Rafiel kept his eye on Keith’s friend as he moved around the tables taking orders. He’d never really had a job as a waiter, but he had helped Alice sometimes when she worked at this same diner, back when it was The Athens. It was amazing how it came back to him and, except for the fact that Tom’s menu was far more elaborate than that of the old Athens, and that he wasn’t really desperate to get tips to supplement his income, it was just like being back in time.
His gestures came back, too—the broad wipe at the table before taking orders—the scribbling of orders on his pad, the carrying of the trays, one-handed and perfectly balanced.
As he approached the table where a new customer had just sat, he did a double take. The customer had pulled her—fake-fur fringed—hood back from her face, and was unbuttoning her black, knee-length knit outer coat. Underneath it, it was Lei, from the aquarium, with her long, sleek black hair, her exotic features, and her very shapely body, highlighted by a miniskirt and tight sweater. At least, Rafiel thought, as he ran his gaze over her legs—purely out of concern, of course—she was wearing thigh-high leather boots. He still didn’t understand how anyone could, voluntarily, wear a miniskirt in this weather, but then again he couldn’t really understand how anyone could voluntarily wear any skirt in cold weather. He’d consider it a peculiarity of the female brain—like inability to feel your legs from the thigh down—were it not for all those proud Scots and their kilts.
“Hello,” he told Lei, smiling at her, and giving the table a quick wipe. “How may I help you?”
She was staring at him, openmouthed, just like he had grown a second head, or possibly stood on his head, and it took him a moment to realize in what capacity she had met him, and what she must think of him. A brief, lunatic impulse commanded him to tell her that he was his own underachieving twin, but this he conquered, forcefully. Instead he told her, “I’m just giving some friends a hand for an hour or so. I haven’t changed jobs.”
Lei turned very red, as though she’d been thinking exactly that, then grinned. “Oh well,” she said. “I had been thinking that the police in Goldport must pay very poorly if their officers moonlight in diners.”
“Nah. I’m friends with the owners and they had to go out for a little bit.” Please let it be only a little bit. He gave her his best dimpled smile, which had made weaker women melt. “So, what will you have?”
“Just … a hot chocolate,” she said, looking at the menu then folding it and returning it to its holder on the edge of the table. “I was just walking by and I felt like coming in.” She shrugged. “I guess the aquarium being closed, and my not having to go to work left me with this great need for human company or something.”
Rafiel’s curiosity peaked at the mention of her having had an impulse to enter the diner. But a deep breath brought him no whiff of shifter-scent. Only the smell of washed female flesh and some perfume that was deep and spicy and hot, and probably cost upward of his salary per ounce and likely sold under some name like Dagger or Treason or something of the sort. And then, after all, people did sometimes feel an impulse to just go in somewhere without being shifters or smelling the specialized pheromones that infused the diner. He shrugged. “Right. I’ll bring it to you, right away.”
He went back, and drew the hot chocolate, and got a baleful look from Keith. “Do you have any idea how long Tom is going to be? People are ordering souvlaki, and I’m sure he keeps some pre-made, somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it.”
“No clue,” Rafiel said, as he added a dollop of whipped cream atop the cup of rich, dark hot chocolate. “Sorry. But they should be back soon. They said it was only for a few minutes.”
“Right,” Keith said, but in a tone that implied he didn’t believe it. He lowered a basket of fries into the oil, causing a whoosh that seemed deliberate and, somehow, irritated. “You know, I wasn’t intending on having to work. I just came in to introduce Summer to you guys, and now here I am, working.”
“I know,” Rafiel said, trying to be patient. Sometimes it was hard to remember that Keith was younger than all of them. And sometimes it was much too easy. “I know. I’m sure they didn’t mean to go out either. Quite sure.”
Keith made a sound under his breath. It could probably be translated as “harumph.” Rafiel couldn’t answer that in any way, so he turned his back, and took Lei her hot chocolate, which she received with a wide smile, as if he had just fetched her fire from the mountain.
“I don’t suppose you can sit and talk?” she said.
He looked around, and at the moment there wasn’t any customer clamoring for his attention, so he shrugged. “Not sit,” he said. “But I suppose I could talk a little. It isn’t as though I’m going to get fired. It’s just if I stand, at least anyone who needs something knows whose attention to get.”
“Oh,” she said. And “Yes.”
He smiled. “So, what do you need to talk about?” He wondered about her brittle frailty and once more it seemed to him as though she were trying to make a play for his attention—whether his romantic attention or his friendship, he couldn’t tell.
All other things being equal, he would have discouraged her. It was often easier to get rid of prospective romantic interest before the first date than after. It saved the girl some hurt feelings and him some of that fury to which hell could not compare.
However, Lei was involved—by working in the aquarium, if nothing else—in the case with the sharks. And Rafiel was never sure when a romantic come-on was just that, or an attempt by an otherwise awkward bystander to tell him something about a case in progress.
“It’s not so much that I need to talk,” she said, and looked down at her hands, one on either side of the hot chocolate cup. They were nice hands, the nails clean of any polish or shine, but carefully clipped and filed into neat ovals. “I just … I was wondering how long till the aquarium is allowed to open again, because, you know, the thing is that … Well, I know I’m only an intern of sorts, and I’m there to study as much as to work, but you know, they pay me, and I count on that payment to help make my tuition at CUG.”
She looked up at him, intently, pleadingly almost. Her eyes were black, which was something Rafiel had never seen. You always heard talk of black eyes, but you never saw them. Instead, you saw eyes that were deep, dark brown, or something like that, but never that pure black, unreflective.
“We are working as fast as we can,” Rafiel said. Except, of course, when he wasn’t, like right now, when he was waiting tables, while he should have been visiting people who’d been around the aquarium a week or so before the first human remains were found—around when they’d calculated the first victim had fallen or been thrown into the shark tank. And selling his superiors on the need to do that would be interesting enough—though no one was likely to ask him for a very close accounting of his time for a week or so—because after all it would seem more logical to investigate who had keys to the aquarium, and who might have gone there since it had been closed to the public and in the middle of a snowstorm.
The second corpse—or the bits of it the sharks hadn’t eaten—had shown up in an aquarium closed to the public. The suspects should, obviously, be the employees or—if his superiors ever found out that Rafiel had abstracted a key—Rafiel himself.
Only, having found out how easy it was to steal a key, Rafiel could argue—was arguing, with himself, just as he would with his superiors should they call him on it—that other people might have done so. And given his privileged knowledge that there were shifters and that two, maybe three of them, had been to the aquarium around the time of the first crime, he thought it made perfect sense to find out if one of those might have stolen the keys, as he had, and had copies made, and if the crimes were, somehow, being committed as part of a shifter imperative, driven by the animal half of some poor slob with less self-control than Rafiel himself had.
“The police are pursuing enquiries?” Lei said, ironically.
“Well, as a matter of fact the police
are,” Rafiel said and sighed. “You know”—he wiped at the table in what was more a nervous gesture than anything else—“it’s amazing how often those words are true and how often they define most of what I do in my work. We pursue enquiries. We go from place to place and ask questions.” He smiled. “All those TV series with heroic detectives who can flourish a gun and threaten a suspect just in the nick of time, or who have the ability to magically assemble pieces of evidence given by some amazing new scientific machine for analyzing skin cells, or whatever, do my job a great disservice. Most of what we do is just … patient, slow work. I’m sorry it’s affecting your job. I’m sure it affected the job of the poor slob who got killed, also.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, looking guilty as people had a tendency to when they complained about a murder disrupting their lives and somehow managed to ignore that it had ended someone else’s life. “It’s just …” she shrugged. “Of course I’m very sorry for the man. The TV says he was an out-of-town salesman, or something, but you know, I still need to work and I need a paycheck.”
“We will solve the murders as fast as we can,” Rafiel said. “Trust me, I don’t want some lunatic at large, pushing people into shark tanks.”
She looked up at him and her curiously opaque black eyes managed to project an impression of innocence and confusion. “Are you sure that is what happened? I mean, couldn’t people just have fallen in? Or … or jumped in, even?”
“Oh, sure,” he heard himself say. “The first one, maybe. But this one? With the aquarium closed? Are you honestly suggesting that someone took it into his head to steal keys to the aquarium and go in to commit suicide by shark? What kind of person does that? Given how cold it was, it would have made more sense for him to stay outside and let himself die from hypothermia. Alternately, to jump from a very high building. But jump into a tank full of creatures with sharp teeth? Who views that as an easy way out?”
“Well, not easy, perhaps, but quick,” she said, hesitantly. “Or perhaps they just were drunk, and dropped into the tank? Who knows?”
“Who knows indeed?” he said, thinking that it was very clear that Ms. Lei Lani knew less than nothing. “Do you often have drunken visitors who take the trouble of copying keys and come in after hours?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. A blush suffused her cheeks. “I don’t know why you keep talking about people stealing keys,” she said. “It’s not needed, you know. When the restaurant company took over the aquarium, they never bothered to change the locks. They’re the same we had when the aquarium belonged to the city and was so poor we had fewer fish than your average pet store—or at least that’s what I’ve heard. I wasn’t here, back then. But they never changed the locks and some of the …” She blushed darker, a very interesting effect on her tanned cheeks. The more he talked to her, the less he was confident identifying her as a native Hawaiian, and the more it seemed to him she was probably Mediterranean or generic white, who just happened to have dark hair and a generally broad face. “You know, some of the guys who work there, like, some of the ones who clean the aquariums, talk about how easy it is to pick the lock, and about breaking into the aquarium and bringing dates there. I don’t know if it’s true or if they just talk about it to … to tweak me. But I know when we clean that observation area just over the shark tank, we often find …” She looked away from him, past him, at the front window and the sparse traffic out there on Fairfax. “We often find used condoms in the planters.”
Rafiel raised his eyebrows. “Interesting,” he said, while trying to sound, in fact, perfectly disinterested. Not that he was. She might simply be repeating salacious tales her male coworkers told each other. Most of the people who worked at the aquarium were high school or college age, and Rafiel knew better than to put any stock in the stories told by males in that age group. On the other hand, they might very well be true. And if true, they would open a whole other front of investigation into these crimes.
At that moment, he heard Keith say, “Oh, thank God, Kyrie, you’re here,” and looked up to see Kyrie duck behind the counter, looking like she had been crying but noticeably in one piece.
“Excuse me a moment,” he said. “I’ll go see if they still need me or if I can go back to my real job.”
Kyrie saw Tom’s clothes and boots at the back entrance to the diner, just under the overhang that prevented them from getting dripped on by the gutters filled with melted runoff. She picked them up, carrying them in with her. In her mind, she could see Tom shuffling out of them, hurrying to her rescue. She’d seen him do this before, and knew that he always kicked off his boots before he shifted.
He was lucky, she thought, that no one had stolen his boots yet, as likely as he was to leave them in all possible—and some distinctly impossible—locations around town. But the thought that he had been in a hurry to come to her rescue remained, as she stepped into the warm atmosphere of the diner, perfumed with the homey scent of fries and redolent of basil, fennel and mint.
Before they’d taken over, there had been an underlying bad smell to the diner, as though the old grease was never completely cleaned from the various surfaces. As they’d found in their grand cleanup and repainting before reopening under their management, this was by and large true. But now all that you could smell in the diner was the clean aroma of well prepared food. Tom was as fanatic about hygiene as he was about helping people who just didn’t seem able to make it on their own. People and animals, she thought, as she remembered Not Dinner. Not that she resented Not Dinner. As someone who had long ago accepted it would be neither safe nor sane for her to have children, a pet might be as close as she came to motherhood.
She put Tom’s boots on the lower shelf of the space behind the counter, the shelf into which all of them shoved either uncomfortable or too-heavy shoes on occasion—as well as purses, or bags of purchases. She smiled at Keith’s enthusiastic and somewhat shaky salutation, and wondered if Keith had been worried about her, or even knew why Tom had left.
Grabbing an apron from beneath the counter, she said, “Tom will be in in just a second, and then you can go.”
“Good,” Keith said, sounding even more relieved. “You know, I was supposed to bring Summer here, and introduce her to you guys, and then take her out for a movie, or something. I was not supposed to bring her here, duck behind the counter, and leave her all alone. I don’t even know where she’s gone now.” He cast a panicked glance around the tables—of which only five were occupied, and none of them except the one table with the dark-haired woman who was talking to Rafiel, showing anyone even remotely in Keith’s age range.
“What does she look like?” Kyrie asked.
“Blond. Wearing a pink coat.”
“Maybe she got bored and went for a walk,” she said. Privately, she was thinking that if the girl got bored that quickly and went for a walk instead of, say, sitting at the counter and talking to Keith while he worked, she might not in fact be very interested. But she didn’t say anything aloud.
She didn’t remember being Keith’s emotional age. Chronologically, they weren’t that far apart. They were both, roughly college age—but Kyrie couldn’t remember a time when she had felt so incapable of standing on her own two feet that she needed the props of a group, or of a friendship, or even of a boyfriend. In fact, until very recently, she had none of those. However, Keith clearly needed friends or a girlfriend or something and even in the months she’d known him, she had seen him assume that people liked him or even loved him on very scant evidence. It would be cruel to disabuse him of it.
Instead, she said as tentatively as she dared, “So this was a date?”
He shrugged. “Something like it. I mean, I told her I wanted her to meet some of my friends, but the idea was that I was going to take her to the morning showing of Monsters of the Deep at the Imax at the museum, and then we were … you know, going for coffee or something.”
Ah, yes, Keith, take the girl to the Nature Mu
seum Imax, why don’t you? Dazzle and seduce her. She’ll never know what hit her, Kyrie thought. After all, who was she to judge the mating rituals of others. It wasn’t like she had a great deal of experience with mating or dating. And Keith, being a confirmed geek, was probably following the right tactic in looking for a girl who could share his obsessions. “Sorry to leave you stuck here,” she said. “Maybe she’s just outside looking at shop windows or something.”
“Maybe,” he said, sullenly. “But it’s not even that. If Rafiel hadn’t offered to help, I don’t know how I would have managed both the tables and the cooking.”
“Well,” Kyrie said. She looked up to see that Rafiel was indeed wearing the red apron of The George, and smiled despite herself. What would the police force think of its officer moonlighting in this way? “I’m glad he stayed, then.”
At that moment, Rafiel excused himself and sailed towards her across the diner, notebook in hand, a smile on his all-too-handsome face. “So glad you’re here and okay,” he said, in an undertone that couldn’t be heard by anyone but Keith. “Are the two guys okay, too?”
“Yeah. They’re showering,” Kyrie said. “They’ll be here any moment, or at least Tom will.” And then, rapidly, “Rafiel, Tom says you didn’t call me and ask me to meet you at my place?”
“Huh?” Rafiel said. “No, I didn’t. I went by the bed-and-breakfast to get the key and when you weren’t there, I came here to get Tom’s. That’s it.”
She had known it before, but hearing it now made her heart sink. Hearing that Rafiel had never called, confirming absolutely that it must have been the dire wolf playing mind games brought on a slight shake, and caused her to reach for the counter for support. She must also have gone pale, because Rafiel said, “What’s wrong?”
She told him, rapidly, in just slightly above a whisper. When she finished, she realized that Keith too was staring at her. “You’re saying this thing was in your mind? That it made you think things had happened?”
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