Kat Richardson: Seawitch

He turned his head a bit so he was looking at me from the corner of his eye—a posture I was familiar with from the many times I’d used it to peer deeper into the Grey without falling in. “How did you get past me?”

I shrugged. “I’m slippery.”

“Yes, and you are, as always, not telling me something.”

I pulled a rueful face. “Can I explain later? Right now I just want to get a look at the problem and get out of here so I can change into dry clothes.”

He nodded and opened the door, keeping one eye on me the whole time.

Nothing new came out, but the tide of Grey surged a bit, as if he’d opened a gate at the locks and let a gush of water through. I waited for it to calm before I stepped into the doorway, mentally bracing myself, and looked into the cabin.

The room was cramped and not very square—or at least it looked that way with the wall opposite me sloping and curving outward on one axis and inward on the other. This was obviously the boat’s hull near the bow, where things got narrow and pointy. The narrow bunk made me think this was a crew cabin, not guest accommodations. Judging by the slopes and angles, part of this room—as with all the rooms and corridors down here—was below the waterline. The smell was strong here but not identical to the stink above; this had the additional odor of burned driftwood and the harsh sting of iodine. The room itself seemed just a bit out of focus, as if the swirling liquid Grey clouded my eyes, and everything was filthy with decayed ocean flora as well as the same sort of black and green mold stains we’d seen upstairs. That was ugly enough, but the floor and the built-in bed must have been the things that caught the SPD’s attention.

A low moan seemed to issue nearby and I jumped little. Solis didn’t look quite as startled, but even he was unsettled by the sound. It took a moment for me to realize it wasn’t a ghost—it was a foghorn—before I could return my attention to the strange sight on the cabin floor.

A pattern of rust-colored arcs and markings started on the floor and carried on over the surface of the bed and back to the floor, incompletely enclosing a twelve-pointed star in a circle of intertwined curves that looked like cresting waves. Smeared letters or numbers had been sketched at each point of the star with barely enough room between the point and the circling, painted waves. In the middle of the star something had bled a lot and matching spatters crusted in mold marked the walls. Incongruous dots of luminous color and rainbow shimmer were scattered throughout the weird markings. One edge of the ring and some of the figures had been wiped out, creating a gap in the circle. I’d never seen this before yet it felt familiar in a way I couldn’t pin down. . . .

I crouched, keeping one hand on the doorframe to steady myself as I studied the circle of symbols. Something gritty rubbed against my palm. Resting my weight against the doorpost, I looked at my still-damp left hand. The dry substance from the wall made a bright red stain on my hand. I held it out to Solis.

“Is this blood?”

He nodded. “It’s human.”

“Crap,” I muttered, and I knew what had tripped my sense of the familiar: This was some kind of blood magic—not like what I’d seen before, but I recognized the general sensation and stink of it. Magic really wasn’t my strong suit; I’d have to wing this one on my own, since my friends the Danzigers were out of the country and I usually brought this sort of problem to them. “Any idea whose blood this is?”

Solis shook his head. “It’s hard to tell with samples so old and broken down, but it appears to be mixed with something else as well as the blood of more than one person. Who is not yet known.”

“And may not be if the bleeders have no match in the DNA database. Any suspects?”

“Everyone who was on board when the boat was reported missing.”

I stood up again and turned to face Solis directly. “You have a working theory?”

He gave a small shake of his head. “Empty speculation has no point. This is the only cabin with such markings, although there may be traces of blood in many others. Traces only.”

“May be? You’re not sure?”

“This is a low priority case for the SPD and the risk of false positives is too high in this environment for extensive use of the Luminol test. I’ve had to take test scrapings from the obvious stains and submit them to the lab.” He pointed to the small, numbered evidence-location tags stuck here and there in the cabin. “The results are not yet available and stains have not been easy to find or identify.”

“Do you think they were cleaned up or just . . . decayed beyond identification?” I asked.

“It’s the discovery that has been difficult, but if this stain survived, why not others? The whole boat has the dirt and mold so if this marking is a sign of crime, why only here? If the passengers and crew were killed, why isn’t there more blood elsewhere? What does this symbol mean? This is where my questions begin.”

I nodded. “Dirt. Blood . . . Where did the seaweed come from?”

Solis raised his eyebrows. “From the sea.”

I was still wet and the room was unnaturally cold, so I was distracted, scowling, and shivering a little, but not enough to miss that rare spark of sarcasm. Or was it rare? I’d never spent much time with Solis beyond a cumulative hour or two of mutual info swap and occasional interrogation. I’d assumed the taciturn detective didn’t have much of a sense of humor, but that wasn’t likely. Homicide investigation is one of those fields that demands an outlet for the purging of the disillusion and disgust that come with the territory. A lot of cops and forensic investigators tend toward a sense of humor as black and dry as gunpowder; others become callous and irreverent or just plain crass. Only those about to crack lose their ability to laugh, however gruesome and unfeeling that may sound. Rey Solis was apparently—though quietly—just as odd as any other cop and possibly more stable than most.

I felt I should ask him some insightful, buddy-bonding sort of question at this point, but I couldn’t think of one. Or have some clever comeback for his snarky quip—if he’d have been Quinton, I’d have called him a smart-ass at the very least—but that also seemed to come up blank for me. Instead I just gave the eye roll I awarded to most bad jokes and puns.

“You guys find anything like this in the rest of the boat?”

“Not guys. Only me. But there is nothing else quite like this. Other stains, other similar materials, but not arranged as so.” He made an indicative circle with his finger at the blood-painted symbols and their collection of muck.

I stood back as far as I could and still see the whole space. I gave the encircled star and its mess a sideways glance through the Grey; it writhed and wavered in liquid colors that circled the bloody star like the edges of a whirlpool. I couldn’t detect any sign of who had made the circle or what it was for, but I did see some holes in the pattern—just two or three. . . .

“Is this exactly as you found it?” I asked Solis.

“No. I removed one of the pebbles and some of those shiny flecks for testing. I believe the flecks are fish scales.”

“And the pebbles?”

He shrugged. “Very old glass that’s been sand-scoured.”

Beach glass, though they didn’t look much like any kind of glass from where I was standing. Dull surfaced, pitted, dirty, and partially smirched with filth and blood, they looked more like small, colorful river rocks or broken marbles of almost a dozen colors: cobalt, apple green, gold, cherry red, kelly, aqua, brown, violet, white, jade, and black with a rainbow sheen barely seen beneath the crud. They were irregular shapes that ranged in size from shards no bigger than my pinky fingernail to clods as long as my thumb; when you consider how large my hands are, that’s a good-sized chunk of junk. But even knowing what the material was, I still didn’t have any idea what had happened aboard the Seawitch .