“They’re not with you this trip?”
She knew I normally never went anywhere without my two shepherds. Keeping up the legend, I told her this wasn’t an operational outing, so I’d left them home this time.
“Now I feel much safer,” she said. “No shepherds, no bad guys.” More body language, with lots of independent movement. I realized I’d finished my wine. I don’t even much like wine.
“You need to refresh that?” She indicated my empty wineglass. Then she cocked her head. “Or is there somewhere more private? Where we could… talk?”
I caught my breath. She was doing what nice girls are never supposed to do: looking straight into my eyes and communicating on the limbic channel. I couldn’t really find my voice, so I just nodded, slowly, and pushed back my chair. She drained her glass, stood up, and smoothed out her skirt, looking away at nothing while she did it but once again creating a cone of bumbled male conversations in the immediate vicinity. The girl was on fire, and every hetero man within range was hoping I’d just fall over and die so he might come to her rescue. What little female talent there was in the lounge was shooting daggers.
I was so entranced I forgot to pay my tab, but, hell, they knew where I was staying.
I’d come down to Wilmington on short notice, so the only thing available had been one of the expensive top-floor suites. We sat out on the river balcony and enjoyed some more wine. It was actually a bit cold to be sitting out there, but neither of us had seemed to notice. What I had noticed was that Mary Ellen Goode was a genuine damsel in distress. Physical distress. Horns so long she was having to go through doors sideways. I was in pretty good shape for a man of my advancing years, with daily workouts at the Triboro police gym, ten-mile runs every other evening with the shepherds, and a diet that emphasized red meat for protein and Scotch for carbs.
She, on the other hand, led a semi-sedentary life as an assistant professor of environmental science, whose only concession to physical exercise was a three-mile walk down city sidewalks to and from her apartment. And still she wore my delighted ass right out, coming at our lovemaking with an urgency and desperate need that damned near flattened me in the worst possible context of that expression. We’d approached intimacy in our previous connections, but we’d never actually gone to bed. I should have tried a whole lot harder and a whole lot sooner. I did have the sense not to talk.
Afterward I ordered up a room service dinner for two and we went back out onto the balcony. We were wearing those terrycloth bathrobes the Hilton puts in their suites, but she had neglected to close things up. I’d been relieved when our room service waiter turned out to be a sweet young thing who was either oblivious to the layer of lust-scented ozone in the suite or else a really good actor. He hadn’t even looked twice at Mary Ellen in that loose robe. Maybe it was because he was concerned about my respiration rate.
I’d switched to Scotch and was trying not to think about anything while Mary Ellen excused herself and went into the bathroom. Then she was back.
“Ready?” she asked brightly, interrupting my mental drift.
I cowered behind my napkin and tried not to squeak. “Ready?”
“I am so glad you called,” she said, that bright stare back in play. “But it’s been a long dry spell, and, well, you know. Night’s young, yes?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. Not exactly a squeak, but not entirely authoritative, either. Bad guys would not have been impressed.
She gave me a mock look of impatience. “This is a Hilton-the bathtub in there is a hot tub.”
I hadn’t noticed. I’d been distracted. Now she was slipping out of that useless robe, and I was even more distracted. The cold air did amazing things to her superstructure. I waited for sounds of ships colliding out there on the Cape Fear River.
“Tub will take five more minutes,” she announced. “Why don’t you get us some champagne.”
With that she pranced across the balcony and into the living room, heading in the direction of the bathroom. I sat back in my chair and wondered if I could get oxygen with that.
The new and much improved Mary Ellen decamped the next morning at eight, still smiling. I thought about getting up and going for a walk around the tourist district. Getting up I could manage. Walking was out of the question. I went back to sleep instead. A phone call from Bernie Price woke me up around ten.
“We have developments,” he said.
“Developments are good,” I said, wiggling my toes to make sure they’d still work.
“Not always,” he said mysteriously. “I’ll be down to get you in twenty minutes.”
“Make it thirty,” I said.
“What-you hungover?”
“No, just a long night.”
“Lucky you.” He laughed.
“You have no idea,” I said.
This time he drove us to the New Hanover County medical examiner’s offices. The ME himself was not available, and since he hadn’t been willing to tell Price what the developments were over the telephone, we remained in the mushroom mode while they rustled up a substitute.
Price had given me a long once-over when I got into his unmarked Crown Vic. “Mmm-hnnh” was all he said.
“Jealousy doesn’t become you,” I replied.
“Good thing we’re not walking to the lab,” he said.
“I can walk just fine,” I said.
“You squeak pretty good, too.”
We finally met with one of the assistant medical examiners, a visibly agitated, middle-aged black woman wearing a doctor’s white coat and radiating a disapproving attitude. She swept us into a tiny conference room and asked Price to close the door.
“Who’s this?” she asked him, pointing at me with her chin.
“Closest thing to next of kin and also the DOA’s employer,” Price said. “He’s a retired police lieutenant. What’s the big deal here?”
The doctor thought about it for a moment, looked me over belligerently, but then apparently consented to my remaining in the room.
“The big deal,” she said, “is that your College Road DOA turned out to be highly radioactive.”
I saw Price frown, as if he were confused. “Radioactive” is a term cops sometimes use to describe another cop who has sufficiently pissed off the brass that all the other cops begin keeping their distance. Then I realized she meant literally radioactive.
It turned out that they’d sent Allie’s remains to the state autopsy facilities in Jacksonville, where the requisite cutting and gutting had been duly conducted. When the remains were rolled by the nuclear medicine office on their way to cold storage, three separate radiation monitors had gone off simultaneously. The people in the nuclear meds office had started tearing the place up looking for the problem when the monitors suddenly went silent again-which implied that the highly radioactive something had gone by and was no longer in range.
They caught up with the morgue attendant in the hallway and had him roll his draped gurney back down the corridor. All the alarms went off again. When they explained what that meant to the attendant, the attendant went off. He’d abandoned said gurney and beat feet down the hall, at which point the entire facility had gone to general quarters. The feds had been summoned, and there were lots of questions flying around and apparently lots more inbound.
“You said they did the autopsy,” Price said calmly. Being the good bureaucrat that he was, Jacksonville being in a state of pandemonium wasn’t necessarily his problem. “Do they have an opinion?”
“An opinion?” she repeated, almost shouting. “Yeah, they have an opinion, Detective. Severe radiation poisoning. She apparently drank something that was highly radioactive.”
“Literally radioactive?” I asked.
“There’s a damn echo in here,” she snorted. “Whatever it was, it was hot enough to burn the bejesus out of her innards. Mouth, esophagus, trachea, heart, lungs, stomach-the works. First-class case of radiation poisoning. The lab people up there are beside themselves, and, of course, the whole damn world wants to know where it came from.”