The first was from Soren Faith. The department had found an electronic file containing the list of resident home owners around the lake on Strother’s computer. It had half a dozen names and addresses, going back to 1988. It looked as though Strother had been out trying to talk to some of them in person when he’d told Ridenour he wasn’t nearby. I guessed he was buying time for Willow to leave the greenhouse but hadn’t known I’d take his place and undo that gift. Faith seemed to think the list wasn’t that useful, but he told me to call him anyhow.
But there had to be something to it. If Strother had found something interesting, maybe he’d gone back to follow up rather than coming to look for me on the mountain. Of course, he didn’t know Ridenour hadn’t picked me up, so he’d have assumed I’d be at my hotel once the storm came in after dark. He’d had no way to know about the zombies or how long it would take me to get back to Port Angeles. But someone could have followed him down the mountain and to my hotel.
I let the other messages wait while I called Faith back and asked for the list.
“Well . . . it is the homicide of a fellow officer, now, Ms. Blaine. Not sure I should pass it on.”
“You know I’m not the one who killed him and he only made the list because I suggested it. My client wants some closure on the death of her father. I promise not to get under your feet. I just want to see the list.”
Faith sighed. I could hear an ancient desk chair creak as he leaned back into it. “I wish I was working with a dog on this. . . .”
“Excuse me?”
“Usually my partner and I spend most of our time with K-9 units, hunting down missing persons and dead bodies that float up off the Strait, chasing down marijuana smugglers, and picking up after idiots who drink and drive on the cliffs. No offense, but frankly the dog’s a lot easier to work with than you. I know you’re cooperating, but for God’s sake, lady, you’re kicking over rocks like you want to get yourself killed next. One freakin’ homicide a year’s more than enough. I’ll give you this damned list if you can get yourself into my office by four thirty. But after I do, you tell Mrs. Newman that any more carnage on this account will not be ignored. She is not going to wave this off with the smell of money.”
I found myself nodding at the phone. “Understood, Mr. Faith.”
“Ah, that ‘mister’ stuff makes me think I ought to wear a tie.” He said it as if he could already feel it strangling him. “Just ‘Faith.’ And you’re not here by four thirty, I’m gone.”
I didn’t get a chance to reply before he’d cut the connection. I checked the time and thought I could listen to the next message and still make it back across the hill if I started right away.
The other message was from Quinton.
“Hey, beautiful. Um . . . sorry about the other day. But I’m done with my project and I thought I’d better come talk to you so . . . I’m about to get on the ferry to Kingston. I’ll call again when I get to Port Angeles.” Strange—not only did he sound odd, but he wasn’t in the habit of checking in on me or randomly showing up while I was working.
The next call was also Quinton. “Hey. I’m in Port Angeles, but the clerk says you checked out of your hotel. I’m just sitting in the lobby for a while, staring at this pay phone. . . .” He rattled off the number. “I’ll wait here until four. I brought you something from Ben.”
He sounded worried and I guessed the sheriff’s department was still hanging around. Given his feelings about police agencies, I imagined he was nervous, and I wondered what had prompted his trip—I doubted that whatever Ben had given him was so compelling that he had to bring it to me immediately. He hadn’t called very long ago, so I tried the number.
“Hello?” It was definitely Quinton’s voice at the other end.
“Hey,” I said. “What brings you out this way?”
“Hey. Um . . .” He cleared his throat but didn’t say more.
“So . . . someone’s nearby whom you don’t want listening to this conversation?” I asked.
“That sounds right.”
“All right. I have to stop at the sheriff’s department. Do you want to meet me there?”
“Not so much. I met most of them already, I think.”
“OK. Go down to the Canadian ferry dock and I’ll pick you up there about four forty-five.”
“Will do.” He got off the phone without an endearment or goodbye, which was standard procedure for Quinton if he thought anyone might be too interested in what he had to say. Since having worked for a covert agency, he really distrusted phones.
I rushed to get back to Port Angeles before Faith’s deadline. In the steadily increasing rain, it was going to be tight.
But I made it and found Soren Faith standing beside a desk in the sheriff’s department, shrugging on his jacket. He looked up and waved me closer.
He picked up a file from the desk as I approached and held it out to me. “I don’t think it’s going to be much help.”
I took the folder anyway. “Why not?” I asked.
“Well, most of the folks on that list are already suspects. The rest aren’t around anymore. The 1990s were a good time for real estate investors, so most of the lake cabins were bought as vacation homes, not permanent ones. Aside from Elias Costigan, the Newmans, and a couple of Morganroths and Barnses whose families have lived here as long as Washington’s been a state, no one’s a year-round resident who isn’t accounted for. Alan’s car computer logged all his stops and times, so I marked up which houses he visited and when on that list. He pretty much covered everyone. The only thing that’s unusual is that he drove back and forth a couple of times.”
“Did he drive or did he stop?” I asked.
Faith smiled—a crooked, funny smile—as if I’d figured out something that pleased him. “That is the interesting feature, but I haven’t been able to figure out what he was doing yet.” He reached for the folder I held and I gave it back to him so he could spread the contents on the desk. He pointed to the car computer log, item by item. “Down here, he stops by Costigan’s place. Then he stops a few minutes later at the Newmans’. That’s not too strange since they lie along the same route. But then he goes back and stops at the Log Cabin Resort—isn’t that a strange coincidence—about four hours before you called us from there. Then he turns it around and drives out to Lake Sutherland and goes around the back side of it and stops at three different houses, including Steven Leung’s. All of them are unoccupied. He goes to Fairholm, around to Camp David Jr. and back, then heads to Lake Sutherland again. He was out of the car for about thirty minutes at that point, and he didn’t log what he was doing, so I assumed he was eating or having a piss, but the car wasn’t near any facility because all of them are still closed and there’s no one resident at the small lake who’d have let him.”
“So where’d he go and what did he do?” I asked, as expected.
“I don’t know. Nothing else on the list or the log points to anyone specific,” Faith replied, rubbing the scar under his hair.
I frowned and started to push my hair back, mirroring his movement until I caught myself. Faith gave me another of his crooked cat-smiles. “It points to no one,” I said, disappointed. “I was sure it led to something.”
A wry quirk twisted his mouth. “It does. We just don’t know what. And that’s why I’m giving it to you. I don’t want you getting into trouble, but putting the extra brainpower on the problem won’t hurt. You been up here most of a week, so I figure you might see something I’m missing.”
I gave him a suspicious glance. “How do you know how long I’ve been in town?”
“I like to be thorough. I checked with the hotels and guesthouses,’cause you don’t look like the camping type.”
I snorted. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t or couldn’t go camping; I’d just never had much cause or chance to. Though I suppose surveillance details were kind of like camping, in a homeless-guy-living-in-his-car kind of way. And thinking about cars made me ask, “Hey, do you have a list
of the items found in Leung’s car? I’d like to take it to my client and see if anything stands out.”
Faith glanced down, thinking. “I believe I do. Hang on a second.” He banged around on the nearest computer keyboard for a moment and coaxed a page from a cranky laser printer that made grinding and coughing noises and shook as if the page were being generated by a hidden Gutenberg press tended by asthmatic souls of the damned. Faith handed the still-warm paper to me. “Good luck with that. And if you come up with any ideas, don’t act on ’em. Call me first.”
I agreed, knowing I was probably lying. “Oh, one more thing,” I said as he shooed me toward the door.
Faith cocked me a look with raised brows. “Yeah?”
“What happened at the lake in 1989?”
“’Eighty-nine?” He gave it some thought. “Nothing. Nothing I know about at least. Ridenour’d be the one to ask. He would have been pretty new back then, but I imagine if anything significant happened, he’s the one who would know.”
I plunged back out into the rain in Faith’s wake and watched him head deeper into the parking lot until the rain hid him from sight, reflecting light from the sodium vapor lamps into scrims and rippling swags of liquid gold streaked black in the fallen night.
The rain was no heavier by the water, but the wind off the Strait of Juan de Fuca blew it in at a cutting angle that filled the windshield with blurry white lines. I had to concentrate on the road just to be sure I was on it, and not wandering into some ghostly pocket of the Grey, but I found the Black Ball Ferry Line’s passenger pickup zone without having to circle around more than once.
There was only one passenger at the dock at that time of night, since the last boat from Victoria hadn’t arrived yet. The size and shape were right, but in the downpour it was hard to tell if it really was Quinton. After what had happened to Strother, I was a touch more paranoid than usual and moved my pistol into the center console. I kept my hand on it as I unlocked the doors.
He bounded into the front seat and shut the door, sweeping off his hat and dropping it onto his boots along with his backpack. Then he pushed back the hood of the sweatshirt he had on underneath the coat, and as the light fell on his face I almost shot him.
“Whoa!” he shouted, putting up his hands as he saw my hand on the gun. “Next time I’ll say something first.”
I let my breath out in a relieved puff at the familiar sound of his voice and drew my hand away from the pistol. I peered at him for a second, just in case it wasn’t really Quinton but some kind of Grey trick. “What the hell happened to your hair?” I asked as I started to pull the truck back onto the road.
He made an embarrassed chuckling sound and ran one hand over his head. His long ponytail was gone and his hair was clipped into a neat, short style that probably looked boringly corporate when it wasn’t damp and mussed. He’d shaved off his beard as well, and his face seemed too large and a little too hard around the jaw without it. He looked more like the old ID photo I’d seen of him when the NSA had come calling a couple of years earlier than like my beloved, shaggy anarchist. I recognized him from other details as well, but it took some restraint not to stare at his broad cheekbones and naked chin.
“Well . . . um . . . I had a need to change my look.”
“Are you running from someone? Is that why you’ve been so jumpy? Is that why you’re here?”
“Not as such.”
“How ’bout you get to that ‘such’ and tell me what’s going on?”
“Could we go somewhere drier and quieter for that? And private?” he added, reaching into his pocket for his pager. Then he popped off the back and removed the batteries, eyeing me with an unspoken suggestion that I do the same.
I pointed at my phone where it sat in one of the cup holders. Quinton took it and removed its battery also, putting the two parts in separate holes in the console. He seemed to breathe easier once it was done.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“It’s a long story. I’d rather tell it all at once. Where are you staying?”
“I was at a hotel a few blocks away, but I wasn’t planning on going back there. One of the local cops—”
“Was killed in your previous hotel room. Yeah. I got that story out of the desk clerk. So you were going to take a different room tonight?”
“It sounded like a good idea to me.”
“Is there some other place, not a hotel, we could go? Someplace a bit . . . off the grid?”
I thought about the key Geoff Newman had given me. The Leung place wasn’t perfectly safe, but it wasn’t likely anyone would come there by chance. It also was guaranteed to have no phone or Internet connections, and probably no cable, either, so if Quinton was being paranoid about electronic surveillance, it was the best choice we had, short of staying in the Rover. We’d done that before and I hadn’t cared for it.
“I have a place. . . .”
TWENTY-FIVE
Leung’s house was shuttered tight and silent as ever, and a strange luminescence swirled around the eaves like a flock of ghostly swallows, though the energy playing on the rise nearby had shifted lower and darker since I’d last been there. I hoped that was caused by Jin’s having cleaned up the magic circle there and not by something more sinister. I’d had quite enough of sinister for the day and even though I knew there was something unpleasant behind Quinton’s appearance in Port Angeles, I was hoping it wouldn’t wreck all chance of a quiet night snuggled together under the pile of cheap blankets we’d bought in town. I was counting on Geoff Newman’s wariness to have sealed his lips about lending me the house key, so no one would turn up to disturb us.
The hike in from where I’d left the Rover at a discreet distance from the cabin had left us more than damp around the edges, but the lakefront building with its big decks and upper-floor entry was sound and dry inside even after it had been closed up for five years. Most of the houses around the lakes were summer homes, but this one had been meant for year-round residence, so even though there was no water or electricity, it had everything else you could want, including some old canned goods and a couple of firearms—in case of rampaging bears, I supposed. The shutters kept any movement inside from being visible and it would be cozy enough so long as we didn’t make a lot of noise or wave flashlights around like disco lights. We debated, but in the end Quinton started a small fire in the Franklin stove on the bottom floor and we took the risk that anyone would notice the trickle of smoke it put out the chimney.
We huddled in the dark together before the stove with blankets around our shoulders and sock-clad feet propped on a stool just out of scorching range. A couple of fat little candles provided enough light to see, but we hoped not enough to attract attention if a vagrant flicker fell through the storm shutters and onto the water outside. It was still too tense and soggy to be romantic, but the scene had potential.
“So,” I started, teasing, “where’s the ferret?”
“I left her with Brian Danziger. Oh, that reminds me: Ben gave me something for you.” He scrabbled around in his backpack and handed me a small package swaddled in plastic wrap—not quite what I’d had in mind.... “I guess he was expecting you to come by on Monday, so when I showed up this morning, he gave it to me. Did he tell you about the book?”
I’d forgotten completely to go visit the Danzigers. I winced in shame. “Book?” I looked at the package—it wasn’t big enough for a paperback.... “No.”
“That’s not the book. He’s writing a book. Ben is.”
“Yes, I know—a paranormal field guide. He’s been working on it for a while.”
“He got a publication deal. Some small press, but they’re excited. Mara’s taking a sabbatical at the end of the quarter and they’re going to Europe and Asia for a year to finish up some research for it. She’s going to write something about sacred rocks while they’re out—petroglyphs and dolmens . . . I think.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling odd. I’d never thought about the book seriously
or how it might change their lives—and mine. The Danzigers had been my lifeline through the Grey so many times that I couldn’t imagine my life without them nearby. That was silly and selfish of me, and I didn’t realize how much I’d taken them for granted—I’d taken most of my small number of friends for granted, really. . . . I rubbed the plastic-covered packet in my hand and began to unwrap it. “So . . . what’s this?”
Quinton sat back down and snuggled into the blanket beside me, but his body was tense. Even in the dim light from a handful of candles, I didn’t have to look at his aura to know he was nervous about something. “Ben said it’s a spell to banish demons. Or a demon—I’m kind of unclear on how many. . . .”
It wasn’t demons that worried Quinton, though. I suspected he didn’t want to talk about why he was really here and why he’d cut his hair, at least not yet. I gave him some time while I removed the plastic and an inner wrapper of brown paper to reveal an intricately folded piece of yellow silk a little larger than my palm. A Chinese character had been inked on one side in red. I remembered what Ben had said about banishing demons, and I guessed this soft little fabric flower was a spell to do just that. It was small enough to shove into a yaoguai’s mouth—if you didn’t mind the risk of losing a hand.
“Ben doesn’t write Chinese,” I said, putting the bundle back into its wrappers and tucking it into my shirt for the time being. “I wonder where he got it.”
“He said some colleague of his made it.”
I wondered what sort of colleague he meant, since I couldn’t imagine the college professors he knew suddenly changing their minds about how weird and silly Ben’s interest in the paranormal was. “Ah,” was all I said.
Quinton tucked me against his side, putting his arm around my waist and pulling the blankets close. I leaned my head against his shoulder. Silence fell between us, deep enough to hear the muffled hiss of the damp sticks burning in the stove.
Downpour g-6 Page 24
