Page 48

A s I drove away from the courthouse, wondering if I could move to Siberia and start all over, my cell phone rang. I flipped it open. "Hold on."

Then I pulled into a parking space on the side of the road. Emotional devastation plus supreme humiliation plus cell phone equals December smashing into the back of a truck, I always say.

I put the convertible in park, realizing I hadn't even put the top down once yet. "Okay, I'm here."

"December, it's Max. I was calling to find out if the hearing was over and give you directions to MOSH. How did it go?"

"Don't ask," I muttered.

"What? What's wrong? Did poor Bear get sent to the concrete and bars jungle? Did they throw away the key?"

Max gets her knowledge of criminal law from TV, too.

"No, he's free. I'm the one who went down to the concrete jungle. Or at least the humiliation jungle. I'm such an idiot. I knew better, and Jim even helped me, but I made a fool out of myself in a SPECTACULAR fashion."

I moaned and dropped my head on the steering wheel. "Stupid. Stupid. Stupid."

"What happened?"

I closed my eyes. "Nothing. Except for the part where I starting orating about the Founding Fathers and freedom from repression."

"What? And don't you mean oppression?"

"No. No. Nooooooo. Don't you think we need more freedom from repression? And witnesses with piercing infections? Or maybe a few more experiences that make judges rethink their conclusions that I'm not a whacked-out junkie Yankee?" I moaned again.

"What the H. E. double toothpicks are you talking about?" she yelled.

I moaned again, but held the cell phone further away from my poor eardrum. "Forget it. I'll tell you later if it's not on the front page of the paper. Give me the directions, please."

As I reached down in my briefcase for paper and pencil, a knock on my window scared me half to death. After I untangled my tongue, I realized I was looking through the glass at Jim Thies.

I found the car window button on the Beemer and pushed it. "Hey, Jim. Believe nothing you hear today, okay?"

He grinned. "If you say so, but are you sure that's the way the Founding Fathers would have wanted it?"

I hate my life.

T wenty minutes later, having written Max's directions and promised Jim I'd never, ever tell anybody that he'd helped me, I was on my way to my stupid cloak-and-dagger meeting at the MOSH. I'd decided the whole thing was an enormous waste of my time, but I was going because it was a way to hide out for a couple of hours and – hopefully – regain a little of my equilibrium, before I had to face my employees and tell them their boss was an idiot without hope of redemption.

Maybe I needed a couple of days .

The drive to the museum gave me some time to calm down and try for some optimism. Maybe I was an idiot, but I was an idiot driving a great car (even though it wasn't mine) on a beautiful day (hot enough to melt pavement) to meet a guy who wouldn't give me his name (about an invoice that probably didn't matter a bit).

My "glass half-full" needed work.

As I drove over the bridge, then around to the road appropriately named Museum Circle, I tried to enjoy the sunshine and remember all the reasons I'd been so ready to leave Ohio.

What I wanted to do was stuff my face with donuts and spend the rest of the day in bed watching my DVD of Pride and Prejudice . Colin Firth never would have married Elizabeth's secretary. I slammed the steering wheel to the left, after I nearly drove right by the entrance.

I parked and got out, wondering if I could figure out how to put the top down for the drive back. I needed to call Jake, anyway, about Gina, and also find out when I would get my car back.

"He's probably already heard about the fiasco today. Something else for him to laugh at me about," I mumbled to myself, walking toward the giant building where, according to several giant banners, the Dinosaurs were here.

Maybe I'd get lucky and one would eat me.

I paid my admission fee and took the building map to figure out where the planet show would be held, wondering again why I was doing this. The guy'd sounded like a psycho. Threading my way past a hundred kids wearing purple Dolphin Day Camp shirts, I made it to the staircase and headed for the second floor. Gaping at the enormous robotic dinosaurs, I almost didn't see the planetarium entrance at first.

By the time I figured it out, a couple of teenagers dressed in MOSH shirts were getting ready to close the doors. I squeezed in behind a family of six, and tried to remember what my caller had said.. I was pretty sure it was "Mars show, back row, left side, red hat."

I looked to my left, but the lights were going down fast, and I saw only the dim outline of a man wearing a hat. I couldn't tell what color the hat was. I sat down, anyway. He said nothing, so I waited for a minute, not really wanting to humiliate myself again by asking some poor tourist about being my clandestine contact.

Two or three minutes into the show, I'd learned that Mars is red because it's rusty. The soil contains iron oxide; the planet was once wet, and now it has had no rain in millions of years. A rusty planet – who knew? Speaking of rust, the planetarium stank of rust or mildew or something nasty and metallic. Maybe they were piping in a rust smell to complement the Mars show, but that was going a little overboard, if you asked me. Not to mention my horrible certainty that somebody had stashed a smelly diaper under one of the adjacent seats.

Rust and diaper smell was enough to make me want to get the heck out of there. Rust and diaper smell on an empty stomach was making me feel like I was going to start dry heaving any second.

I still hadn't heard a peep out of the guy next to me, but I was almost positive his hat was red. He was leaning all the way back in his seat and looked like he was asleep, but I'd had enough of Mars and its aromas.

Leaning toward him, I tried to quietly get his attention. "Psst!"

The smell worsened near his seat, and the acrid stink burned my eyes. Maybe he'd passed out after being asphyxiated by the fumes and would need a good lawyer. "Psst!"

Nothing. He didn't even move.

I tried again, louder. "Psst!"

Nothing.

"Oh, for Pete's sake. Hey, dude. I'm December Vaughn, and I can't take the stench. Are you the guy from Orange Grove Productions?"

He didn't move, which was kind of rude. I mean, the least he could have done was say no if I had the wrong guy.

I hate rude people. That's my only defense for what I did next.

I leaned clear over across the two seats between us and poked him in the arm. Hard. That's when three things happened all at once: He fell forward and smashed his face into the seat in front of him, the lights came up, and I started screaming.

Because the back of his shirt was soaked with blood. His head had tilted sideways, so I had a front-row view of the four-inch gash in his neck.

Then everybody else started screaming, and there was running and yelling and somebody's baby starting crying.

I sat there, unmoving, staring at the bloody man in the red hat until somebody grabbed my arm. "Did you check his pulse?" somebody asked. I pointed to the open wound that ringed the part of his throat where his pulse should have been — would have been— but I still couldn't talk. Only after they dragged me out of my seat did I realize I was shaking and tears were pouring down my face.

It was my first dead body. I couldn't stop staring at him, even as I walked away. At the body. At it . He didn't look like anything but what he was – dead. Not like anything I'd ever seen anywhere before. Not in movies. Not on TV.

Dead.

I fell back against the wall just outside the planetarium and stared at the people hovering near me. "I just poked the arm of a dead man," I said, then burst into tears.

" C an you tell me your name? And what you saw?" The woman frowning down at me was way too pretty to be a sheriff's deputy, but that's what her uniform said. Her hair, severely pulled back in a ponytail, said she was all business. Her name tag said her name was SMITH-SIMMERS.

Her expression said she was annoyed with me.

"Join the club, Simmers," I muttered.

"Excuse me, Ma'am?" she said, leaning closer.

"I'm December Vaughn. Is that your real name?" I asked her. "I mean, Smith-Simmers, really? Is it Deputy Smith-Simmers?"

She blinked. "Yes, it's Deputy. Or you can call me Brenda. Ma'am, are you okay?"

I clamped my teeth together to keep them from chattering so hard they broke. It was suddenly so cold in the museum. Freezing. "Deputy Brenda, when did they turn the air conditioning up so high? Was it to keep him . . . was it to keep the body fresh for evidence?"

I laughed. Or at least I think I was laughing. But the tears kept rolling down my face. The deputy's eyes widened, and she called out to somebody standing behind her. "Hey, Bethany! Get over here. I think she's in shock."

An EMT carrying a blanket rushed over and bent down to take my pulse. She smiled at me, all calm and peacefulness. "My name is Bethany Hilkert. Can you remember that?"

"How d-d-d-d-do you d-d-d-do it?" I asked while she wrapped a blanket around me.

"Do what?"

"How do you stay so calm when you see dead people? You must see a lot of dead people, and you're so calm, and that was my first one, and I d-d-d-don't . . . I d-don't . . ." I started crying again and scrubbed at my face. "Some tough trial lawyer, huh?"

She patted my shoulder. "We focus on the ones we can help. That's what keeps us calm. We have to stay calm to do a good job. Now, do you remember my name?"

I sniffled. "Brenda Smith. No, Simmers-Smith. No, Smith-Simmers." I gave up, frustrated. "I don't remember."

She looked over her shoulder at the deputy. "Bliss, she's a little confused. I'd like to get something warm to drink inside her before you ask your questions."

The deputy nodded grimly. "Fine, but she doesn't go anywhere. Her name is December Vaughn."

I wasn't quite following the conversation. I kept seeing the man's head falling to the side, with his neck gaping open in a way necks shouldn't gape.

Ever.

"Who's Bliss?"

The EMT smiled again. She was awfully cheerful, considering somebody had just died. "I'm Bethany, remember? Deputy Smith-Simmers is a friend of mine, and her nickname is Bliss."

A fresh wave of teeth chattering hit me, and my whole body was shaking so hard it felt like I had the worst flu of my life. But the name confusion seemed like the most important thing. I had to sort it out. I had to think about something other than the neck gaping and gaping and the blood . . .

"Bliss Simmers? Are you a stripper?"

The deputy looked kind of offended. "With a name like December, you have the nerve to ask me that?"

Probably a bad idea to tick off a deputy at a murder scene, right? Oh, crap. "Am I a suspect? I watch CSI. I'll take a polygraph test. I'll take lots of polygraphs. You can have my fingerprints and everything. Do you need my DNA? You can scrape whatever you want out of my mouth."

I opened my mouth as wide as I could and sat there, mouth open, eyes clenched shut. Nobody scraped me, though, so I opened one eye.

Deputy Simmers stood there, hands on hips, sighing. "I hate that freaking CSI. Every freaking place I go, people are offering me their freaking DNA. Do you know how freaking much DNA tests freaking cost?"

Bethany laughed and stood up. "I think you should carry Q-tips around and swab everybody just to make them happy."

The deputy shuddered. "Like I want all those nasty body fluids anywhere near me. Get real."

Body fluids . . . "The diaper," I said.

They both looked at me. "What?"

"The diaper. There was a smelly diaper under the seats near us. Maybe the killer was a parent who brought his or her baby along, and you can find a clue in the diaper," I said, not realizing until the words came out of my mouth how stupid they sounded.

Deputy Simmers rolled her eyes and stalked off. "I'll get some tea. You watch her for more shock or something."

Bethany shook her head. Her smile had vanished. "Ms. Vaughn," she said gently. "The body . . . releases after death, especially after a violent death like that. The smell was?—"

I held one hand up in the air, and the other near my mouth in case my now-roiling stomach gave up the fight to keep from shooting acid everywhere. "Oh, God . I get it. I get it. Please stop. Please stop. I've had such a long day."

When my fear of hurling on, well, near a crime scene passed, I wrapped my arms around my knees and rocked back and forth, waiting for someone to tell me I could go home.

I'd never wanted to go home so badly in my entire life.