“Oh?”
“Linnea was never really rich. She had fancy things, sure. But she didn’t come from money. She was a grifter. A con artist. Henry knew. He liked that about her. Said it made her exciting. And she was looking to retire, so they settled down together.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
“Because I thought you should know about her past. I just didn’t want you to think Henry was stupid… trusting someone like that. He was a good son.”
“I know he was,” Simone said. The yarn and trash crackled, and the fog came in thicker, like a down blanket tossed over them.
“Thank you,” Trixie said. She peeked into the fire. “It’s all gone. Do you know how to put out a fire?”
“Sure. Stand back, though.” Trixie took several steps back, and Simone used her feet to scoot the flaming barrel towards the edge of the bridge, near an empty taxi stand. It was hot but didn’t burn through the soles of her boots. Finally she got it to the edge and kicked it over.
“Oh!” Trixie said as it fell into the water, taking a few steps forward. Then she stopped. The barrel turned sideways in the water, bobbing half above the surface for a moment, then began to sink. Trixie began to laugh. Simone turned to look at her, and she looked genuinely happy, her eyes fixed on the barrel as it went under. A small stream of bubbles popped on the surface, quickly at first, then slowly, then not at all. Trixie kept laughing, and Simone smiled. But the laughter went on and on, longer than it should have, and still Trixie watched the spot where the last bubble had come up. Quietly, Simone turned and walked away.
When she got home, the fog was thick, and the air sliced past her ears like the sound of a sharpening blade. There would definitely be a storm tomorrow, probably a bad one. Simone frowned as she walked up the stairs to her office. She knew almost everything now, and she still didn’t really know anything.
Simone ducked the moment she opened the door to her office. The smell of blood was clear and sharp in the darkness. She took her gun out and stayed crouched by the door, listening for an intruder. She stayed that way for what seemed an eternity but could have only been a few minutes, but there was no sound—just the smell, rusty and floral. She cautiously raised a hand up and flipped on the lights but stayed crouched, her gun ready. There was just one figure in the waiting room, slumped over in the chair in front of the receptionist’s desk, as if waiting for an appointment, but clearly dead. Blood sparkled on her fur coat like rubies. It was Linnea.
TWELVE
LINNEA HAD BEEN TORTURED before she was killed and deposited in Simone’s waiting room. Simone did a quick search of the office and her apartment. There was no one else there—just Linnea’s body, wrapped in her coat, topped with a hat and veil. The coat hung open, and under it she was naked, with cuts and bruises on her face and stomach, a few puncture marks in her arm, and several red cigarette burns crawling up her leg to a single, blackened cigar burn on her inner thigh like a smudged thumbprint. No obvious sign of how she’d died. The ends of her hair were matted with dried blood, and stuck to her chest. It was a thorough going-over.
Simone turned away from the body. There was something too easy about it, too natural, and it chilled her. She could almost imagine Linnea was merely asleep in her coat, wearing red stockings and waiting up late in bed for the husband who never came home. Well, they were together now, whether they liked it or not. Simone pressed her hands down on the desk for the secretary who would never exist. She bent her head. Linnea wasn’t her friend, but Simone hadn’t disliked her, which was more than she could say for a lot of people.
Normally she’d call Caroline now to tell her a case had come to a body in her office and she was going to call the cops; she’d ask Caroline to come over, smooth things out, maybe let her lean on her shoulder a little. It wasn’t the dead body. Simone had seen bodies. And it wasn’t the sense of invasion. It was something else. She found herself thinking of Trixie, and the way she’d looked when Simone kicked the trash-can pyre into the sea.
“Phone,” she said, and her earpiece beeped, ready to be given an order. “Call Peter.”
“Hey, soldier,” he said when he picked up. He said it with a creak in his voice that she recognized, the way he talked as he was sitting up in bed and stretching, like he had after sex, asking her if she wanted something to drink. Then he’d walk to his kitchen naked and bring back a few beers. They’d lay in bed and drink, the sweat from the bottles slowly dripping down their arms and onto their bodies.
“Hi,” Simone said, realizing she’d let the pause linger.
“You called me.” He was smiling; she could tell.
“Did I wake you?”
“Don’t worry about it. I had to work late, I was just grabbing a few hours where I could.”
“If you need to sleep, I can call back—”
“What’s wrong, Simone?”
“Can you…” she trailed off. “Can you meet me at the battlefield? I don’t want to talk about this over the phone.”
“Yeah, I’ll be there in ten minutes.” She could hear him moving, putting on clothes.
“Thanks.” She hung up before he could reply. She turned around again and leaned back on the desk, taking a long look at the body. She memorized the way the body fell, one arm over the back of the chair, head leaning. Natural, but not. Just the wrong side of alive. She stared at the burns again, circles of different sizes, like a map of the solar system, and the lines of dried blood like empty riverbeds. Then she tightened her coat around her, turned out the lights, and left, locking the door behind her.
Outside, it was colder than it had been when she’d gone inside. How long had she been staring at the body? It hadn’t felt long, but it must have been an hour, at least. The night was brittle, and the fog rose up like steel walls.
She went over suspects who would put the body in her office. This wasn’t about someone trying to frame her; it wasn’t calculated enough for that. It was a warning. Whoever had done this was telling her they were willing to kill—and worse—for the painting, and leaving Linnea in her office meant, “find the painting, or you’re next.” But find it for whom?
Simone sighed as she realized who had done this. No one else made sense; it had to be him. Charming Dash Ormond. Linnea was just another of those dead bodies that always seemed to end his cases. But Simone didn’t know who’d hired him. She could call and ask, but Dash would just deny the whole thing. And there wouldn’t be a shred of evidence on the body pointing to him, either. Cold, beautiful Dash would be clean about it. He must have been cleaning off the blood when he went to “wash up” during her visit. She must have really scared him, waiting like that when he’d just gotten back from leaving a body in her office. She wouldn’t be sending him any more drinks at the bar, she thought. Maybe she’d send him a bottle of something wherever he ended up, though.
She got to the battlefield first. It wasn’t too far from the office. It wasn’t really a battlefield, either. That was just what Simone and Peter had called the Douglass Farm Building as kids, when they played with their army figures, laying out strategies and maps for taking over hostile territory. The corn was usually the hostile territory. They attacked from the potatoes.
There were a lot of farms around the city. Most produce was grown in the ocean as algae before being turned into paste for 3D printers, or in the crystal floating houses that bobbed on light plastic, hovering on the waves, built for this environment. But there were a couple of farm boats and a few dozen farm buildings. Not all buildings broke the water’s surface at the twenty-first floor. That was just a generalization. New York had had an upward slope once. The Douglass Farm was a building that, because of the height of the floors, had a partially submerged top story—a foot or two of water at the bottom and nothing to stand on above. No one had known exactly what to do with buildings like this—rooftops on the ocean, with nothing livable beneath them. Then someone got the bright idea to open up the rooftop, leaving the rest of the building in place. They coated the inside with thick, insulating layers of desalination filters, and then covered the rest up with soiclass="underline" a seaside farm with constant freshwater underneath, and if the waves started looking high, just put up a big tent for a while. The vegetables grown on them always tasted saltier and windier, somehow, but they were cheap compared to the stuff from the mainland or other countries.