Dead Spaces

Chapter 1-2

As one, she and Ingrid moved to the second coffin and lifted its lid. And stared. Hannah tried to think of something to say. These were not the bodies she usually dug through. That meant the coffins just became Ingrid’s problem and she might get her day off back. She gave her sister a “take it away” gesture, trying not to giggle.

Ingrid grabbed a camera, her lips twitching. Only then did Hannah look at her brother.

“Well?” Patience was not really in Alex’s wheelhouse, though it should be. As the eldest, he’d had a choice. Be awesomely awesome at patience or totally suck at it. He’d opted for sucking. Didn’t seem to regret it either.

She didn’t rub her chin. One didn’t when one worked in a morgue. But she wanted to. Ingrid finished her photographs and moved to the second coffin. Even though it would have been entertaining to see their faces, she didn’t invite them across the line. Another lesson learned in family trenches: you’ll never get back given ground.

“You wanna start collecting the, um, evidence?” Ingrid looked up from her camera to ask. She gave a quick look at her watch.

Hannah opened her mouth to remind her that it was her day off and that she hadn’t wanted to get sucked into this, but ran into Ingrid’s hopeful look.

Hannah gave a nod that had a sigh in it and a lot of reluctance. She’d prepped for what she’d assumed would be an autopsy, so she was geared up enough to grab the nearest item. There was a faint ripping sound as rotted fabric gave way. The “corpse” had apparently been secured on purpose in its, um, interesting pose. She held it high so that the four men could see it. It stalled Alex’s next question. Four jaws went slack.

Ferris recovered first. “What is it?”

She turned it one way, then another, studying it for at least a minute. “It’s a doll. Possibly a Barbie doll.” She rubbed the mildew off the face with her thumb. “Malibu, I think.”

It was a bit embarrassing she knew this, but she did have five sisters. And seven brothers. Yes, that was also embarrassing. She flicked a glance at the slack jaws and hoped Ingrid would get a shot of that. Even their heads were angled the same direction. Felt a bit like they’d wandered into a Saturday Night Live sketch when one combined those looks with a naked doll that had been secured in a coffin in the mooning position.

As if he heard the thought—he’d developed a bit of parental psychic power growing up—Alex’s jaw snapped closed. “What’s in the other one?”

Hannah stepped to it and tugged at one of its “corpses.” More ripping sound before she held it up. “I’m gonna guess this is Ken. Three of them in this one.”

Were the dolls significant or merely a curiously weird joke? Hannah knew the story behind the coffins, knew what was supposed to have been buried in them. Phillip St. Cyr and Antonia Calvino, two star-crossed lovers, s***h, mob prince and princess, blown to bits by person or persons unknown nearly three decades ago. Only they hadn’t got blown up. They’d faked their own deaths and fled to Wyoming where they raised a daughter. That daughter, Nell Whitby, had come to live in New Orleans. That wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t looked like the ghost of her grandmother, Ellie Calvino. This resemblance had launched an unfortunate series of events, including a couple of murders and some attempts on her life. That Alex was dating Nell, the long-lost granddaughter of two crime families, added another level of complication to a situation weird even by New Orleans standards.

It made Hannah’s head hurt thinking about the wheels within wheels of the messy past—a past that seemed determined to take out her day off.

The girlfriend was the other reason for keeping Alex on the other side of that line. The sibs were divided on the wisdom of Alex dating someone related to two crime families. Divided on how bat crap crazy it was, that is. Hannah thought he’d be in Wit-Sec by the end of the year. Made it hard to warm up to Nell.

“Kens?” Alex looked and sounded incredulous. “Kens?”

Hannah studied Ken. “Could be Malibu, too, I suppose.” She glanced at the other two.

“This one might be Superstar Ken. Looks like he was dressed in a suit. Black. With some glitter.” Ingrid held up some rotting black threads, a bit of dull sparkle along what could have been a lapel.

Hannah released the last Ken from his bonds and studied him. “Nothing left of his clothes but a tie. I think he’s a ringer, a fake.”

Ingrid blinked a bit. “Really?” She moved closer and studied the alleged ringer. “It’s scary you know that.”

“You’re telling me,” Hannah muttered, her gaze moving between the dolls. Someone had a dark sense of humor. She liked that. But then she worked in a morgue. She frowned. Was the dirt heavier—she rubbed at ringer Ken’s temple. “This one’s been—” what did one call a doll wound? “It’s got a hole in the side of the head. His temple.”

Did dolls have temples?

“So does this one.” Ingrid exchanged a look with Hannah, then checked the last doll. “They all do. Except Barbie.”

“But—” Ferris stopped, most likely because he didn’t know what to say. Or didn’t want to say it with the wise cousins still in the room.

It wasn’t a crime to disfigure and bury four dolls, though the attempt to deceive might be. Hannah wasn’t clear on that. Didn’t have to be. No human remains, not her problem. Obviously it had been a crime to fake the deaths, but since they hadn’t killed anything but some dolls, she figured that the statute of limitations had to have passed a long time ago. As had the two people who were supposed to have been buried in these caskets. Had Nell’s parents arranged this before disappearing into new lives? She could make the case both for and against a couple of teenagers thinking it up, but not even a tiny one for them having the resources for this kind of hoax. Someone back then had helped them, but who? And why? She’d have thought there’d been enough to do just to keep from really dying.

Hannah looked at Claude, then Guido, mostly so she wouldn’t look at Ferris looking at Ingrid. Claude’s pale gaze had widened a little. Guido looked amused, possibly a bit relieved. The coffins predated him by a lot, so what did he have to be relieved about? Or was he proxy relieved for his big bad great uncle, Bettino Calvino? He knew what wasn’t in there, but what had he been afraid would be in the caskets? Or was that who?

“Dolls?” Alex rubbed his face.

You’d think a guy with six sisters could wrap his brain around the concept of a doll.

“Dolls.” Ferris echoed the word, only without the question mark. With some reluctance, Hannah glanced at him. Of course, he’d opted not to shave. That was usual. According to Alex, his unmade bed look attracted girls like flypaper. The chin was probably rough when—okay, not a place to go when it was already too warm and she was draped in protective gear. She and Ferris? Never going to happen. His type of gal didn’t dig through brains and body parts. Besides, she usually made her bed. Not because she was a neat freak. She needed it to function as a couch during the day.

It was a pity there wasn’t a real dead body to distract her from Ferris. She didn’t want to notice that he had good hair and teeth—dark everything including the beard shadow. Ferris’ hair kind of reminded her of Malibu Ken’s, which made her lips twitch. She knew his sleepy gaze hid a decent brain that he didn’t always use for good. She studied the line of his jaw, easy to do with the five o’clock shadow. He’d make a pretty corpse but was much sexier breathing. A guy most likely to be shoved out a window by an irate lover, she decided. The thin, firm line of his mouth parted, then closed. The look in his dangerous green eyes told her he’d had something to say but had opted—again—not to say it.

Didn’t seem like anyone wanted to talk, so Hannah filled the silence in a way that would hopefully clear the room. “Ingrid will process the dolls and the caskets and she’ll make a list of the, er, contents.” She gave Ingrid a “jump in here anytime” look. “She’ll let you know when…if what happens next.”

Her best guess was the dolls would be added to the file. If someone found it. Then the DA would stamp it closed and move on to the hundreds of other cases sitting on his desk. No one ever said the Big Easy was easy.

“Will I receive a copy of the list?” Guido asked.

The guy did have a nice voice. And smile. It was a pity he was a piece of evil crap.

“That’s for the lawyers and the DA to sort out,” Hannah said. Another thing a gal learned growing up with twelve siblings, never promise anything. Ever.

“You can be assured my lawyer will be in touch,” Claude said, his voice as thin and cold as his frame.

Hannah blinked. Hadn’t really expected him to care. Maybe he cared because Guido did? Still, he’d only recently ascended to head of the St. Cyr empire. And he’d had to wait a long time for someone to take out Phineas St. Cyr. Hannah had done the autopsy. It had been yawningly uninteresting, considering he’d been one of the infamous three wise geezers, the third being Aleksi Afoniki. A single shot to the temple was a boring way to die—Hannah blinked, her gloved thumb rubbing the wound in Ken’s noggin. Three wise guys. Three Kens. But only one dead wise guy, she reminded herself. She gave a mental shake and looked at her unwelcome guests.

She gave a pointed look at her watch. “Since we’re done here…” She threw in her “I can autopsy you” look. That got them moving toward the door. Alex and Ferris pretended to follow, then shut the door when they were on the other side.

“You’ll search thoroughly?” Alex asked.

Ingrid looked at Hannah and rolled her eyes.

“No,” Ingrid said. “I’d planned to do a crappy job. Jeez, Alex. Check the big brother crap at the door.”

“Preferably the other side of the door,” Hannah added.

Ferris laughed, his gaze admiring as it rested on Ingrid. Why didn’t Ingrid get the little sister treatment? And how sad was it to feel—well, it wasn’t jealousy because she wasn’t, but something enough like it to be annoying. To distract herself, Hannah set down the Ken, popped the Barbie’s head off and looked inside. Empty as Hannah’s love life. Not even a brain to dig through.

“This is a message,” Alex insisted. “Just—”

“Go away, Alex,” Hannah said. She didn’t look at Ferris, but she knew he looked at her, and she wondered how she knew that and what he saw, then was glad she didn’t know when she noticed out of the corner of her eye that he’d grinned. It was a nice grin. A pity they couldn’t be friends. That was probably a guy rule, right after: don’t date a dude’s sister.

“Come on, Alex.” Ferris grabbed his arm. After a moment of resistance, Alex followed him out. Though he paused and looked back.

“Be careful.”

Hannah held the Barbie up, bare tush out. “Kiss my—”

The door swung closed. Hannah laughed, then turned around. Met Ingrid’s gaze. She looked at the headless doll in her hand, then the doll Ingrid held. Three Kens and one stark naked Barbie. Her thoughts drifted back to the three wise guys. Hadn’t Alex said something about the three wise geezers, well, they weren’t geezers then, but the three of them competing for Ellie Calvino back in the day before she married Bettino Calvino? And that possible coercion had been applied to get her to marry him? Hannah shivered at the thought of being forced to marry one of those creepy boys. Maybe there was an upside to digging through brains. Even the bad guys steered a wide path around her.

“A message?” Ingrid cast her doll a dubious look.

“Could be a lot of things.” Hannah sighed, then wished she hadn’t when beads of sweat popped out along her upper lip. She tugged off one layer of protective gear.

“If it was a message, I wonder who it was meant for?”

Before Hannah could respond, Ingrid’s phone went off. She pulled it out and looked at it.

“Gotta suspicious death in City Park. Outside in August. Jeez fricking Louise. They could at least do their killing inside where it’s cool. Would you mind bagging and tagging the dolls for me? I’ll get someone to collect all this crap later.” She followed the question up with another one of the sister looks.