Directions said two rights, one left, then straight. The first two turns were easy enough; the left was a tight squeeze between two pines. Beyond the turn, tall bamboo hugged the road, forming a dense green tunnel. I steered the Jeep through it.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Andrea frowned.
“Would you like me to pull over and ask that bamboo for directions?”
“I don’t know, do you think it will answer?”
We peered at the bamboo.
“I think it looks suspicious,” Andrea said.
“Maybe there is a heffalump hiding in it.”
Andrea stared at me.
“You know, heffalump? From Pooh Bear?”
“Where do you even get this shit?”
The bamboo ended abruptly, spitting us into a gravel driveway leading up to a large modified A-frame. Wrapped in a railed porch with the roof extending all the way over the porch steps, the house looked like it had grown from the forest: stone foundation, dark cedar walls, brown roof. Shrubs hugged the porch steps. No unnatural colors, no ornaments or carvings.
“Look at all that window space. Built pre-Shift,” Andrea murmured.
I nodded. I could see eight windows from where we sat; most were as tall as me and none had bars.
Modern houses looked like bunkers. Any window larger than a bread box was barred.
I drove midway up the driveway and stopped with the engine idling. Good guards didn’t prance around the perimeter making themselves into easy targets. They hid.
“A sniper in the attic,” Andrea said.
It took me a second, and then I saw a dark shape, obscured by the gloom under the gable—a black outline of a rifle barrel stretching from the attic window.
I stepped out of the Jeep and leaned on the bumper. Andrea joined me.
“Pine, nine o’clock,” I said.
Andrea glanced to where a man in a camo suit did his best to blend with the foliage. “Bushes at two.”
She inhaled deeply. “Also, someone is behind the Jeep.”
“That makes three. The fourth is coming up at us from the left,” I said.
“Should we go meet him?” Andrea arched an eyebrow.
“I think that’s poison ivy over there. I vote we sit here and wait until they ask us for the code.”
The bushes on the left parted and an older black man stepped out. His graying hair was cropped into a severe high-and-tight. Henderson, looking exactly like the picture in the file Andrea had shown me.
Judging by the hard lines of his face and the flat look in his eyes, he’d left the Marines, but the Corps hadn’t quite left him. The Red Guard shield patch on Henderson’s shoulder had two red stripes—he’d been promoted twice as a sergeant, which made him Master Sergeant. Rene oversaw this job, but she probably oversaw others, too. Henderson quarterbacked only one job at a time, and while he had it, he owned it. His guys had screwed up and lost the body they were guarding. He looked like somebody had pissed in his sandbox, and he was none too pleased that we’d come to dig in the mess.
I nodded at him. “Afternoon, Master Sergeant.”
“Names?”
“Daniels and Nash,” Andrea said.
The master sergeant checked a small piece of paper. “Code?”
“Thirty-seven twenty-eight,” I said.
“Name is Henderson. Don’t let the ‘master sergeant’ muddle your thinking. I work for my living.
You’re clear to proceed. Park at the top of the driveway.”
We got back into the Jeep and I pulled up to the house. Henderson trotted behind us and up to the doors.
I stepped out of the vehicle. “Where is de Harven’s body?”
“In the workshop.”
We followed Henderson behind the house.
The workshop occupied a wooden shed large enough to contain a small apartment. The garage-sized wooden gate stood ajar.
Henderson halted. “In there.”
I stepped inside.
Counters ran along the wall, filled with tools and metal junk. Plastic bins filled with screws rose in towers next to boxes of lug nuts, bolts, and assorted metal trash that would’ve been more at home in a metal jungle lining the bottom of the Honeycomb Gap. On the left counter, delicate glass tools of unknown purpose vied for space with a jeweler’s loupe and tiny pliers. On the right, metalworking tools were spread out: angle grinders of assorted sizes for cutting metal, shears, hammers, saws, a large lathe with a metal cylinder still fixed on it. A delicate pattern of glyphs decorated the left end of the cylinder—someone, probably Kamen, had begun to apply the complex metallic lattice but hadn’t finished.
A nude male body hung from the rafters in the middle of the shop, suspended by a thick chain, likely attached to a hook that bit into the corpse’s back. His head drooped to the side. Long dark hair spilled from his scalp down onto his chest, framing a face frozen by death into a contorted mask. Light gray eyes bulged from their sockets. The man’s mouth gaped open, the bloodless lips baring his teeth. Panic and surprise rolled into one. Hello, Laurent.
I dropped my backpack and pulled a Polaroid camera from it. Magic had a way of screwing up digital cameras. Sometimes it wiped the memory cards clean, sometimes you would get noise, and occasionally the pictures came out perfect. I wasn’t willing to play Russian roulette with my evidence. The Polaroid was hideously expensive, but the pictures were instant.
Andrea raised her eyebrows. “Look at you, all high-speed.”
“Yeah, you’d think I was a detective or something.”
Andrea held her hand out. “You’ll jinx it.”
I put the camera into her hand and crouched, trying to get a look at the floor under the body.
“No drip?” Andrea asked.
“Nope. You smell anything? Decomp, blood . . .”
She wrinkled her nose. “Cayenne pepper. The place reeks of it. It drowns out everything else.”
Odd.
I dropped to all fours and bent lower. A faint line of rusty powder crossed the floorboards. I leaned over, trying to get a better look. The line ran into the counter on the right and touched the wall on the left. A telltale spatter stain marked the wall boards.
I pointed at it. “Urine.”
Andrea craned her neck and raised the camera. “Such glamorous jobs we have. Taking pictures of pee stains.”
I turned my head. An identical stain marked the other wall, exactly across from the first one. “That’s why we do it. For the glamour.”
“A shaman?” Andrea asked.
“Possibly.”