by C. E. Murphy
Billy sighed around a smaller bite of doughnut. “Not as much as I’d hoped. He didn’t really know he was dead yet. Said he had a migraine when he came in. I checked his records, he had prescription medication for them. He got the light-sensitive kind, with halos and sparks, so he liked working nights. He said he had one, not enough to make him really off his game, but that he wasn’t at his best. He thought the lights around the cauldron display’d set it off. Poor kid. In the end I told him to just go over to one of the quiet corners and sleep it off, that I’d clear it with Sandburg. With any luck he’ll just fade out.”
I licked maple frosting off my pershing while I listened. It was a disgusting habit, but I’d been eating doughnuts that way since I could remember. First maple sweetness, then cinnamony goodness beneath it, spiraled in a flat roll bigger than my palm. Yum. I had to wipe my mouth to ask, “That was it? Nothing else at all?”
Billy shook his head. “He said it was quiet, that Redding entertained him with stories about his family, but that was about it. He never saw what hit him. Usually they don’t when it comes from behind.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything about Redding’s family.” I dropped my doughnut, appetite gone. “Do I need to talk to them?”
“No, Chan said they were killed in a wreck years ago. A wife and two little girls. Redding liked to talk about them, and never got married again. He still wears his wedding ring. Chan figured that was love.”
“Oh.” My appetite, fickle thing that it was, came back immediately upon realizing I didn’t have to go break bad news to an unsuspecting wife. “That’s too bad.”
“Yeah. I hope we find him alive. I—Who is that guy?”
I turned to see Daniel Doherty opening the O’s front door. I didn’t think he could be looking for me specifically, unless somebody’d told him when Billy and I radioed to say we were heading back to the office, in which case I was going to pull someone’s toenails out. Doherty’s gaze roved over the café in the way that strangers in a strange land look: as if they know they’re the wrong type to hang out there but that they’re shy on choices, yet still willing to turn tail and run if the territory looks too unfriendly.
I did my best to look unfriendly.
His expression of surprise, then relief, told me that one, he hadn’t been looking for me, and two, that he would now cling to me like a leech. Briefcase in hand, he scurried over to our table. “Detective Walker.”
“Mr. Doherty.” I had a pretty good growl when I wanted one, but it failed to deter him. He offered Billy a hand, saying, “Daniel Doherty, it’s a pleasure to meet you. May I join you?”
Billy picked up on my subtle “no” signal—I was kicking him under the table—and said, “Yeah, sure, Mr. Doherty. We were just discussing a murder case. What do you do?”
I kicked him one more time. Doherty put his briefcase down, tugged the thighs of his pants up an inch and sat. “I’m in insurance. I was at your office today to talk to Detective Walker.” He procured a rueful smile that was probably meant to be charming. “I’ve been waiting for her to come back, and someone was kind enough to tell me I could get a decent cup of coffee here.”
“Why the hell are you here on a Sunday, anyway?” I demanded. “Don’t you have a family to go home to?”
“Actually, no,” he said pleasantly, “but I came in because I believe your schedule gives you the next two days off, and I didn’t want to miss you in case you had plans that took you out of town for your weekend. Really, I won’t be in your way, Detective. I’ll just be an observer. I could have even done this without informing you, but that approach always makes me feel like something of a Peeping Tom. It’s an unpleasant sensation.”
Not nearly as unpleasant as my elbow breaking his nose was going to be. Billy looked back and forth between us like we were a Ping-Pong match. “Committing insurance fraud, Joanie?”
Of all the things he didn’t need to say right then. I savaged what was left of my pershing. “It’s about the vandalism Petite suffered earlier this year, you jackass. The insurance doesn’t like that me and my nice neat driving record suddenly had a slew of claims even though that’s exactly why I pay full coverage.”
“Oh. Crap.” Billy shifted uncomfortably. “Sorry. If I’d known it was Petite I wouldn’t have cracked a joke.”
Doherty’s eyebrows went up. “Why not?”
“Because Walker has no sense of humor about her car. It’s like making apartheid jokes to Nelson Mandela.” Billy, coward that he was, stuffed most of his remaining doughnut into his mouth and choked it down with coffee. “I’m going to check out Redding’s apartment, see if we luck out and he’s home, or if anybody knows anything about enemies. See you at the office.”
For a guy complaining about weight gain, he blew out of there like a race car, leaving me with Mr. Doherty. We stared at one another for a moment before he said, “I feel like we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot, Det—”
“There is no right foot. I gather that, short of pouring you into a concrete block and sinking you in Puget Sound, I’m not going to get rid of you. Fine. Go do your job from stalker distance. I don’t want to see you again. And I swear to God, if there’s one hint, one whisper, of raising my rates or not paying up, I’ll have you and your company in court so fast it’ll make your head spin.” I didn’t know if I had a leg to stand on. I didn’t care if I had a leg to stand on. Threats made me feel better. “I have more important things to do than cater to your comfort level while you decide whether to give me the service I’ve been paying a premium for. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my goddamn partner’s not actually supposed to go visiting sites without backup, so I need to catch up with him and do my job.”
I shoved away from the table and stomped out after Billy.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Billy had the grace to look apologetic when I caught up to him. I muttered dire imprecations and we called it good without actually discussing anything, which was how I preferred to resolve temper tantrums.
Archibald Redding lived in Ballard, not particularly convenient to his job, but if he’d lived there more than a few years, it was probably right on the money for what I imagined a security guard’s salary to be. There was no answer when we knocked on his door, but the building manager, a sturdy woman in her fifties, let us in without a warrant when Billy explained the situation.
The two-bedroom apartment was the epitome of a Felix bachelor’s pad: tidy to the point of looking almost un-lived in. His bed was neatly made, his clothes were hung up or folded, and the bathroom sported a carefully rolled toothpaste tube and inexpensive aftershave with an inoffensive smell. A lone, clean pot in the kitchen sink and an old-fashioned teakettle on the stove suggested Redding’s cooking skills were rudimentary, not that I had any room to point fingers. The building manager trailed along behind us, setting imagined wrongs to right as we went through the rooms. “He’s a nice man. Always pays rent on time. Always stops to ask how you’re doing. Oh, but that’s what they always say, isn’t it?” She put her hands over her mouth, eyes large. “‘He was such a nice man.’ And then you find body parts in the freezer.”
Billy and I exchanged glances and I went back to pop the freezer open. It didn’t even have TV dinners, much less body parts: there were carefully labeled packages of fish and chicken breasts, and bags of frozen vegetables. “He must have another freezer,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and reassuring. Somehow it came out macabre, and the poor building manager made a sound of dismay. Billy gave me a look that I probably deserved, then escorted the woman toward the front door, plying her with questions: how long had Redding lived there? Did he have friends we could talk to? Had she known his family?
The opportunity for gossip snapped her right out of her worries. “Oh, no. They died a long time ago. Archie’s been living here twenty years, longer than I’ve been managing, and it’s always been just him. Seems like a real tragedy, such a nice man living on his own, but he says true love never dies, and tells stories
about his little girls. We have a Tuesday-afternoon bingo game he joins us at, so I’d say all of us are friends. I can get you a list of all the names, if you like.”
“That’d be great. We’ll be right there.” Billy smiled and the woman went hurrying off too quickly to see how his expression faded. I saw it, though, and sighed as I leaned on the frame of Archie Redding’s front door.
“I guess it’s romantic, but it’s also kind of sad. That kind of attitude, I mean. I mean, the way Gary talks about his wife, I think she really was his true love, but he’s talking about dating again. It seems like that’s good. Being hung up on a life that ended twenty years ago…” I shook my head, then frowned at the sudden uncomfortable idea that I could easily be describing myself.
“Gary’s dating?” Amusement danced around the edges of Billy’s mouth, his own concerns dying for a moment. “How you feel about that, Joanie? I thought the old guy was your territory.”
I summoned up every ounce of maturity at my disposal. “Pblthbth.”
Billy laughed. “Glad we got that straightened out. What I don’t get is how anybody can live in one place for two decades and not leave more mark on the space than this.” He gestured back at the apartment and I turned to consider it.
“Maybe he’s just waiting to die. To be back with his family. It’s morbid, but why bother collecting a lot of stuff if that’s all you’re waiting on?”
“But no reminders of his family? No photos, no mementos? The closets were empty. There are no finger paintings or wedding pictures. It’s like he’s a monk.”
I shrugged. “Photographs fade. Maybe it’s worse to see them turning orange and sepia than to rely on the memories. I don’t know. We’ll ask the bingo…team. What do you call a bunch of bingo players, anyway?”
“Does there have to be a collective name for them?” We closed Redding’s door and followed the building manager downstairs.
Tidy; kind; charming; sweet; not an enemy in the world: the handful of bingo players—mostly women—we were able to contact quickly all used the same words to describe Archie Redding. The other men in the group were variously out of town for the weekend, already in bed or hospitalized: Billy and I exchanged glances, decided to put off further questions until morning and retreated to the station, less defeated than simply tired.
The proverbial “They” say the first forty-eight hours are the most important in a murder case. As it happens, They’re right, but we hadn’t heard back from the coroner as to how long Chan’d been dead, and I was convinced we were running out of time faster than the clock read since his body’d been found. The ghosts had awakened almost eighteen hours earlier, and all I had was a suspect whose aura made him look innocent.
On the off chance that our ghosts had died the same way he did, I spent over an hour searching for bludgeoning deaths around Halloween. There were a few, but none unsolved. Billy finally got a call from the coroner reporting that Chan had died from a blunt blow to the head, probably between eleven and midnight the night before. I said, “No shit,” and he spread his hands, shrugging. They were doing their best, and so were we.
His phone rang again and I muttered, “Don’t tell me, they’re calling back to say it might’ve been a sudden cessation of breathing that caused his death, too.” Forensics hadn’t turned up anything like a murder weapon, or even drops of blood outside the huge smear around the display area. Our killer had been tidy. Just like the missing Archie Redding. I wrote down his name and put a question mark beside it, then shook myself and tried to pay attention to Billy’s report.
They had picked up faint streaks on the white floor, parallel and leading, more or less without breaking, to the museum’s front doors. Analysis suggested they were from hard black rubber, like that which heeled the security guards’ shoes, but for all I knew, they also could’ve been from dragging a dolly with reluctant wheels through the museum. I wasn’t sure how they told the difference between one hard black rubber and another, especially on a floor that had hundreds of people tracking things over it on a daily basis. Jason’s shoes had no wear along the backs of the heels, but that was inconclusive: a third party might have dragged Redding out and left the scuffs behind. I just didn’t know why a hypothetical third party would kill one guard but take the other.
An unpleasant gurgle squished through my stomach. I was assuming Redding’d been alive when he’d been dragged out, if that was indeed the case. He might simply have been less of a mess, and easier to clean up after. The only way I could think to test the cauldron was to throw a dead body inside and see what happened. A security guard killed in the course of stealing it would be handier than murdering somebody else to find out if the magic worked.
I put my face in my hands, exerting enough pressure against my eyelids to hold my contacts in place while I rolled my eyes beneath them. Tears sprang up and leaked through my lashes, warning me the contacts had been in too long and my eyes were far too dry, but I didn’t have spare glasses at the station. That wouldn’t be a bad investment, for days like this that went on forever. I rubbed tears away and parted my fingers to look at Redding’s name on the paper.
He could have looped the security tapes; he had access. And he was missing rather than proven dead. What I couldn’t see was any kind of motivation. If his family had just recently died, their bodies still on hand, then maybe I could see a certain kind of madness hoping to raise them from the dead. But the accident had been more than twenty years ago, and I was pretty sure that even with modern burial techniques there wouldn’t be much left to their bodies besides a few sticky smears, hardly enough to resurrect.
Which brought me back to the innocently auraed Sandburg. “Billy, is there some kind of—there’s got to be. Some kind of black market in magical artifacts?” I looked up to see him put his phone against his shoulder. I’d forgotten he was on it.
“You busy tonight?”
“It is tonight. What time is it, like seven?” I glanced at my watch and my stomach rumbled. “If I say I’m not busy, do I get one of Melinda’s home-cooked meals?”
“No. You get to meet a medium.”
“I’d rather have dinner, but yeah, I can—wait, what time?”
“She likes ten o’clock.”
“Really? I’ve always been partial to a quarter past anything.” I curled my upper lip in what I hoped was an approximation of she likes ten o’clock? what the hell is that supposed to mean? but shrugged. “Yeah, I can do that. I’ve got a fencing lesson at eight, but it’ll be long over by then.” It might be long over by five past eight. I didn’t know what I was going to say to Phoebe, which reminded me that I hadn’t called Thor. My life was getting hard to keep track of.
“Arright.” Billy got off the phone and reached for his coat. “I’m going to go home and kiss my wife before I stay out all night ghost hunting. I’ll meet you back here at nine-thirty. Take a break and get some real food, Walker.”
Granted a dispensation to stop working, I turned off my computer screen and leaned back in my chair. “Yeah. I will.”
I didn’t.
The morally superior thing to do would have been to follow up my own question about black-market magic. I, though, had never even pretended to be morally superior, and cut out of the office a few steps behind Billy.
Doherty was sitting in a green 1998 Mazda Miata a few spaces down from Petite when I left the precinct building. He reminded me of Laurie Corvallis, one of the local news station’s reporters, who’d stalked me earlier in the year, sure she could get a story out of me. She’d been wrong, not because there was no story, but because she didn’t have the eyes to see it. Much as she’d annoyed me, I’d almost felt sorry for her.
I didn’t feel sorry for Doherty. I was tempted to take Petite out for a high-speed spin and lose him, but it was still raining. Besides, his entire purpose in existing, as far as I was concerned, was to prove I was a liar, a fraud artist and an unsafe driver. No way would I give him the satisfaction of being proven right. I patted Peti
te’s dashboard as I climbed in, promising, “Another time, baby,” and drove over to Thor’s apartment. I figured I could earn good-girlfriend points by ordering Chinese and sacking out with him for part of an hour, even if I hadn’t called like I said I would.
His monster truck wasn’t in the parking lot, and the lights were out in his window. I pulled over to dig out my phone and laboriously punch in his number. My general loathing for cell phones had instilled in me an utter refusal to learn how to use them properly, although I was beginning to break down: this one asked every time if I wanted to save the number, and I knew one of these days I’d give in and do it. Not today, though. I peered up at Thor’s apartment as his phone’s voice mail invited me to leave a message. “Are you out having fun without me? I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier. There was a murder, and…” And that was all he really needed to know to forgive me. “I’ll probably be busy with it tomorrow, but if you want to have lunch, call me, okay? It’s supposed to be my day off, so I can probably sneak out for an hour to eat with you. Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”
I hung up and looked in my rearview mirror. Doherty’s Miata was idling half a block behind me. They were decent little cars, Miatas. They were certainly the right size for somebody of Doherty’s build. I wondered if Petite reflected my build accurately, and was sure The Truck reflected Thor’s. Amused by the idea, I drove home, changed into clothes that could both pass on a fencing strip and be wearable in public, and ate a Pop-Tart on my way out the door to the gym. I got there early, but went in anyway, pleased with the idea of leaving Doherty sitting in his car in the rain.
My next conscious thought was that my ankle hurt. I peeled my eyes open to find Phoebe standing beside the bleachers I’d sacked out on, her foot drawn back to kick my ankle again. “Oh, you’re awake. I guess that means you’re not having another out-of-body experience.”
“I dunno. You didn’t try kicking me last time.” I sat up and mooshed a hand over my face. “You showed up.”
