Depth (19 page)

“I know he was,” Simone said. The yarn and trash crackled, and the fog came in thicker, like a down blanket tossed over them.

“Thank you,” Trixie said. She peeked into the fire. “It’s all gone. Do you know how to put out a fire?”

“Sure. Stand back, though.” Trixie took several steps back, and Simone used her feet to scoot the flaming barrel towards the edge of the bridge, near an empty taxi stand. It was hot but didn’t burn through the soles of her boots. Finally she got it to the edge and kicked it over.

“Oh!” Trixie said as it fell into the water, taking a few steps forward. Then she stopped. The barrel turned sideways in the water, bobbing half above the surface for a moment, then began to sink. Trixie began to laugh. Simone turned to look at her, and she looked genuinely happy, her eyes fixed on the barrel as it went under. A small stream of bubbles popped on the surface, quickly at first, then slowly, then not at all. Trixie kept laughing, and Simone smiled. But the laughter went on and on, longer than it should have, and still Trixie watched the spot where the last bubble had come up. Quietly, Simone turned and walked away.

When she got home, the fog was thick, and the air sliced past her ears like the sound of a sharpening blade. There would definitely be a storm tomorrow, probably a bad one. Simone frowned as she walked up the stairs to her office. She knew almost everything now, and she still didn’t really know anything.

Simone ducked the moment she opened the door to her office. The smell of blood was clear and sharp in the darkness. She took her gun out and stayed crouched by the door, listening for an intruder. She stayed that way for what seemed an eternity but could have only been a few minutes, but there was no sound—just the smell, rusty and floral. She cautiously raised a hand up and flipped on the lights but stayed crouched, her gun ready. There was just one figure in the waiting room, slumped over in the chair in front of the receptionist’s desk, as if waiting for an appointment, but clearly dead. Blood sparkled on her fur coat like rubies. It was Linnea.

TWELVE

LINNEA HAD BEEN TORTURED
before she was killed and deposited in Simone’s waiting room. Simone did a quick search of the office and her apartment. There was no one else there—just Linnea’s body, wrapped in her coat, topped with a hat and veil. The coat hung open, and under it she was naked, with cuts and bruises on her face and stomach, a few puncture marks in her arm, and several red cigarette burns crawling up her leg to a single, blackened cigar burn on her inner thigh like a smudged thumbprint. No obvious sign of how she’d died. The ends of her hair were matted with dried blood, and stuck to her chest. It was a thorough going-over.

Simone turned away from the body. There was something too easy about it, too natural, and it chilled her. She could almost imagine Linnea was merely asleep in her coat, wearing red stockings and waiting up late in bed for the husband who never came home. Well, they were together now, whether they liked it or not. Simone pressed her hands down on the desk for the secretary who would never exist. She bent her head. Linnea wasn’t her friend, but Simone hadn’t disliked her, which was more than she could say for a lot of people.

Normally she’d call Caroline now to tell her a case had come to a body in her office and she was going to call the cops; she’d ask Caroline to come over, smooth things out, maybe let her lean on her shoulder a little. It wasn’t the dead body. Simone had seen bodies. And it wasn’t the sense of invasion. It was something else. She found herself thinking of Trixie, and the way she’d looked when Simone kicked the trash-can pyre into the sea.

“Phone,” she said, and her earpiece beeped, ready to be given an order. “Call Peter.”

“Hey, soldier,” he said when he picked up. He said it with a creak in his voice that she recognized, the way he talked as he was sitting up in bed and stretching, like he had after sex, asking her if she wanted something to drink. Then he’d walk to his kitchen naked and bring back a few beers. They’d lay in bed and drink, the sweat from the bottles slowly dripping down their arms and onto their bodies.

“Hi,” Simone said, realizing she’d let the pause linger.

“You called me.” He was smiling; she could tell.

“Did I wake you?”

“Don’t worry about it. I had to work late, I was just grabbing a few hours where I could.”

“If you need to sleep, I can call back—”

“What’s wrong, Simone?”

“Can you . . .” she trailed off. “Can you meet me at the battlefield? I don’t want to talk about this over the phone.”

“Yeah, I’ll be there in ten minutes.” She could hear him moving, putting on clothes.

“Thanks.” She hung up before he could reply. She turned around again and leaned back on the desk, taking a long look at the body. She memorized the way the body fell, one arm over the back of the chair, head leaning. Natural, but not. Just the wrong side of alive. She stared at the burns again, circles of different sizes, like a map of the solar system, and the lines of dried blood like empty riverbeds. Then she tightened her coat around her, turned out the lights, and left, locking the door behind her.

Outside, it was colder than it had been when she’d gone inside. How long had she been staring at the body? It hadn’t felt long, but it must have been an hour, at least. The night was brittle, and the fog rose up like steel walls.

She went over suspects who would put the body in her office. This wasn’t about someone trying to frame her; it wasn’t calculated enough for that. It was a warning. Whoever had done this was telling her they were willing to kill—and worse—for the painting, and leaving Linnea in her office meant, “find the painting, or you’re next.” But find it for whom?

Simone sighed as she realized who had done this. No one else made sense; it had to be him. Charming Dash Ormond. Linnea was just another of those dead bodies that always seemed to end his cases. But Simone didn’t know who’d hired him. She could call and ask, but Dash would just deny the whole thing. And there wouldn’t be a shred of evidence on the body pointing to him, either. Cold, beautiful Dash would be clean about it. He must have been cleaning off the blood when he went to “wash up” during her visit. She must have really scared him, waiting like that when he’d just gotten back from leaving a body in her office. She wouldn’t be sending him any more drinks at the bar, she thought. Maybe she’d send him a bottle of something wherever he ended up, though.

She got to the battlefield first. It wasn’t too far from the office. It wasn’t really a battlefield, either. That was just what Simone and Peter had called the Douglass Farm Building as kids, when they played with their army figures, laying out strategies and maps for taking over hostile territory. The corn was usually the hostile territory. They attacked from the potatoes.

There were a lot of farms around the city. Most produce was grown in the ocean as algae before being turned into paste for 3D printers, or in the crystal floating houses that bobbed on light plastic, hovering on the waves, built for this environment. But there were a couple of farm boats and a few dozen farm buildings. Not all buildings broke the water’s surface at the twenty-first floor. That was just a generalization. New York had had an upward slope once. The Douglass Farm was a building that, because of the height of the floors, had a partially submerged top story—a foot or two of water at the bottom and nothing to stand on above. No one had known exactly what to do with buildings like this—rooftops on the ocean, with nothing livable beneath them. Then someone got the bright idea to open up the rooftop, leaving the rest of the building in place. They coated the inside with thick, insulating layers of desalination filters, and then covered the rest up with soil: a seaside farm with constant freshwater underneath, and if the waves started looking high, just put up a big tent for a while. The vegetables grown on them always tasted saltier and windier, somehow, but they were cheap compared to the stuff from the mainland or other countries.

The farms were strangely beautiful, too. The desalination filters—so many of them together—resulted in the walls of the buildings being crusted over in salt, making them look like the tip of an iceberg sticking out of the sea, leveled into a plateau and patterned in rows of plants. When she was little and they’d scaled the fences to sneak in, like she did now, Simone had thought it something from a fairy tale. Tonight it looked like a mountain of bone. Beyond the fence, the farm was still laid out as it had been back then. She headed for the borderline, where the potatoes met the corn, and squatted down to touch the dirt. Then she stood, lit a cigarette, and waited.

Peter showed up when the cigarette was half gone, eleven minutes after they’d hung up, even though he lived much farther away.

“Hey,” he said, when he was still far enough away to just be a shadow in the fog.

“Hey,” she said back. He came closer. He was wearing a plaid shirt, open more than he would normally wear it. She stared at the gap in the fabric where his skin and chest hair showed through. He glanced down at where she was looking and buttoned the extra button. She took another drag on her cigarette.

“What did you want to meet about?” She looked up into his eyes. “You sounded upset.”

“There’s a dead body in my office,” she said. He narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t put it there.”

“I didn’t say you did,” he said, taking a step back.

“I just didn’t want you to have to ask. It’s Linnea St. Michel. She’s been beat up pretty bad. Cuts, burns . . . someone wanted something from her.”

“And then they left her for you?” Simone shrugged. “Kluren isn’t going to like this. That’s why you called me, right? To report it. You didn’t want me to . . . help you hide it, did you? Pitch her in the water?”

“No,” Simone said. “She deserves better than that. But Kluren is going to lock me up as soon as she sees the body.”

“Yeah, but you’ll get out. Caroline can help with that.”

“The body is a warning. Someone wants me to . . .” She turned around. She didn’t know how much Peter knew.

“You kept digging, didn’t you?”

Simone took a long drag on the cigarette. She could vaguely feel him stepping closer, a faint heat on her shoulders. “Yeah.”

“So who is the body a warning from?”

“Don’t know. I mean, I know the delivery man, but not the guy who sent it.”

“Who’s the delivery man?”

“You’re not going to find him, and if you do, he’s going to be cleaner than a bar of soap.”

“So you’re not going to tell me.”

“It’ll make things more complicated if he thinks cops are sniffing around him.”

“You’re going to have to tell Kluren something.”

“I’ll tell her the body was there when I came in. I don’t need to tell her my guess as to who put it there.” Peter was silent at that, but she heard him kicking the dirt behind her. She turned around and found him closer than she’d thought, almost face to face, except that he was looking down at the ground. She reached a hand out, half the distance between then, but then pulled it back. When he looked up, she focused on his eyes, and how they seemed almost colorless in the dark.

“Okay, soldier. Show me this body.”

HER OFFICE WAS A
forensic circus within twenty minutes. Peter had walked back with her, both of them silent. When she unlocked the door and opened it for him, he didn’t say anything but laid a hand on her shoulder and tapped his earpiece. His hand stayed there, almost locking her in place as he talked to other officers on duty. The forensic team showed up with two uniforms who spoke directly to Peter, ignoring Simone, except to occasionally glare at her, as though the dead body was her fault. They took the place over pretty quickly, dusting and shining lights and examining the body while Peter and Simone waited in the hallway outside.

When Kluren showed up, she had two more uniforms with her and was barking orders at them. Simone hoped for a moment she might not even see her, but after Kluren glanced in the room, she came back out, that same water-snake smile on her face.

“Some fish you throw back, but they just don’t learn. They swim right onto the hook again.” She stared at Simone, the gold in her irises twinkling. “I was having a nice dinner, you know.”

“You still could be,” Simone said. “I’m sure the restaurant is saving your table.”

“I’m pretty sure I told you to drop this case.”

“Sometimes, you throw something behind you, you find it on the bottom of your boot later.”

“That would explain the smell.” Kluren looked back into the room. “We have a cause of death?” she called at the sea of blue around her.

“Chief,” said one of the techs, deliberately putting himself with his back to Simone. “She didn’t die from the cuts. It was a heart attack, probably from stress and the drugs in her system. I’ll have to run some tests to confirm, but I’m fairly sure.”

“We know what drugs?” Kluren asked.

“Barb of some kind. We already did a quick blood test. I’m guessing one of the more upmarket truth serums. I’ll know more at the lab.”

“Okay,” Kluren said with a nod. She looked back up, as if suddenly remembering Simone was there. “Weiss, cuff her, take her to Teddy. I’ll do the interview myself.”

“Cuffs?” Simone asked. “You can’t think I did this.”

“You’re a person of interest in two murders now. I don’t think you’re dumb enough to kill her and then keep the body in your office, but you know a hell of a lot more than you’re telling, and for some reason you seem to think that’s your right. It isn’t. I told you you were off the case, you didn’t listen. Now you get the cuffs. If I can make it stick, you’ll get some prison time, too, maybe a year if I’m lucky, and then maybe, just maybe, you’ll realize that we’re the professionals and you’re just the daughter of a dropout cop who left the force when things got tough. You don’t know better, Pierce. We do.”

Simone bit her lower lip and inhaled. She put her hands behind her back and let Peter cuff her. Kluren stared at her, squinting for a moment. Simone wondered what her lenses told her.

“You can take the cuffs off her once she’s in Teddy,” Kluren said, waving them off like they were children.

Peter led Simone out of the building and took the cuffs off her. Simone nodded her thanks.

“That went better than I thought it would,” he said.

“Yeah?” Simone rubbed her wrists.

“I thought she’d be a lot louder, maybe order all your stuff taken away for testing.” Peter walked next to her, his hands in his pockets. He was still out of uniform, and he smelled like leather.

“She could still do that.”

“Nah. She would’ve done it in front of you, hoping you’d throw a fit.”

“I throw fits?”

“I guess not.”

It was a quiet night. The fog seemed to muffle other people’s footsteps and hide their shadows. Simone walked slowly beside Peter. They’d gone a few more blocks before he spoke again.

“You know, you could escape.”

“And do what? That won’t help my case.”

“I have that boat.”

“No, Peter.” She said it firmly enough that he just nodded and kept walking.

“So what are you going to tell Kluren?”

“I walked in, found a body, called you.”

“And when she asks why it was left on your doorstep?”

“I don’t know. I guess she hasn’t solved that case she said she was going to solve yet.” The words came out with a tang of nastiness that seemed to vibrate the fog. She took a deep breath. She had to keep cool.

“That jab about your dad stung?” He asked. Simone fished out a cigarette and lit it, then inhaled deeply. “Your dad was a great cop. My dad always said so.”

“Dad didn’t talk about life as a policeman,” Simone said, her voice low in the fog. “Or why he left the force. Just . . . work. How to think, investigate.” From the time her mom left, he was a detective, and she was his prot
é
g
é
e. All he talked about was work. Never Mom, never their life before she was gone, never even what was right or wrong. Just how to be a detective, how to solve the case. She had a sudden memory of him, showing her how to load a gun when she was eight years old, pushing each bullet neatly into the row of the clip.