Draw One In The Dark(43)

But she couldn't ask him. He'd continued ahead of her, down the cool tiled hallway, and she had followed him, without thinking, by instinct, like a child or a dog. And now he stood near a man who sat at a desk, and said, "Hi Joe. I'm here to see last night's pickup." He removed his sunglasses and pocketed them.



Joe, a middle-aged man, with a greying comb-over and a desk-job paunch, looked pointedly at Kyrie.



Rafiel smiled, that dazzling smile that seemed to hide no shadows and no fears. "Girlfriend," he said. "Kyrie is thinking of joining the force and I told her she should see an autopsy first. Kyrie Smith, this is Joe Martin. You know I've talked to you about him. He practically keeps this place running."



Kyrie, head spinning at being called someone's girlfriend, put her hand forward, to have it squeezed in a massive, square-tipped paw. Joe gave her what he probably thought was a friendly smile, but which was at least three quarters leer, and told her in a tone he surely believed was avuncular, "You take good care of our boy, Ms. Smith. He's been lonely too long. Not that some ladies haven't tried."



And on that auspicious blessing, they walked past Joe and down the hallway, past a row of grey doors with little glass windows.



They all looked similar to Kyrie, and she had no idea what prompted Rafiel to stop in front one of them. But he stopped, and plunged a hand into his pants pocket, handing her a small notebook. She took it without comment, though considering the tightness of Rafiel's pants, she had to wonder what quantum principle allowed him to keep notebooks in there. When he handed her a pen too, from the same provenance, she was even more impressed, because sharp objects there had to hurt.



"Just take notes," Rafiel told her. "And no one in there will ask who you are. They'll assume you're a new officer I'm training. Goldport has one of the smallest full-time forces in the state. To compensate, we have a never-ending string of part timers, usually either people blowing through town for a few months, or people who took a couple of months of law-enforcement courses and decided it wasn't for them. If they ask, then I'll tell them you work at the diner and I want your opinion, okay?"



Kyrie nodded, feeling marginally better about being an apprentice policeman than about pretending to be Rafiel's girlfriend. A sense of unease about Rafiel built in her mind, even as she nodded and held the notebook and pencil as if she were official. Might as well make some notes, too. Hell. Who knew? She might need them. She was, after all, investigating this herself, wasn't she?



Rafiel opened the door and the smell of spoiled meat leaked out, overwhelmed—fortunately overwhelmed—by the smell of chemicals. She thought she detected rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde among them.



Inside was a small room, with tiled walls and floor, all leading down to a drain in the center of the floor, above which a metallic table was placed and into which something was gurgling. Kyrie knew very well what the something would be, but she refused to look, refused to investigate.



In the full light of day, without the pressure of the moon on her body and mind, it was unlikely that the smell of blood would be appetizing. But she refused to give it a chance, all the same.



The tiled room should have looked cold and sterile and it probably would have, had it been tiled in standard white. However, the walls looked like someone had either gone crazy with artistry or—more likely considering what Kyrie had seen of how the public departments of Goldport, from town hall to schools, operated—they'd received remnant tiles from various public projects.



Be it as it may, bright blue, fierce red, sunny yellow, and the curious terra cotta orange of Southwest buildings covered walls and floor.



It all went to make the man who stood in the middle of the room look greyer and more colorless. He would be, Kyrie judged, somewhat past middle age. Colorlessness came not only from his white hair, but from a skin that looked like he was never allowed out in the sunlight. He had an aquiline nose that looked broken but probably had just grown like that, and—on either side of it—brightly sparkling blue eyes, rife with amusement.



"Hello there, Rafiel," he said, and grinned. He wore a lab coat, and the sleeves—and his hands, in latex gloves—were stained as colorfully as the tiles that surrounded him. "We were just about to start, but Bob—" He nodded toward the other man in the room, who was somewhat past middle age, with a bald head surrounded in a fringe of grey hair. He wore a bright Hawaiian-style shirt, incongruously patterned with what seemed to be palm trees and camels on a virulently green background. "—Bob said it was proper if you were here, as there should be more than one of you watching."