D. Gilles - Colder Than Death

“You want me to do anything more?”

“No.”

“Not even acting as a liaison between you and Quilla Worthington?”

“Just stay out of my way and keep doing what you do best…burying people. By the way, speaking of Quilla Worthington, her mother called in here. She hasn’t come home for two nights. Disappearing must run in the family.” Perry leaned back in his chair.

“She’s been investigating the case herself.”

Perry smirked. “Right!”

“Maybe she accomplished what you couldn’t.”

“What are you saying?”

“Maybe she found the killer and he’s got her.”

“Bullshit.”

“You think you have problems now? If anything happens to that kid you might have six murders to account for. You talk about being disgraced in this town, let me tell you something, you’ll be tarred and feathered.” I pointed to his computer. “It’s a good thing you’re so adept on that thing. If Quilla stays vanished you’ll be spending the rest of your life making eight bucks an hour as a word processor.”

I turned and left, nodding good-bye to Oscar in the outer office. As I headed back to the Home I wasn’t sure how I felt. A part of me was relieved that I didn’t have to be around Perry and think about the case. But another part made me wonder if Perry would half-ass his investigation and deny Quilla, Gretchen and I the closure we so desperately wanted.

It was close to midnight when I swung into the parking lot of the Home. I was surprised to see a vehicle parked in the lot. It was Viper’s ancient VW bug. I pulled alongside it, got out of my car and looked inside. Viper was sleeping. I nudged his right calf a couple of times, waking him.

“Hi, Mr. Coltrane,” he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and sitting up.

“Did you get my message?” I asked. I assumed Gretchen had finally reached him and that he’d come to see me.

“What message?”

“From Gretchen.”

“I didn’t get any message from anyone today. Our phone was out of order all day.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To pick up a magazine from Mr. Fowler. Yesterday, Quilla and I went to his house to get a bunch of ’em and…”

“You saw Quilla yesterday?”

“In the afternoon. She went with me to Mr. Fowler’s.”

“And she was okay?”

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t she be? I can’t believe I fell asleep.” He glanced at his watch. “Whoa…I’ve been out here for three hours. Mind if I get out and stretch my legs?”

“Go ahead.” He opened the door and got out. “Quilla didn’t come home last night or the night before and as of a couple hours ago, she hasn’t been home tonight.”

“She stayed at my house night before last.”

“Why didn’t she tell her mother?”

“We kind of got drunk and forgot. She’s mad at you.”

“Why?”

“Because you were giving up on finding the killer.”

“Did she stay at your house last night?”

“No.”

“Where could she have stayed?”

He got a bemused look. “She has a few other places to crash, but that’s only when she’s pissed at her mom. She said they’re getting along good since her Aunt’s funeral so she wouldn’t have had a reason not to come home last night. I’m starting to feel weird about this. In fact, I think I’m gonna, like, pass out.”

Suddenly, Viper fell into my arms. I picked him up and carried him inside, into my office where I placed him on the sofa. I took an ammonia pellet from a drawer and opened it under his nose. He regained consciousness instantly.

“Wow,” he said, sniffling and coughing as he sat up. He looked around the office. “How’d I get in here?”

“You fainted. Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Fainting. It’s like, such a chick thing. Would you promise not to tell anyone, especially Quilla?”

“Promise. When was the last time you saw Quilla?”

He paused for a few seconds, scratching his head and scrunching up his forehead. “We went to Mr. Fowler’s to get the mortician magazines he wanted me to look at. We stayed there about ten minutes. No. Wait. That’s wrong. We went to Mr. Fowler’s after we went out to the cemetery.”

“What were you doing at the cemetery?”

“Checking out gravestones. By the thing where her Aunt’s body was found. Quilla said you and she went up there at night and checked ’em out, but she felt you guys might’ve missed something because of the dark. She’s got this idea that nobody’ll be able to solve her Aunt’s murder except her, so she’s putting a package together to give to a private detective she was gonna hire.”

“Where’d you two go after you left the cemetery?”

“Her laptop’s broken so we went to my house and she typed the names in alphabetical order. There were a bunch.”

I glanced at my desk and noticed the detailed printout of the names that Perry had given me when he showed up after Alphonse’s funeral. I reached for it. I was curious if they had managed to find some additional names that Quilla and I might’ve missed.

“Would you know how many names you two came up with?” I asked as I held Perry’s printout in my right hand. There were fifty-six names in two columns. Column A contained forty-five names that Perry labeled as Typical/Normal. Column B had the eleven oddly spelled foreign surnames that Perry felt could have been Americanized into shorter names.

“Not off the top of my head,” said Viper. He reached into his shirt pocket, removed a flash drive and glanced at my computer. “I can plug this in and pull up the list for you.”

“You always carry a flash drive with you?”

“It’s Quilla’s. Forgot to give it to her.”

Viper inserted the flash drive into the back of my computer. Within seconds I was looking at the list of names he’d typed up. They weren’t numbered, so I had to count. He stood behind me and counted, as well.

“I get sixty-four names,” I said.

“I get sixty-three,” said Viper.

“Let’s count together.” We did. Viper was right.

“You and Quilla found seven more names. Tell you what… ” I handed him my list. “That’s in alphabetical order too. You read the names from it and I’ll check them off on the computer screen.”

“This has two separate lists of names,” he said.

“Read the longer one first.”

“No problem.”

It took us only a few minutes to find the additional names. All seven were common and none rang a bell for me.

“What’s this other list?” asked Viper.

“Foreign names that might’ve been shortened to sound more American.”

Viper glanced at the list. “Some of these are really strange-sounding. And I thought having to go through life with a name like Petrovitch was bad.”

He laughed. I did too.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “This one name…” He stared at the sheet of paper. “I could swear I saw this…”

“What? Which name?”

“The fifth one from the top.” He handed me the list.

“Oberfuolner? You know this name?”

“I saw it.”

“Where?”

Viper closed his eyes and again scratched his head and scrunched up his face for several seconds, then a huge smile flashed across his face. “Ah! Yesterday. At Mr. Fowler’s.”

“Nolan’s?”

“It was over his fireplace. Hanging on the wall. It was one of those things. People with ancestors who go way back have them. Family… uh…family somethings.”

“Family crests?”

“Yeah! That name was part of a design with a couple of Crossed swords and some other stuff on it, but I remember the name because it was so weird-looking.”

I looked at the name again: Oberfuolner. I froze.

“What does it mean, Mr. Coltrane?”