Downpour (20 page)

“And to my money.”

“Certainly to that.”

“I think I liked you better when you weren’t so venal.”

“No, you didn’t. Because you couldn’t figure out what handle to twist me by. But I’ll tell you, the money’s not enough.”

“I won’t go higher.”

I walked closer and pulled one of the hard little chairs away from the table at the end of the bed and sat down on the other side of the window so I could face her. I noticed in passing that the card topmost on her pile showed a man in motley about to step off a cliff. “It’s not money you have to give me,” I started. “I want your promise—the most binding promise you can give—that you’ll let me do what I consider necessary.” I started to press on the Grey, letting the black needles of compulsion and persuasion grow between us. I didn’t try to hide them from her, but I wasn’t sure she noticed as I continued. “You’ll back me if I ask you, even against your family or your husband or the law. Do you understand?”

She shivered and pulled back from me. “What? How dare you ask that of me? Don’t you know who I am, what I can do to you if I choose? I may be sick and dying, but I’m not gone yet and I don’t—”

I cut her off, pushing harder as she resisted. “I know exactly what you are.” OK, I was lying, but I bluff well. “But if you could do this yourself, you wouldn’t need me. I’m not afraid of you and I won’t be hampered and hog-tied by any sudden regrets or attacks of conscience from you. If you want this done, it will be my way. It was your father’s ghost who got me into this and it’s his murder I have to solve. After that, this whole nasty web of magic and murder has to be torn down. I won’t kill these people for you—I’m not an assassin—but I’ll make them go away. I’ll break their hold on the lakes and find a way to take down whoever killed your dad. After that . . . it’s on you. Because I’m not here to build anything: I’m here to destroy something. Do you understand that?”

She straightened up defiantly, though I could see it cost her to do so. The cold black points of my demands pressed against her and I could feel her shudder through the Grey. She could resist the geas—the magical contract I was building between us—if she tried hard enough. I wasn’t pressing it with any great weight or determination. I had no interest in forcing her: I
wanted
her cooperation. It was in both our interests, I hoped—unless she was lying to me, in which case, I’d have to deal with her, too.

Jewel breathed heavily, fighting, I supposed, against her impulse to be in control and plow me under like a weed. I could feel her distaste for this agreement as a burning in the back of my own throat. She didn’t like having to play by anyone’s rules but her own. I felt evil for the way I’d done it, but I had her and she knew it.

She glared at me, settling back in her chair and letting the black points of the geas cut into us both. I twitched at the sudden cold, piercing sensation of it and she gave a satisfied smile that lit her eyes with malice.

“All right,” she said. “You do what you must and I’ll back you. But you’ll stay till the last dog’s hanged. No running out.”

“No running out,” I agreed. “But I will need the money up front.”

She struggled in the web of the geas. “What?” she screeched.

“You offered it and I’m accepting. And that’s how we’ll go. Geoff and I can haggle the details of how it’s paid out.”

Her narrowed glare should have cut me to ribbons, but she was not at the height of her powers anymore and she had already tied herself to me. She was stuck with it. “Agreed,” she ground out, choking on her rage.

I let the pressure off, feeling the icy shape of the geas ease into an invisible but unbreakable binding between us. “Call Geoff up and we’ll do the paperwork, unless you’d rather you didn’t have to watch. . . .”

Jewel growled, but she caught her breath and pressed a button on the remote that rested on the bed beside her. “Geoff, bring up the checkbook and some writing paper.” She didn’t bother to exert herself to send out a voice of command. She knew her husband would do what she wanted.

I nodded and got up to wait on my feet for Geoff. I knew it would make Jewel happier if I weren’t posing as her equal when her husband came in. Her pride was still a formidable power on its own and it didn’t hurt me to let her keep it—for now.

The smoldering glare she kept on me while we waited let me know she hated me. I’d have disliked me, too, for knowing what a calculating liar she was; it hadn’t slipped past me that she’d never said a damned thing about finding her father’s killer in her proposal.

Suddenly she grabbed my hand, her expression tense. “Draw a card.”

“What?”

She pointed at the messy pile of tarot cards. “Pick one. Now.”

I plucked a card out and flipped it over onto the top of the pile. Jewel’s eyes widened, but she said nothing, staring at the image of a stone tower blasted by lightning.

SIXTEEN

G
eoff Newman wasn’t pleased with the arrangements, but he played the role of secretary without audible complaint. Once things were settled, he followed me back into Port Angeles and to his bank where we made appropriate financial arrangements that left me with a nice chunk of cash and a check with a hell of a lot of zeroes on it. I wished I had Quinton’s devious tinkerer’s brain at my disposal to figure out where I could hide the stuff, but I’d have to make do with my own.

Before he left me in the drizzly parking lot, Geoff turned back and gave me a hard look. Then he glanced around and held out a key. “You might want to use my father-in-law’s cabin instead of staying all the way out here. Be more convenient and you wouldn’t have to be driving up and down the hill all the time.”

“And I’d be a lot easier to keep tabs on.”

He didn’t deny it. He just kept standing there, staring at me, the key to Steven Leung’s house in his hand.

I shrugged and took the key. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

“Keep your ferret out of the vents—that’s all I ask.”

“I wouldn’t want to leave a mess for Mr. Shea.”

Newman snorted. “I’ve done all the maintenance on that house myself. I wouldn’t ask that pie-sucking liar into my place, much less give him the keys.”

I nodded, filing his comments under “volatile.” “All right.”

He glared at me for a moment as if I were a friend of Shea’s before he finally turned away and headed for his Mercedes. I waited him out. He didn’t need to know where I went next or what I did. I might have been on the payroll, but I wasn’t hired to be the entertainment.

As I was already in Port Angeles, I thought I’d try the sheriff’s office first and see if Strother was in, since he was so interested in me. I found him at his desk in an aluminum cubicle that had the charm of an upholstered soda can.

Without his hat, Strother reminded me a bit of a baby mouse—the scalp showing through his fine blond hair was pink and the skin on his face was just as pink. I hoped there weren’t any big ugly snakes around waiting to swallow him whole.

I walked into his view and waited for him to look up. When he did, I said, “I hear you’ve been asking about me.”

He turned an even brighter shade of pink. “Sorry about that, Ms. Blaine. I was just . . . interested.”

“I understand. Are you the investigator assigned to the case?”

He looked slightly nauseated at the reminder. “Yeah. I’m not qualified—I know that. But Ridenour kind of insisted that since I was already on it, I should stay on it. ‘Continuity of evidence,’ he said.”

“Ridenour insisted? Is the sheriff’s department normally on such . . . cordial terms with the park service?” I asked, sitting down in the ratty, rickety typist’s chair nearby. The seat lurched and leaned, but I perched on it as if I didn’t notice.

Strother turned his own chair to get a better view of me and leaned close. “Not really. I don’t know why he wants me on this. I don’t know why my boss didn’t overrule him. We have a good investigative team here. Do a lot of drug work and missing persons stuff in cooperation with the Canadian authorities—the Mounties and the Canadian Coast Guard—along the Strait. People going overboard, stuff washing up on beaches . . . You know. Remember those feet last year . . . ?”

“The shoes that floated in? Wasn’t that a hoax?”

“Only the one. The rest are the real deal. But so far only one’s shown any sign of unnatural separation from the body. The rest are just poor souls lost at sea and the feet float in when the body falls apart—because athletic shoes are full of foam. It’s not any conspiracy or serial killer—” He cut himself off before he reached full rant and shrugged to apologize. “Anyhow, the investigators here are damned good and the cadaver dogs are the best. They didn’t need to put me on this. ’Cept there’s not much to investigate, I guess.”

“How do you guess that?”

He shook his head. “This case is so cold, you could store fish on it.”

“You guys ID the body?”

“Yeah, had to ship it to King County for further forensics, but the ID was easy. Steven Leung all right, like you thought. He was a local guy, so a local dentist matched up the records with the teeth in the skull and the rest recovered from the car. The ME said it was the fastest ID on a body so badly decomposed that he’d ever done. Got the ID back last night.”

“What else are they looking for? Why send the remains to King County?”

“We don’t have a medical forensic lab. We don’t even really have a morgue. The county prosecutors act as coroner to certify death, but they don’t have any medical expertise for a cause-of-death investigation. If there’s a question or need for an autopsy, we send ’em to KC. Otherwise they just go to the nearest mortuary until the family can pick ’em up.”

Strother continued, a little self-consciously. “In this case, the body was decomposed to bones and bits of flesh, but . . . there were signs of fire in the vehicle, and the doctor who looked at it to recommend we send it on said most of the flesh was”—he gagged a little—“burned away. He also thought there might have been some kind of injury to the head, and with most of the rest of the flesh either eaten up by fish or . . . sappo-saffo—I can’t manage that word.”

“Saponified?” I asked, echoing the voices of the Winter kids in the cozy comfort of the Veela Café.

“That’s the one.” He nodded and looked even sicker. “I guess it means, um . . .”

“Turned into soap.” I’d had to look it up to be sure.

Strother cleared his throat and licked his lips, looking pale. “Yeah. It’s the craziest damned case. They don’t know anything about how it happened yet or how the car got in the lake, but I was wondering . . . what you were doing up here, looking for him.”

“Just doing some pretrial for a lawyer in Seattle. Backgrounds, story check, that sort of thing. Nothing in your field—it’s a corporate case.”

Strother nodded, his mouth open. If he wanted to look like an idiot, he was doing a good imitation, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. “So you don’t know Mr. Leung?”

“I don’t,” I said, but then I had a thought. “But it looks like I might get to, in a manner of speaking.”

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, which made him look comical to the point of something drawn by Walt Disney. “Oh?”

“Much as I hate to say it, it appears the family doesn’t have as much confidence in the investigative powers of the county as you do, so they’ve asked me to poke around a bit as well.”

Strother gave an ironic laugh. “You mean Jewel has. And I suppose she’s already got someone picked out for the deed.”

I cocked my head. “Why would you think so?”

“Best I can tell, she’d make a damned fine prosecutor: Jewel Newman never has done anything that didn’t benefit her first and she never asks a question that she doesn’t already know the answer to. When she asks ‘a favor,’ she’s already got a way to make sure you do it. The Newmans may be of a minority color, but let me tell you, their money isn’t, and in a county this close to the edge, money talks. She wouldn’t be talking to you unless she thought she already knew how the whole thing was going to go down.”

“How well do you know the Newmans, personally?”

“Feh,” he scoffed. “I don’t know them at all in person. Just the common knowledge.”

“What about the rest of the Leung family? Did you ever know any of them? Go to school with Willow or her brother?”

His eyes widened, but he quickly forced the expression into amusement and shook his head. “I grew up on the other side of the county, actually. Out near La Push, where the
Saint Nikolai
ran aground.”

I didn’t corner him about his evasion—though I was a little surprised that he had grown up on an Indian reservation. Instead, I took his bait to see where it might lead. “The what ran aground?”

Strother laughed with a touch of honest embarrassment. “Where the first white woman in Washington came ashore. It was our obscure claim to fame—aside from the Quileute reservation—before that vampire movie up in Forks. So, anyhow, back . . . 1809 or so, this Russian ship was coming down from Alaska and foundered out near Destruction Island—it’s a rock, really, but ‘island’ sounds better—and the crew came ashore at La Push. Everybody got off, including the captain’s wife, Anna Petrovna, so she was the first white woman in Washington.”

A cold stab of memory lanced through my chest. “What happened to them after that?”

“Some were killed and the rest were captured—probably by Makah—and they sold ’em as slaves. Anna and the captain finally died in captivity after about a year or so, but most of the surviving crew were found out around Quileute and the Hoh River and bought back by an American sea captain. Kind of tragic and ironic, huh?”

Anna Petrovna . . . a Russian lady who died near La Push in 1810—I wondered if she was the ghost I’d seen in my hotel room on Thursday night. And if she was, why had she been so far from her resting place?

“Strother,” I asked, “do the Newmans know the regular investigation team?”

“I imagine so, what with Willow’s way of causing trouble and all.”

“Maybe that’s why you were assigned and not one of them. You don’t have any past association with the family or the area, so you’re less likely to be influenced by them.”