“So, you guys think that some guy with mystic powers is running around killing people over this painting? And that he’s the one who killed the captain and Karim and put Damien in the hospital? Have I got it right, so far?”
Parker didn’t respond. He just nodded thankfully and downed his newest shot as Kenny put it in front of him. Drakanis took up the reins of the story while patting himself down for a pack of cigarettes.
“Pretty much, yeah. Only problem is that we still have jack shit to go on. Forensics went over his room, took samples from the toilet, from the sink, from anything and everything where he might have left something. I swear, they even sat there and swabbed every hole on the telephone handset and still, nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.”
Drakanis sighed and then seemed to brighten just a bit as he finally located his pack, which had migrated from the front pocket of his natty and out-of-date sport coat to the back pocket of his slacks. He shook one out, offered the pack to Sheila, who refused, and then Parker, who took one with a grunt, and then set to lighting it.
“Now, on the brighter side, we ran the name and came up with some fifty matches in the last three years alone, and we’ve got folks running the backtrail, but I can already pretty much personally guarantee what they’re going to find.”
Sheila broke in then, speaking his next line before he could: “More nada, zip, zilch, and zero, right?”
Drakanis nodded and blew a long plume of smoke out of his mouth. The smoke served to cloud his features, but both Sheila and Parker were relatively sure that they would show more of the depressed and aimless anger that had formed much of his personality for the last few weeks. Parker considered that an improvement, though. At least there was something else mixing with the depression these days.
“So where does that leave us?” Sheila asked. “And do you really think this Tehn guy had anything to do with it?”
Drakanis was thinking of his own visit to the hotel room, the way it had felt, the smell that had come to him when he had gone in. He didn’t think that it had been any real scent, not one processed by the nose anyway. Parker hadn’t said anything about it, and the plainclothes and forensics guys hadn’t made any comments either, but that was what he thought of it as anyway. It made him think of spoiled eggs, and also of the time when he and Vincent had been kids and run across a rabid dog. The dog had been well on its way to dying and hadn’t been able to give much of a chase, but when they had rounded the corner and found it, it had smelled something like that. It was too elemental, too broad to really define, but there was still a simple thing to call it, and Drakanis found that to be the easiest way to deal with things. It was just the smell of bad, the smell of something that’s crawled off to die or should be doing so, something that meant nothing but bad news to those unfortunate enough to catch a whiff. When Parker had brought him back to the station and they’d had a peek at the supplies closet where Woods and the janitor had been found, that smell had been all over the place too. He nodded.
Parker dropped his two cents in the barrel, his voice coming out slightly slurred.
“’Course it was. Fucker said somethin’ wuz gunna happen ta Woods, said he wuz ’sposed to quit nosin’ around.” The tone of remorse and regret in his voice was nearly as blurry as the words themselves, but it was still there. Drakanis had spent much of the previous few days trying to tell his friend that he couldn’t have anticipated something like that, couldn’t have known what would happen. They were still holding out hopes that Officer Woods would come out of it okay, but the fact that he hadn’t woken up or said anything else since his brief waking period the day he’d been admitted put it further and further outside the realm of believability with each passing hour.
Brokov shook her head and signaled for a fresh daiquiri as she set the empty glass on the bar. “You couldn’t have known. Besides, I don’t think he was nosing around anything. He talked a lot that ni…” She stopped, and while Parker was too drunk to notice, Drakanis caught the flush that spread across her cheeks, as she cleared her throat and started again. “He’d said a lot about stuff he was working on, but nothing about that. I think he would have said something, at least.”
Drakanis scowled. He nodded when Kenny asked if he was up for a fresh beer. “Maybe you guys should pull Woods’ files in the morning, see what else he was working on. Maybe there’s a link somewhere, and we’re just not seeing it.”
Brokov nodded, and Parker grunted something in the affirmative while Drakanis took a long swallow of his new beer, feeling it coat his throat and imbue him with that serene state of false confidence that liquor granted so easily. He nodded to himself, dropped his used cigarette into the old bottle, and passed it over to Parker so he could do the same.
“All right. That’s one thing, at least. Either of you got anything on the janitor’s autopsy, or even why he was dead? Any professional medical opinions on what the hell happened to the pair of them even? Shit, any far-fetched theories? I’d take a fucking Hitchcock special with a bow at this point.”
Both of them shook their heads. “Karim Alvat’s goin’ on the table in tha mornin’,” Parker said, “but I doan’ think he’ll show us an’thin. Stroke, I figger.”
Sheila nodded in agreement and then added her own information. “I know they did an examination at the scene. Bruise on one knee—they think he got that falling down in the closet—and some old scars on his back, but no other physical damage. Prelim COD was stroke or heart failure. They’re just too backed up to do him right off, since nobody tagged him as case related.”
Drakanis shrugged. “Can’t, really. No proof, just a bunch of old biddies gossiping and scared shitless. Still, two guys turn up dead or almost in a supply closet, and nobody looks too close at it?” He wondered if everything had gone to hell just since he’d been away or if it had always been going on and he just hadn’t been able to see it from the inside. Probably the latter, he decided.
Parker mumbled something under his breath, but it was Sheila Drakanis’s attention was focused on at the moment, since she was in the office pretty much day in and day out and understood how these things worked better than a pair of detectives, one of whom was forcibly retired and one well on his way to being drunk. From the look of her, she didn’t have an answer either though. She just shook her head and raised one hand, almost in a defensive gesture, and looked at him over the lip of her glass as she took a sip from the fresh daiquiri.
Setting the glass down, she answered, “Look, everybody’s all fucked up over the thing with the captain, and nobody knows what the hell happened in that closet. Then you’ve got something like thirty fresh bodies coming in every day, some of those homicides or otherwise suspicious. Now, add in one immigrant janitor without a case number, and you get what you get, hon. I can try to call up Hollis in the morning, push him a little—he’s married to my sister—but if he’s going to do it then anyway, it’s just going to make him stubborn.”
An abbreviated sound of air passing over his lip was Drakanis’s only initial response; Parker didn’t give any at all. He just put his forehead on the bar and stayed that way. Drakanis then adjusted Parker’s collar, pulling it up, and moved the debris out of his way so Parker could rest comfortably, before turning back to Sheila.
“Look, I’m sorry, okay. I didn’t mean to sound so snappy or anything.” He lifted one hand, palm outward in a “peace” gesture. “So let it drop. We’ll know about Karim tomorrow, fair enough. Anything on Woods yet?”
Sheila’s lips pursed, and she looked away, staring at her own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. She could tell from what she saw there that she had gotten a lot more attached to Damien than she’d wanted to, and with everything else that was going wrong lately, she was losing far too much sleep. The circles around her eyes were getting thicker, and even the great advances in makeup technology weren’t going to be able to keep up for long. She guessed Drakanis
had noticed as well.
You’re being dumb, and you know it. It’s not like it was a big secret that you were with him the night before and almost all the time since.
She knew that on some level, but it was still hard to let go of the veil and let someone in, even just a little bit. It was made even harder because of the speed of the thing. She’d noticed Damien before, of course, but still, going from almost strangers to lovers to sitting by his bedside every night in the course of a week was moving almost ridiculously fast. It just felt like she didn’t really have any choice. It just happened; that was all. Drakanis and all the others would just need to deal with it.
Thinking of it that way made it a little easier—she could at least look at Drakanis now—and so she went on. “I’ve been watching over him when I can. Nothing since the first night. He mumbles sometimes, or I think he does, but nothing I can understand.”
As if he’d been waiting for a cue, Parker mumbled from his side of the bar, sounding half asleep already. Brokov wrote it off as half-drunk babble, but Drakanis had caught the last couple of syllables, and something in it dinged the little radar in his head. He laid a hand on Parker’s collar and dragged him up just a bit. He patted one cheek until a bleary eye rolled open. “What did you say?”
“Diff’runt language, mebbe. S’all.” Parker had obviously gone well beyond his limit, and for such a big man, that was an accomplishment. Drakanis was thinking it was nearly time to drag his ass home, but not before he followed up a bit on this one. He lowered the big man’s head back down, and Parker went back to his napping.
“Different language, maybe.” Drakanis chewed on it for a second, considering, while Brokov watched him, brows raised. When he turned to look at her again, his eyes were alight with possibilities, practically burning from inside.
Something’s got his wind up. Hope it’s something good, Sheila thought.
“What kinds of sounds does he make? Doesn’t have to be 100 percent, just close. Best guess.”
Sheila thought about it for a minute and tried to approximate it, which was not an easy task since the words—if that was what they were—had been spoken through layers of drugs and unconsciousness. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t know. Something like ‘shampoo tarp’ or something. That’s what I keep thinking, anyway. And sometimes he says something about a ‘colpepper’ or something that sounds like that.”
Drakanis was nodding now, the fire in his eyes brightening. “Maybe he said, ‘Talu Shar,’ or something like that?”
Sheila stopped and took another swig of her drink, as she replayed it in her mind a few times, trying to picture the shape his lips had made. Then she nodded, swaying one hand in the air. “That’s close. Maybe. But it’s dreamspeak. Never makes any sense, and you hear what you want to hear in it, I guess.”
Drakanis was standing up. He scrabbled for the pair of twenties he kept in the back of his wallet with one hand while the other rummaged in his long coat’s pockets. He dropped the money on the bar and then passed a small object to Brokov, who took it with curiosity. “What’s this?”
“Tape recorder. One of those voice-activated ones. Put it in his room, if you can.”
She arched her brows, gathering her purse and keys as she stood up. “I don’t get it.”
“When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, I’m going to get him to find me a linguistics specialist. Bribe him with the Advil, since it looks like he’s going to need it.” Drakanis gave Parker a friendly thump on the back, grinning as he did it, and then started to try to haul him out of the chair. Sheila tried to help, but it was slow going, and once he was standing, Drakanis was holding all the weight, though it didn’t seem to bother him much.
“Then we take the tape of whatever Damien says—if anything—to this guy, and see if he can spit out what language it’s from at least. That’ll help. Maybe even get a translation.”
Sheila shook her head. “But it’s just babble. And it’s not like it’s anything to do with the killer, or whoever did this to him.” Even as she was saying the words though, she knew they weren’t precisely true. The look in Drakanis’s eyes—combined with the stories she’d heard of his intuitive leaps and how well they worked out sometimes—had her half convinced that this was the magic key to all of it.
“If it’s gibberish, it doesn’t matter and one tape recorder and five minutes of some professor’s time are the only wasted resources. If it isn’t though, it could mean a lot. It’s all I’ve got to work with at the moment, so I need a shot at it. Are you going to help me or not, Sheila?”
Something in his voice seemed to indicate that he was nearing his wit’s end, that whatever sanity he’d managed to find since his removal from the force was near to running on empty. Maybe it was just the way he accented the final question, maybe it was just the look in his eyes, but Sheila believed that he believed. She could feel that conviction and that desperation burning off of him in waves, and she couldn’t find any real reason to deny the request. She was going over there now anyway. And he was right; what was five minutes of some professor’s time and a tape that had cost $1.99 at the nearest RadioShack, when it had the chance to put them back on track? She nodded slowly and then with more confidence.
“All right, I’ll do it. Want me to call if he says anything useful?”
Drakanis nodded back to her as he began to drag Parker back to the door. “Fuck yes, Sheila. You’ve got the cell number. And if he wakes up, I want to talk to him, ASAP. The fact that our boy said anything about him means that he’s got a part to play here, and I want to know what it is.”
Sheila sighed, not wanting to consider what that part might be, since it had apparently almost gotten him killed. But on the other hand, that seemed like reason enough to give Drakanis and Parker a hand. They’d all lost something important to them to this mess, and if there was anything she could do to help put an end to it, she was bound by both the vows she’d taken upon becoming a cop and on her own personal wishes to do it. “All right. I’m down. I’ll call if I hear anything. Need any help?”
Drakanis, straining and sweating as he tried to pull almost three hundred pounds of passed-out Scandahoovian toward the door and out to the car, most definitely looked like he could use some help, but he just flapped a hand at her. “Naw, naw. I’m fine. This won’t be the first time I’ve had to drag Mr. Vinny here out of a joint, and God willing, it won’t be the last either. Go on. Take care of that tape.”
She contemplated arguing the point but figured Mike would just pull more of the tough macho crap on her, so instead, she just shook her head, curled her fingers around the tape recorder, and blew past him, mumbling her good nights and heading to the car. She did sit outside, letting the old VW warm up a bit, until she saw Drakanis unload the meatbag into the vehicle though, just to be safe. Then she pulled away, heading to the hospital and trying not to be too hopeful.
Chapter 21
8:30 am, December 20, 1999
Head Coroner Dicky Hollis was already working himself into a fine snit by the time he parked his rebuilt RX-7 in front of the morgue. By the time he had gotten through the motions of shutting down the stereo, the fuel pump, the heating unit, and lastly the car itself, he was very prepared to spend a day carving up bodies instead of the turkey he should have been cutting at his mother’s house in Florida.
Any other year, Richard (“just call me ‘Dicky’”) Hollis would have flown out of Reno on the eighteenth, to return no earlier than January 10, but things hadn’t been going as planned this year. Apparently, unlike the previous ten years that he had been doing this job, everyone had decided to die in a suspicious fashion right during that week. Add in that one of them, the fallen Captain Morrigan, had been a close friend and one hell of a quarterback on their weekend pickup games, and life was already looking miserable. Then his sister-in-law had called this morning, and life continued to go down the drain.
Originally, he’d intended to do the cutting on Mr. Alvat this morning, but over the course of the evening, six so-called gangstas had decided to put a good number of holes in each other, and two had run off. That pushed the four who had remained behind onto his calendar, as ASAP items. That, in turn, pushed the janitor back, and that would have been just the same to Dicky. He found a great deal more purpose in digging slugs out of gangbangers so they could ID weapons than he would have in cutting on one janitor’s brain, looking for irregularities that he was fairly certain he wasn’t going to find. Of course, then Sheila had called, Marie had gotten pushy, and there went your nice, sedate morning.
Sheila apparently had a bug up her ass, considered poking at Alvat to be a great deal more important—for reasons she couldn’t state, of course—than any gangbanger’s autopsy. After all, she had argued, wasn’t it pretty obvious what had killed them? Dicky saw her point but could have argued the opposite, as well. The only thing that made Alvat interesting at all was what had happened to the officer who supposedly had been in the room with him when whatever had killed him had happened. Dicky personally put more money on figuring it out by checking the living member of the pair, but so far, the idiots down at St. Mary’s were mystified.
So, he had come downstairs this morning, found his wife on the phone talking with Sheila, and had then been given his marching orders. From past experiences with such discussions—and there had been many, especially at the beginning, over the course of their eight-year marriage—he knew that to fight about it was to accomplish nothing save to put them both in a fouler temper and ensure that supper would be cold unless he bought it or cooked it himself.
Then, of course, there had been all the usual holiday hang-ups on the way to the office: children who did not yet understand the concept of crosswalks constantly jumping in front of traffic, construction still going on in the most heavily traveled sections of the freeway, traffic jams as people rushed to make it to relatives’ houses or the airport, a great number of them from out of state and roughly as able to find their way around Nevada as the average otter was to build a skyscraper.
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