The second floor creaked under his feet, and he found craters of rot or vandalism squeezing him down to a single path. Plaster lay scattered in heaps and spread around as dust, and the footprints led to another stripped stair of saw-tooth stringers and no handholds.
The third floor actually looked better, most of the plaster still in place and doors hanging on their hinges. Probably few people dared to climb this high. Daniel still followed footprints in the dust, though. One path led to a pile of dried-out human turds and a tattered telephone directory for toilet paper. And a scattering of empty tampon boxes and wrappers. Girls, all right.
The first door creaked away into its room, rusty hinges straight out of a cheap horror flick, and Daniel sent the flashlight beam into the darkness ahead of him. Dust. Cobwebs. Furniture. Ancient chair and table and dresser. Ancient bed. Ancient air, musty, clammy, like a tomb just opened.
Ancient corpse lying on the bed.
Dan froze and stared, free hand creeping toward his pistol and his ears snatching every creak and whisper of the ancient crumbling hotel, bats and rats and pigeons. Deep behind his thinking brain, something kept expecting the corpse to move. It didn't. He started to take a deep breath and then decided that was a bad idea.
He checked his gloves. He'd never left fingerprints at any of his crime scenes — damned sure he wasn't going to start with someone else's.
He edged into the room and studied what evidence remained. The body lay straight and calm, as if laid out for a funeral, a man, naked, with a hole in the chest where his heart should be. Corpse looked like it had been there for a year or more, skin shrunken around bones like a dried-up mummy found in the desert, and the rats hadn't bothered it. That sent icy fingers down Daniel's spine.
And it hadn't been killed there. No black blood staining the ancient yellowed linen on the bed.
Okay. Daniel backed away, careful of his feet, careful of hands and elbows. Everything he wore had an appointment with the incinerator. Shoes had left prints, jacket and pants would have scraped a wall or splintered wood and left snagged threads, gloves would have left smears of grease and pitch and flaked dry paint. Forensic science was a bitch for finding matches — so don't leave anything to match to.
Time to have a chat with Alice.
Chapter Seven
Alice sat and thought for a few minutes, staring into nothing across the parlor and listening to Sibelius on the CD player — a dark wintry symphonic poem full of wind and snow and wolves ghosting through the shadows of the Finnish forest. She always chose music to mirror her mood, reflect her heart.
Good thing Caroline is shaping up so well. If I can get her to keep a lid on that quicksilver impulsiveness, I'll leave the House in good hands if I lose the next one.
God, she'd been feeling bleak lately. At least it hadn't gotten bad enough for Piaf. Yet.
The man sitting in the other chair hadn't brightened her mood any. Not that it was his fault. The House seemed amused and unusually relaxed, far from its usual tension when she'd let a man inside the sacred walls. She studied this latest incarnation of Daniel Morgan, shook her head, and lifted one eyebrow. "So you've decided to come over to the Dark Side?"
He blinked.
"The dye job."
"Oh." He nodded, brain swerving to catch up with her non sequitur. "Skin color sure affects what people see, doesn't it? But you've known that all your life. It's a strange feeling."
Alice snorted. "Tell me about it. When I was in ER training down to Boston, I lost count of the number of times that well-meaning idiots tried out their high-school Spanish on me. After all, I'm small and dark, but I don't look Black. One guy even tried Tagalog — thought I was a Filipina. Nobody expects First People nurses in a white hospital. 'Cept maybe near a big rez, like the Navajo."
She squirmed a bit in the soft leather of the big Eames chair, adjusting a pillow that kept pressure off her aching shoulder blade. Cold front coming through, she thought.
Atropos lifted her head from where her calico coat artistically mirrored the Bokhara rug, blinked lazily, stretched, and strolled across the floor, tail up in a friendly crook. "Mrr?"
A request for lap space, since Kate wasn't available. Alice shifted again and acquired a vibrating heating pad with gently kneading paws. The cat's purr seemed to radiate calm and soothing, and she melted into a boneless puddle of warmth. Sometimes the cat and the House carried their bond to extremes. Sometimes, just sometimes, the result brought comfort.
Alice settled one hand on the cat's back and smoothed silky fur, shaking her head. Atropos was awfully young to manipulate humans so well.
"So. Mummified, eh?"
"Mummified. Plaster dust, cobwebs, eye-sockets staring at the door and jaw sagging. Creepy scene, deliberate stage setting, you walk through the door and you're looking right at the hole in its chest, splintered rib ends, like they'd chopped the heart out with a hatchet. And the rats had left the body alone. I know there were rats. I saw them."
Alice wrinkled her nose at that, the nurse taking over from the witch for a moment. Rats spread too damn many diseases for her to like their position in the natural balance of life.
Still . . . "I can think of two, three reasons they'd avoid a corpse. Poison's one — some rats learn the smell of poisoned bait and won't go near it. But I can't work up a scene where that makes sense. To check reasons two and three, I'd have to feel the corpse, smell the air, generally poke around." She paused and listened to the cold arctic
