“Just so you know, I’m not going to screw up the Kruge investigation to spite you. If anything pans out on Farnsworth, let me know.”
I smiled and nodded once. She turned and walked in the other direction. I knew she wouldn’t screw up the investigation to spite me. If I found any key evidence, she would take credit for solving the case to spite me.
Chapter 6
I could hear the phone ringing when I was in the shower, as phones tend to do at inconvenient times. I let the machine pick up. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t leap out dripping wet to answer the phone. I don’t always remember to check the answering machine because it’s more or less my junk phone number. Anyone who really knows me and needs to reach me has my cell or knows someone who does. The apartment phone was for strangers and bill collectors, who apparently share it freely. Besides, I don’t have caller ID on that line, and I like to choose whom I talk to when I’m wet and naked.
I hit the answering machine replay as I got dressed. “Hello, Mr. Grey. My name’s Janey Likesmith. I work at the OCME. I have some information about a case you’re involved in. I…um…I don’t always get my messages, so please stop by the office so we can talk. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but the value of this may not last. I can explain in person. Thank you.”
The OCME is the Office of the City Medical Examiner. At the moment, the only person I knew there was Dennis Farnsworth. Murdock, of course, knew the staff, but how anyone knew me was intriguing. I had to laugh about this Janey Likesmith not getting phone messages. The OCME had been in a slide downward for so long, the fact that the lights were on was a minor miracle. Asking for a decent receptionist was probably out of the question.
At the end of my street, a bitter wind swept up the channel and welcomed me to the outside world. Boston sits on a harbor, of course, and the Charles River frames it to the north, making the city an island of cold misery in the winter. Even in October, wind chills off the water pull the temperatures down in the freezing zone, and when you live in the Weird, you have no choice for decent transportation except your feet. There’s a bus line that does run down Old Northern, but it doesn’t take anyone where they want to go. I made my way over the Northern Avenue bridge with shoulders hunched against the wind, my ears freezing. While I’m not particularly vain about my hair, the least I figure I could save people is the spectacle of hat head. So, my ears freeze. I crossed into the financial district and hopped a bus to the South End.
The bus trundled down Washington Street, weaving in and out of the steel girders of the abandoned elevated subway. It’s a strip of perpetual twilight, the el blocking out the sun during the day, sooty arc lights casting dim illumination at night. I hate buses. They’re slow, irregular, and rank. It’s hard to feel the least bit important if you have to ride a bus. It practically proclaims to the world you can’t afford a car or cab fare. The subway is at least a convenience. A bus, though, a bus says sit in traffic, in discomfort, until you’re late as hell. Fortunately, I didn’t have an appointment.
Boston’s South End is not South Boston. Newcomers make the mistake all the time. The South End is next to Southie, but it’s a whole other world. Where Southie always maintains its identity as a middle-class Irish enclave, the South End is more like an eccentric sister that likes to change her image as often as possible. Sitting at the crossroads of other neighborhoods, it has an eclectic vibe of old Irish, Lebanese, Asian, African-American, Hispanic, gay men and lesbians, rich and poor, college students, artists who can’t be bothered with New York, and, yeah, a lot of fey. It has always been a neighborhood in flux, always interesting, and politically powerless. So, it ends up with a lot of city agencies like free clinics and welfare offices that other areas try their damnedest to keep out. And the OCME. No one ever wants to live next to the city morgue.
The bus left me in a cloud of blue exhaust, and I walked the final two blocks to the OCME. The place looks and feels tired, as though all the human tragedy that revolves through its doors has taken its toll on the building. I pushed through the scarred Plexiglas doors and found the reception desk. Of the four desks behind the main counter, an older woman occupied one and the others were empty. She did not look up.
“Excuse me?” I said. She still did not look, but held up her index finger as she continued reading something.
I felt a tingle of unexpected essence behind me and turned. A dark elf walked purposefully toward me, gave one glance at me, and placed some folders on the counter. As she perused her files, I couldn’t imagine what she was doing at the OCME. Dark elves are rare in Boston, never mind working for human normals. They preferred keeping the peace in the southern parts of the country, particularly Atlanta and Birmingham,
One of the better things about Convergence was the dark elves. They didn’t much care for oppression of people based on skin color, something they found utterly ridiculous conceptually. If there was one thing the Alf and Swart elves agreed on, it was that they were elves first. Elves knew racism, but skin color alone wasn’t something to base it on. Swarts had swiftly become involved in politics and pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1934. I guess Congress didn’t have much hope of defying a bunch of people who could chant their asses to hell and back.
The woman behind the counter still had her hand up. “Excuse me, I’m looking for Janey Likesmith,” I said. Without moving anything else, the woman dropped her index finger forward and pointed.
“I’m Janey,” the dark elf said, smiling as she extended her hand. She had deep brown skin and warm cocoa-colored eyes. Nutmeg brown hair swept over her delicate ear points and stopped abruptly at the nape of her neck. “You must be Mr. Grey.”
“Connor. How’d you know?”
She leaned against the counter. “No one comes here looking for me unless I call them. Do you have a few minutes to look at something?”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, smiling back so it wouldn’t sound like sarcasm.
With an almost childlike excitement, she gathered her folders and led me across the hall to a stairwell. She wore chunky shoes that echoed loudly as she descended the steps. “I found something unusual in the Farnsworth case. I called you when I saw you were consulting with Detective Murdock. The Boston P.D. won’t know what to do with it. No one here would get the ramifications.” She paused at the basement door, concern troubling her face. “He won’t mind, will he? That I called you and not him?”
“No, that’s why he calls me, too.”
She relaxed. “Oh, good. This way, please.” She opened the door to another, dimmer hallway, and we were in the morgue area.
“Likesmith isn’t a fey name,” I said.
She threw me a smile. “It’s Dokkheim, actually. I used to say to humans that where I come from it’s ‘like Smith.’ So I changed it. The irony is now I have to explain it to the fey all the time.”
She led me to a small lab with two tables, one empty, the other strewn with instruments, and walls lined with drawers. Without hesitation, she opened a particular drawer and pulled out several large envelopes and plastic bags. I recognized the Farnsworth boy’s clothing in one of the larger ones. She laid them out on the table with care, immediately marking the tracking sheets to indicate the date and time she removed the items and put my name down as well. She lifted an envelope, removed a glass box about four inches square, and placed it on the table.
“You made a ward box?” I said.
She nodded. “As a precaution. I found these stamps in the lining of Dennis Farnsworth’s hoodie.”
Disappointment crawled across my mind. I’d seen stamps like this before. Kids licked them to get high. Farnsworth had drugs on him. The kid was running drugs while wearing Moke’s gang colors.