Possession

by Kat Richardson

  The tunnel construction area was huge—about the size of a commercial parking lot—crammed in under the slowly disappearing viaduct between a row of old buildings and the industrial straightaway heading south on Alaskan Way. A yellow-striped plywood barrier had been erected around the project boundaries just south of the ferry terminal, forcing pedestrians to cross the road with the blind hope that Seattle’s drivers would actually obey the signals and signs temporarily put up around it. Honking, cursing, and scampering demonstrated that neither the pedestrians nor the drivers were willing to play by the ever-changing rules at that location.

  Most of the pedestrians came from the water side of the road at the ferry terminal and headed down the row of buildings on the landward side or toward the stadia farther east. I was on the other side and I figured any route into the construction would be on the water side off the straightaway, so I crossed the street, staying close to the plywood barriers and their confusing profusion of signage.

  I went quickly around the water-facing side of the barrier and came to a hard stop on the other side of it, between the blind plywood wall, painted like a school-bus-colored zebra, and the southbound traffic. I’m tall, but still under six feet, and the barrier hid me completely. My tail peered around the barrier as he walked past the end and I snatched him into a headlock, dragging him behind the upstanding plywood and then pivoting, propelling him past me with our mutual momentum and into the next plywood frame head first.

  He got his arms up and slammed himself back off the wood as it started to topple, spinning around to face me. He drew his hands across his body and flicked one outward. A steel baton telescoped out of his fist. I turned to keep my good eye on him, not wanting to lose him under the visual noise of the Grey.

  He took a step forward, raising the baton, and said, “I can tell you’re going to be trouble, Harper Blaine.”

  It was the voice as much as the dark brown hair and the slim, athletic build that put the pieces together for me. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year, and then it had been fleeting as he’d shoved me down in my own living room and bolted out the door. He still looked essentially like Quinton—a similarity he had enhanced at the time with hair dye, clothes, and facial hair. Now he had let his natural gray thread through his hair and had shaved off the beard. His voice was as colorless as air and chill-neutral. Now I understood why his aura looked the way it did. “I’m surprised it took you so long to figure that out, Papa Purlis,” I said.

  His energy flushed red. For a moment the bands of his control flexed under the strain of his anger and I had the strong impression that he hated me but wasn’t going to give in to it. He feinted forward, but I didn’t take the bait and flinch. Behind me was a train of cement trucks and I knew better than to go toward them. He swept the baton at me—not very seriously, but I still had to turn aside to avoid an unpleasant contact.

  “Now, now,” I chided him. “If you break me, Quinton will be very upset with you.”

  “Then he might stop playing games and do what I tell him.”

  I snapped a hand at his face. He caught it and pulled me to him. I dove forward as he pulled and rammed my shoulder into his chest. I heard him gasp and his grip on me loosened. I ducked and rolled my shoulders down, hoping to pull him under me. Instead, he let go, rolling to the side and scrambling back to his feet. He was quick, had great instincts, and was in fantastic condition for a man in his late fifties. I suspected he didn’t spend much time behind a desk. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped.

  I swept one booted foot under him and he hopped to avoid it. I spun with the movement and came back up, grabbing and turning him with me to put my back to the plywood barrier while nearly throwing him into traffic. He clutched my jacket and shoved one leg between mine, using my own weight and momentum to trip me up.

  I got a heel and a hand on the ground to break the fall and we both went down in a heap. A cement truck roared past, inches from our heads, blowing its horn. I tried to keep hold of him, but he had retained the baton and rapped hard on my knuckles. I let go and scampered backward, rising to my full height against the tilting barrier. I was taller than he was, but that wasn’t necessarily an advantage.

  He glared at me, his eyes almost glowing with ire, then pushed the emotion away and straightened up, taking a step back and sideways out of my reach. Standing still, contained and focused, he looked very much like his son. Except that I loved Quinton and I felt no such thing for his father.

  “Why have you been following me, Purlis?”

  “I just want to know what J.J.’s been up to—and who he’s been sleeping with.” He looked me over as if I were an insect caught crawling on his dinner plate.

  The sneering didn’t bother me, but I wasn’t used to anyone calling Quinton by his initials—or his real name—and it threw me off for an instant before I said, “Just fatherly concern, then. Nothing about trying to get him to return to the fold and play spy with you.” Quinton claimed that misplaced hero worship was what had gotten him into government work to begin with, but I had never been sure there wasn’t a good dose of naive delight in cracking codes and solving problems all day involved as well.

  “He talks a good game, but J.J. knows what he needs to do. If I have to remind him what’s best for him—and what’s not—I will,” his father said, his voice dead calm.

  “You’d better think hard before you do him any harm, Pops.”

  He laughed and it wasn’t a pretty sound. “It’s not my son who’ll get hurt first.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Absolutely. Persuade J.J. to stop fucking around and get with my program and we’ll get on fine. But if you get in my way, or hold him back, I will go through you.”

  “I’m a lot harder to get through than you think.”

  “Everyone has soft spots.”

  I gave him a cold smile. Then I lunged and snatched him by the shirt, yanking him toward me. He pushed and we hit the barrier behind me. The baton swung around again and I ducked as the plywood crashed down into a pit behind us.

  I shook him and pushed him off me, backward toward another of the endless line of cement trucks. “Piss off, Purlis.”

  He caught himself, just out of my range, eliciting another horrified screech from the nearest truck’s horn. “Or you’ll shoot me, like Bryson Goodall?”

  I laughed. If he had any idea what had actually happened the night Goodall died, he would never let me out of his sight again. “I won’t need to shoot you. You would be wise to stay out of Quinton’s life and out of my sight.”

  “Oh, you won’t be seeing me again. I know what I need to about you.”

  “I don’t think you do,” I said, starting forward one more time.

  SEVEN

  Someone started shouting from behind the downed barrier. “Hey! What are you two idiots doing? Get the hell out of here!”

  I turned around, letting James Purlis slither away—I would have other chances to make my point to him and find out what he was up to with the vampires. I was pretty sure I’d have no trouble finding him when I was ready.

  A slim woman with curling auburn hair pulled back into a serviceable ponytail was jogging across the city block–sized wasteland of dirt and machines toward me with two big guys in hard hats and safety vests coming along behind her. “What’s the idea? This is a restricted area—it’s dangerous. We have an open excavation down here!” she shouted at me.

  “I’m sorry. I was looking for the tunnel site and I stumbled into the barrier. Those trucks are really close.”

  “Next time walk on the sidewalk side. What are you, suicidal?”

  “No, just lost.”

  The woman sighed and turned around to wave the construction workers away. “It’s just a tourist, guys. I’ll take care of it.” She turned back to face me. “What were you trying to find?”

  “The initial bore site for the tunnel project.”

  “The launch pit. Well, this is it. Thoroughly unexciting. Why ar
e you looking?” she asked, wiping her hands on her coveralls and then resting them on her hips. She was petite and had the sort of elfin features that had probably been called “cute” often enough to gall their owner to fury. Her coveralls, work boots, and mud smears only added to the impression that she was a visiting sprite trying to pass for normal.

  “I’m trying to find the location where Kevin Sterling was injured,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “He’s a tunnel engineer. He was on the project until a few months ago when the tunnel collapsed on him.”

  “Oh. That. Well, yeah, this would be the place, then. The official digging ceremony was really just for show and that’s the section of pit wall that collapsed. We’ve been doing everything right, I can assure you.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You don’t just dig a tunnel. I mean you do, but not just like any old hole. You have to do all sorts of soil tests and structural analysis, ground stabilization, water removal, staging-area creation . . . and, of course, archaeology. Which is where I come in—or rather the Washington State Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation.”

  “I’m still not sure I’m following you. Look, I’m a private investigator and I’m afraid I don’t know anything about tunnels or how you build something like this, so I can’t understand what happened to Mr. Sterling and I thought I could get a better idea if I came down here and saw the site.” I offered her my hand. “My name’s Harper Blaine.”

  She wiped her hand on her coveralls again and shook mine, leaving a bit of grit behind in spite of her best efforts. Being a woman who often works in messy situations, I didn’t mind. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “I’m Rhiannon Held. I’m the archaeological site monitor. I wasn’t here when the launch pit collapsed, so I’m not sure how much I can help you.”

  “I’ll settle for whatever you can tell me—how the collapse might have happened, what an archaeologist is doing here . . . that sort of thing.”

  She looked intrigued and glanced around. “I don’t think anyone’s going to care if I’m not watching them insert bracing sections for a few minutes. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll find you a hard hat and I can give you a general idea of what’s going on—if that will help. It’s got to be more interesting than watching dirt get shoved out of the hole.”

  She waved me through and manhandled the plywood back into place between us and the traffic. She may have looked adorable, but she was no weakling. On the other side of the plywood barrier stretched the site of the tunnel’s southern mouth. Right now it looked like the human equivalent of an anthill—a long open pit supported by poured-concrete walls and walkways across the top that was the focus of furious activity by men and excavating equipment in the middle of a huge expanse of mud about a block wide and three city blocks long. The ground shivered around the hole and a distant growling sound issued from the opening. I noticed that we were several feet below the level of the pavement outside the barriers.

  “So,” I said, “this is the famous tunnel.”

  “It will be once it’s done. This is the launch pit—it’s where the excavator entered the ground to start the dig. It had to be shored up and angled so the boring machine could get into position to make the tunnel without risk of the mouth collapsing and burying the machine—it’ll also be the basis of the ramp into the southern end of the tunnel once the project is ready for traffic. The small collapse you were talking about happened before the excavator was brought in. The area is a little wetter than everyone hoped it would be. We also found some bottles and other debris at the historic level, but no significant artifacts. All that’s been cleared away long ago, though. The project is into the serious tunneling now and that’s actually kind of dull to observe. But that’s my job—watch the site and keep an eye out for anything that the department will want to take a closer look at.” Held led me to a trailer and went inside to grab a hard hat and a sort of coverall coat, which she handed to me.

  “Put these on,” she said.

  As I did, I asked her, “Why do they need an archaeologist on site to look at bottles? Couldn’t they send them to you?”

  “Legal complications. This area is mostly landfill over tidal mud flats that the local Indians used to fish and go clamming on. The original landfill is kind of interesting on its own, too, so there’s potential historical interest and artifacts. Ever since the Kennewick Man find and all the legal wrangling that went with it, Washington has had pretty stringent requirements about working in areas that may present anything of significant archaeological interest. So much of the area around Puget Sound was populated or used by the local tribes that all construction projects have to be investigated and cleared before any work can go ahead—we already did that stage here—and then there has to be a monitor standing by during the construction in case they dig into something unexpected that could be significant. Usually they don’t, but that’s the bread and butter that keeps most archaeologists employed and in Washington there are enough projects to keep a whole lot of people busy year-round. There’s really not a lot of work for us, otherwise. It’s not all whips and fedoras out here, as you can see,” she added with a derisive snort. “Mostly it’s either preparation work screening buckets full of mud for significant items—that’s the fun part—or it’s sitting on a site like I am, waiting to see if anything pops up. Lots of tedious sorting and grubbing around or sitting and waiting and looking at more buckets full of muck. And I mean a lot of muck.

  “The excavator—which is named Bertha, incidentally—is about five stories tall and it’ll remove about eighty-six thousand cubic yards of mud before it’s done. And I get to look at every yard, just in case there’s something interesting in it. The hard part is figuring out what’s significant and what’s just grunge. Mud’s not as bland as it seems, though this stuff is pretty cold and nasty. It’s mostly seawater here, you know.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. The seawall leaks. It’s over a hundred years old and it wasn’t the best construction to begin with, so that’s being replaced—that’s another part of the project. The whole area’s unstable due to seawater infiltration and the type of fill they used. First they dumped in sawdust from the mill, then they dumped in mud from when they did the regrades. People threw in all sorts of junk and garbage. There’s a small artificial island of old ships’ ballast stones that was completely buried between Washington Street and Main—we just found some of the cores and minerals that aren’t native to Washington, so now we know right where the island was—parts of the buildings that burned down in the Great Fire were thrown in, and there’s even a shipwreck in here somewhere at the north end.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She glanced up at me and grinned. “No. Some old wooden sailing ship—not a big one—that was beached before they built the seawall. No one wanted to pay to move it, so they just buried it. This part of the harbor was below the mill and the original sewer outflow, so it’s got a lot of weird stuff in it that came down from the bluff in the sewage as well as the landfill and junk that was dropped or lost over time—the prep team found some old patent medicine bottles and things like that at the historic level.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Oh, before you get to anything interesting, you have to get past all the modern debris, roads, dirt, and so on that builds up or gets dumped on top of older layers. About ten feet down is where you get to the historic level in Seattle—you’ll notice the whole site is about six to ten feet lower than the streets around it. That’s because the prep and investigation teams had to basically scrape off the modern layer and look for deposits or sediment that would indicate an area of archaeological significance. That was done back in 2010. For instance, there used to be a coal wharf here before the first seawall was built, so the early team found bits of old anthracite coal and ships’ hardware. That kind of stuff is interesting, but the work going on now should be well below
even that level. I don’t think they’ve found any of the bodies, though.”

  I was startled. “Bodies?”

  “Yeah. This is where the bad part of town started. It’s pretty awful, but during the diphtheria epidemic of 1875, a lot of people died—especially children—and they couldn’t bury them fast enough, so they dumped a lot of the bodies that went unclaimed or whose families couldn’t afford a burial into the landfill down here. People used to get killed in brawls and accidents around the brothels and saloons, and the poor died of disease and starvation, and the bodies got put in the graveyard here or thrown in the bay. Sometimes they washed out and then floated back on the tide, so the city offered money to any mortuary that would pick them up and bury them. So there was an upswing in ‘accidental deaths’ for a while down here. Sometimes people who wanted the cash would ambush or drug a sailor or a lumberjack or someone like that and then tie the body under the piers so they could ‘find’ it the next morning. Then they’d take it to one of the mortuaries in town, like Butterworth’s, and split the fifty bucks the city paid the business for dealing with the bodies. Not very nice. This is a great place for gruesome stories—like the car that went down around here.”

  “Hang on—a car went into the bay?”

  “Yes, but it was a long time after the seawall was completed and way out there,” Held replied, pointing nearly due west toward the waters of Elliott Bay. “Before the container docks, the bit straight out from here used to be the King Street pier. I think it was 1929 or ’30 . . . the family who owned the dock came to look it over and left the car in gear, so the car drove off the end of the pier by itself. The husband and both of the boys who were in the car got out, but the wife drowned, along with their dog. Horrible.” She closed her eyes and looked a little ill. Then she shook herself and added, “Anyhow, they pulled it out later, but I always wondered what might have drifted out of the car and into the mud there. I guess it’s the morbid streak in me. Probably an archaeologist thing. We’re all a little creepy that way—we want to dig up dead people and their homes and find out how they lived and died. There’s a lot of freaky things to be found in the mud—it’s waterlogged history with teredo worms. This end of the old shoreline is fairly wet and it’ll take a while after the new seawall is in place for the landfill to dry out and solidify.”