Walking Dead

by C. E. Murphy

  My inherent drama probably would’ve been better suited to hearing about a child’s injury, but Petite was my baby. She’d been fine four hours ago when I parked her outside the precinct building. Short of a bulldozer rolling through the parking lot, I couldn’t really imagine what might’ve happened to her, but I had visions of terrible things. Worse than tires slashed or roofs split open by swords or being helicoptered out of an earthquake zone, all of which were bad, but only the first hadn’t happened to my poor car in the last year. We’d had a rough year, Petite and me.

  “According to our records ‘she’ is.” He gave me a smile that wasn’t exactly oily, but I didn’t have a better word for it. Slippery, maybe. He was nice-looking, if tiny—he was probably five or six inches shorter than me, very slim throughout, with curling black hair and chiseled features that verged on pretty. Not my type, even if he wasn’t an insurance agent, and I didn’t trust the smile. “But there’ve been some irregularities in your insurance claims this year, and I’m here to inspect the vehicle and spend a day or two with you so we at FAHI can get a better feel for your daily usage and what might be the appropriate insurance coverage.”

  I caught a “Like hell you are!” behind my teeth and kept it there. Belligerence rarely did any good with insurance adjusters. Or cops, for that matter. When I released the words, they were an as-polite-as-I-could-make-them “Petite’s a 1969 Mustang and I consider her worth the cost of maintaining full coverage, Mr. Doherty. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that the premium I’m paying actually covers acts of God, so I’m really not sure why you’re here.”

  “Your insurance is comprehensive.” He managed to make it sound as if I should be given a gold star for knowing that. What a good little driver I was. “But you’ve had some extraordinary claims this year, have you not?”

  “I have. My car was vandalized in January—” by a god, no less, but the insurance did cover acts of gods, dammit—not that I’d put it down as such in the paperwork, because that would be insane “—and I was unlucky enough to be at Matthews Beach Park when the earthquake hit in June. Petite slid into one of the fissures and had to be winched out.” With a helicopter.

  “These things do happen,” Doherty said with sympathy, except it didn’t go anywhere near his eyes. “Curiously, though, you submitted no mechanic or bodywork invoices, and your driving record has been spotless up until this point.”

  That was because I was a very very good driver, and Petite could outrun any cop car you cared to pit her against. I didn’t say that out loud. I gritted my teeth, pushed my face into a smile and said, “Actually, I did submit mechanic and bodywork-fee paperwork. I’m a mechanic by trade, and—”

  Doherty looked at me, looked around the detectives’ office I was in, looked at the nameplate on my desk with my name on it, and looked at me again, all with an air of mildly amused but polite disbelief.

  I had six inches’ reach on the guy, easy. I could break his nose before he even knew I’d thrown the punch, and then I could put a hand on top of his head and watch him swing like a little kid. I fixed my smile harder into place. “I’ll show you my résumé, if you like. I only joined the force recently. Every other job I’ve had is as a mechanic, and Petite’s my pet project.” My face felt like it would freeze in its smile, which is presumably not what mothers all over the world meant when they gave that warning. “All of this is in the paperwork.”

  “I’m sure, but you understand that after such an exemplary record, coming on several expensive discrepancies in six months looks a little strange. We only want to provide you with the best possible service, Detective, and we need to have full and complete records to do that.”

  “It’s taken you almost ten months to decide you needed to look at the case a little more carefully? I have full coverage. I don’t see the problem. Perhaps I should be talking to your competitors instead of you, Mr. Doherty.” My smile was getting a little strained. Maybe a lot strained. There was probably a rule against leaping on insurance adjusters and ripping their throats out with your teeth.

  “You’re welcome to, of course, although I think you’ll find our rates are competi—”

  His tone of utter reason did me in. My short fuse, let me show it to you. I leaned across my desk and his briefcase and snapped, “Oh, go to hell. I’m not scamming your damn company. I’ve submitted my invoices. I don’t even charge for my own time—” Belatedly, I realized that could be the problem. “Would it help if I did? Would I seem more legitimate then? Would you be happier if I was asking for five times as much money? I thought I was asking for plenty already, but if you want to pay me for my efforts, I’m not going to object. Otherwise go away and cut me a check. There are people committing real insurance fraud out there. Go harass them.” I wanted my coffee. I wanted dainty Mr. Doherty to leave me alone. I wanted all kinds of things.

  It’s good to want. Billy blew in through the front door—I didn’t even know he’d left—and thrust a cardboard coffee cup in my hand, then grabbed my coat. “Drink up. We gotta go.”

  “What? Where?” I shot Doherty a look and put the coffee down to take my coat from Billy and fumble it on. Amaretto’s distinctive scent rose from the cup and I nearly wept. “Thank you. This is manna from heaven. I’m unworthy of its gift, and yet I immerse myself in it.” I got my coat on and scalded my tongue on the first blissful sip of coffee. “What’s the rush? Where’re we going?”

  “The Museum of Cultural Arts. C’mon, you’re driving.” He threw the keys at me next, and I snapped a hand out to catch them.

  “What, the café there has just opened a new coffee-and-doughnuts express line? I don’t want to spend my lunch hour admiring old spearheads and meaningless blocks of color on contemporary paintings.” I took a slow, glorious drink.

  Billy scowled. “Good, because we’re going to spend our lunch hour investigating the murder they’ve just called in.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The museum was a new building, funded by one percent for the arts and, much more helpfully, by a big fat grant from Seattle’s favorite multiconglomerate powerhouse. I wished I thought that was noble and wonderful, but mostly I thought it was a tax write-off. Still, at least some good had come out of the evil that corporations do.

  I didn’t consider myself much of an artist, but even my eye took in the curved sweep of the museum building with its slim arched wing rising into the air and grasped that I was looking at the architectural representative of a killer whale. It was white, not black, but it worked, and made for a very pretty modern building.

  Inside was considerably more open and airy than I expected from a killer whale’s belly. Billy’d read the museum’s mission statement aloud on the way over, so I knew the left wing—the tail—held the permanent Seattle display, with cultural material on loan from local tribes, fragile bits of the past preserved behind glass. I’d suggested, brightly, that if we came up dry with our research on Halloween murders, we could visit the museum’s bits and bobs and try getting psychic readings off them. There were people who could do that, though Billy and I didn’t number amongst them, and I’d probably deserved the dirty look he gave me.

  We were met by the museum director, a tall man who looked more like the rugged-adventurer type—scruffy, slightly battered clothes, good solid boots, that kind of thing—than a behind-the-desk fund-raiser. He introduced himself as Saul Sandburg and ushered us into the right wing, the killer whale’s head, and I suffered a moment of one of these things is not like the others.

  Actually, two of those things did not belong. The second was the security guard lying on the marble floor. His head had lolled to the side, showing clearly how the back of his skull was broken in. Blood had caked on his ears, making his head seem even more mis-shapen, but worse, it was smeared in a wide brownish circle around a display unit. I was pretty certain bits of bone and brain were squished through that smear: he’d pretty clearly been dragged around the whole room. Everything stank of blood and other body fluids.

 
; The first thing that didn’t belong was the massive, gaping hole in the display unit where something was obviously missing. It was so obviously missing that it somehow overshadowed the dead man and the huge bloody smear around the room.

  An enormous variety of supplementary material surrounded the gaping area: glass-encased books, a few manuscript pages, bronze and iron swords, a tattered remnant of leather armor. I was too far away to read the information docket set slightly to one side, but I had no doubt we’d get to it.

  I exchanged glances with Billy. He nodded, which told me there was a ghost, and I put away my curiosity to give him space to work. My part of the esoteric investigation was less pressing: ghosts faded fast, and their ability to communicate depended on how fresh they were. Billy’d told me that before, but the previous night’s experiences had hammered it home. I took Sandburg’s elbow and directed him a few steps away from the dead man, partly so he didn’t have to look at the body and partly so Billy could do his thing.

  “What’s he doing?” Sandburg looked over his shoulder as Billy crouched beside the corpse. I turned him back toward me as gently as I could.

  “Preliminary investigation. The forensics team’s on its way, but I’d like you to tell me what happened in your own words. Then I’m going to need you to help calm everyone else down so we can talk to them individually. I know it’s a lot to ask.” That was true. It was a lot to ask. However, many people—especially men—seemed to function better if they knew they had a specific and helpful task to perform. If I could make him an ally who felt important in the investigative process without actually getting in our way, it was good for everybody.

  Sandburg bucked right up. He was holding it together pretty damn well as it was, but his posture straightened and his gaze cleared as he pulled his thoughts together. “We open late on Sundays, not until noon. There’s twenty-four-hour security, but the first staff don’t come in until eleven to set up.”

  “Are you among that staff?” It seemed unlikely. Directorial bigwigs didn’t typically do the drudge work alongside their minimum-wage employees. I was flummoxed when Sandburg nodded.

  “The museum’s only open for four hours on Sunday. I work so I don’t feel wholly divorced from the day-to-day running of the facility. Besides, sacrificing a few hours of my time means someone else can spend a weekend day at home with their family. I don’t have any myself, but I appreciate its importance.”

  “That must make you popular. So you’re here every Sunday?”

  “It helps me avoid the pointy-haired boss label, at least.” Sandburg offered a brief smile, then shook his head. “Three Sundays out of four. We usually have two people on, one for reception and ticket sales, the other to give guided tours every hour. The first one begins at twelve-fifteen.” He looked at his watch like he was already running late, and his features crumpled. I gave him a few seconds, waiting to see if he’d recover on his own. After a couple of long breaths, he did.

  “I did the usual morning routine, which is to glance at the security tapes, count the till, that sort of thing. Meghan came in at a quarter to twelve. She’s the one who found the—” He broke again, then drew himself up with a shudder. “She found Jason when she went to check the security ropes around the exhibits. It’s always the last thing we do before we open. Security does it, too, obviously, but children like to play on them and they get knocked out of place, so we double-check to keep it tidy. Appearances, you know…” It was a strange comment from a man with scruff and cargo pants, but I could see where he might lend a certain romanticism to a cultural arts museum. It probably needed all the romance it could get.

  “What time did the deceased arrive at work?” Jason. Jason Chan, who was twenty-four years old and who would never be twenty-five. It didn’t help to think about him in those terms; the deceased was much easier, and in some ways, much worse.

  “Six last night. Our security works twelve-hour shifts, six to six. Jason and Archie just worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights,” Sandburg replied. I nodded and wrote it down—I’d been writing everything down, in a semi-comprehensible shorthand that I’d be able to read later because what Sandburg was saying was too hard to forget.

  “Archie. That would be Archie Redding, your missing guard?” I knew he was; it’d been in the hysterical call that had brought us to the museum, but I’d learned two things as a detective. One, if your witnesses start babbling, listen, because they might say something important, and two, try to deal with one subject at a time when talking to them, even if it’s all interconnected. It was the focus thing again: chances were their thoughts were already fractured and running amok. Asking them to deduce concurrent events was asking for trouble.

  Right on cue, Sandburg sagged, as if the thought of another crisis was too much to bear. “Yes. He was a lot older than Jason, in his fifties—”

  “Was?” I put too much emphasis on the word, but couldn’t stop myself. “Is there another body, Mr. Sandburg?” I shot a look at Billy, wondering if he had more than one ghost to chat up.

  Sandburg turned a bleak expression on me. “No, but isn’t it just a matter of time?”

  “Not necessarily. If Mr. Redding is missing but there’s neither blood nor a body, he may have been kidnapped. We can hope our perpetrator has no reason to resort to more violence.” Perpetrator. I felt all official, using words like that. I could’ve said perp, but I’d realized that made me feel like I was in a Chicago crime story, so I stuck with the multisyllabic version.

  Sandburg’s face didn’t lighten any. “It’s a thin hope, though, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so. Still, I’d rather assume the best.” We went through another round of routine questions before I finally bit back a sigh and brought my attention around to the elephant missing from the room. “What’s been taken from the display, Mr. Sandburg?”

  I’d been avoiding asking for two reasons. One, I wanted to get the details about the dead and missing men out of the way before moving on to missing property, which, in my opinion, wasn’t as important. Two, I suspected whatever had disappeared was a lot nearer and dearer to Sandburg’s museum-director heart than a couple of security guards, and I’d been afraid letting him focus on it would wipe out any details he might remember about our victims.

  I was right. Sandburg very nearly moaned, not at all a sound I expected from a hale-looking man in his late fifties. If he’d sagged when I mentioned the second guard, he deflated now. “The Cauldron of Matholwch.”

  Billy looked up from his conversation with dead people and said, “The what?”

  So did I, but when I said it, it was with bewilderment, and when Billy said it, it was with dread and amazement. I’d spent a lot of quality time online and in libraries the last few months, reading up on shamanism and the occult, but all it took was one phrase to let me know just how far at the back of the class I still was.

  Fortunately, Sandburg didn’t seem to expect that I’d recognize the name. “You might know it by its more common name, the Black Cauldron. It—”

  “Wait! Wait! I know this one!” I bounced and waved my hand in the air, then remembered there was a dead man not fifteen feet away and tried to pull together a little decorum. “Like from the movie, right? I saw it when I was little. There’s an army of undead in it, right?”

  There’s an expression of betrayal that I associate with deceptions on the magnitude of learning there’s no Santa Claus. It says, You have taken my childhood and crushed it utterly. There is nothing left in this world for me to remember kindly, or to hope for in the future. I am lost, and you are dead to me for all time.

  Billy and Sandburg both had that look. My hand sank and I looked between them, finally venturing, “No?” in a small, apologetic voice.

  Sandburg recovered first. From Billy’s expression, he might never recover, and he would definitely never forgive me. “That cauldron,” Sandburg said a bit frostily, “originated from the true Cauldron, which belonged to an ancient Welsh king called Bran, who gave i
t to the Irish king Matholwch as a wedding gift when Matholwch married Bran’s sister, Branwyn. The dead could be resurrected into undying warriors by placing them in the cauldron. It was reputedly destroyed in battle between Matholwch and Bran, by a living man climbing within it.”

  I held my hand up again, a finger lifted. “Battle between the king who gave the cauldron and the one he gave it to?”

  Sandburg lost a little of his despondency, obviously enjoying the chance to lecture. “Matholwch mistreated Branwyn, and so Bran invaded Ireland to rescue her.” He brightened further, adding, “Of course, there’s no way of knowing for certain that this is Matholwch’s cauldron. It was found several years ago at an ancient battlefield and gathering place in Ireland, with the remnants you see there.” He gestured toward the display. “All of the artifacts are Celtic in origin, but compositional and artistic differences in the pieces suggest some are Welsh, while others are Irish. Combined with the cauldron’s presence, it lends credence to the legend, and makes a wonderful story and artifact to draw audiences to museums. It’s on tour.”

  His pleasure faded again and he looked at the empty space where the cauldron had been. “We must recover it, Detectives. It’s insured, but there’s no way of realizing its true value in monetary terms. It’s a piece of legend and of history.”

  “How big is this thing?” I asked dubiously. “Big enough to put a dead man in, I assume. And made of iron?” A full-grown man could fit into, say, a fifty-five-gallon barrel, though not comfortably. I looked at the gaping spot in the display, and at Sandburg. “Even empty, that’s got to weigh a ton.”

  “Some seventy gallons,” Sandburg said, “and made of oak with iron bands. It’s not quite a ton, but it’s very heavy.”