wasn’t as crowded as it usually was this time of year. The merchants were doing enough business to keep their doors open, though—for the most part. There were more empty shop fronts than there had been in 2008. Clouds overhead scurried by in a haphazard parade, casting shadows that passed on after a few minutes to let the sun through. It wasn’t a bad day to be outdoors, looking for people.
I had some luck pretty quickly, since the bakery has a door onto Occidental Park—a popular place for the homeless with its high tourist flow and its odd nooks in which a smallish person can easily hide from the persistent rain. So long as the homeless are clean and don’t cause any fuss, the cops around Pioneer Square mostly leave them alone during the day. The authorities step in if someone complains or if the situation is dangerous, and they make a point of checking on the “regulars,” if they can, since it’s useful to have the homeless community on your side when you need information about things happening on the street. Things still looked odd to me since my left eye continued to see through the Grey more than the normal, but when the sun cut through the clouds, the effect was much easier to ignore. I found one of my best informants leaning against the wall outside the bakery door: Sergeant Sandy. She’s an elderly woman with a small wire shopping cart always in tow who claims to be an undercover police detective, but no one at SPD has ever heard of her. So she’s either the deepest-cover agent in the Western Hemisphere or she’s just a half bubble off plumb. She would have made a good detective, though: She’s observant, patient, and almost unnoticeable. On seeing her, I ducked back inside and bought a cup of tea and a roll stuffed with ham and cheese.
I walked outside and held out the cup of tea to her. “Hello, Sergeant Livengood. How is your duty going today?”
She took the cup with a grateful nod as the sun hid for a moment behind a cloud. “It’s a little slow. This unpredictable weather’s been keeping the subjects indoors a lot. How are your cases doing?”
“Pretty much the same. I was looking for Twitcher. I’d swear I saw him up at the market a few days ago. Did he move on?” I took the roll out of my pocket and offered it to her.
Sandy sipped her tea and took the roll. “Thank you.” She took a discreet nibble and thought while she chewed and swallowed before addressing my question. “Twitcher . . . ?” she confirmed, then shook her head. “Couldn’t be. I’m afraid he died a while back.”
I had hoped to hear something else, but I hadn’t really believed I would. Confirmation of suspicion saddened me. “It must have been someone who looked like him. What did he die of? Was he outside?”
“Oh yes. He went back to Western State for a little while, but they let him go again and he came back, but he seemed to be having some kind of problem with his digestion after that—they may have poisoned him, you know. They don’t like admitting how many folks they kick out to fend for themselves.”
In my experience, all homeless develop a streak of conspiracy theory if they’re on the street long enough, whether they start out a little paranoid and freaked out or not. The hard part is figuring out when they’re right and when they’re confabulating. It was entirely possible that Twitcher had been poisoned—and equally possible that he hadn’t. I’d have to check with other sources to find out.
“Has anyone else moved on or died recently? Like, since December?”
“Oh, there’s always a few on the move all the time. As you know. There’s been a few deaths, though. Winter was rough and with the economy so down, it’s been a little harder to stay fed and dry.”
“Who died, aside from Twitcher?”
She kept her eyes moving, watching everyone but me as she answered between sips of tea. “Samuel died a few months back, and Ron—you know, the one with the stick people.”
“Any idea how?”
“Not sure about Samuel, but Ron was hit by a truck in the alley behind the Indian place. Not a great loss. Upset the poor trucker something awful, though. Wasn’t his fault, of course. Ron was lurking around the trash bins, probably planning to rob the cab when the driver got out to make his deliveries—he’d done that before—and stepped out before the guy’d set his brakes. Got crushed into the wall, the fool.”
I made an acknowledging sound. No one had been fond of Ron. He’d been a leering, unpleasant man who made figures out of sticks and scraps and intimidated tourists into buying them so he’d leave them alone. Such a death wasn’t pleasant, but it was hard to feel much sadness for the passing of a man who’d stolen from anyone he could take advantage of and had the habit of groping any woman he could reach. He’d been in and out of jails, just skirting a long sentence several times. He was, as Sandy had said, not a great loss. It appeared I’d get no more from her, though; she was focused on other people and giving me only the selvage of her attention.
“Who is your subject today?” I asked as a polite segue to taking my leave.
She tipped her head very slightly toward the corner of the park, where some crafts booths were being set up. “Fella in the jacket. Dark hair, short, Hispanic.”
I looked and snorted back a laugh. “That’s Rey Solis. You know—Detective Sergeant Solis.”
She nodded. “Yup. Been acting odd lately.”
I’ve known Solis for years, but we’d only recently become friends. He was as far from odd as I could imagine—though I could go for “subtly intriguing.”
“Odd how?” I asked.
“Just out of character. Gotta keep an eye on that.”
I was pretty sure I knew exactly why Solis was acting out of character, but I wasn’t going to say so to Sandy. I gave her a sideways look. “Internal Affairs?”
She nodded again and went back to watching Solis and the people at the booths.
“Well,” I said, “I need to speak to him myself, so if it won’t cause you any trouble, I’ll be on my way now.”
“No problem. Good luck.”
“Thanks. Good luck to you, too.”
Armed with names, I walked across the park toward Solis as a sunbeam cut through the cloud for a moment and blazed a trail along the brick plaza, slicing away the glimmer of silvery mist in my left-side vision. The light passed over the booths with their canvas roofs and cast a softened glow on the people working inside, making them strangely radiant in my overlapped vision. I strolled around a display of paintings on pieces of found wood arranged next to jars of arty hand cream and rounded a corner, nearly running into Rey’s back.
He turned around sharply. “Oh. Why am I not surprised to see you?” he said.
I shrugged. “Not much surprises you?”
“Not much about you surprises me.”
“All right, I’ll buy that.”
“You have business down here this morning, Blaine? Or do you just enjoy the walk?”
“Business. You?”
He pulled at his jacket as if it didn’t fit the way he wanted. “The same.”
“Should I go, then?”
“No, no. We’re canvassing about some thefts in the area. Seems to be a gang of kids causing a disturbance so their friends can take goods off the counters. You have any ideas about that?”
“I haven’t been in the area much the past few days but I’d suggest you hunt down a street rat named Mimms. If he’s not in it, he knows about it.”
“I have been looking for Mimms. So far, no luck.”
“Try the back door at Cowgirls an hour or so before opening. He had something going with one of the waitresses there a while back. If they’re still together, he may walk her to work, and if they aren’t, he may drop by to flirt with her coworkers just to spite her.”
“Ah. That sounds like his way,” Solis said.
Mimms was one of those good-looking, fast-talking, low-rent troublemakers girls find charming until they get to know them. I’d dated enough of them in my turn to recognize them at a distance now. Mimms was one of the least offensive variety—more charming than vindictive and smarter than his impulses, but still too brass-balls stupid to ignore them. He might clean up all right if he survived.
“I had not heard about the girlfriend. I’ll check on it. Thank you. And you?”
“I heard a couple of homeless from the area died in the past eight months or so. Anything on that?”
He gave a tiny shrug. “A few do in the winter. What aspect of these deaths interests you?”
“I’m just wondering how they died.”
“Nothing as spectacularly disturbing as the last time you pursued that question. I would have to look it up,
