Darkness of the Soul (22 page)

She lifted his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Come back to us, you punk. Can’t dump me that fast, can you, Mr. Man?” She smiled at him, thinking that maybe his eyes had twitched in her direction just a bit at the sound of her voice, but she wasn’t entirely sure. She gave one more squeeze and then headed out into the hall to make her phone calls.

Chapter
20
 

9:00 pm, December 19, 1999

Woody’s had been redecorated again. The things that had been taken down for Morrigan’s wake had been replaced and made even more gaudy, if that was possible. The music on the jukebox—currently Tom Petty—had been cranked to ear-splitting volume once more. Gone were the black curtains and covered mirrors. The whole joint had been returned to neon glitz and moody corners, with little indication that at least two of their favored regulars had been removed from the bar tab in the last month.

Drakanis sat at the bar, flanked by Parker and Brokov, looking unimpressed with the almost forced mood of the place. Neither of his companions looked particularly happy to be there either; still, it was somewhere they could sit and talk, and familiarity was always shining around the edges, no matter how many decoration teams came through the place. It was too full of memories, both good and bad, for them all to be killed just because of a lighting change.

Parker, just having finished the summary of the things they knew and the things they suspected, dropped his gaze to the bar once more and stared at his reflection for a long moment. He did not like what he was seeing. He’d lost weight, and while some folks might have said a little of that would do him good, he was starting to look a little hollow. His skin was yellowing and his eyes bulging out of baggy sockets like those of a corpse that had forgotten it was supposed to lie down and stay there. That only depressed him further, so he raised a hand, sticking two fingers up to flag the bartender. Kenny nodded once and raised one finger in return, as he finished up with his customers at the other end of the bar.

Sheila was looking nowhere near as glum as the two men. Instead, she was wearing an expression that seemed to be made of equal parts wonderment and understanding. Stories of ancient cults and psychic psychos didn’t put her as out of sorts as Parker or Drakanis had thought they might have. Growing up in the time she had instilled her with a fascination for that sort of thing, and having heard the killer’s voice long before either of them had her ready to believe nearly anything about the situation. Perhaps it wasn’t the best mentality to have when getting involved in a murder investigation, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. She rolled her own drink—a strawberry daiquiri—between her palms for a moment and shook her head.

“So, you guys think that some guy with mystic powers is running around killing people over this painting? And that he’s the one who killed the captain and Karim and put Damien in the hospital? Have I got it right, so far?”

Parker didn’t respond. He just nodded thankfully and downed his newest shot as Kenny put it in front of him. Drakanis took up the reins of the story while patting himself down for a pack of cigarettes.

“Pretty much, yeah. Only problem is that we still have jack shit to go on. Forensics went over his room, took samples from the toilet, from the sink, from anything and everything where he might have left
something
. I swear, they even sat there and swabbed every hole on the telephone handset and still, nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.”

Drakanis sighed and then seemed to brighten just a bit as he finally located his pack, which had migrated from the front pocket of his natty and out-of-date sport coat to the back pocket of his slacks. He shook one out, offered the pack to Sheila, who refused, and then Parker, who took one with a grunt, and then set to lighting it.

“Now, on the brighter side, we ran the name and came up with some fifty matches in the last three years alone, and we’ve got folks running the backtrail, but I can already pretty much personally guarantee what they’re going to find.”

Sheila broke in then, speaking his next line before he could: “More nada, zip, zilch, and zero, right?”

Drakanis nodded and blew a long plume of smoke out of his mouth. The smoke served to cloud his features, but both Sheila and Parker were relatively sure that they would show more of the depressed and aimless anger that had formed much of his personality for the last few weeks. Parker considered that an improvement, though. At least there was something else mixing with the depression these days.

“So where does that leave us?” Sheila asked. “And do you really think this Tehn guy had anything to do with it?”

Drakanis was thinking of his own visit to the hotel room, the way it had felt, the smell that had come to him when he had gone in. He didn’t think that it had been any real scent, not one processed by the nose anyway. Parker hadn’t said anything about it, and the plainclothes and forensics guys hadn’t made any comments either, but that was what he thought of it as anyway. It made him think of spoiled eggs, and also of the time when he and Vincent had been kids and run across a rabid dog. The dog had been well on its way to dying and hadn’t been able to give much of a chase, but when they had rounded the corner and found it, it had smelled something like that. It was too elemental, too broad to really define, but there was still a simple thing to call it, and Drakanis found that to be the easiest way to deal with things. It was just the smell of bad, the smell of something that’s crawled off to die or should be doing so, something that meant nothing but bad news to those unfortunate enough to catch a whiff. When Parker had brought him back to the station and they’d had a peek at the supplies closet where Woods and the janitor had been found, that smell had been all over the place too. He nodded.

Parker dropped his two cents in the barrel, his voice coming out slightly slurred.

“’Course it was. Fucker said somethin’ wuz gunna happen ta Woods, said he wuz ’sposed to quit nosin’ around.” The tone of remorse and regret in his voice was nearly as blurry as the words themselves, but it was still there. Drakanis had spent much of the previous few days trying to tell his friend that he couldn’t have anticipated something like that, couldn’t have known what would happen. They were still holding out hopes that Officer Woods would come out of it okay, but the fact that he hadn’t woken up or said anything else since his brief waking period the day he’d been admitted put it further and further outside the realm of believability with each passing hour.

Brokov shook her head and signaled for a fresh daiquiri as she set the empty glass on the bar. “You couldn’t have known. Besides, I don’t think he was nosing around anything. He talked a lot that ni…” She stopped, and while Parker was too drunk to notice, Drakanis caught the flush that spread across her cheeks, as she cleared her throat and started again. “He’d said a lot about stuff he was working on, but nothing about that. I think he would have said
something
, at least.”

Drakanis scowled. He nodded when Kenny asked if he was up for a fresh beer. “Maybe you guys should pull Woods’ files in the morning, see what else he was working on. Maybe there’s a link somewhere, and we’re just not seeing it.”

Brokov nodded, and Parker grunted something in the affirmative while Drakanis took a long swallow of his new beer, feeling it coat his throat and imbue him with that serene state of false confidence that liquor granted so easily. He nodded to himself, dropped his used cigarette into the old bottle, and passed it over to Parker so he could do the same.

“All right. That’s one thing, at least. Either of you got anything on the janitor’s autopsy, or even why he was dead? Any professional medical opinions on what the hell happened to the pair of them even? Shit, any far-fetched theories? I’d take a fucking Hitchcock special with a bow at this point.”

Both of them shook their heads. “Karim Alvat’s goin’ on the table in tha mornin’,” Parker said, “but I doan’ think he’ll show us an’thin. Stroke, I figger.”

Sheila nodded in agreement and then added her own information. “I know they did an examination at the scene. Bruise on one knee—they think he got that falling down in the closet—and some old scars on his back, but no other physical damage. Prelim COD was stroke or heart failure. They’re just too backed up to do him right off, since nobody tagged him as case related.”

Drakanis shrugged. “Can’t, really. No proof, just a bunch of old biddies gossiping and scared shitless. Still, two guys turn up dead or almost in a supply closet, and nobody looks too close at it?” He wondered if everything had gone to hell just since he’d been away or if it had always been going on and he just hadn’t been able to see it from the inside. Probably the latter, he decided.

Parker mumbled something under his breath, but it was Sheila Drakanis’s attention was focused on at the moment, since she was in the office pretty much day in and day out and understood how these things worked better than a pair of detectives, one of whom was forcibly retired and one well on his way to being drunk. From the look of her, she didn’t have an answer either though. She just shook her head and raised one hand, almost in a defensive gesture, and looked at him over the lip of her glass as she took a sip from the fresh daiquiri.

Setting the glass down, she answered, “Look, everybody’s all fucked up over the thing with the captain, and nobody knows what the hell happened in that closet. Then you’ve got something like thirty fresh bodies coming in every day, some of those homicides or otherwise suspicious. Now, add in one immigrant janitor without a case number, and you get what you get, hon. I can try to call up Hollis in the morning, push him a little—he’s married to my sister—but if he’s going to do it then anyway, it’s just going to make him stubborn.”

An abbreviated sound of air passing over his lip was Drakanis’s only initial response; Parker didn’t give any at all. He just put his forehead on the bar and stayed that way. Drakanis then adjusted Parker’s collar, pulling it up, and moved the debris out of his way so Parker could rest comfortably, before turning back to Sheila.

“Look, I’m sorry, okay. I didn’t mean to sound so snappy or anything.” He lifted one hand, palm outward in a “peace” gesture. “So let it drop. We’ll know about Karim tomorrow, fair enough. Anything on Woods yet?”

Sheila’s lips pursed, and she looked away, staring at her own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. She could tell from what she saw there that she had gotten a lot more attached to Damien than she’d wanted to, and with everything else that was going wrong lately, she was losing far too much sleep. The circles around her eyes were getting thicker, and even the great advances in makeup technology weren’t going to be able to keep up for long. She guessed Drakanis had noticed as well.

You’re
being
dumb,
and
you
know
it.
It’s
not
like
it
was
a
big
secret
that
you
were
with
him
the
night
before
and
almost
all
the
time
since.

She knew that on some level, but it was still hard to let go of the veil and let someone in, even just a little bit. It was made even harder because of the speed of the thing. She’d noticed Damien before, of course, but still, going from almost strangers to lovers to sitting by his bedside every night in the course of a week was moving almost ridiculously fast. It just felt like she didn’t really have any choice. It just happened; that was all. Drakanis and all the others would just need to deal with it.

Thinking of it that way made it a little easier—she could at least look at Drakanis now—and so she went on. “I’ve been watching over him when I can. Nothing since the first night. He mumbles sometimes, or I think he does, but nothing I can understand.”

As if he’d been waiting for a cue, Parker mumbled from his side of the bar, sounding half asleep already. Brokov wrote it off as half-drunk babble, but Drakanis had caught the last couple of syllables, and something in it dinged the little radar in his head. He laid a hand on Parker’s collar and dragged him up just a bit. He patted one cheek until a bleary eye rolled open. “What did you say?”

“Diff’runt language, mebbe. S’all.” Parker had obviously gone well beyond his limit, and for such a big man, that was an accomplishment. Drakanis was thinking it was nearly time to drag his ass home, but not before he followed up a bit on this one. He lowered the big man’s head back down, and Parker went back to his napping.

“Different language, maybe.” Drakanis chewed on it for a second, considering, while Brokov watched him, brows raised. When he turned to look at her again, his eyes were alight with possibilities, practically burning from inside.

Something’s
got
his
wind
up.
Hope
it’s
something
good,
Sheila thought.

“What kinds of sounds does he make? Doesn’t have to be 100 percent, just close. Best guess.”

Sheila thought about it for a minute and tried to approximate it, which was not an easy task since the words—if that was what they were—had been spoken through layers of drugs and unconsciousness. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t know. Something like ‘shampoo tarp’ or something. That’s what I keep thinking, anyway. And sometimes he says something about a ‘colpepper’ or something that sounds like that.”

Drakanis was nodding now, the fire in his eyes brightening. “Maybe he said, ‘Talu Shar,’ or something like that?”

Sheila stopped and took another swig of her drink, as she replayed it in her mind a few times, trying to picture the shape his lips had made. Then she nodded, swaying one hand in the air. “That’s close. Maybe. But it’s dreamspeak. Never makes any sense, and you hear what you want to hear in it, I guess.”