Inside, in a spacious living room, a small crowd had gathered. A woman in a two piece Chanel suit and shiny black pumps sat on the couch, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. A young man was holding her hand. Several well dressed couples who were probably her neighbors sat on the overstuffed leather sectional, murmuring words of support.
There was a deputy sitting in a chair with a laptop on his lap, tapping away as he wrote his report. They all glanced up when Ginger walked in.
“This is Ginger Colby, sheriff’s office liaison. She’s a certified post-death communications expert,” Portia announced loudly. “She’ll be able to communicate with the deceased about his final moments.”
The woman in the Chanel suit blanched.
“Well, I really don’t think that’s necessary…” she protested.
“After everything that she’s just been through!” one of the other women on the couch said indignantly.
“It’s routine.” Portia threw a glance at Ginger. Everyone was staring at Ginger with open hostility, and Ginger glanced back at Portia, to see that cold little smile playing across Portia’s lips again. The smile vanished as soon as Ginger’s eyes were on Portia, and her face went carefully neutral.
“Follow me, please,” Portia said, and lead Ginger down a hallway and into the couple’s master bedroom. It was a large room decorated in dark gray and black tones, with black lacquer furniture.
A corpse lay on the bed with a sheet pulled over him.
“The rigor mortis and livor mortis in the body shows us that he didn’t die in the position that we found him. He’d been dead for several hours, and then somebody moved him. But the wife is insisting she came home from her garden club meeting this morning and found him in exactly that position,” Portia said.
Ginger sighed, taking a deep breath.
She closed her eyes, letting the world disintegrate around her, and when she opened her eyes she could see a man with curly silver hair on the bed – and he wasn’t alone.
The silver haired man was mostly naked, on his hands and knees, facing the edge of the bed. He wore a leather harness held together with metal rings.
Standing by the bed was another man – a muscular young man who had pulled his pants down around his ankles. The silver haired man had the younger man’s cock in his mouth, and was enthusiastically fellating him – when suddenly, he collapsed, face down and buttocks in the air, still in the kneeling position.
The younger man jumped back in shock. Then, grimacing, he reached out tentatively and shook the older man by the shoulder, and shouted his name several times. When he couldn’t rouse him, he quickly pulled his clothes on and fled without a backward glance.
The silver haired man abruptly sat up and looked straight at Ginger. Sometimes the dead did that. Sometimes they just played out the scenes of their death, again and again.
“My wife can’t know,” he said. His eyes were huge and hollow.
Ginger shook her head, clearing her thoughts, and the room returned to normal. No ghosts, no final death scene.
Her hands were shaking. She turned and walked quickly out of the room, with Portia following at her footsteps.
“Well?” Portia said loudly, glancing around the room. Everyone stared at Ginger with a mixture of anger and fear.
It was likely they all knew about this man’s double life, or at least suspected. And Ginger would lay odds that the body on the sheet had been stripped of the leather harness and repositioned before the police were called.
Ginger took a deep breath. Portia knew exactly what had happened, and she’d set Ginger up to be the bad guy.
If it were necessary, Ginger would have announced the truth, but there was no need to humiliate this man’s family. The man hadn’t been murdered; he’d died in the middle of sex.
“Death by natural causes,” Ginger said coolly. “He appears to have collapsed and died from a heart attack.” She turned to the widow. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
There were audible sighs of relief from the widow and several of the people sitting with her.
“What?” Portia’s voice cracked angrily through the room. “Remember…you’re certified! You are sworn to tell the truth!”
“I am telling the truth,” Ginger said coldly. And she was. It appeared that the man had died of a heart attack. She didn’t need to mention what activity he was indulging in when he had that heart attack.
“If you lie during an investigation, you will lose your certification!”
“You think that the coroner’s office is going to find some other cause of death besides a heart attack? He wasn’t shot, stabbed, strangled, or poisoned…he collapsed,” Ginger said firmly. “I’m not a doctor, but I know what I saw. He collapsed. And never regained consciousness.”
Suddenly Portia looked around the room and realized that all eyes were now on her. All the people in the room who’d been glaring at Ginger were now glaring at her.
Her gaze dropped to the floor, and she shot Ginger a dirty look.
“We’ll just see about that,” she mumbled angrily.
“Portia Sinclair, what the heck is going on here?” Loch Armstrong’s voice rang through the air.
Chapter Nine