I didn’t move a muscle.
“The FBI,” said Margo. “And what does the FBI want with the Ottessen Brothers Funeral Home?”
“Just some questions,” said the agent. As with Simon Watts, I could tell that I knew this voice from somewhere, but I couldn’t quite place it. None of the FBI agents I’d known or worked with had been named Harris. “I understand you had a pretty nasty fire in here recently.”
“You can see the damage on the wall behind you,” said Margo. “Are you here to investigate the arson?”
“Among other things,” said the agent. “Do you happen to know who first found the fire?”
“My brother-in-law did,” said Margo. “Harold Ottessen, though I suppose technically the fire alarm went off even before he got here, and that alerted the fire department. We’ve already given all the information to the fire marshal and the police.”
“You did!” said the agent. His voice was cheerful, almost, which was a strange contrast to the dour stereotype most FBI agents tended to fall into. And frustratingly familiar. “You definitely did,” he continued, “and I have no reason to doubt that report. I’m just crossing various i’s and dotting some t’s. I couldn’t help but notice you’ve got a small apartment on the side of the building—that’s common with mortuaries, isn’t it? A holdover from the days of the old family business. Is there anyone living there at the moment?”
“Mr. Connor’s in there now,” said Jasmyn. “But back during the fire it was—”
“Empty,” said Margo. “Mr. Connor’s only staying here a few days. Before the fire Jasmyn lived in the room—this is Jasmyn Shahi, by the way, she’s my assistant here—but she moved out on her own a few months ago.”
I couldn’t see them, but I imagined Margo had given Jasmyn a subtle signal of some kind, reinforcing her order of silence. Jasmyn didn’t offer any more information.
“I see,” said Harris. “And during the time of the fire, is there anybody who might have had access to the room or the building? Someone who might have been able to get inside here before the firefighters showed up?”
“You mean aside from the arsonist?” asked Margo. “Or the arsonist herself?”
“Herself? You think it’s a woman?”
“I’m using a generic pronoun,” said Margo. “Women can be arsonists if they want to be.”
She said it right this time.
“Let me show you why I’m asking,” said Harris. “Maybe this will clear things up, maybe jog your memory a little. This is a photo the local police took of the burned refrigerator, after the fire was put out. Do you see this here on the … well I’m afraid I don’t know the lingo. What do you call that?”
“That’s the slab,” said Margo. “It’s like a metal tray that slides in and out; it’s what the body goes on.”
“Thank you,” said Harris. “The slab. Do you see this here on the slab? This kind of … pattern, I guess you’d call it. What would you say that looks like?”
“Ash,” said Margo. “Makes sense, given there was a fire in there.”
“Ash, yes,” said Harris. “Definitely, but what shape is it? You, um, Jasmyn, was it? What would say that looks like?”
Jasmyn paused a minute before speaking. “A smear.”
“A smear,” said Harris. “That’s exactly what I thought it looked like as well: a curved smear. And that seemed very strange to me, because a smear is not a pattern that one would expect to find at the scene of a fire, because it’s not a shape that fires or fire hoses—which are the two dominant forces acting on the scene of a fire—would typically create. It looks almost like somebody wiped the slab, like they were trying to clean it off. So this being an arson, rather than a free-range organic fire, we may well be looking at a third force: human intervention.”
“You think somebody lit a fire in my corpse fridge and then cleaned up after herself,” said Margo. “May all our criminals be so civic-minded.”
“Two witnesses reported a car speeding away from the scene,” said Harris, “just as the firefighters were pulling up. Now it makes a certain kind of sense that an arsonist would choose to light a fire in what you lead me to believe is called a corpse fridge: garbage cans and Dumpsters and other metal containers are far and away the most popular places for urban fires because they contain the flames, and this is just a strange but very specific version of that. But I noticed on my way in here that you have a Dumpster in the back, which makes the choice of a corpse fridge much harder to account for. What kind of person would break all the way into a mortuary to light his or her fire in this specific location, and then delay leaving long enough to clean up after him or herself on the way out?”
“I can’t say that I know,” said Margo, and as bad as I was at reading vocal emotions, even I could tell that her voice was as cold as ice.
“I don’t know either,” said Harris, “though my working theory is that it was someone who had a connection to the mortuary—mortuaries in general, and this one specifically, given that the fire alarm was the only one that went off. You did say you have a security system, right?”
Margo paused for several moments before answering. “Yes.”
“And yet the intruder alarms, the perimeter alarms, none of those went off. Implying that whoever lit that fire had access to the building.”
Crap.
The room was silent for a while, and I wondered what was happening—they were all just staring at each other awkwardly, I guess—but I didn’t dare to peek in. After a moment Harris spoke again.
“Just two more questions, ma’am, and then I can be out of your hair. The first is a favor: do you mind if I look in that drain by your feet?”
“I mind very much,” said Margo.
“What do you think you’ll find in the drain?” asked Jasmyn.
“Horrors beyond imagining,” said Harris, “given that it’s the floor drain in an embalming room. As it happens, though, I do have a search warrant, so asking your permission was mostly a formality.” I heard rustling papers, and Margo muttered something, and then they all went silent for a moment. I imagined that Harris was kneeling down and unscrewing the grate on the drain, and took the risk of peeking in while he was distracted. He was indeed kneeling, facing away from me, his head hunched down over the drain in the floor. From this angle I couldn’t see enough of him to make a clear identification, though I could at least confirm that he was young. Margo and Jasmyn were focused intently on his work, and none of the three saw me. I ducked back out of sight and a moment later heard the metallic clink as Harris lifted the grate and set it on the tiles. I heard the snap of a rubber glove and Jasmyn’s groan of disgust. “That’s the stuff,” said Agent Harris. “Perfect. Jasmyn, would you be so kind as to open that plastic evidence bag next to me on the floor? I don’t want to get this on the outside of it.”
There was only one thing he could be looking for in the drain: soulstuff. Whoever this was knew about the Withered, and knew that one had died here. He was probably tipped off by the smear on the slab—I kicked myself mentally for doing such a crappy job of cleaning it up. I heard him take the glove off and then handle the bag; he’d probably just put the glove, soulstuff and all, inside the bag and sealed it up.
“There,” he said. “Now, on to question number two. Which pocket did I put that in—ah, here it is. Do you know this young man? He may be going by the name John, or David, or I guess really anything. He changes it a lot.”
Damn. Damn damn damn, around the parking lot and back in for another damn.
“He doesn’t look familiar,” said Margo. “Is he an arsonist?”
“And a mortician,” said Harris. “So this is really right in his wheelhouse. You’re sure you haven’t seen him?”
“Pretty sure.”
“You haven’t … given him a job and a room in the back?”
Another damn. Who could have told him? The police—I would have been a part of the statement Margo gave to the police. And since Harris had already been to the local court, since he had a search warrant, it made sense he’d talked to the local cops, too.
“We had a boy for a day or two,” said Margo, “but he wasn’t here the night of the fire. And he’s gone now.”
“And he didn’t look like this?”
“These old eyes don’t work too well anymore,” said Margo.
“What about you?” asked Harris. “Is this the boy?”
“You white people all look alike to me,” said Jasmyn, and I’d never wanted to high five someone so hard in all my life.
“I see,” said Harris. “Well then. Thanks for the floor-drain muck, and I’ll be on my way. If you happen to remember anything else, here’s my card, please give me a call.”
“You can count on it,” said Margo. “Thanks for coming.”
I realized in sudden horror that the chime in my backpack would make a loud noise the instant he stepped outside, and I was standing close enough that he might hear it. I started creeping away as quietly as I could, wondering how fast I could go without creaking a floorboard or sounding an audible footstep and terrified that I wasn’t going fast enough. I tried to get as far away as I could, an impossible combination of fast and silent, all the while scrambling to open my backpack and turn the chime off. I unzipped it and looked in, and realized that I had no idea which chime was which, or what sound they might make when I shut them down. The backpack chimed suddenly—“We Wish You A Merry Christmas”—and I prayed that the agent hadn’t heard it. If he was already outside I didn’t have to sneak anymore, so I sprinted at full speed and got to the window just in time to see the man walk out to his car: a black SUV with a Nebraska license plate. The agent turned back one more time, and I caught a clear glimpse of his face as I ducked out of sight.
Agent Mills. Or at least that’s how he’d introduced himself, but I’d known at the time that was probably a fake name. Harris might be fake as well. He was the agent who’d caught up to Brooke and me in Dillon—an FBI analyst who specialized in serial killers and, more recently, the Withered. And me, by extension. No one else had ever been able to find me, but now Mills had done it twice. If he was here, the only move I had left might be to run.
But I was so close! I couldn’t just leave. Especially not if the FBI was moving in on Lewisville—the last two times they’d come hunting Withered, they’d gone way overboard, filling the city with cops and SWAT and soldiers and guns, and it had ended poorly both times. If Rain and her army of monsters were really starting a shadow war, a huge government response could bring it out into the daylight.
The SUV drove away, and almost instantly I heard Margo calling my name: “Robert!” I ignored her and ran through the halls to the front door; I had to see which way Mills turned when he left the mortuary. He’d obviously already spoken to the local police—he had their crime-scene photos and a local search warrant. That meant that he had three obvious leads to follow up on next if he wanted to find me: Kathy Schrenk, Luke Minaker, and Crabtree Jones. The three Withered victims. If he turned right, he was headed to the highway, out to Crabtree; if he turned left he was headed to one of the other two. The only other people who’d seen me were the men at the bar and Jasmyn’s friends, and Mills had no way to link them to me. I got to the front door with seconds to spare and watched as Mills turned left, into the center of town.
“Robert!” said Margo, shuffling up behind me. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Thank you for covering for me. I’m leaving now.”
“That man had a picture of you,” she said. Jasmyn stood next to her. “Did you light that fire?”
“I did not.” I watched Mills’s car drive away, disappearing out of sight behind a row of houses. I looked at Margo. “Yes, he was looking for me, but no I didn’t do anything he said I did.”
“What did you do?”
“You’re better off not knowing.”
“Which one is your real name?” asked Jasmyn.
I looked at her, terrified of telling the truth.…
… But I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her. “John.” That one word had the power to unravel everything I’d worked for, if she wanted to.
Her voice was quiet. “Did you hurt somebody, John?”
I stared back for far too long before I answered. “No one who didn’t deserve it.”
Margo started to talk, but I cut her off. “You won’t see me again. And you should probably get out of town.”
“I have a funeral to take care of,” said Margo.
“The man you just met is … well, not a bad man, but like a bad omen.” I tried to find the right words to make her believe me—which meant it couldn’t be the whole truth, but it had to be a version of it. “Let me put it this way: there’s a group in Lewisville. Think of it like a cartel, though this is not about drugs. Agent Harris is hunting that group, and that group does not like to be hunted. There will be trouble, and please understand that while that word is one hundred percent accurate in meaning, it’s maybe only two percent accurate in scale. Many, many people will get hurt, and I don’t want you to be one of them. You’re good people.”
“You’re going to do something stupid,” said Margo. “I can see it in your eyes, and I know what trouble-eyes look like.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Eventually. First things first: I’m doing exactly what I told you to do. I’m disappearing.”
I pushed open the door, and my backpack chimed as I walked away.