Walking Dead

by C. E. Murphy

  The Seattle Daily Times archives for November 1, 1900, had a scrap of a story about Matilda Whitehead, a thirteen-year-old girl from a good family who’d gone missing the night before. A likeness had been drawn, and if I squinted just right I could see a resemblance between the ghostly green spirit and the solemn-faced child in the sketch. The paper labeled it a tragedy and warned young women of the dangers in the night.

  Two days later a much more salacious story smeared itself across the front page of a Seattle broadsheet publication that had gone out of business in the 1930s. I printed the story off and took it, clenched in my fist, up to Jen in Missing Persons.

  I hated the Missing Persons office. I hadn’t liked it before I went all sensitive, and now just walking in there depressed me. The walls, the desks—even the floor, in places—were covered with photographs of the missing, with lists of names, descriptions, last sightings; all the things that made up lives without endings. Homicide was bad, but even the unsolved cases there had a certain finality to them. In the MPD, unsolved meant a whisper of hope, and that much hope unanswered burned a bleak mark across the department.

  A tall woman—tall by most people’s standards, not by mine; she was probably four inches shorter than me—with straight brown hair and a new pair of horn-rim glasses came around a file-cabinet-lined wall and said what she usually did when I came by: “Close the door, Joanne. You’re letting in a draft.”

  “I don’t think it’s me. I think this whole office is just drafty by nature.” I closed the door anyway, and shook Jennifer Gonzalez’s hand. Jen always shook hands when she met someone, even if she’d seen them five minutes earlier. It was her way of sizing somebody up, and I’d come to suspect it had a psychic component to it. She’d been one of a very few who’d known how to offer me energy in a cohesive manner, back when I’d asked the police department to help me stop a god. We hadn’t really talked about it, mostly because she was as no-nonsense and straight-forward as I liked to think I was, and psychic impressions weren’t the sort of thing normal people discussed over coffee.

  I stood there for a couple seconds trying to remember what normal people did discuss over coffee, then gave it up as a bad job. “I like the glasses. Didn’t know you wore them.”

  “Thanks. I didn’t used to. They make me self-conscious, but I’ve been wearing them three weeks, and you’re only the second person who’s noticed.”

  “At least nobody’s calling you four-eyes.” I tried to push my own glasses up, even though I wasn’t wearing them. I didn’t, usually. I’d had contacts since college, and I was always a little surprised by the leftover body language that kicked in when I thought about glasses. “Did Billy talk to you about the Whitehead case?”

  “Yeah. Come on back.” She led me through a maze of cabinets and paper trails to her desk, where she handed over a single-page file. “There’s not much there. She went for a walk Halloween evening and disappeared off the street. Her mother swore she saw—”

  “A cloaked figure snatch her up?” I gave Jen the broadsheet story in exchange. “I guess people in cloaks were probably more common in 1900 than they are now, but…”

  But Edith Whitehead had described the cloaked figure as moving like an old person, too stiff and slow to possibly seize a child. She’d insisted there had been something wrong with the abductor, something inhuman and monstrous that gave it unnatural strength. The same words were on the missing-persons file, written dryly, but in the broadsheet story they carried the frantic pitch of her voice clearly enough that I could all but hear it through the century that separated us.

  Both versions came to the same conclusion: Edith Whitehead was deranged, and if she’d seen her daughter’s disappearance at all, it was probably because she’d had a hand in it. The police report had a note tagged on years later, relegating the Whitehead kidnapping to cold cases. I wondered if there was a similar coda to the newspaper story, writing off a family’s loss as dramatics brought on by a feeble mind.

  “It’s all I’ve got,” Jen said, bringing me out of my musings. “The other girl, Anne-Marie, if she died here in Seattle, it was either before there was a newspaper or law enforcement, or it didn’t get reported.”

  “Both, probably.” I frowned at the files, trying to tease a thought out of my brain. It clung stubbornly, not wanting to see the light of day. I blew a raspberry to drive off the intention of pursuing it, opened my mouth to thank Jen, and instead said, “The interesting thing is they’re all white.”

  Ha. My brain thought it was so clever, but I could still outsmart it. I knew it’d had something to say. All I had to do was pretend I didn’t care. Ha! Jen, fortunately oblivious to my internal monologue, but more or less following what I’d said, said, “Serial killers usually stay in their ethnic group, unless their actions are actually racially motivated. Which is it?”

  I wobbled my head. “There pretty much weren’t white people in Seattle before about 1850.” Billy’s history lessons were paying off. “So either we’ve got incoming whites, one of whom is a madman, or a local tribesman trying to scare off the incomers. I think it’s the incomers.”

  Jen’s eyebrows inched upward. “Buying into the noble savage, are we?”

  I snorted. “More thinking that if you’re trying to scare off newcomers, you probably wouldn’t stop with murdering just one little girl. And hoping that we’re lucky and our half-century killer started with Anne-Marie, so we don’t have to look beyond the city for this pattern repeated.” I thumped my knuckles on her desk, then dredged up a brief smile. “Thanks, Jen. I think that’s probably all we need right now.”

  “A case file on somebody who’s been missing a hundred years? Billy didn’t tell me what you were working on.”

  My smile went all crooked and I shrugged as I headed for the door. “Ghost stories.”

  Halfway back to Homicide, my phone rang. I’d learned to expect bad news when it did that, so I answered cautiously, as if wrinkling my face could ward off whatever’d gone wrong. For once, though, it was a friendly voice with a friendly question: “So are you going to manage lunch today?”

  “Thor! Where were you last night?” It didn’t matter; I was just as glad he hadn’t been sitting around waiting for me. That kind of thing never seemed like healthy-relationship material to me, not that I knew from healthy relationships. “You know what, I can do lunch. Are you at work?”

  “Lemme think about that.” I could envision him rolling up his sleeve to look at his watch. He wore one like mine, a big heavy Ironman plastic thing that was hard to damage. “It’s ten forty-five on a Monday morning. Yep, I’m at work. Where else would I be? I got your message last night. You doing okay?” He sounded genuinely concerned, which I found charming.

  “I’m good. Busy with this mess that fell in our laps. You?”

  “Fine. I went out with some of the guys last night. Sorry I missed you.”

  “Yeah. How dare you go out and have a life without me, especially when I’ve forgotten to call.” I grinned and ducked into the Homicide Department, where I had a whiteboard lying across my desk. It made me feel like my life was a cop drama, which had its ups, as well as its downs. On the upside, it gave me the inter-office romance storyline that usually dominated the emotional side of those shows. On the downside, it meant I was investigating murders, which sounded cooler in theory than in practice. I took a black pen and started writing on the board. “You missed out on Chinese takeaway and me, all for what, a couple beers and a game of bingo?”

  Archie Redding hadn’t yet been heard from. Jason Chan was dead. I drew an arrowhead between them and put Sandburg’s name in between, then struck it out with a yellow pen. His aura had just been too damn clean. Thor said, “Darts, and I won seventy bucks on the game,” cheerfully.

  “You can buy lunch, then.” I fell silent a minute, half listening to his good-natured protest as I wrote down the names of a bunch of long-dead kids on the other side of the board, and drew another arrowhead to “Shadowy Cloaked Figur
e.” I wished the bad guys would turn up wearing meringue dresses and pompadours sometimes, instead of being so predictably dour.

  Between them I drew a cauldron, complete with a zombie climbing out. Right since the very beginning of my new life, I’d been hoping there was no such thing as the undead. I figured ghosts didn’t count, since they weren’t corporeal. I didn’t want zombies, though on a scale of one to ten, they were maybe a seven, with vampires holding the coveted ten-spot. I didn’t know what went in between, but it didn’t matter. I really didn’t want vampires. I put the phone against my shoulder, muffling Thor’s account of the darts game. “Billy, that cauldron doesn’t make vampires, does it?”

  He said, “No,” as if I’d asked a perfectly reasonable question. “Just undead warriors. Nobody ever mentioned them being bloodsuckers.”

  “Good.” I struck a line down the center of the whiteboard, cutting the cauldron in half, to remind myself these were two different cases. Then I circled the cauldron, because two cases or not, I was convinced it was the heart of it all. “Billy, I’m going up to the Space Needle. Want to take an early lunch?” The second part was to the phone, but Billy shook his head.

  “I get indigestion from the room spinning. Oh. You weren’t talking to me. So I get left behind to do the dirty work while you cost lunch to the department?”

  Thor, in my ear, said, “Lemme ask Nick,” and, in defiance of all the studies that said people aren’t made for multitasking, I said, “Pretty much,” to Billy. “I’m going to see if I can get a read on the cauldron from up there. It’s a better vantage point than the museum.”

  “What’re you going to do if you lock on?”

  “Finish my salad, then call you and we can go storming in like superheroes to save Archie Redding, arrest the bad guy, retrieve the cauldron and rebind it so it stops waking up the dead.” It sounded like an awesome plan. I was all for it.

  “Any idea how we’re going to do that last part?”

  “Not a clue. Don’t burst my bubble. We’ll be done in time for you to take the kids trick-or-treating. What’re you going to do in the meantime?”

  “I’m going to see if I can connect Sandburg to any kind of black market, and maybe find some reliable backup and go talk to him again.” Billy gave me a dour look that made me feel only slightly guilty. There weren’t many other detectives who wouldn’t snort laughter in their sleeves while Billy asked questions about a missing cauldron and a potential sale on a magical black market, but there were a couple, whereas there was literally nobody else who could do what I was planning. I was cobbling together an unconvincing apology, when Thor spoke in my ear, startling me.

  “Nick says I’m cool. Think we can make it back by noon?”

  For an instant I didn’t know what he was talking about. So much for my amazing multitasking skills. Then I caught up with the secondary conversation and shook my head. “I think we’d be lucky to get downtown and parked, much less eat and be back here by noon.” I was only exaggerating a little. “Maybe we better take separate cars. I don’t think I’m coming back here after lunch, at least not right away.”

  “Will you reconsider if you get to drive The Truck?”

  My knees went weak. I never let anybody else drive Petite, but Thor’d handed over the keys to The Truck a couple of times. Climbing up into that big tall cab was enough to set me aquiver. I’d even worn a miniskirt the second time I drove it. We’d gone to a monster-truck rally, and I figured there was nothing more awesome than looking like a real girl at a show like that. I’d gotten thunderous applause just for climbing out of the driver’s seat. I still felt sexy just thinking about it, and sexy and I weren’t that familiar with each other.

  I groaned into the phone. If there hadn’t been witnesses, I might’ve said I moaned, but that would’ve been indiscreet. “Meet me in the parking lot and we’ll discuss it.”

  “That sounds promising.” Thor hung up with an audible grin. I grabbed my coat and scurried out before anybody could give me hell about getting worked up over a truck.

  Doherty’s green Miata was parked next to Petite. I’d managed to forget about him, so seeing his car was almost enough to make me climb into Thor’s truck and have my way with it right then and there. While I was wibbling, Thor came out of the precinct-building garage and jangled his keys, siren sound of seduction. “You know you want to.”

  I groaned again and caught the keys when he threw them, but threw them back. “You’re right. I do. But I can’t promise to be back here by noon. I’m hoping to arrest bad guys for dessert.”

  “You have a bizarre idea of fun, Joanne Walker.” Thor rattled the keys one more time, then swung up into The Truck’s cab. Doherty leaned over his steering wheel, watching us both, and I barely restrained myself from flipping him the bird as I climbed into Petite. He smiled pleasantly and gestured for me to pull out in front of him. I did, then, swearing, drove the speed limit all the way downtown.

  I found parking at the First Avenue North Garage, which, at eleven in the morning, was against all odds. Triumphant, I scampered out to leave Doherty behind. He drove around the lot once, and must’ve invoked some kind of higher power of parking, because by the time he got back to Petite, a late-’80s Chrysler sedan had pulled out of the spot beside her and given him room to pull in. I wanted parking karma like that, although if I had to be an insurance adjudicator to get it, I wasn’t sure it was worth the cost.

  At least my unwelcome shadow didn’t seem inclined to follow me into buildings. He was only interested in what I did with my car. I left him behind to watch over Petite—it was my car under surveillance, so I could interpret things as I liked—and bought two tickets to the Space Needle’s fiftieth-story observation-deck pinnacle. Thor met me at the elevators and a tour guide told us that the Needle was the height of eighteen hundred and fifteen Mars bars set end to end. I whispered, “When did Mars bars become a standard unit of measurement?” to Thor, and the guide gave us a dirty look when we began snickering. We couldn’t help it. “Marsing” wasn’t a common synonym for laughter, and she was the one who started talking in terms of candy.

  The Sight washed out my normal vision as we stepped into the rotating restaurant. The food was decent but hugely overpriced, which I thought should somehow show up in astral terms, like flashing neon signs over every plate reading, You’re paying too much! It didn’t happen, though. Very disappointing. Auras ought to come with a sense of humor attached.

  A pretty girl at the greeting desk said, “Two for lunch?” in a voice that did a wonderful job of belying how very bored she was. Her aura lay flat against her skin, occasionally popping, and I was fairly sure they were the aural equivalent of spit bubbles. Maybe auras had a sense of humor after all.

  I said, “Yes, by the window, please,” and Thor gave me a dismayed look, his own colors going flat. “You own a truck that takes a stepladder to get into, and you don’t like heights?”

  “The Truck is different. It’s not a six-hundred-foot drop from the running board.” He edged his way toward his seat when the hostess showed us to our table, and leaned toward the center of the room once he’d sat down. Blue and gray sucked up against his skin, like even his aura was nervous.

  I tilted my head so I was in alignment with him. “Maybe you should ask for a seat somewhere else. I’ll come find you when I’m done looking for…stuff.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to explain. I just didn’t know how to summarize “looking for metaphysical evidence of a death cauldron’s location” in ten words or less. Like that, I guess.

  “Your eyes are gold.” Thor spoke on top of my last few words, his aura suddenly bouncing back with interest. At least he dropped his voice to say, “You’re doing magic, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I crossed my eyes like I could see their color, then blinked at him. “I needed to come up here to see if I could get a pinpoint on something, but I didn’t know you were afraid of heights. If you want to move…”

  “No, no, it’s okay, I don�
��t want to get in the way of your thing.” His aura’d brightened right up. Apparently Joanne’s Funky Eye Tricks trumped long drops. That was good to know. Wondering if he’d asked me out in the first place because I was weird was less good. Maybe he was the kind of guy who couldn’t resist the strange, and dumped it once he’d figured it out.

  On the positive side, I was so far from figuring myself out that presumably nobody else had a snowball’s chance. I could be looking at the love of my life. “Tell me if there’s anything good on the menu. I want to…” I made myself really look out the window for the first time since we’d come into the restaurant, and discovered I didn’t want to at all.

  On the Go Team Me side, I’d been right: the Needle gave a fantastic view of the city and let me see, far more clearly, the thin inky blackness spreading over it. On the not-so-great flip side, a glance was enough to tell me that the death shroud was pooling in places. I sat there, gaze bleak as the room slowly rotated to show me other stretches of city. Thor asked me something about the menu and I nodded, less than half-aware that he put in an order with the waitress a few moments later.

  Areas in the city glowed with serenity. Some of those soft inviting places were parks, deliberate bastions of wilderness within Seattle’s confines. Others were graveyards, and even there, bursts of light—animals, people, insects—whisked through the calm light, proving that life prevailed.

  Cauldron murk clouded and gathered above the cemeteries. From the distance I was at, it looked like far-off rain clouds, seeping toward the earth without yet reaching it. Watching it set up tenterhooks under my skin, thin piercing discomfort that dug into the center of me and began pulling outward. Pulling toward the black rain, in fact, as if that was where I needed to go. That sick-stomach feeling had gotten me into the shamanic mess that was my life. Having it step up again, no longer integrated into the rest of my magic, promised all sorts of damage about to be unleashed.