Read an Excerpt

What the Fly Saw

St. Martin's Press

Saturday, January 18, 2020

5:47 A.M.

After the storm passed, in the chilly hour before dawn, the last of the "space zombies" found their way back to their nest in the derelict house.

From his command post, the squad leader gave the signal: "Go!"

A black van pulled up in front of the house. Albany PD vice cops wearing protective gear jumped out and stormed up the walk. They used a battering ram to smash open the wooden door.

"Police! Albany PD!"

"Police!"

Their high-powered torches illuminated the grotesque horror movie creatures in the 3-D posters on the walls.

One of the cops ripped down a dangling black plastic replica of the 2012 UFO. He tossed the boomerang-shaped object to the floor.

Hippie freaks, he thought. Ought to make them all go live out in the Mojave Desert and wait for the mother ship to arrive.

He kicked at the nearest mattress on the floor. "Police!" he shouted down at the long-haired occupant. "On your feet!"

Blank eyes in an eerie white-painted face stared up at him.

"Hands up! Hands up!" the cop yelled as the kid stumbled to his feet. He shoved the boy against the wall and patted him down.

Upstairs, in a bathroom, another cop found a girl sprawled out, unconscious, on the dirty tile floor beside the toilet. She had vomited in the toilet bowl. Her jeans were stained with urine and feces.

Reaching down, he shook her, and then rolled her onto her side to see her face beneath the mop of dark hair. A nasty bruise on her cheekbone stood out against the streaked white paint. He moved her red scarf aside to feel for a pulse in her throat. The scarf was damp, like her tee shirt and soiled blue jeans.

"Whaddya have?" another cop asked from the doorway.

"Looks like an OD," the cop inside the bathroom said. "Still breathing, but the wagon had better get here fast."

"Got it," the other cop said, touching the comm button on his helmet.

The cop in the bathroom spotted a smear of blood on the corner of the sink. That explained the bruise. She'd banged her face on the sink when she passed out.

Downstairs in the kitchen, cops surveyed the debris of dirty dishes and rotting garbage — and an impressive array of drugs and paraphernalia.

One lowered her weapon and observed, "With a stash like this, they could have stayed zonked out until the next UFO came to visit."

Saturday afternoon

3:17 P.M.

Funeral director Kevin Novak stared at the Cupid and Psyche bronze clock on his host, Olive Cooper's, mantel. He had allowed himself to become marooned on a conversational island with Paige, Olive's great-niece.

As Paige complained about the conversation and laughter filling the long room — the "rabble babble," as she put it — Kevin found a name for what he had been feeling for the past forty-eight-plus hours. Grief.

He was experiencing firsthand what he had often observed when relatives came into the funeral home after the unexpected death of a loved one: that first stage of grieving the experts described as denial, but he often thought of as amazement and disbelief. The stage of bereavement when family members spoke of their dead loved one in the present tense because they couldn't yet believe their lives had been ripped apart.

It seemed, in this state of mind, one went through the usual motions, saying what was expected. But the shell was thin. His was developing cracks. He could tell because he felt no inclination at all to warn Paige Cooper that he had glanced over her shoulder and seen her great-aunt Olive headed their way, and Paige had better shut up. So he must be moving into the next stage: anger.

"Where in the galaxy did Aunt Olive find these people?" Paige said. "Look at them."

"Some of them are from the church's community outreach," Kevin said.

True, Olive's guest list for this celebration of her life reflected her eccentricities. An odd assortment of guests: old friends, relatives, church members and business associates, and other people who tickled Olive's fancy or touched her big heart. But they had all cleaned up and put on their best in Olive's honor.

"It's freezing in here," Paige said. She pulled the belt of her hand-knit cardigan tighter and held her hands out toward the fireplace.

"Feels fine to me," Kevin said.

"It really is annoying we have to come out for this farce when there's a blizzard on the way. The least Aunt Olive could do is heat this mausoleum. Everyone here except her will come down with pneumonia, and we'll still have to do this all over again when she finally does kick off."

"When I finally do 'kick off,' Paige," her great-aunt said, right behind her, "you may feel free not to attend my funeral. In fact, if you die first — maybe of the pneumonia you expect to catch — you'll spare us both that annoyance. And for your information, it was your father who insisted on including you in this shindig."

Paige flushed an unbecoming shade of scarlet. "Aunt Olive, I didn't mean —"

"I know what you meant. Get yourself a glass of champagne, now you're actually old enough to drink, and make the best of the situation."

Olive's sharp gaze fastened on Kevin. "And since you already know you're going to get to bury me when I'm dead, you can relax and enjoy the party."

"I always enjoy your parties, Olive," Kevin said.

"Come with me," she said. "There's someone I want you to meet."

Aware of Paige's suspicious glare, Kevin smiled in her direction. That would teach the little brat to say funeral directors reminded her of vultures without first checking for one of the species within hearing distance.

Vultures sometimes exacted their petty revenge.

"At your service, Olive," he said, offering his arm to the woman, who was eighty-five years old and counting and might well live to be a hundred.

"How have you been?" she asked him.

"Fine," Kevin said. "Never better."

"Don't give me that. Anyone who knows you can tell you're still taking Bob's death hard."

"Having your best friend collapse with a heart attack while you're beating him at tennis, and then die on the operating table, can have that effect."

"It's been over four months since it happened. You should be coping with it by now."

"I am coping with it."

"You're still off-kilter. Not your usual self. That's why I want you to meet Luanne Woodward."

"Luanne? That medium or spiritualist or whatever she calls herself that you found somewhere?"

"I didn't find her 'somewhere.' She was the featured lecturer at a fund-raiser."

"Lecturer? Don't you mean 'performer'?"

"She talked about being a medium and answered questions. She's an interesting woman. I think you could benefit from talking to her."

"I don't believe in that hocus-pocus, Olive."

"I don't believe in most of it, either. I'm almost ancient enough to remember the Fox sisters and their flimflam. But, as I said, Luanne's interesting. I invited her today so you could meet her."

Kevin noticed one of Olive's guests filling his plate high with the urgency of a man who expected the bounty in front of him to disappear.

"And do what?" he said in belated response to Olive. "Sign up for her next séance?"

"That might not be a bad idea. Spiritual therapy, so to speak."

"I get my spiritual therapy at church on Sunday from our minister. You might consider doing the same."

"At my age, I take what I need from wherever I happen to find it. And the fact you're going all righteous on me instead of laughing about my eccentricities, as you like to call them, proves you're off-kilter. We need to get you put to right."

"Olive, I don't think a medium and a séance will do the trick."

"You need an opportunity to confront your feelings."

"I have confronted my feelings. I confronted them after Bob died. I sought counseling from both Reverend Wyatt and Jonathan Burdett."

Olive stopped walking and glared at him. "Now, if you want to talk about hocus-pocus, psychiatrists are right up there. You lie on their couch spilling your guts. And they mumble an occasional Freudian pearl of wisdom while they're thinking about how they intend to spend what they're charging you."

"Burdett offers the option of sitting in a comfortable armchair, and, as you well know, his services are free to church members."

"The church pays his salary, so he's not free. He's full of his diplomas and his jargon, that's what he is."

"And what about your medium? Is she one-hundred-percent jargon free?"

"Not a chance. They all have their language, intended to impress, but she's a hell of a lot more fun than Burdett. So come along and meet her."

"I suppose it would be a waste of time to say no?"

"Yes, it would. You said you were at my service."

"Yes, I did say that."

Not much sleep last night or the night before. His moment of irritation with Paige had given way to weariness. No doubt he would feel the anger later. No chance he'd be able to skip over that stage. Not with the piper to pay.

"Luanne," Olive said to the plump, blond woman sipping from a champagne glass as she observed the people around her. "I'd like you to meet Kevin Novak, the friend of mine I was telling you about."

"I'm so happy to meet you, Mr. Novak," she said in a Southern drawl that suited her pleasant, round face. Her blue gaze met and held his.

If he believed in such things, Kevin would have sworn she'd looked past his tailored suit and crisp white shirt straight into his tarnished soul.

He took a step back, and reached out to steady Olive, whose hand rested on his arm.

"Sorry, Olive," he said. "I just remembered something I need to do."

Luanne Woodward said, "It's all right, Kevin, honey. You don't have to run away from me."

But he did, Kevin thought. He had to run as fast as he could.

Saturday evening

6:13 P.M.

Detective Hannah McCabe glanced up from her ORB when Walter Yin walked into the bull pen.

He dropped his hat onto the grinning Chinese dragon standing on his desk. It turned out the dragon, a gag gift from the cops in his old unit, made an excellent hat stand. His new hat, made of high-tech fiber, was a replacement for his battered fedora. His wife, Casey, bought it for him a few months ago. He seemed to have finally gotten it broken in to his satisfaction.

While she was thinking about Yin's hat, she heard Sean Pettigrew, Yin's partner, say, "Was Todd okay?"

Todd was Yin's seven-year-old son.

From her desk across the aisle, McCabe asked, "Did something happen to Todd, Walter?" She had come in a few minutes earlier to send a tag to Research about one of her cases. She hadn't had a chance to talk to Pettigrew.

Yin sat down at his desk. "He's okay. But he gave Casey a scare. He was down the street playing with one of his buddies. They got into a tussle. The kid's parents separated them and called Casey. When she got there, Todd was red in the face and crying, and he was having trouble breathing. She didn't know what was happening, so she got the other kid's father to drive them to the emergency room."

"What was wrong?" McCabe asked.

"The doctor said he was hyperventilating. Probably caused by his temper tantrum, but we need to have him tested for asthma. The doctor gave him a shot, and we brought him home and put him to bed."

"Well," Pettigrew said, "at least, you said he hadn't drawn any more of those pictures since his sessions with the school psychologist."

McCabe remembered what Pettigrew told her about that. Todd had heard a special bulletin about two cops who had been shot and killed during a traffic stop. Two sheriff's deputies in Virginia. But the fact they were cops had been enough to trigger Todd's apprehension about his father's safety. And that apprehension had been expressed in the pictures that he drew.

"Yeah," Yin said, "Casey and I think we're making real progress. Our kid stopped drawing pictures of his daddy the cop being blown away on the job. Now, he's just going ballistic during playtime."

McCabe pushed back her chair and reached for the Elvis 2000 concert mug she'd found on the Web. "Anyone want green pomegranate lemon tea?" she asked.

"Thanks," Pettigrew said, "but I think I'll stick with bad coffee."

"Me, too," Yin said. "Your tea sounds a little too healthy."

McCabe dropped a tea bag into her mug and pressed the hot water button on the beverage unit. "If we're stuck here for a while, both of you will live to regret the caffeine buzz you're going to get from the coffee."

"I'm more likely to get heartburn," Pettigrew said. "I've got my acid reflux pills right here in my drawer."

Yin said, "Sean, if you'd call the nutrition center woman for another date, you could stop taking pills. Having a girlfriend who teaches cooking classes is a lot better than eating cereal for dinner."

"I know. That dinner she cooked for me on our last date was great. But I don't think she'd be up for getting together again."

"Why?" McCabe asked as she sat down with her tea. "Did something go wrong?"

"You could say that," Pettigrew said, glancing at his partner. "After dinner, we were talking, and she asked about my divorce. I was telling her about it when she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek." Pettigrew grimaced. "That was when it happened."

"When what happened?" Yin asked.

"When I dropped my wine glass. Red wine splashed over her and the sofa and onto her white carpet. We both grabbed for napkins to mop up the mess, and that was when I elbowed her in the nose."

"Ouch!" McCabe said.

"She was really nice about it," Pettigrew said. "But I'm pretty sure she'd have other plans if I asked for another date."

Yin said, "How come I'm just hearing about this? When I asked you how your date went, you said you had fun."

"I did. But then I screwed things up at the end."

Yin shook his head. "We've got to work on your dating skills. Maybe we can get Casey to help."

McCabe took a sip from her mug to hide a smile. Yin and his wife were a loving couple, so Yin worried about his partner's lack of a woman in his life.

Or, rather, he worried about the fact that Pettigrew was having a hard time getting over his ex-wife. As Pettigrew's friend, McCabe worried about that, too. He had now been divorced longer than he had been married to Elaine. She had spent most of their seven months of wedlock traveling for her hospitality industry job, and it was Pettigrew who had asked for the divorce. But it was almost two years later, and he still hadn't recovered from his whirlwind courtship and marriage to a woman he'd met on a vacation in Bermuda.

Of course, it hadn't helped that at first Elaine had dropped in whenever she happened to be anywhere near Albany. But Sean said he put a stop to that. And yesterday when he and McCabe were downtown together, attending an awards ceremony, she detected signs that he might be coming out of his doldrums. He even made a couple of jokes.

"All right, Detectives. Listen up," Lt. Jack Dole said as he strode into the bull pen.

McCabe gave her boss her full attention. So did the other detectives in the room. A natural response to a man who was six-foot-four with a shaved head and whose "listen up" was seldom good news.

"We've got confirmation," he told them. "We're expecting at least twenty inches of snow between now and tomorrow night. We're here for the duration. The Comm Center is having trouble with ghost images on the surveillance cameras and echoes from the acoustic devices. We need to have all hands on deck in case patrol needs backup."

"So we're just going to hang around and twiddle our thumbs?" a detective in the back of the room asked.

Dole said, "No, Quincy, the first call we get for backup will be all yours. Of course, your partner may not appreciate that, but you can settle it between the two of you." He glanced around the bull pen. "Meanwhile, let's try to get caught up on some of that outstanding paperwork."

McCabe had already started tackling hers. "Paperwork" meaning the idiosyncratic notes she and everyone else had in their ORBs. Most of them put off transferring their case notes to the Master File.

When the lou was out of sight, Yin said, "It would be nice if our state-of-the-art surveillance system were able to handle the weather."

"The weather's been crazier than usual," McCabe said.

"Just like the world in general," Pettigrew said. "The latest breaking rumor has it Howard Miller is considering heading to Albany for Lisa Nichols's trial. All that media coverage would give his presidential campaign a boost."

"Media coverage while he rants about evil women," McCabe said. "Even Lisa Nichols doesn't deserve Howard Miller and his hatemongers at her trial."

McCabe's ORB buzzed. She checked the ID and touched view. "Hi, Chels. Are you at home because it's your anniversary or because of the blizzard?"

"Blizzard. We closed at four today," Chelsea, her best friend, said. "There was no point in staying open after the travel advisory went into effect. Anyone with good sense had stocked up with food and planned to eat in."

"Well, happy fifth anniversary in spite of the weather. Did you get the card I sent? The gift I ordered isn't going to make it until flights are taking off."

"Hannah, tell me again ... what's the name of the island your brother and his girlfriend went to on vacation?"

"Roarke's Island. Why? You and Stan thinking of celebrating with a romantic couple's getaway to a jungle oasis?"

---

Excerpted from What the Fly Saw by Frankie Y. Bailey. Copyright © 2015 Frankie Y. Bailey. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---