Helix: Plague of Ghouls (21 page)

“And where’s her mother?”

“Ran off eight months ago in the middle of the night without even paying the rent. Left two hundred bucks on the counter and a note saying ‘Sorry’. Sydney’s been staying with friends of the family. A friend of an aunt, I think, until she was kicked out.”

“Ran off? How does a mother just run off like that?”

She shrugged. “Catherine Mission . . .” She cleared her throat. “Hasn’t been right in the head. Not since Pritchard Park.” He was about to ask if Catherine Mission had any connections to the brothers involved in the Pritchard Park incident, but she took a sharp breath. “Two-Trees. Hector.” She seemed to roll the names around in her mouth to better taste their flavour. “Any relation to Red Cloud?”

“Yes, actually,” Two-Trees said, with a smile.

“I thought you looked familiar. Red Cloud officiated at my wedding, almost twenty years ago.” But I’m divorced now
,
her angry and embarrassed expression seemed to say.

“Red Cloud was my grandfather. Hector Two-Trees was his legal name.” He inclined his head. “I
am
a local boy, Ms. Maurelli. And I was called in to investigate Pritchard Park, and I was the one who identified the body as one of the Reid brothers. And no, I’m not here to fulfil some vigilante CSI fantasy. I’m here because two kids have been dismembered and thrown away, and because a girl is missing, and because if we don’t jump on this, someone else is going to get hurt. I’m not a cop, but I’m not useless either. And if more civilians got off their asses to help, to do something other than complain, we’d have a lot fewer ‘just another runaway’ girls, don’t you think?”

She fiddled with the picture of her dogs. “He was an interesting guy, that Mr. Red Cloud.”

You’re avoiding me, and yet you’re trying to win me over. What’s on your mind, Ms. Maurelli?
He needed to know what she recognized about the obese boy, and more importantly, why she denied knowing him. He decided to charm his way into her good graces and see what became of his efforts. “Ever read the picture book
Sister Whitehair and the Trickster
as a kid?” he asked.

“Sure. He came to our school and read it to us, way
waaaaaay
back in the day. He wrote it, didn’t he? Based on oral tradition or something?”

“No, he made it up himself. He painted all the illustrations, too. I was the model for
Wenabozho
, the Trickster. I was nine at the time. Red Cloud was a great storyteller.”

She nodded and spoke softly. “I heard about his death when it was news. I mean, we all did. That was no way to go.”

She didn’t know the half of it. The world knew that Red Cloud had been axed in the face by some drunken Indian. Hector Two-Trees and his father knew better.

Two-Trees grunted. “Well . . . just one more unsolved Halo County mystery. Just one more Indian, right?” he said, with more gravity than he’d intended. The suspension cables between her jaw and cheekbone seemed to soften a little. He checked his phone for the time. “Could you take another look at those photos? Maybe one of them was a student from a few years ago. Maybe the faces are older from when you knew them last. I can’t be sure of the decedent’s age, not until we get a more thorough work-up from the medical examiner.”

“Mr. Two-Trees,” she began impatiently.

He wasn’t getting anywhere, and his own frustration was making it awfully hard to be charming. “I know you’re busy, and I realize I’m barging in on your turf without an invitation. But can we stay in touch? Please?”

She considered it. She nodded. “What’s the best time to call?”

“As soon as humanly possible.” He offered to send her a soft copy of each of the pictures, she accepted, and he left in search of the internet café.

BRIDGET ALSO MADE
a habit of chewing on construction materials, but she didn’t have the same striated jaw as Laura Maurelli. She had a head like a volleyball squashed top and bottom, with Neanderthal eyebrows, full lips, and a mischievous gleam in her eyes. When Two-Trees entered the café, she rose and signalled him over. He approached the table, taking off his gloves. “Sorry I’m late.” Ishmael nodded impatiently and pointed at the seat across from him. Holly said hello. The Padre kept his grouchy face hidden behind the visor of a baseball cap.

“We haven’t been here long either.” Bridget was only armpit high on Two-Trees. He went in for a hug, but she was all business, clasping his wrist in a warrior’s handshake instead. “Sit. We shouldn’t stay long.” That morning, she’d applied her scar cream to hide her hyena-freckles, but it did little to soften her displeased expression.

Two-Trees wanted to say that he’d been worried sick about her since the Wyndham Farms thing. They’d spent the last six years joined at the hip, sharing the same hotel rooms, and finishing each other’s meals. Since the escape, they hadn’t so much as spoken to each other. He could tell she was short on sleep. He wanted to ask her how she was, make sure she was all right, let her get a month of stress off her chest, let her shout and weep, if that was what she needed. Instead, he sat in the booth beside her, across from the others, and began to explain where he’d come from and why he was late.

“You two would hit it off,” Two-Trees mused. “In a baseball bat to the head kind of way.”

“She’s too soft?” Bridget asked.

“She’s too much like you.”

The Padre sat in the corner of the booth, arms crossed until he tugged down the brim of his stiff baseball cap. That hat, along with a denim jacket, plaid shirt, and faded jeans, should have made him blend in with the local custom. In a way, it did; the Padre looked very much in his element. He looked like the wildcat-trucker type, wiry and small and quick to be mean, like so many of the White folks who lived in Halo County. The problem was, the Padre looked guilty, and he looked mad. Ishmael sat beside him—practically on him—to keep him from clawing his way out of the booth.

“This,” Two-Trees said, pointing at the Padre, “was a bad idea.”

“No
shit
, Sherlock,” Bridget agreed. “But he’s still got to eat.”

“And he wouldn’t stand out so much if you didn’t point at him,” Ishmael added.

Despite the fact that they’d both belonged to Wyrd for well over thirty years, each, it was only the second time Two-Trees had seen Ishmael. They knew of each other though, since Ishmael had been the field mission coordinator for the longest time. They’d never worked as partners, and most field briefings were done at Varco Lake with only the lycanthropic partner present, while the human stayed in the car, or better yet, at a hotel in Winnipeg.

There was no doubt that Ishmael was as inhuman as Bridget was. His hair was as thick as rabbit fur, the fingers of his broad hand were nearly all the same length, his upper and lower canine teeth were thick behind his lips, and there was something mutable under the skin of his face, as if some invisible sculptor was subtly massaging the clay of his bones. To the layman’s eye, that constant, physical fluctuation made the viewer so subconsciously uncomfortable that the eye simply turned away. To the analytical gaze, it was nothing more than a perpetual, travelling facial tic. To the trained eye, it was the second best way to spot a lycanthrope in a crowd. Only Harvey’s dogs were more reliable when it came to detection.

Two-Trees had been expecting some brooding, brilliant, intensely staring sex-god, based on Bridget’s description. Instead, sitting across from Two-Trees was a cagey, soft-spoken, broad-shouldered professional in business casual, wearing the pale sheen of a man with the flu. Fresh out of Wyndham Farms, Ishmael had looked like a sheepish Bruce Banner holding up his overstretched pants by the waistband. Now, except for the neck muscles and his one-size-too-small polo shirt, Ishmael could have passed for anybody in corporate tech support. And this man was in dire need of a new coat, because the one he had no longer fit him in the sleeves or collar.

But most of all, it was Ishmael’s behaviour that gave him away. He never made eye contact with anyone at the table. He always seemed to look just past a person, to their right or left, or more often, about chest high, and was always distracted by any sudden movement. Whenever there was a loud noise, Ishmael’s eyes would flash open and he’d orient toward the sound with an alarmed and hungry expression. Two-Trees figured Ishmael wore dark contact lenses for two good reasons: one, to cover up the famous mismatch, and two, to disguise the way his pupils would dilate until there was little colour left, as happened with any normal, hyper-aware housecat. If manufactured correctly, Two-Trees thought, contacts might even help to refract the cat’s-eye reflection, if someone shone a light on him. Like the Padre, Ishmael had purchased a ball cap, though he left this upside down on his lap while he ate calmly and prodigiously. And, like all lycanthropes, he had a craving for calcium, so when no one was looking, he crushed his empty eggshells into tiny pieces, which he then sprinkled on toast and covered with jam.

Holly rarely lifted her eyes either. She was as shy as they came. Her hair was light and airy, but it was so blonde it could have passed for white, and her skin was pale except for a recent sunburn on one side of her face, probably from sitting in the truck for too long. She glanced up only once, flashing a shade of blue Two-Trees only saw deep in icebergs.

He wondered what kind of animal she turned into when the mood was upon her. She reminded him so much of the legendary Sister Whitehair. Air churned, and Two-Trees tugged down his sleeve over his wrist to hide the goose bumps, and he rubbed at his ticklish nose.

“So what do we do about
him
?” Two-Trees asked.

“
He
is at the table,” the Padre muttered.

Two-Trees made a hand sign, begging him to keep quiet. It was bad enough that the Padre bore such a striking resemblance to the missing girl. There was no telling who might also recognize his voice.

“He’ll stay at the hotel,” Ishmael said, “same with the rest of us—after we’ve finished buying him some clothes and other basic necessities.”

Two-Trees didn’t like that idea either.

Ishmael’s knife grated against his plate when he sawed through a day-old bagel. “The man hasn’t seen civilization in six years, and Wyrd wouldn’t sell him any other clothes.”

“He could have started
anywhere
else but here,” Two-Trees said. “Like Vancouver, for example, or Halifax. Hell, even Winnipeg.”

Bridget gave him a dour look. “He’s here now, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

“We’ll head back to the hotel as soon as he has clothes,” Ishmael said, “and he’ll get clothes as soon as we leave here, and we’ll leave here as soon as we’re finished talking business. Until then, can we all stop talking like we’re about to get caught?” Ishmael had six empty packets of cream cheese on his plate. “You’re Dr. Two-Trees, forensic anthropologist. Bridget’s your assistant, and the Padre’s her husband, temporarily unemployed and bored out of his mind.”

The Padre agreed, using some rather un-Catholic language.

“Holly’s your intern,” Ishmael said, “and I’m her Italian boy-toy along for the ride.”

“I like that,” Holly said, with a tiny smile.

“See? All of us here for business purposes,” Ishmael said. “So let’s talk business, instead of looking like we’re aiding and abetting.”

Two-Trees sipped the coffee Bridget had bought for him. The coffee was cold, but it had just the right amount of sugar and milk.

“So what have we got so far?” Ishmael asked.

While four shape-shifters ate their breakfasts in relative silence—Ishmael devoured his with hardly a breath between bites—Two-Trees told them everything he could: about the bodies, about the scene of the crime, about the facial reconstruction project he was on, and about the jungle punk suspects that had been interrogated the night before. By the time he got to the part about the pharmacy thief, they’d all run out of breakfast and excuses for sticking around. The café was painfully quiet. Even the people at the computers near the back of the store had begun to type more slowly and as silently as possible.

Two-Trees leaned in. “We need to talk about this someplace else.”

“I agree,” Ishmael said. “People are talking about you.”

“Me?”

“They recognize you.”

“Well shit.”

Ishmael said, “They’re connecting you with the murders at Pritchard Park.”

Two-Trees shrugged and pointed with his chin at the Padre. “Well, better me than—”

Ishmael made eye contact that time. So did the Padre. Two-Trees’ bowels shrivelled.

“The hotel,” Two-Trees said. “Since we’re all checked in there anyhow. Did they tell you about the bed bugs yet?”

“That could be a problem,” Bridget said.

There was always a slim chance that blood-sucking vermin could transfer lycanthropic viral material into healthy human beings, but a single case of such an infection had yet to be documented. No one would know about a cross-infection for up to six months, assuming the unsuspecting victim survived the initial infection, and by then, they could be half-way around the world.