Destroying Angel, page 4
Julia leaned in – close enough to feel the warmth of Emery’s body, and the freshness of her scent. “Don’t let Nick step off the trail once you find it. I don’t think the kid had anything to do with his friend’s death, but I can’t have him contaminating the scene just in case.”
If Tom was here, he’d have something to say about this choice but if this was the only day she had an expert mycologist at her disposal, she’d have to make do. Besides, if Tom was here, they could split up and the problem would be solved.
Emery stayed close, their faces only inches apart, as she met Julia’s gaze. “Are you sending me into the forest with a potential murderer, detective?”
“I trust that you can handle yourself,” Julia said. She knew Emery was teasing, but at the same time, she was making her question every choice she was making.
But Emery winked at her, then hopped back across the creek and climbed up the bank with Nick. They disappeared up the trail, and Julia stood there with her hands on her hips, the morning sun starting to bake down on her, a skeleton beneath the tree at her back.
Yeah, this was a strange life, but it was the one she’d chosen and she loved it.
8
EMERY
They didn’t have to go far to find the fairy ring – it was just another five minutes up the trail, and it turned out to be Agaricus campestris, the perfectly edible and common meadow mushroom.
Emery picked a couple for lab analysis just to be thorough, and carefully checked over the whole ring.
Nick stood on the trail looking bored now that the adrenaline of his gruesome finding was wearing off. “Do you really have to check every one? They’re the same.”
“So says the mushroom hunter who stumbles upon a group of similar-looking fungi and foolishly assumes they’re all alike,” Emery said. Although, to be fair, the likelihood that the mushrooms growing in a ring would be of different species was very rare. Still, she was out here to do a job and she was going to do it well.
It took her about twenty minutes to thoroughly inspect the fairy ring, which was about five feet in diameter and one of the neater specimens she’d come across, with no breaks in the ring—although a few of the stalks were missing their caps—and a number of bright-white, fully mature mushrooms. A welcome sight for foragers, and in this case entirely harmless.
“All right, I guess I have enough samples,” Emery said, standing and tucking the meadow mushrooms into the pack at her waist.
“I don’t want to say yay because that just means we’ll have to go back and look at that skeleton again,” Nick said. “Any chance I can convince you to just finish the hike? It’s a big loop, goes back to the parking lot.”
“I promised the detective we’d swing back.”
Nick rolled his eyes but started walking.
“Do you think she thinks I had something to do with Brandon’s death?” he asked after a few seconds. He seemed incapable of enduring silence.
“I really don’t know,” Emery said.
“We’ve been best friends since the third grade,” Nick went on. “I was closer to him than my own brothers.”
He just kept talking, trying to expel his nervous energy, and Emery could see the anguish in his eyes. Eventually, she mustered a few words of consolation. “If Detective Taylor thought you were a murderer, I doubt she’d let you wander around near the evidence.”
Nick nodded. Then he let out a strained laugh and added, “Or be alone with you.”
“Yes, let’s hope not.”
It was easy to find the place where they’d left Julia because when they got back, reinforcements had arrived and were in the process of stringing up yellow caution tape in a wide perimeter around the tree. There was a forensic investigator with a large plastic briefcase preparing to collect evidence.
When Julia spotted Emery, she passed off the caution tape to a woman in a patrol uniform, asking, “Can you take over?”
“Yep, no problem,” the officer answered.
Julia climbed up the bank, her cheeks rosy with exertion. “Well?”
“No Amanitas,” Emery said. “The fairy ring was edible meadow mushrooms.” She pulled the bag out of her pack to show the detective. “And I haven’t seen anything on the whole hike that would be lethally toxic. I’ll confirm it in the lab, but the worst you’d get from these is a stomachache if you’re sensitive.”
“And if you’re not, you can eat them?”
“Probably not a good idea to eat them raw – that goes for all mushrooms,” Emery said. “But yeah, these are as edible as they come.”
Julia was nodding along attentively – she was a much better student than the kids Emery had been dealing with lately. Nick was inching his way along the trail, though, trying not to look in the direction of the skeletal remains.
The detective noticed him and said, “Do you want to leave? I think that’s all we need from you today.”
“That would be great,” he answered, and practically ran down the trail toward the parking lot.
“Aren’t you going to tell him not to leave town?” Emery asked.
“He already got that warning when we talked to him yesterday,” Julia said. “Do you mind sticking around a little bit longer, though? I have some questions while I’ve got you, but I can’t leave yet.”
She hooked a thumb in the direction of the investigator and the cop down by the stream, and Emery tried not to smile at her choice of words. While I’ve got you…
You can keep me as long as you like.
“No problem, I’m not expected at the university until after lunch.”
“Great,” Julia said, pulling out her phone to take notes. “I read the patient chart from the hospital, and talked to the doctor, but it all seemed so chaotic – Hawthorne was pretty much circling the drain by the time he got to the ER. What I don’t understand is why he just sat around his apartment and let his liver shut down. What would his symptoms have been?”
“It’s possible he thought he was on the mend,” Emery said, pleased to be teaching an adult – and to have a few more minutes of admiring Julia’s warm brown doe eyes. “If he’s not an experienced forager, or he didn’t know that he consumed a destroying angel, he likely thought he had a particularly nasty flu, or food poisoning.”
She explained the progression of symptoms, something that she fortunately only had theoretical knowledge of.
“It takes a few hours for the poisons to be metabolized and released into the system. You feel fine for six to twelve hours, and then you are very, very not fine,” she said. “Food poisoning symptoms – nausea, vomiting, diarrhea – persist for about a day. If you go to the hospital at that stage, you have the best chance at survival. You’ll get purgatives and fluids and hopefully flush the toxin out of your system before it has a chance to do any lasting damage to your organs. If you don’t get treatment, the gastrointestinal symptoms let up after the first day and you start to think you’re over it. That lasts another twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
“So we’re three days out from consumption now,” Julia tallied.
“Yep, and then the really bad turn comes,” Emery said. “The GI symptoms resume, and the toxins start to attack the liver, causing major damage that can go on to cause convulsions, coma, death…”
“That’s about when Brandon’s mom found him,” Julia grimaced.
“At that point, it’s too late for purgatives and fluids,” Emery added. “Liver dialysis may help, but most of the time when it goes that far, the patient needs a liver transplant urgently or they will die.”
Julia nodded. “Hawthorne was on the transplant list, he just didn’t get a match in time. So you think he started feeling better and got tricked into thinking the worst was over?”
“I’m not a medical doctor so reading his chart wasn’t really enough to let me answer that, but it’s possible,” Emery said.
“So, if he didn’t come out here and pick these things himself, where would he have gotten them?” Julia asked. “Somebody had to poison him is all I can figure.”
“I was thinking about that,” Emery nodded. “Worst-case scenario is a restaurant. Someplace that might still be serving them to unwitting patrons.”
“Seriously?” Julia blanched.
“High-end ones often source their ingredients from local sellers,” Emery said. “And small-time foragers who sell to restaurants are sometimes just in it for a quick buck. There aren’t nearly as many regulations in place as there are for chain restaurants, so you could end up with an inexperienced seller who doesn’t know a deadly mushroom from an edible one.”
“What a nightmare,” Julia said. “And that doesn’t even account for the possibility it was intentional. Like those old news stories about people going into pharmacies and tampering with Tylenol bottles.”
“There would probably be an awful lot more sick people if this happened on purpose,” Emery tried to reassure her.
“Detective?” the officer called from the creek. “Could we get a hand down here?”
“Sure, just a minute,” Julia called back. She turned to Emery. “Duty calls. Thank you so much for the information, and for agreeing to come out here today. It’s been really helpful.” She cast her eyes down toward her shoes as she added, “And sorry again for…”
The phantom sensation of her palms tingled over Emery’s breasts.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, then dug a business card out of her fanny pack. “Here, in case you have any more questions about the case.”
“Thanks.” When Julia met her eyes again, she was smiling, and Emery thought she could see desire dancing in her eyes – maybe she was reliving her near-tumble too?
“I know you already have my office number, but I wrote my cell on the back,” Emery added. It was something she pretty regularly did because she didn’t always remember to forward her office phone when she left, but something had compelled her to make sure Julia knew that her cell number was there.
Something like the feeling of the detective’s hands on her chest, maybe?
Julia flipped the card over, noted the number and shot her a quick, sideways smile. “Got it, I’ll call you.”
And then she was skidding down the hill toward the investigation scene, and Emery was struggling to keep a stupid smile off her face until after she was out of view. There was chemistry there – she wasn’t imagining it… was she?
9
JULIA
Julia was tempted to walk Emery back to the parking lot, if only to spend a bit more time with her. She could always disguise her interest as curiosity about the mushrooms involved in Brandon Hawthorne’s death, but the plain truth was that she was immediately attracted to Emery Ellison.
Which was saying something after what Samantha put her through back in Michigan.
She’d fully expected to never fall in love again, or at least require some major therapy first. And yet here she was, definitely more in lust than in love, but feeling something.
And a whole lot of it.
In the end, though, a combination of professional duty and morbid curiosity had her sticking around the death scene. She wasn’t a forensic investigator, but she damn well wanted to know how the ME’s office was planning to get that skeleton out of the tree that had grown all the way around it.
Turned out, the answer was heavy machinery and the forest’s second specialist of the day – a forensic anthropologist.
It took most of the day to arrange it all, by the end of which Julia’s feet and thighs ached from clambering up and down the hill so many times and her stomach had given up on reminding her that she was hungry. But she got to watch as they chopped the skeletal remains out of the base of the tree, and then dug into the stream bank to free the ball of roots and bones that resulted.
It was a hell of an undertaking and the investigator – who Julia learned was named Tyler – took pictures throughout the process. The whole thing culminated in Tyler painstakingly backing his van down the trail, and all of them working together to load the various pieces of skeletal remains and roots into the vehicle.
It was dark by the time they were all finished, and Julia was exhausted. Her stomach reawakened just as she was sliding behind the steering wheel of her car, relieved to be sitting for the first time all day.
She watched the ME’s van make its way back up the trail, and Tyler paused with the window down right beside Julia’s car. “You good? Not too tired to drive home?”
“Been a long day but I’m fine, you?”
“Yup,” he said. “I’ll call you when we know something.”
He pulled onto the road, headed back to the ME’s office. The patrol officer – Mel – had already left, as had the anthropologist and the lumberjack, so that just left Julia in the parking lot. Suddenly she couldn’t wait another minute to get some food in her.
It was that I would literally kill for a burger sort of hunger, so she decided to go to the burger joint she’d found near her apartment that was pretty decent. It occurred to her as she drove that both the restaurant and her apartment were not far from the university Emery worked for.
It was called Foster University, which Julia hadn’t realized until she saw it on Emery’s business card. She’d heard a few people around the station call it Fox U, and as cheeky as it was, she’d assumed that was the actual name.
Julia was tempted to call her now. It was after seven and the chances that Emery would still be in her office were slim. But she did have Emery’s cell, and Julia hated to eat alone.
She could invite her out for a burger, thank her for her help today. Explore the spark she was sure she’d felt on the trail earlier.
Get herself into a whole new batch of trouble in Pennsylvania to match what she’d left behind in the last state.
Yeah, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.
So she went to the restaurant, ordered a burger to go, scarfed half the French fries before she even got back to her apartment, and ate the rest alone with an episode of Bones for company – prompted by the day’s crime scene, no doubt.
And went to bed alone – alone was safest.
10
JULIA
The next day, Julia reported to the station and filled everyone in on her gnarly discovery in the woods. All the detectives were just as fascinated as she was, but so far there was no evidence that there’d been foul play.
Julia had called Tom the previous day during a slow moment to tell him what had happened. She resisted the urge to beg to be reassigned to the more interesting case, but he had suggested that she stay in the woods for the day and let him take over the Hawthorne investigation for the day.
It seemed like a fair compromise. There might not even need to be a homicide detective on the tree-skeleton case if the ME determined the death had been natural.
“Dr. Trace has her work cut out for her,” Arlen said this morning, shaking her head. “The tree was actually growing around the skeleton?”
Julia nodded. “All tangled up – it was wild.”
Renee snorted. “Literally wild.”
“Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you today,” Tom reminded Julia. “While you were out yesterday, I called Brandon Hawthorne’s boss, head coach for the Fox City High boys’ baseball team. He said Brandon called off work a couple weeks ago with the flu, he came back a couple days later and acted fine for a day, and then he just stopped showing up.”
Julia told him the mycologist had outlined a disease progression that matched that perfectly.
“Note it in the case file,” he said.
“She gave me a good lead yesterday, said fancy restaurants sometimes buy foraged mushrooms, so I’m gonna call around and see if any of them have recently made a purchase,” Julia added.
“Good,” Tom said. “I also tried to reach the girlfriend to no avail, and I called his parents and they’re ready to talk. They said they’d come in today – you want to team up on this one?”
“Sure,” Julia said. “When?”
Tom checked his watch. “About five minutes.”
“Oh shit, let me review my notes.” She turned to her computer, tuning out the morning chit-chat going on around her while she worked on pushing yesterday’s death scene out of her mind and refreshing herself on her original reason for being in those woods.
She took out Emery Ellison’s business card and added it to the case file, and she made a mental note to call and see if anything had come of the samples Emery took yesterday.
What felt like about thirty seconds had gone by when Julia blinked and found Tom standing over her desk, a couple to-go cups of coffee in a cardboard beverage holder his hands. “You ready?”
“It’s time?”
He nodded, and Julia stood.
“Ugh, thanks for that, I haven’t had any caffeine yet–”
She reached for one of the to-go cups but he held them out of reach and snorted. “These are for the grieving parents. Plan better next time.”
Dully noted.
Julia followed him down the hall to a so-called pink room, specially designed to be soothing for victims and family members – as opposed to the stark, discomfort-inducing interrogation rooms used for suspects. It was a lot like the waiting room they’d initially spoken to the Hawthornes in at the hospital – comfortable upholstered furniture, lamps instead of harsh overhead lighting, and yes, light-pink walls believed to produce a calming effect.
Still conspicuous, however, were the hallmarks of a police observation room – tissues, trash can, recording equipment.
The Hawthornes sat together on a sofa, but this time Mrs. Hawthorne wasn’t tucked into her husband’s side. There was a foot and a half between them, and she sat rigid, her lips pressed into a tight line like she’d shut down her emotions in order to maintain her composure. Julia wondered if she’d done that just for this meeting, or if it was how she was coping at home too.
