Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (27 page)

“And if you understood thing one about human beings, you’d know that’s why I’m willing to kill you. That body’s in misery, and it used to be someone I knew.” He stopped, just out of arm’s reach, and stared down at the ifrit. “It’ll be quick, and then this whole clusterfuck will be over.”

“I do not want . . . ” But the ifrit’s voice trailed off, as if it could no longer be certain what it did want, or didn’t want; Mick remembered for no reason that mongooses were supposed to mesmerize their prey by dancing for them.

“Hold still, Shawna,” Jamie said, his voice terribly kind, and then he moved.

Greased lightning had nothing on Jamie Keller, and Mick was still shocked at the idea that anyone so big could move so fast when he realized that small dry noise he had heard, like a twig breaking, had been Shawna Lafayette’s neck. The body was just a body now, slumped and broken. The ifrit was gone.

“Is it dead, too?” Mick said hoarsely.

“Fucked if I know,” Jamie said, and it was clear he didn’t care, either. “Shawna’s better off, though. I’m sure of that.”

They reached the Skylark half an hour later, without another word being exchanged; Jamie folded down into the driver’s seat with a sigh of relief and reached for the handset.

Mick caught his wrist. “Tell me first—are you okay?”

“Yeah. Adler got me down with a hex, not a cosh. Hadn’t gone face-first, I wouldn’t even have the bloody nose.” He sounded disgusted at his own clumsiness.

Mick hadn’t really meant physically. “Jamie . . . ”

“I’m fine, Mick. Let’s report in and get this over with, okay?”

Mick couldn’t argue with that, although he had a vague feeling he should. He listened as Jamie called in; neither of them was surprised when Jesperson’s voice interrupted to pepper Jamie with questions. Jesperson really
didn’t
sleep, and he almost never went home. The first was the result of being a class nine necromancer—a necromancer dux, they called it in Britain—even if officially non-practicing; Mick often wondered if the second was as well.

“Did you find out what killed Brett Vincent?”

“Yes, sir. And Shawna Lafayette, too. Well, part of Shawna Lafayette, anyway.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“No, sir. Because Adler’s hosting ifrits.”

Jesperson’s vocabulary became briefly unprintable. “Are you sure? Adler’s only . . . ”

“Class four, yessir.
That
’s what happened to Shawna Lafayette. And Brett Vincent.”

“That . . . oh. Oh, bloody hell.”

“Yessir. Adler and his boys, they’re talking ‘bout it like a ritual, and I know for a fact Henry Adler ain’t got the math. He can’t figure a tip without a calculator.”

“I like this even less than I thought I would. How long do you think this has been going on?”

“Dunno, sir. But I know what happened to Brett Vincent’s body was on account of them getting the phase wrong, and the stupid bastards didn’t even know the word.”

Becoming aware of Mick’s goggle-eyed stare, he covered the mike with his palm and hissed, “
What
?”

Mick just shook his head, and Jesperson said, “’Brett Vincent’s
body
.’ You don’t think—”

“I think Brett Vincent’s been dead for a long time. Same way I would’ve been if Echo hadn’t come and got me out.”

“Yes, what
was
November Echo’s part in this evening’s escapade?”

“Echo was invaluable, sir,” Jamie said, and elbowed Mick hard in the ribs to make him stop laughing.

“Good,” Jesperson said. A pause, probably while he wrote something on one of the legal pads that littered his office like shed snakeskins. “How many ifrits do you think there are in Electric Squidland?”

“There can’t be that many,” Mick said, and now it was Jamie’s turn to look goggle-eyed at him.

“How do you figure that, November Echo?”

“Yeah,” Jamie said. “How
do
you figure that?”

“Well, you said it yourself—and how did you get to learn so much about necromancy, anyway?”

“
I
don’t spend my off-hours fornicating like a bunny rabbit. Go on—what did I say?”

“That they didn’t know what they were doing. I mean, I don’t either, but if they had to repeat the spell every so often—?”

“Yeah. ‘Bout once every five years. Ifrit starts losing its grip, and that ain’t pretty. Well, you saw.”

“Yeah. And they’ve fucked up twice
that we know about
in the last three years—they can’t be maintaining an army of ifrits, or we’d be up to our asses in Missing Persons.”

“They must’ve lost the person who knew what they were doing.”

“Carolyn Witt,” Jesperson said, startling them both badly. “She was part owner of Electric Squidland. Sold her share to Adler just before her arrest. And she was class seven. I think a word with Ms. Witt might clear up a great many questions.”

“Yessir,” Jamie said and yawned.

“Go home, November Foxtrot and Echo,” Jesperson said, and for a moment the rasp in his voice sounded less like irritation and more like concern. “You can finish the paperwork when you’ve got some sleep.”

The BPI raided Electric Squidland that same night, discovering things in the rooms beneath the Neon Cthulhu that would keep the state Office of Necromantic Regulation and Assessment busy for years. Suzanne Parker was not among those arrested; she had taken Mick’s advice and gotten the hell out of Dodge.

At 11:34 the next morning, Mick set two cups of coffee on the desk he and Jamie shared, and sat down opposite his partner. Although his head was clear this morning, and the world was coloring within the lines, Mick had a gloomy feeling today was not going to be a good day at all. They were facing a mountainous stack of paperwork, including the closing of a file on an seventeen-year-old boy named Daniel McKendrick who had disappeared from a Nashville suburb in 1983. His fingerprints matched those of Brett Vincent.

Jamie pushed back from the desk, stretching until his spine popped.

“Lila going to forgive you?” Mick asked.

“Maybe,” Jamie said dolefully. “She hates my schedule.”

“That’s because you don’t have one.”

“Bite me.” Jamie took a generous swallow of coffee and said, “Do you think we’re right to say that body is Daniel McKendrick?”

“It
is
Daniel McKendrick.”

“Not like that. I mean, his family’s gonna be notified, and they been thinking he’s dead all this time, and now they get half a fucking body to bury? Aside from which, Daniel McKendrick
has
been dead all this time—or at least most of it. That body was . . . somebody else, if it was a person at all.”

“You mean, you think when you were sleeping with him . . . ”

“Oh, I’m sure of it. Because he didn’t give a shit when Shawna Lafayette disappeared, and now I know why.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Mick asked, red-faced at his own stupid clumsiness.

“No, but I’m gonna have to put it in the report anyway.” Jamie sighed, took another slug of coffee. “It’s the reason I quit Electric Squidland. Well, one of the reasons. Shawna was a waitress in the Kaleidoscope. She caught Adler’s eye, because she was pretty and not very bright, and I was worried about it—because she was pretty and not very bright. And then she disappeared, and nobody cared, and I asked Brett if he didn’t think there was something strange about it, and he essentially told me to mind my own business. And, you know, I’d seen him talking to Shawna before she disappeared. Talking to her
a lot
.”

“Persuading her.”

“Seducing her,” Jamie corrected. “And I don’t know how many other people he seduced like that, or why he didn’t try it on with me.”

“Jamie, you’re not helping yourself—”

“You know, that’s the worst part. He let me go.”

“Sorry?”

“
He let me go.
Oh, he tried to make me stay on, but when I wouldn’t, he was okay with it. He never used magic on me, or tried to get me to play Adler’s little games. Hell, he never even asked me to go down to the Neon Cthulhu with him, and he must have known I would have. I think about the shit he could have pulled on me and the fact he didn’t pull it, and the fact that he fucking let me go, and . . . Well, fuck it, Mick, I don’t know. Was I just not worth it? Or do you think ifrits can love?”

“I don’t know,” Mick said, wanting desperately to give a better answer but simply not having one. “I really don’t.” And hesitantly, almost cringing, he reached out and put his hand over Jamie’s, feeling the warmth and the strength and the roughness of Jamie’s knuckles. And Jamie turned his hand over, folded his fingers around Mick’s hand.

They sat that way for a moment, saying nothing. Jamie squeezed tighter, then let go and said briskly, “This ain’t getting the paperwork done.” But his eyes were clearer, as if some of the pain knotting him up had been released, and Mick returned to his share of their report feeling better himself.

Today might turn out to be a good day after all.

They were pulling out of the parking lot of St. Dymphna’s Psychiatric Hospital when the radio crackled into life. Mick 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 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.

Eye-witness 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.