Dead Spaces: The Big Uneasy 2.0 Read online

  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.

  Which just went to show how good deeds got punished. Sometimes really fast.

  She sighed, which Ingrid took for a yes.

  “You’re the best.”
/>
  Ingrid stripped off her gloves and tossed them in the trash. She eased the door open, grinned back. “I’ll email you the photos as a thank you. I got the best shot of them all with their jaws slack. It’s epic.”

  Hannah had to grin then, though it still had some wry in it. At least there didn’t seem to be much in the coffins. How sad was it that she was sorry there wasn’t a moldy old body for her to puzzle over? Yeah, that would be why she spent most of her Friday nights at home watching CSI shows on NetFlix.

  It felt a bit weird to be alone with the coffins and the dolls. Were there any horror movies with killer dolls? There was a good reason she didn’t watch horror movies, she decided, glancing around the suddenly too quiet room. She rubbed at the hole in the side of the doll head. Was this a message? Or a teenaged joke? They’d all been secured in place. The three Kens lined up like corpses. And Barbie? That she’d been secured in the mooning position did seem like a message. Had they thought the coffins would be opened sooner? Or had it been meant as a private joke?

  She lined the dolls up on the table usually reserved for human bodies, and began her search of the coffins’ interiors. Bagged a few dead bugs and some of the dust. Never knew. Maybe someone would shake loose some money so they could parse the dirt, investigate this like they did on TV. Yeah, and Elvis was gonna walk through the door any minute now.

  The Ken coffin netted lots of dirt and a Ken loafer that she almost missed. Why was it always one shoe that went missing? The surface under the lining was hard, even where a body usually lay. Maybe they didn’t pad coffins. It’s not like a corpse needed soft. She lifted the rotting fabric as much as she could without ripping it more. Looked like some kind of stone under there, possibly to weight the coffins so they’d feel properly heavy. Ingrid was gonna have a cow when she saw them if she had to catalog them all.

  She shifted attention to the Barbie coffin. Bricks under the lining, too, or so it seemed. She felt along the sides until her hand bumped something hard. She shifted the debris carefully aside. A ring had been tucked—or fallen?—between the side and the bottom. She grabbed her cell phone and took a couple of shots, then extracted it. She rubbed enough grime off to see that it looked to be a fairly cheap version of a high school class ring. She held it up to the light, felt a rising unease as the school initials became visible. It was her dad’s high school insignia, one of the smaller, private high schools in the area. She put it under a magnifying glass, and saw, barely legible through the dirt, some words engraved on the inside. It was just a coincidence. Had to be. Was it possible to pull prints off it after all this time? She bumped up the magnification and gently blew off as much debris as she could.

  Charles Evans Baker.

  She leaned against the table to support knees that all the sudden felt weak. How had her Uncle Charlie’s high school ring ended up in a coffin buried almost twenty years after he’d disappeared?

  * * *

  “Do you think it’s some kind of message?” Alex said broodingly.

  Ferris stopped next to Alex, just outside on the loading ramp, in the shadow of the big freezer trucks where the bodies were stored. The air was hot and thick, but despite being an alley, it smelled better than inside the NOCC. He glanced at his partner and resisted the urge to shake his head. Love was kicking Alex’s rear. He was so far up the river denial, he needed an airlift rescue. And if he wanted to get punched out, he’d tell Alex that. Since he was constitutionally opposed to getting punched, Ferris considered Alex’s question instead.

  “Yeah, sure.” Seemed to Ferris it was a pretty succinct message: kiss this, jerks. With maybe a touch of: your turn is coming. That made him frown a bit. Been a long time coming. Those coffins had been interred a long time ago. Pretty private message. Or inside joke. Really inside joke.

  “Three wise guys. One girl. What if Ellie Calvino helped her daughter and the St. Cyr kid get away and that’s why…”

  Ferris had heard bits of the story. Though Ellie Calvino had been listed as missing for thirty-some years, the conventional wisdom was that her loving husband had her put down quietly. Bettino did have some experience in making inconvenient people go missing permanent-like. As did Aleksi Afoniki and the late, unlamented Phineas St. Cyr. Way the story went, the three had competed for her hand, Bettino had won, then had buyer’s remorse. What Ferris found interesting is that one of the two losers hadn’t killed Ellie quicker for the crime of not picking them. Neither of them were what you’d call good losers. The three wise geezers had been a huge, stinking pile of brown stuff before they became geezers. A pile that didn’t seem that much smaller since St. Cyr got his well-deserved bullet to the brain last month.

  If Ellie Calvino had survived, she’d be on his suspect list, but it was St. Cyr’s widow who was out on bail for the hit on her husband. Sounded like they had a solid case, too, even if the hired shooter’s brain had short circuited a bit after his arrest.

  As he recalled, the sorta geeky Hannah had been the one to dig the bullet out of St. Cyr’s skull. Why did he find that kind of sexy? He’d had a thing for smart girls since high school. He liked it when she turned her analytical gaze on him. Just wish it stayed longer. Holy Hannah. Pity a partner’s sisters were off limits. Especially when his partner had so many of them. All blonde and all easy on the eyes. It was Hannah who tested his self control, though. So far he’d managed to keep it. He didn’t want to get punched. Alex had been wanting to punch someone since people started shooting at his girlfriend. Pity Calvino or St. Cyr hadn’t given him an opening. Dude needed to feel better, even if it wouldn’t last.

  While Nell did nothing for Ferris, he could see why she had Alex’s wheels spinning. They both had that look couples got when love whacked them upside the head. He wasn’t one to wish marriage on a bubba but dude, it was coming, with or without the wishing. He’d wish Alex luck if Nell weren’t related to two mob families. Okay, he did wish him luck. The guy was gonna need it.

  Why, he wondered, did Alex care if Ellie Calvino helped them or not, other than her being Nell’s grandmother. Man, the guy was up to his eye balls in crap. He needed to step back and take a breath. Use his brain. Ferris would have told him that—which brought him back full circle to not wanting to get punched. He looked speculatively at Alex. On the other hand, maybe he was distracted enough to not notice Ferris chatting up his little sister. If the other sister hadn’t been in there, he might have made an excuse to stroll back in—

  Alex’s cell shrilled. He answered with a curt, “Baker.” Then his eyes widened. He lowered his arm, a frown forming on his face.

  “What?” Ferris knew that look. Someone had died, but a someone whose death made the world a better place.

  Alex rubbed his face. “Someone popped Bettino Calvino.” He made a gun with his hand and pointed at his temple, then added, “In City Park.”

  So why the frown— Ferris stopped. “Don’t tell me we’re Guido’s alibi?”

  Alex’s frown deepened to a scowl. “One of these days, he’s going to give me an excuse to hit him.”

  “Be better to arrest him,” Ferris pointed out mildly. Ingrid Baker was on duty, so that meant she’d have to go to the scene, leaving Holy Hannah all alone…

  “I need to talk to Nell, hopefully before this hits the news.”

  Ferris looked at his watch. “Lunch hour?” He cast a speculative glance back at the NOCC. “Why don’t you pick me up back here?” Alex arched his brows. “Body’s gonna end up here. Maybe I’ll hear something.”

  Alex nodded an okay. “Want me to bring you something?”

  “I’ll figure something out,” Ferris said easily, pulling the door open as Alex headed for their wheels. He didn’t rush retracing his steps. In the park with the gun. In the head, too. Like the Kens. Did that mean Afoniki was next in line to get his? A guy could hope. And wonder why it had taken so long…

  * * *

  Guido Calvino found it easy to let Claude—clod—get ahead of him. Four bodyguards waiting outside? Cl
aude probably thought it made him look powerful, not scared of his own shadow. He’d waited too long for power. Should have taken the old man out years ago. It had been obvious to everyone that Phineas St. Cyr had neither feared nor respected the spare heir.

  St. Cyr had liked to think of himself as the “gentleman” mafia king. Guido could admit to wondering why his Uncle Bettino hadn’t moved on St. Cyr. He’d been the weakest of the three—his thoughts stalled.

  This Ken is a fake, a ringer.

  Another day, Guido might have been intrigued with the idea, but St. Cyr was dead. A clod was now in command of his empire. If—if there had been some sort of agreement between Bettino, Afoniki and St. Cyr, it would be void, would it not? Not that Guido was eager to kick up Afoniki’s anthill by making an obvious move on the clod’s stuff. Afoniki made Uncle Bett—who saw himself as old school mafia—look like the family pet. St. Cyr had been a polite killer and Uncle Bett a practical one, but Afoniki? He liked it, the power, the corrupting and the killing. Guido knew better than to let it show, but he’d been as uncomfortable at Afoniki’s dinner party as his reluctant new cousin, Nell.

  If Afoniki had hoped to turn the girl back to her roots, well, he’d failed and not just for now. Nell had been remarkably resilient, not to mention resistant to exploring her darker roots. His cousin, Cinzia, had it right when she’d said her bedroom was probably cleaned by singing birds and mice.

  He’d never been opposed to corrupting the innocent, but Alex Baker had made it clear, you messed with Nell, you messed with him. In this city, there was one truth even his side knew to respect. You messed with one Baker, you messed with them all.

  The hounds of hell would be easier to manage.

  It was possible the ill-timed shooting at the dinner party had tipped the balance for Baker. He couldn’t be steered, led, or warned off. No one had owned up to it, but then if someone did, it would be their last act in this life.