“I have to go.” I ended the call and ignored the phone when it rang a heartbeat later. I was saved from myself when Rixton exited the hospital room. “Get anything useful out of him after I left?”
“All he wanted to talk about was you.” His worried stare pinned me to the spot. “He must be one of the fanatics. Seeing you excited him too much for him to be of any use.” His expression shifted into a glare. “Don’t apologize. I see the words forming on your lips. We had no idea this guy was a fruitcake.” He paused. “Okay, so we had a pretty good idea he was candied cherry crazy going in, he did light up a restaurant then pull up a chair, but there was no way to know you’d be his trigger. We’re done here. You ready to go?”
No, I wasn’t. I didn’t have much choice, though. “Yeah.”
Ungluing my heels from the linoleum took me so long Rixton glanced back over his shoulder. I wanted to hang around and wait on Miller so we could take another crack at Ivashov, but I couldn’t think of a single excuse that would fly. Ivashov had tweaked Rixton’s nose by making his interrogation all about me, and Rixton would no more let me in that room alone than he would toss Nettie into a tank full of piranhas.
The two halves of me kept brushing up against each other these days, and the friction was brutal.
Leading a duplicitous life wasn’t anything new. I had always concealed aspects of my nature in order to fake being normal. There had always been the mask I showed the world, and the face I kept hidden.
These days I was elevating navel gazing to all new heights, and the mask I had worn so faithfully had started slipping. I was peering around its comforting edges at others like me, learning more about my new normal, discovering ways to sink deeper into my own skin. The idea of losing an ounce of my humanity terrified me almost as much as embracing the charun side of my heritage, but in order to remain who I was, I first had to understand who I had been.
Reaching that new plateau of enlightenment came at a price, and for me, that cost meant leaving behind parts of my old life to embrace a new one. For the first time since Kapoor neatly boxed me into joining his cause, I looked to the future with a smidgen of anticipation.
There would be fewer lies to remember once I worked with other charun, and I wouldn’t have to break my brain in pursuit of two possible outcomes – the human-friendly one and the truth. Then again, that duality of thinking might always be part of my reality. There would always be two answers going forward, the seen and the unseen, and I would forever be seeking what lurked within the latter. It was part of my nature.
We must have passed Miller in the lobby, but I didn’t spot him. Ignoring the stab of disappointment at being sidelined, I got in the car with Rixton and left Miller to handle coterie business. He would update me later, and that would have to be enough. With the case against Timmons still making headlines, and Jane Doe a question mark in the public’s collective consciousness, I couldn’t afford the extra scrutiny right now.
Rixton got a call before we made it out of the parking lot. I didn’t pay much attention to his conversation until I saw he had turned left, heading into town, instead of right, putting us on the road home. I waited for him to finish before raising my eyebrows. “What’s up?”
“That was Summers. There’s a small problem with your request for the autopsy reports.”
“What kind of problem?” I checked my phone to see if she’d emailed me, but I came up empty. She had reached over my head to Rixton, which annoyed me beyond reason. Men passing info along to male colleagues was nothing new, but it sucked to see a woman reinforcing those negative behaviors. Summers and I hadn’t crossed paths enough to qualify as friends, but we were friendly, or so I’d thought. “Can she not share them?”
“The bodies are missing.”
Jill Summers met us at a Waffle Iron off East County Line Road in nearby Ridgeland, the halfway point between her house and her office. She had secured a corner booth, and we piled on the bench opposite her. The waitress filled our mugs with coffee, her expression tightening when none of us ordered more, and she left us alone to pursue more lucrative tables.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Boudreau.” She reached for a packet of artificial sweetener and managed to rip the thing in half with twitchy fingers. Fake sugar rained down on the table, and she gave up with a disgusted sigh. “I heard you were on vacation.”
The annoyance beating under my skin quieted. “Who told you that?”
“I’m crap with names.” She sipped her coffee black like the jolt might kick-start her brain and flagged the waitress down for a refill. Maybe too much caffeine explained the shakes. “Tall guy, early to mid-thirties. Asian. Black hair, brown eyes. A real looker. Dressed well. Slight accent.”
Crap on a mother-effing stick. “Adam Wu?”
“Yeah.” She snapped her fingers. “That sounds right.”
Rixton swung his head toward me, his stare burning a hole through my right temple, but his question was for Summers. “What did he want?”
“The same thing as you,” she said. “The coroner’s reports on the Orvis family.”
“Did he happen to mention why he wanted them?” Rixton rubbed his thumb in the bowl of his spoon. “Who he works for?”
“He works for All South Insurance.” She shrugged. “The father, Timothy Orvis, is the beneficiary listed on all the policies. The couple was recently divorced, but they both lived in Madison. Greedy bastard must have cracked the whip on All South.”
Rixton leaned forward. “What did you tell him?”
“The same thing I’m telling you. I collected my evidence, MPD collected theirs, and then the bodies were loaded into a transport and taken to the coroner’s office for examination.” She swept errant granules off the table onto the floor. “They never arrived. I spoke with the coroner myself, and my call was the first she had heard about the Orvises. She checked with her staff, but no one had been told to expect burn victims. They scanned their logs. No one had checked out any of their transports, but the odometer on one vehicle read higher than its last checkin. There were enough miles to account for a trip out to the nursery and back with about fifteen miles for padding.”
Rixton’s spoon clattered from his hand. “Tell me there’s surveillance footage in the garage where the transports are kept.”
“I could, but I’d be lying.” A wry grin curved her lips. “I can remember when the system went digital, if that tells you anything. We’re lucky we’ve got that much work already done for us. Otherwise, we’d be thumbing through the old log books to find out who was on call.”
“We’re going to have to pay Mr. Orvis a visit,” I told Rixton.
“No, we’re not.” Rixton shook his head. “There’s no concrete evidence connecting our cases. We can’t impede MPD’s investigation. The Orvis fire occurred within the Madison city limits. That makes Mr. Orvis their suspect, not ours. There’s too much riding on us resolving these cases for us to stomp on another department’s toes, particularly one who’s a close neighbor.”
Mentally, I was already composing Wu a scathing text message when I zeroed in on Summers. “How did my name come up in conversation?”
“I was dictating an email to you on my phone when he let himself into my office. He heard your name, mentioned he knew you, and led with that.” She twirled her mug between her hands. “He wondered when I saw you last, I pretended not to remember, and I asked him the same to see if he was legit. That’s when he pulled one hell of a scowl and told me you were sightseeing up in New York.”
Rixton nudged me in the ribs with his elbow. “Are you going on vacation and forgot to tell me?”
Wincing at how close the accusation mirrored the truth, I grimaced. “I’m not going on vacation anytime soon.”
Rixton accepted that as fact and looked to Summers. “Wu must have embellished how well he knew Luce to get you to loosen up. Get it? Luce-en?”