No One Puts Baby in a Coffin
"Not again," he muttered, as I chased him, our steps echoing in the stairwell. His grey suit was wrinkled from sitting too long, his movements slow. I imagined Detective Ramos' shift was almost done, his distinct coffee and cologne scent suggesting a day spent at his desk or in a courtroom instead of on the street. The ink stain on his left hand only corroborating my theory. I tried to ignore the gold glint and the sharp pang it gave me. Instead, I thought about tiny coffins-not really an improvement, but far more on point. He had as much paperwork to do as I had bodies, which happened to be more than either of us cared to think about.
"Yes, again," I shot back, catching up to him and thrusting the pictures in his face, the same images that had become regular features in my nightmares. It was fright night, every night: 2am, my bedroom. Like a damned indie cinema had taken over my sleep.
Blood splattered butterfly shirts and dirt stained miniature Chuck Taylors, worse than anything Freddy Krueger's writers could dream up. Their faces-pigtails and freckles, tiny primary colored glasses and dead eyes-the reasons behind the midnight-shaded bruises under my own.
"I've seen the pictures, Kee," he sighed, turning around to stare me down, his use of my nickname only bothering me slightly. I resisted the urge to roll my shoulders. His caramel eyes crinkled in concern and brunette hair messy from a day's worth of stress, "You know that I know that these are just accidents."
His voice was weary, the death of a child was not easy on anyone-no matter the perceived circumstances. But I just shook my head, trying to get his tousled hair and tired eyes out of my head. I needed to stay focused on the children: Jessica Starn, Lily Huang, Valerie Peralta, Bridget McConnell, Angela Jeffreys, Emma Bailey. He interrupted my descent down the rabbit hole, again.
"You're just trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense," his voice quieter than before, like he knew what I was doing, "It sucks, I'm sorry."
As a doctor in a morgue, I could tell him that these kinds of things don't just happen. That a spike in children's deaths, even accidental, is not normal. That six bodies in four months of girls all in the same age group just didn't sit right. That I had looked into the statistics, if he would just get past the fact that they were all different races and different causes of death, then look at my notes he would realize that I did my research. He would see the pattern. But, I was done fighting. I had tried to get everyone to see two bodies ago. And now, I had two more children lying in my freezer. This was not about us. I started my list again.
"Fine," I turned away from him. I would not let him see me cry, Ramos would think that he had finally broken through. I calmly walked back down the steps, the red brick of the walls blurring into one solid color. A gentle hand on my shoulder stopped me from taking the last steps to my cold basement domain.
"Keeva," he said quietly, his wedding band cutting me more than I cared to admit.
"Ben," I warned him, not turning around, "just let me go."
Those four words hung in the air, sucking the atmosphere out of the stairwell. Would life as we know it survive without the oxygen? Neither of us said anything and when he finally did let me go, conserving what little we had left. I bit down hard on my cheek and kept on walking. His eyes burned holes into my back, but I could still feel the gold of his ring through my lab coat.
