by Kevin Hearne
“From the train station?”
“At first, yes. You’re under surveillance almost anywhere you go in a city these days. You’re on camera forty, fifty times a day, easy, just walking around town. So they take a screen cap of your face in the train station, run it through facial recognition software, and then start running searches for a match. That’s how they found you in Eugene.”
“Shit. But that means some serious stalking. And resources.”
“That’s right. But they have to have access to the train station footage to begin with. And who had that?”
Suluk swore again. “The cops.”
“Exactly. Someone in the Portland P.D. is helping.”
“Well, I’d like to stuff a whale down their cheesehole.”
I’d never heard of that particular hole before. I’d have to ask Atticus how humans were managing to keep them hidden if you could insert whole whales into them.
“You’d better just go. Take their car and get out of here. Disappear for a few months in the woods. If you stay away from cameras and don’t have a human face to recognize, you’ll be in the clear.”
Suluk nodded. “All right. I’ll go to the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness in Malheur National Park, somewhere around Strawberry Lake.”
“Good.”
“But after I get dressed.”
Chapter 6:
There Are Rules
About Tacos
Once Suluk drove off to the east in the Charger, Atticus called Detective Ibarra and asked if he could buy her tacos for lunch. She gave him an address and he said we’d meet her there in an hour. We drove back to the cabin, fixed up a snack for Starbuck and Orlaith, and then we shifted to the Japanese Garden in Washington Park where Atticus had bound a tree. We had to jog from there to 16th and NW Northrup in the Pearl District, where there was a taco cart that the detective claimed had the best tacos in Portland.
It was called Frogtown Tacos, and they made their tortillas fresh right in front of you on a hot grill thingie. Atticus bought a huge mess of carne asada tacos, four of them just for me, and asked that they leave off the onions on mine. We took them back to the detective’s tiny car and the humans sat on the hood and chowed down while I properly wolfed down my tacos once Atticus unwrapped them for me. They were so delicious and I had to make sure she knew I appreciated it.
Uh, no, buddy, I don’t think she’d appreciate being called by her first name. We don’t have that kind of relationship.
That confused me.
I wish the world worked that way, but it doesn’t.
“You’re right, Detective,” Atticus said around a mouthful. “These are the best tacos in Portland.”
“Right?” she said, her mouth also full. She smacked her lips a couple of times and waved a hand around at the intersection. “I mean, it’s got shit for seating, I know, but you can’t beat the quality.”
“Well, I’ve got shit for details, but you can’t beat the tip I have for you.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Someone working the case in your department is taking money from the same people who paid to have Keane and Medina killed. You have a corrupt cop on your force.”
Detective Ibarra stopped chewing and glared at Atticus in silence for a few decades. He did not appear concerned—in fact, he made me proud by stuffing half a taco into his face, showing that he had no intention of elaborating on that no matter how dirty a look she gave him. When she raised one eyebrow at him in an attempt to make him talk, he just raised one of his eyebrows in return, his cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk. She shook her head, finished chewing, and dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin before saying anything more.
“On what evidence are you basing this accusation?”
Atticus took a moment to clear his mouth before saying, “I can’t share that. Sorry.”
“Well, you have to give me something. I can’t investigate a colleague without cause.”
“You know what these murders are about?”
She shrugged. “Money would be my guess.”
“Mine too. Specifically, money from the energy industry.”
“How do you know that? Did you figure out something from those numbers I gave you?”
“No,” Atticus lied. “Just deductive reasoning. Ignacio Medina was an electrical engineer and Hudson Keane was a chemical engineer. Put those facts together with their secret bankrolling and they were probably working on breakthrough solar tech, which would create lots of enemies. Autocratic nations who depend on oil would be threatened, let alone multinational corporations.”
“Plausible, sure. But you’re withholding something from me.”
“I withhold plenty from you and you’ve known that from the first day we met. I freely admit that I occasionally dabble in matters beyond dog training. But I hope you also know I’m trying to help you. Look, it doesn’t matter to me if you charge your colleague with this or that. You can keep it all hush-hush so long as he talks. He’s not the priority. Following the money is, because whoever paid off your cop will lead you to who’s behind the murders of Hudson Keane and Ignacio Medina.”
“Well, I think we already have at least one of our murderers on tape. Want to see?”
“Sure.” She ducked into her car for a moment and fetched a tablet, then returned to sit next to Atticus on the hood. I positioned myself so I could get a look too, and Atticus helped make it look natural by petting my head.
The video was one of those black-and-white security feeds with numbers flickering in the corner, which Atticus called timecode and which meant I’d never have a chance of understanding it.
It was a shot of the Portland train station platform with a bunch of humans milling about as the train left the station. The detective pointed to a couple of them. “There,” she said. “That’s your lookalike, Hudson Keane. That woman right there, see her?” She paused the video to get a freeze frame. “She clearly knows him. They’re talking and smiling. She walks with him into the station, into that stairwell, and then a few minutes later, she walks back out with her hood up. Looks Native American, maybe.”
“Maybe,” Atticus said, but he could do better than that. She was of the Alutiiq people who live in the Kodiak archipelago and he knew it, because we were looking at none other than Suluk Black.
She did, Oberon. She flat-out lied to us. She knew him all along and also knew I wasn’t dead. To the detective he said, “Was she the only person to go into that stairwell with him or come out?”
“No. There’s someone else who goes in and comes out we can’t identify at all. Look.” She let the video play again and pointed to someone going into the stairwell after Suluk and Hudson wearing a balaclava and sunglasses. That fit the description of the murderer that Suluk gave us, at least.
“Whoever that is looks pretty shady,” Atticus said.
“Yeah, but the problem is, we have no way to trace that person, and there’s no obvious display of the weapon on either of them. What we have to do is find the woman Keane was talking to, because she either committed the murder or witnessed it.”
“How long have you had this video?”
“Me personally? A couple hours, maybe. Just got around to it.”
“But the department pulled the video long before that, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Like I said, someone in your department is dirty. You need to take a look at whoever saw this video before you, and follow the money from there.”
Atticus shrugged. “I might know somebody who does. Make you a deal, Detective. I’ll try to track her down for you, and you look into your department for me. Somebody had to make a big cash deposit in the last couple of days.” He thrust out his hand for her to shake and she considered a moment before taking him up on it.
“Wonder if I’m making a deal with the devil,” she said.
“Nah, no worries about that, Detective. The devil would never be interested in animal rights.”
“Huh. You probably have a point there. What’s your hound’s name again? Oberon?” I perked up at the mention.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Think he’ll let me pet him?”
I didn’t wait for Atticus to say yes. I just wagged my tail and walked around to her so she could get to it.
“Ha! I think you have your answer, Detective.”
She gave me some scritches and told me I was a very good boy, then she looked up at Atticus. “You know, Connor, when it’s just us like this, you can call me Gabby.”
Chapter 7:
Strawberry
Fields
for a Year
Atticus isn’t perfect but he likes to think he is. He doesn’t like to be taken for a fool, but whenever it happens, he mutters a lot. After saying farewell to his new friend Gabby, he repeated in stunned disbelief, “Suluk lied to me. What the hell.” And endless variations of that.
We jogged back to the bound tree in Washington Park and paused there while he got out his cell phone and called Suluk.
“Great timing,” she said. “I’m about to drift out of tower range.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Burns. Getting ready to ditch the car and walk into the National Forest.”
“We need to talk. Meet you at the lake in an hour?”
“Sure.”
We shifted home after that and checked in with Starbuck and Orlaith. Granuaile was home from her bartending job in Poland—she shifts around the world every day because she’s trying to build a Polish headspace. She was super tired and ready to sleep, though, so we didn’t talk very much. Orlaith was happy, though, her tail wagging.
“It’s a deal,” Granuaile said. Both of our Druids understand that napping is a team sport.
Starbuck wanted to go with us to the lake, however, so the three of us shifted there to an old lodgepole pine Atticus had bound a long time ago.
The squirrels in the neighborhood were properly respectful of us and ran away without argument or throwing their nuts around, unlike those city squirrels. The lake itself was very pretty, resting in a little valley beneath Strawberry Mountain, which did not look like a strawberry at all. We had it all to ourselves; it was still pretty cold outside and few hikers were willing to brave such weather.
Suluk had no problem with it, though. She walked up some time later after Starbuck and I had explored the whole perimeter of the lake. We were waiting for her on the side where Atticus said she’d be coming from, in the direction of the trailhead.
She waved at us and was smiling until she got a good look at Atticus. “What’s wrong?”
“You knew who Hudson Keane was the whole time. You lied to me.”
Her shoulders slumped and her mouth twisted in remorse. “Yeah, I did. I’m sorry. I was scared.”
“You knew Ignacio Medina too.”
“Yeah, I did. I was the one funding their research.”
“You were the source of all those cash deposits?”
She nodded, her mouth a tight line of regret. “I never really wanted to do what Dad was doing, managing accounts for people like you. When he went roaming as a bear, it was me who looked after things, you know.”
“Yeah, I knew that.”
“Well, that meant we could never go roaming together, you know? When I was young—I mean the seventeenth century, back before the Russian fur traders came and wrecked our culture—we used to go to the salmon runs together every year and have the best time eating fresh fish out of the Karluk River, or wherever else we went. But as the decades ticked past, he wound up having so many clients that it became a full-time job to just keep up with things. One or the other of us always had to be human. So a couple years back I suggested this project to him as a way to keep ourselves flush but get out of the long-term accounting business. Riding high on an energy innovation would keep us rolling in money forever without having to do much day-to-day. Dad agreed and we hooked up with Iggy and Hudson. And when he got killed, well, I just kept going with it. I’ve let all the accounting clients go. This was my shot, but I don’t have their research notes, so now it’s toast.”
“Maybe not,” Atticus said. “Tell me why Iggy was going to Eugene. You both went to see him off, right?”
“Yeah. He was heading down to check on a prototype installation we had set up, inspect for degradation, record energy output and efficiency, that sort of thing.”
“After Hudson got killed, didn’t you call to warn him?”
Suluk nodded. “I did! I did. As soon as I was out of the train station.” She dashed a tear away from the corner of her eye and sniffed. “But it didn’t do any good. They were waiting for him at the other end. He was supposed to call me back when he was safe, but he never did. When I called again to check up on him, I got a message that his number was out of service. They destroyed his phone.”
“Who did this? Who are ‘they’?”
“Someone who either wants to prevent their tech from getting to market or someone who wants to steal it. Take your pick. How’d you find out? Did the police discover the lab?”
“No. Not as far as I know, anyway. They showed me security footage from the train station. They have a clear shot of your face and saw you enter that stairwell with Hudson. They want to talk to you.”
“I really don’t want to do that. They’re going to dig around in my business and find out I’m four hundred years old.”
“Four hundred? Wow.”
“Never mind that. They’re going to freeze my assets and take my DNA and figure out I’m not entirely human. I can’t let them do that.”
“Why not? You haven’t committed any murders they can pin on you, right?”
Suluk just stared at Atticus and said nothing, but she didn’t have to. It wasn’t hard to guess that those bodies back in the forest weren’t the first that Suluk had put down, and they wouldn’t be the last. “Oh. Okay, then. No DNA,” my Druid said, and walked over to the shore. He picked up a flat rock and skipped it across the surface of the water six times, showing off his opposable thumbs. Suluk joined him and skipped her rock seven times.
“Speaking of DNA, Hudson was my great-great-grandson.”
“No kidding? No wonder he looked like you. Did you know?”
“No, I hadn’t a clue. I’d go mad if I tried to have a relationship with my descendants.”
“I understand. I have a few different lines of descent myself. You get lonely and it hurts too much so you let yourself love for a while, but it’s like getting drunk. Feels real good for a time but the hangover’s waiting on the other side. Kids, I mean. Except they don’t go away if you take two aspirin. Couldn’t tell you what happened to most of them. I only keep in touch with the one who got to be a bear. He’s up in British Columbia, trying to start his own family right now.”
“That’s great.”
“Sure is.” Suluk picked up another rock and tossed it at the lake, but she must have lost her Zen mojo or something, because it just plunked in without skipping at all. “What did you mean when you said maybe my plan isn’t toast after all?�
�
“Hudson had his research stored on an encrypted flash drive. I found it in his place and decrypted it. Snuck it out of there right under the cops’ noses.”
I expected some jumping up and down at that point or maybe a fist pump on Suluk’s part, but she stood very still, didn’t even turn her head. She looked out at the lake and the silence grew. I laid down in the grass between them and Starbuck crawled on top of me and sprawled across my back, sighing a spluttery sort of sigh.
“What do you want?” Suluk finally said.
“I want you to tell me why you didn’t have a copy of this already. And then I want in.”
Suluk grunted. “We had an informal agreement. They needed my money and I needed their brains. They wanted to keep their research secret because most scientists get ripped off these days by the corporations that employ them. I said I’d agree to that if they followed a strict security discipline regarding their money and in going to the lab so no one would realize what we were up to. The research was going well and we were just about ready to file for incorporation and a patent, take everything from informal to formal. That office space above the train station was going to be our front. We were going to split the patent up four ways.”
“Four ways?”
“Dad was going to be the fourth.”
“Oh. Well, it can all still happen. Make me the fourth. Make Hudson and Iggy’s families the other beneficiaries. Or not. Your call. In the meantime, I can make the police go away.”
Suluk’s head moved ever so slightly in his direction. “How?”
“Let me record a video of your testimony, like an affidavit. And give me someone to go after.”
“I don’t know who’s doing this. I don’t even know how anyone found out about the project. Either Iggy or Hudson screwed up somehow and let it leak.”
“We have to prove someone else committed the murders or you can never live in the open again. You’ll always be a suspect because of the security footage.”
“I know. But I honestly haven’t the slightest clue who’s after us.”