Super Meals: Part Seventeen

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Detective Mimi was no stranger to phone calls at 4am.

People were rude enough to be killed at all hours, and it was her job to find out who killed them, so it was nothing new to her to be awoken by her phone.

She opened one eye and read the caller ID, sighed, and picked up. “What do you want, Donnewicz?”

He didn’t answer right away, he hesitated.

Something was very wrong.

“Mi… I mean, Detective Spatchcock, this is officer—“

She sat upright in the seconds it took him to stutter out his response and said “Cut the shit, Mark, what is it?”

 “Look, Mimi, you need to get down to the Down Town Motel, room 110, like now.”

She thumbed the speakerphone button and tossed the phone down on her bed while she put some pants on, saying “Why? What happened?”

“Look, you know I can’t give details over the phone. Just…there’s been a murder and the coroner’s on her way already and you need to be here first.”

She was looking for a bra, but hearing the combination of that motel, a murder, and mention of Jane made up her mind to skip it and get moving.

She had the lights and siren on before she even put her car in gear and when the pedal hit the floor it didn’t come off until she was at the hotel four minutes later. It was barely in park when she threw the door open and leapt from the vehicle.

“Where is she?” she asked the officer approaching her. It was Mark Donnewicz, the one who’d called her.

“Before you go in there, I have to warn you it’s…weird,” he said.

Mimi stopped. She’d heard of things being gross, sick, fucked up, twisted, messy, and, once, “goofy.”

So far, nobody’d ever said that a murder scene was weird.

“Weird how?” she asked.

“Look,” he continued, “get in there and do your job and I’ll hold Jane out here as long as I can so you can. But, and I hate to say this, it looks like you two are gonna have to figure this one out together.”

In and of itself, that was nothing unusual. She was a murder detective; Jane was the coroner. Jane provided medical expertise; Mimi provided the creative thinking and knowledge of the criminal mind. The worked well together until the breakup, and after the breakup they were at least professional and cordial with each other (although they tended to communicate more via emails and memos than in person).

 Donnewicz was one of the few officers who knew about Mimi and Jane’s relationship situation, so a warning like this was something to pay attention to.

He stepped out of her way and she went into the hotel room.

Bethany had fallen over backwards onto the bed, but her legs were locked straight and stuck out over the edge. She was still holding the gun to her head; her mouth frozen agape and her eyes open and rolled backward.

There were signs of a struggle, of course, which didn’t surprise her. Someone had blasted pepper-spray in the room – it stained the wall and the scent lingered in the air – and the furniture was tossed askew. The front desk clerk was in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub and a uniformed officer was standing next to him taking notes in a flipbook-style notepad.

Without thinking, Mimi went over to Bethany’s corpse and checked the pulse in the neck. As soon as her fingers touched her skin, a scream ripped into the air.

Mimi yanked her hand back, but the scream continued. Realizing that it wasn’t coming from Bethany, she whipped her head around looking for the source.

Jane was standing in the doorway.

Her eyes had locked on her dead baby sister, and she couldn’t stop screaming.