Downpour (16 page)

From the office I started on the business that was still hanging over my head from before I’d left. First I called Nanette Grover and, once I had her on the line, she argued that having found the car and body and turned further investigation over to the sheriff ’s department, I was now free to come back to work for her. I hadn’t found anything on Shea, though; he was still as much a blank as ever. I needed more time on him and, much as I’d have liked to, I couldn’t walk away from the broader problem of the lake, its monsters, and its magicians. I knew the police wouldn’t get into it—it wouldn’t even register in their minds and whatever motive they eventually found for Leung’s murder would be as mundane and sordid as for any other normal-world homicide. And there was the matter of the Grey itself.

There wasn’t much doubt in my mind that Jewel Newman’s job was at least akin to the best interests of the Grey and the Guardian Beast. There might have been a loophole to get me out of the situation, but ignoring Grey jobs tended to be a lousy idea. Like the proverbial bad penny, it would keep turning up and causing problems until I gave in and dealt with it, anyway. I was also a bit on the fence about the quarter of a million dollars. Certainly it was a tempting amount, but taking the money would imply my doing Jewel’s bidding, and what she demanded in the heat of grief and anger—or in cold calculation—might not be so wise once things began coming apart under my prodding. Her avowed preference was that I kill the competing mages, but I was no assassin. Her second choice—to drive them away—was more to my taste; better still if I could get them to turn on one another.... I was still a little unsure of my powers in the Grey now, but I was reasonably certain I could make a damned fine mess if I tried. And after a night to think about it, I wanted to try, no matter how much I despised Jewel.

Even with these twisted thoughts, I carried on talking to Nan. “I still don’t have any information on Shea’s background, and the family of the dead man is still very concerned about the situation at the lake. It’s complicated by the overlapping jurisdictions. There’s still a lot of information to be found on both cases. I’d like to go back out and work them both some more. You know how the family becomes the last concern when agencies start bickering over who’s stuck taking out the garbage,” I said.

Nan made a noise of disgust. “Yes, I do, but that’s a distraction, and it doesn’t make me any happier about this. Stick on Shea and make sure I have something before we hit trial or I will start contracting with Feldman in the future. Don’t let this become a habit, Harper.”

“I understand, Nan.”

“I hope you do. I hire you because you’re reliable. Whether we’re friends or not makes no difference to me.”

If we
had
been friends, that would have hurt, and it stung more than I liked to admit, but I nodded at the phone, repeating, “I understand.”

“Good.” She hung up.

I wasn’t sure if I was burning a bridge or opening a door to something else, but I didn’t have a lot of time to ponder it. My phone rang within seconds of my putting it down.

Wishing I’d stopped for coffee on the way in, I picked up the phone again. “Harper Blaine.”

“Rey Solis. I wanted to ask you a few more questions.”

“Can it wait a few hours? I have a ton of paperwork to catch up on since I spent the weekend out on the Peninsula.” He rarely called—usually he just showed up if he wanted to grill me—so I guessed he wasn’t yet ready to arrest me for making Will Novak disappear, but I still thought maybe I ought to be considering the money end of the Newmans’ offer a little more seriously. If I had to dodge Solis until I could find a plausible way to convince him I wasn’t a good suspect, a quarter of a million dollars would certainly come in handy. . . .

“So I understood.”

“Understood what?”

“That you have been busy around Lake Crescent finding sunken cars with human remains in them.”

I sighed in annoyance. “It wasn’t exactly a plan.”

“So Steven Leung was your missing person case.”

“Yes, and now he’s found—I’m assuming it is Leung’s body in the car. But how do you know about the car and Leung?”

“The Clallam County sheriff ’s investigator called me this morning to vet you.”

“To vet me? Why?”

“Professional courtesy. And I suppose he is curious what a King County–based PI was doing in his territory.”

“I think I told you it was a coincidence. I was in the area on some pretrial work for Nanette Grover. I assume you know her.”

“Professionally only.”

“Not surprising; she’s not a social butterfly.”

“How did you come to be involved in this case?”

“One of the witnesses I was looking for mentioned a car accident in the area a few years earlier. It just sounded odd, so I looked it up, but there wasn’t any record of the accident and . . . you know how I like to poke my nose into anything weird,” I said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “The more I looked at the information on Leung, the more it seemed like he’d simply disappeared, and with that and the accident information, I thought I should find out if they were connected, since no one else seemed to give a damn. The more information I got, the more it looked like I was right. So I poked around the lake a bit on the weekend and found the car. That’s all. I’m more than glad to turn over my research on Leung’s financial and property situation to the investigator if he wants it.”

“I’m sure he will.”

“Then I’ll be sure to send it over, if you give me the investigator’s name and office address.”

“I would also like to speak with you myself.”

“Why? What business is Leung’s death or his family’s misery to you?”

“They aren’t. But I am still concerned with the matter of William Novak.”

There it was. I wanted to swear, but I held back. “Solis, I’ll talk to you all you like in a few hours, but I have to get some work done here first. We can meet after lunch if you like. Wherever you want.”

“That will do. One o’clock here at the police department. I’ll meet you in the west lobby.”

I would have objected—if I had any intention of turning up—but I’d already given him the choice of place and time; throwing a fit wouldn’t change anything. “All right,” I replied. I think I sounded snappish and I didn’t care. Nor did I put the phone down politely. I just dumped it into the cradle and got ready to go out.

Before I could go on with anything else, I needed to talk to Michael Novak. I’d let it slide, and now with Solis breathing down my neck, apparently thinking I was somehow responsible for Will’s disappearance, I had to face up to it. I also had to find out what Michael had already told Solis and if there was any hope that I didn’t have to duck and run.

The pressure from Nan and my own sense of paranoia about both the situation at the lake and Solis’s sudden interest in Will’s disappearance swamped my brain, and I dove into the nearest of the impending disasters without noticing I’d forgotten all about meeting with Ben Danziger.

It didn’t take very long to hunt Michael Novak down. He and Will had been in London for almost two years and he’d been back in Seattle for less than one, so he’d gravitated back to the parts he knew best and the jobs he understood. I found him at a motorcycle repair shop in the industrial part of Ballard. I recognized his shaggy head of blond hair even streaked with grease and at a distance. The shop was noisy, full of metallic bangs and loud engines, but in spite of the cacophony, the energy around the place flowed in calm blue lines and concentrated swirls. I didn’t think I stood much of a chance of being heard over the din and I didn’t want to pick my way through the work area nor yell my business at full volume, so I walked to the customer counter and waited for one of the men in coveralls to come talk to me.

The guy who walked up to the counter was in his mid-thirties, tanned so leathery, the creases at the corners of his eyes looked as if they’d been stitched into his skin. Even with the nearest engine barely idling, he had to raise his voice. “Do for ya?”

“Michael Novak?” I asked, pointing.

“Why?”

“Personal business about his brother.”

The mechanic winced slightly, the creases beside his eyes deepening to canyons for a moment. “Ahhh . . . yeah.” He turned his back on me and let out a piercing whistle, waving his arms over his head.

The volume in the place dropped in a wave moving from him to the rear wall, and all eyes, including Michael’s, turned toward the front. His gaze flickered over me and the corona of pleasant blue around him sank down to a narrow band I could barely see at this distance.

“Novak! ” the mechanic at the counter yelled. “You good for fifteen minutes?”

“Yeah,” Michael called. He put his tools down with care before he started walking my way. The noises started up again as Michael passed each workstation.

The man at the counter looked at me. “S’all right?”

“Yes, thanks.”

He nodded, but he also didn’t return to work until Michael had stopped beside me and turned to give him a reassuring nod. “Back in ten, OK?” Michael asked.

“No problem, man,” the other guy replied, heading for the bike he’d been working on.

I glanced toward the narrow strip of graveled parking outside and Michael shrugged, leading me out. He kept going around the corner of the building and stopped to lean back against it. Cold wind channeled between the buildings and pushed the sound of the shop into the canal ahead of us. Michael started to cross his arms over his chest, but then he dropped them to his sides and pressed his palms against the cold wall, letting his gaze fall to the ground.

It was a strange posture, as if he was afraid of me but couldn’t or wouldn’t bother to hide it. The thin line of his aura flickered blue, then orange, and back to blue. “I wasn’t sure you’d ever come around,” he started.

“I’m sorry, Michael. I should have come sooner.”

He shrugged, still not looking at me. “I think I understand. Will . . . really screwed things up. After all you did, he couldn’t let it go. He got so crazy at the end. . . .”

“That isn’t why,” I said. “I was just being selfish, pretending everything was all right everywhere, just because it was all right where I was.”

“How all right was that?” he scoffed. “I heard you got shot and it was pretty bad.” He snuck a glance at me, as if looking for evidence of the wound or some change he could spot with his ordinary vision.

I worried my bottom lip a second. “Yeah . . . it was bad. But I’m still here. And Will’s not.”

Michael finally looked up at me. “What happened to him? I mean . . . I know he’s not coming back, but . . . He really isn’t, is he?”

I shook my head. “No, he’s not coming back.”

“Not even . . . like a ghost?”

I knew there was something even worse than ghosts in his mind, but almost a year after London, he seemed to be trying to soften what he knew about the Grey and its horrible denizens. I didn’t know if I was going to make that easier or harder for him.

“Not like any of those things,” I said. “Not at all.”

He looked relieved, yet he still asked, “But what happened? Why can’t they find any trace of him?”

The words hurt as I said them, as if each syllable had barbs. “I’m not sure you want to know. Because if you do, you may want to tell the truth when . . . someone asks you for it, and they’ll think you’re crazy if you say something like that at my trial.”

“
Your
trial?”

I nodded. “Detective Solis thinks I killed your brother. Or am responsible, at least, since I was the last person to see him alive.”

Michael pushed himself off the wall, standing straight and wide-eyed. “No, he doesn’t! He doesn’t think it’s you; he thinks it’s me!”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“Solis thinks
I
killed Will. He thinks it was an accident, that I was angry at Will or scared of him or something like that. He thinks that because Will hit me, I—I hit him back. But I didn’t! I didn’t, I swear to God. I swear. . . .” His voice broke and he covered his face with his grease-stained hands, his words coming out in hard, gulping sobs. “I don’t want to be here. I want to go back to England. I tried to hold out here, but I can’t make it—I can’t stand the pitying stares and the horrible memories. I was going to leave, but that detective started asking around and then he told me he would find out.” He lifted his face. “I can’t go while he thinks I did it, but I
want
to. I want to so bad. I just want out of this place. I just want to go back to where I had a life I understood. I want to make my own life.”

I grabbed onto his shoulders, keeping him from sliding to his knees from the weight of his despair. “Michael, I know you didn’t do it. I
know
it was nothing to do with you. But you can’t run while you’re under suspicion, and why would anyone believe you killed Will?”

It took him a moment to catch his breath and rein his emotions in, but he managed. “Because . . . he broke my jaw. And then . . . he ran off.”

“He ran off?” I questioned, not because I didn’t believe him, but because something wasn’t adding up: Wygan had made Will call me to come to the gymnasium on the night I’d most recently died. Will had clearly been a prisoner and in their clutches for hours by the time I saw him. He certainly hadn’t run to Wygan and the asetem. How had they grabbed him?

“Tell me what happened, Michael. Just tell me in sequence. When did Will hit you and why? What happened before that and what time was all this?”

Michael sucked in a shaking breath and looked ill. “It was about four, I think. In the afternoon. I came down here to drop off my references—I was trying to get a job. I’d been sticking to Will or trying to keep him with me, because every time I didn’t, he’d slip away or do something horrible to himself. I’d taken him to the doctors when we first got here and they said he shouldn’t be left alone, but . . . I needed a job—we needed the money so badly. I was here that time you called me—remember?—about Charlie Rice’s shop. That was when Will socked me in the eye. I thought he couldn’t hear me talking to you, but he did, and he asked if you were going to Charlie’s and I lied and said no. But he didn’t believe me.”