Anne Frasier - Play Dead

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She stopped and cast a glance around. "Where's my car?"

"I drove." Gould pointed to his black Honda. "You left yours at the morgue."

He unlocked his car with the automatic opener and they both slid inside.

"It just doesn't seem like you care about anything other than to be occasionally amused by it," Elise said. There. It was finally out. She'd told him what she'd been thinking for the past three months. "You aren't engaged."

He reversed the little car, then quickly exited the lot. "I can do my job without being engaged."

"A good cop has to care about people."

"You get hurt that way. You burn out that way."

"Is that why you wanted to avoid Mr. Harrison's room?" she asked. "Because you go out of your way to keep an emotional distance?"

"I told you. I don't like hospitals."

"Well, that's too damn bad! Neither do I! Do you think you can run from everything unpleasant?"

"I try."

Why couldn't they just have a normal conversation? Why did he have to make everything so hard?

"So." He stopped at a red light. "You're telling me I should do something about my attitude."

"Some adjustment wouldn't hurt and might even make your life easier." And hers.

"Hmm."

Remarkably, he seemed to give her words consideration.

"You might have a point."

This had been so easy. "Please give it some thought." Why hadn't she brought up his attitude before? Communication. That was what it was all about.

"Just say no," he said.

"Say no?" For a total of thirty seconds, their conversation had made sense. "Say no to what?"

"Some things I need to deal with, that's all."

"Such as…?" She wanted to keep the moment of frankness and camaraderie going.

"Nothing I want to talk about." Slam.

Oh, forget it. If she was from Venus, Gould was from a planet in a galaxy that hadn't yet been discovered. "I need food," she announced with a conscious effort to change the subject.

She was only thirty-one, but lately she'd noticed her brain didn't function as well on an empty stomach. "Swing by a drive-through on the way back to Police Headquarters," she told him.

The light turned green and he shot through the intersection. "Sounds good to me."

They ordered hamburgers, fries, and soft drinks.

Elise normally preferred healthy meals, but the frustration of the moment made her abandon her good intentions.

Once they had their food, Gould headed for the Savannah Police Department and parked in the lot across the street. On the way to Elise's office, they passed a group of coworkers, two of them homicide detectives Gould had been fighting with since his first day on the job. Elise had worked with both. Mid-thirties. Married, with kids.

"Cagney." Gould gave them a nod. "Lacey."

Their real names: Detectives Mason and Avery.

"Heard you got assigned the zombie case," Mason said, addressing Elise. He glanced at his partner, and pretty soon they were both hunched over, laughing into their fists like a couple of schoolboys.

"Appropriate, wouldn't you say?" Avery asked once he'd come up for air.

Gould shot Elise a curious look.

Apparently he was the one person in Savannah who didn't know everything about her-which was at least one bonus brought about by Gould's lack of social skills. Normally new recruits had Elise's history spelled out to them within days.

Avery's question was proof that no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't outrun your past. But Elise was always hoping people would at least lose interest.

That hadn't happened.

Everyone in the police force knew Elise had been abandoned in a cemetery as an infant. They knew that soon after her rescue a rumor began to circulate, claiming she was the cursed, illegitimate daughter of Jackson Sweet, a powerful white root doctor who'd died about the time Elise was born.

Nobody wanted a cursed infant, but eventually she was adopted into a rigid Christian family, where she was treated with a rather odd and aloof kindness. She spent her early childhood as an outsider, someone without a true identity, but the mystery and supposition surrounding her heritage gave her foundation and definition.

During those isolated years of early childhood, she read everything she could on root doctoring. By the time Elise was Audrey's age, she was learning simple spells and herbal remedies while studying under a hag who was looking for someone she could "pass the mantle" to.

But those days were long over.

She'd spent her entire professional career trying to put her past behind her in order to build credibility among her peers. But in Savannah, a place that seemed impervious to the outside world, you were your past.

Shrugging off Gould's silent question and ignoring Avery's taunt, Elise headed upstairs.

The office she and Gould shared was located On the third floor of Savannah Police Department Headquarters, with a window overlooking Colonial Park Cemetery. The city was proud of the historic police building, but even the addition constructed years ago wasn't enough to keep the PD from bursting at the seams.

Elise was afraid that once they were alone Gould would grill her about Mason's and Avery's comments. Anybody else would have been full of questions.

Instead, he planted himself in front of his computer, sandwich wrapper rustling, while Elise got on the phone and tried to contact Truman Harrison's cowork-ers in the Savannah Street Maintenance Department.

Behind her, she heard the rapid clicking of keys. "Not a homicide case," Gould muttered. "Don't know why Hoffman gave it to us."

Elise ended her conversation with the maintenance department secretary. "As soon as we find the restaurant where Truman Harrison ate, we can turn this over to the Department of Public Health. If his wife decides to sue the hospital, it will be a lawyer's game. Six years later, when it finally goes to court," she said, without trying to hide the annoyance she felt when it came to the legal system, "we'll be expected to recall every minute detail as if it happened yesterday."

"What I don't get is why it didn't kill Harrison."

"Maybe he ingested it before. Maybe he's built up a tolerance to it. Some poisons are like that."

"Here it is," Gould announced, fingers pausing on the keyboard, eyes focused on the screen, the hint of excitement in his voice getting Elise's attention.

" 'TTX is one of nature's strangest molecules and one of the deadliest poisons on earth,' " he read. " 'Gram for gram, it is ten thousand times more lethal than cyanide. A few short minutes after exposure, it paralyzes its victims, leaving the brain fully aware of what is happening.' "

He fell silent while continuing to read to himself. A few minutes later he let out a loud, derisive snort. "Guess Lacey wasn't so far off after all. It says here that tetrodotoxin is one of the ingredients used to make zombies."

Elise thought about that for a moment. "Makes sense."

He swiveled around to face her, hands braced behind his head. "I suppose you're going to tell me you believe in zombies."

"Zombies exist."

He dropped his hands, physically portraying his frustration. "Are you insane? Is everybody in this town insane?"

"You've seen too many B movies. Have you heard of The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis?"

"I think I caught a few minutes of it on Showtime before switching channels."

"That could have skewed your perspective. In the book, Davis postulates that zombies are very real, but never actually die. He suggests they are dosed with a powder that can be absorbed through the skin, leaving the victim in a state that mimics death. After the burial, the voodoo priest returns in the middle of the night and digs up the corpse, which isn't really a corpse but a somewhat lobotomized, oxygen-deprived individual, whom he then sells as slave labor in some town far from the victim's home."