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Dr. Leblanc’s eyes were shadowed as he met my gaze. He’d seen it too many times, I realized. He was used to it.
He gave me a sad smile. “Welcome to death.”
I stood in the cooler until the cold seeped into my bones, and my fingers began to grow stiff. Death wasn’t fair. Death didn’t give warning. Death hit nice people and nasty people. It didn’t give a shit.
My one-month anniversary of working here had come and gone, and nothing had happened. No one gave me a medal or certificate for good behavior. It didn’t make a difference, I realized. Nothing had changed. I was still the same thing I was a month ago.
It wasn’t until hunger began to nudge at me that I realized I was being a moron and pushing my body too far with this whole standing-in-the-cold bullshit.
After making sure I was alone in the morgue, I went through my procedure of scooping the brains into my pickle jars. I felt no qualms when I salvaged the overdose victim’s brain, but when I turned to Ms. Jackson’s bag, I hesitated. Her death had been unfair enough already. Now I was going to desecrate her by making her brain my dinner?
Hunger poked at me again. Tightening my jaw, I quickly put her brain into the jar. Yeah, death wasn’t fair. And I’m not gonna give it any more head starts.
Chapter 21
“What the hell happened to this guy?”
Detective Mike Abadie turned at my question then offered a thin smile. “Lawn mower,” he said, gesturing to the riding mower lying on its side a few feet away from the body. Not just any lawn mower, either, but one of the big tractor things usually used in yards that were measured in acres instead of feet.
And that certainly fit the bill here. We were in the front yard of what could almost be described as a mansion: a three-story white house with a broad curved driveway, on a piece of land that was at least five acres—the majority of which was mowed grass. The house itself was about a thousand feet from the road and, in bizarre contrast, was also less than half a mile from the trailer park where the drug dealer-gamer guy had been killed. Sometimes it cracked me up the way the super nice neighborhoods were smack up next to the total shit neighborhoods.
“Looks like he was trying to do some sort of repair on it,” the detective continued. “He must have had it propped up on that piece of four by four, and when it fell it smacked onto his head and pretty much crushed it.”
“Crushed the hell out of it,” I observed. Why the hell had he been underneath the damn thing? Didn’t people ever stop and think how dangerous stuff was? The guy’s head was damn near flattened, with two deep impressions that would probably match up perfectly to the underside of the tractor. He’d probably been dead before the tractor had fully settled on him.
“So this was the lawn guy for the place or something?” I asked.
The detective shook his head. “Nope. That’s Rob Harris himself.”
I let out a whistle of surprise. Rob Harris owned a local RV dealership and was also something of a local celebrity due to a series of commercials that had run for several years and featured his numerous grandchildren. He’d passed the business on to his son recently and was supposedly enjoying his retirement.
Not so much anymore, obviously.
Stupidly annoyed at the waste, I crouched by the head and by the chunks of brain that had been squished out. Maybe, if I’d been desperate, I’d have tried to recover the bits that were on the ground, but they were so mingled with dirt and grass that I wasn’t about to go there. I wanted badly to pull some of the skull pieces off and see how much was left inside, but I knew I couldn’t do that with so many people around. There was “tough” and “hardcore,” and then there was “sick bitch.”
“Want a bite?”
I jerked my head around to see Detective Abadie standing behind me, grinning. “Hunh?” I managed, trying to not look guilty. Or hungry. Of which I was both.
He nodded his head toward the scattered chunks of brain. “That’d be a buffet for a zombie, right?”
I couldn’t move, simply continued to stare at him. He knows? How? Is he one?
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Crawford. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Dawn of the Dead, or Zombie-land . You know—” He rolled his eyes up into his head and assumed a slack-jawed expression. “Braaaaiinnnssss.”
I swallowed and struggled to control my stunned expression. “Oh. You’re talking about movies.” I managed to keep from saying “not real zombies.”
He gave me a faintly disgusted look. “No shit, Sherlock. Wow, you have no sense of humor at all. It’s not like I was asking you to really eat brains.” He shook his head and turned away. As he walked off, I heard him mutter “freak” under his breath.
I stood up, fighting the desire to laugh out loud, almost surprised to realize that I wasn’t bothered by the intended insult. Especially considering what the truth was.
Derrel came up beside me, casting a grimace down at Mr. Harris. “Damn. That tractor sure did a number on his skull.”
“Yeah.” I slid a glance to the underside of the tractor—easy to see since it was lying on its side—then cocked my head and frowned. “So, what part of the tractor do you think came down on his head to smush it like that?”
Derrel gave me a puzzled look, then followed my gaze. “That’s a damn good question, Angel,” he murmured.
“You got those two x-shaped impressions on his head,” I said. “And there’s that bit at the center of the blades that’s x-shaped, so that fits. For one of them, at least.”
