Page 58 of The Turning of the Tables

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.” I chewed my lip, tears filling my eyes. “Throats and stomachs cut open. Naked. Bruising… everywhere.”

“Seth…”

“I try not to look at them. When they’re that bad. You know? But it’s my job. Document evidence. Mark it. Tag it. Fingerprints. Shoe prints. Everything.”

He waited, silent, although I could hear him breathing.

“They were buried only a few feet down. Some guy’s dog found the first. They were close enough together…” I broke off. There had been two of them. One girl, one boy. Neither one older than about ten. Officially, we had to wait for the postmortem, but you get to recognizing the signs of that kind of physical abuse. I knew what I’d seen.

“You okay?” Elliot asked after a while.

“No.”

“What can I do?”

My fingers tightened in the blankets. “I don’t want to be alone,” I whispered.

“Okay.”

A minute went by. “Tell me something?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Anything.”

Another half-minute or so, then, “Back before the coming of the white man, in the days before the animals ceased to talk, there were four brothers. Manabush was the oldest of them and loved the humans most of all his brothers…”

Shit.I had fallen asleep while Elliot was talking, telling me what I’m pretty sure was a legend from his people. And I was so shitface-drunk that I’d clearly been unaccountably rude and fallen asleep, and my cheek against the phone had probably hung up on him. Or maybe I’d started snoring, and he’d hung up on me, which I totally deserved and wasn’t even a little bit offended by.

Or my phone had died.

I definitely had a dead phone. So I had no idea if I’d hung up on him when it went or if that had happened after one of us had hung up on the other.

I really needed to never, ever drink that much again.

Or text Elliot, given the fact that I’d just shit all over Rule Two andthenI’d been unaccountably rude by falling asleep during what was probably a very personal legend and possibly hanging up on him. After I’d drunkenly texted him for some sexting while shitfaced because I’m clearly a sad, pathetic loser.

I rolled over on my back and stared up at my ceiling, trying to decide if the humiliation or the headache was worse. My eyes felt vaguely gummy—that, combined with the fact that I could clearly make out the details of the popcorn paint on the ceiling, told me I’d fallen asleep with my contact lenses in. Ugh. Ihatethat feeling.

I hated even more the fact that I really needed to go to work again, so I couldn’t give my eyes the break they now desperately needed by wearing glasses because you can’t do decent lab work if your glasses keep fogging up because of your mask.

That and the horror of your glasses sliding down your nose while you’re working a crime scene was the primary reason I wore contacts. Because you can’t just shove your glasses back up your nose when your hands are covered in blood and who knew what else. I don’t mind my contacts—most of the time. But the morning after falling asleep shitface-drunk I minded them. I just didn’t have much of a choice.

It was my own damn fault.

With a groan, I pushed myself up, plugged my dead phone in, and limped to the bathroom to brush the dead-animal taste out of my mouth. At the very least, I needed to do that before dragging my sorry ass in to work—assuming it wasn’t so late that I didn’t have a job to go back to.

Teeth brushed, I determined that I had about forty minutes before I needed to be at the CSI lab, so I swalloweda bunch of Pepto, took a speed shower, and threw on clothes, then grabbed my phone and keys and headed out, hoping the Pepto would kick in so that I wouldn’t throw up the coffee I desperately needed.

My head and knee were competing over which wanted to throb more, shame and self-recrimination making my stomach just as sour as the aftermath of the alcohol.

I still had to go to work to a lab that my friend wasn’t in because she was sick—and getting sicker—thanks to a serial killer we hadn’t managed to catch. A killer we hadn’t caught yet, even though I’d made so much progress two days ago.

And then last night’s case had just completely derailed me.

That was the thing about working homicide. You didn’t just get the one case and then ignore everything else. The detectives pulled cases—we got pulled to whatever crime scene needed us. I was glad this one had been Clements, though. She was easier to work with than a lot of people, and she didn’t put up with bullshit at her scenes. I already didn’t do well with dead kids, and if I’d had to deal with some of the horribly off-color jokes that some of the uniforms threw around in addition to not having Quincy, things would have been even worse.