“It’s your sister,” he called out. “It would be.”
“I’ll take it in the kitchen,” Eileen called back.
I gathered that Mother still had her habit of phoning everyone in the family on Sunday in order, usually, to berate them about their various failings. I sat down in the chair Aunt Eileen had just vacated, opposite Nathan, who was just closing a photo album.
“I’ve found several clear images of your brother.” Nathan tapped his shirt pocket. “Your aunt told me to take whatever the police needed.”
Uncle Jim wandered back out into the living room to join us. He stood aimlessly between our two chairs, his hands shoved in the pockets of his gray trousers. “Can I offer you a drink—” he began.
“No, no thanks,” Nathan said. “I’m on duty.”
“Oh, right. Jeezus H, I never realized how much waiting there is, when something like this happens.” He turned and looked down the long white room to the portrait of Father Keith. “It would happen on a Sunday! Well, I’ll give Keith a call when Eileen’s off the damn phone. See if he’s done with business yet.”
I smiled at another family joke, Father Keith’s “business day.” Uncle Jim shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back again. Nathan looked at me, I looked at him, we both looked away, because we could do nothing, sure enough, but wait for Sanchez to call. I had the grim feeling that when he did, he’d have nothing to report anyway. With the slap of fuzzy slippers on a polished floor, Aunt Eileen bustled into the living room and broke the ugly mood with an uglier one.
“Nola, I’m sorry, but I had to tell your mother. She’s on her way here.”
“Oh, Jeezus H God in heaven! ” Jim muttered. “That’s all we need, that old dragon!”
“Now, Jim darling.” Aunt Eileen laid a hand on his arm. “Michael’s her son, and she’s really upset.”
I got up fast and motioned to Nathan to join me.
“Please, try to remember.” Eileen was looking earnestly into Jim’s eyes. “We haven’t heard from Nola in weeks. She hasn’t come back into town. Can you remember that? She isn’t here.”
“Of course I can. Why the hell do you think I couldn’t?”
With a dignified toss of his head, Uncle Jim stalked off, heading for his study, where, or so I devoutly hoped, he’d fall asleep in front of the old TV. I turned to Nathan.
“We need to leave,” I said. “Now.”
“Very well.” He looked and sounded utterly puzzled. “Mrs. Houlihan, try to stay calm. The police are doing their best.”
“For all the good that’s going to do,” Aunt Eileen said. “But thank you anyway.”
I steered Nathan out of the house and down to the car as fast as I could. For a change I appreciated his predilection for high speeds on city streets. Once we’d made the turn onto O’Shaughnessy, I could relax despite the occasional screech of brakes and the way he laid on the horn. Mother would never have recognized me in this unfamiliar car if we zipped past her on the road.
“What is it about your mother?” Nathan said abruptly.
“Just what Uncle Jim said. There are times when she really is an old dragon, and you don’t want to be around her when she is. Today she’ll actually have a good reason for some full-scale histrionics.”
For a welcome few minutes he concentrated on his driving.
“Is that like lycanthropy?” he said eventually.
“What? No! Just a metaphor for her awful temper.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Oh, come on, did you think she actually turned into a dragon now and then?”
“I told you, I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
He sounded perfectly serious. I clung to the hope that he was teasing me.
“Well, I have to admit,” I went on, “that she has her reasons. One of the things that drove her around the bend was having seven kids in just under sixteen years.”
“That would unbalance anyone, I should think. And then, I take it, your father deserted the family?”
“I don’t know if you can call it that. He may have. He may not have. One Friday night he drove down to the store to buy a six-pack of beer and never came back.”
“Good God! Did the police—”
“They found the car and the six-pack not all that far from home, but they never found a trace of him.” I paused—should I lie outright or just skip the truth? I decided on the latter. “They called it a carjacking and murder, eventually, but there wasn’t any actual evidence for that. They wanted to make it possible for my mother to declare him legally dead and get on with her life.”
“I’m so sorry.” He looked sincerely saddened. “That must have been very difficult for all of you.”
“Yeah. You could say that. You can imagine how upset she’s going to be with Michael gone missing. A rerun.”
Nathan made a sympathetic noise and ran a red light. I said nothing more about the family tragedy. I hoped, in fact, that he’d forget to ask again.
We returned to the apartment to wait for our phones to ring. When neither did, after an hour of watching Nathan watch soccer on TV, I realized that I had to do something about Michael’s disappearance or I’d go crazy. I decided to try a particular procedure that the Agency called Mind Penetration. Although it hovers on the edge of being unethical, the Agency has never outright banned it, merely designated it as “use only in extreme circumstances.” With six people confirmed dead, counting Pat, and now a seventh gone missing, these were just that.
“Those pictures of Johnson,” I said. “Do you still have them, or are they at the police station?”
“They made copies.” He switched off the TV. “Why?”
“I need them. I’m going to try to get a fix on Johnson’s actual mind. I might be able to sense if he knows anything about Michael.”
Nathan brought out the envelope. I retreated to the kitchen table to work. I put the passport picture on top of the pad of paper I used for LDRS to give it a neutral background, then laid my hands on either side of the picture. I leaned forward, stared into Johnson’s eyes, and let my mind range out.
Immediately I felt his presence, carried to me on a wave of fear tinged with physical pain. He’d been cut on his arm, somehow, and the cut terrified him far beyond its severity. He was fussing over it, taking a bandage off, putting it back on, over and over, while in the background of his consciousness he was listening to someone taunt him for worrying. He began to get angry, then enraged, at the constant taunting. With him occupied with his anger, I could probe a little deeper. I picked up fleeting images: dry grass, trees, a sudden lupine face looming over him. Mary Rose in wolf-form.
Johnson’s mind swirled and tipped—I can’t think of any other way to describe it—as if he were a boat caught in a vortex in a sea of terror. Rage and terror—no coherent thoughts could penetrate that storm. I shut down and withdrew.
I ran my fingers along the table edge to remind myself I had a body, then looked around at the familiar kitchen to make sure I knew where I was. I found the sight of Nathan standing in the kitchen doorway oddly reassuring. No matter what I thought of his complete lack of good manners, he was solid, real, and a good shot. With Johnson in his current mood, the “good shot” loomed large in my favorable appraisal.
“Mary Rose bit Johnson, all right,” I said. “And boy is he pissed about it.”
Nathan laughed, one short sound. “What do they call that?” he said. “Karma?”
“That’ll do, for sure. The trouble is, I couldn’t pick up anything about Michael—or anyone else, for that matter, except Mary Rose.” I shuddered from a sudden cold insight. “He’s glad he killed her. He enjoyed it entirely too much.”
“We always knew that he was a psychopath. Try not to dwell on him. Can you put him out of your thoughts?”
“I’ll try.”
I managed to perform a Conscious Evasion Procedure by giving Nathan back Johnson’s photo and then ripping up the piece of paper that it had touched. A
lthough I’d planned on scanning for Sneezy and other members of the coven, the effort from the MP followed by the CEP left me exhausted.
Nathan insisted that I rest on the couch while he went out to hunt up some dinner. I found an animé serial on TV and watched that to occupy my thoughts until he returned. He brought a massive amount of take-out food from the deli down the street, enough little white cardboard boxes to half-cover the coffee table. Nathan sat at one end of the couch; I sat decorously at the other. I ate some marinated artichoke hearts, the only vegetable among his purchases, and sampled a few bites of the other stuff despite Nathan hectoring me to eat more.
“Are you really that afraid of me slipping into trance again?” I said.
“No, I’m afraid you’ll starve to death. Look at your sodding collarbones! They stick out.”
“They’re supposed to.” I shielded them with one hand. “It’s the in look.”
He rolled his eyes heavenward and opened another white box. “Baklava.” He grinned as he held it out. “Want some?”
You bastard! I thought. Of course I did. He shoved the box into my hand.
“Have it all,” he said. “I got it for you. I don’t care much for sweets.”
Box or plate, fingers or fork—I find it impossible to eat anything that’s both sticky and flakey without making a mess. By the time I finished I ended up with drips of honey and bits of phyllo on my sweater as well as my hands. I went through a couple of napkins getting it off.
“There’s some on your face, too.” He slid over next to me. “Shall I wipe it off?”
He leaned close, his lips half-parted, his eyes so soft and warm that I realized he was planning on licking the honey away. I should have pushed him away, I should have moved, but my own raw desire caught and held me.
The phone in his shirt pocket rang with a burst of Bach. I yelped, he swore, I got up from the couch.
“I’ll just wash my face,” I said and ran for the bathroom.
When I came back, Nathan was still talking on the phone. I collected the boxes of leftovers and stowed them in the fridge, a nice mundane task that kept me in my reality. I returned to the living room just as he was putting the phone into his shirt pocket.
“That was Sanchez,” he said. “They’ve put out an all-points missing persons for Michael. Forensics tells him that yes, that dead duck was electrocuted. They’re freezing the autopsied remains on the off chance they’ll need it for evidence later.”
That bit of news destroyed the last remnant of my romantic mood.
“I’m glad they’re doing something.” I took my own phone out of my pocket. “I’ll just call Aunt Eileen and tell her.”
“Yes.” With a long sigh Nathan picked up the TV remote. “You might as well.”
CHAPTER 8
MARY ROSE ROMERO’S FUNERAL SERVICE was scheduled for one o’clock Monday afternoon. I was surprised to hear that it would take place in a mortuary chapel rather than an actual church. I wondered if her parents blamed themselves for her lycanthropy, a pity if so, and were keeping her funeral simple out of shame. I could imagine my mother doing that. Since Nathan and I would probably have to go to the grave site afterward, I was relieved when the day turned out sunny if cold.
For this kind of event I had a black wool challis dress with an A-line skirt and a short-sleeved jewel-neck bodice—plain, appropriate, and let’s face it, ugly. I wore it with black high heels and a black jacket that was actually part of a dinner suit. Since he’d stay outside for the service with Lieutenant Sanchez, Nathan dressed like a cop—the navy blue pinstripe suit with a white shirt and, of course, the gun in the shoulder holster under the jacket, an appropriate enough accessory.
The squat stucco mortuary sat behind a parking lot well back from Junipero Serra Boulevard in Daly City. At the moment, cars filled about half the lot, including the long gray hearse that would take the casket to the cemetery, a few miles farther south in the little town that functions as San Francisco’s land of the dead. Gaudeamus igitur, I thought, because nos habebit Colma. We timed our arrival to the edge of being late, so I could slip into the chapel without an invitation. I made a point of signing the guest book, though, as “Nola O’Grady (Pat’s sister).”
In the chapel, recorded organ music fell softly from speakers high on the blue-gray walls. A white casket, barely visible under garlands and sprays of red and yellow flowers, stood on a bier in front of the altar, where a priest in full vestments knelt in prayer while an altar boy stood guard. Behind him on the wall hung an enormous crucifix. In spe resurrectionis, I thought. Or is it expectatione, not just hope, of the resurrection? I could no longer remember which.
I took a seat in an empty pew at the very back, right by the door, and looked over the sparse gathering. Since morticians usually reserve the front rows for the family, I assumed that Romero’s people sat there. A middle-aged woman wearing a black skirt suit, whom I pegged as the mother, leaned against a gray-haired man, most likely the father. At times they’d turn their heads and look around them with dazed eyes. The mother’s slack mouth and slumped posture indicated she’d been given a tranquilizer of some kind.
Behind them sat a gaggle of young women, Mary Rose’s friends from college, I figured, judging from their ages and their cobbled-together attempts at appropriate clothes—tight black sweaters, mostly, and short black skirts better suited to clubbing. They huddled together, frightened, whispering among themselves, still disbelieving that murder had touched them through a friend’s death. Behind them sat three young men, who’d also scrounged together black clothing including, in one case, a black jacket with the Giants’ logo on the back. They sat close together and neither moved nor spoke. I wondered at first if one of them was Frater LG. Pat had never described his fellow pack members except in the most general of terms, but they seemed unlikely candidates for the alpha male.
Just as the priest rose from his kneel, a young man dressed in a black suit entered the chapel. I realized that he had to be Lawrence Grampian, young, blond, tall, and utterly stricken, his eyes puffy, his face streaked red and raw from weeping. He stopped in the chapel door and looked around with a toss of his head, then slunk in and sat down at the other end of the pew I was occupying. He glanced my way and stiffened, staring at me for a long minute, then looked away with a swing of his head as if in fear. Pat had resembled me, just as we O’Gradys all resembled each other, what was left of my family. When four young men in suits entered the chapel, Grampian got up and joined them in another pew.
Since I had work to do, I paid as little attention to the actual service as possible, which skipped serving Mass, no doubt at the parents’ request. They both stared at their daughter’s casket through the entire thing without a tear or a sound, as if they’d already poured out every last bitter drop of their grief. While the priest spoke, I was testing the atmosphere in the chapel, opening myself to whatever forces might have been present.
Overwhelming grief flooded my mind, dull grief on the part of the friends, the drugged miasma surrounding the parents, and the wild animal rage of Lawrence Grampian. I wrenched my mind away and began to scrutinize the chapel itself. As I considered the floral cascade over the coffin, I saw a tiny face peering out from among red roses, all long snout and teeth. It disappeared so quickly that I thought the grief might have objectified itself into an image. I refrained from throwing a ward just because my talents do sometimes get in their own way.
The bell began to toll, a prerecorded death knell sounding over speakers. Mortuary attendants slithered forward with a peculiar silent, please-ignore-us walk and began to remove the flowers from the casket. Underneath lay a white pall marked with a purple cross. Grampian, his four friends, and Romero’s father stood up and strode forward. They hoisted the coffin and carried it up the aisle behind the priest and the altar boy, who led the procession with a silver crucifer. While the bell tolled on, the mourners followed, and I fell into line at the very end.
Outside the sunlight made me blink a
nd squint. I stood off to one side as the pallbearers slid the coffin into the waiting hearse. It stuck halfway, an awkward moment that made Romero’s mother collapse in tears. The father left the ghastly juggling act to the young men and the mortician and rushed to help her up from the sidewalk. I heard him say, “We don’t have to go,” and her murmured answer, “I want to.”
I stepped back into the doorway and sketched a Chaos ward, then flung it at the coffin. I heard a high-pitched squeal, inaudible to anyone else, apparently, since no one reacted to it. The coffin slid safely forward into the hearse. You filthy bastard, I thought. Had to add one last measure of misery!
The mortician hurried over to the parents and guided them into the limo waiting behind the hearse. As the funeral party dispersed into various cars, Nathan jogged over to join me.
“We’re going to the cemetery,” he said. “Sanchez and a squad car are driving at the head of the procession. We bring up the rear along with another squad car.”
“Good. Johnson’s nearby. I haven’t seen him, but I know for sure he’s prowling around.”
“Very well, then. Stay on your guard. One good thing, he won’t be able to hide a long gun in broad daylight.”
On this happy thought we joined the cortege.
The grave site lay on the side of a grassy hill, a smooth slope of perfect lawn running down to a small artificial stream shaded by an ancient willow tree. The grave itself, a slash of dark brown earth, opened like a mouth waiting to devour Mary Rose’s mortal remains. I refused to climb that slope in heels and found a place to stand on the flat near the artificial stream, out of the way of the police presence.
At the crest of the slope, well above and behind the funeral party, Nathan and Sanchez took up a position. Every now and then they turned to look behind them, just a casual gesture, or so an observer might think. I doubted if it would fool Johnson. Downhill, a couple of uniformed police officers were strolling back and forth on guard. Police at the funeral—a dismal addition to the more usual miseries of death.
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