Diana Rowland - My Life as a White Trash Zombie

I smiled without humor. No. Where I went wrong was believing that being in the loser segment had anything to do with income or social class.

Derrel bagged up the various pills, then helped me maneuver the stretcher out of the condo and into the van. I wonder if she bought her pills from Clive. Certainly a possibility, though I knew there was a hefty market for pain meds, and plenty of people looking to make a buck that way.

Derrel’s phone rang as I was closing the back doors of the van. He made some notes on his pad and then looked up at me, expression sour. “Busy day today. Good thing there’s room in there for more than one body.”

The second body of the day was at the other end of the parish, in an apartment at the opposite end of the economic spectrum from Ms. Anderson’s luxury condo.

An ambulance was parked outside next to a Sheriff’s Office car and an unmarked one that clearly belonged to a detective. A quick glance at the unit number on the marked car told me that it wasn’t Marcus’s, and I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or disappointed.

Inside the apartment the carpet was old and threadbare in spots, and none of the furniture matched, but it was absolutely neat as a pin and as spotless as it was possible to make such a place. A faint scent of biscuits hung in the air, mingled with a faint flowery scent. I looked around to see if there was a reed diffuser in this place as well, but then realized that the source of the flowery smell came from actual flowers in a ceramic pitcher on the dining room table.

Detective Roth stood by the doorway to the kitchen. “Your victim’s in here,” he said in a low voice to Derrel, stepping aside so that we could see the woman on the floor. “Sarah Jackson.” Then he nodded his head toward the living room. A twenty-something black man wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and workboots sat on the couch with his head in his hands. “That’s Drew Russell, her boyfriend. They live together, but he got in from working offshore about an hour ago and found her.” He grimaced.

Derrel gave him a grave nod and then moved to the living room. I stayed back while he spoke in soft tones to the boyfriend, but the grief on the man’s face was so stark I had to turn away.

Stepping into the kitchen, I thought for a brief, jarring instant, that the woman was simply asleep—even though I knew that couldn’t possibly be the case. Not if we were there. She was lying on her right side, left arm out in front of her, legs slightly bent as if she’d curled up to take a nap. But her eyes were open and lifeless, and when I stepped closer I could see that her right arm was twisted awkwardly beneath her.

Crouching, I tugged on gloves. The portion of the body nearest the floor was red and mottled, and I’d been on the job long enough to know that was called “lividity”—the settling of the blood in the body after the heart stopped beating. I gently poked at a spot of red on her lower arm. It didn’t change color, which meant the lividity was fixed and that she’d probably been dead for several hours, at least. At least this isn’t something where the boyfriend is responsible , I thought with a vague relief. He seemed so devastated by loss, I’d have felt cheated if it was all some sort of act.

I looked up as Derrel came into the kitchen. “Anything interesting?” he asked as he crouched beside me.

“Lividity is fixed,” I replied. “That’s as far as I got.”

He nodded, then lifted the victim’s left arm and flexed it at the elbow. “Rigor’s come and gone, though that’s a lousy way to determine time of death. No sign of pulmonary edema—that bubbly-spit thing that the last body had. That can be a sign of possible OD.”

I didn’t think this woman had overdosed, but I had nothing more than a gut feeling to back that up, so I said nothing.

“I don’t think she’s an OD,” he said in echo of my thoughts. “But Dr. Leblanc will find out for sure.”

We did a quick sweep of the apartment for meds, coming up with nothing more than some antibiotics. A neighbor came and sat with the boyfriend while Derrel gently obtained information about her legal next of kin, and then I departed with the body, leaving the emotional wreckage behind.

Dr. Leblanc was ready to start the autopsies almost as soon as I made it back with the bodies. With the first, Theresa Anderson, he performed a quick-test for drugs while I was still getting her propped up on the block. He peered at the results then sighed and set the test aside. He practically zoomed through the rest of the autopsy, doing cursory examinations of the organs while I struggled to keep up. I’d seen the quick test, and I figured he didn’t feel like wasting time on an in-depth procedure when it was obvious to anyone with eyes that the woman had died of an overdose, whether intentionally or not. Of course there was always the consideration that it could have been staged and that it was a possible homicide, but that was for the cops to figure out. The pathologist’s primary job was to determine manner and means of death.

Realistically, though, we all knew there was no foul play involved in Theresa Anderson’s death. This was senseless, not sinister.

In stark contrast to the first, Dr. Leblanc took his sweet time with the second victim, Sarah Jackson. He performed a quick test on her as well, but it came back as clean as a whistle.

“Ah, well,” he finally said, looking down at the heart that he’d carefully sliced open on his cutting board. “That explains it.”

“What?”

He gestured me over with the blood-covered scalpel, and I obediently moved to his side. “She had an abnormally small right coronary artery. Most likely caused a fatal ventricular arrhythmia. Probably never had a single symptom.” He pointed to something within the heart, but I could only take his word that whatever I was looking at was abnormal in any way.

“Wait,” I said. “She never felt bad or sick from this? She just dropped dead?”

“That’s probably what happened.”

“That’s not fair!” I blurted, then realized how dumb that sounded. But it wasn’t. The rich bitch had thrown her life away, while Sarah Jackson had been working her ass off trying to make as nice a life as possible with what she had. Then she died with no warning.

Dr. Leblanc’s eyes were shadowed as he met my gaze. He’d seen it too many times, I realized. He was used to it.

He gave me a sad smile. “Welcome to death.”

I stood in the cooler until the cold seeped into my bones, and my fingers began to grow stiff. Death wasn’t fair. Death didn’t give warning. Death hit nice people and nasty people. It didn’t give a shit.

My one-month anniversary of working here had come and gone, and nothing had happened. No one gave me a medal or certificate for good behavior. It didn’t make a difference, I realized. Nothing had changed. I was still the same thing I was a month ago.

It wasn’t until hunger began to nudge at me that I realized I was being a moron and pushing my body too far with this whole standing-in-the-cold bullshit.

After making sure I was alone in the morgue, I went through my procedure of scooping the brains into my pickle jars. I felt no qualms when I salvaged the overdose victim’s brain, but when I turned to Ms. Jackson’s bag, I hesitated. Her death had been unfair enough already. Now I was going to desecrate her by making her brain my dinner?

Hunger poked at me again. Tightening my jaw, I quickly put her brain into the jar. Yeah, death wasn’t fair. And I’m not gonna give it any more head starts.

“What the hell happened to this guy?”

Detective Mike Abadie turned at my question then offered a thin smile. “Lawn mower,” he said, gesturing to the riding mower lying on its side a few feet away from the body. Not just any lawn mower, either, but one of the big tractor things usually used in yards that were measured in acres instead of feet.