Who would want to kill her? Obviously her brother had enemies, but she’d been a hospice worker. Because of my mother’s illness, I’d dealt with them plenty. No one was calmer or friendlier; those people were saints. And there were far too few of them to throw away.
Last, but certainly far from least, what did a detective from New Orleans have to do with any of it?
All good questions, none of which I would find the answers to on the Internet, nor the reason I’d come to it in the first place.
Genevieve.
I’d need to discover her last name before I could do a more advanced search.
*
Bobby walked into the police station at 7:01. He was pretty proud of himself.
Chief Johnson wasn’t. He scowled at the clock, but at least he didn’t comment.
“Follow me.”
Bobby cast a longing glance at the coffeepot. He doubted what was in there would do much beyond eat his stomach lining, but there were days he thought such eating was what kept him awake and functional. Right now he was barely either one. However, he’d been raised in the South where manners reigned and one did not take anything that wasn’t offered. Even bad coffee.
He followed the chief down a corridor and through a door at the back of the station. It appeared he and Johnson were the only people in the place beyond the ancient dispatcher. Bobby couldn’t tell if the officer was male or female—short gray hair, glasses, dumpy—the nameplate read Jan Knutson. Not helpful.
The door opened into a long, white corridor exactly the same as the first. But this one spilled into a funeral home, with an equally androgynous secretary. At least the nameplate read Marion. Then the person spoke—in a baritone—and Bobby remembered that John Wayne’s real name had been the same.
“Morning.” Marion pointed to yet another door, nodded to Bobby, then went back to his computer.
The smells beyond door number two identified the place even before they’d descended the stairs into the basement embalming area where a man—this time Bobby was certain—was hard at work on the single body in the room.
“Dr. Christiansen,” Johnson said.
The fellow was tall and lean, he had to bend over fairly far to remove something pink from the corpse and set it on a scale. He was of an age with the police chief, but he still had all his fluffy blond hair.
“You must be the detective from New Orleans.” Christiansen peered at the weight with eyes as blue as everyone else’s in town but Raye’s, then turned back to the body.
“Bobby Doucet.”
Even though Bobby hadn’t asked, Johnson explained the way things worked. “Dr. Christiansen is our funeral director and medical examiner.”
“Thrifty.”
“We don’t have need for any more. There hasn’t been a murder here in decades.”
While that might be fabulous on the brochure, it did not give Bobby a good feeling about the state of the crime scene or the evidence.
“Forgive me, Doctor, but maybe the body should have been sent to…” Bobby paused, uncertain which city was the appropriate one.
He’d flown into Madison, the home of a well-respected university, a medical school, a teaching and research hospital—that had been on their brochure. Then again, maybe there was a closer place with adequate resources.
What did it matter? The doctor had already opened up the woman and started to dig around.
“If I’d felt I wasn’t competent, I would have said so.” Christiansen didn’t seem offended. Like most funeral directors Bobby had encountered—and he’d encountered a lot of them—the man possessed a personality so laid-back as to be nearly asleep. Considering what he had to deal with, that was probably for the best.
“In this case, it wasn’t difficult to determine a cause of death.” Christiansen lifted his gaze. “She’s missing an arm.”
“She died from that injury?”
“I’ve found nothing else that would have killed her.”
Bobby moved forward. “I’m most interested in the brand.”
“More than a missing arm?” Christiansen shrugged. “To each his own.”
“We’ve discovered several bodies in New Orleans with a similar mark. May I see?”
Christiansen gently drew the woman’s hair away from her neck. Branded into her flesh was the head of a snarling wolf.
“It’s the same,” Bobby said.
“Do you have any leads?” Chief Johnson asked.
“Haven’t had a body in nearly a year.”
“So, no,” Christiansen murmured.
“No.”
Johnson frowned. “How many bodies?”
“Five.”
“And not a single damn clue?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Didn’t mean they had a clue—literal or figurative—but he certainly hadn’t said so.
“Different methods of death,” he continued. “Young, old, male, female, white, not. The only thing they had in common was that brand.”
“What did you find out about it?” Johnson asked.
“Nothing.”
“It would seem,” the doctor began, “that such a mark would be easily traceable. Especially in this day and age.”