“Oh. Oops.”
“Yes, dear. Oops.”
Faraday pushed her tea away. “I didn’t mean to kill anyone. I was thinking we could break her pinkie, to keep her quiet. It worked with Oscar.”
“Itdidn’twork with—” I began, but both of them glanced at the ceiling. I lowered my voice. “You have to let us handle things like this.”
“I screamed for Bazzy, and he didn’t come.” A tear rolled down Faraday’s cheek. “Andyouhaven’t been here all semester. You never even saw the koi pond before the smoke killed them all.”
I sat at the kitchen table beside her, head in hands. My buzz from the cocktails was sliding into an early hangover. The exhilaration of running in the rain had faded into sore muscles and wet feet. Sebastian’s sodden coat was heavy on my shoulders.
“Can I borrow a shirt?” I asked.
“We aren’t really the same size, dear.”
“Don’t worry, dear.” I managed a smile. “We’ll make it work.”
62
Rigor mortis had begun by the time we opened the pantry door.
After two and half hours, the stiffness was still proximal—eyelids, neck, lower jaw, chest—but more than I’d expected.
I turned off the space heater. The air in the pantry felt like a desert and smelled like piss.
“Why did you keep the body warm?”
Sebastian pulled on plastic gloves. “To throw things off. Make it look like she died later, after dark.”
I gently tried to rotate the neck—it was stuck fast.
“Right, but the heat’s sped up rigor. The body temp won’t match. They’ll know it was kept someplace warm, then dumped.”
He sighed. “It’s been ages since Uncle Orrin’s thanatology lessons.”
“We never had a body this fresh,” I said.
As kids, we worked with corpses in the Barrow Marsh. But those had been transported to the estate after assignments, for purposes of education and disposal, arriving many hours later.
We were trained to perform our own forensics—recording pallor, rectal temperature, blood pooling, all the indicators of time and position of death.
How would you know this body has been moved?
What could’ve prevented you from knowing?
“It’s cold and raining,” I said. “By morning it won’t matter.”
Sebastian took another photo. “As long as we get the position right.”
“Ugh,” said Faraday. “Is that smell going away? Or will my snickerdoodles taste like piss from now on?”
“It’s just ammonia,” Sebastian said. “The Romans used to clean with it.”
“Oh, great: Romans. The people who puked at dinner breaks.”
“Misnomer,” Sebastian said. “A vomitorium was more like a fire exit. We don’t have a plastic tarp, do we?”
Getting the bodyinto Dutton’s car was slow, careful work. We waited till dark and pulled onto the back lawn, right up to the kitchen door.
