The Good, the Bad, and the Undead

by Kim Harrison

  “Nice,” I said sarcastically as he ushered me into his office. The off-white room was almost barren, the dirt obvious in the corners. A new computer screen sat on a nearly empty desk. It had old speakers. A nasty chair sat behind it, and I wondered if there was a decent chair in the entire building. The desk was laminated white, but the grime embedded into it from past use made it almost gray. There was nothing in the wire trash can beside it.

  “Watch the phone lines,” Glenn said as he swept past me and dropped his bag-o-rat on the file cabinet. His jacket came off and he meticulously hung it on a wooden hanger which then went on a hat tree. Looking over the ugly room, I wondered what his apartment was like.

  The twin phone lines from the jack behind the long table ran across the open floor to his desk. It had to be an OSHA violation having them strung like that, but if he didn’t care if someone pulled his phone off the desk by tripping on it, then why should I?

  “Why don’t you put your desk over there?” I asked, looking at the paper-cluttered table in the logical spot for a desk.

  Standing hunched over his keyboard, he looked up. “My back would be to the door, and I wouldn’t be able to see the main floor.”

  “Oh.”

  There were no knickknacks of any kind—nothing of a personal nature at all—the single shelf holding only folders leaking papers. It didn’t look as if he had been here long. Light rectangular shadows showed where pictures had once hung. The only thing on the walls besides his detective certificate was a dusty bulletin board with hundreds of sticky notes thumbtacked to it, hanging right over that long table. They were faded and curling, with cryptic messages only Glenn could probably decipher.

  “What are these?” I asked as he checked to see that the blinds on his window overlooking the open floor were closed.

  “Notes from an old case I’m working on.” He had a preoccupied tone in his voice as he edged back to his keyboard and typed in a string of letters. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  I stood in the middle of his office, staring at him. “Where?” I finally asked.

  He looked up, reddening as he realized he was standing over the only chair. “I’ll be right back.” He moved around his desk, coming to an awkward halt before me until I got out of his way. His gait was stilted as he edged past me and strode out.

  Thinking his office was the most inhospitable slice of FIB bureaucracy I had seen yet, I took off my hat and coat, hanging them on the nail sticking out from the back of his door. Bored, I wandered to his desk. A welcome screen with a blinking prompt waited.

  A rattle preceded Glenn as he pushed a rolling swivel chair into his office. Giving me an apologetic look, he set it next to his. I dropped my bag on his barren desk and sat beside him, leaning forward to see. I watched him type in three passwords: dolphin, tulip, and Monica. Old girlfriend? I wondered. They showed up on the screen as asterisks, but he was a two-fingered typist and it wasn’t hard to follow.

  “Okay,” he said, pulling to him a notepad with a list of names and ID numbers. I glanced at the first and looked back at the screen. With a painful slowness, he furrowed his brow and started to type them in. Tap. Pause. Tap, tap.

  “Oh, just give me that,” I said, pulling the keyboard close. Keys chattering happily, I typed in the first, then grabbed the mouse and clicked the All button, making the only limit to the retrieval being those entries made in the last twelve months.

  A query came on the screen, and I hesitated. “Which printer?” I asked.

  Glenn said nothing, and I turned to see him leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed before him. “I bet you take the remote away from your boyfriend, too,” he said, pulling the keyboard back in front of him and reclaiming the mouse.

  “Well it’s my TV,” I said hotly, then added, “Sorry.” Actually, it was Ivy’s. Mine was lost in the big salt dip. Which was just as well since it would have looked like a toy next to Ivy’s.

  Glenn made a small noise at the back of his throat. He slowly typed the next name in, checking it against the list before moving to the next. I impatiently waited. My eyes went to the crumpled bag on the file cabinet. An inane desire to take the rat out filled me. This must be why he had said we’d be here for hours. It’d be faster to cut the letters out and paste them in a note.

  “That’s not the same printer,” I said, seeing he had switched them.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to look at everything,” he said, his voice preoccupied as he picked letters off the keyboard. “I’m sending the rest to the basement’s printer.” Slowly he typed in the last string of numbers and hit Enter. “I don’t want to hear about tying this floor’s printer up,” he added.

  I fought to hide a smirk. Didn’t want to hear about it? How much could there be?

  Glenn stood, and I stared up at him. “I’ll get them. Stay put till I get back.”

  I nodded as he left. Swiveling my chair from side to side, I waited, listening to the background chatter coming in. A smile eased over me. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the camaraderie of my fellow I.S. runners. I knew if I went out of Glenn’s office, the conversations would stop and the looks would go cold, but if I stayed here and listened, I could pretend someone might stop by to say hi, or ask my opinion on a tough case, or tell me a dirty joke to see me laugh.

  Sighing, I rose to take Glenn’s rat out of the bag. I set the ugly, beady-eyed thing on the cabinet where it could watch him. A scuffing at the door pulled me around. “Oh. Hi,” I said, seeing that it wasn’t Glenn.

  “Ma’am.” The heavy FIB officer eyed first my leather pants, then my visitor’s badge. I shifted so he could see better. The badge, not my pants.

  “I’m Rachel,” I said. “I’m helping Detective Glenn. He’s getting some printouts.”

  “Rachel Morgan?” he said. “I thought you were an old hag.”

  My mouth opened in anger, then shut in understanding. The last time he saw me, I probably did look like an old hag. “That was a disguise,” I said as I crumpled the bag and threw it away. “This is the real me.”

  He ran his eyes over my outfit again. “Okay.” He turned to leave, and I breathed easier.

  He was gone when Glenn strode in, a decidedly preoccupied air about him. There was a nice-size packet of paper in his grip, and I thought the FIB’s information gathering must be on par with the I.S. after all. He stood for a moment in the center of his office, then pushed the papers on his long table against the wall to one end. “Here’s the first one,” he said, dropping the reports on the cleared spot. “I’ll be right back with the ones from the basement.”

  I froze in my reach for them. The first one? I had thought that was all of them. I took a breath to ask him, but he was gone. The thickness of the report was impressive. I wheeled my chair to the table and positioned it sideways so I wouldn’t have my back to the door. Sitting, I crossed my legs and pulled the wad of pages into my lap.

  I recognized the front picture of the first victim because the I.S. had released it to the papers. She had been a nice-looking older woman with a motherly smile. By the makeup and jewelry, it looked like they lifted her photo from a professional picture, like those poses you get for anniversaries and such. She had been three months from retiring from a security firm that designed magic-resistant safes. Died from “complications from rape.” This was all old news. I shuffled to the coroner’s report, my gaze dropping to the picture.

  My gut clenched, and I flipped the report closed. Suddenly cold, I stared out of Glenn’s door to the open offices. A phone rang, and someone picked it up. I took another breath, and held it. I forced myself to breathe, holding it again so I wouldn’t hyperventilate.

  I suppose, in a loose fashion, it could be considered rape. The woman’s insides had been pulled out from between her legs and were dangling to her knees. I wondered how long she had stayed alive through the ordeal, then wished I hadn’t. Stomach turning, I vowed to not look at any more pictures.

  Fingers shaking, I tried to conc
entrate on the report. The FIB had been surprisingly through, leaving me with only one question. Stretching, I snagged the cordless phone from the desk. My jaw hurt from having clenched it too long as I dialed the number listed for next of kin.

  An older man answered. “No,” I assured him when he tried to hang up on me. “I’m not a dating service. Vampiric Charms is an independent runner firm. I’m currently working with the FIB to identify the person who attacked your wife.”

  The picture of her lying twisted and broken on the gurney flashed before me. I shoved it down to where it would probably stay until I tried to sleep. I hoped he hadn’t seen the picture. I prayed he hadn’t found her body.

  “I apologize for calling, Mr. Graylin,” I said in my best professional voice. “I have only one question. Did your wife happen to talk to a Mr. Trent Kalamack anytime before her death?”

  “The councilman?” he said, his voice thick with astonishment. “Is he a suspect?”

  “Perish the thought,” I lied. “I’m following up one of the faint leads that we have concerning a stalker working his way up to him.”

  “Oh.” There was a moment of silence, then, “Yes. As a matter of fact, we did.”

  The zing of adrenaline pulled me upright.

  “We met him at a play this spring,” the man was saying. “I remember because it was the Pirates of Penzance, and I thought the lead pirate looked like Mr. Kalamack. We had dinner afterwards at Carew Tower and laughed about it. He’s not in any danger, is he?”

  “No,” I said, my heart pounding. “I’d ask you to keep our line of investigation quiet until we’ve proven it false. I’m very sorry about your wife, Mr. Graylin. She was a lovely woman.”

  “Thank you. I miss her.” He hung up the phone in the uncomfortable silence.

  I set the phone down, waiting three heartbeats before whispering an exuberant, “Yes!” Spinning my swivel chair around, I found Glenn standing in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, dropping another stack of papers before me.

  I grinned, continuing to shift back and forth in my chair. “Nothing.”

  He went to his desk and punched a button on the phone’s cradle, frowning as the last number called appeared on the tiny screen. “I never said you could call these people.” His face went angry and his posture became stiff. “That man is trying to put this behind him. He doesn’t need you dredging it up for him again.”

  “I only asked one question.” Legs crossed, I swiveled, smiling.

  Glenn glanced behind him into the open offices. “You are a guest here,” he said roughly. “If you can’t play by my rules—” He stopped. “Why are you still smiling?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Graylin had dinner with Trent a month before she was attacked.”

  The man straightened to his full height and drew back a step. His eyes narrowed.

  “Mind if I call the next?” I asked.

  He looked at the phone beside my hand, then back to the open floor. With a forced casualness, he shut his door halfway. “Keep it down.”

  Pleased with myself, I pulled the stack of papers closer. Glenn went back behind his computer, typing with an annoying slowness.

  My mood quickly sobered as I scanned the coroner’s report, skipping the picture portion this time. Apparently the man had been eaten alive from the extremities inward. They knew he had been alive at the time by the tearing pattern of the wounds. And they were fairly confident he had been eaten by the lack of body parts.

  Trying to ignore the mental picture my imagination provided, I called the contact number. There was no answer, not even a machine. I called his former place of work next, my intuition settling into a nice groove at the name of the place: Seary Security.

  The woman there was very nice, but she didn’t know anything, telling me that Mr. Seary’s wife was away at a “health resort” trying to relearn how to sleep. She did look in her files, though, telling me that they had been contracted to install a safe on the Kalamack estate.

  “Security …” I murmured, pinning Mr. Seary’s packet to the bulletin board atop Glenn’s sticky notes to get it out of my way. “Hey, Glenn. You have any more of those sticky notes?”

  He rummaged in his desk drawer, tossing me a pack, shortly followed by a pen. I scrawled the name of Mr. Seary’s workplace and stuck it to his report. After a moment’s thought, I did the same to the woman’s, writing “safe designer” on it. I added a second sticky note with “Talked to T” circled in black ink.

  A scuffing in the hallway brought my eyes up from the third report. I made a noncommittal smile recognizing the overweight cop, minibag of chips in hand. He acknowledged me and Glenn’s nod, coming to a rest in the doorway. “Glenn’s got you doing his secretary work?” he asked, his good-old-boy tone almost thick enough to cut.

  “No,” I said, smiling sweetly. “Trent Kalamack is the witch hunter, and I’m just taking a moment to tie the links together.”

  He grunted, eyeing Glenn. Glenn wearily returned his look, adding a shrug. “Rachel,” he said, “this is Officer Dunlop. Dunlop, this is Ms. Morgan.”

  “Charmed,” I said, not offering my hand lest I get it back covered in potato-chip grease.

  Not getting the hint, the man walked in, crumbs falling to the tile floor. “Whatcha got?” he said, coming to peer at my thick reports stuck to the board atop Glenn’s faded sticky notes.

  “Too soon to say.” I pushed him out of my space with a finger in his gut. “Excuse me.”

  He backed up but didn’t leave, going instead to see what Glenn was doing. Heaven save me from cops on break. The two talked over Glenn’s suspicions concerning Dr. Anders, their rising and falling voices soothing.

  I blew chip crumbs off my papers, my pulse quickening as I saw that the third victim had worked at the city racetrack in weather control. It was a very difficult field of work, heavy in ley line magic. The man had been pressed to death while working late, stirring up a fall shower to dampen down the track for the next day’s race. The actual implement of death was unknown. There had been nothing in the stables heavy enough. I didn’t look at that picture, either.

  It had been at this point that the media realized the three deaths were connected despite the varying methods of death and named the sadistic freak the “witch hunter.”

  A quick phone call got me his sister, who said of course he knew Trent Kalamack. That the councilman often called her brother to ask about the state of the track, but that she hadn’t heard if he had talked to Mr. Kalamack before his death or not, and that she was just sick about her brother’s death, and did I know how long it took for insurance checks to come in?

  I finally got my condolences wedged in between her chattering and hung up on her. Everyone handled death differently, but that was offensive.

  “Did he know Mr. Kalamack?” Glenn asked.

  “Yup.” I pinned the packet to the board and stuck a note to it with the words “weather maintenance” on it.

  “And his job is important because…”

  “It takes a heckuva lot of ley line skill to manipulate the weather. Trent raises racehorses. He could have easily been out there and talked to him and no one would have given it a second thought.” I added another note with “Knew T” on it.

  Old Dunlop-the-cop made an interested noise and ambled over. He hung a respectful three feet behind me this time. “Done with this one?” he asked, fingering the first.

  “For now,” I said, and he pulled it from the board. Some of Glenn’s notes fluttered down to fall behind the table. Glenn’s jaw tightened.

  Feeling like someone was starting to take me seriously, I sat straighter. The overweight man ambled back to Glenn, making noises as he found the pictures. He dropped the report onto Glenn’s desk, and I heard the patter of chip crumbs. Another officer came in, and an impromptu meeting seemed to be taking shape as they clustered around Glenn’s computer screen. I turned my back on them and looked at the next report.

  The fourth victim had b
een found in early August. The papers had said the cause of death was severe blood loss. What they hadn’t said was that the man had been disemboweled, torn apart as if ravaged by animals. His boss had found him in the basement of his workplace, still alive and trying to push his insides back into him where they belonged. It was more difficult than usual since he only had one arm, the other hanging by his underarm skin.

  “Here you go, ma’am,” a voice said at my elbow, and I jerked. Heart pounding, I stared at a young FIB officer. “Sorry,” he said as he extended a sheaf of papers. “Detective Glenn asked me to bring these up when they finished. Didn’t mean to startle you.” His eyes dropped to the report in my hand. “Nasty, isn’t it?”

  “Thank you,” I said, accepting the reports. My fingers were trembling as I dialed the number for the victim’s boss when there was no next of kin.

  “Jim’s,” a tired voice said after the third ring.

  My greeting froze in my throat. I recognized his voice. It was the announcer at Cincinnati’s illegal rat fights. Heart pounding, I hung up, missing the button the first time. I stared at the wall. The room had gone silent.

  “Glenn?” I said, my throat tight. I turned to see him surrounded by three officers, all looking at me.

  “Yeah?”

  My hands shook as I extended the report across the small space. “Will you look at the crime scene photos for me?”

  His face blank, he took it. I turned to his wall of sticky notes, listening to the pages turn. Feet shuffled. “What am I looking for?” he asked.

  I swallowed hard. “Rat cages?” I asked.

  “Oh my God,” someone whispered. “How did she know?”

  I swallowed again. I couldn’t seem to stop. “Thanks.”

  With motions slow and deliberate, I took the report and stuck it to the bulletin board. My handwriting was shaky as I wrote “T availability” and stuck it on the pages. The report said he had been a bouncer at a dance club, but if he was one of Dr. Anders’s students, he had been skilled with ley lines and was more likely the head of security at Jim’s rat fights.