“Are you at least going to help me carry her body home?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, glancing back toward the rip, which was turning orange now and seemed to be moving more slowly. “But let’s hurry. This thing is about to die.”
We carried Holly back home together, and as I felt her cooling skin against my palms, I swore I would have my pound of flesh. I supposed that was the way all wars escalated, but I didn’t care. She looked very young and as if she were just sleeping. Which made it worse.
McKesson insisted on dressing her in a robe before we called the cops. “It already looks enough like a sex crime,” he explained.
This just seemed to add insult to injury and made me madder. “So the hell what?”
“You are a boyfriend. Even with me helping out, you might spend a few days being sweated by the guys downtown. I don’t run the whole department. Which way do you want it?”
I shook my head and went to the closet to search. Everything Holly owned in the way of bed wear was sexy. There were silk pieces and satin pieces—I took a short robe of lavender satin because at least it wasn’t see-through. Even though the point was not just to help me, but to give her some dignity, it all felt wrong. Here I was, helping a detective alter evidence at the scene of a crime. I wondered how many things like this happened every day. I hoped the count was low. I brought him the satin robe and held it out to him.
“You put it on her,” he said. “I’m not touching anything in this place. They’ll have to dust her for prints. You have an excuse as the boyfriend.”
I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation, with Holly dead less than an hour.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “There are no bullet holes in the robe.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Yeah, it does. How can you not know that? Any coroner will know the body was moved.”
McKesson stepped close to me and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You have to trust me,” he said. “That’s not how it’s going to happen. All I need is good photos of her with some clothes on.”
I stared at him, hating what he was implying—that more people were in on this. I realized that he had to be right. It couldn’t be just McKesson cleaning things up by himself. He had to have help within the department to get away with these cover-ups. Still, I didn’t think he was behind any of these events; he was caught up in them as much as I was.
“What do they pay you to do all this?” I asked him.
“Not enough.”
In the end, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t push Holly’s dead arms into the robe. Instead, I pulled a sheet from the bed and draped it over her.
“This is going to make it harder to clear you,” McKesson complained.
“You’ll manage,” I said, heading for the door.
“Hold on a second. I need a statement.”
“Make it up.”
“C’mon, Draith, give me something.”
“OK, you want a statement? Here’s a statement. Holly wasn’t a hooker. She was a friend of mine. And now she’s dead, and I don’t know why.”
I walked out the door and slammed it behind me.
Maybe it wasn’t right to take Holly’s car to visit Jenna, but I needed to see a familiar face, someone who I thought understood me, at least a little. I also just couldn’t bring myself to hail another cab. I wanted to be alone for a while, trying hard not to think of Holly. As I drove, something McKesson had said came back to me. He’d said these objects never brought you happiness. They attracted trouble and each other. And people who carried more than one of them generally ended up dead—really fast. I had to admit, of all the bullshit I’d heard out of him, that part was certainly true.
I found Jenna’s room at the hotel and let myself in. It was more than rude of me, I knew, but I was starting to get lost again, seeing in memory Holly’s dead body in the desert. I knew there was no escaping the impact of that, but perhaps talking to Jenna would distract me for a while.
Maybe it was selfish of me to come see Jenna. It had occurred to me that I should stay away from her, that I was possibly endangering her life by coming back to her. But I also knew that friends died when I wasn’t there to protect them too.
I stood in the half-light coming in from the bathroom, watching her sleep. She was pretty—in a different way than Holly had been. She was sexy too, but had a certain innocence about her. I thought about waking her up, or taking a shower, or simply lying down beside her and falling asleep. In the end, the minibar captured my attention. I opened it and built myself a water glass full of clear and tan liquids.
Jenna came awake with a gasp.
“Who’s there?” she said.
“It’s just me, Jenna,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Dammit, Draith, you shouldn’t do that! I know you have the power, but you can’t just wander into a woman’s room at midnight.”