“I’m Detective Al Lindstrom with Seattle P.D.’s homicide squad—” Al began.
The nurse cut him off. “I already told you. We don’t need any cops.”
“We’re here concerning a homicide—”
“This isn’t a homicide, for God’s sake,” Riley interrupted. “Don’t you understand plain English?” He tried to shut the door again, but my foot got in the way. Thank you, Fuller Brush. I worked my way through college selling brushes door to door, and some of the training still proves useful.
“Excuse me,” the driver said, clearing his throat. “We’re a little pressed for time. If you could just show us where the deceased is, we’ll get started.”
For a moment, I thought maybe I was losing my mind. What deceased? Whose body? I was under the impression we had just bundled up Richard Dathan Morris’s body and sent him off to the medical examiner’s office for an autopsy. How could he be in two places at once?
As though forgetting us entirely, Riley swung away from the door without closing it. He nodded slowly, making a visible effort to control himself. “Right,” he managed. “This way.”
He walked across the room and disappeared down a darkened hallway, followed by the two men and their stretcher. For a brief moment, Al and I paused on the front porch, exchanging questioning glances. We hadn’t exactly been invited into the house, but we hadn’t exactly been ordered to stay out either.
Al shrugged his shoulders. “Why not?” he said.
We hurried through the front door and followed the stretcher down the hallway. At the far end of the hall a bedroom door stood open.
That’s where we all ended up, inside that darkened bedroom. The room was incredibly hot and stuffy. The windows were shut and heavily curtained, and the stifling atmosphere was thick with the medicinal odors of long illness. Riley went to the window, raised the curtain, and opened the window itself, allowing a hint of fresh air into the room.
“The sunlight hurt his eyes,” he explained. “And he was always so cold.”
A hospital bed stood in the middle of the room, occupying most of the space. On it lay the blanket-covered figure of a man. The patient lay on his side with his face turned away from us. Seen from the doorway, he appeared to be asleep. It was only when I stepped to the foot of the bed so I could glimpse his face that I encountered the unnatural pallor, the open-eyed, slack-jawed, frozen mask that indelibly separates the living from the dead.
One thing was certain the moment I saw him: this dead man wasn’t our dead man. Richard Dathan Morris was still safely in the hands of the medical examiner. That made me feel better. At least I wasn’t slipping.
The driver looked at Riley. “If you’d like to go back out to the other room and wait…” he offered.
“No. I’m all right,” Riley answered. “Go ahead.”
Totally focused, Tom Riley, R.N., stared at the corpse. A series of expressions played over the nurse’s face, a combination of sorrow, revulsion, and something else, some other ingredient I couldn’t quite identify.
The driver turned to me, ready to ask Al and me if we were going or staying. Silently, I shook my head. We weren’t budging, but I didn’t want him calling Riley’s attention to us either. I don’t think it had dawned on him yet that we were in the bedroom too.
Deliberately, cautiously, the two men placed the stretcher beside the bed. They approached the corpse warily, like little kids afraid of a bogeyman. It was almost as though they expected the dead man to jerk awake, sit up, and grab them.
I’ve seen more than my share of mortuary types in my time. They’re usually in and out in a jiffy; wham, bam, thank you ma’am, the less time spent the better. These two were taking their time, taking care, making sure each movement was slow and meticulous. Something was definitely out of whack, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Can we wrap him in these sheets?” the driver asked, directing his query to Riley.
The nurse nodded. “Sure. Go ahead.”
Reaching down, the driver gently moved a pillow out from under the dead man’s head, shoving it to the far side of the bed. It tottered there briefly, then fell to the floor.
My vast experience with pillows tells me that they usually fall silently. This one didn’t. It landed on the room’s hardwood flooring with a resounding thump.
I was standing at the foot of the bed. I took one more step to the side so I could see the pillow. A plastic package of some kind had slipped halfway out of the pillowcase onto the floor beneath the bed, right beside Tom Riley’s foot.
Instinctively, I moved toward the package. Cops are trained that way. If something doesn’t make sense, check it out. Ask questions. Get answers. I was quick, but Tom Riley was quicker.