Underground (14 page)
SEVEN
“Harper, you’d better get back down here.”
It was five in the morning, so I was kind of groggy, but I recognized Quinton’s voice. “What’s happened?” I mumbled—the automatic response to such a statement as his.
“Someone else has found a body. Near the park.”
I sat up in bed, blinking. “Which park?”
“Between Oxy and Waterfall. There’s already police securing the area, so I haven’t been able to find out who it is or what’s going on.”
“You think it’s another one like Thursday’s?”
“I’d bet on it.”
I groaned. “Great. I’ll be right there.”
No time for more than a splash of water on my face before I pulled on several layers of sweaters and a wool coat over my jeans and boots. Light snow had fallen overnight, and the air seemed no warmer although the radio report claimed the temperature had risen a whopping twenty degrees. My condo was in one of the coldest parts of the city. I figured they must have been reporting from Boeing Field, where the acres of tarmac on the windless plain of the airport always makes it hotter.
I negotiated the ice-crusted streets of West Seattle and crossed the bridge to downtown, where there was no sign it had ever snowed at all. The air coming off Puget Sound was warmer but still nowhere near the usual temp for January.
There were some cop cars, an aid car, a couple of city vans, and a small ant farm’s worth of busy people in official-looking clothes around Occidental Park when I arrived at my office building. I parked the Rover in my lot and walked back down the block toward the park.
Pioneer Square was deserted—too early for weekend business and too cold for just hanging out—so the unusual activity just south of the square drew whoever was around. My short walk was accompanied by Zip and one of the other homeless men I’d met the night before. Zip waved to me and I nodded back, guessing they’d come down early to scout the recycling bins behind the bars for any bottles containing a little booze or beer that had been tossed the night before—if the closing crew was in a hurry, they didn’t check too closely. Zip smelled like he’d already been diving for bottles. We all walked down the block and into Oxy Park by the totems. A huge, blanket-covered lump snored at the base of one of the wooden statues, oblivious to the killing cold. Zip and his friend stopped near the sleeper, watching the cops warily as I continued.
I spotted a dun-colored van from the medical examiner’s office and followed it as it pushed through the crowd toward the southern edge of Oxy Park. I stopped in the fringe of the crowd, but the van stopped where the edge of the parking lot met the wall and iron fence of Waterfall Garden Park on the southeast corner of the block. The low sun hadn’t penetrated the frozen shadows on the ground yet, but the shape of a human body was discernible there in the frosted morning gloom. I recognized Detective Solis and a coroner’s investigator kneeling beside it. The layers of time around the area were disarrayed and heaved up in broken shards shaggy with disrupted energy lines that were writhing around to reknit themselves as I watched. It made me feel queasy to see them moving like that, confirming that the energy grid was alive in some way.
I backed away a little, staying out of the detective’s line of sight to watch the scene.
The coroner’s investigator stood up, and he and the scene technician chatted for a moment while Solis continued to stare down at the body. I could see something was wrong with the shape. As Solis dropped the waterproof sheet back over it, the settling fabric fell too flat on the corpse’s legs.
As if disturbed and released by the stirring of the air below the covering, a thin Grey shape coiled up from the body and held a human form like a breath in the cold. It looked confused and more vague by the moment. I thought it wouldn’t last very long before it disappeared to wherever the lingering memories of ourselves go when there’s no reason to stay. I glanced up at the face of the lingering ghost and felt a shock of cold as she met my gaze and then faded from sight, leaving a flashbulb vision of what lay beneath the sheet: Jenny Nin, the hat gone and her right arm ended too soon—the hand that had offered Quinton a bottle and lingered over his own hand was missing, the stump short and gnawed; ragged legs hung in space below the rest. Something clung to her shape like a shredded shawl and her face was blue, twisted with surprise. I felt her go away and hoped I wouldn’t see her again in any form, but especially not that one. But I’d have to get a look at the body itself before I’d be sure.
I saw Solis stand, returning his attention to the scene and the removal of the body. By the pulsing line of color around him I knew he was more upset than he let on. I’d have to dodge him, since I couldn’t answer the questions he’d surely ask. I turned and stepped behind the orca totem. Then I walked straight from it, keeping the tall wooden figure between me and Solis’s sharp eyes until I was too far away to recognize. Then I turned the corner and hurried back to my truck. If I could get to the morgue faster than the ME’s van, I might see the body brought in and that might tell me enough.
The slippery road was tricky driving. I wanted to gun it up the hill to Harborview, but I knew the wheels would only spin on the icy bricks and asphalt. Luck was on my side: I had a small head start and just beat the van to the parking lot. Since I didn’t have a clumsy gurney to unload, I made it into the building and down to the basement ahead of the ME’s men and their burden.
The morgue always has its compliment of ghosts, though there were fewer this time than the last time I came and they ignored me. None of them seemed aware enough to want anything from me on this occasion. The area’s always a bit unwelcoming—old and sterile and furnished in institutional patchwork—and no one particularly notices the drafts, cold spots, and general sense of being in the presence of the unseen. In this dour atmosphere, the night shift was drawing to a post-Friday-night close. Looking drowsy and haggard, the night crew wasn’t terribly worried about me as I made my way toward the desk at the pace of a winter tortoise.
The elevator opened behind me and the men from the van came in with their gurney. They stopped at the desk and I stopped next to them. As they handed over paperwork, I stared hard at the bag enclosing the remains of Jennifer Novoy.
I couldn’t see through the plastic but there was enough of something clinging to the bag itself to know I’d guessed right. Soft strands of Grey curled from the zipper like fuzzy threads. The same sort of thread I’d seen on the hole in the tunnel wall and on Thursday night’s zombie. I hoped it wasn’t having the same effect on Jenny that it seemed to have had on him.
I needed to find out and took a risk.
“Hey,” I said. “Is that Solis’s Jane Doe from Oxy Park?”
The three men around the desk looked back at me, startled.
“Uh, yeah,” one of the gurney men replied. “Why?”
I pulled out my license and flipped it past them fast enough to blur the name. “I have a related case. Solis said I should take a look.”
The two men with the body glanced at each other and shrugged. The man behind the desk sighed. “Let’s get her in the cooler first, huh? Richards will be pissed if she stays out here any longer than necessary.”
The men with the gurney agreed and pushed the cart through the swinging doors into the morgue work area. The other man— a rather stocky fellow with skin the color of madrone bark and short, thick, black hair dramatically streaked with white, making him look like a badger—picked up a clipboard to which he’d attached a pile of forms and followed them, motioning me along.
We went past doors to the autopsy rooms and back into the storage area. The chilly air of the cooler was actually warmer than the air outdoors—no one wanted to accidentally freeze the dear departed.
The van crew lifted the bag with care and transferred Jenny to a steel table. Then they unzipped the bag and left it to the man with the clipboard to do the rest. He signed a sheet and handed it to them to sign before ripping off a copy for them and keeping the rest.
“OK, I got her. You’re done.”
The two men from the van grunted and left with their gurney.
The badger-faced man looked me over. “Don’t I know you?”
That threw me. I recognized him from the last time I’d been in the morgue, but I was surprised he remembered. “I’m a PI. Some of my searches end here.”
He frowned in thought. Then he snapped his fingers. “Yeah! Back . . . October I think it was. How many Does do you have to look at every year?”
“A lot less than you.”
He laughed. “I think I see more corpses in a week than most horror film freaks see in a year. So. You want to eyeball this one and we’ll get the hell out of here? Don’t know about you, but I’m cold!”
“Yeah, let’s get it over with.”
He put on indigo-colored latex gloves and peeled the edges of the bag down with big, gentle hands, as if to some silent ceremony he carried in his head. There was no sick delight in it, only a kind of sad reverence.
I looked down at Jenny’s pale blue face and flinched at the surprise there. Whatever had killed her had come upon her too fast for screaming. The soft Grey strands I’d expected were curled around her face and chest, but frayed away as they went lower; they didn’t form the same kind of tangled web I’d seen on the zombie but looked more like a moth-eaten shawl that was falling away in broken threads. There was very little blood and she looked as if she might have simply frozen to death—if not for her startled expression. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t stand up and come looking for me later, and I breathed relief.
“Well?” the badger-man asked.
I shook my head. “Nope.” I let him take the answer as he pleased. I hated lying, but if I identified her, I’d have to sign a form that would bring Solis to my door in a hurry.
He nodded and leaned over to attach a temporary ID with a number to her. Then he gently closed the bag and led me out of the room.
“Have you seen any other bodies like that recently?” I asked.
“What do you mean, ‘like’? They’re all dead and we’ve had more homeless than usual, but that happens when the weather’s severe.”
“Another body came in on Thursday in a similar condition— very little blood, very cold, extremities missing. A Robert Cristus?”
We stepped out through the swinging doors and stopped by the desk. The morgue attendant looked thoughtful.
“Yeah . . . Now you mention it, very similar—at least at first glance.” He turned a piercing gaze on me. “You’re interested in that case?”
“And this one. Actually I wonder if there have been any others like that—similar condition and circumstances.”
When he stopped to stare at me, I got a look at his badge, which read “Fishkiller” in large letters followed by two groups of smaller words I couldn’t read before he moved again.
He scowled in thought and went behind his desk, putting the clipboard down. He looked at his computer screen and sat. “I think so. . . . I’m not sure without looking, but I think there have been a few others. All homeless, high blood loss with very little spatter or staining, chewed or missing extremities . . . We have a limb or two also. Similar condition, but no associated bodies.”
“Would one of those be the leg discovered in the hotel excavation on Occidental near Royal Brougham?” I asked.
“That’s the one. Very similar . . .” He was intrigued, squinting and staring to the side as he thought. I dangled some bait to see if he was the curious type he seemed.
“Do you think there might be older cases like this?”
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