Dating Can Be Deadly. Wendy Roberts, LCSW

the words, Pacific Refuse Inc., was a black pentagram. That real bad feeling I’d had earlier returned. Lara walked closer to the bin and was now only a couple of feet away.

      “Don’t,” I said weakly.

      “It’s just a Dumpster.” She looked over her shoulder at me and made clucking noises. “Unless you’re thinking there’s something in here besides trash, like maybe another mutilated cat or something.”

      “It’s the or something that bothers me and I’m not hanging around to find out.” I stomped away hoping that Lara would follow, but after a dozen steps I looked over my shoulder and saw that she was not behind me. She’d done the exact opposite—she’d shimmied up the side of the Dumpster.

      “You know what?” Her voice echoed loudly inside the container. She shoved herself off, landed on her feet and wiped her hands on her jacket with a look of revulsion.

      “What?”

      “The Dumpster’s empty but there’s a puddle of something inside there. It looks like it could be blood. Of course, it’s hard to tell in the dark.”

      My throat tightened. “I’m guessing there’s a lot more blood than would come from a cat, right?”

      “Yep. A lot more.”

      I wanted to run. Run far. Run fast. Lara, on the other hand, did the exact opposite, again. She called the cops.

      Twenty minutes later I was sitting curbside with a good view of one of Seattle’s finest shining his flashlight into the Dumpster. He pushed himself off it in much the same manner as Lara had and then his partner climbed up and did a similar look-see inside with his flashlight. Lara was pacing nonstop in front of me, her face bright with excitement.

      After a few minutes, the cops strode over. One was a fiftyish Hispanic guy with a thick mustache. The other was a younger cop who was built like a refrigerator with stringy blond hair.

      Refrigerator Cop spoke first, addressing Lara. “You’re right that it looks like blood but, obviously, we can’t tell just by looking at it that it’s from a human. Probably somebody just dumped some meat.”

      I let out a snort from my place at the curb and Refrigerator Cop turned and narrowed his eyes at me. “Tell me again what brought you around the building to look in the Dumpster.”

      “Hey, I didn’t look in there,” I protested. “I was just following her.” I indicated Lara with my chin.

      “Yeah, and she wanted to check because you had a psychic vision or something,” Mustache Cop said sarcastically and he and his partner shared identical smirks.

      I got to my feet and clapped my hands together. “Well, looks like you guys have everything under control, so I’m going to go home to bed.”

      “We’ve got the crime lab guys on their way and they’ll check out the Dumpster to be sure,” said Mustache Cop. “And we’ve got your information, so we’ll be in touch if anything further comes up.”

      The look on his face said that he didn’t believe anything further would come up. He believed the pentagram on the side of the Dumpster was teenage graffiti and that the gooey stuff in the Dumpster was not human blood. I slid my gaze to the Dumpster and fear made my nerves ping.

      Lara caught her bus and I ran the rest of the way to my apartment. I spent the better part of the night not able to sleep because of an unending slide show of morbid snapshots that flashed behind my eyelids. It began with the poor mutilated kitty in the graveyard, then that picture faded and the image of a woman’s bloody torso took its place. In the final slide, I saw the inside of a dimly lit building where someone was lighting a large black candle. I could almost smell the wax at this point. That’s when I would wake up in a cold sweat. Needless to say, fighting the dreams meant that sleep eluded me until I finally helped it along at three-thirty in the morning with tequila—kept for medicinal use only.

      Since my car was sick I’d set my alarm for 6:00 a.m. It was an hour earlier than usual, but it would give me plenty of time to catch a bus and get to the office promptly. However, tequila-induced sleep does what it’s supposed to do. I slammed my fist on the snooze button no less than a dozen times. When I finally did roll out of bed—groggily at that—it was after eight.

      “Holy shit!” I yelped and stumbled into the shower.

      My apartment was described in the ad as a cozy, metropolitan unit with a parklike view. Actually, it was a dumpy basement studio with narrow, dirty windows, one of which looked out onto the parking lot and some sparse shrubs. The pipes grumbled before spewing hot water for my five-minute shower, then I wrestled my eyelids to remain open long enough for me to impale them with contact lenses. I was hopping into pumps and running out the door a couple minutes later.

      As usual, my neighbor, Mrs. Sumner, opened her door a crack and peered at me. Also, as usual, Mrs. Sumner, a stale fiftyish woman, had her hair in curlers, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth and sported a ratty pink housecoat. The only time I ever saw poor Mr. Sumner, a meek whipped form of a man, was when he was sneaking out the door and tiptoeing down the hall.

      “Mornin’, Mrs. Sumner.” I nodded as I passed.

      “If you’re gonna be comin’ in late and leavin’ early don’t always be slammin’ your door!” she shouted after me.

      “Bye, Mrs. Sumner,” I shouted back and ran as fast as I could.

      The prestigious law firm of McAuley and Malcolm practiced family and criminal law at its location on the twelfth floor of the Bay Tower. It blended with similar glass office buildings downtown that hugged the shores of Elliott Bay. The good news was that there was a bus stop directly in front of the gleaming office tower. The bad news was that I fell asleep on the bus and woke up six blocks past my stop and had to jog back.

      In the elevator I attempted to compose myself. I smoothed down my frazzled hair, straightened my skirt and took deep calming breaths. At the twelfth floor, the elevator doors whooshed open onto the reception area. A large mahogany desk, in the shape of a horseshoe, stood front and center. It was my duty to sit behind it and answer telephones. Since I was now an hour late, Jenny was there instead. She looked up at me, her eyebrows raised in amusement.

      “You look like shit,” she said, getting to her feet so that I could slip behind the desk.

      “I also feel like shit.”

      “First morning taking the bus didn’t go well?”

      “I’ve discovered a fascinating fact about morning transit commuters,” I announced, depositing my purse into the bottom desk drawer. “Most people who take the bus do not bathe and those that do, choose to do so in loathsome perfumes.”

      A call came in and I put on my office voice and sang, “Good morning, McAuley and Malcolm. How may I direct your call?” I managed to transfer the call without cutting the person off.

      “I thought maybe you looked like shit because of the whole pentagram and bloody Dumpster thing,” Jenny put in.

      “Oh, that. I guess Lara told you.”

      Jenny grinned. “She woke me out of a dead sleep to tell me every detail.” She leaned in. “Do you really think somebody was killed and tossed in that Dumpster?”

      Before I could reply, the elevator doors opened and Clay Sanderson stepped out along with senior partner Ted McAuley. They appeared to be engrossed in a serious discussion as they passed through the reception area with barely a nod in my direction, but suddenly Clay stopped.

      “Do you smell that?” he asked.

      Old Ted McAuley sniffed loudly. “Huh? What? I don’t smell anything.”

      Clay shrugged. “Odd. For a second I was sure I smelled popcorn.” He glanced over at me, behind Ted’s back, and winked before they continued on their way.

      “Oh, my God,” Jenny breathed. “He actually winked at you!”