Elijah worked the night shift and seemed to maintain that schedule with adamant zeal; records in the mortuary office showed that when the day-shift guy was unavailable Elijah would go so far as to hire a temp worker out of his own pocket rather than take the day shift himself. Another piece of the puzzle. The most obvious guess was that he couldn’t go out in daylight, but our very first sighting of him at Whiteflower had been in the daytime, so that wasn’t it. Our next thought was that he had something vital to do during the day—like following us, for example—but after a week of careful surveillance, that proved false as well; he slept during the morning, on the normal schedule of any other night-shift worker, and in the afternoon he went shopping, or he went driving, or he shoveled his sidewalks. He didn’t really talk to anybody, but he didn’t avoid them as devoutly as Mary had, either. By all appearances he was just a quiet man who kept to himself; we couldn’t even find evidence that he’d been communicating with other Withered, which made our entire investigation that much more confusing.
The obvious exception to his solitude was, of course, the man he met with at Whiteflower: Merrill Evans. By all accounts, Merrill was a completely normal Alzheimer’s patient, albeit a very young one; he was in his seventies now, but had suffered from crippling dementia for just over twenty years, which meant the disease had struck him earlier in life than most. Elijah had been visiting him the entire time, an average of once a week. Looking solely at each man’s publicly available history we couldn’t determine exactly how they knew each other—they’d never worked together or lived in the same part of town—but the only way to learn more was to interview the Evans family directly, and we wanted to avoid that as long as possible. Instead we focused on Meshara himself, studying his office when he was at home, and his home when he was at the office. When that gave us nothing, we simply watched and waited.
For six nights Diana and I sat in the car and watched his mortuary, our hands tucked into our pockets, too wary of being spotted to risk turning on the heater. This mortuary wasn’t like the one I’d lived in for sixteen years; it was larger and newer, full of offices and chapels and viewing rooms and even a garage in the back. And of course an embalming room, which we’d examined very briefly a few days earlier, under the guise of a murder investigation for an unrelated corpse. There wasn’t a real murder, as far as we knew; we just wanted a look at their facilities. Elijah worked in the garage, staying out of the embalming process completely, and our cursory examination had revealed nothing unseemly about anything in the building—but, oh, did I want to go back there. I hadn’t been in a real embalming room in too long. The memories of it pricked at my heart in the same way Marci did.
“Hold up,” said Diana, staring out the window with sudden intensity. I followed her gaze across the street to the mortuary. A black car pulled up and three people got out; they wore black coats and were mostly indistinguishable at this distance, but one of them stood out for his size—easily a head taller than the others, with the bulk to match.
“It’s after business hours,” I said, pointlessly, since it was practically eleven o’clock. “They might be from the police, maybe a forensics lab, but they don’t look like it.”
“Elijah’s the only one in the building,” said Diana. “They have to be here to see him.”
“Four Withered in one place is…” I grimaced. “That’s a lot.”
“We don’t know that’s what they are.”
“Can you see the license plate?”
She raised her small binoculars. “It’s too dark,” she said, “but I can see the visitors pretty well in the light by the front door. All three are men, well dressed, clean-shaven. Not sure of their ethnicity—darker than you, lighter than me. The lighting’s too weird to tell for sure. They’re … picking the lock. Whoever they are, Elijah’s not expecting them.”
“Then get ready,” I said, and put my hand on the door.
“Don’t you dare talk to them.”
“Not them,” I said, watching as the three strangers opened the door and slipped in, disappearing into the building. As soon as they closed their door I opened mine, looking quickly up and down the darkened street for any sign of movement. Diana hissed at me to get back in, but I ignored her and trotted across the street. I heard her door open as she scrambled to follow me, and then I saw it—two men in black coats, standard-issue police gear, walking toward the mortuary. Our unofficial police escort would try to use the picked lock as an excuse to intervene in our investigation, to see if our bizarre claims were actually true, but if they went in that building they’d be dead in minutes. I ran to cut them off, and Diana caught up just in time. The cops scowled when they saw us.
“Don’t go in there,” I said.
“Oh, look,” said the taller cop, “it’s the Murder Boy.”
They didn’t call me by name, which was good; Ostler hadn’t told them who I was, and it looked like they hadn’t figured it out for themselves yet. Allies or not, I was already uncomfortable just working with a team—bringing in a whole police department made me feel short of breath, like I was locked in a crowded room.
“Get out of the road,” I said, glancing back at the mortuary. I couldn’t see anyone watching us, but that didn’t mean they weren’t. “Let’s talk about this out of sight somewhere.”
Diana flashed her FBI badge—I, as a minor, didn’t have one. “This is part of our investigation, and we ask you to stay back.”
“Investigation?” asked the shorter cop. “What exactly are you investigating? I know it’s not the boogeyman, no matter what your boss says. So is it smuggling? Drugs? Are they using dead bodies to move drugs around?”