Death Warmed Over - By Kevin J. Anderson Page 0,18

Miranda was our client, and the client is always innocent, always wronged, and always on the right side of justice. But I’m not naïve, and I assumed that the sultry and vivacious woman was fooling around as well. Undoubtedly, her husband had his own private investigators trying to find dirt on Miranda. I just hoped that she was good at hiding it—and that Harvey wasn’t. In the matter of the prenup, it would all come down to which person had the better mudslinging campaign.

I spread out the photos and tapped them, focusing the conversation on business before Miranda could go into detail about her own sex life. “Here’s a curious one. I followed your husband to the landfill outside the city, after dark. Some kind of off-books delivery or disposal. Shouldn’t a big corporate exec have underlings for jobs like that?”

“Harvey has underlings to do everything, sweetheart. It’s suspicious, but I don’t see how that helps us.”

“I plan to follow up and ask around.” I pulled out more photos. Twice, I had tracked Harvey Jekyll to clandestine nighttime meetings with shadowy figures, once accompanied by his chief sales rep, Brondon Morris. “I have no idea what those meetings were. I could never get close enough.”

“Could it be a sex parlor of some kind?” Robin sounded embarrassed. “Drugs? Gambling?”

“We can only hope,” Miranda said. “You’ll need proof.”

“I will step up the surveillance, Mrs. Jekyll.” As a zombie, I could put in long hours, day and night. “It’s taken me a few weeks to . . . get back on my feet. Don’t worry, I’m on the job now. The cases don’t solve themselves.”

“No, sweetheart, they don’t.” She reached into her handbag, which probably cost as much as a block of real estate in the Unnatural Quarter, and withdrew her checkbook. “I’m going to double your hourly fee this week in hopes that it encourages you.”

She wrote out a check from her husband’s account, blew us an air-kiss, and said her goodbyes.

CHAPTER 8

Seated at my desk, I spent half an hour studying the homicide file McGoo had delivered to me (unofficially) four days after I awakened from the grave. “Here you go, Shamble—do your stuff. The cases don’t solve themselves.”

I was grateful, though intimidated. “It’s not often a person gets a chance to catch his own murderer.”

“Consider this a do-it-yourself project. Besides, it’ll save me the work.”

Fortunately for me, the medical examiner relied on virtual autopsies and high-tech imaging of suspected murder victims. (In my case, there wasn’t much “suspected” about the murder.) My body had been buried intact, relatively speaking.

Now I reread the report, although I already had the words memorized: Classification of Death: Homicide. Cause of Death: Gunshot wound to head. Bullet entered lamboid suture of skull, completely penetrating brain and exiting forehead. Wound is consistent with .32 caliber bullet found at crime scene.

The slug had been embedded in a wooden door in the alley, having lost most of its momentum after passing through my skull. The bullet was damaged by striking the door (not to mention the back and front of my skull, which, according to McGoo, is quite thick). Even so, the lab had gotten good information:

Lead rim-fired bullet, five lands and grooves with a right-hand twist, consistent with a round from an antique Smith & Wesson No. 2 Army .32 caliber revolver. As best we could tell, the weapon was made around the time of the U.S. Civil War. No bullet casing found at the scene, but in that kind of gun, someone would have had to remove the casing manually, and only a stupid murderer would have left it on the ground. Anybody who could have killed me had to be reasonably smart, or lucky. Just for my own reputation, I preferred to imagine him, or her, as fiendishly smart.

A lot of unnaturals had a fondness for antiques. Gun shops specialized in exotic pieces, and in the Unnatural Quarter it was easy enough to get hold of unregistered weapons of all makes and types. I just needed to figure out who owned a hundred-fifty-year-old Smith & Wesson .32 revolver.

Piece of cake.

Chambeaux & Deyer dealt with the usual gamut of cases: missing persons, divorces, civil lawsuits, recovery of stolen objects.

Seven years ago, Robin had won her first legal case dealing with unnaturals—securing a victory for a monster-literacy charity—before the two of us ever joined forces. A prominent werewolf millionaire had died as a result of a tragic silver-letter-opener accident (another story entirely), and the will left his