by C. E. Murphy
“Why? Wouldn’t it be better to have ritual murders linked to the cauldron? Some kind of appeasement or something?” I wasn’t trying to be a smartass. I really wasn’t. It just made sense to me: shake a death cauldron and ghosts come out, regardless of whether it’s their home turf or not.
Billy sighed. “It’d be tidy, and I’d rather that than find out we’ve missed semi-centennial murders in Seattle, not that I know how we’d have caught them. It’s not much of a pattern. But I don’t have jurisdiction in Ireland, and neither do you. So we look where we know the territory.”
I knew he was right. My mouth still went all droopy, like sugar in the rain. Billy sighed again, louder this time. “Okay, all right, fine. I’ll add Interpol to the search. You’re fixing the minivan for a year if it comes up dry.”
It seemed like a bad time to point out I’d fix the minivan anyway. I beamed, said good-night and headed home, praying nothing would go wrong so I could get a full night’s sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Monday, October 31, 8:13 a.m.
I jolted out of bed with the conviction of a woman who’s just heard the bell tolling for her. Thirty seconds later I was scrubbing shampoo out of my hair and reaching for a towel, having completed the fastest shower in human history. My heart raced from the unexpected wake up, adrenaline souring my stomach. My brain hadn’t yet identified whatever noise had awakened me, but it didn’t matter. I was late for work. Morrison would ride my ass and I’d deserve it. I couldn’t believe I’d slept through the alarm.
I couldn’t, in fact, believe that I’d gotten home and gone to bed uneventfully. My past experiences suggested I’d be up for three days straight while I tried to get the world sorted out, so I was grateful for small favors. I tore out of the bathroom and flung my clothes on, then sat down and put my forehead against my knees. I was due in at eight. In the grand scheme of things, Morrison wouldn’t be any more pissed if I got in at 8:31 a.m. than at eight-thirty. Something had woken me up with a scare, and I knew by now that was a bad sign. Half a minute to figure it out wouldn’t signal the end of the world. On the other hand, not taking that half minute might. Such was my life.
The panic faded from my chest, heart rate slowing. I’d been awake barely two minutes. Two minutes was a lot of time in terms of things going wrong, so whatever’d awakened me—a guttural snort, I suddenly remembered, like a wookelar from the old Tim Conway Disney film. The wookelar had been a flesh-eating monster of some kind. It was too early to deal with flesh-eating monsters. I looked for door number two.
It opened with a bolt of sunny revelation. Heat flashed up my face, reached the top of my head, got bored and rushed back down again toward my collarbone. There was no wookelar. Furthermore, I hadn’t slept through the alarm. I’d turned it off because Mondays and Tuesdays were my days off.
And then I’d woken myself up with my own snoring.
Hands over my face, I toppled into my pillow and blushed until my head pounded. This was the sort of event that haunted a person through the years until she suddenly couldn’t take it anymore and flung herself from a building top. Darwinian embarrassment, though in my case it was too late. I’d already passed on my genetic legacy. For a rare moment I let myself dwell on that, hoping the son I’d given up for adoption was more socially adroit than his biological mother.
Of course, Godzilla was smoother than I was. I crawled out of bed and drank two glasses of water, trying to get the blood in my face to thin, and considered going back to bed. Starting all over again seemed like a better way to face the day than starting out by terrorizing myself with violent snoring.
Unfortunately for me, there was a fresh murder case and a whole series of stale ones to be dealt with. I was showered and dressed anyway. I shuffled into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee—just what my jumped-up heart rate and sour stomach needed—and shuffled out the door, coffee mug in hand, to walk into a big wall of a man with his hand raised to knock.
Actually, I narrowly missed walking into him. We froze a scant inch or two apart while the coffee sloshed and burned my fingers. I felt like a cartoon character, afraid to move for fear the ground would be gone from beneath my feet. I eased back onto my heels, finding the floor still nice and solid, then grinned and took a full step back into my doorway. “Gary.”
I got a gleaming white smile in reply. “Happy Halloween, doll.”
Gary Muldoon was probably the only man on earth I’d allow to call me “doll.” Or “lady” or “broad,” or any of the other gangster-era endearments he used, for that matter. He wasn’t quite old enough to use them legitimately, at least not unless he had mafia connections he’d never mentioned, but with a name like Muldoon I didn’t figure he did. On the other hand, even at seventy-three, he’d be a great piece of hired muscle: he was a bit taller than me, and still had the broad shoulders of his linebacker youth. We’d been friends since I’d jumped in his cab most of a year ago and demanded he drive me on a wild-goose chase. I’d ended up almost dead—not his fault—and the circumstances surrounding it made him decide I was interesting enough to hang with. Not that he’d used the phrase. I was just proving my street cred with it.
I lifted the hand that didn’t have a coffee mug in it and mocked thwacking his shoulder. “Happy Halloween. You didn’t come to my party!”
He took my coffee and slurped. “You shouldn’t be drinking this stuff before we do a session. Did I miss anything? This needs milk.”
I stared at my—his—coffee in dismay. “We’re not doing a session this morning. I’m going to work. There was a murder.”
Gary pushed past me in search of milk. I followed him and made another cup of coffee as I recounted the weekend’s events. By the time I had a new mug curled protectively in my hands, Gary’s craggy features had settled into an excellent approximation of a sullen child’s. “And you didn’t call me?”
“I thought you were coming to the party. And then it was four in the morning. Why didn’t you come?” I sounded as childish as he looked. We made a great pair.
Guilt slid across Gary’s face. “I was busy.”
“Too busy to come to the first party I’ve ever hosted in my entire life? What’d you have, a hot date?”
Gary’s ears turned a deep, rich red, making a brilliant contrast against white hair. I gasped, very ingenue-like, and set my coffee mug down so I could point at him accusingly. “You did have a date! You had a date and you didn’t even tell me! Garrison Matthew Muldoon! How could you?! Who is she? Do you like her? How did it go? Are you going to see her again? Why didn’t you bring her to the party? When do I get to meet her?” I was worse than somebody’s mother, but I couldn’t shut up. Curious glee had my tongue and was trying for my feet. It was all I could do not to jump up and caper around.
Gary’s ears turned redder. I’d never seen him blush. I hadn’t known he could. He’d been the most rock-steady thing in my life the past year, and rocks weren’t known for their ability to get embarrassed. Delight got the better of me and I did get up and dance around, waving my hands and cackling. As far as I was concerned, he deserved every chance at happiness the world could offer.
I got ahold of myself and sat back down. My cheeks hurt from laughing, and poor Gary looked discomfited. I was utterly unaccustomed to seeing him anything but ruggedly suave, and relished the change enough to reach across and pat his hand. “Never mind the third degree. You’re forgiven for not coming to the party.” My eyebrows waggled, entirely of their own accord. “And maybe you didn’t want me calling you at four in the morning anyway. I’d hate to interrupt.”
Gary hid a not-very-convincing scowl in his coffee. “I don’t give you this kinda trouble over your love life.”
My eyebrows, still acting on their own, shot toward my hairline. “Excuse me? Mr. I-rescued-the-phone-number-you-threw-out Muldoon doesn’t mess with my love life? You must have you confused with somebody else.”
He gave me another unconvincing glower. “So when’re we doing
your next session?”
“Way to subtly change the subject, Gar.” I picked up my coffee again, studying it like it might have answers. “Probably not tomorrow, unless this thing wraps up before then. Next week, I guess.”
My “sessions” had been going on for months. A couple mornings a week, Gary came over to drum me under, letting me explore the astral plane and the Middle World through shamanic eyes. I was a hell of a lot more confident in my ability to See and to heal than I’d been, and I’d scared up a lot of memories that had been buried in dreams. My spirit guide, Coyote, who turned out to be not so spirity after all, had impressed on a much younger me that one of the essential aspects of shamanism was change. It made sense; healing was a fundamental change, from illness to wellness. At the height of my power, when both myself and my patient fully believed in what I could do, my will alone should be able to affect a healing pretty much instantaneously. I hadn’t pulled out that particular big gun since I’d finally come to understand it, but on a fundamental level, I knew I could.
The trouble was, healing was a one-shot kind of deal. It wasn’t so much good against ghosts or black cauldrons. I had other rabbits in my hat: I’d learned to fight in the real world, and had armor that could travel with me to other worlds, psychic protection against battles that didn’t take place on the physical plane. I could bend light around me so I became much harder to see, but even that came down on the side of parlor tricks when I was going up against ghosts.
I said, “You know,” idly, half forgetting Gary was even there to answer. He grunted curiously in response and I focused on him, a little surprised. “Nothing, really. I’m just rolling around in irony. I step up, and I find out I’m still behind the eight ball. I’ve learned a lot, but I’m starting to think it’s never going to be enough. Once, just once, I’d like to go in basically knowing what I was dealing with.”
“Darlin’, wouldn’t we all.” He stood up and leaned across the table to kiss my forehead. Coffee breath spilled down. I wrinkled my nose, but it turned into a smile as he straightened. “I’ll get out of your hair so you can get to work, but you need me for anything, Jo, you call. Arright?”
“I will.” I got up to hug him, and we walked down to the parking lot in companionable silence.
Billy looked as if he hadn’t gotten enough sleep. I retreated from the precinct building to the Missing O, got coffee and doughnuts, and brought them over in hopes of perking him up. He took a doughnut, managing to be both grateful and imperious as he pointed it at my desk. “I didn’t have to go to Interpol.”
Good little automaton that I was, I went to look, and found three missing-persons reports on top of other paperwork. One was from October 29, 1950, for a Richard “Ricky” David Peterson, age seven, and the other was for twin boys born in August 1999 and reported missing fifteen months later, the day before Halloween. They were all from Seattle. I put my doughnut down, appetite lost, then picked it up and ate it anyway, because I needed more in my system than caffeine. “Anything on Matilda?”
“This is as much as we have on data file.” Billy nodded toward a clock on the wall. “I’ll get Jen in Missing Persons to go through the older records that aren’t digital yet, once she gets in. Shouldn’t take long, we’ve got a pretty clear window for death or disappearance. You could hit the archives and check the microfilm for news stories.”
“Okay.” I took my doughnut, my coffee and the missing persons files and went to Morrison’s office, then stood outside it frowning at the doorknob. I was reasonably certain his office didn’t have much in common with the archives, although the idea of a zillion rolls of microfilm cluttering up his tidy desk and neat bookshelves pleased me.
“Can I help you with something, Walker, or did you just want to stand around in the way all morning?” Morrison spoke from behind me, a droll note to what once would’ve been a wholly acerbic question. I flinched anyway and narrowly missed spilling hot liquid all over myself a second time. Too much coffee, too little food. I couldn’t quite remember the last time I’d eaten something that wasn’t in the doughnut family.
I said, “We have this case,” somewhat inanely, and waved the papers at him. He rolled his eyes and gestured me into his office ahead of him. I went in and sat down; he came in, shrugging off the seaman’s coat he usually wore in the winter, and hung it by the window. His hair was light brown, like he’d washed it six or eight times since Saturday night and the temporary coloring had almost, but not quite, let go its hold. I waved my fingers at it. “You’re going to have to grow the rest of that out, you know. It’s going to stay discolored.”
“You never struck me as the type who knew a lot about hair-coloring products, Walker.” Morrison unbuttoned his suit jacket and sat down behind his desk, hands folded over his chest. He looked younger. Dark brown hair had been disconcerting and profoundly wrong, but light brown took five or six years off, turning him from an aging superhero to one in his prime. I could imagine him blond, now, and it kind of worked.
I was sure he’d be terribly relieved to hear that I’d decided his natural hair color was satisfactory. I sighed at myself and leaned forward to push the files at him. “These are part of the ruckus at the party. There was a murder yesterday at the—”
“Cultural Arts Museum. I know. Are they related?” He picked the papers up, but he watched me.
“I think so. I just don’t have proof yet. And if I get any it probably won’t be the kind you can present in court.”
He gave a noncommittal grunt and glanced at the files. “This is from the fifties, Walker.”
“And the other ones we’re looking up are from the turn of the century—the last two centuries—and 1850.”
I had to hand it to the man. He didn’t bat an eyelash. I guessed he’d meant it when he’d assigned the weird and wacky cases to Billy and me. If we were looking up missing persons from a century ago, it seemed he trusted that was what we needed to do. All he said was, “Yesterday’s security guard doesn’t fit that pattern.”
“Yeah.” I pushed a hand through my hair and got up to go stare out his window. Morrison had a great office. Two walls were windowed, one looking over the parking lot and street, the other looking over the main precinct office area. Usually the latter was open, but he hadn’t yet pulled the blinds, so we had a modicum of privacy. Or we would have, if I hadn’t put myself at the outside window to show everybody I was there. Raindrops clung to his seaman’s jacket, close and cool enough to make hairs rise on my arms. “I don’t think there’ll be another matching murder for another forty-whatever years.”
“I’m all for preventing crime, Walker, but…”
“We might be able to nab two killers at once here,” I said over him. “Chan’s murder might lead us to the party cauldron ghosts’ killer. Look, I—” I bit off my words and turned to face Morrison, frustrated. “How much explaining do you want, boss? Do you want to know how I think the knee bone connects to the thigh bone?”
Morrison lifted his eyebrows. In somebody else I might’ve thought the expression was hiding a laugh, but Morrison and a sense of humor about weird crap were unlikely companions. “Will it make any sense if you do?”
“If you accept the basic premise that the cauldron that’s gone missing from the museum has the capability to disturb the dead, sure.” Okay, I wasn’t known for my sense of humor about the weird, either, but I was starting to smile by the time I got through with that. I sounded so rational, as long as I didn’t listen to what I was actually saying.
Morrison’s expression wiped my smile away. He just sat there, regarding me, until I figured what was left of my coffee was undrinkably cold. Then, in a voice that really did sound calm and rational, and not so much like how I’d sounded after all, he said, “What do you want from me here, Walker?”
“I want you to know I’m working on two cases,” I said very quietly. “I guess I want permission. I just want you to know what’s going on. I’m just trying to be…” A good cop, but that wasn’t someth
ing I could say aloud to my boss. Not now, not ever. It sounded too much like I was trying to live up to his expectations of me. Which I was, but that wasn’t the point. I folded my arms across my chest and found a corner to stare at, unable to meet Morrison’s eyes any longer.
“Don’t let the party investigation get in the way of solving Chan’s murder.”
“Sir.” I drew myself up with something close to military precision, relieved and surprised. “I won’t. Thank you.”
He nodded and jerked his head toward the door all at once, effectively dismissing both me and my thanks. I collected my files and my cold coffee, and got almost all the way out the door before my body staged a coup and turned back. My voice was in on the revolution, because it said, “Captain?” very quietly, and without any noticeable input from my brain on whether it should be talking.
Morrison was already absorbed in paperwork and looked up at me with a glimmer of faint impatience and expectation. “Walker?”
My rebellious voice said, “Thank you,” again, while my brain threw its hands up in exasperation. After all, it said, and for once I was very sure the snide little voice was a hundred percent me, and definitely something that’d been around before my powers woke up, after all, repeating thank-you is going to have some kind of profound effect on the almighty Morrison. What the hell. I didn’t even know why I was repeating myself. There was probably some kind of meaningful undertone to it, but my brain and I hadn’t been let in on the secret.
My boss, though, apparently had been. He looked at me a few seconds, then sighed, his shoulders dropping. “You’re welcome. Now get to work, Detective.”
I got.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN