Underground

by Kat Richardson

  I stared after him, wondering what that meant. Then I was jarred from my thoughts by a hand on my back. I turned to see Quinton, his brows drawn down and a small orange light outlining his form as he peered at me in the waning light of the fire.

  “Did he say something?”

  A rattle of wings from the darkness made me cover a shiver with a shrug. “Something about death and fools. I think he’s unimpressed. ”

  “Grass and Jenny and I have made a list of who’s missing.”

  I’d lost a few minutes in my reverie. I glanced at Tall Grass and Jenny, who both appeared a lot more trashed than before. I shot a questioning look at Quinton. He pointed at the empty bottle on the ground.

  Jenny tittered. “Good stuff, Maynard.”

  “Jet fuel is what it is,” Quinton corrected.

  “S ’good though,” she replied, and broke into half-swallowed guffaws that sounded like whale hiccups.

  Tall Grass wrapped his arm around her and pulled her into his chest, kissing drunkenly at her head and mostly getting the hat under his lips. He growled and jerked it off, revealing messy, butched-out brown locks. He managed to snare her short hair in his fist and yank her head back, exposing her thin face to his slobbering assault. They tumbled sideways into the ice-coated wall, groping and pawing at each other.

  I rolled my eyes and pushed to my feet, banishing the complaints of my knee to a back compartment of my attention. I hoped those two wouldn’t get frostbite or set fire to anything, but that was about as far as my concern for Jenny and Grass went. “How do we get out of here?” I asked Quinton.

  “Out’s easier than in.” He grabbed my hand and we went the same direction Jay had taken, away from Occidental, around the Second Avenue corner, and down the short stretch of tunnellike sidewalk to a recently installed metal door with a push bar on it. The door led into a tiny space with two more doors. The one on our right opened on a modern fire stair, and we went up it to exit on Second between the Cadillac Hotel and its neighbor.

  We peered out of the doorway like frightened animals and found the cold street empty of all but ice and the unearthly chill of Grey mist. Quinton nodded. “OK. Let’s move. It’s too cold to stand here.”

  We walked away toward my office. I felt a little disoriented, as if I’d missed something, so I kicked the conversation back into gear as we went. “All right. Who’s on the list?” I asked.

  “The first of the strange dead bodies was a guy named Hafiz. No one was sorry to see him go. The Women in Black didn’t organize a vigil but just stuck him on the leaflets for the next time—that’s how much people didn’t like him.”

  “Hafiz. Was he Muslim?”

  “Not that I heard and certainly not that anyone cared. Being a mean-spirited ass seems to have universal application. Then Chaim Jankowski and now Go-cart. There’ve been a couple of other deaths, but they were from things like heart attack and drug overdose, so I’m not counting those. Just the weird ones.”

  “Go on. Who else?”

  “John Bear and Little Jolene, Tandy, Pranker Jheri—no idea what his parents were thinking with that name—and Felix.” He pronounced it the Spanish way: Feh-LEEHKS. “There may be others, but that’s for sure. None of them would just take off or had anyplace else to go, and if they moved up, they’d have told someone. The Enhancement League tries to keep track of who makes it into housing, and there’s usually talk if someone’s been seen in another part of town. None of that’s true with those five.”

  “So you’re thinking all of them are victims of vampires or whatever it was that killed Go-cart.”

  “I’m leaning that way.”

  We’d come to my parking garage and I stopped by the gate. “Sandy’s talk about the lack of blood gives me pause, but I’m still reserving judgment on the vampires. There is something going on, creating a pattern, and that’s disturbing. Even crazy ladies and homeless criminals are picking up on it—though I’m not putting too much store by any one set of remarks.”

  “Smart. I live with these guys and I understand them, but most of them are at least a little nuts.”

  “Crazy sounds like self-defense, here.”

  “Yeah.” He looked at me for a moment in silence before continuing, his expression hidden by the shadow of his hat brim. “Better go home. It’s too cold to stay out here.”

  “Yeah. I’ll try to get some info from the medical examiner about Go-cart—Robert Cristus, right?—and look into cause of death on the others to see if there’s a real pattern or just an appearance. I’ll let you know what I find and see if that moves us anywhere.”

  “All right. Then I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Yeah.”

  We stood and stared at each other for a moment. I felt exhausted and uncertain of a lot of things and Quinton seemed hesitant himself, but for a wavering second it seemed he might do or say something. But he didn’t and I wondered if my disappointment with Will was making me think all men were on the verge of untoward actions.

  At last Quinton turned away a little and started to walk back toward First, lifting a hand to wave. “OK. Good night, Harper.”

  “Good night,” I echoed and lingered a few frowning seconds before going to my truck and heading home to West Seattle.

  It felt much later than it was and I was tired, cold, and distracted. I let Chaos out of her cage to romp around the living room while I took a shower and warmed up some soup for my dinner. The ferret followed me into the bathroom but had abandoned her post beside the tub by the time I got out.

  I found her in the living room, curled up around a squeaky toy that was shaped like a small eggplant sporting Richard Nixon’s face. I scooped her up and put her in my lap while I ate dinner, but she didn’t want to stay there either and slithered down the chair leg to the floor to wander off and throw herself down on the living room carpet with a sigh, doing the flat ferret thing and staring at me as if I’d let her down by spending time outside her company. I just wasn’t measuring up to anyone’s expectations and I found myself irritated by it. I wanted to yell at someone and tell them off about what they could or couldn’t have from me. Chaos wasn’t the one who deserved it, but I wasn’t quite sure who did.

  SEVEN

  “Harper, you’d better get back down here.”

  It was five in the morning, so I was kind of groggy, but I recognized Quinton’s voice. “What’s happened?” I mumbled—the automatic response to such a statement as his.

  “Someone else has found a body. Near the park.”

  I sat up in bed, blinking. “Which park?”

  “Between Oxy and Waterfall. There’s already police securing the area, so I haven’t been able to find out who it is or what’s going on.”

  “You think it’s another one like Thursday’s?”

  “I’d bet on it.”

  I groaned. “Great. I’ll be right there.”

  No time for more than a splash of water on my face before I pulled on several layers of sweaters and a wool coat over my jeans and boots. Light snow had fallen overnight, and the air seemed no warmer although the radio report claimed the temperature had risen a whopping twenty degrees. My condo was in one of the coldest parts of the city. I figured they must have been reporting from Boeing Field, where the acres of tarmac on the windless plain of the airport always makes it hotter.

  I negotiated the ice-crusted streets of West Seattle and crossed the bridge to downtown, where there was no sign it had ever snowed at all. The air coming off Puget Sound was warmer but still nowhere near the usual temp for January.

  There were some cop cars, an aid car, a couple of city vans, and a small ant farm’s worth of busy people in official-looking clothes around Occidental Park when I arrived at my office building. I parked the Rover in my lot and walked back down the block toward the park.

  Pioneer Square was deserted—too early for weekend business and too cold for just hanging out—so the unusual activity just south of the square drew whoever was around. My short walk was acc
ompanied by Zip and one of the other homeless men I’d met the night before. Zip waved to me and I nodded back, guessing they’d come down early to scout the recycling bins behind the bars for any bottles containing a little booze or beer that had been tossed the night before—if the closing crew was in a hurry, they didn’t check too closely. Zip smelled like he’d already been diving for bottles. We all walked down the block and into Oxy Park by the totems. A huge, blanket-covered lump snored at the base of one of the wooden statues, oblivious to the killing cold. Zip and his friend stopped near the sleeper, watching the cops warily as I continued.

  I spotted a dun-colored van from the medical examiner’s office and followed it as it pushed through the crowd toward the southern edge of Oxy Park. I stopped in the fringe of the crowd, but the van stopped where the edge of the parking lot met the wall and iron fence of Waterfall Garden Park on the southeast corner of the block. The low sun hadn’t penetrated the frozen shadows on the ground yet, but the shape of a human body was discernible there in the frosted morning gloom. I recognized Detective Solis and a coroner’s investigator kneeling beside it. The layers of time around the area were disarrayed and heaved up in broken shards shaggy with disrupted energy lines that were writhing around to reknit themselves as I watched. It made me feel queasy to see them moving like that, confirming that the energy grid was alive in some way.

  I backed away a little, staying out of the detective’s line of sight to watch the scene.

  The coroner’s investigator stood up, and he and the scene technician chatted for a moment while Solis continued to stare down at the body. I could see something was wrong with the shape. As Solis dropped the waterproof sheet back over it, the settling fabric fell too flat on the corpse’s legs.

  As if disturbed and released by the stirring of the air below the covering, a thin Grey shape coiled up from the body and held a human form like a breath in the cold. It looked confused and more vague by the moment. I thought it wouldn’t last very long before it disappeared to wherever the lingering memories of ourselves go when there’s no reason to stay. I glanced up at the face of the lingering ghost and felt a shock of cold as she met my gaze and then faded from sight, leaving a flashbulb vision of what lay beneath the sheet: Jenny Nin, the hat gone and her right arm ended too soon—the hand that had offered Quinton a bottle and lingered over his own hand was missing, the stump short and gnawed; ragged legs hung in space below the rest. Something clung to her shape like a shredded shawl and her face was blue, twisted with surprise. I felt her go away and hoped I wouldn’t see her again in any form, but especially not that one. But I’d have to get a look at the body itself before I’d be sure.

  I saw Solis stand, returning his attention to the scene and the removal of the body. By the pulsing line of color around him I knew he was more upset than he let on. I’d have to dodge him, since I couldn’t answer the questions he’d surely ask. I turned and stepped behind the orca totem. Then I walked straight from it, keeping the tall wooden figure between me and Solis’s sharp eyes until I was too far away to recognize. Then I turned the corner and hurried back to my truck. If I could get to the morgue faster than the ME’s van, I might see the body brought in and that might tell me enough.

  The slippery road was tricky driving. I wanted to gun it up the hill to Harborview, but I knew the wheels would only spin on the icy bricks and asphalt. Luck was on my side: I had a small head start and just beat the van to the parking lot. Since I didn’t have a clumsy gurney to unload, I made it into the building and down to the basement ahead of the ME’s men and their burden.

  The morgue always has its compliment of ghosts, though there were fewer this time than the last time I came and they ignored me. None of them seemed aware enough to want anything from me on this occasion. The area’s always a bit unwelcoming—old and sterile and furnished in institutional patchwork—and no one particularly notices the drafts, cold spots, and general sense of being in the presence of the unseen. In this dour atmosphere, the night shift was drawing to a post-Friday-night close. Looking drowsy and haggard, the night crew wasn’t terribly worried about me as I made my way toward the desk at the pace of a winter tortoise.

  The elevator opened behind me and the men from the van came in with their gurney. They stopped at the desk and I stopped next to them. As they handed over paperwork, I stared hard at the bag enclosing the remains of Jennifer Novoy.

  I couldn’t see through the plastic but there was enough of something clinging to the bag itself to know I’d guessed right. Soft strands of Grey curled from the zipper like fuzzy threads. The same sort of thread I’d seen on the hole in the tunnel wall and on Thursday night’s zombie. I hoped it wasn’t having the same effect on Jenny that it seemed to have had on him.

  I needed to find out and took a risk.

  “Hey,” I said. “Is that Solis’s Jane Doe from Oxy Park?”

  The three men around the desk looked back at me, startled.

  “Uh, yeah,” one of the gurney men replied. “Why?”

  I pulled out my license and flipped it past them fast enough to blur the name. “I have a related case. Solis said I should take a look.”

  The two men with the body glanced at each other and shrugged. The man behind the desk sighed. “Let’s get her in the cooler first, huh? Richards will be pissed if she stays out here any longer than necessary.”

  The men with the gurney agreed and pushed the cart through the swinging doors into the morgue work area. The other man— a rather stocky fellow with skin the color of madrone bark and short, thick, black hair dramatically streaked with white, making him look like a badger—picked up a clipboard to which he’d attached a pile of forms and followed them, motioning me along.

  We went past doors to the autopsy rooms and back into the storage area. The chilly air of the cooler was actually warmer than the air outdoors—no one wanted to accidentally freeze the dear departed.

  The van crew lifted the bag with care and transferred Jenny to a steel table. Then they unzipped the bag and left it to the man with the clipboard to do the rest. He signed a sheet and handed it to them to sign before ripping off a copy for them and keeping the rest.

  “OK, I got her. You’re done.”

  The two men from the van grunted and left with their gurney.

  The badger-faced man looked me over. “Don’t I know you?”

  That threw me. I recognized him from the last time I’d been in the morgue, but I was surprised he remembered. “I’m a PI. Some of my searches end here.”

  He frowned in thought. Then he snapped his fingers. “Yeah! Back . . . October I think it was. How many Does do you have to look at every year?”

  “A lot less than you.”

  He laughed. “I think I see more corpses in a week than most horror film freaks see in a year. So. You want to eyeball this one and we’ll get the hell out of here? Don’t know about you, but I’m cold!”

  “Yeah, let’s get it over with.”

  He put on indigo-colored latex gloves and peeled the edges of the bag down with big, gentle hands, as if to some silent ceremony he carried in his head. There was no sick delight in it, only a kind of sad reverence.

  I looked down at Jenny’s pale blue face and flinched at the surprise there. Whatever had killed her had come upon her too fast for screaming. The soft Grey strands I’d expected were curled around her face and chest, but frayed away as they went lower; they didn’t form the same kind of tangled web I’d seen on the zombie but looked more like a moth-eaten shawl that was falling away in broken threads. There was very little blood and she looked as if she might have simply frozen to death—if not for her startled expression. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t stand up and come looking for me later, and I breathed relief.

  “Well?” the badger-man asked.

  I shook my head. “Nope.” I let him take the answer as he pleased. I hated lying, but if I identified her, I’d have to sign a form that would bring Solis to my door in a hurry.

  He nodd
ed and leaned over to attach a temporary ID with a number to her. Then he gently closed the bag and led me out of the room.

  “Have you seen any other bodies like that recently?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘like’? They’re all dead and we’ve had more homeless than usual, but that happens when the weather’s severe.”

  “Another body came in on Thursday in a similar condition— very little blood, very cold, extremities missing. A Robert Cristus?”

  We stepped out through the swinging doors and stopped by the desk. The morgue attendant looked thoughtful.

  “Yeah . . . Now you mention it, very similar—at least at first glance.” He turned a piercing gaze on me. “You’re interested in that case?”

  “And this one. Actually I wonder if there have been any others like that—similar condition and circumstances.”

  When he stopped to stare at me, I got a look at his badge, which read “Fishkiller” in large letters followed by two groups of smaller words I couldn’t read before he moved again.

  He scowled in thought and went behind his desk, putting the clipboard down. He looked at his computer screen and sat. “I think so. . . . I’m not sure without looking, but I think there have been a few others. All homeless, high blood loss with very little spatter or staining, chewed or missing extremities . . . We have a limb or two also. Similar condition, but no associated bodies.”

  “Would one of those be the leg discovered in the hotel excavation on Occidental near Royal Brougham?” I asked.

  “That’s the one. Very similar . . .” He was intrigued, squinting and staring to the side as he thought. I dangled some bait to see if he was the curious type he seemed.