I sat down across from her, a spike of sympathy piercing me. I’d had a long night, but I had healing magic to shore me up. Rita, whose morning had apparently started with a murder, but who lacked my talent, looked small and fragile and hard-used again, like she had in the first moments we’d met. “Hey, Rita. You doing okay?”
She lifted her gaze, film of despondency clearing from her eyes as she recognized me. “Detective Walker. I didn’t think you’d come. I didn’t do it.”
I blinked, first at her, then at Monroe, who hadn’t yet sat down. He shrugged his eyebrows and gestured to the third chair at the table, questioning. I raised a finger to ask him to hold off and turned my attention back to Rita. “This is Detective Monroe, who’s going to actually be handling this case. It’s way out of my jurisdiction, so the best I can do is be here while you tell us what you saw. You mind if he sits down?”
She glanced up at him, shook her head and looked back at her coffee cup as Monroe pulled the chair out, turned it backward, and sat. I downwardly revised my estimation of his age to something closer to my own, especially since upon inspection, there were no gray threads in his brown hair, then focused on Rita, who started talking like she’d been waiting on my cue. What she said, though, had nothing to do with the case: “Was the show good?”
Her expression was so quietly hopeful I didn’t have the heart to tell her what had transpired the night before.
Not that it would be useful to do so during a witness interview, anyway, so I said, “It was unbelievable,” which I thought covered both the amazing performance and the dreadful aftermath in sufficiently enthusiastic yet noncommittal terms.
I got a hint of her youthening smile as a reward for my discretion, though her gaze went straight back to the coffee. “I helped close up the Solid Ground soup kitchen last night. It’s open late because there are so many homeless down here, so it was after midnight when I left. I stayed nearby—”
“Where?” Monroe was taking notes, and his interruption—though I’d have asked the same thing—was unwelcome. Rita glanced at me nervously and I nodded, encouraging her. She didn’t look encouraged, which made it Monroe’s turn to eye me, in a get-her-talking manner.
“I’m guessing you stayed somewhere you’re not supposed to.” At Rita’s nod, I opened a palm, brushing away her concern. “We’re looking at a murder investigation here, Rita. Nobody’s interested in busting you for an illegal flop-spot. You or anybody else who’s using the place, for that matter. Okay?”
Her gaze shifted between us, guilty. “We—I—stay in the Underground a lot recently. Outside the tourist area, so they don’t have any reason to run us out.”
I nodded, having expected that. Seattle, like half the big cities in America, had burned down once upon a time. When they rebuilt, they’d moved street level between ten and thirty feet higher to help cut down on flooding and backed-up toilets. The old city disappeared under the new, until by the early twentieth century, the only people in the Underground were people like Rita today: homeless, criminals, or both. Parts of it had been reclaimed and made into a tour—I’d gone on it—but there was a lot more Underground than there was safe territory to explore. I personally had no clue how to access the less-safe areas from the outside, but then, I’d never had reason to search for a comparatively safe, warm place to hide from the elements or the law. There were five or ten thousand homeless people in Seattle. It was a safe bet that a fair chunk of them knew a lot about surviving beneath the city, even if I didn’t.
Rita watched Monroe and me both carefully, waiting to see if we were going to condemn her or her fellows. When neither of us spoke, she exhaled quietly and went on. “So we’re nearby, but not close enough to hear anything. I just know he wasn’t there last night when I left the kitchen, and he was when I went out this morning. I turned him over. I had to, to see if he was dead. I shouldn’t have done that, should I? It means my fingerprints will be on him and I’d be easy to throw in jail. But there was blood everywhere, so I had to see. And then I saw I called you. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Her aura was agitated, earthy colors rubbing against each other like static-furred cats, but there was no deception streaking through it. She was just afraid, as I would probably be in her position. “You did the right thing, Rita. Did you know him?”
“His name was Lynn. He was a Vietnam vet, and I don’t know how he ended up on the street. He hardly ever drank, and he liked blues music. He used to hang out at Holy Cow Records in the Market. They might know more about him. I just know he was a nice man. I always thought he could’ve made it, if somebody’d just given him a hand.”
“Any enemies you knew about?”
Rita gave me a look purely the opposite of her youthening smile. It turned her into a bitter old crone, so full of anger at the world that even her aura darkened with it, deep crimson spilling through otherwise gentle shades. “Anybody can be your enemy when you’re living rough, Detective Walker. Even your best friend, if you’ve got booze or smokes or food he wants. People liked Lynn, but that doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“Anyone you know with a violent enough temper to have done this?” Monroe put in. Rita gave him the same look she’d given me, though she shook her head.
“You’ll laugh, but we try to police ourselves in the Underground. It’s warm and safe down there, and we keep watch at night. We’re trying to get by,” she said fiercely. I squelched the urge to pat her arm in reassurance, and she went on, focus bright and angry on Monroe. “Nobody down there could’ve done this. I’m not even sure anything human could have done it.”
She didn’t look at me when she said that, but my stomach lurched anyway. All of a sudden I didn’t know if she’d asked for me because she wanted someone she trusted on her side, or if she had a deeper understanding of just how I’d saved her life a few months earlier. More important, I also realized I had no idea how the vic—Lynn—had died. It was a lousy time to ask, but the question was on my lips when Monroe said, “Then why’d you call it in as a murder?”
Rita had a whole repertoire of scathing looks. “Because there’s blood everywhere, but no paw prints, and if a dog was hungry or desperate enough to attack a man, wouldn’t it have done more than rip his throat out?”
I swallowed a squeak. Ripped-out throats were a new exciting kind of violent death for me, and I was torn between terrible urges. One: run home and hide under the bed. Two, and much stronger: run outside and see if Billy had found a ghost to talk to. I pushed my chair back, preparing to do that, but Monroe fixed me in place with a glare worthy of the Mighty Morrison, and turned his next question on Rita: “Can you describe what you saw when you approached?”
She put her face into her hands and sighed, words muffled behind her palms. “The sun was just coming up, not high enough to be daylight yet, just lightening. There wasn’t anybody else around right then. That’s unusual. There are usually joggers out that early.” She lifted her head to show lines drawing deeper around her eyes and mouth. “Do you think one of them saw something and decided not to get involved? I can tell you what some of the regular ones look like. Homeless people see more than you think.”
Monroe actually looked pleased. “That would be very helpful. I’ll get our sketch artist to come talk to you. Go on.”
“I don’t sleep a lot, so I was up early to go help the kitchen get started. Saturdays are busy. I saw him at the corner, just lying on the sidewalk facing the wall. I thought he’d fallen asleep there, and that he was lucky it was one of us and not a cop who’d seen him first, so I went to wake him up. When I got closer I saw the sidewalk was wet around him, but it hadn’t rained, nothing else was wet. It just looked dark, not red, until I got closer. And then I saw, and I rolled him over, and he was dead. He looked terrified. Death isn’t supposed to come on you like that. You’re supposed to be able to just close your eyes and slip away.” She sounded like she wanted to believe it and knew better. She should have known better: she’d almost died violently not so very long ago.