by Dan Wells
“So why?” I asked. “Male or female, whatever pronoun you want to use, why did the killer drown them?”
“Answering that question is not our job,” said Margo.
“We’re multitasking.”
“I think he does it because he’s sick,” said Jasmyn. “I’ve … wanted to kill people before, but never old people. Never anyone harmless.”
“Nobody’s harmless,” said Margo. “Obviously not Crabtree, but even Kathy had her faults.”
Or they knew something, I thought. The wrong information in the wrong hands could be more harmful than any weapon, and I knew that I, at least, was certainly guilty of snooping around in Rain’s affairs. That might be why she’d come after me. Maybe Kathy and Crabtree had done the same?
But again: why the drowning?
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get technical about this. The central question of criminal profiling is: what did the killer do that they didn’t have to do?”
Margo looked at me, long and hard, but she didn’t say anything.
“Criminal profiling?” asked Jasmyn. “Your hobbies are way cooler than mine.”
“I grew up in a mortuary,” I said. “We saw a lot of murders, and I got curious about the detectives who solved them.”
Margo raised her eyebrow.
“The killer is drowning them,” I said. “Why?”
“We don’t even know how,” said Jasmyn.
“How doesn’t matter yet,” I said. “Why tells us more.”
“Maybe you should ask yourself where,” said Margo, looking back down at the legs she was scrubbing. “There certainly wasn’t anywhere to drown anybody in the middle of that junkyard.”
“What about Kathy’s place?” I asked.
“Kathy was a friend of mine,” said Margo, “I’d prefer not to speculate on her death.”
“The kitchen sink,” said Jasmyn. “A pot of water. The bathtub.”
“Was her whole body soaked?” I asked. “Like Crabtree was?”
Jasmyn nodded. “Yep.”
“Then the bathtub’s a possibility,” I asked. “You’d need something big. But they didn’t find her in the bathtub, they found her in the living room. And there was nothing around there that could have drowned her.”
“So they moved her,” said Jasmyn.
“Exactly,” I said. “So: why? They didn’t have to move her, but they did. Were they trying to take her somewhere and gave up? Were they trying to pose her? Some serial killers ritualize the bodies, but Kathy hadn’t been messed with—the cops didn’t even think it was foul play until Crabtree showed up dead the same way.”
“I will ask you more directly this time to stop talking about my friend,” said Margo.
I nodded. “Fair enough. So Crabtree, then. He wasn’t moved, but he was still drowned. And he wasn’t anywhere near a sink or a bathtub, so it can’t have been easy.” I gestured at the frail old body in front of us. “There must be a hundred different ways to kill a decrepit old man like this, so why pick the hardest one?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Jasmyn.
“It always makes sense,” I said. “We just don’t know how until we find all the pieces and put them together.”
“Crabtree was a bastard,” said Margo, “but Kathy wasn’t. No one would kill her on purpose, so maybe this is all a bunch of accidents.”
Maybe it was—not all of the Withered enjoyed what they did, and some of them went out of their way to live peacefully, but accidents did happen. Simon Watts’s attack on me wasn’t anything like an accident. Not that I could tell them that.
“I thought you didn’t want to talk about Kathy,” said Jasmyn.
“Nothing salacious,” said Margo. “All I’m saying is that she was a good woman.”
“So what if it was an accident?” asked Jasmyn. “Someone accidentally drowned Kathy, and then he—or she—or whoever, it might not even be the same person—decided to kill Crabtree and went out of their way to use the same weird method, to make people think it was the same killer as the first one. So it’s more likely that it wasn’t the same person, just someone trying to throw the police off the trail with a fake serial killer.” She looked at me. “Okay, I can see how you got into this; it’s fun.”
“There’s nothing fun about death,” said Margo.
“Says the woman holding a corpse’s ankle,” I said.
“This is serious,” said Margo. “Why do you think I do this?”
“You’ve made jokes in the embalming room before,” said Jasmyn.
“A little levity to lighten the mood is one thing,” said Margo. “But you can fling mud or you can wallow in it, and all wallowing does is get you filthy.”
“You do this because somebody has to,” I said. “The mortuary, the funerals, the visits to the widows. You do it because death is everywhere and nobody wants to deal with it, but if you do it then at least it gets done right. The bodies get respect, and the family gets some peace of mind, and Shelley Jones gets the right kind of flowers on the casket. You do it because you’re the only one who can.”
“And why do you do it?” she asked, and I knew from her eyes that she wasn’t just asking about the mortuary. She was asking about my ideas, and my investigation, and my weird singing backpack, and my drifting, and my running, and my everything. She was asking like she knew what it meant to ask it.
“Same reason,” I said.
We watched each other for a moment, and then Jasmyn broke the silence. “I do it because I like washing dead people,” she said. “Don’t bother yourselves finishing your parts of the job—that’s all the more dead person for me to spend my entire afternoon scrubbing down with a baby brush.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll get back to work.”
I took a soft comb and ran it through Crabtree’s hair, over and over, slow and easy, though he didn’t have much left. I combed out the gunk at the base of the hair—we all have it, whether we notice it or not—and then rinsed his whole head with a spray nozzle hooked up to the sink. The soap ran down and into the drains built into the table, and Crabtree was cleaner than he might have ever been.
Maybe Jasmyn was right about the killer pulling a fake out. Not trying to convince us she was a serial killer, because why would Rain care about that? But trying to convince somebody, somewhere, that the deaths were supernatural. Simon Watts had been ordered to drown me, but then what? Was he going to move me? Had Kathy been drowned in the canal as well, and then moved to her living room where it was sure to look bizarre? The police had called it an accident and gone on their way, but I’d come straight here. What had the killer done that she didn’t have to do? She’d made a run-of-the-mill killing, to use Jasmyn’s term, look like a Withered attack. And the only reason to do that was to attract the attention of someone who knew about the Withered.
Rack had done the same basic thing: hidden the nature of his own kills in order to trick and trap us. We were hunting him, so he’d gathered an army and hunted us back. A shadow war. Now Rain, maybe, was doing the same thing.
I’d already seen Assu, and I knew for a fact the Withered were gathering. Maybe she was starting the war again, and these drownings were the first shot fired.
“We Wish You A Merry Christmas” blared loudly from my backpack, and I grabbed it and ran.
“Robert!” shouted Jasmyn.
“Quiet,” said Margo. “You let me do the talking.”
“To who?” and Jasmyn.
I stopped in the hall, holding my breath and listening. The receiving door opened, and a man’s voice called out.
“Knock knock,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“Depends on who you are,” said Margo.
“My name’s Agent Harris, and I’m with the FBI. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
CHAPTER 11
I didn’t move a muscle.
“The FBI,” said Margo. “And what does the FBI want with the Ottessen Brothers Funeral Home?”
“Just some qu
estions,” said the agent. As with Simon Watts, I could tell that I knew this voice from somewhere, but I couldn’t quite place it. None of the FBI agents I’d known or worked with had been named Harris. “I understand you had a pretty nasty fire in here recently.”
“You can see the damage on the wall behind you,” said Margo. “Are you here to investigate the arson?”
“Among other things,” said the agent. “Do you happen to know who first found the fire?”
“My brother-in-law did,” said Margo. “Harold Ottessen, though I suppose technically the fire alarm went off even before he got here, and that alerted the fire department. We’ve already given all the information to the fire marshal and the police.”
“You did!” said the agent. His voice was cheerful, almost, which was a strange contrast to the dour stereotype most FBI agents tended to fall into. And frustratingly familiar. “You definitely did,” he continued, “and I have no reason to doubt that report. I’m just crossing various i’s and dotting some t’s. I couldn’t help but notice you’ve got a small apartment on the side of the building—that’s common with mortuaries, isn’t it? A holdover from the days of the old family business. Is there anyone living there at the moment?”
“Mr. Connor’s in there now,” said Jasmyn. “But back during the fire it was—”
“Empty,” said Margo. “Mr. Connor’s only staying here a few days. Before the fire Jasmyn lived in the room—this is Jasmyn Shahi, by the way, she’s my assistant here—but she moved out on her own a few months ago.”
I couldn’t see them, but I imagined Margo had given Jasmyn a subtle signal of some kind, reinforcing her order of silence. Jasmyn didn’t offer any more information.
“I see,” said Harris. “And during the time of the fire, is there anybody who might have had access to the room or the building? Someone who might have been able to get inside here before the firefighters showed up?”
“You mean aside from the arsonist?” asked Margo. “Or the arsonist herself?”
“Herself? You think it’s a woman?”
“I’m using a generic pronoun,” said Margo. “Women can be arsonists if they want to be.”
She said it right this time.
“Let me show you why I’m asking,” said Harris. “Maybe this will clear things up, maybe jog your memory a little. This is a photo the local police took of the burned refrigerator, after the fire was put out. Do you see this here on the … well I’m afraid I don’t know the lingo. What do you call that?”
“That’s the slab,” said Margo. “It’s like a metal tray that slides in and out; it’s what the body goes on.”
“Thank you,” said Harris. “The slab. Do you see this here on the slab? This kind of … pattern, I guess you’d call it. What would you say that looks like?”
“Ash,” said Margo. “Makes sense, given there was a fire in there.”
“Ash, yes,” said Harris. “Definitely, but what shape is it? You, um, Jasmyn, was it? What would say that looks like?”
Jasmyn paused a minute before speaking. “A smear.”
“A smear,” said Harris. “That’s exactly what I thought it looked like as well: a curved smear. And that seemed very strange to me, because a smear is not a pattern that one would expect to find at the scene of a fire, because it’s not a shape that fires or fire hoses—which are the two dominant forces acting on the scene of a fire—would typically create. It looks almost like somebody wiped the slab, like they were trying to clean it off. So this being an arson, rather than a free-range organic fire, we may well be looking at a third force: human intervention.”
“You think somebody lit a fire in my corpse fridge and then cleaned up after herself,” said Margo. “May all our criminals be so civic-minded.”
“Two witnesses reported a car speeding away from the scene,” said Harris, “just as the firefighters were pulling up. Now it makes a certain kind of sense that an arsonist would choose to light a fire in what you lead me to believe is called a corpse fridge: garbage cans and Dumpsters and other metal containers are far and away the most popular places for urban fires because they contain the flames, and this is just a strange but very specific version of that. But I noticed on my way in here that you have a Dumpster in the back, which makes the choice of a corpse fridge much harder to account for. What kind of person would break all the way into a mortuary to light his or her fire in this specific location, and then delay leaving long enough to clean up after him or herself on the way out?”
“I can’t say that I know,” said Margo, and as bad as I was at reading vocal emotions, even I could tell that her voice was as cold as ice.
“I don’t know either,” said Harris, “though my working theory is that it was someone who had a connection to the mortuary—mortuaries in general, and this one specifically, given that the fire alarm was the only one that went off. You did say you have a security system, right?”
Margo paused for several moments before answering. “Yes.”
“And yet the intruder alarms, the perimeter alarms, none of those went off. Implying that whoever lit that fire had access to the building.”
Crap.
The room was silent for a while, and I wondered what was happening—they were all just staring at each other awkwardly, I guess—but I didn’t dare to peek in. After a moment Harris spoke again.
“Just two more questions, ma’am, and then I can be out of your hair. The first is a favor: do you mind if I look in that drain by your feet?”
“I mind very much,” said Margo.
“What do you think you’ll find in the drain?” asked Jasmyn.
“Horrors beyond imagining,” said Harris, “given that it’s the floor drain in an embalming room. As it happens, though, I do have a search warrant, so asking your permission was mostly a formality.” I heard rustling papers, and Margo muttered something, and then they all went silent for a moment. I imagined that Harris was kneeling down and unscrewing the grate on the drain, and took the risk of peeking in while he was distracted. He was indeed kneeling, facing away from me, his head hunched down over the drain in the floor. From this angle I couldn’t see enough of him to make a clear identification, though I could at least confirm that he was young. Margo and Jasmyn were focused intently on his work, and none of the three saw me. I ducked back out of sight and a moment later heard the metallic clink as Harris lifted the grate and set it on the tiles. I heard the snap of a rubber glove and Jasmyn’s groan of disgust. “That’s the stuff,” said Agent Harris. “Perfect. Jasmyn, would you be so kind as to open that plastic evidence bag next to me on the floor? I don’t want to get this on the outside of it.”
There was only one thing he could be looking for in the drain: soulstuff. Whoever this was knew about the Withered, and knew that one had died here. He was probably tipped off by the smear on the slab—I kicked myself mentally for doing such a crappy job of cleaning it up. I heard him take the glove off and then handle the bag; he’d probably just put the glove, soulstuff and all, inside the bag and sealed it up.
“There,” he said. “Now, on to question number two. Which pocket did I put that in—ah, here it is. Do you know this young man? He may be going by the name John, or David, or I guess really anything. He changes it a lot.”
Damn. Damn damn damn, around the parking lot and back in for another damn.
“He doesn’t look familiar,” said Margo. “Is he an arsonist?”
“And a mortician,” said Harris. “So this is really right in his wheelhouse. You’re sure you haven’t seen him?”
“Pretty sure.”
“You haven’t … given him a job and a room in the back?”
Another damn. Who could have told him? The police—I would have been a part of the statement Margo gave to the police. And since Harris had already been to the local court, since he had a search warrant, it made sense he’d talked to the local cops, too.
“We had a boy for a day or two,” said Margo, “but he wasn’t here the night
of the fire. And he’s gone now.”
“And he didn’t look like this?”
“These old eyes don’t work too well anymore,” said Margo.
“What about you?” asked Harris. “Is this the boy?”
“You white people all look alike to me,” said Jasmyn, and I’d never wanted to high five someone so hard in all my life.
“I see,” said Harris. “Well then. Thanks for the floor-drain muck, and I’ll be on my way. If you happen to remember anything else, here’s my card, please give me a call.”
“You can count on it,” said Margo. “Thanks for coming.”
I realized in sudden horror that the chime in my backpack would make a loud noise the instant he stepped outside, and I was standing close enough that he might hear it. I started creeping away as quietly as I could, wondering how fast I could go without creaking a floorboard or sounding an audible footstep and terrified that I wasn’t going fast enough. I tried to get as far away as I could, an impossible combination of fast and silent, all the while scrambling to open my backpack and turn the chime off. I unzipped it and looked in, and realized that I had no idea which chime was which, or what sound they might make when I shut them down. The backpack chimed suddenly—“We Wish You A Merry Christmas”—and I prayed that the agent hadn’t heard it. If he was already outside I didn’t have to sneak anymore, so I sprinted at full speed and got to the window just in time to see the man walk out to his car: a black SUV with a Nebraska license plate. The agent turned back one more time, and I caught a clear glimpse of his face as I ducked out of sight.
Agent Mills. Or at least that’s how he’d introduced himself, but I’d known at the time that was probably a fake name. Harris might be fake as well. He was the agent who’d caught up to Brooke and me in Dillon—an FBI analyst who specialized in serial killers and, more recently, the Withered. And me, by extension. No one else had ever been able to find me, but now Mills had done it twice. If he was here, the only move I had left might be to run.