“Do you know the … source?” Finch asked. Didn’t know if he understood what Heretic was telling him.
“There is no trace of it now. The apartment is cold. There are just these bodies.”
“How does that help me?” he wanted to say.
Finch usually dealt with theft, domestic abuse, illegal gatherings. Flirted with investigating rebel activity, but turned that over to the Partials if necessary. Tried to make sure it wasn’t necessary. For everyone’s sake.
Murder only if it was the usual. Crimes of passion. Revenge. This didn’t look like either. If it was murder.
“Anyone live in the apartments next door?”
“Not anymore,” the Partial replied. “They all left, oddly enough, soon after these two … arrived.”
“Which means they made a sound.” Or sounds.
“I’ll interrogate anyone left in the building after we finish here,” the Partial said.
What a pleasure that’ll be for them.
Still, Finch didn’t volunteer to do it. Not yet. Maybe after. Not much worse than door-to-door interviews in unfriendly places. Many didn’t believe his job should exist.
“What do you think, Finch?” Heretic asked. Just a hint of mischief in that voice. Laced with it. Just enough to catch the nuance.
I think I just walked in the door a few minutes ago.
The bodies lay next to each other, beside the sofa.
Finch frowned. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
The man lay on his side, left hand stretched out toward the gray cap’s hand. The gray cap lay facedown, arms flopped out at right angles.
“Might be a foreigner. From the clothes.”
The man could’ve been forty-five or fifty, with dark brown hair, dark eyebrows, and a beard that appeared to be made from tendrils of fungus. That wasn’t unusual. But his clothes were. He wore a blue shirt long out of fashion. Strange, tight-fitting long pants. Dirty black boots.
“He’s not from the city,” Heretic said. Again, an inflection that bothered Finch. A statement or a question?
What’s on his mind?
Finch squatted beside the bodies. Took out his useless pen and his useless pad of paper. Above him, the Partial leaned over to take a picture.
The dead gray cap looked like every other gray cap. Except for the one glaring lack.
“I don’t know what caused the injury to the other one, sir.”
I don’t know what caused the leg situation.
“When we find out,” Heretic said, “we will be just as understated.”
The exposed cross section, cut almost precisely at the waist, fascinated Finch. He almost forgot himself, poked at the tissue with his pen.
The cut had been so clean, so precise, that there was no tearing. No hemorrhaging. Finch could see layers. Gray. Yellow. Green. A core of dark red. (A question he was too cautious to ask: Was it always that dark, or only in death?) Within the core, Finch saw a hint of organs.
“Is this … normal?” Finch asked Heretic.
“Normal?”
“The lack of blood, I mean, sir,” Finch said.
Gray caps bled. Finch knew that. Not like a stream or a gout, even when you cut them deep, but a steady drip from a leaky faucet. Puncture wounds healed almost immediately. It took a long time and a lot of patience to kill a gray cap.
“No, it’s not normal.” The humid weight of Heretic was at his side now. A smell like garbage and burnt glass. Made him nauseous.
“None of this is normal,” the Partial ventured. Ignored.
Finch looked up at Heretic. From that angle: the pale wattled skin of Heretic’s long throat.
“Do you know who…” Finch hesitated. Gray caps didn’t like being called “gray caps,” but Finch couldn’t pronounce the word they did use. Farseneeni or fanaarcensitii? The Partial circled them, blinking pictures through his fungal eye.
“Do you know who that is?” Finch said finally, pointing at the dead gray cap.
Heretic made a sound like something popping. “No. Not familiar to us. We cannot see him,” and Finch understood he meant something other than just looking out a window.
“Have you…?” Couldn’t say the whole sentence. Too ridiculous. Terrifying. At the same time. Have you eaten some of his flesh and picked clean the memories?
But Heretic had been around humans long enough to know what he meant. “We tried it. Nothing that made sense.”
For a second, Finch relaxed. Forgot Heretic could send him, Sintra, anybody he knew, to the work camps.
“If you couldn’t decipher it, how will I?”
Then went stiff. Richard Dorn, a good detective, had questioned Heretic too closely. Nine months to die.
A bullet to the head. In that case.
But the gray cap said only, “With your fresh eyes, maybe you will have better luck.”
Heretic pulled a pouch out of his robes, opened it. Finch rose, stood to the side as Heretic sprinkled a fine green powder over both bodies. Could’ve done it using his own supply, but Heretic enjoyed doing it. For some reason.
“You know what to do,” Heretic said.
In time, a memory bulb would emerge from both corpses’ heads. Did the fanaarcensitii rely too much on what made them comfortable? No autopsies, just mushrooms. But also hardly any experts left to perform them.
Nausea crept back into Finch’s throat. “But I’ve never. Not a gray cap. I mean, not one of your people.”
“We don’t bite.” The grin on that impossible face grew wide and wider. The laughter again, worse.
Finch laughed back, weakly.
“Write down whatever you encounter, whether you understand it or not.”
Mercifully, Heretic looked away. “A gray cap and a man. Dead in such a manner. We need to know everything.”
“Yessir,” Finch said. He couldn’t keep the grimace off his face.
Heretic seemed to take it for a smile. As he walked past on his way to the door, he patted Finch’s elbow. Finch shivered. A touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.
“Report in the morning,” Heretic said. “Report and report and report, Finch.” The laughter again.
Then Heretic was gone. The hallway shadows ate him up, the apartment door opening and closing.
Finch could hear his own breathing. Shallow. The sudden panicked drumming of his heart. The butterfly blinks of the Partial, still snapping photographs.
Took a breath. A second. Closed his eyes.
A sunny day by the river. A picnic lunch. A tree with shade. Long, cool grass. With Sintra.
2
No obvious bullet or stab wounds. No tattoos or other marks. Grunting with the effort, Finch turned the man over for a second. He seemed heavier than he should be. Skin warm, the flesh solid. From the position of the arms, Finch thought they might be broken. A discoloration at the edge of the man’s mouth. Dried blood? When Finch was done, the man settled back into position as if he’d been there a hundred years.
No point checking the gray cap. Their skin didn’t retain marks or burns or stab wounds. Anything like that sealed over. Besides, the cause of the gray cap’s death was obvious. Wasn’t it? Still, he didn’t want to assume murder. Yet.
Out of the four “murders” in his sector over the past year, two had been suicides and one had been natural causes. The fourth solved in a day. Disappearances were another subject altogether.