Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  “The sketch artist finished about a half hour ago,” Burkitt said, smiling as we sauntered up to his cube, which was adorned with zero pictures of his kids, surprising me. Wasn’t it federally mandated that if you had kids, you had to be eager to brag and show pictures without your single acquaintances even asking?

  “Where’s Liu Min?” I asked.

  “We cut her loose once she was done,” Burkitt said with a shrug. “Got an address and phone number where we can reach her if we have any other questions. She did have a cell phone, and said the manager of the massage parlor calls her on it all the time.”

  “But of course,” I said. Next time I saw Michelle, she was going to find out what those yoga pants tasted like—all the way in the back of her throat.

  “Here it is,” Burkitt said, raising up a picture of a blonde woman with sunglasses on. It wasn’t a great picture, thanks to the glasses being in the way, but it beat the hell out of the limited surveillance footage I’d seen because of one crucial factor:

  Her hair was blonde. Yellow-blonde, not white-blond, a sunny color that was a marked contrast to the black wig she’d been wearing.

  “Hello, Elsa,” I said, looking at the photo, which was a photocopy of the original. There was already a stack of them on Burkitt’s desk. I looked up. “Blonde-ish, winter powers—”

  “I got it,” Burkitt said, grinning. “My kids love that movie.”

  “My wife has the kids,” Holloway said, a little more grouchily, shoving his way back into the conversation. “And all my money. We don’t really talk, the ungrateful little shits.”

  “How utterly unsurprising,” I said, turning my attention back to the sketch. “You said it’s running now?”

  “Yeah,” Burkitt said. “It’d be a miracle if we got a hit before tomorrow, th—”

  “Hey, Burkitt,” a dark-skinned woman called from across the bullpen. “Your sketch got something.”

  “Do you believe in miracles?” I asked, deadpan.

  “Not since 1980,” Holloway hiccupped.

  We made our way across the room to a smaller office off the main bullpen where a few computers sat. A tall, broad-shouldered guy was sitting at one of them, the printer next to it quietly humming as it spit something out. “Hey, Clemons,” Burkitt said. “This is Holloway and Nealon from—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Clemons said, not looking up. “Your sketch turned up an interesting result.” He picked up the paper the printer spit out and handed it over his shoulder to us. “Jane Doe from a missing persons case.”

  “So, our assassin decided to check out of civilized society before beginning her assassinating career,” Holloway said, thumping into the doorway as he tried to keep upright. “What’s ‘interesting’ about that?”

  Clemons was the kind of guy whose eyebrows seemed to naturally rise in response to stimuli, which gave him a funny look as he peered at Holloway. “The interesting part? This is from a—a whaddya call it, where they make a model of a dead and decomposing body that they can’t identify?”

  Holloway shrugged. I didn’t know, either, and apparently neither did Burkitt.

  “Well, it was one of those,” Clemons said, flapping a strangely realistic photo image of a woman who looked a hell of a lot like our sketch. “Shown all over the news, based on a body that was found partially decomposed in Caernarvon Freshwater Diversion, Plaquemines Parish, in June of last year.” He pulled up a grisly photo of a dead body floating in water from a crime scene file. “So…looks like your assassin bears an awfully close resemblance to a dead woman.”

  25.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I asked, pacing around the small computer room. Holloway and Burkitt were standing, like me, and Clemons, the local geek—except he didn’t look like a geek, really—was sitting in front of the computer, still tapping away like he had more to find.

  “Murder, intrigue, desperation,” Holloway managed to slur out, still suffering the effects of the three glasses of scotch he’d inhaled at dinner.

  “Assassination, not murder,” Burkitt said, arms folded in front of him. “Technically. And attempted, at that.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “My job is to pound superpowered criminals into a paste when they get out of line. Not run half-marathons in my bare feet along Bourbon Street or try to untangle mysteries about dead women rising from the grave to shoot the governor of Louisiana.”

  “Is there a metahuman power to rise from the dead?” Burkitt’s face froze in a stricken look. “Is that a real thing?”

  “Not as far as I know, and I’m actually related to the Greek god of the dead,” I said, continuing my pacing as Burkitt relaxed about a half a millimeter. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one I don’t know about.” I considered, just for a moment, reaching out to old Hades and seeing what he had to say about the subject, but that’d be a pain in the ass, at least until bedtime, and at that point I already had another call I wanted to make.

  “So, is this gal actually dead?” Holloway asked, looking at my feet.

  I had my boots back on, but I got the implication. “You think they found her corpse, dead from drowning, but she healed and came back to inflict furious vengeance on the parties who wronged her? Which maybe includes the governor?”

  Holloway blinked. “Huh?”

  I pointed at my boots. “You were looking at my feet. I figured you were thinking about how fast metahumans heal.”

  Holloway shook his head. “No, I’m just having trouble holding my head up at this point. Got real sleepy all the sudden.”

  “A gallon of scotch will do that to you,” I said, rolling my eyes. Burkitt and Clemons averted theirs; I guessed squealing on a co-worker for drinking during an on-the-job dinner was part of that whole blue wall of silence thing. “But you raise an interesting point. Maybe she isn’t dead. Maybe the coroner thought she was, from drowning, but once her lungs got clear enough to draw a breath, her body healed and she came back. Angrier, certainly, probably with some higher brain function reduced, but—”

  “Wait, that can happen?” Burkitt asked. “I thought you said there was no metahuman resurrection power.”

  “I was thinking in a more classic, ‘He arose!’ sort of sense,” I said. “There have been cases where a metahuman powerful enough was badly wounded or suffocated somehow and as soon as they got breath in their lungs and oxygen to their brain, they sprung back to life, fresh as a daisy. A rabid daisy, because of the higher brain functions being shut down so long, but still—a daisy.”

  “So, we have a dead body that may not be dead,” Holloway said, rubbing his head as if the hangover had started to set in. “Here’s another reason I hate this detail. Any other job, dead people stay dead.”

  “Not so,” I said. “This isn’t restricted to your current job. Metahumans are out there, now, and always have been, though more and more are coming out these days. Your issue is not with this job, it’s with change in general. You dinosaur.”

  He flicked me a single-finger salute. “Fine, expert. What do we do now?”

  “It seems to me,” I said, “in my non-expert opinion, this so-called lead has left us with more questions than answers. Now we’ve got a possibly dead or maybe not dead girl—”

  “Twins,” Clemons said, tapping away.

  I blinked as that one settled on the room.

  “It’s never twins,” Holloway said with an air of barely contained impatience.

  “It could be,” Clemons said. “Identical twins.”

  “It’s not twins, dammit,” Holloway said.

  “Is it not because it’s really not,” I said, “or because you don’t want it to be?”

  Holloway was holding his head, eyes closed, and did not answer.

  “Anyway, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this could actually be a false positive,” I said, looking again at the sketch. “We are going on a drawing composed by a woman who saw our suspect for all of five seconds, tops. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say she could be w
rong and this is officially a wild goose chase.”

  “Also, the result is of a decomposed body partially recomposed by an artist,” Burkitt said, the voice of reason. “It could be off in the details, lending credence to the idea this lead is setting up a wild goose chase.”

  “Well, your goose took a shot at a governor, so she’s certainly wild,” Clemons said, and he looked up. “I’m into the autopsy file on the Jane Doe, if you have any questions.”

  “Holloway is wondering if the curtains match the carpet,” I said, drawing such a hateful look from him that it made my night worthwhile. “Also, do we have a cause of death?”

  “Cause of death is listed as drowning,” Clemons said, and then he double-clicked the mouse so a way-expanded view of an overhead cadaver photo blew up on the screen, then turned away like he didn’t want to look at it. “As for that other question…”

  “Ew,” I said. The body had clearly been in the water a while. “If she did come back from the dead, she’d sure have a lot to be pissed off about.”

  “Okay, I have a question about this,” Burkitt said, looking like he was really hesitant to even ask. “If she was this badly decomposed…I mean…how would a meta even come back from this?”

  “Like this,” I said, and pulled my right foot out of my boot, ripping off the toilet paper I’d mummified my foot with in the process.

  Burkitt stared at my foot, eyes widening as he looked. “Half the sole of your foot has already grown back.”

  “Yeah, they do that,” I said, pushing the toilet paper back in place as I stuffed my foot back into my boot. “As long as my brain gets oxygen, my body repairs itself.” I paused, coming up with a list of qualifiers to that which I didn’t want to list out right there. “Subject to some reasonable limitations.”

  “Do you grow a new arm or leg it gets chopped off?” Burkitt asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “And that’s come very in handy on multiple occasions.”

  “Okay, question,” Clemons said, now spun totally around in his chair to face me. “If you were decapitated—”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You been reading Holloway’s diary?” Holloway just rolled his eyes.

  “—and they put your brain in a jar, would you be able to grow a new body?”

  “That’s a great question,” I said, “and one I hope I never have to discover the answer to, for obvious reasons.”

  “As much fun as it is to think about ways to harm Nealon here,” Holloway said, “can we get back to the dead body we’re talking about? And just leave the various ways to kill this young lady for my diary entry later?” He raised his voice to slightly high and mocking, “‘Dear Diary, Today I discovered that trying to bleed her to death via excessive road rash does not work. Next idea.’”

  “Good point by Holloway,” I said.

  “About the diary?” Clemons asked.

  “About us getting back on track,” I said. “The diary is just mildly disconcerting. Let’s play this two ways: one, our assassin is not the person in these autopsy photos. If that’s the case, we’re on the wrong track and at a dead end until something else breaks. However, if they are either the person in the photo or related—”

  “Twins,” Clemons muttered, drawing another pissed-off look from Holloway.

  “—then we’ve got a break and we need to exploit it fully,” I said. “And we need to figure out how the hell this ties to Warrington.”

  “Here’s another head-scratcher,” Burkitt said. “Why did this lady assassin make an ice bullet? I mean, she went through all this other trouble to maintain her anonymity—fake credit cards, cleaning up the room, picking up her brass and wearing gloves so there were no fingerprints—”

  “She could just be a person that doesn’t leave fingerprints,” Holloway said, holding up a hand. “Some people just don’t make the grease needed to generate them.”

  “Either way,” Burkitt picked up, “she goes through all this trouble, then signs her work by making a bullet with powers.”

  “But were they her powers?” I asked. “Someone else could have made the bullet.”

  “My head hurts,” Holloway said.

  “Scotch,” I muttered.

  “It’s way too complicated,” Holloway said. “Too many questions.”

  “Seriously, though, Burkitt has a great point,” I said. “Why bother with an ice bullet? A regular bullet would have done as well, though I guess this one didn’t hold fingerprint evidence. Or ballistics.”

  “That gave us less to work on,” Holloway said. “That’s not nothing, in terms of a reason to do it.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Something about it doesn’t sit right with me, but we’ll puzzle it out later. Now, we’ve got something to do.” I looked at Clemons. “Where’s she buried?”

  Clemons minimized the corpse photo window now that the question I hadn’t really wanted answered had been kindasorta answered, if that wasn’t seaweed. “Blackford Cemetery.” He frowned. “Huh.”

  “That place is huge,” Burkitt said. “Right out the interstate. We passed it on the way in from the airport.”

  “Hey, Burkitt,” Clemons said, still frowning. “You ever heard of a Jane Doe getting buried at that cemetery?”

  Burkitt paused halfway out the door, and then he started frowning. “No. Unidentified and unclaimed bodies usually get held for years at the coroner’s office. Hell, I think they’ve still got corpses from Katrina there.”

  “Exactly,” Clemons said, and shook his head. “No record here of who claimed the body or paid for a burial plot, but if I were on this investigation—”

  “You’d ask whodunit?” I flashed a grin of my own to match his small smile and nod. “Adding it to the list for whoever we talk to when we get out there.”

  “It’s pretty dark, you know,” Holloway said, finally spurring himself into motion. “How likely is it we even get hold of anyone at this Blackford at this hour?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “See if you can find a contact for us there, Clemons?” He nodded, and we headed out.

  “What’s your genius plan if they tell us to come back during normal business hours tomorrow?” Holloway asked. I could hear the stumble in his step as he followed behind me by a few paces.

  I didn’t bother to turn as I answered. “That’s what I’ve got you for, Holloway. I’ve got an activity planned for you to sweat your way back to sobriety.” I didn’t let him see me grin. “Say, Burkitt…you got a shovel in that car? Because we’re going to need one.”

  26.

  “I can’t believe you bought me a shovel,” Holloway said, sounding a little nonplussed from his place in the back seat, with two shovel heads draped over it next to him. The black Louisiana night was broken every few hundred feet by a light pole as we cruised down Interstate 10, a sign for Metairie passing us by as we rolled onward.

  “I seriously need your help in excavating the corpse,” I said, trying to keep a straight face. I wasn’t watching him nearly as hawk-like now, mainly because I doubted in his present condition he could shoot straight enough to hit me at six inches, let alone whatever the spacing was between us. “What’s the point of having a big, strong man around if he doesn’t spare my sensitive lady self from the hard labor portions of the job?”

  “You should have been in the military, Nealon,” Holloway said, settling his head back and clipping one of the shovel heads as he did. He was so impaired he didn’t even realize I’d set them that way to mess with him. I could easily have turned them around, far from where they would bonk him. “You’d love basic, and you’d make a hell of a drill sergeant.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” I said, “and it did sound like fun in my warped, crazy sort of way. But following orders is a tough gig for me, especially on a long-term basis.”

  Burkitt caught that from his place at the wheel, even if Holloway was too blasted to put it together. “How’s that work with you being in the FBI, then?”

  “TBD,” I said.

  �
��What the hell does that mean?” Holloway asked.

  “To be determined,” Burkitt answered for me. “How long you been in now?”

  “Three months or so,” I said.

  “I guess the honeymoon is over if you’re thinking like that.” Burkitt tried to put a little humor into it, but I caught his genuine question behind it. Most people didn’t start a job thinking they’d be out soon, and certainly not this kind of job.

  We pulled off and took a right at the next exit, and I could see the cemetery in question. It was sprawling, looked like it went on for miles, and a megachurch with a tall steeple made for a nice background to the scene. We pulled up into the parking lots and found a couple guys standing there, both black, both huddled against the fifty degree or so weather in windbreakers, one with grey hair and a slump, the other younger, thin and tall.

  “Man on the phone told us we’d know you when you showed up,” the grey-haired fellow said as I stepped out of the SUV. Burkitt had parked right by the curb. “Reckon I do know you.” He extended a hand to me, first. “Ma’am. Sam Purvis. I’m the caretaker.”

  I shook it, carefully, and only for a few seconds. “Sam, nice to meet you. This is Holloway and Burkitt.” I looked behind me; only Burkitt had made it out. “Well, that’s Burkitt. Holloway we only let out when he’s had his nap and juice box.”

  “Screw you, Nealon,” Holloway said once Burkitt had let him out of the child-locked backseat.

  “Don’t go thinking I’m easy just because I’m a succubus, okay?” I kept my tone light. “That’s a vicious stereotype probably started by those sluts in the Persephone community who are just jealous of the legend of my sexual prowess. So…I guess I mostly blame Kat for that one. Which is maybe unfair.”

  “This is Deandre,” Sam said, brow furrowed like he was trying to either make sense of or ignore what I’d just said. He nodded at his sidekick, the younger guy.

  “Hey, Deandre.” I shook his hand, too.