The Laughing Corpse

29

The St. Louis County morgue was a large building. It needs to be. Every death not attended by a physician comes to the morgue. Not to mention every murder. In St. Louis that made for some very heavy traffic.

I use to come to the morgue fairly regularly. To stake suspected vampire victims so they wouldn't rise and feast on the morgue attendants. With the new vamp laws, that's murder. You have to wait for the puppies to rise, unless they've left a will strictly forbidding coming back as a vampire. My will says to put me out of my misery if they think I'm coming back with fangs. Hell, my will asks for cremation. I don't want to come back as a zombie either, thank you very much.

John Burke was as I remembered him. Tall, dark, handsome, vaguely villainous. It was the little goatee that did it. No one wears goatees outside of horror movies. You know, the ones with strange cults that worship horned images.

He looked a little faded around the eyes and mouth. Grief will do that to you even if your skin tone is dark. His lips were set in a thin line as we walked into the morgue. He held his shoulders as if something hurt.

"How's it going at your sister-in-law's?" I asked.

"Bleak, very bleak."

I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't. So I let it go. If he didn't want to talk about it, that was his privilege.

We were walking down a wide empty corridor. Wide enough for three gurneys to wheel abreast. The guard station looked like a WWII bunker, complete with machine guns, In case the dead should rise all at once and make for freedom. It had never happened here in St. Louis, but it had happened as close as Kansas City.

A machine gun will take the starch out of any walking dead. You're only in trouble if there are a lot of them. If there is a crowd, you're pretty much cooked.

I flashed my ID at the guard. "Hi, Fred, long time no see."

"I wish they let you come down here like before. We've had three get up this week and go home. Can you believe that?"

"Vampires?"

"What else? There's going to be more of them than of us someday."

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. He was probably right. "We're here to see the personal effects of Peter Burke. Sergeant Rudolph Storr was supposed to clear it."

Fred checked his little book. "Yeah, you're authorized. Take the right corridor, third door on the left. Dr. Saville is waiting for you."

I raised an eyebrow at that. It wasn't often that the chief medical examiner did errands for the police or anybody else. I just nodded as if I had expected royal treatment.

"Thanks, Fred, see you on the way out."

"More and more people do," he said. He didn't sound happy about it.

My Nikes made no sound in the perpetual quiet. John Burke wasn't making any noise either. I hadn't pegged him as a tennis shoe man. I glanced down, and I was right. Soft-soled brown tie-ups, not tennis shoes. But he still moved beside me like a quiet shadow.

The rest of his outfit sort of matched the shoes. A dressy brown sport jacket so dark brown it was almost black, over a pale yellow shirt, brown dress slacks. He only needed a tie, and he could have gone to corporate America. Did he always dress up, or was this just what he had brought for his brother's funeral? No, the suit at the funeral had been perfectly black.

The morgue was always quiet, but on a Saturday morning it was deathly still. Did the ambulances circle like planes until a decent hour on the weekend? I knew the murder count went up on the weekend, yet Saturday and Sunday morning were always quiet. Go figure.

I counted doors on the left-hand side. Knocked on the third door. A faint "Come in," and I opened the door.

Dr. Marian Saville is a small woman with short dark hair bobbed just below her ears, an olive complexion, deeply brown eyes, and fine high cheekbones. She is French and Greek and looks it. Exotic without being intimidating. It always surprised me that Dr. Saville wasn't married. It wasn't for lack of being pretty.

Her only fault was that she smoked, and the smell clung to her like nasty perfume.

She came forward with a smile and an offered hand. "Anita, good to see you again."

I shook her hand, and smiled. "You, too, Dr. Saville."

"Marian, please."

I shrugged. "Malian, are those the personal effects?"

We were in a small examining room. On a lovely stainless steel table were several plastic bags.

"Yes."

I stared at her, wondering what she wanted. The chief medical examiner didn't do errands. Something else was up, but what? I didn't know her well enough to be blunt, and I didn't want to be barred from the morgue, so I couldn't be rude. Problems, problems.

"This is John Burke, the deceased's brother," I said.

Dr. Saville's eyebrows raised at that. "My condolences, Mr. Burke."

"Thank you." John shook the hand she offered him, but his eyes were all for the plastic bags. There was no room today for attractive doctors or pleasantries. He was going to see his brother's last effects. He was looking for clues to help the police catch his brother's killer. He had taken the notion very seriously.

If he wasn't involved with Dominga Salvador, I would owe him a big apology. But how was I to get him to talk with Dr. Marian hovering around? How was I supposed to ask for privacy? It was her morgue, sort of.

"I have to be here to make sure no evidence is tampered with," she said. "We've had a few very determined reporters lately."

"But I'm not a reporter."

She shrugged. "You're not an official person, Anita. New rules from on high that no nonofficial person is to be allowed to look at murder evidence without someone to watch over them."

"I appreciate it being you, Marian."

She smiled. "I was here anyway. I figured you'd resent my looking over your shoulder less than anyone else."

She was right. What did they think I was going to do, steal a body? If I wanted to, I could empty the damn place and get every corpse to play follow the leader.

Perhaps that was why I needed watching. Perhaps.

"I don't mean to be rude," John said, "but could we get on with this?"

I glanced up at his handsome face. The skin was tight around the mouth and eyes as if it had thinned. Guilt speared me in the side. "Sure, John, we're being thoughtless."

"Your forgiveness, Mr. Burke," Marian said. She handed us both little plastic gloves. She and I slipped into them like pros, but John wasn't used to putting on examining gloves. There is a trick to it, practice. By the time I finished helping him on with his gloves, he was grinning. His whole face changed when he smiled. Brilliant and handsome and not the least villainous.

Dr. Saville popped the seal on the first bag. It was clothing.

"No," John said, "I don't know his clothing. It may be his, and I wouldn't know. Peter and I had … hadn't seen each other in two years." The guilt in those last words made me wince.

"Fine, we'll go on to the smaller items," Marian said, and smiled as she said it. Nice and cheery, practicing her bedside manner. She so seldom got to practice.

She opened a much smaller bag and spilled the contents gently on the shiny silver surface. A comb, a dime, two pennies, a movie ticket stub, and a voodoo charm. A gris-gris.

It was woven of black and red thread with human teeth worked into the beading. More bones dangled all the way around it. "Are those human finger bones?" I asked.

"Yes," John said, his voice very still. He looked strange as he stood there, as if some new horror were dawning behind his eyes.

It was an evil piece of work, but I didn't understand the strength of his reaction to it.

I leaned over it, poking it with one finger. There was some dried skin woven in the center of it all. And it wasn't just black thread, it was black hair.

"Human hair, teeth, bones, skin," I said softly.

"Yes," John repeated.

"You're more into voodoo than I am," I said. "What does it mean?"

"Someone died to make this charm."

"Are you sure?"

He glared down at me with withering contempt. "Don't you think if it could be anything else I wouldn't say it? Do you think I enjoy learning my brother took part in human sacrifice?"

"Did Peter have to be there? He couldn't have just bought it afterwards?"

"NO!" It was almost a yell. He turned away from us, pacing to the wall. His breathing was loud and ragged.

I gave him a few moments to collect himself, then asked what had to be asked. "What does the gris-gris do?"

He turned a calm enough face to us, but the strain showed around his eyes. "It enables a less powerful necromancer to raise older dead, to borrow the power of some much greater necromancer."

"How borrow?"

He shrugged. "That charm holds some of the power of the most powerful among us. Peter paid dearly for it; so he could raise more and older dead. Peter, God, how could you?"

"How powerful would you need to be to share your power like this?"

"Very powerful," he said.

"Is there any way to trace it back to the person who made it?"

"You don't understand, Anita. That thing is a piece of someone's power. It is one substance to what soul they have left. It must have been a great need or great greed to do it. Peter could never have afforded it. Never."

"Can it be traced back?"

"Yes, just get it in the room with the person who truly owns it. The thing will crawl back to him. It's a piece of his soul gone missing."

"Would that be proof in court?"

"If you could make the jury understand it, yes, I guess so." He stepped towards me. "You know who did this?"

"Maybe.»

"Who, tell me who?"

"I'll do better than that. I'll arrange for you to come on a search of their house."

A grim smile touched his lips. "I'm beginning to like you a great deal, Anita Blake."

"Compliments later."

"What's this mean?" Marian asked. She had turned the charm completely over. There, shining among the hair and bone, was a small charm, like from a charm bracelet. It was in the shape of a musical symbol-a treble clef.

What had Evans said when he touched the grave fragments; they slit her throat, she had a charm bracelet with a musical note on it and little hearts. I stared at the charm and felt the world shift. Everything fell together in one motion. Dominga Salvador hadn't raised the killer zombie. She had helped Peter Burke raise it. But I had to be sure. We only had a few hours until we'd be back at Dominga's door trying to prove a case.

"Are there any women that came in around the same time as Peter Burke?"

"I'm sure there are," Marian said with a smile.

"Women with their throats slit," I said.

She stared at me for a heartbeat. "I'll check the computer."

"Can we take the charm with us?"

"Why?"

"Because if I'm right, she had a charm bracelet with a bow and arrow and little hearts on it, and this came from the bracelet." I held the gold charm up to the light. It sparkled merrily as if it didn't know its owner was dead.