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It was also a very public way, one that could end Roger Pyle’s career.
She studied the rest of the room in a slow, careful sweep while the Spectrometer beeped quietly from its new holster around her waist. Two dressers, two bedside tables with ornate handles on the bottom doors. Everything in the room had a twin, a mirror image of itself. How imaginative of Kym. If she hadn’t married whom she married, Chess thought, she probably would have been one of those women who hung plaster ducks on the walls and collected painted plates.
The Spectrometer found a steady beat while Chess paced the floor, speeding up by the bed, slowing down by the window, finally beeping faster outside a closed door on the right-hand wall. She glanced up.
“Bathroom,” Roger said.
Chess went inside.
No, Kym Pyle was not a woman with a lot of inhibitions. The window in the bathroom had no blinds or shades; cold white light spilled over the marble tub and floor and filled the mirror to Chess’s right. In summer it might have been pretty. Now it felt sterile, and hushed like a cemetery.
Something of life was in the room, though. The Spectrometer continued beeping, the high-pitched sound bouncing off the marble until it sounded more like one long continuous whine and Chess’s heart started pounding. Whatever noise her boots made on the shiny floor was lost while she walked this way and that, trying to determine the source of the beeps. Trying to find the ghost. Her shoulders tensed. She was not alone in this room, she knew it. Dead eyes watched her from a place she could not see. Her skin crawled and tingled, her tattoos warming, waiting for it. Whatever it was.
But nothing happened. After a few minutes she started to relax. The Spectrometer’s beeps didn’t have to mean a ghost was present, just that one had been—and there were ways, illegal ways, to fool even the Spectro. She didn’t see how any of those could be used here—there wasn’t much room to hide them—but still…
She shook her head. It was not time to start thinking of this as a real haunting yet. She was spooking herself. A bad move. Time to get going.
It wasn’t until she turned around to leave that she became aware of the smell. It had been there almost from the moment she stepped into the room, but subtle, almost undetectable. The minute she caught it, recognized it, it grew stronger still. Death. Decay. Rotting things, squirming things buried in the earth. Everything foul and wrong hid inside that smell, was caught by it and transmitted to her through it.
She still felt safe enough; even her tattoos had stopped tingling. But the odor remained, wafting through the air like a whisper. She checked the tub drain, wondering if perhaps the scent came from inside, but it was no stronger there than anywhere else.
That left the double sinks below the mirror. Her feet moved as if through mud. The smell was all she could think of, all she could focus on; it blurred her vision, made her ears ring and her head hurt.
The sinks were white, gleaming and pure in the dark green countertop. Chess thought the smell might be stronger there but couldn’t be sure. She was beginning to doubt she would ever breathe fresh air again. The thought of all the bacteria that must be carried in that smell, the thought of plagues and epidemics, made it almost impossible to check the other sink.
She didn’t have to. Movement caught her eye. She turned automatically and saw a cockroach crawling over the lip of the sink, its horrible black body an abomination against the spotless marble. Another appeared, and another. Chess forced herself to take a step closer, being careful to keep her body away from the counter itself, and saw movement in the drain, heard the dry rustle of scabrous exoskeletons rubbing together.
Her fists clenched. A spot of red liquid flew from the drain and landed on the mirror. Her insides twisted as one drop became two, became three, and blood burbled up from the drain, viscous bright blood filled with squirming bodies, rising in the sink.
She didn’t realize she’d been moving until the back of her thigh hit the high, cold side of the tub. For a second she teetered, trying not to fall, unable to take her eyes from the groaning, bubbling sink.
Her hand hit the edge of the tub to brace herself. She would not throw up, would not, could not. This too could be faked. It wasn’t a difficult trick to do. Even the smell of the blood, a coppery tang beneath the stronger odor of decay, could be faked. She’d never seen anything this elaborate on a case before, but she’d never investigated millionaires, either.
“Okay. Okay.” Her own voice soothed her, brought her back into herself. It was time to leave this room. Every cell in her body screamed at her to get out. She’d come back later, examine, investigate. She had the layout of the house down, she had an idea of how the family worked and what their relationships were, it was all she needed.
Her composure thus regained, she strode out of the bathroom with a smile that made her cheeks ache. Church policy for Debunkers: Never, ever indicate you’ve seen anything out of the ordinary or been scared by anything you’ve seen. If they’d staged it, they’d wonder why she hadn’t mentioned it and it would unbalance them. If they hadn’t, mentioning it might sound like an admission.
“Okay,” she said. “I think I have basically everything I need, so I’ll get back to the Church and start writing everything up, and I’ll be in touch soon.”
“Soon? How soon?” Kym did not look pleased.
“Oh, um, tomorrow, maybe, after sunset. We don’t really work on Holy Day, of course.”
Kym frowned. “We’re having a party tomorrow night. Arden won’t be here.”
Yes! Finally, something going right. Her chances of getting into the house would be much easier if there were a lot of people around anyway. And if Arden wasn’t home…
“I haven’t seen Arden’s room yet.” She turned to the girl. “Would you mind showing me before I go? That way you can be there while I look at it, it’s less like an invasion of privacy.”
Arden didn’t look convinced, but led Chess down the hall to the second door on the left—odd, wasn’t it, that her room wasn’t directly opposite her parents’?—and opened it.
Dark curtains on the windows turned the room into a cave. Chess picked her way across the floor, through the colorless, limp shapes of discarded clothing, and pulled the curtains. It only took a second to pop the wire out of the security alarm to disable it, and to unlock the window itself. It might be detected, sure, but it at least increased her odds of getting in easily when she came back later. She palmed the wire as she turned around.
The room was…just a room. Posters of pop stars covered the walls—apparently Arden was not into movie stars, which wasn’t much of a surprise considering what her father did for a living—and clothes and schoolbooks covered every available surface. A sparkly pink cell phone and matching laptop sat on an ornate white desk, which was itself almost hidden by stickers and pictures and scribbled phone numbers.
The rest of the room was dark blue and yellow, a surprising choice, but one Chess imagined Arden hadn’t made herself.
More clothes exploded from the closet, and Chess suspected from the anxious sidelong glances the girl kept giving the half-closed door that she had something hidden in there as well, but there was no point in trying to find out what. Not when she could look the next night with a lot more ease.
She gave Arden’s yellow bathroom a cursory glance—staying well away from the sinks—and made her goodbyes, taking with her Roger Pyle’s business card and a burning desire never to return.
Merritt was nowhere to be seen as she climbed into her car and pulled away from the garage. They’d searched the vehicle—expertly, but she knew they’d done it. She could smell them, sense them, hard hands rifling through her belongings, feeling around beneath her seats.
The wooden gate crept open for her once again and she was gone, speeding down the road, managing to get out of sight of the walls before she had to pull over and take her pills.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_86cda330-3051-588b-8960-ee11b2631b65)
Worse still are those who commit the ultimate evil, who bind themselves unto the dead. No good can come of such an act; at the end of it lies only misery.
—The Book of Truth, Rules, Article 37
“He could have made the brand, yeah,” she said, as Terrible slid the car up on the curb. The Johnny Cash CD cut off with the ignition, leaving too-loud silence in its wake. “It’s not something ghosts normally do, but it’s possible. Or he could have found it, or—I don’t know. It had to have happened right before she died, but I have no idea why.”
“He brand them dames before?”
“No. At least it wasn’t in the file, and there were—there were pictures.” More dead faces to add to the gallery that already followed her: Randy Duncan, Brain—the teenager she’d failed to protect a few months back…Brain’s pale little face refused to leave her. She’d had to put her new bed in a different location, against the opposite wall. Every time she walked into her bedroom she’d seen the shade of that still, wideeyed figure, silent and cold on her old bed.
“So he pick up new tricks, aye, in the City?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
He accepted this without comment and left the car, the removal of his weight lifting his side by several inches. Chess waited in the still-warm interior until he came around and opened her door for her, a habit of his she’d gotten used to.
Without the dead body on the ground, the street somehow managed to feel even more threatening than it had the night before. More empty. Daisy was gone, and already forgotten, as if by dying she’d erased herself from memory as well as the world itself.
Chess looked away from the spot where the girl had lain and nodded at the alley. “In there first, I guess. While there’s still a little light.”
Beneath her clothes her skin felt raw from the vigorous shower she’d practically thrown herself into when she got home. Raw, and a little tingly. The energy wasn’t anywhere near as strong as it had been the night before, but it lingered.
“Brought one along,” Terrible replied, pulling a long steel flashlight from the trunk of his car. When he leaned over, the butt of his gun and the thin round handle of some other weapon poked at the fabric of his shirt. The sight reassured her—not that she’d doubted. Terrible didn’t take chances.
Neither did she. In her bag was everything she thought she might need if the ghost of Charles Remington showed up again, and a few things she thought she might not but grabbed anyway.
“After, you wanna see Red Berta? Maybe she got more for you. Them dead ones, they ain’t forgotten, if you dig.”
“What, you mean the hookers still remember them?”
“Aye. Ain’t somethin they allow me into, but they got—they got secrets, aye? Knowledge they don’t share, least not with me or Bump. Not with men.”
“Yeah, okay. Is she going to be free tonight?”
“I give her a ring up, you want. After.”
“Okay.” A glance around told her the street was empty, but trusting your eyes was folly here, where shadows multiplied with every passing second. She squared her shoulders and stepped into the mouth of the alley. Another rush of sex magic swirled around her, then settled. “Think we’re going to be alone this time?”
“Slobag always tryin to make a grab,” Terrible said. Not really an answer, but an answer just the same. “Back round Festival time he tried makin some deal up on Fifty-first, get his hands on a buildin. Figured he planned to set up there, Bump and me did.”
“What’d you do? Burn it down?”
“Aye.”
Chess’s fingers brushed Terrible’s as she took the flashlight from him. Normally she would start looking up the walls, at the ceiling had there been one, but that was going to be difficult in this instance, so the ground would be first. She scanned back and forth, slowly, studying every inch revealed by the circle of light.
She didn’t bother asking him if anyone had been inside the building when the fire was started, figuring the odds on it were probably about fifty-fifty. Not her business, anyway.
“He knows it was you?”
She didn’t see him shrug, but knew he did. “Guessin he do. No matter though.”
“Because you’re safe here?”
“Because he always after us. Reason ain’t important.”
A spark of light shot off the flashlight’s beam, but when Chess bent down she saw it was only a bit of broken glass. She shone the light on the base of the wall to her left, listening as the creatures who’d eavesdropped on her phone conversation the night before once again skittered out of her way. Skittered, like roaches…ugh.
“Some things are—” She stopped. “Hey, come look at this.”
He crouched beside her, his arm bumping against her shoulder. “Aye?”
“There. The feather.” Inside her bag was a small box of surgical gloves. She handed the flashlight back and slipped one on, then picked up the feather between her thumb and index finger. Even with the gloves on, a slight tingle ran up her arm. Definitely connected.
Terrible shone the light directly on it, and she could see the buff tinge on the hairs, the stripes and mottling. “Shit.”
“What?”
“It’s an owl feather,” she said.
“Aye?”
“Yeah.” She turned it in the light. “I’m not sure what kind. I think it’s a Great Horned Owl, but I didn’t do as well in ornithology as I should have.”
“Ain’t know the Church teach you birds.”
“Birds are psychopomps. Especially birds of prey. Especially owls.”
“Takin souls to the City, meanin? They what you use?”
“No. I mean, yes, they do in normal circumstances, but no, we use specially trained dogs. Birds are too unpredictable, they can be hard to work with in ritual.”
“Why a ghost use a—a bird? Ain’t need it get up here, aye?”
“I’m not sure. No, he wouldn’t necessarily use it to get up here, but—” With her free hand she found some plastic pouches in her bag and dug them out. “Open one of those, will you?”
He did, holding it out for her to slip the feather into. She felt better once it was sealed away, but not much. “Ghosts don’t use psychopomps, no,” she said slowly, trying to force her recalcitrant brain into thought. “They’re not capable of magic—I mean, they can only feed off energy, not create it.”
“The psychopomp give them it?”
“No. They have energy of a sort, but it’s not the kind a ghost can use.”
Terrible caught the implication, as she knew he would. “So somebody working alongside yon ghost, aye?”
She nodded. The walls of the alley loomed over her, stretching into the dim sky like broad hands trying to cup over her and squash her. She hadn’t mentioned the energy from the night before, but she couldn’t put it off any longer. “Last night…,” she said, then cleared her throat and tried again. “Last night I noticed, I felt the energy from the magic they’d been doing. Sex magic. They were doing sex magic.”
Pause. “Them who killed her?”
“Yeah, I think so. I’m pretty sure. It was really strong, on her body and everything.”
“Lots of whores use magic. Makes them work go faster, if you dig. Maybe were them other dames you felt?”
“No. I wondered that too but this was…blacker, if you know what I mean. It didn’t feel right. And it didn’t feel like any of those girls could have made it. Too powerful, for one thing. And it felt male.”
Funny, she hadn’t really thought of that the night before, but it was true. It had felt male; too strident and aggressive to be a woman’s magic, even a woman like Red Berta.
“Ain’t know you could tell.”
“Yeah. Everyone’s magic feels a little different, it’s kind of like fingerprints. Or how everyone smells like themselves, it’s all chemical, you know what I mean? The energy from one of my spells wouldn’t feel like the energy from yours, or anyone else’s. It’s unique.”
“So you can say who done it from the feel?”
She nodded. “Usually, if I have something to compare it with. Like with the Lamaru, since it was a lot of people doing the spell, the energy was mixed and I couldn’t identify it. But if it’s a single practitioner, yeah, I could.”
“Damn. ‘Sfucking cool, Chess. You like—cool, is all.”
To hide her blush she focused on tucking the plasticencased feather into one of the pockets in her bag. “Thanks.”
“Ain’t think birds lose feathers in winter,” he said, standing up. She did the same, the movement making her legs ache.
“Some do, it all depends on—no. No, you’re right. Great Horned Owls don’t molt in winter. It’s their mating season.”
“Ain’t just fall out, aye? Got pulled out.”
“Well…I guess it could have caught on something, but yeah, chances are it got pulled out.”
She took the light back and shone it around, looking for something the bird could have landed on. The alley was full of sharp edges, but nothing looked like it could have snagged a feather.
“That’s some serious, aye? Takin a feather? You figure maybe it’s part of it?”
“I don’t know, really. It’s not as serious a crime to hurt a psychopomp as it is to kill one, but it was probably an accident anyway. You can use the feathers in ritual, but I can’t think of any where you leave it behind after, or where the ritual doesn’t destroy it. You know, like burning it or something.”
