Chapter Text
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"There was just something about the building that drew me," November March was saying to the thicket of microphones and video cameras clustered around him. "An aura of old evil. I knew it had to be swept away before we could do good."
I was watching this spectacle with my old partner Haldis Jansson. She'd picked a shaded spot apart from the crowd where the bare ground was relatively free of rubble, as we didn't see any reason to muck up the wheels of my fancy new chair. Haldis murmured, "Another catchy caption and pretty picture for the news."
I adjusted the sling on my arm but didn't say anything. No question the media was feeding March's ego, cooing over him with phrases like "a Korean-Latino Adam Lambert with psychic superpowers," but March himself—who was still constantly urging everyone to call him "Vem," as if that was less ridiculous than his full name—wasn't shy about playing up his pop-idol good looks, either. For the groundbreaking ceremony today he'd chosen a lustrous silver-gray jacket, white shirt, and tight black jeans that had more than one reporter glassy-eyed and drooling.
If only the blurb jockeys knew the real story.
Captain Forester, who was standing behind March like a half-proud, half-incredulous parent, caught my eye and scowled faintly, as if she too was psychic and could read my traitorous thoughts.
Not that she needed to: I had grumbled often enough since the day, several weeks earlier, when she had called me into her office, said, "I hate to do this to you," then handed me a file.
That phrase, with its undertone of Better you than me, had helped me brace myself, but even then, opening the folder had still delivered a gutpunch.
The face in the photo had light brown skin, feline features, stunning blue-green eyes, black hair, a neatly trimmed goatee, and a "Come taste me" half-smile. That wasn't the problem: it was that the face was nearly identical to what I had been seeing in half-remembered dreams and visions for weeks. "Who is this?" I had asked, staring at the nonsense words under the photo: November June March.
"A very very VIP's son," Forester had said. "We need to keep November out of trouble for a few days. A week at most."
Here I'd thought that I'd been dreaming of my much younger self, back when my hair was black instead of white: learning that it was someone else had been like the weightless moment at the top of a thrill ride hill. I had paged through the file; multiple DUIs and violations of public decency in posh international locations. "You want me to babysit a snot-nosed rich kid?"
"The 'kid' is twenty-three," Forester had said. "Don't think of it as babysitting; pretend it's witness protection."
It was no fun if I waved the white flag too soon. "Why not have Jansson do it?" I asked. "She's better at this sort of thing than I am."
"And what sort of thing is that?" Forester folded her hands; her voice was as smooth as a freshly-honed razor.
"Handling delicate situations."
Forester was silent.
"I have cases," I said weakly.
"All of them cold." She unfolded her hands and began to sort the scree of paperwork on her desk. "I'll try to get a laptop set up for you with copies of your files and some data you can sift through."
"I hate laptops. Plinky little keys and teeny-tiny screens and that infuriating little square of Where the Fuck is the Cursor."
"A touch-pad, Daw, it's called a touch-pad." She paper-clipped some things, and then shredded a page of some other thing. "Well, it's your choice: either join us in this century, or take a book to read while you're there. Something long."
"Fine, fine. Send the damn laptop. But make sure whoever sets it up copies my whole cold cases folder."
She didn't look up, but she did make a note. Maybe. She was probably writing Daw is a fucking pain in the ass. "Any other questions?"
I sighed. "Which safe house is he at?"
"Emperor Suite at the Golden T."
I should have known. The Exalted Imperial, commonly referred to by lowly serfs like us as the Golden Turd, was the place the most crusty of the uppermost crust went when mere ostentation wouldn't do. "So security is taken care of at least twice over?"
"Yeah," Forester said, and finally looked up at me. "Look, all you have to do is keep November from doing anything that would embarrass his father."
"Such as," I referred to the rap sheet, "having public sex with three other people on a dance club stage?"
"I know you feel this is a shit assignment," Forester said, "and I won't pretend that it's the best use of your time, but this is a quid pro quo situation driven by politics. The brownie points we'll get will benefit the entire city."
"How?"
"Cutting the red-tape holding up Lower Sixth and Union."
Well, didn't that just slap my tantrum? I could hardly stand in the way of finally converting that unused monstrosity into a women's shelter and homeless housing.
I tossed November's folder onto her desk. "Well then, ma'am, tell the mighty whoevers I'm honored to serve."
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The doorman at the Exalted Imperial, unimpressed by both my badge and the letter on ambassadorial cardboard I carried, made me feel like a lice-ridden unwashed derelict despite my fresh white shirt, dark gray funeral suit, and ten-year old tie. I bit back the comments I wanted to make about bespoke uniforms and the quality of the leather in my shoulder holster, which was too bad. Those comments had ghost pepper levels of burn.
Golden Turd snobbery was maintained by a second Exalted Imperial who, with wrinkled nose and pursed lips, led me to a private elevator.
When the doors opened on the top floor, half the large men who lined the hallway had their weapons drawn; the rest were tensed for action.
I stood absolutely still and said, "One four two dash eight five seven. Guillermo is my contact. My badge is in my inside left breast pocket. I have a firearm in a shoulder holster."
One of the large men, presumably Guillermo, tapped something into his wristwatch, then nodded. "He's good. Exit the elevator, detective."
The rest of the action movie extras lowered their guns.
I murmured, "Well that was exciting," hoping to get the elevator operator to unpurse or at least unwrinkle, but he gave me nothing.
I followed Guillermo down the hall past several unmarked doors; at the second to the last, Guillermo stopped and knocked softly.
The door was opened by yet another dark suited action movie extra. After an exchange in a language I didn't follow, Guillermo left and Action Man led me across the high-ceilinged foyer, through a room stuffed with more antique furniture and gilt than Versailles, down a narrow butler's pantry hallway, past a conference room with a huge table, and finally to what looked like a living room furnished in mid-Century Modern.
A dark-haired young man in a blue robe stood on a balcony outside the far glassed wall, looking down on the little people below, and while I couldn't say what I had expected a scion's son to be wearing, a blue silk kimono with cranes and white chrysanthemums seemed fairly on-brand.
"Sir," Action Man said, and the kid turned.
I had been prepared for March's non-WASPy good looks, of course, having seen his photograph, but not his air of simmering mischief—though, given his arrest record, that wasn't surprising either. "You're not room service," he said, with almost comically arch amusement.
Ah, youth. "No, I'm Detective Daw."
"Well," March said, standing up and sauntering toward me in a way that allowed plenty of display time for the low-slung black mesh underwear framed by his unbelted kimono. "I had no idea the police department delivered." He held out his hand and said, "Call me Vem." He batted his lashes in a way we both knew was ridiculous, and added, "or Ganymede."
The kid had balls, I'd give him that. "Cut the crap, March. I'm not a snack."
"Sir, yes sir!" March said, saluting.
I looked at Action Man. "I guess I'll take it from here."
"Am I in trouble again?" March asked, "or are you here to babysit me?"
"It's only babysitting if you act like a baby."
March looked surprised, and briefly hurt. "Well, whatever. You can leave. My father put more than enough prison guards here to keep me from doing anything fun."
"It doesn't make sense to me either, but I'm going to stay and do my job."
March eyed me again. "Just so you know, you've got a Zeus vibe I really dig, what with the white beard and the deep voice and all, so I plan to flirt with you non-stop."
"Knock yourself out," I said. "Although if you need it to lead anywhere, you're better off calling the concierge and requesting something from the special menu."
March suppressed a smile. "I might just do that."
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The room service waiter was built like a Tom of Finland character, a pyramid of bulge and muscle wedged into a custom made uniform. He didn't hesitate when March ordered him to wheel the cart into the bedroom, but left less than three minutes later.
March sauntered out after him and threw himself, half lounging, onto a couch across from where I sat. "He was cute, wasn't he?" he asked. "Was he your type?"
"I didn't notice."
"Aren't you supposed to pay attention to things like that?" March asked, narrowing his eyes. "To make sure no assassins get in here and kill me?"
Assassins. Please. "That's what the suits in the hall are for," I said.
March made a tsking sound and leaned his head on his arm. "Really? You're pulling the 'Not my job' excuse?"
Fuck. March's skin was starting to glow like a farolito, and the subtle blue and purple streaks in his dark hair were neon. This was not the time for this shit to kick in—and what was it going to show me, anyhow? I doubted the kid was any kind of criminal, and anything outside that was nothing I needed to see. "How many rooms in this suite?" I asked.
March looked up at the ceiling. "Let's see… six bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, a dining room, a conference room, a fitness room with a sauna, foyer, powder room, sitting room, kitchen, media room. Fourteen. Fifteen if you count the sauna as its own room." He looked over at me. "Would you count the sauna?"
I knew damn well how this scenario was supposed to run. I should say I'd never been in a sauna, an admission which would be seen as a green light for a tour and subsequent sweaty grappling. "Are the amenities here lacking?"
March chuckled. "Amenities? How quaint you are. No, I'd say this luxury hotel has adequate amenities." He sat up; his face had a sudden, disarmingly innocent boyishness. "Would you like to watch a movie with me? We could get pizza!" Before I could answer, the boyish innocence evaporated. "Or maybe something else? There are toys in the Jade Room. We could start with the nipple clamps."
"How about this," I said. "You go to the Jade Room, and stay there."
"And you'll join me?"
"No, I'm going to make some phone calls." And maybe pass out, I thought, because every time March moved he left contrails. "Call room service again if you get lonely."
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March stomped off after informing me that his last boyfriend had called him "an alluring incubus," and I went to sit in the Versailles sitting room next to the entrance foyer until my laptop arrived.
When it did, I was not disappointed. Knowing how much I love trawling through data, Forester had not only sent me the files from the computer at my desk, but a deep scoop, with pictures, of ME data going back almost ten years and covering all of the city's morgues. Of course, most of the identifying information about the victims was encrypted into garbage letters because the laptop wasn't on the station's internal network, but I had COD and photos and key crime scene data and basic demographic, and that was good enough.
I loved doing data analysis, because it felt the right way, the only way, to catch criminals. Not by sitting around hoping for sparkles and drips and bad dreams, but by putting in the work. Which I did. Sorting and resorting the data, dragging the sieve again and again, up, down, across. Looking for bumps in the data, unexpected mountains or molehills or gullies where there should be plateaus. The hours flew by.
"Look, we got off on the wrong foot." March was posed in the doorway. His body language and demeanor had changed; he was quieter, and seemed shorter. He'd belted his kimono, and although he was still glowing, it was less headache inducing. "What will it take for you to let me sit by you?" he asked.
"You being less of a gaudy gnat," I said absently, then looked up.
He had folded his arms: classic defensive posture. "Less Dionysian, you mean?"
"I have no idea what that is," I said, which was a lie. Unfortunately I knew the Roarer's domain far too well.
"You want me to act civilized," March said, with the dead monotone of frequent rehearsal. "Put on reasonable clothes. Go get a book and read quietly somewhere out of sight."
So that's what it was with him. I felt a small twinge of sympathy: his kind of bratty acting out was usually a result of fragile self esteem, from knowing you were very low on the list of what was important to your parents. Tricky to navigate, given our current situation, so I lowered my eyes to my computer screen as I tried to formulate the best response.
Too late: there was a whisper of silk as March left the room.
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"Is this better?" March was now wearing tan trousers and a tight black t-shirt.
"Good enough."
Without waiting for an invitation March sat next to me and peered at the screen. "Is that morgue stuff? It looks fascinating."
A complex-yet-pleasant fragrance wafted from him. I didn't think it was what was making the floor ripple, but I shallowed my breathing just in case. "Not the word I'd pick. Most of the time people die in obvious, easily explainable ways. They crash their cars, get shot or stabbed, overdose on drugs, fall off balconies and cliffs, or simply drop dead while walking their dogs or grocery shopping or gardening or sitting in church."
"Or having sex?" March said. "Do a lot of people die during sex?"
"Not as many as trashy pop culture would have you think." I realized now that I was unlikely to get much done with him hovering over me; if I was lucky, he'd get bored soon and I could get back to my spreadsheets and photos of dead bodies.
"What's that?" March was pointing to a closeup photo of a circular, vaguely New Age-ish tattoo inked in dark green. Above, a half circle sky arced above the branches and trunk of a sturdy oak; below, roots were cupped in a half-circle of earth. "A tattoo?"
The image began to pulse. A coil of nausea stirred in my guts, rising up like a charmed cobra. "I don't think so."
"What is it then?" March said. He stretched one arm across the back of the couch, and then leaned close enough to prop his chin on my shoulder. "It sure looks like a tat."
"Do me a favor," I said as the room started to disintegrate. "Grab me a club soda from the minibar?"
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There was a cool damp something across my eyes.
I was lying down. My shoes were off, my jacket had been removed, and my tie loosened.
Shit.
I pulled the cloth off my eyes. Action Man was watching me from the doorway to the foyer. He nodded and backed out of sight, taking his phone from his pocket.
Double shit.
"Oh, you're awake. Good." March was sitting on the floor next to my shoulder; in front of him was my laptop, balanced on a tiny, fragile-legged footstool that I suspected should have been in a museum. He turned the laptop so that I could see the screen, and went on, "So I figured out how to do searches. Since that first one was tagged with 'green tattoo,' I looked for everything else that had that tag. And I found a lot more pictures. A bunch were tagged with 'BPDCN,' which I thought was some drug, or a club, but Google said it's—"
"Blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm." I sat up with a groan.
March was taken aback. "And you know that how?"
"Because there's a frustrated oncologist wanna-be somewhere in the system who pins that tag on every damn picture of a bruise." My head was throbbing, but at least the psychedelic landscaping had receded.
March reached down and picked up a small bottle of club soda, which he held up to me. "Well, now I'm less impressed with you."
I reached over and closed the laptop, then took the bottle. "Use of department resources is restricted to department members," I said.
March shrugged. "Well, sorry, but I was bored, and you were passed out." He paused for a beat. "We should have called the hotel doctor for you, shouldn't we? I wanted to, but Guillermo said if you didn't need CPR it wasn't really an emergency."
I waved a hand, opened the club soda, and took a swig. Vile stuff when unaccompanied. "It's nothing. Happens to me all the time. No big deal."
"No big deal? Narcolepsy with cataplexy? Are you hallucinating as well?" March asked, then bristled at my astonished stare. "Yes, I know what those words mean. It's insulting that, just like everyone else, you think I'm just an empty-headed party boy. Well, guess what? Rich doesn't always mean stupid. And looking up symptoms is easy." His brow furrowed in concern. "You're sure you're okay?"
"Yeah." I carefully lifted the laptop off the priceless piece of furniture. "Let's keep this on an actual table."
"Like in the conference room? Sure." March got up and went to a mirrored cabinet. "Do you want something restorative first? A brandy, or a cocktail? I'll bet you're a classic Old Fashioned man."
"Not while I'm on duty."
"It's after five."
"Doesn't matter. I'm on duty as long as I'm here."
"Seriously? Twenty-four seven?"
"Yes."
"Suit yourself." March started to concoct something for himself that required the opening of many bottles and small jars. "Poor thing," he said.
I didn't know which one of us March was referring to, but either way I agreed.
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After a surprisingly homey dinner of roast chicken with mashed potatoes and asparagus—I had expected March to order something outrageous, the sort of "tiny chic food sculpture on a huge plate" thing you'd find in an upscale restaurant—March led me to the conference room. The enormous table of exotic wood was lit with soft indirect lighting, while on every wall panels masquerading as abstract art in subdued shades concealed office supplies and equipment.
"Can I stay and watch you work?" March asked. " I'll be quiet."
This timid yet desperate to please puppy demeanor in place of the earlier How Many Buttons Can I Push? approach suggested that March was trying to latch onto me as a substitute father figure. I was definitely not comfortable in that role, but I decided not to be an arsepot about it. "Yes, you can stay."
We sat down, and I re-opened the laptop to review his search results.
A few were the result of bad tagging, and he'd missed a few by making a syntax error in the search, but all in all, he'd done better than some who'd been in the department a year. "Not bad," I said, and meant it.
"The weird part is the thumbprints," March said, "or am I seeing something that's not there?"
So much for staying quiet. "Thumbprints?"
March scooted his chair closer and pointed. "See? Isn't that another bruise, on the front of the body?" He pressed his thumb to a spot just below his collarbone. "It's like, right here. I noticed it on a few of them."
An unpleasant squiggle ran up my spine and stabbed at the base of my skull.
"It's opposite the mark on their backs." March held his hand up, palm down, making an inverted U-shape with his thumb and middle finger, then made a pinching gesture. "Like if someone with really big hands grabbed them. Or at least super long fingers. But it has to be from some kind of grabby thing. Maybe a fucking machine clamp?"
I snorted, but scrolled through the anterior photos anyhow, and he was right. Not about the fucking machine clamp, of course, but at least seven victims had a distinct thumbprint-sized greenish bruise on the front of their body, and at least a dozen more had a faint mark that might have been a bruise.
"Was that good?" March asked eagerly. "Did I help?"
"Yes." I began to tag all the photos.
March clapped his hands, then jumped up and went into the hall; the sound of ice clinking into a glass followed.
The marks were too oddly placed and too precisely shaped to be the result of something random. If only the photos were good enough to tell if the mark had bloomed around injection sites! Frustratingly, given the dates of death, none of the bruisees would still be around for closer examination, but without evidence of a puncture wound… I dumped the data from the tagged photos out into a text file, pulled it into a new spreadsheet, and then began to sort on various fields.
"What brand of shampoo and shower gel do you use?" March called out.
I looked up. "What?"
March was standing in the doorway holding a glass containing a honey-colored liquid and a curve of orange peel. "You smell good. I wondered what you use."
"Generic dish soap," I said. "Whatever brand's cheapest."
"You're joking."
It was too easy to be truly satisfying, but I went with it nevertheless. "Great time saver. I can wash my dirty dishes while I shower. "
"Ha ha. Very funny." March took a sip of his drink. "Actually, if you can, always pick the blue or purple one. Those tints take out yellow tones, so it'll keep your hair and beard pure white, and let Mister Daw stay silver-foxy."
I raised an eyebrow at him.
"Anything else I can do?" March asked.
"Give me some privacy," I said slowly, "while I make a phone call."
March nodded, then turned and went down the hall, presumably toward a bedroom.
Forester answered on the seventh ring; there were conversation and glass-clinking noises in the background. "Hang on," she said.
"Did I interrupt a dinner party?" I asked once she'd moved somewhere quieter.
"No, I'm still at work. Late meeting. How's it going?"
"Fine. He's off getting drunk. Or sulking. Probably both."
"Play nice."
"I have been." I considered not bringing up March's part in what I'd discovered, but decided it was better to be up front. "We were looking through the scoop—"
"We?"
"Yeah, I know, technically it's a violation, but the kid was bored, and the identifying fields are masked. Plus, who's he gonna tell?"
"Fair enough," Forester conceded. "Go on."
"We were looking through the scoop and found something weird." I explained about the tattoo-like marks, and March's grabbing idea. "Only a few had toxes, but with most of the CODs being multiple GSWs or cardiovascular events—"
"It would have been seen as a waste of time. Why didn't anyone pick up on this bruising sooner?"
"Because, at first glance there's no common thread," I said carefully.
"Other than that people who were once alive died with a little green tree on their back." She paused: I could almost hear the coin drop. "First glance?"
"Right. So I was playing with the data, and it just hit me," I said, "we've got men, women, young, old, a range of ethnicities and body types, scattered all over the city."
"Nothing odd about that," she said.
"True. But what is odd is that nearly every victim was looked at by a different ME. In a few cases I happen to know it was when the regular ME was on vacation. I think the deaths were carefully scheduled, and deliberately random."
"Shit." Forester said quietly. "Shit, shit, shit."
I waited.
"I can't decide if your knack for patterns that no one else notices is a blessing or a curse," she said.
Of course she couldn't. It was always both, like ice so cold it burns.
"Anyone in particular you'd like assigned to this?" she asked.
New topic. Good, especially since I had already given it some thought. "Novich. He's pretty well inked."
"So you think the marks are tattoos after all?"
"No, but it never hurts to cross a possibility more firmly off the list. And who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's some new tat tech. An underground procedure. Radiation branding, hemp decal, metallic goat jizz." I said this, even though I didn't think I was wrong, and neither did Forester. We both knew it's usually best to go by the book, even if you're itching to skip past the boring chapters.
"Let's hope it's that simple," she said, "and not something else."
And then, barely aware that I was speaking aloud, I heard myself say, "I'm thinking the kid could tag along while I start looking into this."
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© 2020 First post 30 June; revised 6 Jul 2020