Сара Пинскер - Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea - Stories

“Yeah. Four others pretty similar to her. They’d all been on the verge of making the same discovery, so they were the first ones she reached out to.”

Next question, if I was acting sheriff. “I don’t suppose this bar has a walk-in fridge or freezer?”

“Why? Oh God. Shit. Yeah, there’s a walk-in fridge.”

“You take the legs and I’ll get the arms?”

She nodded.

As I positioned myself, the body’s head tipped forward, and I saw what I would have looked for earlier, if I were a real detective: a sickening, deadly deep indentation at the back of the skull. A cave-in. The hair was matted and sticky-looking, blood and—I didn’t want to look closer.

“I think I found the cause of death,” I said. “And I think we can rule out natural causes. Fuck.”

I didn’t want to touch the head any more than I wanted to look, but we still had to move the body. I grabbed a towel from the bar and wrapped her like she’d just stepped out of the shower. It still lolled against me as I lifted, and I fought the urge to be sick. She wasn’t heavy, wasn’t yet stiff. Rigor mortis started two hours after death. An odor came off her; a body doing body things, I told myself.

We put her in the walk-in in a re-creation of the position she’d been sitting in. I inspected her exposed parts. No blood other than the back of her head. No bullet holes. Some bruises, as I’d noted earlier, but none that looked like they came from a fight or a fall. I wasn’t comfortable looking any further than that. After, I waited while Hotel Sarah rummaged in a drawer for notepad and tape and made a thick-markered “Do Not Open” sign for the fridge door.

“So, do you think she just fell and hit her head?” she asked. “Or do you think she was murdered?”

There was a hopeful note in her voice on the first option, but below that, I could tell she didn’t believe it any more than I did. “ You do, or else you want me to reassure you that the track marks suggest she overdosed and stumbled off the stage. Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me up here. You would have dealt with it quietly, to keep from scaring the rest of the guests or harming the convention. You still want to deal with it quietly.”

She shifted from foot to foot. I recognized her restlessness. She felt helpless. Wanted something concrete to do, a decision made for her, a plan.

“Okay, here’s what I need from you,” I said, taking pity. I didn’t know my next step, but I could give her a task. “Go back down to registration, make me a copy of whatever you’ve got down there. Um, and what time was that dance supposed to start? They can decide if they want to have it in some other space, but they probably shouldn’t have it in here, in case there’s still evidence to be found. And, you know, out of respect. I’m going to look around right now, but I’d think the police would still want this left untouched.”

“I think they’ll cancel the dance. The DJ didn’t look fit to play.”

“I’m going to need to talk to her, too. But maybe downstairs, so she doesn’t have to come back in here? And the sound person.”

She nodded and left.

There really wasn’t anything else to do without the registration list. And it wouldn’t do any good to interview people without the right questions. Hard to ask who else was up here, when everyone looked the same. Hard to ask “Where were you at x o’clock?” if you didn’t solve for x. I could at least guess at that.

Or start with the crime scene; I walked back over. The stage was about chest high. I’d only had eyes for her before, but looking now, there was a blood smear on the stage’s lip just above where the body had been. The spot where she’d hit her head? No, the lip wasn’t the right shape to have caused the damage, I didn’t think. I pictured myself tripping or slipping off the edge of the stage, but I couldn’t imagine a way I would have fallen that would have had that result. No scuff marks, no chips in the wood, no bone fragments or hair. Just the one small smear and a deeper bloodstain where her head had been resting when we got to her. The wound itself hadn’t bled a lot. Maybe a forensic expert could see more.

A coroner would be useful, too. They’d be able to say if she’d fought someone, though I didn’t think so. She hadn’t looked scared or angry or horrified or even distressed. Dead. An absence of her, an absence of me.

The stage had two narrow curtained wings, and stairs on both sides. I walked to the front of the stage, to the spot where she must have slipped off or fallen after being hit. I tried to imagine falling from here. If someone had hit me from behind, I’d have put my hands out, fallen forward, unless they had dropped me in my tracks. There was no scenario I could think of that would result in stepping straight off to hit the back of my head on the stage. Maybe if I was looking behind me as I walked, and missed the edge? Even then, I’d expect more of a twist, a person trying to catch herself as she went down.

Something caught my eye a few feet from the stage, under the pedestal foot of the first table. I hopped down carefully. A keycard, still in its envelope. Room 517. The dead Sarah’s pockets were shallow enough that it could have fallen from her pocket, though the trajectory didn’t seem quite right. I dropped it into my bag and looked around to see if the floor held any other secrets, but didn’t see anything. Back to the stage.

The far wing was packed with music equipment and PA speakers. I hefted one of the mic stands. It had a pedestal base, heavy enough to hit someone with. There were six of them in a row, and any of them could be a murder weapon, though I didn’t see blood, and they were rounded, where the wound had looked angular.

The wing closer to the DJ table was empty except for the top of a travel case. It was black and silver, all the edges and corners reinforced with metal. I hefted it: heavy, and this was the unpacked half. The underside was foam, cut to fit the turntables. It had a small dent in one corner, and I flipped it to look at it closely. The shape was right, but it would be an awkward thing to wield. Still, I mentally added it to the list.

I felt around the edges and found a luggage tag. Sarah Pinsker. The unmoored feeling caught me again; it was getting more familiar. Seattle address, in Rainier Beach, if I was right about the zip code. One of the cheaper neighborhoods to rent in the city, at least in my world.

The DJ equipment was set up on a table in front of the alcove. Under the table, two full record crates. I thumbed through them, amused I’d guessed the genres correctly. On the table, two fancy-looking vinyl turntables with a mixing console in between, all cushioned in the other half of the travel case. I knew nothing about DJ gear, didn’t know if this was expensive or cheap equipment. There were two records already on the turntables, the Sharon Jones/David Bowie cover of Bowie’s “Modern Love,” and Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours.” I’d have had fun dancing to those. Too bad the dance wouldn’t happen now.

There was an “SP” in silver marker at each record’s center, and on each piece of equipment. I pictured tomorrow’s lineup of musicians, all with the SPs that normally differentiated their gear from others’.

I ran my finger over a spot where the foam had separated from the protective casing. Some glue would stick it back, an easy repair, except as I touched it I realized something had been pushed down in between. I crooked a finger into the gap and felt around until I snagged a tiny envelope. Tapped it out into my palm: eight tiny pills. I didn’t recognize them, but I didn’t have any knowledge of narcotics. They could be ibuprofen, for all I knew, though most people didn’t go around slipping envelopes of ibuprofen into secret cubbies. In my world, anyway.