Murder on the Rocks Read online

  “Sure,” I said, tasting chocolate again. “Go ahead.”

  “You found the body?”

  “I did.”

  “Your name?”

  “Mackenzie Dalton. People call me Mack, or sometimes Little Mack.”

  “Like the bar?”

  I nodded.

  “I take it you own the place, then?”

  “I do, though it was originally my father’s. His name was Mack Dalton.”

  Albright was scribbling this information in his notebook when he paused and looked up at me. He was attractive, with even features, light brown, sun-streaked hair, and a pleasant face with laugh wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth. His eyes were a deep, dark brown, the kind you find on cuddly puppies. I pegged him as around my own age—somewhere in his mid- to late thirties—and I ran a self-conscious hand through my hair as he stared at me, wishing I had showered and fixed myself up a bit before all this happened. My hair is a nest of wild red curls that I typically pull back into a ponytail or clip, but I hadn’t done so yet this morning. The least the killer could have done was give me a heads-up so I could fix my hair and put on a little foundation to cover my freckles.

  “Forgive me,” the detective said finally. “I’m new to the area, but that name rings a bell.”

  “That’s probably because my father was murdered this past January, shot in the alley out back, not far from the body that’s out there now. It’s still an open case. The cops who investigated thought it was a robbery gone wrong.”

  “And you don’t?”

  I shrugged. As far as I was concerned, there were a lot of unanswered questions surrounding my father’s death.

  Albright studied me a moment longer, making my insides squirm strangely, and then he scribbled something else in his little book. I set my glass down, tossed the bar towel over my shoulder, and stepped back away from him. I was hoping a little distance would lessen my reaction to him.

  “What time did you get here this morning?” Albright asked, still scribbling and not looking at me.

  “I live here, in an apartment upstairs. I found the body when I took out my trash.”

  He stopped writing then and looked at me, his eyes doing a quick head-to-toe assessment. “Do you live alone or with someone?”

  Hmm . . . why is he asking me that? “Alone.”

  “And were you alone last night?”

  Wow, nosy much? “Yes, I was.”

  “Ever been married?”

  “No.”

  “Are you dating anyone?”

  “Yes.” Well, sort of. “How about you?”

  “What about me? Have I ever been married, or am I dating?”

  “Either.”

  “Neither.”

  Interesting. “What’s with the twenty questions? Am I a suspect?”

  He flashed me a smile and tossed back a non sequitur. “Do you know the woman whose body is out back?”

  So it is a woman. “I don’t know. Like I told the 9-1-1 operator, I wasn’t even sure if the body was male or female. It was underneath a pile of cardboard and all I saw was an arm.”

  One eyebrow arched and he scribbled some more. I felt myself relax a smidge now that he wasn’t staring at me like some bug on a pin, but his next question tensed me right up again.

  “But you moved the cardboard to look at her, didn’t you?”

  I didn’t answer right away as I debated the pros and cons of telling the truth. Realizing that my hesitation alone was enough to make me look suspicious, I tried to cover by assuming a confused but hopefully innocent-looking expression.

  “There was a light rain this morning,” Albright explained, pinning me with his stare again. “And it left the cardboard wet. Part of one of the victim’s arms was damp, too, but there was another part of that arm that was exposed, and it was completely dry. That tells me somebody moved the cardboard.”

  I briefly considered continuing with my lie but then thought better of it. “Okay, I did try to look but I couldn’t see anything.” Before he could commence the lecture I sensed was coming, I added, “But I was careful not to touch the cardboard directly. I used a baggie.”

  His perturbed sigh told me my efforts didn’t impress him. “What do you mean you couldn’t see anything? You obviously knew it was a body or you wouldn’t have called it in.”

  “I knew there was a body there, but I couldn’t see it clearly.”

  “Why not? Do you have some sort of vision problem?”

  “I guess you could call it that.” He cocked his head and gave me a questioning look. I shifted from one foot to the other and back again, squirming under that warm but intense gaze. I realized I was going to have to explain myself and I didn’t relish the idea. Every time I try to describe my condition to anyone, they always look at me like I just escaped from the loony bin, which would be more amusing if not for the fact that I almost ended up in one a time or two in the past. “I couldn’t see the body because I saw other things instead.”

  “Other things?”

  “Yes, colors and shapes, stuff like that.” Over his shoulder I saw Blunt roll her eyes.

  Detective Albright’s expression turned wary and he wiggled the pen in his hand as he studied me. “Are you saying you’re some kind of psychic or something?”

  “No, I’m not a psychic,” I said with a weary sigh. “I have a neurological disorder. I’ve had it since I was born. My mother was involved in a car accident early in her pregnancy with me and she hemorrhaged internally. She also had a very serious head injury. The doctors were able to keep her body alive but she ended up brain-dead and in a coma. They kept her on life support until I was full term. After they did a C-section to deliver me, they removed the ventilator and let her die.”

  “I’m sorry,” Albright said, and he looked as if he meant it.

  I shrugged. “It’s not like I ever knew her or anything. But apparently the stress of all that affected my development . . . at least that’s the theory the doctors put forth. As a result I ended up with some minor . . .” I hesitated. The words brain damage always sounded so damning. “I ended up with a few things in my brain cross-wired. The doctors call it synesthesia. It’s a condition that affects the senses so that they don’t respond normally, and mine is a rather extreme type according to the doctors. As a result, I may taste or see sounds, hear or feel smells, taste or feel things I see . . . stuff like that.” I paused, expecting to see the same skeptical expression I get from most people when I try to explain my condition. But so far Albright simply looked curious, so I went on.

  “When I was out back by the Dumpster, the heat and the smell were both so strong, so . . . intensely visceral, that I heard and saw them.”

  Albright arched his eyebrows, looking skeptical. “You heard and saw what, the heat and the smell?”

  “Yes.” I waited for a roll of the eyes, the look of dismissal. But it didn’t come, at least not from him. B. Blunt was another matter. The cynical snort and shake of her head said it all. In her mind, I was a nut job.

  “Let me see if I have this straight,” Albright said. “You can hear smells?”

  “Yes, though sometimes I feel them.”

  “And you see sounds?”

  “Sometimes. Other times I taste them. I also see things that I feel, you know, things that I touch or that touch me, like the heat.”

  “Okay . . .” He scribbled something down before he continued. “So what did the smell in the alley sound like?”

  I hesitated, unsure if he was genuinely interested or subtly mocking me. But since he didn’t have a give-me-a-frigging-break expression, I decided to play it straight for now. “There wasn’t just one odor, there were many. All those smells became a big, messy mix of noise because each smell has its own distinct sound, kind of like what you hear when an orchestra is warming up. Some noises stand out, others don’t. It’s always that way. My visual interpretations typically manifest themselves in colors and shapes that float across my field of vision and some
stand out more than others. It gets confusing because I also tend to see things that I feel. Not just tactile sense, but things I feel emotionally. And stress magnifies the whole process. Finding the body was very disturbing to me so my response was a strong one. In this case the visual manifestations were so intense, they blocked out much of my normal vision. That doesn’t happen often.”

  I paused and braced myself with a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds. My secret was out. Now it was just a matter of waiting to see what Detective Albright’s reaction would be. He set down his pen and leaned back a little, as if to put some distance between us. It was a reaction I’d seen before, usually about the time someone decides I should be heavily medicated and placed in lockdown.

  “So you are feeling stressed this morning?” Albright said.

  I answered him with a little snort of disbelief. “Well, wouldn’t you be? I mean, it’s not every day I discover a dead body in the alley behind my bar.” Then I clamped my mouth shut, remembering that this was the second time in less than a year that I had done so, though my father was still alive when I found him.

  Albright folded his arms over his chest and scrutinized me.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m not crazy or anything, just different. I’ve had this condition all my life. I was six or seven years old before I realized that my way of experiencing the world was different from everyone else’s. I kept it to myself until I hit puberty. But then hormonal surges worsened it to the point that I finally confided in my father. He took me to a bunch of doctors and after a few misdiagnoses of schizophrenia and some other mental illnesses, we finally found out what it was. Because of the brain damage I suffered, my type of synesthesia is unique. My senses are not only cross-wired, they are very finely tuned.”

  “You’re saying your senses are keener than most people’s?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s that, or if I’m just more aware of things because of my reactions. One neurologist thought I could sense tiny particles of stuff that other people can’t. So the reason I can hear or feel smells is because I can sense minute particles of the scent left behind as they react with my skin or eardrums. And I see sounds because of the way the sound waves disturb the air and light. My mind senses that disturbance and interprets it visually. Because of this, I can sometimes see sounds that have already occurred, sounds I never actually heard.”

  “Wow, that could be a nightmare,” Duncan said. After a moment he added, “Or perhaps a handy talent.”

  “A little of both, actually, because the same thing happens when I see things that have been changed, or are changing. My dad noticed it when I was young because I was always adjusting things, like putting the salt and pepper shakers just so because I could sense they weren’t in the same exact spot they’d been in the last time I saw them. Or if Dad did laundry and made my bed, if he didn’t put the sheets and pillowcases back exactly the way they were before, I could tell and I had to fix them. It wasn’t that I could see any obvious difference, it was a feeling I would get, a tactile sense of irregularity that wouldn’t go away until I fixed whatever the problem was.”

  “Forgive me, but that sounds a bit like an obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Duncan said.

  “Yes, and I suppose it is in a way. In fact, I’ve often wondered if some people who are diagnosed with OCD are also synesthetes. I’ve learned over the years to ignore or shut out a lot of my synesthetic feedback so I no longer have to have the salt and pepper shakers just so, but I still know when they’re out of place.”

  “You would make a fun date. That could be a handy parlor trick at a dinner party.”

  I hesitated a second, unsure if he was serious or poking fun at me, and finally decided to simply ignore the comment altogether. “My father used to play a game with me by having me go into a room and look around, and then leave while he moved something. When I’d come back into the room I could tell where the change had occurred and most of the time what it was that had changed. I could feel it as an irregularity on my skin, like touching something smooth that suddenly turns rough, or sensing a sudden change in the air temperature. You know that kid game where you hide something and then tell the searcher if they’re hot or cold?” Albright nodded. “Well, for me there are times when it literally works that way.”

  “Fascinating,” Duncan said in a flat tone and with a vague expression that made me wonder if he was being facetious. But I’d gone this far, so I figured I might as well keep plunging headlong into things.

  “Sometimes it’s a smell that cues me in. I’ll detect a smell that will suddenly change when I get to the spot that’s been altered. The feel of something when I touch it usually triggers an image, and if that item later changes in any way, so will my image if I touch it again. I may not know exactly what has changed, but I can tell something is different about the item.”

  I paused and waited for Albright to say something, or twirl a finger around alongside his head, the universal sign language for crazy. I couldn’t believe I’d told him as much as I had. I almost never tell anyone about my synesthesia and if I do, I usually play it down a lot. Something about Albright or the situation had turned me into Mt. Vesuvius, spewing my secret out like molten lava and hot ash.

  I smiled at Albright and said, “Look, I know it sounds weird but what I have is not life threatening or anything. It’s just me.”

  Albright unfolded his arms and leaned forward, lacing his hands together and resting them on the bar. “So tell me,” he said. “If I show you a picture of the victim, do you think you’ll be able to look at it without having one of these . . . synthesizer reactions?”

  “Synesthetic,” I corrected. “And to be honest, I don’t know. Without the smells, it’s possible.”

  “Wait right here then.”

  He hopped off the bar stool and headed for the alley doorway, leaving me and B. Blunt in a visual standoff that grew more and more uncomfortable with each passing minute. Finally Albright returned. In his hand was a digital camera and I braced myself for what I knew was coming.

  “Take a look at this,” he said, sticking the camera’s screen in front of me. “It’s a close-up of the victim’s face. Tell me what you see.”

  I closed my eyes for a second or two and swallowed hard. Then I looked.

  “Oh, God,” I muttered, turning away from the camera’s image and burying my face in my hands. “That’s Ginny Rifkin, my father’s girlfriend.”

  Chapter 3

  “Ishould have known when I felt that vibration,” I told Albright.

  “Vibration?”

  I nodded. “Some of my sensations correlate to certain things or people. When Ginny was around, I would often feel this vibration in my head. I never felt it with anyone or anything else, except once when my dad came home after a night out with her. There was a different smell on him—Ginny’s smell, I guess—and I felt that same vibration. That’s how I knew he’d been with her.”

  I paused and closed my eyes again, trying to isolate details from my alley experience. Yep, the vibration in my head had been one of them.

  “I remember now. I felt that vibration when I was outside, when I lifted the cardboard,” I said, my eyes still closed. “It was mixed in with a whole lot of other sensations, but it was there.”

  I continued mentally sorting through the experiences from earlier. “I think I knew whoever was out there was dead because I saw a black wavy curtain above all the other images. I saw the same thing when I found the dead rat, and when I viewed my father’s body. I tend to interpret sounds visually, so I guess the black wavy curtain is my mind’s interpretation of a lack of sound, as in no heartbeat and no breathing.”

  “The dead rat?” Albright said, zeroing in on that part of my explanation.

  I opened my eyes and gave him a dismissive wave of my hand to let him know that I didn’t want to explain. “It’s a long story,” I said, and I was saved from having to elaborate any further when the portable bar phone rang. I gave Detective Alb
right a questioning, may I? look.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  I glanced at the caller ID and saw the name Riley Quinn, the divorced, fifty-something owner of the bookstore next to my bar. Our buildings, though listed as separate pieces of property, share a common brick wall. My bar is on a corner, giving me two walls of windows, and the bookstore shares my other side wall.

  Unlike me, Riley lives in a real house out in the suburbs somewhere and uses both floors of his building for his store. Ten years ago, when he bought the place, he developed a habit of stopping by the bar most nights after closing to grab a nightcap and a bite to eat. As a result, he and my father became good friends who loved to talk shop: marketing strategies, cost-cutting measures, supply woes, advertising ideas, pricing tactics . . . you name it, they discussed it. Since my father’s death, Riley has continued to come by most nights, but his relationship with me is more of a paternal one. While he has helped me with the occasional business aspect of running the bar, mostly he is just there with a friendly ear when I need one, doing his best to fill the void created by my father’s death.

  “It’s the owner of the bookstore next door,” I told Albright. “He watches out for me. If I don’t answer, he’ll just come over here.”

  “Fine,” Albright said in a put-upon tone. “But put it on speaker, please. And don’t divulge any details.”

  “Hello, Riley,” I said, answering on speaker.

  “Mack, I just got in. What the hell is going on over there? There are cop cars all over the place. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. But I found a dead body out back in the alley this morning.”

  “What? Oh, my God! How awful for you. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “As good as can be expected.”

  “Do you need me to come over? I can delay opening up the store for a bit if need be.”

  “No, there’s no need to do that. I’m tied up talking to the police now anyway. I’ll give you a call later.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “You know I’m here for you if you need me.”