Chapter 3: The Rings
The lab where I spend most days is a little like being in a shopping mall, in that all the light is artificial, the exits are concealed, and there's no way to tell what time of day it is. I can say with a little certainty that I spent the morning after my adventure with Karne reviewing the missing persons reports for any clues I could apply to the vertebrae on my lab table. But as to the rest of the time between printing the reports and beginning my long stare at the bones on my exam table, well, I don't know how long that was. For all the nothing I was figuring out, I hoped it hadn't been that long. But when Karne showed up, I knew it had been.
"Ms. Connell," he said sharply, making me snap my head up in alarm. I grabbed at the back of my neck and scowled at him. "I have spent the afternoon at Magique; it has been illuminating."
"What?" I blurted. Of all the things I could picture Karne doing, sitting all afternoon at the local peeler bar was not near the top. "Illuminating?"
"Yes," Karne said quickly, walking toward the lab table. He stretched a hand toward a column of vertebrae I'd set out. I slapped lightly at his wrist. He looked up at me, stunned. Then he scowled.
"Don't." I put my hands on my hips and looked across the lab table at him. "How did you get up here alone?"
"I told them we were working this case together." Karne looked back at me, unperturbed. "As we are."
"Then what were you doing in a strip joint all afternoon?" I gestured at him; he watched my hand for a moment.
"I was there with Brent Martinson, lawyer with the Assured Insurance Company branch office in LA." Karne placed his hands at the edge of the lab table, resting his fingers carefully parallel to the line of vertebrae.
"With him?" I said incredulously. "Karne! If you've told building staff you're working the case your identity could come back to him. He's a lawyer; he knows entrapment when he sees it."
"I told the security guard, a man that owes me several favors, that I was working on this case with you. I have not told the staff. Beyond that, I am not affiliated with the police. Entrapment applies to them, not to me. And finally, my identity has never been hidden from him. He simply doesn't care." Karne gave me a self-satisfied look. "Relax, doctor."
"Don't call me that," I said automatically, my brain already on the implications of what Karne had done. "You must've found something out to stay there all afternoon." I turned to him. Karne appeared to be thinking something through.
"I suppose you won't believe that the attractions of the employees overwhelmed my will to leave." Karne said lightly. I snorted. "Very well," Karne said sharply, turning toward me with a pleased look on his face. "Come, Ms. Connell. You aren't getting anywhere here."
"Come where?" I said, shrugging out of my lab coat. I wasn't going to dispute his judgment of my situation in the lab.
"To your apartment, first." He said. "You'll need to change."
"Excuse me?"
"We'll be attending an art opening for Ms. Victoria Grange-Martinson. It's about as formal as a cocktail party, I believe." He held open the door to the lab and put his palm to my lower back as I walked through. I turned to press the four number alarm code.
"Rather obvious alarm code, Connell." He smirked. "The Norman Invasion? Really."
"Why are we going to this opening?" I chose to ignore his sniping this time.
"I'll explain in the car," he said, hustling forward. I had to trot to keep up with him. As soon as he had the car in traffic he started to talk.
"Mr. Martinson is a regular of Magique and well known to the women there." Karne began.
"And to you," I cut in.
"Mm. He's unbearable, really. At any rate, I decided to try Magique after looking through the two missing women's applications for employment at Assured."
"Which you got how?" I demanded.
"By asking. Really, Connell, I am trying to answer your earlier question." I settled back in my seat with a frown on my face. "Thank you. I found that both women had worked at Magique immediately before working at Assured. I suspected Martinson had 'found' them there and offered them more standard employment."
"That's a nice way of putting it," I muttered.
"It seems that was the case. The bouncer told me Martinson generally comes in for lunch, and failing that arrives for a drink after work."
"So you waited."
"I did," Karne paused to merge onto an overcrowded street. "The bartender was kind enough to allow me to wait in the storeroom that overlooks the bar. I simply emerged when he arrived. He was drunk enough to talk before long, just as the bartender had said. A favorite girl of his came over and asked him a few questions I gave her."
"Oh lord, Karne, this is so illegal." I moaned.
"I'm not affiliated with the police, Connell." He made the last turn in the route to my apartment building. "His relationship with his wife, Ms. Victoria Grange-Martinson, collapsed years ago. They have a prenuptial agreement that would financially sting him in a divorce, so he remains unwilling to leave. He takes lovers and she does as well. The wages are his, but the property and investments are hers. Do you begin to see, Connell?"
"The wife has the fortune, and all he has is a job. He's hanging on to her as long as he can," I summarized, "even if that means hiring secretaries to have affairs with him. He gets sick of them and they 'disappear.'"
"I'm not entirely sure that's correct. Not yet, at least." Karne brought the car to a stop and hustled me out the door. We made our way up the stairs in silence. I had my head deep inside my closet when I heard Karne speak again.
"Black would be best." I turned my face toward him, contorting a little to emerge from the end of the hanging bar to which I'd exiled my fancier dresses. "Her work is somewhat avant-garde." Karne had let himself into my bedroom, and was standing with his usual composure next to the pile of lingerie and stockings I'd made on my bed. The unlikely situation nearly made me laugh. I tugged at the knee length black dress in the recesses of my closet until it came free of its hanger. Karne caught it as I tossed it over toward the bed.
"What are you doing?" I peered at him as he held the dress up and inspected the cut.
"It is a bit conservative, but we haven't got the time." He concluded. He handed me the dress and continued to stand there.
"Could you…?" I gestured toward the door to my living room. Karne nodded stiffly and walked out. It struck me he might not have been fully aware that he was standing there in a woman's bedroom until that moment. I grinned to myself as I changed.
When I emerged Karne had changed as well. He wore a closely fitted suit and an expensive looking watch. Far more oddly, he was applying a design in deep black paint to his left ring finger near the knuckle. I stood quietly as he finished; his intent activity seemed to demand it. He held his left hand away from him for a moment before dropping it back to his side and looking at me.
"May I have your left hand?" He said, his tone making it less of a question.
"Why?"
"We'll be married this evening," he paused as my eyebrows shot up. "That's our cover, Connell. Really."
"So you're painting on wedding rings?"
"False tattoos, actually. They're the fashion in Ms. Grange-Martinson's circle." Karne looked critically at his left hand again.
"Tattooed wedding rings? That's hopeful of them." I muttered. Karne grinned.
"There's such a thing as laser removal," he quipped. "We'll be impersonating a couple because neither Martinson can suspect we're the lover of the other. If they do, we'll get nothing out of them."
"I see. If we're together we're not with them."
"Yes. Now give me your left hand." Karne stretched out his left palm to me. I took a few steps toward him and put my hand in his. "Here. On the other side of the lamp." He tugged me to his opposite side so my elbow rested against his stomach. I bit my lip at the awkward position, but Karne didn't seem to notice. He held out the container of ink and asked me to hold it, then laced the fingers of his left hand into mine. He brushed on a stylized set of vines that formed a rough band around my finger.
"When will this come off?" I asked, turning my finished fake tattoo under the light.
"So eager to be rid of me?"
"Karne. Just tell me." I shook my head.
"Nail polish remover will take it off. Until then it's water proof."
"Interesting." I said, still looking at the design. I snapped my head up when Karne handed a tube of lipstick over to me. "What's this?"
"Lipstick."
"I know that. Why do you have it and why are you giving it to me?"
"Connell, you don't wear makeup. Most women in Ms. Grange-Martinson's circle do. This afternoon I picked up some for you." Karne's patient tone grated my nerves.
"Oh all right," I sighed, picking up the set of brightly-wrapped cosmetics Karne handed to me. "Be right back."
"Connell, you do know how…" Karne trailed off when he saw my look.
"Yes, I do," I sighed. "I do have to visit my mother on occasion." I sighed again in spite of myself. Karne's eyes focused intently on my face. I worked to take the grimace out of my expression. Makeup. This opening had better be worth it.
I teetered on my heels walking through the gallery. It had a brick floor laid without mortar; each irregularity seemed to clutch at my stilettos, just begging me to break an ankle. Karne stayed next to me with his hand alternating between my elbow and my lower back. It wasn't disconcerting after the first twenty minutes. By then I was so tired of trying to stay upright and keep the look of displeasure off my face that I couldn't care about where Karne's hands were. Besides, he was no DuPret. Karne was weird, yes, but he wasn't sleazy.
I clamped down on my internal commentary as Karne led us through the loft-style space into a small rooftop greenhouse. The perimeter was lined with snake grass in pots. The grass had been lashed together at intervals to create tall and straight bundles nearly three feet high. In front of the snake grass sat a series of pedestals that seemed to encroach on the small space in the center. The claustrophobic sense was increased by what sat on the pedestals: dead animals.
"Taxidermy?" I whispered to Karne, turning closer to him. I tried to keep my eyes from widening too noticeably.
"Sculpture," he murmured. He turned to me, smiled, and drew his hand along my jaw line. He then ducked to speak into my ear. "She's here. Red shawl by the door. Call it sculpture. I'm going to ask her about gardening." He drew himself back up to full height and walked away from me toward a trim woman in a dress that reminded me of Imelda Marcos. Her pin-straight hair shone under the exhibit lighting, and a cluster of stones glinted from an elaborate ring on her left index finger. She stretched her hand out to Karne, palm down, and eyed him appreciatively as he took her hand.
A wave of discomfort overtook me as I watched her step closer to him. She was touching him too much. Her hand was constantly flitting from forearm to shoulder. She looked at him too intently. Another wave of worry hit, and brought some clarity to me when it receded. This was Karne we were talking about, not my actual husband. Not my actual anything, for that matter. She could touch him all she wanted. I turned resolutely away from them and peered at the forest of pedestals.
The animals were cunningly preserved. Their eyes seemed actively trained on one another, or things in the room. Each sat in a miniature environment—some of which seemed to be of living plants. Their claws and feet had none of the high glossiness some of the old specimens at the natural history building at college had. They seemed almost like living animals posed for a Victorian-style death portrait. I moved around the room slowly, comparing the positions of the animals. No limbs looked broken, and no skins seemed pierced. I couldn't even make out any insect damage. How did these animals even die? The longer I looked at them the more impressed, and the more disturbed, I became.
I cast my eyes back over to Karne. He was scrawling something on a cocktail napkin as he leaned against the doorframe next to Ms. Grange-Martinson. I fought not to sigh aloud. Couldn't he see she was just angling for her next lover? Didn't he know what was happening? I certainly knew—even from over here. I started to turn away again and stopped as she raised her hand to his arm. It was her left hand, and there was no wedding ring.
All right. Not unusual, really. Especially for sculptors, I imagined. Sculpting is probably a messy job. McLynn probably didn't wear her wedding ring all the time either. Right? Then again, the woman had that huge cluster of rocks on her index finger. At that point she lifted her right hand to shake Karne's hand again. There, on her right ring finger, was what I'd call an unmistakable wedding ring. I turned back toward a field mouse frozen beneath a dwarf tree that's scale made the rodent appear monstrously huge. I couldn't shake out the thought once I'd had it: widows wear their wedding rings on their right hands.
Karne returned to me soon after that. We spent a mercifully short time in the rest of the gallery, and my presence seemed to deter Ms. Grange-Martinson from speaking to Karne again. After a hairy few moments during which I tried to converse about minimalism with a half-drunk painter, Karne navigated us both out the door. Once we were in the car I was fairly bursting to talk.
"Something's rotten with that woman." I said sharply.
"The painter?"
"No, Grange-Martinson." I turned to Karne, who looked bemused. "She wears her ring like a widow."
"A stoning offence." Karne deadpanned.
"She's had her forehead done, if not her entire face."
"Terrible." Karne muttered.
"She fails to keep her hands to herself."
"How unseemly." Karne barely suppressed a laugh.
"And I can't tell how she kills those animals but I'd believe she beats them to death." I crossed my arms, content with my outline of the woman's faults.
"She does." Karne said mildly. "She breaks their necks."
"That's cruel," I protested. "You can't convince me she's not crazy."
"I wouldn't try." Karne said. He parked the car outside a Thai restaurant and walked around to my door. "Coming, Connell?"
"Yeah, yeah." I muttered. I followed fairly far behind Karne, as my heels prevented speed. By the time I'd entered the restaurant he'd ordered takeout.
"I think we should talk over the case to this point, Connell," Karne said. He'd taken a paper menu and spread it over his knee. His eyes scanned it restlessly as he talked. "I'd like your opinion on a few points."
"Of course." I said readily, trying not to sound excited that master detective Karne thought I could help. "At the lab?"
"At your apartment, if that's all right with you." He looked up at me. I nodded. "Good. I'd like to put in as few appearances at your workplace as I can." He resumed his inspection of the paper menu. I perched on the sliver of bench open beside him and ignored his look of surprise. If he wanted to pose as my husband he could deal with me sitting practically in his lap.
We sat on the carpet by my coffee table, our legs stretched out side by side beneath it and our backs propped against the couch. The wreckage of our takeout was strewn across the table with a series of line-drawn maps on scrap paper and a set of lists. I'd leaned my head back onto the couch cushion and was staring upward, thinking about the bones of the human neck.
"If she even tried, some process somewhere will be snapped or sheared—even flaked. I can't imagine she'd cause no damage at all." I concluded. I pulled my head back upright. Karne had tented his hands on the edge of the table and was staring intently at them.
"You're missing several vertebrae." He said quietly.
"Yes."
"Could a blow have disfigured only those?"
"Maybe." I considered a moment. If we were talking about a killer who used violent, crushing blows and who only used unmarred body parts for ritual disposal, we were not only talking about a psychopath but one with some anatomical knowledge. And it's so hard to kill a person with just blows to the neck. It's much easier to use a weapon, and well—it didn't fit. "Karne. It takes an outstanding amount of force to break a human neck. Perhaps too much. And there's no pattern to the missing bones—at least, none that would indicate one massive wound to the neck."
"You've said Doctor McLynn found a crushing injury to the arm bones attached to the hand."
"She did. But that's an arm, not a neck." I objected.
"It's only unlikely, Connell. Not impossible." Karne turned toward me, and I was again struck by the unusual color of his eyes. "But there are other means of killing that do not leave marks."
"What are you thinking?" I squinted at him.
"Poison."
"Common for women." I noted. "But let's back up. Say the two women are the source of the vertebrae in the pots. Say Ramos is the source of the hand. We've got a reason for the wife to kill the women, but no reason for her to kill Ramos. We haven't cleared the husband, and we at least know he's in the same place as all three of them."
"It's your instinctive dislike of Ms. Grange-Martinson that started us down this path." Karne noted.
"Suppose so." I agreed. I looked balefully at the pages of notes on the table. "We won't get any farther until I'm in the lab."
"Perhaps not." Karne agreed. He separated his hands for the first time since we'd finished eating; he then started to make piles of notes. I stood and carried the takeout containers to the trash. I caught sight of the clock on the oven and realized I had to be at work in four hours. By the time I turned to walk back toward the living room Karne was standing in the doorway of the kitchen.
"We meet Ms. Grange-Martinson at her private greenhouse at eleven. It's lunch. I'll pick you up at your office at ten." He said.
"Ten? Where do they live?"
"They don't. It's her home—the summer home—and she lives there without him. Trust me about the time." He gave a slight smile at the end.
"Fine. Do you want me to meet you at the end of the street so none of the people in my building see you?" I teased.
"That won't be necessary," he smirked. "Good night, Connell." He turned and quickly let himself out. I followed him to lock the door. He'd left the notes in two tidy piles on the table—one for lists and the other for maps. I thought about putting them in a file, or at least on my desk, but decided the delay in getting to bed was too great a payment for a small increase in tidiness. I fell asleep with my cocktail dress still on, and my heels discarded, one upright and one on its side, beneath the pile of maps on my coffee table.
