Downpour

SIXTEEN

Geoff Newman wasn’t pleased with the arrangements, but he played the role of secretary without audible complaint. Once things were settled, he followed me back into Port Angeles and to his bank where we made appropriate financial arrangements that left me with a nice chunk of cash and a check with a hell of a lot of zeroes on it. I wished I had Quinton’s devious tinkerer’s brain at my disposal to figure out where I could hide the stuff, but I’d have to make do with my own.

Before he left me in the drizzly parking lot, Geoff turned back and gave me a hard look. Then he glanced around and held out a key. “You might want to use my father-in-law’s cabin instead of staying all the way out here. Be more convenient and you wouldn’t have to be driving up and down the hill all the time.”

“And I’d be a lot easier to keep tabs on.”

He didn’t deny it. He just kept standing there, staring at me, the key to Steven Leung’s house in his hand.

I shrugged and took the key. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

“Keep your ferret out of the vents—that’s all I ask.”

“I wouldn’t want to leave a mess for Mr. Shea.”

Newman snorted. “I’ve done all the maintenance on that house myself. I wouldn’t ask that pie-sucking liar into my place, much less give him the keys.”

I nodded, filing his comments under “volatile.” “All right.”

He glared at me for a moment as if I were a friend of Shea’s before he finally turned away and headed for his Mercedes. I waited him out. He didn’t need to know where I went next or what I did. I might have been on the payroll, but I wasn’t hired to be the entertainment.

As I was already in Port Angeles, I thought I’d try the sheriff’s office first and see if Strother was in, since he was so interested in me. I found him at his desk in an aluminum cubicle that had the charm of an upholstered soda can.

Without his hat, Strother reminded me a bit of a baby mouse—the scalp showing through his fine blond hair was pink and the skin on his face was just as pink. I hoped there weren’t any big ugly snakes around waiting to swallow him whole.

I walked into his view and waited for him to look up. When he did, I said, “I hear you’ve been asking about me.”

He turned an even brighter shade of pink. “Sorry about that, Ms. Blaine. I was just . . . interested.”

“I understand. Are you the investigator assigned to the case?”

He looked slightly nauseated at the reminder. “Yeah. I’m not qualified—I know that. But Ridenour kind of insisted that since I was already on it, I should stay on it. ‘Continuity of evidence,’ he said.”

“Ridenour insisted? Is the sheriff’s department normally on such . . . cordial terms with the park service?” I asked, sitting down in the ratty, rickety typist’s chair nearby. The seat lurched and leaned, but I perched on it as if I didn’t notice.

Strother turned his own chair to get a better view of me and leaned close. “Not really. I don’t know why he wants me on this. I don’t know why my boss didn’t overrule him. We have a good investigative team here. Do a lot of drug work and missing persons stuff in cooperation with the Canadian authorities—the Mounties and the Canadian Coast Guard—along the Strait. People going overboard, stuff washing up on beaches . . . You know. Remember those feet last year . . . ?”

“The shoes that floated in? Wasn’t that a hoax?”

“Only the one. The rest are the real deal. But so far only one’s shown any sign of unnatural separation from the body. The rest are just poor souls lost at sea and the feet float in when the body falls apart—because athletic shoes are full of foam. It’s not any conspiracy or serial killer—” He cut himself off before he reached full rant and shrugged to apologize. “Anyhow, the investigators here are damned good and the cadaver dogs are the best. They didn’t need to put me on this. ’Cept there’s not much to investigate, I guess.”

“How do you guess that?”

He shook his head. “This case is so cold, you could store fish on it.”

“You guys ID the body?”

“Yeah, had to ship it to King County for further forensics, but the ID was easy. Steven Leung all right, like you thought. He was a local guy, so a local dentist matched up the records with the teeth in the skull and the rest recovered from the car. The ME said it was the fastest ID on a body so badly decomposed that he’d ever done. Got the ID back last night.”

“What else are they looking for? Why send the remains to King County?”

“We don’t have a medical forensic lab. We don’t even really have a morgue. The county prosecutors act as coroner to certify death, but they don’t have any medical expertise for a cause-of-death investigation. If there’s a question or need for an autopsy, we send ’em to KC. Otherwise they just go to the nearest mortuary until the family can pick ’em up.”

Strother continued, a little self-consciously. “In this case, the body was decomposed to bones and bits of flesh, but . . . there were signs of fire in the vehicle, and the doctor who looked at it to recommend we send it on said most of the flesh was”—he gagged a little—“burned away. He also thought there might have been some kind of injury to the head, and with most of the rest of the flesh either eaten up by fish or . . . sappo-saffo—I can’t manage that word.”

“Saponified?” I asked, echoing the voices of the Winter kids in the cozy comfort of the Veela Café.

“That’s the one.” He nodded and looked even sicker. “I guess it means, um . . .”

“Turned into soap.” I’d had to look it up to be sure.

Strother cleared his throat and licked his lips, looking pale. “Yeah. It’s the craziest damned case. They don’t know anything about how it happened yet or how the car got in the lake, but I was wondering . . . what you were doing up here, looking for him.”

“Just doing some pretrial for a lawyer in Seattle. Backgrounds, story check, that sort of thing. Nothing in your field—it’s a corporate case.”

Strother nodded, his mouth open. If he wanted to look like an idiot, he was doing a good imitation, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. “So you don’t know Mr. Leung?”

“I don’t,” I said, but then I had a thought. “But it looks like I might get to, in a manner of speaking.”

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, which made him look comical to the point of something drawn by Walt Disney. “Oh?”

“Much as I hate to say it, it appears the family doesn’t have as much confidence in the investigative powers of the county as you do, so they’ve asked me to poke around a bit as well.”

Strother gave an ironic laugh. “You mean Jewel has. And I suppose she’s already got someone picked out for the deed.”

I cocked my head. “Why would you think so?”

“Best I can tell, she’d make a damned fine prosecutor: Jewel Newman never has done anything that didn’t benefit her first and she never asks a question that she doesn’t already know the answer to. When she asks ‘a favor,’ she’s already got a way to make sure you do it. The Newmans may be of a minority color, but let me tell you, their money isn’t, and in a county this close to the edge, money talks. She wouldn’t be talking to you unless she thought she already knew how the whole thing was going to go down.”

“How well do you know the Newmans, personally?”

“Feh,” he scoffed. “I don’t know them at all in person. Just the common knowledge.”

“What about the rest of the Leung family? Did you ever know any of them? Go to school with Willow or her brother?”

His eyes widened, but he quickly forced the expression into amusement and shook his head. “I grew up on the other side of the county, actually. Out near La Push, where the Saint Nikolai ran aground.”

I didn’t corner him about his evasion—though I was a little surprised that he had grown up on an Indian reservation. Instead, I took his bait to see where it might lead. “The what ran aground?”

Strother laughed with a touch of honest embarrassment. “Where the first white woman in Washington came ashore. It was our obscure claim to fame—aside from the Quileute reservation—before that vampire movie up in Forks. So, anyhow, back . . . 1809 or so, this Russian ship was coming down from Alaska and foundered out near Destruction Island—it’s a rock, really, but ‘island’ sounds better—and the crew came ashore at La Push. Everybody got off, including the captain’s wife, Anna Petrovna, so she was the first white woman in Washington.”

A cold stab of memory lanced through my chest. “What happened to them after that?”

“Some were killed and the rest were captured—probably by Makah—and they sold ’em as slaves. Anna and the captain finally died in captivity after about a year or so, but most of the surviving crew were found out around Quileute and the Hoh River and bought back by an American sea captain. Kind of tragic and ironic, huh?”

Anna Petrovna . . . a Russian lady who died near La Push in 1810—I wondered if she was the ghost I’d seen in my hotel room on Thursday night. And if she was, why had she been so far from her resting place?

“Strother,” I asked, “do the Newmans know the regular investigation team?”

“I imagine so, what with Willow’s way of causing trouble and all.”

“Maybe that’s why you were assigned and not one of them. You don’t have any past association with the family or the area, so you’re less likely to be influenced by them.”

Strother seemed to consider it. “Could be. Maybe.” He nodded to himself and repeated, “Maybe.”

I pulled an envelope out of my bag and offered it to him. “These are the background notes I took to find Leung. I don’t think they’ll be a lot of help, but they’re what I’ve got. Since this is an active case now, even though it’s pretty cold, I can’t, technically, investigate it. But I can keep you in the loop if I find information helpful to you while I’m on my job. Would you feel uncomfortable reciprocating?”

“You mean tell you what I find?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I could, mostly. I mean, not everything, of course, and not if you might tell your client something that could derail the investigation, you understand.”

I nodded, noticing he suddenly sounded a lot less “hick” than he had a few minutes ago. “That’ll be fine. My cell phone number’s on the paperwork. You might want to start with Leung’s bank records and see if all his retirement money’s accounted for, less his taxes, of course. If it’s not, that might be an interesting angle. . . .”

He sat up straighter. “It certainly would be. And you might want to keep an eye out if you go back up the mountain anytime soon for a fella named Costigan—Elias Costigan. Seems to have some noisy parties and he’s what you might call ‘a practitioner of alternate lifestyle.’ Got a place almost directly across from Jewel and Geoff’s on the west shore of Lake Crescent. Near Devil’s Punch Bowl. They say he and Jewel have been heard to scream at each other across the lake—though I imagine that’s not really possible. He’s not exactly what you’d call a friend of the family.”

That was interesting. If I had the location right, Costigan’s place would have been close to where the white thing I’d seen rise from the lake had come slogging into shore while I was interviewing Shea. “Anybody else I should keep an eye peeled for?” I asked.

“Not sure,” he said, picking up a yellow legal pad with neat rows of writing. “Kind of funny—there seems to have been a little housing boom up at the lakes about the time Steven must have disappeared. A half dozen families in a year or two sold up and moved on. Now, could be they foresaw the market collapse, but I’m thinking not all of’em could have been that smart.”

“You have a list?”

He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I could do.” He flipped the first few pages back and wrote himself a note.

“Could you indicate which of the newcomers are year-round residents and which are seasonal visitors only?”

“I think I could, but it’ll take a little while longer.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll call you when I’ve got the info, all right?”

I nodded and smiled a little. “Thanks. And I’ll let you know if I find anything that might help you.”

“All right, then.”

I noticed he didn’t offer to tell me what he found out from the bank, but I figured he’d trade information with me once I got anything he could use. He wasn’t quite the native guide I might have wanted, but he was at least a useful source of local information. And he seemed disposed to be friendly, which I couldn’t expect from a lot of others if there was, indeed, a nest of tricky mages around the lakes.

I thought it unlikely that everyone on Strother’s list was a magic user of some kind, but I could see where his thinking and mine intersected: Carefully-planned murders don’t happen out of the blue; something in the status quo changes and that triggers the violence. It could be something big, like a crime or an indiscretion, or it could be something small, such as the weather or one too many humiliations. Or it could be that someone comes to town and blows the whole thing up. Steven Leung’s ghost had said something about “them”: “We should never have let them.” His daughter Jewel was also concerned with “them.” I felt pretty confident that one of “them” was—if not the trigger—the one who’d pulled it. I just had to figure out which of “them” it was—once I met them—because, even if it wasn’t my case, I wanted to make sure that someone got special treatment when the flak hit. It takes a dangerous lack of empathy to set a man on fire.

Having picked Strother’s brain for ideas, I thought my next stop should be Ridenour to see what he thought of the names on Strother’s list and whom he might add to it. Between Strother and Ridenour, I stood a good chance of getting many pieces to this puzzle I’d never get on my own, since there weren’t a lot of neighbors in residence of whom to ask questions. Most of the houses were still closed up at this time of year and I’d have to spend some time with the tax records to figure out where the owners actually lived.

I opened my cell phone and called the main ranger station for the park; it seemed most likely Ridenour would be there or that they’d know where he was. I wondered how much damage Willow and her creatures had actually wreaked on the place Sunday evening and how she’d gotten the bears to do her bidding.

The ranger who answered the phone thought Ridenour was at the southwestern end of his territory, near the Sol Duc Hot Springs resort. That was beyond the big lake by a couple of miles, heading toward Forks. The ranger offered to call Ridenour on the radio and have him meet me at the hot springs tollbooth, which sounded like a good idea to me.

It took a while to drive to the far end of the lake and then on down the road toward Sol Duc. A sign at the edge of the road informed me I was entering the Hoh Rain Forest and another sign pointed toward the hot springs. I followed it. When I got to the quaint little booth in the middle of the road with its red and white striped traffic barriers and blinking stoplight, I found Ridenour’s pickup truck parked at the bar, but there was no sign of the ranger. I stopped the Rover and stepped out, thinking he might be in the booth itself, but no dice there, either.

As soon as my feet were on the ground, I felt a flush of sourceless heat and a strange noise took over my ears.