A warm flush spread through me as I tried not to show how much the comment meant to me. “You mean, you’re stuck with me!” I teased.

“Either works.” He tugged the keyboard toward him. “But I still like your idea about Lexis Nexis.” He fell silent while he did the hunt and peck thing again. A part of me wanted to yank the keyboard away from him and do it myself, but the more rational part pointed out that I sucked at typing even worse, and it wouldn’t speed things up at all.

“You have good ideas,” he said after a moment. “The original Peter Plescia died in 1988 and this one showed up here in 1990.” He clicked a few more keys. “Lived at various apartment complexes.”

“Is there a way to find out where he worked?” I leaned forward eagerly. “I mean, other than Pizza Plaza.” If he’d ever worked in a morgue or funeral home, that would clinch my theory that he was a zombie. Plus that would surely make it easier to fake his death.

Derrel gave me a funny look but didn’t question my interest. “Not on here. The system we use tells us stuff like residence history, possible relatives, phone numbers, that sort of thing. Basically, anything available in a public record search. That’s pretty much all we need, since the main reason we use it is for locating next of kin.”

I sat back and nodded. “Okay, that’s cool.” It didn’t matter anyway. I was pretty damn positive that the dude was a zombie. “What about the guy we picked up this morning? Has the ID on him been confirmed yet? Was it Zeke Lyons?”

“Yep. That came through about an hour ago. Zeke Lyons, forty-three years old, white male. No hiccups with that one at least.”

Okay, so he wasn’t an old zombie. I had no idea if he’d really looked forty-three, since I’d never seen him at his “best.”

“How ’bout the guy from Sweet Bayou Road?” I pressed. “And the two guys this week who died of head injuries?” I asked. “Was there anything strange about them?”

This time he gave me a funny look. “You’re stretching now, girl,” he said, though with enough of a smile to take any sting out of it. “The victim from Sweet Bayou was Adam Campbell, fifty-three years old, and no apparent anomalies there either. But as far as the other two—totally different means of death with those.”

“But—” I stopped myself before saying anything about the missing brains, took a deep breath instead, and made myself nod. “Yeah, I guess.”

“However, to answer your question, no. Nothing weird about those two. No connection or similarities. Families were notified. All the usual stuff.”

They were within a few miles of each other. But for the first time I had to wonder if I was seeing something that wasn’t there. Squished-head guy’s brains might have been picked up by a damn dog for all I knew. And decomp drug dealer dude . . . well, his brains could have liquefied and leaked out by the time we arrived.

Damn it. I’d been so certain that Zeke had killed those two. Was I missing something obvious? But even if those deaths really had been accidental, there sure as shit wasn’t anything accidental about Zeke and Peter and Adam getting their heads whacked off.

“All right,” I said. “Well I figured it was worth thinking about.”

“Keep it up and you’ll get promoted to Investigator,” Derrel said. Then his eyes flashed with amusement. “And we all know how much that would piss Nick off.”

“Ooh, something to shoot for!” I said, laughing.

I’d lost track of time and had to run back to the morgue to get everything set up for the autopsy before Dr. Leblanc got there.

I hadn’t assisted at the autopsy of the other headless body, and I felt kind of useless without a head to deal with. Usually as soon as Dr. Leblanc finished his removal of the organs, I’d start on the head while he did the more meticulous examinations and dissections. But since there was no head, I pretty much stood there and watched, all the time feeling as if I was forgetting to do something.

“So it’s pretty obvious it’s a serial killer, right?” I asked Dr. Leblanc.

He glanced up, scalpel poised above a kidney. “Why do you say that? Do you think it is?”

I was starting to get used to Dr. Leblanc and his way of answering questions with questions of his own. Derrel had told me a while back that Dr. Leblanc was a fan of the Socratic Method, which made absolutely zero sense to me at the time. In fact, I didn’t even realize he’d said “Socratic” and thought he’d said “secreting,” which had me just as confused. It wasn’t until I said something about “the secreting method” that Derrel explained—after laughing his ass off at me first—that the Socratic Method was a way of teaching by using questions. I didn’t understand the whole thing, but there were times when I really wished Dr. Leblanc would give me a straight answer.

However, I was willing to go along with it for the moment. “Well, sure. I mean, in the last couple of months we’ve had three people with heads cut off and two others who died of pretty major head injuries.”

He lowered the scalpel and regarded me. “Three,” he said after a few seconds.

“Three what?”

“Three who died of major head injuries,” he said. “Right before you were hired we had an MVA fatality where cause of death was multiple traumatic injuries, most notably decapitation.”

A bizarre chill walked down my spine at this for no reason I could understand. “Okay,” I said, shaking it off. “So. Six total.”

He didn’t lift his scalpel again and continued to look at me. “But what makes you think any of the accidental deaths could be related to the decapitations?”

I sighed and shrugged. “Never mind. I’m being silly.”

A smile flickered across his mouth. “I’m not going to let you off that easily. You think there might be a connection. What led you to that theory?”

I fidgeted. I could hardly say that my zombie super-sense told me that there were brains missing from squished-head guy and decomposed-guy. “Okay, um, the three men who got decapitated. Not the one from the car wreck—” Memory flickered but was gone before I could focus on it. “—but the pizza guy, Sweet Bayou guy, and this one are connected because the heads were chopped off.”

Dr. Leblanc gave me an approving nod. “That is definitely a telling detail. And I believe the fine folks at the Sheriff’s Office are quite inclined to agree with you.” But he still made no move to begin the dissection of the kidney. “Now what leads you to believe that the other three deaths are connected?”

All I could do was shrug helplessly. “I got nuthin’,” I said. “Just seemed weird, so many guys with their brains falling out.”

He smiled and began his cut. “It’s funny how sometimes things seem to have an odd synchronicity.” At my blank look he explained, “Those times when the same word or phrase or incident seem to repeat. Most of the time a closer examination reveals little more than coincidence. And, of course, decapitation is such an unusual and shocking way to die, that when such occurs, it tends to stick in our memory.” A thoughtful expression came over his face. “In fact, about ten years ago or so, a couple of skeletons were found out in the swamp. The skulls were missing, and there was trauma to the spinal column that indicated they’d been decapitated with several blows to the back of the neck.” He shook his head. “It caused a huge stir, obviously, but the case went nowhere. Theories ranged from a psychopath haunting the swamp and collecting heads, to an especially gruesome mob hit.”

I could only stare at him. More people had been decapitated?

Dr. Leblanc smiled, almost as if he could see the thoughts ticking through my head. “But that same year three other bodies were found in the swamp as well—one was a hunter who died of a heart attack, one was a drug dealer from New Orleans who’d been shot and dumped, and the last was the husband of a woman who figured poison would be less of a hassle than divorce. Yet no one remembers those.”

“You did,” I pointed out.

He chuckled. “I did the autopsies. I highly doubt anyone else remembers, though I would imagine there are quite a few who remember the two headless bodies. It made quite a splash in the news for a while.”

“Okay,” I said with a nod. “I see your point.” I did, too. But, still, could those two have been somehow connected to these? Maybe it was a serial killer who decided to take a long break?

I fell silent while I pondered this. Zombies could live a long time, so it wasn’t outrageous at all to think that whoever was doing the beheading stuff now might have also been doing it ten years ago.

“Did you ever figure out who those two were?” I asked.

He gave a slight shrug. “ID was made from items found in what clothing remained. It was a fairly young couple who’d recently moved to the area. The police had a great deal of trouble finding out much about them, and there was a healthy suspicion that they were part of some sort of witness relocation program.” He gave a slight grimace. “Which, of course, added weight to the theory that it was a mob hit or something of that ilk.”

I frowned as a nasty certainty began to form in my gut. I’ve had tunnel vision. I’m looking at this all wrong. “Well that sucks the shit from a dead rat’s ass,” I muttered.

Dr. Leblanc gave a dry chuckle as he sliced into the kidney. “Angel, you truly have a way with words.”

I grinned sheepishly. I hadn’t meant for him to hear that. “Hey, go with your strengths, right?”

“You have more strengths than that.”

“Aww, Doc, you’re gonna make me blush.”

After the autopsy I put the body back in the cooler, turned my attention to cleaning up, and allowed my mind to wander and sort through all this new information.

First off was the biggie: I’d definitely been looking at this all wrong. I needed to stop trying to force a connection where there probably wasn’t one. What if Zeke did kill those two people? He had to have been getting brains from somewhere, and he’d been living in that area. Then what if someone else chopped off his head and the heads of the other two men? That made a lot more sense.