“No. Your neighbor is doing well this morning. He requests that you look after his dog.”
I pointed at Grendel. “Got it. And Rick’s all right?”
“Yes. He should be released tomorrow.”
“So what . . . you got demoted?”
“Eh? No.”
“Then, what brings a detective from Homicide to my door if the guy who got shot is fine?”
Solis made a small shrug, his round, impassive face remaining blank while his close-clinging corona of energy flickered yellow and gold. “Courtesy call.”
“Bull.”
“May I come in?”
The living room gave ample evidence that something was up, piled as it was with bug-out bags and Quinton’s electronic and computer gear. I didn’t want Solis to start speculating but I didn’t want to have a conversation about what had gone down the night before while standing in the hallway. I didn’t want him to catch sight of Quinton either, whom he had known as Reggie Lassiter ever since our run-in with a monster on Foster Island. Complex as the situation already was, I wanted to avoid any additional conversational land mines, like . . . “Why are you still hanging out with that guy from the marsh?” or “Seen any monsters lately?” No matter what I did, this was not going to go well. . . .
I made up my mind and stepped back to let him walk past me. “Sorry about the mess. I just got back from a business trip last night and I haven’t put anything away except for shoving stuff the dog might eat into the closet.”
Solis grunted. “Ah. Where had you gone?”
“London.”
The detective looked at the pile of electronic equipment on my dining table. Then he shifted his gaze over the rest of the room. “How long were you there?”
“About five days. A week with the flight time. Why the cross-examination?”
“Only curious.”
“No, you aren’t.”
He shook his head and shrugged. “You are, again, in the center of a most curious circumstance.”
“My neighbor got shot by some thugs. That’s nothing to do with me.”
“They were knocking on your door.”
My turn to shrug. “I wasn’t here. I came in with the first responders.”
“Your . . . roommate—”
“House sitter,” I corrected.
Solis shrugged. “Your house sitter was here. Could this have been connected to him?”
“No.”
“You’re very confident.” I didn’t think he meant that as a compliment. “And where is Mr. Lassiter?”
“At work.”
“Mr. Lassiter is unemployed.”
So Solis was still suspicous about the whole incident and everyone connected to it. He could worry that bone all he wanted; it wouldn’t get him anywhere on this case and the other was no longer his to pry into. There might be hell to pay for it another day, but not today.
I just smiled back at him and went into the kitchen to start some coffee. “You are a nosy bastard, Solis.”
“I am concerned.”
“Why? Probably just some wannabe gangbangers raising Cain. It’s the sort of thing that used to happen all the time around here. And how is a nonfatal shooting in Southwest district the concern of Homicide?” The coffee machine made burbling noises as I turned back around to look at Solis. I leaned on the counter and waited for his reply.
“There is a pattern of crimes recently that have drawn our attention. This incident, though not fatal, fits into that pattern. And there is you.”
“Me? How? I know you seem to think everything weird in Seattle—”
He cut me off. “No. I do not think it. It is a fact. When cases go strange, you are in the thick of it.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee. “That’s a bit much.”
“Do you think so?” He started ticking things off on his fingers. “In the matter of Mark Lupoldi, at the end I find you and his killer—a young man gone completely mad—in a place neither of you should have been. In the matter of the homeless deaths last year, wherever I turn, there you are, and again, it is you who brings the killer to us—just as the case is classified by the government.” The energy around his head and body began to jump and form spikes of frustrated orange and burning yellow as he continued. “There is the matter of the museum that burned down; and the man who assaulted you two years ago; and the business with the sunken ship, and of the poisoned child, and the lost brooch. . . . Oh yes, there is also the disappearance of Edward Kammerling, whom you had gone to see just before this incident last night. Shall I continue?”
“That’s quite a catalog.” I thought about what he’d said and a few of the items took me by surprise: I didn’t know he’d made any connection between me and the museum fire, and what had happened to the guy who’d killed me? He seemed to think I knew, but I’d never followed up on that—I’d been a little busy. But funny that it should come up again since Alice had mentioned him to me in London. I would have to find out. . . .
“Hardly complete.”
I made a face and offered him a cup of coffee. This might take longer than I’d thought; might as well keep him happy—or at least confined to the kitchen.
Solis accepted the mug I held out. He stared at me over the rim as he sipped, waiting for my reaction to his recitation.
I heaved a long breath. “Look, Solis, you know my cases get strange sometimes. It’s not as if you haven’t benefited from that. I turn over cases that go hot—like the poisoning case. I play fair with you and the department.” Well, as much as I could. “If you think I’ve done something criminal, find evidence and arrest me. I don’t know what you’re talking about on some of those points of yours. The rest is nothing but coincidence and bad luck. Kammerling hired me for the London job. I just got back and was trying to check in. I didn’t even know he was missing. And what was that about the guy who assaulted me? I haven’t had any contact with him.”
“You didn’t know Todd Simondson came out on parole last week?”
“Why would I? The parole board doesn’t have to call me in—it was a plea bargain. Time served, we’re done.”
“So you did not know he died two days ago, either?”
That startled me and I spilled a bit of coffee on the counter as I twitched in surprise. “What? No. Of what?” I didn’t like the sound of that. . . .
“Most mysterious circumstances ...”
“That’s not a cause.”
He shrugged.
“Don’t say you suspect me....”
“It fits.”
“Not unless you believe in bilocation. Two days ago, I was on a nonstop flight from London to New York, and then on the connection from JFK to Sea-Tac. I spent fourteen hours in transit and I have boarding passes that prove it.”
“Do you?”
“Yes!” I stomped into the living room and dug my passport and airline folder from my bag and brought them back to him. I shoved the lot into his hand. “Unless you think I have a secret identity and had someone else fly under my name while I snuck back into the country and murdered the poor bastard. But I’m sure the security cameras at Sea-Tac have tape from the Customs area that you could check if you don’t choose to believe me.”
He studied the papers, his aura drawing in but getting no less orange and frustrated. He huffed and handed the pages back to me.
“Thank you for not arresting me.” Maybe I was a little snippy as I said it, but damn. . . . “So what happened to Simondson? And don’t stonewall—you owe me.”
“Looked like a hit-and-run,” he admitted. “Maybe a beating.”
“ ‘Looked like’? Was it or wasn’t it?”
“No one knows. No witnesses. The body was already in rigor when found.”
That struck me odd: Solis wasn’t the sort to reduce a victim to a mere corpse and dismiss it. “Where did this happen?” I peered at him, looking for a change in his energy that might give me a clue what he thought. Or what he was fishing for.
“He was discovered at the old brewery buildings in Georgetown—the demolished end.”
I noticed Solis didn’t claim the death itself had happened on the same site, but all I said was, “Hardly seems like his sort of neighborhood.” The man had been white collar all the way; even the fraud I caught him at that led to his murderous rage was genteel stuff.
Georgetown—a former independent city of farmers and brewers that had been eaten up by the combined appetites of Boeing and the City of Seattle—was mostly industrial with a few isolated houses and clusters of shops among the warehouses, light manufacturing, and so on. It lay sandwiched between I-5 as it cut below the cliff of Beacon Hill on the east, and the mucky, muddy waters of the Duwamish river a few blocks away on the west. Cases I’d had down there had been connected to industrial accidents, theft, and that sort of thing. The area had made a stab at bohemian trendiness a while back when most of the old brewery and cold storage buildings had been converted into offices and studio space for artists, but that attempt had centered on the streets near the old brewery and hadn’t penetrated much farther. The brewery area housed a lot of funk in a few square blocks, not to mention a metal club named Nine-pound Hammer. It wasn’t the kind of business neighborhood in which I’d expect to find a former estate embezzler with anger management problems hanging out.
The bare dozen blocks of houses still standing in Georgetown were mostly farther south, right across the road from the airfield—single-family structures from the first third of the twentieth century being renovated by hopeful yuppies who were not likely to take in guests from the parole board. Up by the old brewery where Simondson’s body had been found, only two blocks of old wooden houses stood in domestic isolation west of the freeway off-ramp, and I doubted most of them would have suited his taste.
Solis continued. “He was staying at a cheap motel near the airport.” The coincidence that I’d been in the area just hours after the man’s death was disturbing: Georgetown lies eight miles due north of the airport on the route to Seattle. The cheapest airport hotels with weekly rates were mostly on the north end of International Boulevard, where it passed a cemetery and approached the new light rail station next to the freeway. Neither were the sort of places in which Simondson would have willingly spent time before his incarceration, and I couldn’t imagine Boeing hiring him on straight from jail. Georgetown was a bit rough but hardly Blood Alley, so any nonindustrial death there was remarkable. I didn’t buy the coincidence any more than Solis did and the timing was more suspicious than he knew.
About four days ago in London I’d been told that my assailant had been seduced and manipulated to kill me. The next night, I took out the vampire who’d done it and wrecked Wygan’s plans for London and myself. Even vampires can use a telephone or e-mail, so one of the asetem in London had let their Pharaohn know things had gone bad and how. I could guess which white-skinned monstrosity that had been. I’d tied off my own loose ends in London, Wygan had tied off some of his here, and all the oddities of timing were no more coincidence than I was a pastry chef. Wygan didn’t want me to talk to the man who’d killed me. Too bad for him that I wasn’t inclined to be pushed any further. I’d just have to hunt down the guy’s ghost instead.
“What’s the autopsy say?” I asked, reclaiming my coffee cup.
“No report yet.”
“You think the body might have been dumped?” Because if it wasn’t, what had brought Simondson—middle-aged and conservative—into Seattle’s post-grunge bohemia in the first place?
Solis shrugged. “Perhaps. I may not have time to follow up until the report is in. While you have been gone, the homicide rate doubled.”
“You can’t blame that on me.”
“Not legally. Not logically. But it feels right.”
“Gosh, thanks. Now I’m home, it might go back down.” But I wasn’t betting on it.
Solis didn’t seem inclined to bet that way either, but he didn’t say anything. He took my flippant attitude and pointed look as a hint that I wanted him to go away since he couldn’t arrest me. He put down his mug and walked to the door without my having to push him.
“You shall let me know what you discover.”
“Of course. And you won’t try to arrest me for every weird occurrence in King County.”
He raised his eyebrows as if I shouldn’t count on that. “Stay out of trouble. Or at least off my case load.”
“I don’t intend to land on your desk or Fishkiller’s slab, thanks.”
“Ah, but the best of intentions ...” Solis said, waggling his hand dismissively as he strode out into the hall and to the elevator without looking back.
I frowned after him as I retreated inside and locked the door, thinking that if I were Wygan, I’d have put my pet security guy on the job of tidying up: It kept him too busy to wonder what the boss was up to, and Goodall was strong, ruthless, and smart enough to know the moves without the disadvantages of the usual vampire time limits during summer hours. It also had that classy “I’m one step ahead of you” touch that’s so endearing when you deal with psychotics and megalomaniacs.
Now that I’d had coffee, it was unlikely I’d fall back asleep for a few hours. As long as I was up, I thought I should feed Grendel and take him for a walk before he decorated the kitchen floor. I also thought I’d let Quinton get a little more sleep—at least one of us should, and he could play doorman and guard later so I could catch up on the doings in the land of Nod, myself. Grendel was more interested in the food. I put on a jacket against the exterior chill as he devoured his breakfast.
I’d never had a dog of my own as a kid—no pets at all in fact after the disaster of my mother’s first post-Dad boyfriend and his dopey Labradors. It hadn’t occurred to me, until I moved in next to Rick, that happy pit bulls, by nature, are just as playful and silly as any other well-trained dog. Grendel didn’t look too scary most of the time, grinning and wagging and doing the play-with-me bow. But in defensive mode, he was a terrifying bundle of crushing teeth and hard muscle. That’s what the asete and his plain-vanilla vampire buddy must have seen last night when Rick came out into the hall: eighty pounds of pissed-off pit bull. But they hadn’t dominated the dog or frightened it. They’d shot at it. And they were pretty lousy shots—not that I was surprised about that.
Vampires think of themselves as top predator and they aren’t afraid of much at night, not even mean dogs. They generally don’t carry weapons since they think they don’t need them. But the specimens in the hall had been packing guns. That seemed kind of odd to me. I thought about it as I walked Grendel twice around the water tower green space, stopping several times while he left various doggy messages.