"I have to work--"
"It's Sunday."
"I've been busy with Pamela Larsen's case and falling behind on paperwork."
Rose sighed. "Fine. Go. I'll speak to Olivia in the morning."
"But not about--"
"Of course not."
"She needs to see a doctor. She'll argue--"
"I will look after Olivia for you, Gabriel."
"That's not--"
"Yes. I know. Now go."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After I finally did fall asleep, Rose came in every hour to ask the date and my name and how many fingers she was holding up. I played along without complaint. This wasn't how she'd planned to spend her Saturday night, so I was grateful . . . until 7 A.M., when I recited a dozen Sherlock Holmes quotes, back-to-back, and she declared I was clearly not suffering from a concussion and we could both get some sleep. Which would have been lovely, if my phone hadn't buzzed an hour later.
Gabriel.
"Where's your cat?" he said in greeting.
"Wha--?"
"TC. Your cat." He bit the words off, impatient. "I just realized I didn't see him at the apartment last night. Where is he?"
"Gone. The accommodations were not to his liking, apparently."
"When?"
I rubbed my face as I sat up. "Yesterday after my shift. He must have slipped out while I was taking the trash--"
"Did you see him leave?"
"No. I'm just presuming . . ." I realized where this was going. "You think someone took him?"
I must have sounded alarmed, because his voice smoothed out. "No, that'd be too much trouble. It seems unlikely, though, to be a coincidence that he vanished hours before this happened. I suspect someone was testing the door and let him out. I'm sure he's fine. However, that would mean the intruder was at your apartment earlier that day. I'll question Grace about that. Nothing escapes her notice, and she's usually forthcoming with me."
--
After talking to Gabriel, I tried to sneak home, but Rose caught me. We had breakfast. We talked. There wasn't much to discuss. Yes, poppies were a death omen. Yes, the most common hound folklore was the Black Shuck. Yes, finding a dead girl in my car--and her head in my bed--was terrible . . . and clearly an omen of the "you need a security system now" variety. She promised to read the cards and see what came up.
In the meantime, I had to see the doctor. Rose had set up the appointment. Dr. Webster made house calls, even on Sundays. She checked me out and decided I might have suffered a mild concussion but nothing requiring more than rest and painkillers.
After Dr. Webster left, I covered every inch of my apartment, looking for clues. There wasn't so much as a stray hair from the wig. All I had were the photos, blurry from my hands trembling.
I made notes from my memories of the night before. Then I looked up Ciara Conway on the Internet again and found nothing new. She was still missing, and would remain so until her killer decided to part with her corpse, which he or she seemed in no hurry to do.
That was the hardest part of all this to wrap my head around. Her killer was storing her body, toting it about, using it to scare me, as if it was a plastic tarantula. There was something truly chilling about that. What complete lack of respect for life would allow someone to cart a body around like a prop, would allow someone to say, "You know, I can't sneak the whole body into her apartment, so let's just chop off the head"? And what did it have to do with me?
Someone had murdered a young woman, one who resembled me in a very superficial "height, weight, body shape" way, and had a family connection to the tiny town where I now lived. As much as I wanted to believe my assailant had just . . . oh, I don't know, found Ciara dead from an overdose and decided to use her body, the chances of that were infinitesimal. She'd been selected. Killed to warn me not to dig deeper into my parents' crimes or deeper into Chandler's crimes or . . . Oh, hell, I didn't even know what the warning meant. I supposed I'd find out, whether I wanted to or not.
--