walking again.
Over a cold breakfast afterward, I looked over the lists I’d gotten from Faith. I swore and laid the papers aside. “Useless. The people on the list are the people I already know about. There used to be more full-time residents, but now there’s only a handful and they’re all accounted for. I’m still looking for someone who’s here, but not here. It’s not seasonal renters or even the nonresident owners, because most of the overt violence has happened in the late winter and early spring before they come up here.”
“What about Ridenour?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure. He doesn’t seem to have any magical power. He doesn’t seem to even see the magical things going on.”
“He could be acting. He was married to a demon for a while, after all.”
“But he didn’t know what she was until Willow told him. And the huli-jing is gone now, so his connection to the grid through her was cut.”
“Doesn’t mean he can’t have started to play with it on his own, if he was so desperate to get his wife back or take revenge.”
I nodded. It fit to a degree, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with it. Still, it would explain Ridenour’s not coming to find me after Willow had escaped from the greenhouse, since he’d have gone after her himself. I respected Ridenour enough that I wanted more proof before I accused him of bashing in Strother’s head and killing Leung. Ridenour didn’t seem to have any Grey abilities of his own, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have borrowed some. After all, whoever had moved the Subaru into the lake had needed help. If the killer wasn’t very good at magic, it would explain why the crimes themselves were sudden and violent and why only the aftermath and cover-up had the tang of the Grey. Ridenour didn’t live at the lake, but he was around constantly. . . .
Quinton pointed at the other list. “What about that one? Anything there?”
I picked it up and scanned it. “List of what was found in Leung’s Subaru.” I shook my head. “They’re going to have a great time trying to figure out what’s significant in this bunch of rotting junk. Not a lot survived the fire in the front of the car, but the stuff in the back was mostly intact until it hit the water. Leung was a real pack rat,” I added. Then I summarized the list: “A big lump of wet paper—probably maps—that started to rot as soon as it got into the air; pocket change; keys; a rifle and a box-worth of unfired cartridges to match; a large rock; the remains of what was probably a pair of boots—in addition to the pair he was wearing at the time; a tire iron and jack, badly rusted; a spare coat that was mostly rot and guesswork; a plastic crate of rusted canned goods; a surveyor’s transit in a waterlogged wooden box; two baseball caps in dubious condition; the remains of two blankets—”
“Sounds like the back of your truck,” Quinton interrupted, “only wet.”
That gave me pause. The house was neat, orderly, and prepared for a stint of bad weather—if we’d had some gasoline, we could have had the generator running, which would have given us plenty of power to run the water heater as well as the lights. If the propane tank hadn’t been empty, we’d have had heat, a working stove, and a refrigerator, all without main power or a gas line. I’d assumed the house had been cleaned and closed up, but Leung’s clothes were still in one of the closets and the shotgun hadn’t been locked up, but left standing beside the kitchen door in case of aggressive wildlife. Except for removing the gas cans that must have been around and having the propane tank drained and purged, Geoff Newman hadn’t done anything to the house but shutter it up and lock it. Leung hadn’t been a hoarder; he’d been ready.
“It
“So you need to concentrate on what doesn’t fit—if anything.”
I read through the list again. “This is strange. Even ignoring the dead fish and soda bottles, there are some odd things in this collection. The weirdest has to be the extra finger.”
“That’s a little gruesome. Where’d that come from?”
“From a grave,” I thought aloud, remembering the petty, squabbling dead of Tragedy Graveyard.
“A zombie was in the car?”
“I don’t think so. I think someone laid a spell for Leung in his car. I don’t know what it did, but that’s my guess.”
“A spell?” Quinton frowned. “Mara doesn’t need bones to cast a spell.”
“Not the kind she does, no. But not all magical systems operate the same way. Mara was telling me that one of our mages out here might be using hoodoo, or something akin to it, and that practice definitely does use bones. I’d guess anything involving a human finger isn’t a nice thing. The rest of the spell has washed away by now, so no telling what it was. What else doesn’t fit?” I wondered aloud, reading the page yet again. “A rock, a pair of lineman’s pliers, a screwdriver . . .”
“Aside from the rock, those don’t sound too odd.”
I looked up. “According to the list, Leung had a complete tool kit in the back. He didn’t need to have an additional screwdriver and pliers in the front seat. He certainly wasn’t fixing anything while he was driving. Besides those, there’s this stone—some kind of quartz and it weighs eighteen pounds.”
“Wow. Maybe that’s your anchor.”
“Maybe, but what was Leung doing with it? The dead near Costigan’s house said Leung had been killed for the anchor—or because of it. Jewel said . . . her father was going to do something about the lake.... Whatever he was doing, he either didn’t do it right or he never finished.”
“Not before someone killed him.”
“But if the rock is the anchor, then the anchor was in the lake. Why didn’t that fix the problem?”
“Anchors don’t do much good if they aren’t set,” Quinton said. “Maybe he hadn’t put it in the right place.”
“But why would his killer risk putting the anchor back into the lake at all? The problem here seems to have started in 1989 when the magic got wild. The only person who wants to shut that off is Jewel Newman, and if she’d killed her father for it, she’d have made sure the anchor got replaced properly. The others benefit only so long as the anchor is out of place. I can’t see why one of them would risk shutting off the power by throwing the anchor stone back into the lake at all.”
“What if they didn’t know?”
“You’re suggesting an ignorant mage.”
“At least one of them is self-taught. Which is sometimes the same as mud-ignorant.”
“I don’t think Willow killed her father.”
“Then it must be the mysterious number five.”
I sighed and sipped the weak tea Quinton had made by warming up cups of water on top of the Franklin stove. “I still have no idea who that is. Or if it’s the rogue or the child. I can figure out the nexus and the puppeteer—that’s Jewel Newman and Elias Costigan. I know the east must have been Jonah Leung or Willow’s mother, because they’re both dead. Willow could be the child, but she could also be the rogue.”
“Think about it from the ley weaver’s viewpoint. They’re his terms, so the titles are based on his ideas.”
“Which is something I can’t begin to fathom. And it’s not helping.”
“Then leave it for now and we’ll need to attack a different part of the problem. What’s on the last sheet of paper?”
“It’s Alan Strother’s car log for the day he died. It shows the locations and times where his car stopped. For most of these, I can tell whom he went to see by looking up the residents on the other list. I also see when he clocked back in, how long he was out of the car—that sort of thing. But there are these holes. . . .”
“So he checked out the houses on the list and then what?”
“He drove around. Back and forth a few times. It didn’t make a lot of sense and I’m still trying to figure out the pattern.”
“Who’s still on your list to talk to?”
“Almost all of them. And now I want another look at that rock, too.”
“I guess we’re driving back to Port Angeles, then.”
Faith was curious about why we wanted to look at the rock. “It’s not some kind of precious stone. It’s just a
