Unperfect Souls

27

The ring of my cell phone startled me out of a dreamless sleep. After leaving the Guildhouse the previous afternoon, I had gathered my resource materials and holed up in my living room in a fruitless quest to figure out a way to get rid of Uno. Squinting against the light in my living room, I pushed aside the nest of books that surrounded me as I groped for the phone. Uno rose from the floor at the foot of the bed, a physical reminder that my research had gone nowhere, the dry, academic prose of many of the books lulling me into a bored stupor. The dog vanished as my hand closed on the phone, probably fading off to Shay’s apartment again.

“I need you,” Murdock had said.

The man didn’t return my calls all day and night, then rang me at five o’clock in the morning like it was a perfectly normal time for either of us to be awake. Granted, I spent more of my waking hours in the middle of the night than most people, but I was surprised Murdock was up that early—so early that I had to take a cab down to the morgue to meet him because the subway wasn’t open.

I went around the back to the back of the OCME. The building was open twenty-four hours, but the main door was locked before 6:00 A.M. The loading dock, though, remained open for business twenty-four/seven. Dead bodies didn’t much care about regular office hours.

A morgue in the middle of the night is exactly how you imagine it would be. Dim atmosphere, cold light, dark corners, empty corridors, and dead bodies in freezers. Under normal circumstances, I would write off the notion of a dead person leaping out of a darkened room as the product of an overactive imagination. Boston after the Samhain catastrophe, though, made the idea not only plausible, but even likely.

The bright light from the cooling room cast a stark blue beam into the dark basement hallway. When I reached the door, Janey and Murdock looked at me with relief and irritation. They stood on opposite sides of an examining table—a large examining table—with Sekka’s body laid out on it. Her head had been placed above the neck.

“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been trying to talk sense to him for an hour,” said Janey.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Murdock rested his hands on his hips. “I was thinking the best way to find out if Jark was telling the truth about the night he died was to ask Sekka.”

I joined them at the table. “You want to reanimate her.”

“Exactly,” he said.

I opened my sensing ability and looked at Sekka. “I think we’re too late for that. Her body essence is long gone.”

“Well, then, where is it? You keep saying the Dead are here because TirNaNog is gone. If that’s true, where are the dead solitaries going?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have an answer for that, Murdock. But I do know that there is no more essence in this body, and without essence, there is no reanimation.”

Janey crossed her arms. “I already told him Jark killed Sekka.”

That surprised me. “He’s an eyewitness to his own murder. How do we refute that he said she killed him?”

Janey gestured at Sekka’s body. “Physical evidence. Jark left here with a city-issued coverall as clothing. He didn’t want what he was wearing when he died.”

“I don’t blame him. It did go through the sewer,” I said.

Janey nodded. “But that didn’t wash out the DNA evidence in his clothes. I tested it. They were soaked in Sekka’s blood and his own.”

I pursed my lips. “You’re suggesting he couldn’t have Sekka’s blood on him if she killed him first.”

“Right.”

“But if she was near him when she was killed, her blood could have gotten on him if she was close enough.”

Janey nodded again. “True. But if she killed Jark first like he said she did, she’d have his blood on her. It’s virtually impossible to decapitate someone and not get blood on you. I checked everywhere. The only blood on Sekka is her own. The blood on Jark is hers and his.”

“He killed her first,” Murdock said.

“Which leaves the Hound,” I said.

Murdock stared down at Sekka. “You’re sure this won’t work?”

I shrugged and looked at the clock. “Yeah, but we can wait until dawn if you want.”

He nodded. “I’d like that.”

Janey and I exchanged a bewildered look. Murdock usually deferred matters of the fey world to me. He never disputed the things I told him. For someone who had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, Janey seemed a lot more understanding than I was. As the only fey person on staff at the OCME, Janey was used to humans making odd requests and ignoring her expertise.

“Okay. We’re here, so we might as well,” I said.

Another twenty minutes would decide the issue either way, and waiting was a small thing compared to contributing to Murdock’s anger and frustration. I didn’t see the need to get into an argument about it.

“You want to tell us what’s going on, Murdock?”

He spread his hands over the body. “Let’s see what happens. I need to see what happens.”

“Okay,” I said.

The clock ticked off the minutes as we waited in silence. Murdock stared at Sekka’s body like it was going to reveal something important to him. Maybe it was. He didn’t like the whole reanimation thing, didn’t like the questions about his faith it created. Yet now he wanted to make it happen.

Dawn arrived. Sekka lay still, no sign of movement. No sign of essence. Murdock continued staring as Janey checked her watch. “It would have happened by now,” she said.

Murdock had a strange look on his face, at once relieved and frustrated. A polite smile flickered on and off his face as he looked at Janey. “I’m sorry. I had to take the chance.”

Janey pulled a sheet over the body. “Don’t apologize. Part of my job is research. We answered a question.”

We didn’t speak as we left Janey to close up the lab. Murdock pulled out of the parking lot and into early-morning rush hour. We crept along the access road to the highway, waiting to cut over to the Southie side of the channel.

“Are you going to tell me what that was all about?” I asked.

“My father ordered the stand-down the night the Dead attacked the neighborhood meeting,” he said.

I nodded. “I thought so. I didn’t want to say anything because I thought you might think I was being cynical.”

“You are cynical. It gets worse. He as much as admitted he’s letting the Guild operate with no oversight,” he said.

“Why the change? He never likes the Guild to get the upper hand,” I said.

“They persuaded him that the issue was critical. The solitaries are hiding something the Guild wants. In exchange for allowing them in to get what they needed, the Guild offered to take care of the solitary leadership.”

I turned my head toward Murdock in disbelief. “Are you telling me your father—the police commissioner—took out contracts on fey people?”

Murdock grunted. “I asked the same thing. My father said the Guild assured him it meant the solitary leaders would be taken into legal custody. Then he said, of course, if someone dies in the attempt, it serves the same purpose. He smiled when he said it.”

“What does Sekka have to do with this?” I asked.

He glanced in the rearview mirror as he cut across the traffic lane. “She knows who killed her. We make an arrest, we expose the whole damn scheme.”

“You’ll expose your father, too,” I said.

“He’ll survive. That’s the point of their plan, Connor. It’s set up so that everyone can deny what’s going on.”

“So why bother?”

Murdock smiled. “Because it will stop. I don’t care what game the Guild is playing. I never have. I just want the killing stopped.”

“So, we’re back to square one, then. Sekka didn’t reanimate,” I said.

He pulled up in front of my apartment building. “Maybe not.” He gave me a sly smile. “So, who’s the Guildmaster sleeping with these days?”

I chuckled. “That’s funny. That’s very funny.”

I pulled the sending stone out of my pocket. The palm of my hand tingled as my body signature interacted with the ward spell on it. I held it near my mouth. “Hey, gorgeous. I have something for the Old Man.”

Her voice floated softly out of the stone. I hear you, handsome. I’ll let you know when a car’s ready.