"Sit down, please." He indicated a chair, the only chair in the tiny office other than his. It was straight-backed and didn't invite people to relax and linger.
She sat, her skirt positioned to fall at the middle of her knee. She kept both feet on the floor. She was so still she reminded him of a porcelain doll. "You said on the phone that my father's death appeared to be the result of random street violence."
"Not random," he corrected, sitting down and closing a file that had been open in front of him. "Whoever killed him meant to do it. But the reason—" He shrugged. The reason could be anything, from drugs to a dispute over a cardboard box. With no witnesses, no murder weapon, no leads of any kind, the case was dead, and no one was going to put out any more effort on it.
She sat in silence for a moment. Though he would have respected at least some show of emotion or remorse, at least she wasn't yelling at him, demanding that he find her father's killer, as if she really cared what had happened to him. Marc toyed with the idea of finding out if by chance she had taken out a large insurance policy on her father. The possibility wasn't remote; money was at the bottom of a lot of murders, though it could just as easily be over something as mundane as how a steak was cooked.
"How long has it been since you saw your father or heard from him?"
"Years." She looked as if she were about to say something else, but instead, she pressed her lips firmly together and let the single word stand.
"Are there any life insurance policies on him?"
"Not that I know of." Shocked, she realized what he was thinking.
"You didn't know where, or how, he was living?"
Karen sensed his hostility, though he kept his face impassive, his eyes hooded. Detective Marc Chastain definitely disapproved of her for some reason, but if he pursued the insurance angle, he would hit a dead end. Maybe he expected her to start screaming at him because he obviously wasn't working very hard to find out who had murdered her father. But she hadn't expected an all-out effort. She was a nurse; she saw all too often what happened when a homeless person was the victim of a crime. Police departments nationwide worked with limited resources, and they couldn't waste their precious time or money on useless causes. Hospitals did it all the time. Triage was necessary, or everyone lost.
She could have told him that, but she was too hot, too tired, and too stressed to care what he thought. Her head was pounding. She felt as if she were about to fly apart in all directions, her emotions roiling, and the only way to handle it was to stay in control. That was the way she did it at work, when a patient died no matter how conscientious she was in her care, no matter how good the doctor was, no matter that it was a sweet-faced child or a lively old lady with a sparkle in her eye. People died all the time. She had learned how to handle it.
"He didn't keep in touch," she finally said.
"He was a Vietnam vet." Statement, not a question.
"Yes." She knew where this was leading. The disturbed vet, in need of psych care, cast out and ignored by his family because he was too much trouble, too much of an embarrassment with his moods and rages and unpredictability.
But Detective Chastain didn't say it; he didn't have to. Karen read it in his cool, narrow-eyed gaze.
"He walked out on us when I was a child," she said sharply, more sharply than she had intended. She could feel her control frazzling, feel the jagged edge of some pain she refused to let herself identify, and sternly fought her emotions back in line. There would be time enough for that later, when she was alone and this hard-faced, dark-browed man wasn't looking at her with veiled contempt. She didn't owe him any explanations. She didn't have to reveal the pain and anger and fear of her childhood, just so he would think better of her. All she had to do was get through the next couple of days, then return to Ohio and go back to work, to the silent, empty apartment that wasn't home yet despite having lived there for four months.
"What do I have to do to claim the body?" she asked after a moment, her voice once more cool and composed.
"You have to identify him, sign some papers. I'll walk you through it. Have you made arrangements to take him back to Ohio?"
Karen sat there, stunned. She hadn't thought of that. She had been focused on getting through the funeral, but not where the funeral would be. She didn't have a plot in Ohio where she could bury Dexter. There wasn't room next to her mother's grave—not that she wanted that, anyway, but Jeanette would have.
Karen's hands twisted together as she tried to control the sharp jab of pain. She had let her mother down. Jeanette had asked very little from her and had given everything, but Karen had let her own resentment of her father prevent her from doing what her mother would have wanted.
"I—I didn't even think—" she said, then wished she hadn't. His expression was as lively as a rock's, but again she sensed that wave of disapproval.
Regret speared through her, not because of what Detective Chastain thought of her but because she had wasted so much time feeling bitter, letting it cloud her thinking. No more. Chastain gave a brief shrug, broad shoulders moving in a gesture that was oddly Gallic. Karen thought that maybe because she was in New Orleans, she expected everything to have a French flavor. And
maybe she was even more stressed than she had realized, if she was letting unimportant details distract her. She had been trained to keep her mind on the job in front of her, not on trivia such as how a New Orleans cop shrugged.
"If you can't handle the expense of taking him back, I can help you find a burial plot here," he offered, though she could tell he hoped she would refuse. "Not in the city, that would be impossible, but a few miles out of town. Or you might consider cremation. It would be cheaper." Cheaper. He thought she would have her father cremated because it was cheaper. She didn't have anything against cremation, if that was what someone wanted, but she couldn't help thinking of Jeanette again. Dexter should be buried beside her. She had to deal with this now, but when she got back to Ohio, she would start making arrangements to have her parents buried together. She would have to locate two plots side by side, deal with the legalities and technicalities of moving the bodies—oh, God, she couldn't think of her mother as a body .