Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1 (15 page)

‘You getting clucky?’ Which was a fair question from a man I’d only just started seeing.

‘Don’t be silly. I mean somebody else’s kid.’ That came out wrong.
How the hell would I explain this?

‘You getting kidnappy?’

‘I’m . . . making some enquiries about a woman who died. It appears she had a baby, and said baby is missing. So, apart from
random babynappers and an unknown father, where might the child be?’

‘She was a working mum? Before the death, I mean?’ He paused. ‘Crèche? Kindergarten? Day care centre?’

I stared at him, silently berating myself. Surely I should have been able to come up with that on my own? But we childless,
we live in a special kind of happy ignorance.

What David said made sense; of course someone running a business would need time
sans
offspring. And there were definitely crèches and kindergartens in Bulimba.

‘Have you ever thought about changing careers, maybe renting yourself out as a back-up cortex?’ I asked.

We’d had a talk – not
the
talk, not yet – but
a
talk, which meant I’d told him I was a PI. Well, I was, I investigated things . . . we just hadn’t got around to covering
for whom, or mentioning which particular sector of the populace employed me. I didn’t want to lie outright as that struck
me as a very poor way to start a relationship with my first non-Weyrd guy-friend, so all I could do was share as much as I
was comfortable with him knowing for the moment.
Sufficient unto the day is the weirdness thereof
, and all that.

I’d spent the better part of the afternoon getting precisely nowhere – company records showed that the Oxford Street shop
was the extent of her commercial interests and title-deed searches revealed no other properties under Serena’s name. While
I was at it, I’d taken a moment to double-check for deeds to the Ascot house, in the faint hope that Ziggi’s minions might
have missed something, but of course they hadn’t. Then I’d wasted the rest of the day phoning round all the upmarket hotels
and asking if Serena Kallos had ever checked in; when I’d exhausted that list I moved on to the mid-range hotels before finally
hitting the roach motels. But none of this yielded anything, and I was beginning to think that unless she owned another place
under an alias, she’d either been staying with a friend when she died, or hiding out somewhere else.

David’s invitation to dinner had been the shining light at the end of my crappy day. He had an apartment in the Woolstore,
a complex with the kind of architectural strangeness you generally get when someone tries to make a storage space fit for
human habitation. Some areas were too large, others too small and almost all of them could be described as ‘challenging’ in
shape. Stairs ran at crazy angles, strikingly ugly carpets mingled with strikingly beautiful polished
wood and mediocre polished concrete. On the ground floor, banks of mailboxes requiring small keys lined one wall of the lobby,
which I chose to think of as the beginning of the maze: I would not have been at all surprised if I’d bumped into a minotaur
checking his mail.

But enough about me.

‘What did you do today?’ I asked.

‘I spent two hours discussing brown with a client,’ he answered, his expression pained.

‘
Brown?
He’s fond of brown?’

‘Overly so, I’d say.’ He took a bite of naan. ‘He wanted his website entirely in shades of brown, of which, it turns out,
there are
many
.’

‘Fifty Shades of Brown?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And how’d it go?’

‘I stopped listening after the first thirty minutes and sang songs in my head.’

‘You are wise.’

I looked around and couldn’t help but compare the warmth of David’s apartment with the cold refinement of Serena Kallos’ place.
Though it lurked behind one of many identical glossy cream doors, it had much more character than I’d expected, given the
rest of the building. The kitchen was all black granite worktops and gleaming stainless steel appliances; the lounge was resplendent
with heavy wooden bookcases, a dark green leather sofa and matching chairs and a Turkish rug about the size of two Mini Coopers
parked end to end. At the far end of the room, one whole wall was taken up by the big-screen TV and matching sound system
and an enormous desk with a state-of-the-art PC and two monitors. On a charger in the corner of
the desk I spotted an iPad, sleeping peacefully. David’s tour of the place took in a spare room that was pretty basic, but
ready for overnight guests, a fairly large bathroom and a mezzanine platform with a king-size bed and an en-suite bathroom.
The place was anything but beige; it was comfortable and cozy, yet stylish in its own way.

I was about to shovel in a mouthful of butter chicken when my jacket, hanging over the back of a chair, emitted a shriek.
I gave David an apologetic look and checked the number, thinking it might be Lizzie, who’d taken to calling me before she
went to bed – Mel said it helped her get to sleep.

But alas, it was Rhonda’s number, and past experience had shown there was no ignoring Detective Inspector McIntyre when she
wanted attention. She’d just keep ringing until I answered.

She didn’t bother with any of the usual social niceties like ‘Hello’ or ‘Sorry for ruining your evening’.

‘Fassbinder, we’ve got another one of those chicken-women.’ She didn’t bother to keep her voice down; she was unhappy and
she didn’t care who knew it. I held the phone away from my ear and could still hear her perfectly, and so, I suspected, could
David. ‘Have you got any-fucking-thing for me?’

‘Tomorrow I’m trying the kindies near her home,’ I offered.

‘What am I paying you for?’ she barked.

‘Well, strictly speaking, you’re not paying me on this one, Tepes is.’ I made the distinction even though I knew it wouldn’t
make the slightest bit of difference. ‘But even I need to eat and sleep and bathe occasionally. Not to mention that kindergartens
and day care centres close overnight.’ I wasn’t doing a particularly good job of keeping the annoyance out of my voice. ‘You
got any-fucking-thing for me? Something from a birth certificate, perhaps?’

‘Nothing yet – apparently I’m not as important as either of us thought,’ she snapped, then she calmed down a bit and added,
‘Except the autopsy report came in.’

I waited. Her voice sounded a bit odd.

‘Apart from the effects of falling from a great height, her heart was crushed.’

I let that sink in, then asked, ‘It’s not something that could have happened on impact? Wouldn’t the internal organs be the
consistency of a daiquiri after that sort of plunge?’

‘Under normal circumstances I’d agree with you, but these sirens are tougher than old boots. There are finger marks around
the cardiac muscle, very clear to see. Someone reached into her chest –
left no trace going in
– and
squeezed
.’ She coughed and I heard a lifetime of cigarettes rattling around in her lungs.

‘You okay?’

‘Nothing a bullet won’t fix,’ she snorted. ‘Get back to me as soon as you find anything. If any more of these corpses turn
up I don’t know how I’m going to keep it quiet.’

‘The new one – you need me to come to the scene?’

‘Nope. She’s in the Botanical Gardens, caught in a tree like she fell out of a plane. We’re cleaning it up and getting her
removed.’

‘That must be fun to keep out of the public eye.’

‘You’d be amazed how much land you can rope off under the threat of a gas leak.’

‘Ingenious. Take some snaps; I’ll meet you at the morgue in a couple of hours.’ I thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Any ID?’

‘Yep, this one’s got a handbag. See you later.’ Then there was just dead air.

I went back to the couch. Half of my dinner had disappeared, and anything resembling naan bread had apparently never existed.
David’s plate was empty of any trace of food and he wore the look of a guilty dog.

My appetite was gone but I still glared.

‘It was unguarded,’ he said by way of explanation.

‘Okay, this is a boundary issue and we need to talk about it . . .’

*

I didn’t like the morgue. It smelled wrong: the kind of super-duper clean that never quite covered up the fact that there
were dead things everywhere. It felt wrong: grief and death had embedded themselves in the walls, in tile and concrete that
should have been impervious, and it
sounded
wrong too: the clip of my footsteps so final that I was always vaguely astonished to find I was still alive when I left.
Finally, there were the whispers; a gentle, distressed susurrus of the surprised and protesting dead. I was never able to
make out what they were saying, mind; I couldn’t quite distinguish the words. I just knew the tone, the cadences of despair,
which heightened my awareness and made it extra upsetting that I couldn’t always help, no matter how much I wanted to.

It was quite a trek to get out to Coopers Plains. Ziggi had taken the night off and the cab fare was hefty – David had offered
to drive, but I didn’t want the two parts of my life colliding quite so soon. The overly perky night receptionist was new
and gave me directions I didn’t need to the elevators after she’d handed over a visitor’s badge; I was grumpy and definitely
did not want to be there, but I managed to bite down on a sarky comment.
Virtue, thy name is Verity.
I took one to the basement and stepped into the long corridor. A breeze pushed at my back, though there was no source, then
came a flapping noise and I felt as though feathers brushed against my skin, like wings were being wrapped around me. I tried
to rub the sensation away from my arms, much like a junkie trying to remove imaginary spiders, and
resisted the urge to run. Fear made me sweat, and for a moment I was glad I’d not had a chance to eat my dinner, as the little
I already had in my stomach started roiling.

A door opened a little way down the hallway and McIntyre’s dishevelled head popped out. ‘Took your time. Finished farting
about?’

I shuddered and went over to her. ‘You ever
sense
anything down here?’

She looked startled, began to answer, then closed her mouth and retreated into the autopsy suite, leaving me to follow. The
room was brightly illuminated and the technician looked like a stain against all the lightness. Ellen was small and thin and
shaven-headed, and all visible skin except her face was swarming with tattoos. Myriad designs crawled across the backs of
her hands and along her forearms to slip beneath the edge of the sleeve, then reappeared like tendrils from the collar of
her scrubs. They wound their way up her throat and the nape of her neck to blossom all over her shaved head: a colourful collage
of mouths and faces, tears and roses, pearls and breasts, beasts and bells. Her hairline had exquisitely detailed inking,
which made it appear as if her face was peering out from a hole in an eggshell. It was both lizard-like and Bosch-esque, simultaneously
beautiful and disturbing. She looked exhausted.

On one of the steel tables lay a dark-haired woman, her pale skin blotched with bruises and smeared with blood. No Y incision
marked her chest yet, so I guessed she’d not long been delivered. On a separate table were her wings; their stumps still oozed.
I recognised her as one of the sirens I’d seen at the Kangaroo Point nest; she was the one who’d hissed at me and tried to
keep me away from Eurycleia. Who – or
what
– had she pissed off?

I leaned in, examining her exposed flesh, and pointed to a trickle
of crimson that’d dried on her neck. It led up into her hair. ‘What’s that?’

Ellen held the black locks back and I took a closer look, McIntyre at my side. A raw red mark sat high behind her left ear,
mostly hidden by the luxuriant tresses. It was in the shape of a small square cross, and it hadn’t been branded onto her skin,
it had been carved.

I straightened, nearly knocking McIntyre over, and asked quickly, ‘Is Serena Kallos still here?’

The tech shrugged and turned towards the bank of steel drawers, which earned her a glare from Rhonda, who snapped, ‘She means
“yes”. You’ll have to forgive Ellen; she sometimes has trouble using her words.’

She gave me an
it’s-so-hard-to-get-good-help
eye-roll while we waited for Serena Kallos to appear from her cold bed.

I tried not to look at the rough stitching holding her torso together. Ellen had to search carefully, shifting individual
hairs like a grooming monkey, but at last she found an identical mark high on the back of Serena’s skull, dried to a dull
rust colour.

‘What’s it mean?’ asked the tech, and it was my turn to shrug.

‘If we knew that, Ellen, we wouldn’t be here.’ McIntyre wearily rubbed her face with both hands, as if she could smooth out
the wrinkles.

‘More importantly, why didn’t
you
find it?’ I asked, and Ellen looked embarrassed.

‘This one only just came in tonight—’ she began, then stopped and admitted, ‘It was pretty obvious what killed her – both
of them. I didn’t think I needed to look for anything else. I’m sorry.’

‘Believe it or not, Ellen, we’re not only interested in the immediate cause of death,’ McIntyre said cuttingly, and I suspected
words would be had later.

‘Name?’ I asked.

‘Teles Dimitriou, reputed to be twenty-six. Until very recently, resident in an exclusive block of units over at Sydney Street,
New Farm. A lawyer.’

I gestured to the wings. Even though I was certain I knew the answer I asked, ‘You remove those?’

Ellen shook her head, earrings jangling in her left ear. When she turned around I saw the wings inked onto the back of her
head, reaching up either side from the base of the skull to the crown. I glanced at her feet, but the shoes weren’t custom-made,
just ordinary Reeboks. ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m neater than that. These have been wrenched off.’

I touched a finger to Serena Kallos’ lovely dead face and traced a raised scratch, thinking of what might have happened if
I’d been too late to save Lizzie. I imagined how Mel would look if she’d had to come here, identify her child – if there’d
even been a body after the Winemaker had had her way – or worse still, no body, no closure, Lizzie missing like Serena’s daughter
was now. I thought about Calliope Kallos, out there somewhere in the dark of the night, while her mother lay dead in a freezer.