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“So that leaves… who?” he asked.
“Anyone could’ve sneaked up there from the back stairway, and tried to close the cover,” I said. “Patrons, wait staff, bartender, the other merpeople, even.”
“That’s an interesting thought,” he said. “How competitive is the mermaid biz? Any love triangles going on among them we should know about?”
“We can ask Misty when we find her. By the way, Jen knows it’s Christy in the tank. She offered help find Misty, but I told her she was fine. It was just boyfriend trouble.”
“She promised Christy she’d be home tomorrow,” Mason said. He opened his mouth to say something more, and then his phone went off in his hand: a video call.
“Dr. Sharpe,” he said, holding the phone out in front of him. It was dim in the foyer, so we walked to the kitchen, where he’d left a light on.
“Detective Brown, Mrs. Brown,” she said. I didn’t correct her. “Detective Scott gave me the okay to call you with the autopsy results rather than making you come all the way over here for them. The cause of death was drowning, not the blow to the head. That came first but wasn’t fatal.”
I had already known that, of course.
“The water in her lungs was chlorinated,” she went on.
I had suspected that as well. So far, nothing she’d told us was news.
“But how did she look as if she just died,” I asked, “and not a day older than when she vanished?”
“She’d been frozen."
“Frozen,” Mason repeated. “So someone put her body into a freezer, kept her there for ten years, then just now decided to take her out and dump her into the lake? Why?”
“That’s above my pay grade,” Dr. Sharpe said, even though she made more than him and they both knew it. “But she hadn’t been out of the freezer for more than twelve hours. Her core temperature was still colder than the water.”
“Tenth anniversary,” I said softly. “The podcast, all the renewed interest. Maybe it was all too much for the killer. Maybe they thought once her body was found, it would put the whole thing to rest.”
“I’m not a profiler,” Dr. Sharpe said. “There’s something odd here; a dog tag, you know, military? It was lodged in her throat.”
“Whose name is on it?” Mason asked, and I held my breath.
“PFC Paul R. Quaid,” she said.
The fucking husband.
Mason said, “Thanks, Dr. Sharpe. I appreciate the info.” He disconnected and looked at me.
My heart clenched up in my chest and I whispered, “Jeremy’s on his way up there.”
* * *
MISTY
Misty and Zig sprang to their feet from behind the desk. A wall of fire blazed between them and the front door, roaring ever closer, but there was a straight, flame-free path to the bathroom where they’d entered. Zig grabbed Misty’s arm. “Come on!”
“We can’t leave him there!” Misty shouted back as fire climbed the walls and licked at the ceiling. The curtains flashed, blazed, and blackened all in seconds, and smoke burned her eyes.
She dropped to her knees, pulled her shirt collar up over her nose and crawled to the man on the floor until she could get hold of his shirt sleeve, and then she sat back and pulled.
His pants leg was on fire. She could barely move him, but then Zig took hold of his other arm, and the body came along with ease. They were each stooping, clinging to an arm and dragging as fast as they could. They made it into the bathroom, cleared the door, and Zig slammed it, while Misty grabbed a towel to smother the flames on his jeans. Under the towel, burnt denim mingled with burnt skin and the smell made her gag. Then Zig yanked the towel off him and crammed it against the crack under the door to buy them a few more minutes. Seconds, maybe.
“Let’s get him out the window,” Misty said.
“Let’s make sure he’s not already dead fir—” The dead guy interrupted her with an agonized moan. “Shit,” she said. “Okay, let’s go. Get him up.”
They each grabbed him under an arm and hefted him right up over the windowsill. Smoke was pouring in around the closed bathroom door. There wasn’t much time.
