Hollywood Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective Read online

  I pulled past the high fence and nodded to a guard. There wasn’t any barbed wire and the guard hadn’t been holding a rifle but the prison vibe came through loud and clear. We drove down a winding driveway toward the main building, then followed the signs to the left. This was a place for people the world wanted to forget, people who couldn’t go someplace better. I shivered a little, agreeing with Ted’s dislike.

  At the front desk, a nurse offered to walk us back to the secure facility. She wore pink scrubs and had a cheerful pink ponytail holder. Her outfit was the only color in the place. Everything else had faded, industrial colors bought in bulk—green, brown, white, and tan all turning into the same gray. She used the badge at her waist to open most of the doors, then switched to pushing a button and asking for entry. Heavy brown steel doors buzzed and then clicked open.

  “Head straight and you’ll hit the guard desk,” she offered before waving goodbye. I didn’t bother to ask why she wasn’t coming any farther—the guard desk’s thick metal grating answered the question for me.

  Up close, the grating looked like the stuff I’d seen around snack machines at bus stations. Not the prettiest set-up in the world, but the safest for the tired man inside.

  Ted supplied Jen’s full name, his voice calm despite his pallor. We’d been driving fast for most of the night. It was nearly five and he hadn’t slept at all.

  “Hell of a coincidence you want to see her just now.” The guard looked me up and down, not believing it was a coincidence. He was over fifty, with chestnut skin and bright white stubble on his chin. I guessed he’d been working since around seven, maybe eight and it’d been a hard night. “I’ll need your ID.” He paused a second deciding about us. “Both of you.”

  “I’m not going in,” Ted announced. “There’s a lounge somewhere where I can wait, right?”

  The guard nodded and pointed down the hall. Ted was gone in an instant. Alone, the guard and I stared at each other.

  “Hell of a coincidence,” he repeated, nodding.

  “You know better.” I slipped a folded-up bill from my wallet and moved it toward the slit in the grate. “I just want to see her. I won’t touch anything. You can go with me if you like.”

  “I’m not going in that room ever again. In fact, two hours ago when I found her, I decided I don’t need this job that bad. Nobody needs a job that bad. You understand?” His eyes told me what his words didn’t.

  “I need to see her.” I folded a second bill and moved it in with the first. “And I don’t want to sign the sheet, but I would like to see it.”

  He was going to be unemployed soon but he had his pride still so maybe he wouldn’t take my money. A second went by, a minute. The clock behind him ticked. He stared at me with tired eyes, red veins around light brown irises. His hand closed over the money.

  “Sheet’s empty. No one in. No one out. Her room was locked. It’s a secure floor, on the most secure wing. This girl here”—he tapped a piece of a paper I couldn’t see—“she’s special. What she screams about, we’re supposed to write down and forward to some office in Virginia. I don’t know what that means, but when I saw how she looked, I started to wonder.”

  I waited. There was more coming. It probably wouldn’t be helpful but I didn’t want him to stop talking.

  “You were in the war.” It was a statement, not a question. I’d pushed up my sleeves when I’d come in, revealing the silver bands of fake tissue.

  “Yeah.”

  “Things happen, bad things, and people don’t ever get over them. That’s what’s in that room—things you don’t get over.” He paused again, looked at me then pulled at his face. “Tonight’s sheet is empty; so is last night’s. But a week ago a guy came to see her. Cold man in a suit. Showed up late, didn’t stay long. Whatever he said, she screamed for hours afterwards. Now it’s a week later and I’m waiting for the cops to take down her body.”

  I swallowed. Take down. That shook me and I didn’t even understand what it meant.

  “You have to do this?”

  I nodded.

  He grabbed a long set of keys and hit a button. A loud buzz filled the air before I walked through the doors. On the other side, he left his cage, opening the heavy door slowly, carrying a nightstick and mace. The hall in front of us spread out to the right and the left, the guard station making the short end of a “t” shape. Two doors down, and he stopped, his key in the lock. There was a small window, a square of glass crisscrossed with steel inside it, but I couldn’t see anything.

  “Look all you like, but don’t let the door shut. It locks automatically.” The door opened in, so my view was blocked. He started to say something but then stopped, gave up and left.

  I took a deep breath, surprised by the smell of bleach and not blood, and walked in.

  The girl was dead, her stomach hollowed out into a cavity of wet meat. Worse, her arms stretched above her head, purple with bruises. Her wrists had gone raw under the heavy yellow rope someone had trussed her up with. A click, then the soft noise of air and her body swung gently in the air-conditioned breeze. She had been reduced to a flesh-colored shell with no person inside. I stood in front of that shell and didn’t know what to do.

  She swung, a barely perceivable movement, as I cataloged the other injuries. Bruises on her thighs and other minor insults. Probably defensive wounds from trying to protect herself, but the missing parts drew me back.

  I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, but I’d never seen anything like this—a person turned into nothing. I knew now why they hadn’t bothered with an ambulance, why no one had called a doctor. How did you help someone when they’ve been emptied out? That question led to another—all those missing pieces, where had they gone? The room was pristine white, the padded walls and padded floors showing only a few drops of blood at her feet. What did something like that to a person but left a room so clean?

  “Tell me about her.”

  Ted and I sat in the lounge, a few mumbling people around us. I didn’t mind them. They might drool or say the wrong thing but they were all thinking happy thoughts. After what I’d just seen, I needed lots of happy thoughts.

  “Was she hung up?”

  I blinked twice and took a sip of bitter vending machine coffee before I answered. “Yes.”

  “So was her sister, ages ago.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Everyone in OPS has a problem, a history, something that makes them fucked up. For Jen, it was her dad.”

  He went silent so I prodded, “Tell me.”

  I expected him to slip back into the Edward role, the person he’d been a long time ago. But somehow our situation didn’t make him shut down. His voice was tired, but still his own. “Her dad was a hunter. Every year, they’d vacation at a lake where he went hunting. She had an older sister. Apparently when he wasn’t hunting, he went after the sister.”

  I nodded to show I understood and hoped my eyes showed how revolted I was.

  “The sister got pregnant and her dad killed her to cover it up. He told the police an animal had done it, had clawed out her insides, and he’d had to hang the body up to keep it safe until they got there.”

  “Oh dear God.” I realized I knew how Jen’s sister had looked all those years ago.

  “Jen didn’t think that’s why he hung the body up. She was pretty sure it was a warning to her and the other girls.” Ted looked down, connecting a pattern of cracks in the table with his finger. “Her sister was… I mean, he had to get rid of the parts that incriminated him so it looked like she’d been—”

  “Emptied.” Sour acid rose in the back of my throat. I worked hard to keep from puking. “Emptied out and hung up by the arms with cheap plastic rope.”

  “The rope would fit. Jen never told me about it but she worked with it a lot. The yellow kind, three strands that always come unbraided at the end.”

  I nodded, the puke coming back in my throat again.

  “So that’s what she looks like?”

  “Hell of a time t
o be psychic, lover.”

  “That’s not psychic, just a good guess.”

  “A really good guess because it’s right. She was hurt first, tortured maybe, but then hung up, with parts missing. She looks young, too. My first guess would put her around fifteen.”

  “She would be—” he paused, thinking—“twenty-eight? Around there, I think. Jen always looked young. A few years in this place and I’ll bet she looked even younger, lost almost.”

  He gestured around us. Now that the horror of the body was fading, I spent some time on the other patients. A mixed bag of young and old, all of them treated like children by their caregivers. Ted and I sported the only shoes in the room. Gowns or scrubs, not real clothing. No jewelry. The patients were stripped of the personalization that comes from being allowed to make your own choices. They couldn’t say, “Today, I’ll wear my heart-shaped earrings or maybe the red shirt.” I shivered, not for the way they were taken care of but for the way they were kept, as if they were perpetual children instead of adults with an illness.

  “Can we get out of here?” I whispered, trying not to insult any of the patients even more.

  “Happy to.” Ted slid off the bench like he’d been desperate to leave since the minute we’d walked in.

  The guard at the desk touched his eyes with mine, but kept his mouth shut. A gaggle of police officers, the real official deal, were signing in. I suspected my money bought more than entry—it bought his silence.

  Ted was quiet for the first hour of the drive. I played the radio, locking in on an old rock station. There’s precious little that the Stones can’t drown out, but soon I realized I was dropping into an old pattern. My habit of putting things that bothered me out of my mind wasn’t something Ted and I did. Still, I took a deep breath before I spoke.

  “You can torture someone without blinking an eye. You look at blood splatter and dead bodies with perfect calm. But you haven’t said a word since we got into the car. What’s got you so spooked?”

  He shook his head, but spoke anyway. “It could’ve been me in there. Whatever that spell was, whatever Brian wanted us all to feel, the only reason I’m not in there is because I stepped into that circle to save him.”

  “One noble act saves your soul.”

  “Does it? Or does it just buy me time? How much longer until I trade my life for jigsaw puzzles and TV shows watched through metal bars?”

  “Never,” I declared. “You wouldn’t end up someplace like that.”

  “It’s not the place that scares me, it’s the fate. One cage is as good as another when you’re too insane to see the bars.”

  “I don’t think you’d end up like that.”

  “You mean you’d kill me?”

  “Is that what you want?” I tried to sound level but the idea scared me. I’d meant he’d be in a better facility. He’d thought of a death sentence, that’s how afraid he was. The way he brought up me killing him like it wouldn’t be a problem, shook me. Okay, maybe the killing wouldn’t be a problem. I’d done my share of it in the army. Killing him would be the problem. All of those people from the war? They were faceless, nameless bad guys. Ted was someone I loved.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t want to end up there.”

  “Well, relax. Even if I wouldn’t do it, I’m sure William would.”

  The sick thought made him break into a grin. “Without a moment’s hesitation. He’d consider it a kindness.”

  He looked at me as if he expected me to grin along with him. I concentrated on the road.

  “And maybe it would be.” He sighed loudly. “You really don’t like him, do you?”

  “Nope.” I kept my voice light, as if he’d asked if I liked broccoli.

  “He’s an all right guy.”

  “Once you get past the sadistic killer thing.”

  “Uh, actually not much of a killer. At least during the war, he stood outside the room. Kept us safe so we could do our work inside.”

  “Well, let’s hope he can keep you safe now that the war’s over.”

  6

  There were many things in my life that were negotiable. What time I started work, what I ate for dinner, where I slept at night, all of those were under my control, but one thing was set in stone—Sunday church with my mother. Technically, I was an adult and I could skip it, but I knew better. Skip church and you’d better be dying or at the president’s side, stopping nuclear war. No other excuses were acceptable. Mom would ride me about it all week, then force me to apologize to the priest next Sunday. Worse, if I didn’t show, she’d ask me why. I couldn’t explain where I’d been or what I’d seen. So with no sleep, wearing a borrowed shirt I’d had on for too long, I met Mom in the parking lot.

  I didn’t get much out of church. I couldn’t see past the crucifix in front of me. The metal Christ was hung to die almost like the girl I’d seen. I’d dealt with more dead bodies than I liked to remember but none came close to the personalized way she’d been killed. Nothing in my life did, except the bodies I’d cleaned up for OPS and the stylized image in front of me. There are so many horrible ways to die. It made you wonder about God, and not in a good way.

  Church, followed by Sunday brunch, they were unavoidable. But, thankfully, brunch provided the first bright spot in my day—coffee. Gina spent the meal smiling, talking about her new boyfriend. Mom chimed in, praising him almost as much as my sister did. Dad remained silent as a stone. Making me think he had issues with the guy. On our way home from brunch, Mom decided to come see the apartment. I gave all of them the tour, ignoring Gina’s acerbic comments about how much better it looked now that Jo had had a hand in it. Finally, at two in the afternoon, I got to sleep.

  In my dream, I was cooking, chopping tomatoes with a skill I’d never had, dicing peppers, tossing garlic into a pan of butter watching it foam. I woke up and reluctantly cracked one eye, sorry to leave the dream-feast. My clock told me I’d gotten just about four hours of sleep. I wanted more but that dream food had been so real I could almost smell it. I stumbled out of the bedroom, determined to find an Italian restaurant that would make me a to-go. Then I remembered where I lived. The closest I would get was pizza. I showered fast, dressed faster, and was sinking into a hard plastic booth at ‘Zza Joint, our local pizza place, in twenty minutes.

  The slice in front of me took up all of the paper plate, lapping over the edges on the top and bottom. Paper-thin crust with a thinner layer of sauce, and resting on top of that was the part I loved. I ate pizza with everything they had to offer—peppers, onions, sausage, peppers, extra cheese, anchovies, anything in the kitchen really. Each bite was bliss despite the crowd of teenagers and the surly guy wearing only an undershirt behind the counter. He screamed at them and they talked too loud. None of it could stop my slice from tasting divine. Unfortunately, the food occupied my stomach but it couldn’t do anything for my mind.

  I should have been thinking about Monday morning and the case I was being paid to solve, the man who might be cheating on his wife. Tomorrow, I’d be back in LA or maybe in Hollywood, when really I wanted to go to sleep tonight and not wake up until Tuesday. But even if my philandering husband magically disappeared, I wouldn’t sleep. My head kept going back to the case that wasn’t really a case—the dead girl. The sight of her haunted me, the unanswered questions about who she’d been once and what had turned her into that corpse. I didn’t know much about her really, and the only thing that mattered was that she had been Ted’s—no—Edward’s teammate back in the war.

  It was hard to imagine the things they’d done together. Hard to fit the person Ted was now into who he had been. Even worse somehow someone who’d been like him, that kind of predator, had been turned into a shell of a person. What kind of magic did that? How did it even work?

  I sat upright in the booth, realizing I knew someone who probably did that kind of magic. When all that was left of my pizza was a few orange red grease spots on the white table, I headed for Jo’s place.

  The
front door was open and music drifted out of the floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the parlor. Dusk had settled on my drive over, a pleasant blue-gray evening, so the curtains were drawn back. I could see my friend, looking more like a Josephine than a Jo, playing on the diminutive harpsichord. The tinny notes called out to me. It was something by Mozart.

  The engine ticked down while I sat in the car, listening to her music. I didn’t want to interrupt something but once I opened the door, I would. Hell, they’d probably heard me already.

  With a sigh, I opened the door and changed my view. Now I could see LaRue, wearing his leather pants and an open shirt. She was playing for him, and every inch of his body focused on her. The music was beautiful, I couldn’t argue that, but I knew LaRue —for him, this was more about the moment. The idea that he’d woken up next to her, that she’d dressed without a hurry, and now she was playing some song he liked. In the whole time he’d never had to worry about her mother snatching her away or about where he’d have go to find her next. That was what kept him so enthralled, this new happy peace the three of them shared. I should have felt like an ass for disturbing them but I was the reason they had that happy peace. I walked up the steps without another second of hesitation.

  One of the thugs—Calvin, I remembered—opened the door for me before I knocked. I’d seen him do the same thing for Jo when we walked in, as if she was too weak or maybe too important to open a door. She’d taken it as second nature that every door was opened for her, a leftover from her childhood maybe. I hadn’t grown up with servants, and even if I had, I doubted my mother would have let people like LaRue’s thugs, with their rat-like eyes, open doors for me.