“Yes, he will. Brent has some information for him.”
“Information?”
“Yes, he’s not just a ghost hunter, you know,” Adam said, and she couldn’t tell if his voice was teasing or not. “He’s a great investigator, and I think he can help Joe on this. Anyway, don’t worry about it. I’ll call Joe and set up lunch.”
Great, she thought. Joe was going to be just thrilled. But all she said was, “Let me know.”
She hung up and walked back into her living room, where Lori Star’s face was still front and center on the television. She turned away, then heard someone say, Help me.
She swung back to the television. For a moment Lori seemed to be staring straight at her, but then she realized that the video was from the night Lori had been on television claiming to have “seen” the accident. And that there was nothing unusual about it.
Even so, she had the strangest urge to escape her own apartment. All she wanted was to run.
But she couldn’t run away from herself, and she knew it. She remembered the strange sensation of being the other woman in the dream, remembered how she had seen the shadows come alive in the parking garage. And now she thought that a dead woman on television was looking at her, asking for help.
She thought about how strangely Joe was behaving. Perhaps he was running, as well.
Maybe they were both going crazy.
She turned off the television off, and as she did, she heard her cell phone ringing. It was Adam.
“I made a reservation for one o’clock. I’ve got a car, so I’ll be in front of your place at a quarter of.”
“Joe is fine with this?”
“He’ll be there,” Adam told her.
She hung up, reflecting on the vast difference between “He’ll be there” and “Yes, he’s fine with it.”
Doctor Frank Arbitter was a homebody. It was just that his home seemed to be the morgue, Joe thought. The man could eat, drink, chat and read the comics, all with a corpse awaiting his attention, and apparently be no more worried about it than he was about the phone on his desk.
An elderly white woman lay beneath a sheet that morning, only her head visible, so Joe wasn’t sure what stage her autopsy was at. As Frank welcomed him and indicated a chair by his desk, Joe paused. The other man watched but didn’t comment when Joe gently pulled the sheet up to cover the woman’s face.
“She was murdered?” Joe asked.
“No, she was just alone. It was a heart attack, I’m fairly certain, but since no one was there, we have to do the autopsy. Hey, do you want a cat?”
“What?”
“She came in with her cat. They didn’t know it was hiding in the blanket she had around her when she died.”
“Frank, I’m the last person in the world who should own a pet. I’m never home.”
Frank lifted his shoulders and let them fall, shaking his head. “It’s a beautiful cat. Rag doll or something. Furry.”
“Maybe she died trying to brush it,” Joe suggested.
“And I always thought you were a nice guy.”
“I’ll ask around. Raif Green has kids. Maybe they’ll want it.”
“You should reconsider, Joe. You have a place, not a home. A pet would make it a home. Let me take that back. A wife would make it a home. Hell, even just a live-in lover.”
“Frank, give me a break. Can we move on?”
“Sure. Sit.”
Joe took the offered chair. “Have you talked to the guy over in Jersey?”
“By ‘the guy over in Jersey,’ I’m going to assume you mean the medical examiner in charge of Miss Star, Dr. Benjamin Sears?”
“Yes, that guy,” Joe agreed.
“He sent me a copy of his initial report,” Frank said. “But why are you asking? You were at the autopsy. I wasn’t.”
“Sears said the bulk of the injuries were postmortem, including those to the genital region. What does that mean to you?”
Frank frowned, looking at him. “Hey, I’m basically a mechanic. I look at the pieces. I’m not a psychologist.”
“All right, I guess I want collaboration. Do you think the killer could have been imitating a crime, rather than committing one out of personal passion?”
Frank looked steadily at Joe. “I watch the news. You want to know if he was mimicking a real crime, or maybe the literary version of it. Mary Rogers. Marie Roget. Did you know that a number of researchers have bemoaned the fact that there were two autopsies done on Mary Rogers, the original in New Jersey and one later, in New York? No one ever definitively answered the question of whether she died as the result of a botched abortion, or if she was assaulted and killed by a gang. Back then, the Five Points area was overrun by gangs. Most people wanted to think it was gang members, wanted to use that as ammunition to get the police to clean up the streets.”
Joe stared at him, surprised.