Seated at my desk, I spent half an hour studying the homicide file McGoo had delivered to me (unofficially) four days after I awakened from the grave. “Here you go, Shamble—do your stuff. The cases don’t solve themselves.”
I was grateful, though intimidated. “It’s not often a person gets a chance to catch his own murderer.”
“Consider this a do-it-yourself project. Besides, it’ll save me the work.”
Fortunately for me, the medical examiner relied on virtual autopsies and high-tech imaging of suspected murder victims. (In my case, there wasn’t much “suspected” about the murder.) My body had been buried intact, relatively speaking.
Now I reread the report, although I already had the words memorized: Classification of Death: Homicide. Cause of Death: Gunshot wound to head. Bullet entered lamboid suture of skull, completely penetrating brain and exiting forehead. Wound is consistent with .32 caliber bullet found at crime scene.
The slug had been embedded in a wooden door in the alley, having lost most of its momentum after passing through my skull. The bullet was damaged by striking the door (not to mention the back and front of my skull, which, according to McGoo, is quite thick). Even so, the lab had gotten good information:
Lead rim-fired bullet, five lands and grooves with a right-hand twist, consistent with a round from an antique Smith & Wesson No. 2 Army .32-caliber revolver. As best we could tell, the weapon was made around the time of the U.S. Civil War. No bullet casing found at the scene, but in that kind of gun, someone would have had to remove the casing manually, and only a stupid murderer would have left it on the ground. Anybody who could have killed me had to be reasonably smart, or lucky. Just for my own reputation, I preferred to imagine him, or her, as smart.
A lot of unnaturals had a fondness for antiques. Gun shops specialized in exotic pieces, and in the Unnatural Quarter it was easy enough to get hold of unregistered weapons of all makes and types. I just needed to figure out who owned a hundred-fifty-year-old Smith & Wesson .32 revolver.
Piece of cake.
* * *
Chambeaux & Deyer dealt with the usual gamut of cases: missing persons, divorces, civil lawsuits, recovery of stolen objects.
Seven years ago, Robin had won her first legal case dealing with unnaturals—securing a victory for a monster-literacy charity—before the two of us ever joined forces. A prominent werewolf millionaire had died as a result of a tragic silver-letter-opener accident (another story entirely), and the will left his entire fortune to the literacy charity. The jilted family contested the will, alleging that becoming a werewolf had rendered the old man mentally incompetent; they showed video evidence of his slavering, bestial antics to prove their point.
Robin argued that—notwithstanding the allegation that a werewolf was by definition mentally incompetent—the decedent was indisputably competent during the rest of the month when the moon wasn’t full, and she entered lunar charts into evidence to prove that the moon had been in the gibbous phase at the time he signed the will. Based on her argument, the judge ruled that the monster-literacy charity was entitled to the full inheritance, as stated in the millionaire’s will.
A few years before that, I had put out my shingle offering my services as a detective around what would later become the Unnatural Quarter. After McGoo got himself punitively promoted to this part of town, he threw me a bone and set me up with my first unnatural case.
He put me in touch with a forlorn family who was desperately trying to track down their uncle Mel. I treaded it like a regular missing persons case, even though Mel was one of the walking dead. He had died six months before the Big Uneasy, but his corpse was still fresh enough to rise up in the first wave of zombies after all the rules changed. When his family came to deliver flowers to the grave one day, they found the earth churned and a sunken hole left where Mel had battered his way out of the coffin and clawed himself back into the light of day.
They followed the muddy footprints out of the cemetery, but lost his trail on the way to the Quarter. So they hired me to find him. Standard detective work. I remember the blond-haired niece in particular, her lower lip trembling, tears filling her eyes … so sad, so sincere, not even twenty years old. “Uncle Mel is lost—I just know he’s homeless somewhere! We’ve got to find him.”
And that’s what I did. I knocked on doors, I asked around the Quarter, I showed Mel’s funeral-notice photo to anyone I met (though the photo wasn’t going to be a very good likeness, since he’d been ripening in the grave for half a year). I finally found the unkempt-looking zombie sleeping in an alley, covered with flattened cardboard boxes and newspapers, little more than a pile of ambulatory detritus getting snuggly with rodents and beetles.
Success. I had done my job.
Mel was perfectly alert, and he must have been a charming guy in life. When I told him that his family had engaged my services to find him, at first he brightened, then became dejected as reality sank in. “They don’t want to see me like this.”
“Oh, yes, they do. Trust me, it’ll be all right.”
I arranged the meeting, and I was as excited as any of them. Since he’d been in the ground for so long, Mel was too putrid for embraces, however, which made for an awkward reunion. With one glance at his rotting form, the young blond niece and her aunts and uncles immediately reconsidered their wishes. Within minutes, they glanced at watches, consulted day planners, pretended they had other things to do.
The niece put her thumb to her ear and pinky to her mouth to mime a telephone and quipped, “We’ll call you, Uncle Mel.”
The others gave him their best wishes. “Take care of yourself, Mel.”
“So glad you’re okay.”
“If there’s anything we can do … Well, you’d better call first.”
Afterward, the family had not made contact with Mel again, and he was left alone, heartbroken. A painfully typical case: Family loses loved one, loved one rises from the grave, loving family wants risen loved one back in their lives, family gets a whiff and changes their mind.
I had taken the forlorn zombie to the Hope & Salvation Mission and asked Mrs. Saldana to give him a helping hand. She gave Mel some self-help books and arranged for him to get a job. He’s actually quite happy now….
With a sigh, I realized I wasn’t getting any more benefit from the autopsy report, no matter how long I stared at it. Dead end. For now.
I delivered a couple of case folders back to Sheyenne. She opened the metal file drawer, sorted through dividers, and slid the folders back in place. “When I was in medical school, I was planning to be a surgeon,” she said. “Now I’m reorganizing office files.”
“I know, Spooky. Life didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to. Come to think of it, death didn’t turn out like we expected either. But at least you get to see me every day now.” As if that would cheer her up.
She made the pfft sound and ruffled some papers, then flashed me a flirtatious smile. “Small consolation, but it’ll do. Anyway, death is what you make of it.”
She retrieved several unsolved case folders from my office and set them on her desk so she could comb through the documents herself. “Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing the real work here—though it goes above and beyond the job description of an executive admini-strator.”
“You’re a lot more than an administrator. Paralegal too. Sounding board. Customer service rep.”
“Business manager,” she added. “If I didn’t help Robin and you go over the books, you’d never balance the accounts.”
“That’s beyond my detective abilities,” I said.
A week after she died, Sheyenne’s ghost had appeared in our offices and boldly announced that she was my new office manager, Robin’s new paralegal, and yes, thank you, she was going to accept the job, even though we hadn’t offered it. I didn’t have the heart to turn her down, especially after what Sheyenne had been through—after what we’d all been through. And after the promises I’d made to her on her hospital deathbed.
Now she looked up from the files. “Don’t forget, Beaux, you promised to find my murderer in your spare time.”
She’d been killed four full weeks before me, and I’d been diligently trying to solve her murder when I got shot myself. Coinci-dence? Whoever had given her the toadstool poison could be connected to the bastard who shot me. Or maybe not.
“I won’t forget about it, Spooky, honest. I just hope you don’t quit your job after the case is solved.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily—I thought you’d figured that out by now.” She gave me a wink. “Still, could be hazardous.”
“It’s already been hazardous.”
When she gave me that heartwarming-to-the-point-of-incandescence look with those blue eyes, I doubted I could ever forget her if I walked the earth for another two centuries. Nothing would make me happier than to put her killer, and mine, in the electric chair (or whatever form of execution was appropriate for their particular type). I just had to narrow down the suspects until I got the right one.
Alas, there was no shortage of people who wanted me out of the picture.