Weird Detectives (48 page)

When he could, he changed back to human at the home of the local werewolf pack. They let him shower, and gave him a pair of sweats—the universal answer to the common problem of changing back to human and not having clothes to put back on.

He called his oldest son to make sure that Stella had called him and that he had handled the cleanup. She had remembered, and Clive was proceeding with his usual thoroughness.

Linnford was about to have a terrible car wreck. The vampire’s body, both parts of it, were scheduled for immediate incineration. The biggest problem was what to do with Linnford’s wife. For the moment she seemed to be too traumatized to talk. Maybe the vampire’s death had broken her—or maybe she’d come around. Either way, she’d need help, discreet help from people who knew how to tell the difference between the victim of a vampire and a minion and would treat her accordingly.

David made a few calls, and got the number of a very private sanitarium run by a small, very secret government agency. The price wasn’t bad—all he had to do was rescue some missionary who was related to a high-level politician. The fool had managed to get kidnapped with his wife and two young children. David’s team would still get paid, and he’d probably have taken the assignment anyway.

By the time he called Clive back, his sons had located a few missing hospital personnel and the cop who’d been guarding the door. David heard the relief in Clive’s voice: Jorge was apparently a friend. None of the recovered people seemed to be hurt, though they had no idea why they were all in the basement.

David hung up and turned off his cell phone. Accepting the offer of a bedroom from the pack Alpha, David took his tired body to bed and slept.

Christmas day was coming to a close when David drove his rental to his son’s house—friends had picked it up from the hospital for him.

Red and green lights covered every bush and railing as well as surrounding all the windows. Knee-high candy canes lined the walk.

There were cars at his son’s house. David frowned at them and checked his new watch. He was coming over at the right time. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want to intrude—which was understood to mean that he wouldn’t come when Stella was likely to be there.

He’d already have been on a flight home, except that he didn’t know how to contact Devonte. He tapped the envelope against his leg and wondered why he’d picked up a Christmas card instead of just handing over his business card. Below his contact information he’d made Devonte an open job offer beginning as soon as Devonte was eighteen. David could think of a thousand ways a wizard would be of use to a small group of mercenaries.

Of course, after watching David tear up the vampire’s body, Devonte probably wouldn’t be interested, so more to the point was the name and phone number on the other side of the card. Both belonged to a wizard who was willing to take on a pupil; the local Alpha had given it to him.

Clive had promised to give it to Devonte.

David had to search under the giant wreath on the door for the bell. As he waited, he noticed that he could hear a lot of people inside, and even through the door he smelled the turkey.

He took a step back, but the door was already opening.

Stella stood in the doorway. Over her shoulder he could see the whole family running around preparing the table for Christmas dinner. Devonte was sitting on the couch reading to one of the toddlers that seemed to be everywhere. Clive leaned against the fireplace and met David’s gaze. He lifted a glass of wine and sipped it, smiling slyly.

David took another step back and opened his mouth to apologize to Stella . . . just as her face lit with her mother’s smile. She stepped out onto the porch and wrapped her arms around him.

“Merry Christmas, Papa,” she said. “I hope you like turkey.”

Patricia Briggs
is the #1
New York Times
bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson series, the seventh novel of which—
Frost Burned
—has just been published. Briggs also writes the Alpha and Omega series, which is set in the same world as the Mercy Thompson novels. Starting with a novella, “Alpha and Omega,” three full-length novels have followed. She has also penned eight other fantasy novels. Briggs lives in Washington State with her husband, children, and a small herd of horses. For more information about the author, feel free to visit www.patriciabriggs.com.

The Case:
People are going crazy and killing themselves . . . but people don’t just “go crazy” out of the blue.

The Investigators:
Jamie Keller—black, built like a Mack truck, gentle as a lamb—and Mick Sharpton—white, queer, clairvoyant, Goth as Goth can be—both agents of the Babylon, Tennessee, branch of the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation
.

IMPOSTORS

Sarah Monette

They were pulling out of the parking lot of St. Dymphna’s Psychiatric Hospital when the radio crackled into life. Mick Sharpton answered. Dispatch said, “There’s been another one.”

“Shit,” Jamie said. They’d developed a rule that the partner not holding the handset did the swearing for both of them. Mick said to Dispatch, “Give us an address, and we’re on our way.”

There was a hesitation, infinitesimal, but years long in Dispatch-time, which they understood when the dispatcher said, “Langland Street subway station. He jumped.”

“Christ,” Mick said, racking the handset.

“That makes what, three jumpers?”

“Three jumpers, a bullet to the brain, and Mrs. Coulson back there in St. Dymphna’s. I think the police are right. This one’s paranormal.”

“Evidence or hunch?”

“Hunch mostly. But. People don’t just ‘go crazy’ out of a clear blue sky, you know. And here’s four people—five now, I guess—no history of mental illness, going zero to psychosis in sixty seconds flat. Something is very definitely wrong with this picture. And it feels paranormal to me.”

Mick’s 3(8) esper rating wasn’t quite high enough for his intuition to be admissible legal evidence, but Jamie had never known him to be wrong. “Then we’d better start trying to figure out what these people had in common.”

“Nothing,” Mick said, pale blue eyes staring an angry hole in the dashboard. “Absolutely fuck all. Aside from the fact that they all went crazy, of course.”

“Well, and crazy in the same way,” Jamie said, determined not to let this blow up into a fight, not even to make Mick feel better.

“Yeah.” Mick sighed, offered Jamie a sidelong, apologetic smile. “What did she say? ‘I stole her life.’ ”

“Yeah,” Jamie Keller echoed softly and shivered, trying not to imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning believing himself to be an impostor. He didn’t blame any of them for committing suicide, nor Mrs. Coulson for trying.

“Must be hell on earth,” Mick said, and they drove the rest of the way to Langland Street in troubled silence.

Paul Sinclair was brought up off the subway tracks one piece at a time. Jamie kept a weather eye on the progress of that operation and its delicate balance between speed and thoroughness; the last thing anyone wanted was for ghouls to be drawn out of the tunnels by the smell of blood. But although dealing with the ghouls if they appeared would be his and Mick’s responsibility, they’d only be in the way of the morgue workers if they went over there now. They were listening to witnesses instead.

Eyewitness testimony was notoriously volatile, but allowing for the inevitable variations in what individual witnesses perceived, Jamie was getting a fairly clear picture of the last two minutes of Paul Sinclair’s life.

The witnesses agreed that he’d been nervous and jerky in his movements when he came down the stairs from the street. A homeless woman who panhandled in the station on a regular basis remembered noticing him the day before, and he hadn’t looked well then, either. Jamie would have dismissed that as embellishment, a natural desire to stay in the limelight a little longer, but Mick said she was telling the truth.

Paul Sinclair—bank manager, aged thirty-two, single—had advanced to the edge of the platform, where he’d set down his briefcase and waited, attracting attention by his fidgeting and the way he moved sharply apart from the other people on the platform. “Like we were dirty and he didn’t want to touch us,” said a teenage boy who probably should have been in school, but that wasn’t Jamie’s problem and he wasn’t asking. When the 10:43 D train made itself heard approaching the station, its ghoul-ward howling, Paul Sinclair said, very audibly, something like, “Don’t try to save me. I’m not me.” And he jumped straight into the path of the D train, which tore him to pieces.

When the police opened his briefcase, it contained nothing but a suicide note along all too familiar lines. Paul Sinclair, in handwriting Jamie had no doubt would be proved conclusively to be that of Paul Sinclair, asserted that he was an impostor.
I have stolen his life,
he wrote, echoing Marian Coulson and the other victims.
I don’t deserve his life.
The note was not signed—poor bastard, Jamie thought, what name could he use?—but scrawled at the bottom, a painful afterthought:
Please take care of Mr. Sinclair’s dogs. Their names are Leo and Bridget.

“Just like the others,” Mick said. He sounded–and looked—ill. “Even the same phrasing.”

“Definitely paranormal.”

“You say that like you think it helps.”

“It is the first thing Jesperson told us to do.”

“Well, hooray for us.” But there was no anger in him now; he just sounded defeated.

“It’s better than nothing.”

“Tell that to Paul Sinclair,” Mick said, and Jamie was glad to be called away to talk to the morgue crew.

After a hurried and unenthusiastic lunch, they spent the afternoon going through the case files again, correlating and cross-checking, trying to narrow down the possibilities. Mick remained subdued, which increased their efficiency, but Jamie found himself perversely wishing for Mick’s usual argumentative and scattershot approach to this kind of work. It did not reappear, and Thursday was more of the same, as they conducted interviews with witnesses and survivors and Marian Coulson’s bewildered husband, and if Mick strung three words together into a sentence, it was as much as he did all day.

At 3:32 Friday morning, Jamie’s cellphone rang, waking him from a confused dream in which the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations was being moved into his old elementary school. He had the phone open and to his ear before he was even sure where he was, and his “Foxtrot-niner” was as clear and crisp as if he were in his office rather than up on one elbow groping for the lamp on the nightstand.

Lila mumbled something, but Jamie’s attention was focused on the silence from his cellphone. “Hello?”

More silence, but the distinct sound of someone breathing, too rapidly and hard.

“Who is this? Look, if you don’t say something, I’m going to have to assume you have hostile intent, and we don’t none of us want that paperwork. So come on. What do you want?”

Thin thread of a voice: “Jamie?”

“Mick? What the fuck?”

“Jamie, how do you know you’re you?”

Jamie felt every separate blood vessel in his body go cold. “Where are you, blue eyes?”

“I, um, I don’t know. On a bridge.”

Jamie rolled out of bed, yanking sweatpants on over his boxers, shrugging into a flannel shirt one arm at a time, so he didn’t have to put the phone down. “Which bridge, blue eyes? Come on. How’m I supposed to come get you if I don’t know where you are?”

“You’re going to come get me?”

Mick sounded dazed, the way he did when his esper hit him hard.

“Course I am.” Shoes. Shoes. Goddammit, they had to be here somewhere. “Can’t leave you freezing your ass off all night.”

“But I’m not . . . ”

“Yes, you are,”
Jamie said, as forcefully as he thought he could without spooking Mick. “You’re just confused, blue eyes, that’s all.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure I’m me?”

It was all too easy to imagine Mick standing on one of Babylon’s bridges, hunched around his cellphone, his long dyed-black hair straggling across his face. Jamie tried to keep that imaginary Mick firmly on the pavement, but it was even easier to imagine him standing on the railing, one arm wrapped around a stanchion, teetering out over the black water.

“I am absolutely certain you’re you,” Jamie said, cramming his feet into his sneakers. “You trust me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Mick said promptly.

“Good, blue eyes, that’s good. Now can you tell me where you are?”

“I, um . . . ”

“Jamie,” Lila hissed, “what on earth is going on?”

“Mick’s in trouble,” he said over his shoulder, heading down the short hallway to the living room to find his keys. The Saturn was Lila’s, and he didn’t normally drive it, relying on buses and subway trains to get him to and from work, but there were no buses this time of night, and he couldn’t leave Mick out there in the state he was in.

“I should have guessed. God knows you wouldn’t race off like this for your mother.” Mick and Lila had not taken to each other the one time they’d met.

“Can you find a street sign?” he said to Mick.

A long pause, during which Jamie did not panic because he could still hear Mick breathing. He and Lila stood staring at each other, neither one of them quite willing to have the argument they were on the brink of.

“Rossiter!” Mick said triumphantly. “I’m on the Rossiter Street Bridge.”

One of the jumpers had gone off the Rossiter Street Bridge; Jamie wondered if Mick had remembered that, or if this was just unhappy coincidence. “Good, blue eyes. Now, don’t hang up, okay? It’ll take me ten minutes to get to you, but I’ll stay on the phone the whole time. You can talk to me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Mick said. He sounded lost again. “But why would you . . . ”

“Why would I what, blue eyes?” Jamie asked, buttoning a couple of random buttons on his shirt. Lila tsked, rolled her eyes, and came over to do the buttons up properly.