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 something 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.
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 14
The
Two days later a much more salacious story smeared itself across the front page of a Seattle broadsheet publication that had gone out of business in the 1930s. I printed the story off and took it, clenched in my fist, up to Jen in Missing Persons.
I hated the Missing Persons office. I hadn’t liked it before I went all sensitive, and now just walking in there depressed me. The walls, the desks—even the floor, in places—were covered with photographs of the missing, with lists of names, descriptions, last sightings; all the things that made up lives without endings. Homicide was bad, but even the unsolved cases there had a certain finality to them. In the MPD, unsolved meant a whisper of
