Underground

CHAPTER 7

“Harper, you’d better get back down here.”

It was five in the morning, so I was kind of groggy, but I recognized Quinton’s voice. “What’s happened?” I mumbled—the automatic response to such a statement as his. “Someone else has found a body. Near the park.” I sat up in bed, blinking. “Which park?” “Between Oxy and Waterfall. There’s already police securing the area, so I haven’t been able to find out who it is or what’s going on.”

“You think its another one like Thursday’s?”

“I’d bet on it.”

I groaned. “Great. I’ll be right there.”

No time for more than a splash of water on my face before I pulled on several layers of sweaters and a wool coat over my jeans and boots. Light snow had fallen overnight, and the air seemed no warmer although the radio report claimed the temperature had risen a whopping twenty degrees. My condo was in one of the coldest parts of the city. I figured they must have been reporting from Boeing Field, where the acres of tarmac on the windless plain of the airport always makes it hotter.

I negotiated the ice-crusted streets of West Seattle and crossed the bridge to downtown, where there was no sign it had ever snowed at all. The air coming off Puget Sound was warmer but still nowhere near the usual temp for January.

There were some cop cars, an aid car, a couple of city vans, and a small ant farm’s worth of busy people in official-looking clothes around Occidental Park when I arrived at my office building. I parked the Rover in my lot and walked back down the block toward the park.

Pioneer Square was deserted—too early for weekend business and too cold for just hanging out—so the unusual activity just south of the square drew whoever was around. My short walk was accompanied by Zip and one of the other homeless men I’d met the night before. Zip waved to me and I nodded back, guessing they’d come down early to scout the recycling bins behind the bars for any bottles containing a little booze or beer that had been tossed the night before—if the closing crew was in a hurry, they didn’t check too closely. Zip smelled like he’d already been diving for bottles. We all walked down the block and into Oxy Park by the totems. A huge, blanket-covered lump snored at the base of one of the wooden statues, oblivious to the killing cold. Zip and his friend stopped near the sleeper, watching the cops warily as I continued.

I spotted a dun-colored van from the medical examiners office and followed it as it pushed through the crowd toward the southern edge of Oxy Park. I stopped in the fringe of the crowd, but the van stopped where the edge of the parking lot met the wall and iron fence of Waterfall Garden Park on the southeast corner of the block. The low sun hadn’t penetrated the frozen shadows on the ground yet, but the shape of a human body was discernible there in the frosted morning gloom. I recognized Detective Solis and a coroner’s investigator kneeling beside it. The layers of time around the area were disarrayed and heaved up in broken shards shaggy with disrupted energy lines that were writhing around to reknit themselves as I watched. It made me feel queasy to see them moving like that, confirming that the energy grid was alive in some way.

I backed away a little, staying out of the detective’s line of sight to watch the scene.

The coroner’s investigator stood up, and he and the scene technician chatted for a moment while Solis continued to stare down at the body. I could see something was wrong with the shape. As Solis dropped the waterproof sheet back over it, the settling fabric fell too flat on the corpse’s legs.

As if disturbed and released by the stirring of the air below the covering, a thin Grey shape coiled up from the body and held a human form like a breath in the cold. It looked confused and more vague by the moment. I thought it wouldn’t last very long before it disappeared to wherever the lingering memories of ourselves go when there’s no reason to stay. I glanced up at the face of the lingering ghost and felt a shock of cold as she met my gaze and then faded from sight, leaving a flashbulb vision of what lay beneath the sheet: Jenny Nin, the hat gone and her right arm ended too soon—the hand that had offered Quinton a bottle and lingered over his own hand was missing, the stump short and gnawed; ragged legs hung in space below the rest. Something clung to her shape like a shredded shawl and her face was blue, twisted with surprise. I felt her go away and hoped I wouldn’t see her again in any form, but especially not that one. But I’d have to get a look at the body itself before I’d be sure.

I saw Solis stand, returning his attention to the scene and the removal of the body. By the pulsing line of color around him I knew he was more upset than he let on. I’d have to dodge him, since I couldn’t answer the questions he’d surely ask. I turned and stepped behind the orca totem. Then I walked straight from it, keeping the tall wooden figure between me and Solis’s sharp eyes until I was too far away to recognize. Then I turned the corner and hurried back to my truck. If I could get to the morgue faster than the ME’s van, I might see the body brought in and that might tell me enough.

The slippery road was tricky driving. I wanted to gun it up the hill to Harborview, but I knew the wheels would only spin on the icy bricks and asphalt.

Luck was on my side: I had a small head start and just beat the van to the parking lot. Since I didn’t have a clumsy gurney to unload, I made it into the building and down to the basement ahead of the ME’s men and their burden.

The morgue always has its compliment of ghosts, though there were fewer this time than the last time I came and they ignored me. None of them seemed aware enough to want anything from me on this occasion. The area’s always a bit unwelcoming—old and sterile and furnished in institutional patchwork—and no one particularly notices the drafts, cold spots, and general sense of being in the presence of the unseen. In this dour atmosphere, the night shift was drawing to a post-Friday-night close. Looking drowsy and haggard, the night crew wasn’t terribly worried about me as I made my way toward the desk at the pace of a winter tortoise.

The elevator opened behind me and the men from the van came in with their gurney. They stopped at the desk and I stopped next to them. As they handed over paperwork, I stared hard at the bag enclosing the remains of Jennifer Novoy.

I couldn’t see through the plastic but there was enough of something clinging to the bag itself to know I’d guessed right. Soft strands of Grey curled from the zipper like fuzzy threads. The same sort of thread I’d seen on the hole in the tunnel wall and on Thursday night’s zombie. I hoped it wasn’t having the same effect on Jenny that it seemed to have had on him.

I needed to find out and took a risk.

“Hey,” I said. “Is that Solis’s Jane Doe from Oxy Park?”

The three men around the desk looked back at me, startled.

“Uh, yeah,” one of the gurney men replied. “Why?”

I pulled out my license and flipped it past them fast enough to blur the name.

“I have a related case. Solis said I should take a look.”

The two men with the body glanced at each other and shrugged. The man behind the desk sighed. “Let’s get her in the cooler first, huh? Richards will be pissed if she stays out here any longer than necessary.”

The men with the gurney agreed and pushed the cart through the swinging doors into the morgue work area. The other man—a rather stocky fellow with skin the color of madrone bark and short, thick, black hair dramatically streaked with white, making him look like a badger—picked up a clipboard to which he’d attached a pile of forms and followed them, motioning me along.

We went past doors to the autopsy rooms and back into the storage area. The chilly air of the cooler was actually warmer than the air outdoors—no one wanted to accidentally freeze the dear departed.

The van crew lifted the bag with care and transferred Jenny to a steel table.

Then they unzipped the bag and left it to the man with the clipboard to do the rest. He signed a sheet and handed it to them to sign before ripping off a copy for them and keeping the rest.

“OK, I got her. You’re done.”

The two men from the van grunted and left with their gurney.

The badger-faced man looked me over. “Don’t I know you?”

That threw me. I recognized him from the last time I’d been in the morgue, but I was surprised he remembered. “I’m a PI. Some of my searches end here.”

He frowned in thought. Then he snapped his fingers. “Yeah! Back… October I think it was. How many Does do you have to look at every year?”

“A lot less than you.”

He laughed. “I think I see more corpses in a week than most horror film freaks see in a year. So. You want to eyeball this one and we’ll get the hell out of here? Don’t know about you, but I’m cold!”

“Yeah, let’s get it over with.”

He put on indigo-colored latex gloves and peeled the edges of the bag down with big, gentle hands, as if to some silent ceremony he carried in his head. There was no sick delight in it, only a kind of sad reverence.

I looked down at Jenny’s pale blue face and flinched at the surprise there.

Whatever had killed her had come upon her too fast for screaming. The soft Grey strands I’d expected were curled around her face and chest, but frayed away as they went lower; they didn’t form the same kind of tangled web I’d seen on the zombie but looked more like a moth-eaten shawl that was falling away in broken threads. There was very little blood and she looked as if she might have simply frozen to death—if not for her startled expression. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t stand up and come looking for me later, and I breathed relief.

“Well?” the badger-man asked.

I shook my head. “Nope.” I let him take the answer as he pleased. I hated lying, but if I identified her, I’d have to sign a form that would bring Solis to my door in a hurry.

He nodded and leaned over to attach a temporary ID with a number to her. Then he gently closed the bag and led me out of the room.

“Have you seen any other bodies like that recently?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘like’? They’re all dead and we’ve had more homeless than usual, but that happens when the weathers severe.”

“Another body came in on Thursday in a similar condition—very little blood, very cold, extremities missing. A Robert Cristus?”

We stepped out through the swinging doors and stopped by the desk. The morgue attendant looked thoughtful.

“Yeah… Now you mention it, very similar—at least at first glance.” He turned a piercing gaze on me. “You’re interested in that case?”

“And this one. Actually I wonder if there have been any others like that—similar condition and circumstances.”

When he stopped to stare at me, I got a look at his badge, which read “Fishkiller” in large letters followed by two groups of smaller words I couldn’t read before he moved again.

He scowled in thought and went behind his desk, putting the clipboard down. He looked at his computer screen and sat. “I think so… I’m not sure without looking, but I think there have been a few others. All homeless, high blood loss with very little spatter or staining, chewed or missing extremities… We have a limb or two also. Similar condition, but no associated bodies.”

“Would one of those be the leg discovered in the hotel excavation on Occidental near Royal Brougham?” I asked.

“That’s the one. Very similar…” He was intrigued, squinting and staring to the side as he thought. I dangled some bait to see if he was the curious type he seemed.

“Do you think there might be older cases like this?”

His fingers slid to the keyboard without his looking at them. “Maybe…” He began to type, becoming absorbed in his search.

While he was a little distracted, I said, “That’s odd. What does your badge say?”

“Um… yeah. Just call me Fish—technically it’s Reuben Arthur Fishkiller, but… uh… Even for an Indian it’s kind of an embarrassment. Means, you know, ‘crappy fisherman.’ You’re not supposed to kill ‘em, just catch ‘em.”

“You could change it.”

“My mother would skin me. She hates what I do; she hates where I live and where I work. She says I’m a bad Indian for working with the dead—contaminated, you know. The dead and the living aren’t supposed to mingle.”

“I can understand the sentiment.”

He bobbed his head while continuing to type in fits. “Yeah, but its fascinating. I love forensic pathology. I’m pretty far down the food chain, but I feel like—now, this is hokey, I know—I feel like I’m helping the dead find peace, or justice or something. We just throw people away and then we cry over the hollowness of our own lives. Kind of a messed-up society.”

“You mean American society.”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “See, I am a bad Indian. I get frustrated with my own people sometimes. I think some of them hold on too hard, too long. They get pushed around, but they take it because they don’t want to have to change. The rez system, the welfare—it’s messed up. But when we want to take care of ourselves we get told we can’t by the government, or that we’re destroying tradition by the tribal elders. Always in the middle. It’s hard to be in touch with nature, in balance and thoughtful of tradition, while making a living in the bigger world. But that’s what we all want—somehow. My family was so proud when I went to college. Then they were disgusted by what I chose to study—Ha! Yeah!” He sat back and grinned in triumph.

“What?” I asked, smiling back at him—he had that kind of grin.

“Got ‘em! We did have some similar cases after the 1949 earthquake. Also Pioneer Square area—which was pretty badly hit, just like in 2001. Those old buildings are on fill over the mudflats, and they heave and crack and all kinds of freaky stuff shows up. Maybe it’s my ancestors having a little revenge on you guys,” he added with a wink. “You know, Doc Maynard paid Sealth to let them name the city after him—even though that kind of thing is bad luck and binds the spirit to the thing that has its name—and then when he died, none of the whites even came to old Sealth’s funeral. Lousy deal.”

“Didn’t the chief say something about ghosts of the natives haunting the city?”

I asked. I thought I’d seen some quote about it somewhere.

Fish leaned back in his chair. “Well… there’s a pretty speech attributed to him, but I doubt he actually said it. I don’t think he was that flowery a talker in real life. But the quote—they teach this in tribal school—is ‘These shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods, they will not be alone. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning host that once filled and still love this beautiful land.’ Almost sounds like a threat, doesn’t it?”

I blinked at him and thought the old man knew a lot more than he got credit for. Certainly the ghosts of his people did throng parts of Seattle—I’d seen them. “Sounds a little sad to me, for a people who don’t want the dead and living to mingle.”

“Oh, that’s just the bodies. Ancestors and other spirits are around all the time—according to my mother and my old grandma anyway. Not sure how I feel about it, though. Not sure I’d want to hang around myself with nothing to do.”

“Wouldn’t know until you tried it, I guess,” I said.

“Yeah. I think I’ll put that off a little longer, thanks.”

The noise of the day shift arriving distracted him and I made a quick exit before anyone asked me to sign any forms.

I was intrigued and disturbed that there was a matching pattern of deaths from almost sixty years earlier. The indications pointed increasingly toward a long-term paranormal element and the most obvious was the vampires. I wasn’t at all pleased at the prospect of a private conversation with Edward Kammerling, but it appeared I had no other option. Asking the other vampires without consulting Edward first would rouse his annoyance. Our current relationship was one of deliberate distance on my part and occasional attempts to gain control over me on his. I suspected that I had a very small surprise to spring on him that would force him to keep his distance for our chat, but it would only be good the one time. I hoped I wouldn’t regret giving it up in the future, but you can’t horde all your assets forever.

With the information from Fish and a strong feeling that Jenny Nin would not be shambling out of the morgue, I left Harborview with a fair balance of good and evil before me: no immediate monsters and an emerging—if upsetting—pattern of bodies that might point to the cause of the recent deaths; but to learn more, I’d have to walk into my least favorite lion’s den and have a talk with the head lion—who was distinctly a man-eater with designs on me for a side dish.

I drove back to my office past Occidental Park and saw that the police were already cleaning up and closing the crime scene down. Solis was nowhere in sight. I imagined he wasn’t pleased with these deaths, but there might be very little he could do to keep the files active. Without the knowledge I had, the logical conclusion—even if the facts were a bit reluctant to fit perfectly—was simple death by exposure to the intense cold, followed by depredation by feral dogs. Ugly and unpleasant, but adequate for most purposes, and I’d come to know that an adequate explanation was often more desirable than a perfect truth.

From my office I called Edward’s secretary. It was Saturday and I got an answering service staffed by an actual person. She assured me Mr. Kammerling would be in touch.

My mind wandered toward thoughts of Will and, as if summoned, my cell phone rang, displaying his number. I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer, but I poked the button anyhow.

“Hi, Will.” I was still irritable from lack of sleep and the ragged edge of pity for Jenny Nin. Not sure what he wanted, I wasn’t too inclined to fill the empty air between us with words.

“Hi, Harper. I wanted to apologize,” he started, “for being hasty—for freaking out the other night. I know things couldn’t have been what they looked like.”

Since they weren’t so far from what they had looked like, I didn’t say anything.

“This is pretty hard.” I knew he wanted me to make it easier, but I wasn’t going to. My misery and shock at the way our last date had ended were turning into anger, and I had no intention of letting him off the hook with a few halting apologies. “I was hoping,” he continued, “that you might have breakfast with me. I’m down at Endolyne Joes.”

“It was snowing on the hill earlier,” I said, “and I’m at the office now. Driving back across the bridge and down to Fauntleroy isn’t high on my priority list.”

“The snows not so bad here and its keeping the morning crowd away. We’d have some privacy.”

I growled. Will was wheedling, which I’d never heard from him before and didn’t like, but our business was unfinished and I supposed I should take the opportunity he was offering to either save our relationship or bury it for good.

“All right. I need to close up some stuff and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Yet another reason to love my rattly old Rover: four-wheel drive and aggressive tires. Not that they’d save me if I drove like an idiot, but I’d seen enough SUVs in ditches from the ice and mud after the storms to take care and assume nothing.

The Rover managed the trip fine, even with a few patches of ice pretending to be snow in the curvy shadows where Fauntleroy Way wriggles along the coast and then turns inland to climb the hill that I live on top of. There were plenty of parking spaces in Endolyne Joe’s lot, and I could see through the restaurant’s windows that the place was mostly empty.

Officially, the area is Fauntleroy, but the bit just south of the ferry landing is called Endolyne—pronounced “end o’ line,” since it used to be the end of the trolley line until sometime in the 1950s when the last of the Interurban service was shut down. The restaurant is supposedly named for a notorious womanizing trolley conductor called Endolyne Joe, but I wasn’t sure how much truth there was in the tale.

Once again, Will was waiting at a table in a warm corner while the few other customers in the place had chosen to sit at the counter in the immediate blast of heat from the blue-and-white-tiled kitchen. I was hungry, but I had very little desire to eat and shooed the waiter off with “Just coffee, please.” Will reached for my hands and I let him take them without either resisting or aiding. I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the white dusting of snow outside.

“Harper, I’m sorry. That was just the stupidest thing I could have done.”

“I don’t know—freaking out seems like a pretty normal reaction to what happened. Abandoning me under the viaduct… now that was a little rough.” It wasn’t until the words were out of my mouth that I realized how pissed off I was, how saddened, how very disappointed. And how little I cared if I hurt him back.

He shook his head and looked upset. “I know. It was… rotten. I was so shocked by what I thought I saw…”

The waiter returned with a thick-walled mug of coffee for each of us and a plate of coffee cake for Will. I pulled my hands back and wrapped them around the mug, happy for the extra heat and the escape from Will’s grip. I glanced aside and didn’t see any sign of the blue filament of Grey stuff I’d seen on his hands at our last parting, so my discomfort was purely human.

“What did you think you saw?” I asked.

He looked uncomfortable and I noticed that the glow of energy around him fluxed greenish and sank down. “It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t true.”

I was out of patience with being diplomatic. “Maybe it was true. Maybe the thing you saw that you don’t want to believe really was a zombie and maybe I really did tear it into pieces.”

Will jerked back against the upholstery of his seat. “What?”

I pitched my voice down to a harsh whisper. “I don’t know what you think you saw—what sort of justification or confabulation you’ve made for it—but the fact is two monsters walked up to us on the street and I dismantled one of them. To you they looked like bums, but to me they were a hairy man and a walking corpse, and the zombie had to go. And that’s what they really were and that’s what really happened. I’m not crazy, before you ask. I’m telling you the unvarnished truth: I talk to ghosts; I work for monsters. That’s the big, ugly secret you always wanted to know. There it is.”

I sat back with my coffee mug and glared at him and waited to hear what he would say.

Will gaped at me, his face very pale. The light reflecting off the yellow walls turned his silver hair a buttery blond and he looked young and confused and charmingly nerdy behind his spectacles. I felt like I’d kicked a puppy.

“Why?” he choked out.

“Why what?” I replied in a milder voice. “Why work for them? Why tell you now? Why lie?”

“Why are you being like this?”

“I’m not ‘being’ anything but truthful—as ugly as it is. This is why I never discuss my cases and why I disappear and why terrible things seem to happen around me. I don’t like it, but it is what it is. Usually it’s not nice or pretty—it’s brutal and damned ugly and I wish I wasn’t stuck in it. But I do the best I can to keep the ugly from spreading. That’s what I had to do Friday night.”

“By… tearing that… creature”—Will fought to get the words out, and I could see the energy around him twisting and flushing with clashing colors—red, green, orange, and vivid naked blue—“…tearing it apart… you were… making something better?”

I had tried to explain it before and I knew he wasn’t taking it in any better now, so why waste the breath repeating myself “Yes” was all I said.

“But… what happ—”

“What do you think happened?” I demanded, leaning forward again, pinning his gaze with mine. I wished I could push on him somehow—at least stop the strobing, polychromatic storm around his body—but it wouldn’t have been right.

“You—I don’t know.” He slumped in his seat. “I don’t know what you did. I saw you reach into him and he… fell apart. And there was some light. And then he was gone.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s about it.”

The colors around him collapsed to a miserable olive green that clung like toxic smoke. He looked shrunken and disjointed. “How often? How often does it happen?”

I started to say it wasn’t common, but when I tallied it in my head, the number of disturbing and awful things I’d done or seen or had a hand in was too big, and the zombie was actually one of the better incidents—at least someone had taken some relief from it. My pause was too long, and Will saw me calculating the number of horrors.

He shook his head. “I can’t live with that. I can’t take on that… breakage.”

I was torn between outraged silence and screaming, but I chose to speak calmly.

“I don’t have a choice.”

“I guess… this isn’t going to work, then. I am sorry. I am.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m a great girl, except for the ghosts and the craziness.” He shifted in his seat and I held up my hand to stop him. “No. I think it’s my turn to go.”

I got up, still holding my coffee cup. I handed it to a waiter as he passed. “I can’t finish this.” Then I looked back down at Will. It seemed like I ought to kiss him good-bye—a nice Hollywood gesture—but I didn’t. “I am sorry, too, Will. I love you but I don’t belong with you.”

I left, villainous and caddish, because although I felt angry and wrecked and horrid I was also relieved. At least it was over and I didn’t have to care about anyone but me. I wondered if by “breakage,” Will meant mine. Maybe he thought I was crazy and that’s what he couldn’t bear. Or maybe he got it and he just couldn’t face that. Even a tiny dose of the Grey was more than I’d wish on most people, and certainly not on Will, no matter how upset or brokenhearted I was.

Driving was difficult. My eyes kept tearing up and the fog of the Grey seemed worse with the snow light. The road was icy and treacherous—like me, I thought, and then got angry with myself for it. Anger made the tears stop, at least, and I thought I would not go home and feel sorry for myself.

I killed time going to the gym and then doing some research for Nanette Grover’s cases before I headed home again, a little depressed and just wanting to be alone with the simple needs of home and pet. I did chores and played with Chaos for a while. The weather didn’t seem to be agreeing with her, and I caught her shivering a few times. I wondered if I ought to turn up the heat in the condo, though it didn’t seem uncomfortable to me. I reminded myself that she was six years old, so she was entitled to an occasional bout of crankiness, and offered her a raisin, which elicited a bouncing war dance and begging for more treats.

She tried to steal any treats I might be hiding by climbing my legs and searching in my sweaters before crawling around my shoulders to get tangled in my hair and plant whiskery ferret kisses on my face and neck.

“Have you had that cuteness patented yet?” I asked. Annoyed at the lack of additional raisins, Chaos didn’t deign to reply but scampered back down my body to tell her troubles to Nixon the Eggplant as she forced him—with a protesting blat—into a favorite hidey-hole next to the entertainment center. I could hear the toy uttering sporadic squawks and squeaks as Chaos bit and shoved it.

My attempts to rescue Nixon from the lair were interrupted by a phone call from Edward about a half hour after sundown. He purred his delight at my desire to meet. We agreed on eight o’clock at the After Dark—barely the shank of a winter evening for a vampire. I wished Quinton could come along as my bodyguard, but I knew Edward wouldn’t approve and I didn’t want him in a bad mood, however much I despised the necessity of going.

After dinner, I got dressed up as nicely as I could stand for the temperature—nice wool trousers instead of jeans and a better quality of sweater with dress boots instead of my usual urban hikers—and tucked the ferret back into her cage. I left her moping in her collection of old sweatshirt scraps as I headed out.

I had to stop by my office again before meeting Edward, and I needed a little extra time.