught her off guard. “Then maybe it was a drug overdose.”
Pressing her lips together, Natalya shook her head again. “Clancy didn’t do drugs.”
He’d heard that protest so many times from parents when they were told their child had overdosed. No one ever really knew anyone completely.
“That you know of.”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him sharply. “Clancy didn’t do drugs,” she repeated more forcefully. “He didn’t even like to take aspirin.” Then, in case the detective thought she was trying to deify Clancy, she added, “I’ve known him most of his life. Clancy was abrasive, he had OCD tendencies and a whole host of other quirks that drove a lot of people up a wall, but he didn’t do drugs.”
Mike studied her for a long moment. The driver
took a turn and he had to quickly brace himself in order not to fall into her.
“And if they find some in his system?”
There was no hesitation on her part. “Then someone must have forced them on him.”
What did it take to have someone have that much faith in you, he wondered. “You’re sure?”
Again, there was no hesitation. “I’d stake my life on it.”
Mike believed her. Believed that
she
believed her friend to be drug free. But whether or not that was the case still remained to be seen.
“This is going to take time,” he warned Natalya once they had reached their destination and Clancy’s body had been taken to the autopsy area. “Why don’t you go home and I’ll have someone call you about the results.
I’ll
call you with the results,” he amended.
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him, but she was far too wound up to get any sleep tonight. At least if she were at the morgue, waiting for the preliminary autopsy results, she’d feel as if she was doing something instead of taking up space.
She took a seat on the bench directly outside the morgue’s double doors.
“This is the weekend. I don’t have to be anywhere.” Which wasn’t strictly true. There was Sunday dinner at her parents’ house in Queens, but as far
as she was concerned that was too far in the future for her to think about right now. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
A woman as beautiful as you?
he thought. He found that hard to believe. With a shrug he sat down beside her in the corridor.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked him. “You were looking at your watch.”
“Habit,” he lied. “And if this is a homicide, it’ll be mine, so I might as well stick around to find out if it is or not.”
She nodded, accepting the explanation. Holding her hands in her lap, she looked straight ahead. “Thank you,” she said softly.
Getting to his feet, Mike mumbled something about coffee and went in search of a vending machine.
Back within ten minutes, he had a cup in each hand. She accepted the one he offered her with an absent, grateful smile.
Mike sat down beside her again. He took a long sip of the semicool liquid, then held the paper cup in both hands.
“Is there someone we should be notifying?” he wanted to know. “Next of kin?”
Clancy had been an only child. If there were aunts or uncles, she was certain she would have heard about them. After a moment, she replied, “There’s just his mother.”
Her jaw had gone rigid, Mike noted. “I’m guessing you don’t want to be the one to tell her.”
More than once, during her intern days, she’d had to tell family members that their loved one had died. She’d held strangers in her arms and cried with them. But this wasn’t that kind of pain.
She raised her chin. “Only because I know it won’t matter to her. It might even come as a relief.” Without meaning to, she allowed a small, cynical smile to curve her lips. “Until she finds out that he didn’t leave her anything.”
Fascinated, for more than one reason, Mike never took his eyes from her face. “How would you know that?”
“I’m the executor of his ‘estate,’ such as it is.” Clancy had kidded her about it more than once, but no one was more surprised than she when he’d actually produced a slip of paper he called his will.
Glancing at the detective, she saw an interested look come into his eyes. “It’s a joke. Clancy didn’t have an ‘estate,’ he had baseball cards.”
“Baseball cards?” Mike echoed. Was she putting him on?
“He collected baseball cards,” she explained. Pausing, she took a sip of the coffee he’d brought her, grateful for the gesture. “Had them in mint condition. Never even took them out of the wrapper.” She looked at Mike. “I just can’t see owning something you love and not handling it.”
Why that simple statement made him feel so much warmer than he had a moment ago, Mike didn’t know. He attributed the shift to a faulty thermostat in the building’s basement, where the morgue was located.
“And he left them to you?”
She took another sip before answering. For a moment, her energy deserted her and she found herself wishing that the coffee was stronger. “His mother would have only thrown them out.”
Finishing the unsatisfying coffee, he crushed the cup in his hand and tossed it into the wastebasket some ten feet away. “Tell me more about this mother.”
Lucille Donovan was one of the few people on this earth she intensely disliked. “She’s one in name only. Her husband left her years ago. She took it out on Clancy every chance she could, always belittling him, saying that if he were more of a ‘regular boy,’ his father would have never walked out on them.”
“Regular boy?” Mike echoed. He thought he knew what she meant, but he wasn’t sure.
Natalya hated the term, but that was what Clancy had told her his mother had said. He’d tried not to look upset, but she knew it was eating him up inside. He blamed himself for his parents’ split for years, even though he’d just been seven at the time.
She tried to give the detective as clear a picture as she could. “Clancy didn’t play sports, wasn’t suave
like his father supposedly was. Basically had the word
victim
tattooed on his forehead. Mostly the latter was all Lucille’s fault.”
Although he had a hunch he knew where this was going, he asked, “Lucille?”
“His mother,” Natalya clarified. “They hadn’t spoken in five years.”
Didn’t sound like much of a family unit, Mike thought. But he’d make up his own mind when he got a chance to speak to her. In the meantime, there was something else he wanted to know.
His eyes held hers. “What was your relationship like?”
She knew what he was doing. If one path didn’t succeed, he was taking another. But it wouldn’t get him to where he thought he was going.
“I was his ‘big sister,’ although technically, I’m only a month older.” She heard what sounded like a workshop saw being turned on and she tried not to imagine what was going on behind the closed doors.
“Anything else?” Mike pressed.
He interrupted her thoughts, bringing her back to their conversation. “Such as?”
“Something more intimate?”
The one note he was strumming was getting tiresome. “I already told you no.”
“Fair enough,” he acknowledged. “How about him?” The question, he saw, surprised her. “Was he in love with you?”
“He loved me,” she qualified slowly, as if measuring her words. “But he wasn’t ‘in love’ with me.”
She was making a fine distinction. “And you know this because you’re a mind reader?” The question sounded cynical, but he didn’t mean it that way.
Her mouth curved again in a semismile, as if she were sharing a joke with herself. “No, I know this because I was the wrong gender. Clancy was gay. Something else his mother berated him for.” She straightened just a little, turning to face him. “Look, if you’re trying to find out if I had anything to do with his death—”
“No.” He meant that. The stricken look on her face when they’d found the body had been spontaneous. The emotion behind it wasn’t something that could have been faked. He’d had dealings with actresses, both the professional variety and the homegrown drama queens, and he liked to think that he could tell a performance from the real thing. There was always some small, telltale sign that set truth apart from fiction. “But I’m supposed to ask,” he leveled with her. “To rule you out.”
Natalya got her temper under control, realizing it was just the situation and not the man that had made her come close to losing it. Detective DiPalma was being as nice as he could, she thought, especially under the circumstances. She owed him some cooperation.
“Fine, I can appreciate that. I was at my office the
entire day. I worked through lunch. Lots of mothers can testify to that. And if that’s not enough for you, I’ve got a priest who can vouch for me.”
Was she going to tell him that she ran to confession in between patients? “A priest?”
She nodded. “Father Gannon. He brought in his niece. Her mother—his sister—was sick.” She smiled. “We go way back. I knew him when he was Alex Gannon. He’s from my old neighborhood,” she explained.
The woman was getting more and more intriguing. “You have an interesting circle of friends, Doc. No cops in it?”
She almost laughed, knowing her answer would throw him. “My sister is marrying one. Sasha. The one who delivered your nephew,” she tacked on in case he’d forgotten who Sasha was.
It would have only been natural to have gone to someone she knew first instead of turning up at the station. “Why didn’t you ask him to look for your friend?”
“I would have,” she said honestly, “but he’s out of town.” Somewhere in the distance, a door opened and then closed. The sound vibrated down the hall. The morgue was an eerie place at night. “He and Sasha went to Atlantic City.” And then she laughed softly to herself. “Figures.”
He didn’t follow. “Figures?”
It was funny how things turned out, Natalya
thought. “Her first vacation since she was two and I wind up needing her fiancé—who’s not there.”
Well, that answered that question. “So you got me instead.”
In response she smiled at him. It wasn’t a seductive smile or even a sexy one, but if he’d ever seen a more sensual one he couldn’t remember it.
“I got you,” she echoed.
His gut tightened. The morgue’s thermostat must have went on the fritz again as he was enveloped in warmth.
“I don’t believe it,” Natalya insisted.
On her feet, she was looking up at the tall, thin man in a smudged lab coat. There was blood on it and she tried not to dwell on where that had come from.
She’d dozed off and had abruptly woken up to the sound of lowered voices. The M.E. had come out and was talking to Mike.