hope, and that much hope unanswered burned a bleak mark across the department.
A tall woman—tall by most people’s standards, not by mine; she was probably four inches shorter than me—with straight brown hair and a new pair of horn-rim glasses came around a file-cabinet-lined wall and said what she usually did when I came by: “Close the door, Joanne. You’re letting in a draft.”
“I don’t think it’s me. I think this whole office is just drafty by nature.” I closed the door anyway, and shook Jennifer Gonzalez’s hand. Jen always shook hands when she met someone, even if she’d seen them five minutes earlier. It was her way of sizing somebody up, and I’d come to suspect it had a psychic component to it. She’d been one of a very few who’d known how to offer me energy in a cohesive manner, back when I’d asked the police department to help me stop a god. We hadn’t really talked about it, mostly because she was as no- nonsense and straight-forward as I liked to think I was, and psychic impressions weren’t the sort of thing normal people discussed over coffee.
I stood there for a couple seconds trying to remember what normal people
“Thanks. I didn’t used to. They make me self-conscious, but I’ve been wearing them three weeks, and you’re only the second person who’s noticed.”
“At least nobody’s calling you four-eyes.” I tried to push my own glasses up, even though I wasn’t wearing them. I didn’t, usually. I’d had contacts since college, and I was always a little surprised by the leftover body language that kicked in when I thought about glasses. “Did Billy talk to you about the Whitehead case?”
“Yeah. Come on back.” She led me through a maze of cabinets and paper trails to her desk, where she handed over a single-page file. “There’s not much there. She went for a walk Halloween evening and disappeared off the street. Her mother swore she saw—”
“A cloaked figure snatch her up?” I gave Jen the broadsheet story in exchange. “I guess people in cloaks were probably more common in 1900 than they are now, but…”
But Edith Whitehead had described the cloaked figure as moving like an old person, too stiff and slow to possibly seize a child. She’d insisted there had been something wrong with the abductor, something inhuman and monstrous that gave it unnatural strength. The same words were on the missing-persons file, written dryly, but in the broadsheet story they carried the frantic pitch of her voice clearly enough that I could all but hear it through the century that separated us.
Both versions came to the same conclusion: Edith Whitehead was deranged, and if she’d seen her daughter’s disappearance at all, it was probably because she’d had a hand in it. The police report had a note tagged on years later, relegating the Whitehead kidnapping to cold cases. I wondered if there was a similar coda to the newspaper story, writing off a family’s loss as dramatics brought on by a feeble mind.
“It’s all I’ve got,” Jen said, bringing me out of my musings. “The other girl, Anne-Marie, if she died here in Seattle, it was either before there was a newspaper or law enforcement, or it didn’t get reported.”
“Both, probably.” I frowned at the files, trying to tease a thought out of my brain. It clung stubbornly, not wanting to see the light of day. I blew a raspberry to drive off the intention of pursuing it, opened my mouth to thank Jen, and instead said, “The interesting thing is they’re all white.”
Ha. My brain thought it was so clever, but I could still outsmart it. I knew it’d had something to say. All I had to do was pretend I didn’t care. Ha! Jen, fortunately oblivious to my internal monologue, but more or less following what I’d said, said, “Serial killers usually stay in their ethnic group, unless their actions are actually racially motivated. Which is it?”
I wobbled my head. “There pretty much weren’t white people in Seattle before about 1850.” Billy’s history lessons were paying off. “So either we’ve got incoming whites, one of whom is a madman, or a local tribesman trying to scare off the incomers. I think it’s the incomers.”
Jen’s eyebrows inched upward. “Buying into the noble savage, are we?”
I snorted. “More thinking that if you’re trying to scare off newcomers, you probably wouldn’t stop with murdering just one little girl. And hoping that we’re lucky and our half-century killer started with Anne-Marie, so we don’t have to look beyond the city for this pattern repeated.” I thumped my knuckles on her desk, then dredged up a brief smile. “Thanks, Jen. I think that’s probably all we need right now.”
“A case file on somebody who’s been missing a hundred years? Billy didn’t tell me what you were working on.”
My smile went all crooked and I shrugged as I headed for the door. “Ghost stories.”
Halfway back to Homicide, my phone rang. I’d learned to expect bad news when it did that, so I answered cautiously, as if wrinkling my face could ward off whatever’d gone wrong. For once, though, it was a friendly voice with a friendly question: “So are you going to manage lunch today?”
“Thor! Where were you last night?” It didn’t matter; I was just as glad he hadn’t been sitting around waiting for me. That kind of thing never seemed like healthy-relationship material to me, not that I knew from healthy relationships. “You know what, I can do lunch. Are you at work?”
“Lemme think about that.” I could envision him rolling up his sleeve to look at his watch. He wore one like mine, a big heavy Ironman plastic thing that was hard to damage. “It’s ten forty-five on a Monday morning. Yep, I’m at work. Where else would I be? I got your message last night. You doing okay?” He sounded genuinely concerned, which I found charming.
“I’m good. Busy with this mess that fell in our laps. You?”
“Fine. I went out with some of the guys last night. Sorry I missed you.”
“Yeah. How dare you go out and have a life without me, especially when I’ve forgotten to call.” I grinned and ducked into the Homicide Department, where I had a whiteboard lying across my desk. It made me feel like my life was a cop drama, which had its ups, as well as its downs. On the upside, it gave me the inter-office romance storyline that usually dominated the emotional side of those shows. On the downside, it meant I was investigating murders, which sounded cooler in theory than in practice. I took a black pen and started writing on the board. “You missed out on Chinese takeaway and me, all for what, a couple beers and a game of bingo?”
Archie Redding hadn’t yet been heard from. Jason Chan was dead. I drew an arrowhead between them and put Sandburg’s name in between, then struck it out with a yellow pen. His aura had just been too damn clean. Thor said, “Darts, and I won seventy bucks on the game,” cheerfully.
“You can buy lunch, then.” I fell silent a minute, half listening to his good-natured protest as I wrote down the names of a bunch of long-dead kids on the other side of the board, and drew another arrowhead to “Shadowy Cloaked Figure.” I wished the bad guys would turn up wearing meringue dresses and pompadours sometimes, instead of being so predictably dour.
Between them I drew a cauldron, complete with a zombie climbing out. Right since the very beginning of my new life, I’d been hoping there was no such thing as the undead. I figured ghosts didn’t count, since they weren’t corporeal. I didn’t want zombies, though on a scale of one to ten, they were maybe a seven, with vampires holding the coveted ten-spot. I didn’t know what went in between, but it didn’t matter. I really didn’t want vampires. I put the phone against my shoulder, muffling Thor’s account of the darts game. “Billy, that cauldron doesn’t make vampires, does it?”
He said, “No,” as if I’d asked a perfectly reasonable question. “Just undead warriors. Nobody ever mentioned them being bloodsuckers.”
“Good.” I struck a line down the center of the whiteboard, cutting the cauldron in half, to remind myself these were two different cases. Then I circled the cauldron, because two cases or not, I was convinced it was the heart of it all. “Billy, I’m going up to the Space Needle. Want to take an early lunch?” The second part was to the phone, but Billy shook his head.
“I get indigestion from the room spinning. Oh. You weren’t talking to me. So I get left behind to do the dirty work while you cost lunch to the department?”
Thor, in my ear, said, “Lemme ask Nick,” and, in defiance of all the studies that said people aren’t made for multitasking, I said, “Pretty much,” to Billy. “I’m going to see if I can get a read on the cauldron from up there. It’s a better vantage point than the museum.”
“What’re you going to do if you lock on?”
“Finish my salad, then call you and we can go storming in like superheroes to save Archie Redding, arrest the bad guy, retrieve the cauldron and rebind it so it stops waking up the dead.” It sounded like an awesome plan. I was all for it.
“Any idea how we’re going to do that last part?”
