Feet of Lead (1/?)

• Lily Takes Root
• Olsen's Sin

Thomm Quackenbush

The trouble with getting known for the strange cases, Ana Silva thought, is that people stopped coming to you for the normal ones. Cheating spouses are a private detective's bread and butter. No one wants you tailing their spouse when the last time you made the papers was for a cult sacrificing tortoise-shell cats. (Black cats are passe in the occult community, at least as sacrifices; they still made acceptable familiars and mousers.) There had been so much blood, and it wasn't all from unlucky kitties, but she was paid to find what happened to them, not to find them alive. Her creditors didn't care where the money came from, only that the checks cashed, which most had of late.

Still, it was a lousy picture of her, her hair matted with gore, holding a tailless cat in one loose fist as though it were spoiled laundry.

She would have loved few things better than a kidnapped kid, something both headline-grabbing and commonplace. She didn't have the financial cushion to be picky. If it had to be weird, she would take it and pray the next thing was as simple as finding what became of someone's old boyfriend. (The few times she took this kind of case, the answer was "In someone else's bed." It was barely worth investigating, the specifics being little more than what hair color the other woman had or, once, what genitals. It was Brazil and the sixties, after all. She wasn't one to judge.)

She heard the knock on the glass of her door. Perfectly good wood--well, wood, at least--and they knock on her cracked window. They hadn't broken it any further, but it read as both impatient and inconsiderate, neither qualities she could appreciate in her potential clients.

The man was like a mouse: timid and small, gray with oversized ears. He squeezed the brim of his bowler hat in his hands, too nervous to stay composed before her. His pencil mustache twitched as he told her the details. He would not meet her eyes while introducing himself as Mr. Pereira, no first name offered. In this omission, he was already giving her clues, painting a picture.

The facts he presented were these: two men found in a field by a boy, dead but with no apparent signs of distress or harm. They had been dead at least a few days, adding another hitch between the boy reporting the bodies and the officers of Niteroi getting around to investigating. Villem Hill was too rocky for them to get there with any haste, so they left another day before recovering the bodies. Sloppy. As was their nature, the officers trod all over the site and found nothing of use.

"Nothing?" she asked. "Nothing" was never found. The conversation demanded that she dig only a centimeter to find the "something" buried.

"They..." He went quiet, measuring how to say this. "They wore masks. Lead masks. And there was a notebook."

If it were a suicide note, her services would not have been necessary, so she would not waste the question. Nor would she dive immediately into the lead masks. It was the more obvious, splashier clue, so she could take her time with it. An amateur would allow the distraction of the masks. "What is special about the notebook?"

He removed a Photostat from his pocket which read, 16:30 be at the specific location. 18:30 ingest capsules, after the effect protect metals await signal mask.

"It was on the last page," he explained in reaction to her arching eyebrow.

"The rest of the notebook?"

"Nothing special. Bills and appointments and such," Mr. Pereira said. "They were both--the dead men--they were electricians by trade."

He reached for her to return the copy. She slid it into a folder. He said nothing about it. This was not the only copy he had made, but still he was protective of it. Curious.

"You'll take the case then?" he asked.

She placed her hands on the desk and laid out her fee, inflating her per diem and silently promising to puff up her expenses in revenge for his being cagey.

He agreed to everything without negotiation. She wished at once that she had asked for more, but you never could tell who was going to be so easy a mark. Even giving in to her so readily told her volumes.

"I'll need to know your interest in this case, of course," she added, suspecting that this need would go unmet. The case was too fresh for the police to send some intermediary, as they had when they considered a haunting beneath their dignity to admit to investigating. She needed this man's angle before she wasted any more time.

He sniffed sharply, flustered. "You can be assured of the money."

"I am not concerned about money." She was extremely concerned with the money, with the concept of money in general and his in specific. It didn't behoove her to admit this. You never wanted your client to know how hungry you were. She learned that too well in that werewolf case two years ago. "You are too young to be their father, too old to be their son. I know neither of these men can be your relations, not your brothers or your cousins. Not even, I would guess, your friends."

"How can you tell this?" he asked, his tone distant and academic but interested in her method of induction.

"Your manner, very simply. A relative would be sad and vehement. You are neither, just nervous. So, how are you involved? Is this all a matter that I am meant to clear you of murders that you very much did commit?" She leaned forward as if in confidence. "I will charge extra then." She told herself that she would outright turn in a client who was a murderer, but it would be more of a manner how long she could milk her per diem before subtly dropping clues under an officer's nose until it became impossible for them to screw up.

"No," he said with genuine feeling, "I had nothing whatever to do with their deaths. I do not believe that a person killed them, but that will be for you to determine." Some, but not all, of this timorous nature fell by the wayside in his ire at the accusation. "If I did know how this fate befell them, my principals would not have directed me your way." He opened a valise at his side, producing a thick envelope. "If it is a matter only of the cost, consider this an advance on your success."

She had the envelope in hand and opened, with as much patience as was necessary and not a second more, thumbing through the stack to be sure it contained only bills and not cut newsprint between a few high denomination bills. It would not have been the first time someone thought they could dupe her, though it would be the first time the one doing it didn't think they could fool her with a cheap incantation or shoddy illusion.

"And your principals are...?" she asked, knowing he would not give her a straight answer.

"Very appreciative of your discretion in your investigation and trusting that you will promptly turn over any findings to them without the involvement of the authorities whose investigation has already failed," he finished for her, donning his hat. "You will find a card within the envelope. On it is a number. You will hear only silence on the other end of the line when you call. Speak your findings nightly. My principals will be in touch if the need be."

With that, he nodded his head and left.

There was little she liked in this, but she couldn't help but hunger for a mystery, one that might be worthy of her time. Strange again, strange always, it seemed, but lucratively so for once.

She suspected this would turn out to be mundane, some sort of homosexual double suicide. She would investigate still in hopes this proved a soluble challenge. The factor of the small man and his so-called principals intrigued her, as did the stack of money she put immediately into her office safe. One didn't often get one's fee upfront, so readily given, itself something she would investigate.

She unfolded the copy of the notebook page. It was a clear copy, meaning it was taken from the notebook and not copied from a copy. Hasty but fluid script, a man's, though she couldn't guess yet which of the men or decide if they mattered. If they both died together, it would be for the same reason. It was almost a waste of cognitive effort considering the two anything but a monolith.

She scrutinized the paper under the light for any sign of tampering in the notebook, faint traces of erasures, or hesitations in the writing. Finding none, she conceded that anyone trying to manipulate the text would have corrected the grammar. She considered that a clue, though the only hypothesis it drew her to was that the author of this message did not speak fluent Portuguese or was in such a hurry to get down this message. She considered and discarded the idea that this was itself a code. Whatever was before her lacked cleverness. It was a message for only a few readers, none of whom the author meant to have to puzzle it through. It was, in short, as clear as its author had intended it and had made perfect enough sense to him.

The masks were mentioned, but so too were "capsules." Drug abuse seemed too easy a conclusion for this case, excusing any peculiarity surrounding their deaths. It was cheap.

She didn't have a clear idea of either the masks or capsules, so she had her first line of inquiry to satisfy.

Silva had contacts at the medical examiner's office, though they surely wished that she didn't. They were not friends, but she would not want them to be. Friends complicated investigations. Contacts could be persuaded to be helpful.

She bribed a guard to let her through, writing the exact amount and purpose in the small notebook she kept in the breast pocket of her jacket. She would not exhaust her advance without the promise it would be returned to her with interest. Pereira was sure to understand the necessity of bribes to lubricate her search.

She knew better than to go to the examiner's office itself. Instead, she jimmied open the door to the medical records room. Blessedly, the autopsies had been filed in almost the correct place.

She was almost finished photographing the second file when one examiner came into the room.

"Silva, what the hell do you think you are doing?" said a tenor voice, annoyed already by any reply she might give, resigned that he would have to deal with her.

"Stealing your files. I have a case."

Belmiro Santos looked down at the folder in her lap. He was a balding man, still handsome in an academic way, but his looks would not last many more years. She thought it would be a shame if he had to rely on his charms because he lacked those. The best that she could say about him is that he continued to tolerate her, not because she was herself attractive--though Silva was aware that she could be if she cared to put in the effort--but because she was consistent. She respected his work and him, something unusual in his line of work. (Then again, she had held conversations with the recently deceased, so she wasn't squeamish.) She broke into his files, true, but she didn't insult his intelligence when caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar.

"You don't want that to be your case," he said, finger pointed toward the file almost with distaste, as though it were a kitten from her last case. "Even if you think you do, I don't."

She looked up, eyebrow peaked, a smirk on her lips. "You know something juicy?"

He shook his head. "That's just the thing. The autopsy was conducted too late for useful results."

"The capsules," she said, not needing to say more, not wanting to tip her hands further.

He scrutinized that she knew even this, but it would do him no good quizzing her. She would reveal nothing or would obfuscate. She couldn't play the clueless ingenue and wouldn't try, but she could lie convincingly in most situations. One didn't survive as an investigator without that skill.

"There is no definitive evidence that either man ingested anything. If they had brought me these bodies days ago, I could have told you their last three meals and the final time they had a bowel movement," he said, confident in this unenviable skill. "As it stands, I can't tell you anything."

"Radiation?" Even as she offered this question, she suspected it was too revealing.

He raised an eyebrow, slowly frowning. "The masks. Yes," he tapped a pencil against his thigh in thought. "No radiation. Not that we can see."

"Could it have dissipated while they were baking in the sun?"

"They did not bake," Silva said, sharp and quick. "Decayed, yes, but their temperatures did not rise beyond what would be seen in putrefaction in mid-August. Baking? That would give us some information. Radiation? That would tell us much, would give us lines of inquiry. Radiation does not, as you put it, dissipate so quickly. If they had been irradiated, we would know for a long time."

She felt foolish by this, as though chided by a physics tutor for having forgotten a simple equation. "Were they sick?"

He shook his head, not only in answer but also in the weariness of her questions. "I wouldn't know. I see no evidence of illness, no tumors, for instance, no lesions."

"And the police have the masks," she said, not a question. Why would they leave them with the medical examiners, after all, unless they were glued to the men? She could charm (or bribe) her way in there, but the police had dealt with her enough to be so giving and owed her no favors that she could call in.

"Yes, of course. They did the men no good as far as I can tell. I'm not sure how they would, but that is something you hope to determine, no?"

"You've got no clue, then?" she said, not hiding that this had been a waste, except in the way that the absence of evidence suggested evidence. Not helpful proof that she could see, but evidence. "There's nothing here that explains their deaths? They had to have been killed, right?"

"We can't say that definitively."

"Can you even say they are dead?" she asked acidly.

"If they weren't before," said Silva, "they were once we cut out their organs."

Her ears pricked. "So why does the autopsy say there are no conclusions?"

"There aren't."

"That doesn't scan, doc."

He sighed, running his hands through thinning hair. "I'm only telling you this in hopes that you leave and do not find encouragement to return for a long time. The organs were left out too long. They were mush when we got around to thinking of testing them. It would have been a miracle if we found anything by then."

"Is that standard procedure, leaving out the guts?"

"No," he admitted. "But it happens. It's negligence, not malice."

"You'll understand if I don't find that satisfying. You got another doctor I can talk to about this, maybe the one who left the liver out to rot?" He folded his arms over his chest, trying to find an excuse. "Yeah, I'm not surprised. Tell me you had nothing to do with this mess."

"I don't go near the bodies if I can help it," he said, which she knew. Silva wasn't a grunt if he could help it. He had worked here too long to be wrist-deep in a cadaver any longer until some newbie was screwing it up. It was one of the few advantages of his age. "I only check when there is something that seems fishy."

"And this doesn't?"

"It's Niteroi, Ana. It would take more than two dead men in a field to warrant an investigation."

"I don't agree," she said. "Neither does my client."

Pointing his thumb to the door, he said. "We never spoke."

"Of course not." She had an honor about these things. She would go to her grave before she admitted he might have tipped her off if there were something about which he could tip her off.

Records were one thing, but she doubted that she could bluff her way into seeing the bodies. Even if she did, the medical examiners had picked over them to the degree that they could be. She couldn't get anything more from them than the police had. Even if she were in the autopsy room, she wouldn't have known what to look for and didn't have in-roads to a competent shaman who would be willing to help her here.

Her client didn't hire her to follow the police department's steps, of course. There would be no sense to it, not at her cost. She had been hired to see what the police could not. She was hired because she dealt with the weird cases, which meant that there was a better than average chance that this could not be wrapped up as a simple murder-suicide.

Working in the circles she did, she had made the acquaintance of people who existed only at the periphery of society. There was that coven of witches that clued her into the proper use of an alpaca skull, the UFO abductee who debunked a so-called implant in the neck of a murder victim, the purveyor of mystical wares who, after three uneventful dates, opened up about his client list, resulting in the rescue of a seven-year-old girl and five kittens. She got them to help her out both because they understood that she was not out to mock their sincerity and that she was not shy about billing bribes to her clients. The bribes were not always straightforward as money, but the gift of a silver chalice or an autographed copy of Crowley's Book of the Law was not given without conditions.

It was a crapshoot who the lucky recipient of her interest would be this time. She needed to be strategic. Ask the Sasquatch guy about crystals found on a severed hand, and you lost his trust. Also, when dealing with two dead bodies and a case already making the papers, she needed to move with discretion. Others were going to be investigating. Someone who knew her might assume she would be tapped, but she didn't need this known. She did not even know who Mr. Pereira's principals were. In far too many ways, she had too many mysteries on her plate to stir up trouble.

She went for a beer to think this over. They knew her at this bar, which was to say that the regulars knew not to waste their time chatting her up and had the sense to discourage newer barflies from bothering her. The bartender, seeing her arrive, slid over a stack of napkins and left her to her thoughts.

Niteroi wasn't exactly known for these sorts of crimes. Usually, she spent her time on the road, traveling around Rio and Brazil proper. Maybe more people were handling crimes like these. If so, they didn't network. Most of the time, she wasn't sorry about this. Right now, she would damn near kill to find someone who could point her in the right direction.

Almost without thinking, she started to sketch on the napkins. She could blame the beer for loosening her intuition, and she wasn't sorry if it did-nothing like taking the tunnel view when you've got photos of dead men in front of you.

She laid out the facts as best she could. Two dead men, safe to assume that they had died simultaneously and weren't too bothered by it. There was that return receipt for the water bottle. That suggested that they didn't know there wouldn't be a return trip. The bodies weren't found with obvious trauma, no cuts or defensive wounds. The posture hadn't even been one of discomfort, twisted up in the grass, trying to crawl away. So, it was peaceful and quick, whatever it was. And it hadn't left a mark that anyone could see.

She had the kind of contempt most investigators take toward the cops, particularly with a reputation like hers. She couldn't cast too many aspersions into her methods this time. They'd scoured the area, they'd bagged and tagged evidence, and they weren't being tight-lipped about that they didn't have strong leads. It would have been easier by far to save face and pretend that this wasn't baffling. It made her feel better that they didn't seem any more clued in than she did, but not much better.

She wrote down the cost of the beers and her generous tip in her notebook, feeling they fell under the umbrella of investigatory necessities.

That night, she picked up the receiver and dialed the number that Mr. Pereira had given her. The line connected, and, true to what he had told her, there was no answer, not even a breath. Still, from habit, she said, "Hello? Hello, are you there?" She heard nothing still, but she felt the presence of another person on the line.

"You will be unhappy to know that I have turned up little," she said after a moment's more pause. "The mortuary did not get to the bodies in close to enough time, left the organs out to rot. We aren't looking at a conspiracy here as much as incompetence and bad luck, but I suspect you know more about that." She gave a conservative brush at her theories and where she could go tomorrow, telling the silence enough of the truth to appease curiosity. When she went quiet a minute, the line disconnected.

The following day, minutes after arriving at her office, there came a knock on the door. There was no one in the hallway. She could not see how someone could have fled so quickly without loud scampering and huffing. She held her breath to listen more to the sounds of the building, to someone walking down the step, but there was nothing.

Nothing to hear, but a parcel before her door, one she knew better than to open without the door locked. She did not know if it was a gift from a friendly member of the police department--not that she had many of these--Mr. Pereira, or even someone in the occult community, but a gift all the same.

She gave another look down the hallway, the dull yellow light from dirty bulbs that never shut off, the purer orange of the sun beginning to creep in. Still no one, still nothing like an answer there, so Ana Silva closed the door behind her, parcel under her arm, and turned the deadbolt.

She felt the hand on her shoulder at once, stiffening, punching on instinct. Her blow landed on a woman's face, one made up to match a skull, kohl smeared around her eyes like a mask.