“That was some Wonder Woman shit!” Gucci gushed.
“Thank you! Thank you!” I said, taking a tiny bow. “Stand-up was my game, but I always thought I would’ve been decent at micro-impersonations and—”
The beep of the mass spectrometer interrupted me. The test results were in.
“This guy’s blood shows near-lethal levels of botulism toxin,” Gucci said. She’d plunked into a wheelie office chair to study a graph on the computer screen.
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“Either he ate a bunch of spoiled canned food or—”
“We had Mormon neighbors when I was a kid,” I interrupted. “They were always rotating the canned goods out of their pantry on account of botulism risk. The mom used to say a teaspoon of canned peaches gone bad could take out the whole town of Nampa.”
“Does the dead guy seem like he would’ve been eating spoiled Mormon canned goods?”
“Good point. So what’s theor?’”
“He could’ve been injected with a massive dose of Botox.”
“Botox!” I leaned against the nearest lab bench as my mind rippled and stretched to take in this new information—like that long-ago day I found out Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg are friends.
“That would explain the wheezing,” Gucci said. “And it could’ve caused some facial paralysis, which would make him look—“
“Like a monster!” I cried.
Thirty-Eight
After we made a Pole Virgins’ promise to never speak of the night again, Gucci dropped me at the end of my alley so I could roll the garbage out for morning pickup. A fresh inch of snow had fallen, but the alley stank like someone had tossed a well-fed squirrel into their backyard firepit. As I pinched my nose to block out notes of burnt flesh and incinerated hair, Oat Willimena dragged her own can through her back gate.
“Are you getting that smell?” I asked.
“I fired my kiln, not knowing there was a raccoon inside. Poor little guy.” She sounded truly mournful. “All that was left was a few teeth and a little bit of tail. And his penis bone, of course. Also known as a Texas toothpick.” Oat Willimena illuminated a charred, hooked bit of bone with a flashlight.
I stepped back, horrified.
“Raccoon penis bones are considered magical talismans,” Oat Willimena continued. “Jerry Hall—the supermodel?—she told me once that when she was growing up in Mesquite, Texas, boys gave girls they liked racoon penis bones, you know, as a simple love spell. Maybe I should give this one to Emmylou?”
“Woo away,” I managed, feeling a pang at how fun it would have been to tell Emmylou about this conversation.
“Friday, I’m taking her for a tour of the women’s ward of the Old Idaho Penitentiary. It’ll be romantic. How many illicit love affairs took place between those walls?”
“So many?” I said. If Emmylou and Oat Willimena went out Friday night, it would be much easier for me and Miranda to move Connor’s body undetected. “What a great date idea!”
I excused myself and hurried through the back gate. Snow had covered all my muddy tracks. I decided to take a quick peek at Connor’s track marks and taser burns—I felt dumb for having missed them. But as I approached the playhouse Emmylou appeared on the back deck looking radiant in an ankle-length blue silk kaftan.
“Hi, Emmylou,” I said, feeling sad and regretful.
“Evening,” she said.
But before I could make an attempt at reconciliation (or warn her about the amorous penis bone coming her way), she disappeared back into her side of the duplex.
My own television blared the nineties gemStriptease. Layna sat up from where she’d been sprawled on my mom’s old tie-dyed couch.
“I have amateur sleuthing FOMO so bad right now,” she said.
“Do you want an update?” I asked.
“No. Don’t,” she said with a shudder, as if remembering the severed finger pressed into her hand. “The douchebag was right about one thing. I wasn’t cut out to be an investigator.”
