Hidden Things Read online

  She waited. The two men across the desk from her said nothing. Unwilling to waste any more time on the conversation, she said, “This thing stamps the call according to its own time zone, Detectives.”

  For a few seconds the two men said nothing, then Special Agent Walker’s eyes widened and he stood up. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me! We drove down here for this?”

  Johnson jerked a look back at the other man. “Agent Walker?”

  Walker split his scorn between Calliope and his companion. “There’s a two-hour time difference between here and the victim’s location, Johnson. If that thing’s right, the call would have had to have been made an hour after the body was found, probably two to five hours after he was killed.” He jerked his pointed chin toward Calliope. “She thinks she’s got a message from behind the grave.”

  “Beyond.” Calliope interrupted Johnson’s reply. “The phrase is beyond the grave, and no, I don’t.” She waited until both men had turned back to her. “I think it’s obvious that the man you found wasn’t Josh. He might have had his ID, but Josh must still be alive.”

  Detective Johnson shook his head, his already sorrowful expression growing graver. “Ms. Jenkins, there was a positive ID: fingerprints, driver’s license photo, and we could get dental if we wanted it. I didn’t bring along the crime scene photos earlier out of respect for Mrs. Hollis-White but let me assure you: it was Joshua White that they found, and he was not about to get up and make a phone call.”

  Calliope motioned to the machine on the corner of her desk. “Then explain that.”

  “I can’t.” Johnson ignored the dismissive expulsion of breath from the man pacing behind him. “I’d like to have our boys look at it.”

  Calliope made a welcoming gesture with both hands. “Go ahead. I’d love to know what’s going on. I’m sure Lauren would as well.”

  Detective Johnson’s dark brown eyes came back to her. “Ms. Jenkins, I must ask you not to set any false expectations with the family of the deceased regarding this phone call. It would be premature and unkind.”

  Calliope started to reply, but the detective’s formal tone and serious expression stopped her retort. She didn’t say anything as Detective Johnson gathered up the answering machine and left with Special Agent Walker in tow. The federal agent’s narrow face seemed even sharper in the late afternoon light; bitter, like that of a man who’d been told he would have won a grand prize, if only he were taller. Unlike Detective Johnson, he did not wish Calliope a good evening.

  Vikous watched the men leave. He scanned the pair—even from across the street, even amid the growing gloom of dusk. Johnson: build like a football player, face like a marriage counselor. Vikous’s attention lingered on him for only a few seconds. Walker: looked as though something large had grabbed him by the skull and pulled him through a hole two inches too small for him, as though he’d been stripped of—

  Vikous pushed his hood halfway back, letting the remains of the daylight fall across his too-pale skin and too-red mouth. His nostrils flared; he sniffed at the evening air like a hunting dog and, like a dog, he growled.

  The men got into Detective Johnson’s car and pulled into the street. Vikous watched them, shiny black eyes never blinking, until they were almost out of sight. Just as the brake lights of the car flared in the distance, then pulsed to signal a turn, he took three steps, ducked past a pedestrian, stepped around a lamppost, and was gone.

  By six o’clock, Calliope knew that Tom wasn’t going to call—he had a gig, and he liked to warm up early. She watched the sky fade away to the reddish brown that was the closest it ever got to night in the city. When the first streetlight began to brighten outside, she made a wish, ordered pizza, and got to work.

  His office was just the same.

  Josh’s files had always been an amateur shrine to disorganization. Calliope had tried to get him to invest in a computerized system for most of the last two years, but he’d resisted with the same smile he’d used to get her to take the job in the first place. Calliope stood at the threshold of his office, taking in the stack of folders on the corner of his desk and the overstuffed file cabinets along both walls.

  They’d always interviewed clients in Calliope’s office.

  When the pizza arrived, Calliope was still standing in the doorway. She paid the driver, took a deep breath, and marched into the room, flipping on the light as she went. She balanced the box on the windowsill, pulled out a slice, and dropped into Josh’s office chair with the first folder from the stack on the desk, looking for something that mentioned Iowa.

  The notes in each of the folders were handwritten, tiny snippets of her partner’s voice captured on paper.

  Have informed family that Desiree is fine. Got impression they were looking for ‘your daughter’s not dead, just dating a drummer’ discount. Stnd. fee.

  Mr. Vaughn has moved to Seattle—needed to “get away”. Mrs. Vaughn did not understand. Has apparently never met herself.

  Collected fee for Cal’s skip trace, minus cost of her kicking target Amy Whellan through motel door. Need to talk to Cal about calming down. Not while standing in front of a door.

  Calli smiled as she read. Josh knew she always reviewed her case files, and he’d always used the notes to let her know how she’d handled the job. Reading them now was like talking to him again.

  Like the answering machine.

  She wiped the sleep from her eyes and ignored the dampness on her fingers. She hadn’t cried—wouldn’t—at Lauren’s uptown law office; she hadn’t while she waited for the cops to come to her own office to hear Josh’s message; she wasn’t going to cry now, when finding out about his latest job was so important to figuring out what was going on.

  She’d worked through the stack on his desk by eleven and leaned back in the chair, rubbing her neck. There hadn’t been anything of use in any of the files. Most were closed cases.

  She looked at the desk drawers. Notes in a file were one thing, but Josh had always respected Calliope’s privacy and she had returned the favor. It would feel like going through his wallet, but it was worse to not know. Sliding forward in the chair, she moved the last folder back to its stack on the desk and reached for the top drawer on the left.

  Someone knocked on the glass front door of the office.

  For three seconds, Calliope didn’t breathe.

  “The bad guys don’t usually knock, Cal.” She stood, moving around the desk with the sort of stride she hoped was a good mix of Confident Woman and who-could-be-knocking-so-late caution. When she stepped through the office door into the waiting room and saw who was on the other side of the glass, her breath caught again. She kept walking to the door simply to keep from freezing in place, flipped the lock, and stood back.

  Lauren Hollis-White shoved her way in behind a gust of cold air, a spot of high color on each cheek. She glared at Calliope.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Lauren asked.

  Calliope blinked. She was fairly sure that she’d never heard Lauren swear before, and she was absolutely certain she’d never seen her in the office. Before that moment, she would have been willing to bet the woman didn’t know where the office was.

  “I’m . . .” Calliope shook her head. “What are you doing here?”

  Lauren had already turned away from Calliope and was looking in at Josh’s desk. “This is his office? Jesus, it’s just like at home. Why is the light on?” Without waiting for an answer, she stepped through the doorway.

  Calliope followed her. Lauren’s eyes moved over surfaces Calliope doubted her hands would ever touch. She ended her visual tour with the old leather couch in the corner of the office, where Josh would occasionally catch an afternoon nap when things were slow. Staring at it, her expression shifted from distaste to outright anger.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked Calliope again, her voice gone hard.

  “I’m . . .” Calliope moved to the desk to distract herself from the look on Lauren’s face. “J
ohnson and Walker came by here earlier this afternoon. They wanted to know if there was anything in Josh’s files that might tell them what he was working on in Iowa, but they got one look at this”—she gestured at the desk—“and asked me to do the digging for them.” Calliope’s knack for tweaking the truth had always bordered on the mythic.

  “You just decided to help them out?”

  “I wanted something to do and I knew this would keep me busy.”

  “Why not go home and leave it for tomorrow?” Lauren asked.

  Calliope watched the other woman’s face. “I kicked my guitarist boyfriend out of my house this morning and I want to give him time to move his stuff out.”

  Lauren snorted, another first in Calliope’s experience. “Figures,” she muttered to herself as she dropped into a chair beside the desk.

  Something clicked as Calliope watched her guest brush a strand of hair from her face. “You’re drunk.” She couldn’t keep surprise out of her voice.

  Another snort. “Hardly.” There was a short pause. “I have been drinking, but I am certainly not drunk.”

  “There wasn’t enough alcohol in the house,” Calliope said. Lauren didn’t reply. “You figured that since Josh was living out his Sam Spade fantasy down here in the slums he’d have a bottle of . . . what? Rye? . . . stashed in a filing cabinet?”

  Lauren sat very still, her expression sullen. Calliope watched her for a few seconds, then walked across the room, pulled open a drawer, and withdrew a bottle. She set it down with a thump on the edge of Josh’s desk nearest her guest.

  “Johnnie Walker, actually.”

  Lauren stared at the bottle, her eyes slightly damp but unreadable. “Do you have any clean glasses?” she asked without looking up.

  “Cold pizza and whiskey,” Lauren commented from the couch. “It reminds me of college.” She glanced at Calliope, sitting in the padded chair behind the desk with her feet up. “I suppose it reminds you of last week.”

  Calliope ignored the barb. “I’d have to go back at least a couple years for something like this.” She took another bite of pizza. “Probably while I was still in the band.”

  “Oh yes . . .” Lauren dropped her chin to her chest and raised her glass in mock salute. “The band.”

  Calliope frowned. “You know, you knock it, but you don’t know anything about it. It was . . .” She gestured with her glass. “It was good.”

  The other woman shook her head, possibly more vehemently than she would have an hour ago. “What you don’t understand is me.” She struggled to the edge of the couch. “I don’t like bands.”

  “Oh,” Calliope said. “I know.”

  Lauren scowled. “What I mean is, I don’t like bands, or band members, or backstage passes, or any . . .” She shook her head, her hands pressed together in her lap, her lips trembling. “I liked Josh. Just Josh. It didn’t have anything to do with what he did, or how much effort he’d put into something that had never gone anywhere—I liked him despite that.”

  It was Calliope’s turn to snort her derision. “You didn’t exactly have to deal with it for very long, though, did you?”

  Lauren’s eyes snapped back to her. “I never asked him to stop.”

  Calliope’s mouth gave a wry, bitter twist. “And yet.”

  “He gave that up on his own—I think you knew about it before I did.” Lauren glared at Calliope’s unchanged expression. “Do you honestly think”—she gestured around the room as she pushed herself upright—“that I would have tried to get him to become this? He’s brilliant . . . was brilliant. He could have done anything. This . . . private detective fantasy had nothing to do with me.” Her eyes went to Calliope, then the desk, then seemed to lose focus in a very particular way, her expression neutral. “I don’t even know why he did it.”

  Calliope watched her face. “You don’t look like you don’t know why.”

  “I don’t.” Lauren shook her head and took another drink, but didn’t meet Calliope’s gaze. “I don’t know why he started this business, I don’t know why he kept at it for two years while it lost money—a lot of money—and I really don’t know why I helped him pay the bills.”

  “And you don’t know why he hired his ex-girlfriend to work with him.” Calliope’s voice was quiet.

  “No.” Lauren shook her head, her mouth in a grim line. She took another drink. “No, I don’t know that, either.”

  “It wasn’t—” Calliope began.

  “But you know,” Lauren cut in, turning back to the desk where Calliope sat, “that’s not what bothers me.” She pursed her lips, her jaw moving as though she had bitten into something that tasted awful, but which she was too polite to spit out. She moved the tumbler in a slow, flat circle through the air, speeding up the motion as she went, as though she were building up enough momentum to force the words out. “What bothers me . . . is that I don’t know why he ever broke up with you.” She spoke carefully, her voice lower than normal, in that particular way of someone who is trying to speak calmly about something that makes them very angry.

  Calliope didn’t speak. The silence built up into a tangible thing that seemed to take on a physical presence in the room, forcing the two women to look at each other. Eventually. Calliope opened her mouth to give Lauren an answer—any answer—not even sure what she’d say, but Lauren shot to her feet and turned away, wandering barefoot around the room, her eyes looking beyond the paneled walls. “So . . . he was in a band, and I loved him anyway; and then he did this, and I loved him anyway; and now he’s dead.” She trailed off, staring at her empty glass. “I need another drink.”

  Calliope picked up the dwindling bottle and poured, steadier than Lauren only by virtue of the fact that she was sitting. She pondered what Detective Johnson had said to her about Josh’s message and debated telling Lauren about what she suspected. He was probably right; it wouldn’t do her any good to hear if nothing came of it. She might be a bitch but—

  “Whoa. Enough. Calli, shit, whoa.” Lauren pulled the glass away just as Calliope pulled the bottle back, splashing some of the brown liquor across the blotter.

  “Sorry.” She shook her head. “Distracted.”

  “Yeah.” Lauren took a drink from her brimming glass, grimaced, and licked a few drops from the back of her hand. “I can’t feel my tongue anymore,” she muttered as she turned back toward the couch. She took a few halting steps before coming to a stop.

  At her sharp intake of breath, Calliope looked up. They both stared at the figure standing in the doorway. Somewhere in the back of her mind a calm, sarcastic voice was telling Calliope that whoever it was had been standing there awhile and that she was a big drunk idiot who was probably about to die.

  “You left the front door unlocked, before.” The voice coming out of the shadowed hood sounded like the owner had gargled a shovelful of gravel and washed it down with tequila. “Shouldn’t do that. It’s not safe.”

  Next to him, on the wall, the clock read 1:43 A.M.

  4

  “EXCUSE ME?” LAUREN’S voice was sharp and hard. “Who are you?” She turned toward Calliope. “Do you know this—”

  The figure in the doorway turned his head toward her. He spoke one guttural word that bounced off the dark paneling of the office; Lauren dropped to the ground like a puppet that had just had its strings cut. Her glass hit the floor with a thump and jumped sideways, spilling its contents over the thin carpet. The room filled with the stink of whiskey.

  Calliope was standing before she realized it, and a wave of alcohol dizziness swept over her.

  “The hell did you just—”

  “You can’t take her with you.” The vagabond in the doorway stepped forward into the room, closer to Calliope. “You can’t.”

  For a moment all Calliope could do was stare at the shadowed recess of the man’s hood, then she shook her head. “Okay, you’re obviously a little bit completely out of your mind, and I always try to be nice to the insane, but what the hell did you just do to her
?” She made a sharp gesture with her hand as the stranger started to move again. “Stay there or I will kick your chest through your backbone. What did you do to her?”

  The man made a dismissive motion with one gloved hand. “She’s fine. I wanted to talk to you. Didn’t want her around. She’s not part of this. You can’t—”

  “Yeah, take her with me. I heard. I’m not planning to take her anywhere, dumbass, and you really need to get out of my office.”

  “You don’t understand.” He took a step closer.

  “Warned you,” she muttered under her breath. She vaulted over the desk and snapped the heel of her foot at the intruder’s chest.

  Under normal circumstances, the kick might have missed. Calliope had been drinking and was, Josh’s frequent comments to the contrary, generally out of practice with such maneuvers. But she was also very angry and not a little frightened, and those two things together helped her succeed where she might have failed.

  The kick landed square, the shock of impact riding up into her body. She landed in defensive stance, her skirt swirling around her legs.

  Solid, she thought, he’s solid.

  But not immovable. Caught by surprise, the vagrant tumbled backward through the doorway of the office. Rather than sprawling flat with the sort of sounds that Calliope found most satisfying in such situations, he rolled away and sprang up to his feet in a move that was both acrobatic and somehow comical. She caught a glimpse of pale skin beneath the hood and noticed, incongruously, that his shoes were unusually if not ridiculously long, which added to the odd pratfall feel of his recovery.

  “I made a mistake here,” her visitor said from the outer office.

  “Damn straight,” she said.

  The hood seemed to nod toward her, and he was gone, the outer door easing closed behind him.