C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

Ha. My brain thought it was so clever, but I could still outsmart it. I knew it’d had something to say. All I had to do was pretend I didn’t care. Ha! Jen, fortunately oblivious to my internal monologue, but more or less following what I’d said, said, “Serial killers usually stay in their ethnic group, unless their actions are actually racially motivated. Which is it?”

I wobbled my head. “There pretty much weren’t white people in Seattle before about 1850.” Billy’s history lessons were paying off. “So either we’ve got incoming whites, one of whom is a madman, or a local tribesman trying to scare off the incomers. I think it’s the incomers.”

Jen’s eyebrows inched upward. “Buying into the noble savage, are we?”

I snorted. “More thinking that if you’re trying to scare off newcomers, you probably wouldn’t stop with murdering just one little girl. And hoping that we’re lucky and our half-century killer started with Anne-Marie, so we don’t have to look beyond the city for this pattern repeated.” I thumped my knuckles on her desk, then dredged up a brief smile. “Thanks, Jen. I think that’s probably all we need right now.”

“A case file on somebody who’s been missing a hundred years? Billy didn’t tell me what you were working on.”

My smile went all crooked and I shrugged as I headed for the door. “Ghost stories.”

Halfway back to Homicide, my phone rang. I’d learned to expect bad news when it did that, so I answered cautiously, as if wrinkling my face could ward off whatever’d gone wrong. For once, though, it was a friendly voice with a friendly question: “So are you going to manage lunch today?”

“Thor! Where were you last night?” It didn’t matter; I was just as glad he hadn’t been sitting around waiting for me. That kind of thing never seemed like healthy-relationship material to me, not that I knew from healthy relationships. “You know what, I can do lunch. Are you at work?”

“Lemme think about that.” I could envision him rolling up his sleeve to look at his watch. He wore one like mine, a big heavy Ironman plastic thing that was hard to damage. “It’s ten forty-five on a Monday morning. Yep, I’m at work. Where else would I be? I got your message last night. You doing okay?” He sounded genuinely concerned, which I found charming.

“I’m good. Busy with this mess that fell in our laps. You?”

“Fine. I went out with some of the guys last night. Sorry I missed you.”

“Yeah. How dare you go out and have a life without me, especially when I’ve forgotten to call.” I grinned and ducked into the Homicide Department, where I had a whiteboard lying across my desk. It made me feel like my life was a cop drama, which had its ups, as well as its downs. On the upside, it gave me the inter-office romance storyline that usually dominated the emotional side of those shows. On the downside, it meant I was investigating murders, which sounded cooler in theory than in practice. I took a black pen and started writing on the board. “You missed out on Chinese takeaway and me, all for what, a couple beers and a game of bingo?”

Archie Redding hadn’t yet been heard from. Jason Chan was dead. I drew an arrowhead between them and put Sandburg’s name in between, then struck it out with a yellow pen. His aura had just been too damn clean. Thor said, “Darts, and I won seventy bucks on the game,” cheerfully.

“You can buy lunch, then.” I fell silent a minute, half listening to his good-natured protest as I wrote down the names of a bunch of long-dead kids on the other side of the board, and drew another arrowhead to “Shadowy Cloaked Figure.” I wished the bad guys would turn up wearing meringue dresses and pompadours sometimes, instead of being so predictably dour.

Between them I drew a cauldron, complete with a zombie climbing out. Right since the very beginning of my new life, I’d been hoping there was no such thing as the undead. I figured ghosts didn’t count, since they weren’t corporeal. I didn’t want zombies, though on a scale of one to ten, they were maybe a seven, with vampires holding the coveted ten-spot. I didn’t know what went in between, but it didn’t matter. I really didn’t want vampires. I put the phone against my shoulder, muffling Thor’s account of the darts game. “Billy, that cauldron doesn’t make vampires, does it?”

He said, “No,” as if I’d asked a perfectly reasonable question. “Just undead warriors. Nobody ever mentioned them being bloodsuckers.”

“Good.” I struck a line down the center of the whiteboard, cutting the cauldron in half, to remind myself these were two different cases. Then I circled the cauldron, because two cases or not, I was convinced it was the heart of it all. “Billy, I’m going up to the Space Needle. Want to take an early lunch?” The second part was to the phone, but Billy shook his head.

“I get indigestion from the room spinning. Oh. You weren’t talking to me. So I get left behind to do the dirty work while you cost lunch to the department?”

Thor, in my ear, said, “Lemme ask Nick,” and, in defiance of all the studies that said people aren’t made for multitasking, I said, “Pretty much,” to Billy. “I’m going to see if I can get a read on the cauldron from up there. It’s a better vantage point than the museum.”

“What’re you going to do if you lock on?”

“Finish my salad, then call you and we can go storming in like superheroes to save Archie Redding, arrest the bad guy, retrieve the cauldron and rebind it so it stops waking up the dead.” It sounded like an awesome plan. I was all for it.

“Any idea how we’re going to do that last part?”

“Not a clue. Don’t burst my bubble. We’ll be done in time for you to take the kids trick-or-treating. What’re you going to do in the meantime?”

“I’m going to see if I can connect Sandburg to any kind of black market, and maybe find some reliable backup and go talk to him again.” Billy gave me a dour look that made me feel only slightly guilty. There weren’t many other detectives who wouldn’t snort laughter in their sleeves while Billy asked questions about a missing cauldron and a potential sale on a magical black market, but there were a couple, whereas there was literally nobody else who could do what I was planning. I was cobbling together an unconvincing apology, when Thor spoke in my ear, startling me.

“Nick says I’m cool. Think we can make it back by noon?”

For an instant I didn’t know what he was talking about. So much for my amazing multitasking skills. Then I caught up with the secondary conversation and shook my head. “I think we’d be lucky to get downtown and parked, much less eat and be back here by noon.” I was only exaggerating a little. “Maybe we better take separate cars. I don’t think I’m coming back here after lunch, at least not right away.”

“Will you reconsider if you get to drive The Truck?”

My knees went weak. I never let anybody else drive Petite, but Thor’d handed over the keys to The Truck a couple of times. Climbing up into that big tall cab was enough to set me aquiver. I’d even worn a miniskirt the second time I drove it. We’d gone to a monster-truck rally, and I figured there was nothing more awesome than looking like a real girl at a show like that. I’d gotten thunderous applause just for climbing out of the driver’s seat. I still felt sexy just thinking about it, and sexy and I weren’t that familiar with each other.

I groaned into the phone. If there hadn’t been witnesses, I might’ve said I moaned, but that would’ve been indiscreet. “Meet me in the parking lot and we’ll discuss it.”

“That sounds promising.” Thor hung up with an audible grin. I grabbed my coat and scurried out before anybody could give me hell about getting worked up over a truck.