Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

IMPOSTORS Sarah Monette

They were pulling out of the parking lot of St. Dymphna’s Psychiatric Hospital when the radio crackled into life. Mick Sharpton answered. Dispatch said, “There’s been another one.”

“Shit,” Jamie said. They’d developed a rule that the partner not holding the handset did the swearing for both of them. Mick said to Dispatch, “Give us an address, and we’re on our way.”

There was a hesitation, infinitesimal, but years long in Dispatch-time, which they understood when the dispatcher said, “Langland Street subway station. He jumped.”

“Christ,” Mick said, racking the handset.

“That makes what, three jumpers?”

“Three jumpers, a bullet to the brain, and Mrs. Coulson back there in St. Dymphna’s. I think the police are right. This one’s paranormal.”

“Evidence or hunch?”

“Hunch mostly. But. People don’t just ‘go crazy’ out of a clear blue sky, you know. And here’s four people—five now, I guess—no history of mental illness, going zero to psychosis in sixty seconds flat. Something is very definitely wrong with this picture. And it feels paranormal to me.”

Mick’s 3(8) esper rating wasn’t quite high enough for his intuition to be admissible legal evidence, but Jamie had never known him to be wrong. “Then we’d better start trying to figure out what these people had in common.”

“Nothing,” Mick said, pale blue eyes staring an angry hole in the dashboard. “Absolutely fuck all. Aside from the fact that they all went crazy, of course.”

“Well, and crazy in the same way,” Jamie said, determined not to let this blow up into a fight, not even to make Mick feel better.

“Yeah.” Mick sighed, offered Jamie a sidelong, apologetic smile. “What did she say? ‘I stole her life.’ ”

“Yeah,” Jamie Keller echoed softly and shivered, trying not to imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning believing himself to be an impostor. He didn’t blame any of them for committing suicide, nor Mrs. Coulson for trying.

“Must be hell on earth,” Mick said, and they drove the rest of the way to Langland Street in troubled silence.

Paul Sinclair was brought up off the subway tracks one piece at a time. Jamie kept a weather eye on the progress of that operation and its delicate balance between speed and thoroughness; the last thing anyone wanted was for ghouls to be drawn out of the tunnels by the smell of blood. But although dealing with the ghouls if they appeared would be his and Mick’s responsibility, they’d only be in the way of the morgue workers if they went over there now. They were listening to witnesses instead.

Eyewitness testimony was notoriously volatile, but allowing for the inevitable variations in what individual witnesses perceived, Jamie was getting a fairly clear picture of the last two minutes of Paul Sinclair’s life.

The witnesses agreed that he’d been nervous and jerky in his movements when he came down the stairs from the street. A homeless woman who panhandled in the station on a regular basis remembered noticing him the day before, and he hadn’t looked well then, either. Jamie would have dismissed that as embellishment, a natural desire to stay in the limelight a little longer, but Mick said she was telling the truth.

Paul Sinclair—bank manager, aged thirty-two, single—had advanced to the edge of the platform, where he’d set down his briefcase and waited, attracting attention by his fidgeting and the way he moved sharply apart from the other people on the platform. “Like we were dirty and he didn’t want to touch us,” said a teenage boy who probably should have been in school, but that wasn’t Jamie’s problem and he wasn’t asking. When the 10:43 D train made itself heard approaching the station, its ghoul-ward howling, Paul Sinclair said, very audibly, something like, “Don’t try to save me. I’m not me.” And he jumped straight into the path of the D train, which tore him to pieces.

When the police opened his briefcase, it contained nothing but a suicide note along all too familiar lines. Paul Sinclair, in handwriting Jamie had no doubt would be proved conclusively to be that of Paul Sinclair, asserted that he was an impostor. I have stolen his life, he wrote, echoing Marian Coulson and the other victims. I don’t deserve his life. The note was not signed—poor bastard, Jamie thought, what name could he use?—but scrawled at the bottom, a painful afterthought: Please take care of Mr. Sinclair’s dogs. Their names are Leo and Bridget.

“Just like the others,” Mick said. He sounded–and looked—ill. “Even the same phrasing.”

“Definitely paranormal.”

“You say that like you think it helps.”

“It is the first thing Jesperson told us to do.”

“Well, hooray for us.” But there was no anger in him now; he just sounded defeated.

“It’s better than nothing.”

“Tell that to Paul Sinclair,” Mick said, and Jamie was glad to be called away to talk to the morgue crew.

After a hurried and unenthusiastic lunch, they spent the afternoon going through the case files again, correlating and cross-checking, trying to narrow down the possibilities. Mick remained subdued, which increased their efficiency, but Jamie found himself perversely wishing for Mick’s usual argumentative and scattershot approach to this kind of work. It did not reappear, and Thursday was more of the same, as they conducted interviews with witnesses and survivors and Marian Coulson’s bewildered husband, and if Mick strung three words together into a sentence, it was as much as he did all day.

At 3:32 Friday morning, Jamie’s cellphone rang, waking him from a confused dream in which the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations was being moved into his old elementary school. He had the phone open and to his ear before he was even sure where he was, and his “Foxtrot-niner” was as clear and crisp as if he were in his office rather than up on one elbow groping for the lamp on the nightstand.

Lila mumbled something, but Jamie’s attention was focused on the silence from his cellphone. “Hello?”

More silence, but the distinct sound of someone breathing, too rapidly and hard.

“Who is this? Look, if you don’t say something, I’m going to have to assume you have hostile intent, and we don’t none of us want that paperwork. So come on. What do you want?”

Thin thread of a voice: “Jamie?”

“Mick? What the fuck?”

“Jamie, how do you know you’re you?”

Jamie felt every separate blood vessel in his body go cold. “Where are you, blue eyes?”

“I, um, I don’t know. On a bridge.”

Jamie rolled out of bed, yanking sweatpants on over his boxers, shrugging into a flannel shirt one arm at a time, so he didn’t have to put the phone down. “Which bridge, blue eyes? Come on. How’m I supposed to come get you if I don’t know where you are?”

“You’re going to come get me?”

Mick sounded dazed, the way he did when his esper hit him hard.

“Course I am.” Shoes. Shoes. Goddammit, they had to be here somewhere. “Can’t leave you freezing your ass off all night.”

“But I’m not . . . ”

“Yes, you are,” Jamie said, as forcefully as he thought he could without spooking Mick. “You’re just confused, blue eyes, that’s all.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure I’m me?”

It was all too easy to imagine Mick standing on one of Babylon’s bridges, hunched around his cellphone, his long dyed-black hair straggling across his face. Jamie tried to keep that imaginary Mick firmly on the pavement, but it was even easier to imagine him standing on the railing, one arm wrapped around a stanchion, teetering out over the black water.

“I am absolutely certain you’re you,” Jamie said, cramming his feet into his sneakers. “You trust me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Mick said promptly.

“Good, blue eyes, that’s good. Now can you tell me where you are?”

“I, um . . . ”

“Jamie,” Lila hissed, “what on earth is going on?”

“Mick’s in trouble,” he said over his shoulder, heading down the short hallway to the living room to find his keys. The Saturn was Lila’s, and he didn’t normally drive it, relying on buses and subway trains to get him to and from work, but there were no buses this time of night, and he couldn’t leave Mick out there in the state he was in.

“I should have guessed. God knows you wouldn’t race off like this for your mother.” Mick and Lila had not taken to each other the one time they’d met.

“Can you find a street sign?” he said to Mick.

A long pause, during which Jamie did not panic because he could still hear Mick breathing. He and Lila stood staring at each other, neither one of them quite willing to have the argument they were on the brink of.

“Rossiter!” Mick said triumphantly. “I’m on the Rossiter Street Bridge.”

One of the jumpers had gone off the Rossiter Street Bridge; Jamie wondered if Mick had remembered that, or if this was just unhappy coincidence. “Good, blue eyes. Now, don’t hang up, okay? It’ll take me ten minutes to get to you, but I’ll stay on the phone the whole time. You can talk to me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Mick said. He sounded lost again. “But why would you . . . ”

“Why would I what, blue eyes?” Jamie asked, buttoning a couple of random buttons on his shirt. Lila tsked, rolled her eyes, and came over to do the buttons up properly.

“I stole his life. Why would you help me?”

There was the confirmation Jamie hadn’t needed. “Because you need me,” he said. “Besides, remember you trust me? And I don’t think you stole anybody’s life.”

Lila finished buttoning his shirt, stepped back with a firm pat to his chest. “You can make it up to me later,” she said in a sultry whisper and turned to make her way back to bed.

“Blue eyes?” Jamie said. “You still with me?” He left the apartment, took the stairs two at a time.

“I, um . . . yeah. You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If you really thought I wasn’t me?”

“Course I would,” Jamie said. “But that’s not what I think. I think you are you.” Out into the crisp night air, around to the back of the building and the parking lot.

“Oh,” Mick said, a barely voiced exhalation.

Jamie unlocked the Saturn, wedged himself in. “Talk to me,” he said to Mick. “When did you start feeling funny?”

“I’ve always been fake,” Mick said, his voice thin and desolate and eerie. “Glass eyes.”

It was something Jamie had thought more than once himself, pale as Mick’s eyes were against his unnaturally black hair. “You didn’t think you were fake yesterday.”

“Of course I did. I’ve always been fake. It just didn’t . . . it didn’t bother me before.”

Jamie whipped the car around in the tightest three-point turn that parking lot had ever seen, and put his foot down. This time of night, traffic was sparse, and he drove hard and fast, all the while encouraging Mick to keep talking, asking questions, trying both to keep him from jumping—for there was never the slightest doubt in Jamie’s mind that that was why Mick was on the Rossiter Street Bridge—and to get more information, some hint as to the parameters of the thing they were dealing with. He wondered if it was Mick’s esper that had made it hit so hard, so quickly. Wondered if in another three or four days, it would be him on the bridge.

He left the car half on the sidewalk on the north bank of the river and walked, carefully not allowing himself to run, out to the midpoint where Mick was standing, leaning against the railing like a drunk.

At least he wasn’t on the railing, and Jamie took what felt like the first breath he’d had in years.

He hung up the phone only when he saw Mick glance at him, and in another three strides, he was standing beside his partner. The Rossiter Street Bridge wasn’t very high, but it was high enough.

“Hey, blue eyes.”

Mick was looking carefully at his hands where they rested on the bridge railing. He whispered something.

“Sorry, what?”

“You can tell now, can’t you? That I’m an impostor?”

“Oh, Christ, Mick,” Jamie groaned, although it wasn’t Mick’s fault, and he knew it. Except, said a mean and entirely reasonable voice in the back of his head, that he won’t go for the esper training like Jesperson’s been on at him . . .

A sudden, blessed inspiration. “Come on. We’re going to go see Jesperson.”

“Jesperson?”

“You remember, the nice man we work for? Class nine necromancer. No impostor could ever get by him.”

And to his relief, Mick said, “Okay,” and let himself be shepherded to the car.

At 8:30 that morning, Jamie was leaning against the wall of the BPI clinic, watching Mick sleep the sleep of the heavily drugged. Jesperson had wasted no time in calling out the night-shift decon team, and then had torn strips out of Jamie’s hide for not thinking to do the same. Jamie was too relieved to mind, too relieved, now, to do anything but stand and watch Mick sleep and occasionally remember to take a mouthful of lukewarm coffee.

“Well,” said Jesperson, scaring the living daylights out of him, “at least we know considerably more than we did.” And he added, almost under his breath, “Damn and blast the boy,” making the ritual sign to nullify his words with his free hand.

Jamie eyed the stack of reports in his other hand with foreboding. “What do we know, sir?”

“It’s definitely a curse, and it was definitely laid on Sharpton, rather than being transmitted by a curse-vector. But there’s no structure to it.”

“Meaning?”

“This isn’t the work of a magic-user,” Jesperson said grimly. “It’s not even really a curse, in the technical sense. More like an extremely powerful ill-wishing.”

“Thought those went out with the bustle.”

“That’s just the problem, Keller. Ill-wishing is much less common these days, thanks mostly to improvements in public education, but by its nature it will always happen—if only among the ill-educated and the very young.”

“You don’t think a child did this?”

“I was speaking in general terms. And, no, this curse is not the product of a child’s psyche.”

“So it must be someone without much education?”

“Or someone whose mind is not well-controlled at the moment. There is a reason necromancers fear senile dementia above all other illnesses, you know.”

Jamie frowned, trying to figure out where Jesperson was headed. “Mrs. Coulson? But—”

“She and Sharpton are the only two who have survived. And Sharpton only survived because something—training or motherwit or God knows what—impelled him to call you before he—”

“Did anything stupid,” Jamie finished hastily; his memories of the Rossiter Street Bridge were still too vivid for comfort. “So you want me to go see Mrs. Coulson again?”

“At the very least, that ill-wishing needs to be raised. I’m giving you Juliet-seven until Sharpton’s back on his feet. She can take care of that part.”

“Yessir,” Jamie said without enthusiasm. Juliet-seven was Marie-Gabrielle Parker, one of this year’s crop of rookies.

“She’s a class two necromancer,” Jesperson said, amused. “And someone has to blood the tyros, Keller.”

“Yessir. But Mick’s gonna be okay?”

“Oh, yes. The ill-wishing is lifted. Dr. Sedgwick just wants to let him sleep off the residue. He should be gadflying about again by tomorrow.”

“Thank you, sir.” Jamie pushed off from the wall. He might as well go find Parker and get this over with.

“Oh, and Keller—”

“Yessir?”

“Be careful. I don’t know if our ill-wisher is Mrs. Coulson or not, but whoever it is, he or she is . . . ” He hesitated a moment, as if he could not find the right word. “Ill-wishing is made of anger. Someone out there is very angry indeed.”

“Yessir,” Jamie said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

But Jesperson’s suspicions were wrong.

Primed with the knowledge gained from Mick’s case, Parker lifted the ill-wishing, if not easily, then at least without making a huge production number out of it. And she and St. Dymphna’s staff magic-user—a lowly class three magician, but good at his job—agreed: Marian Coulson was a victim here, not a perpetrator. Parker said pithily, “She doesn’t have the strength of will to ill-wish a mosquito.” And looking at the soft-eyed, frightened woman blinking around at her strange surroundings, Jamie could only agree. She hadn’t succeeded in committing suicide because she didn’t have the guts.

He questioned her gently; she was afraid of him, but eager to help, willingly telling him everything she could remember about the events of the previous week. Jamie took notes, although he had no real hope that Mrs. Coulson would remember anything useful, working on autopilot until the words Langland Street brought him back with a thump.

“How did you get to Langland Street, ma’am?”

“Oh, I took the subway.” Remembered irritation creased her forehead and made her voice peevish. “I really wish the city would do something about cleaning up the subway stations. There was a dirty old woman there, asking everyone for money—”

“Thank you, ma’am, you’ve been a great help,” Jamie said, scrambling to his feet, and led the bewildered Parker nearly at a run back to the car.

He was lucky enough to get Avery when Dispatch patched him through to Records, and Avery didn’t fuss or ask questions, but found out what Jamie needed to know. What he already knew.

All of the victims had been on Langland Street in the week before their deaths.

“Son of a bitch,” Jamie said. “All right, Parker, hang on.” And he floored it, wondering how many people, like Paul Sinclair, he was going to be too late to save.

She was a dirty old woman, as Mrs. Coulson had said, and Jamie was ashamed to realize he didn’t remember her name. Avery in Records had that, too: Veronica Braggman. Old and dirty and shapeless beneath layers and layers of ragged clothes, her eyes small and bright and half-mad. She was tucked into a corner of the Langland Street Station, her crudely lettered cardboard sign in front of her like a shield: Cant Work / Gov took my penshon / please help.

She saw him coming—he would have had to be a class nine necromancer like Jesperson to have any hope of concealing himself—and heaved herself to her feet. “You stay away from me, nigger!” she cried. “I was respectable once—I don’t have to talk to you!”

That answered one question: why her ill-wishing had landed on Mick instead of him. He hadn’t been worth her anger.

“Miz Braggman?” he said politely, carefully. “We just need to ask you a few more questions.”

“I ain’t talking to you!” she said, still with her high voice pitched to carry.

“Ma’am, there’s four people dead. You don’t have a choice.”

Her head lowered, and she looked at him sidelong, like an ill-tempered, cunning animal. “Ain’t my doing. I didn’t push ’em.”

“Yes, you did, and you know it,” Jamie said. The stench of her body was nothing compared to the stench of her mind, and he didn’t need esper to feel it. “You hexed ’em.”

Hex was an old word, his Great-Granny May’s word, and he saw from the way she blinked that it was Veronica Braggman’s word, too. “I can’t hex nobody, nigger. Just a poor old lady, that’s all I am.”

He cut her off before she could get well-launched into that rehearsed whine. “Why’d you do it?”

“Didn’t do nothing,” she said sullenly. Then suddenly, she was shouting again, “Get him away from me! Get this nigger away from me! Ain’t there no decent God-fearing folks anymore?” Jamie realized they’d attracted an audience, and one of them was a woman in the uniform of the Babylon Metropolitan Police Department, who was already pushing her way through the crowd toward him.

He turned carefully, not letting Veronica Braggman out of his sight, and said, “I’m with the BPI. If you’ll give me a moment, I can show you my ID.”

“He’s a liar!” shouted Veronica Braggman. “A filthy liar!”

Jamie slowly reached into his hip pocket, slowly brought out his ID folder, slowly opened it for the policewoman’s inspection. He saw her face change, and Veronica Braggman saw it, too, for she changed her tactics. “They’re all against me, all the gummint! Just want to keep a poor old lady down so the niggers and the white-trash can walk all over me. They took it all away from me, so I ain’t got nothing. And now they gonna take that, too!”

The policewoman said, “Do you need any help, Mr. Keller?”

He saw the incandescent fury light Veronica Braggman’s face and instinctively backed away from her. But nothing seemed to happen; she slumped back against the wall, muttering, “It ain’t no use, none of it. Can’t never get back my rights. Can’t never get what they stole from me.”

Marie-Gabrielle Parker’s voice said, from the midst of the crowd, a little unsteady but admirably clear, “Keller, we’ve got the evidence we need. And we need to get you back to headquarters before that ill-wishing has time to sink in. I don’t think I can handle it myself.”

He turned back to Veronica Braggman. “You just hexed me?”

Her head came up; there was nothing sane in her eyes at all. “You stole my life,” she said, and it was the snarl of an animal goaded past endurance, the wail of a lost child, the cry of a woman who had nothing left, nothing, and who sat on the cold tiles of the Langland Street subway station every day, watching people go past, people with jobs and families and homes to go to, people with lives . . . people who saw her, if they saw her at all, merely as a nuisance, as dirt to be cleaned up.

She lunged at him; he had played football from the time he was an eight-year-old bigger than most ten-year-olds, and he could read her body language. She expected him to fall back, to leave her space to twist through the crowd, to throw herself off the edge of the platform like Paul Sinclair. And part of him wanted to let her do it. Even if she didn’t break her neck in the fall, and she didn’t land on the third rail, and a train didn’t kill her, the ghouls would take care of her before she’d gone half a mile in the darkness of the subway tunnels. Like a garbage disposal.

Jamie put his hands out and caught her—and narrowly avoided being bitten to the bone for his pains. And then Parker was there, and they were getting handcuffs on her; she went limp, weeping great maudlin crocodile tears, and Jamie knew no matter how long he spent in the shower, he’d never really get the stink of her off him: madness and hate and despair and the terrible bewilderment of not knowing how she had ended up like this. He did not want empathy with her, but he could not help understanding. Blame the government at first, but the government is faceless, far away. It’s the people who walk by you every day and don’t make eye-contact, who call you names and talk about needing to “clean up” the subway stations; they’re right there, and it must be their fault. They’re the ones with lives they don’t deserve; they’re the ones who have stolen your life. They’re the impostors, because under their clothes and makeup, their cellphones and iPods and the hard shell of security, they’re just like you.

Jamie shuddered, and Parker said, with surprising authority, “Come on, Keller, move your ass.”

She was all right, Parker was.

He ended the day where he’d begun it, in the BPI clinic. Mick was awake now, a little owlish still with the sedative and somewhere between mortified and furious at what Veronica Braggman had done to him.

The decon team had lifted the ill-wishing off Jamie, although it had taken them three tries before they were sure they had all of it, and somewhere else in the BPI’s sprawling bulk, that lady was doubtless being fingerprinted and tested and, Jamie hoped, fed.

“Ironic that she’s probably going to end up better off,” Mick said.

“ ’Less she goes to the electric chair.”

Mick shook his head. “She’ll be found insane, and they’ll put her in Leabrook.”

“You sound awful sure.”

“I was . . . well, I wasn’t in her head, exactly, but something like it. The reverse of it, maybe. She’s insane.”

“And four people are dead.”

Mick raised his eyebrows. “You sound like you think your halo’s a little tarnished on this one.”

“Fuck off, Mick.” He couldn’t leave—they wanted to keep him under observation overnight, and Lila’d had a fit about that, too—but he got up to pace. Up and back, the room not really long enough to accommodate his stride, but it was better than sitting still with Mick sneering at him.

“Jamie?”

He swung round to give Mick a glare, and maybe a piece of his mind, but Mick was looking at him wide-eyed, solemn and a little taken aback, and Jamie’s anger drained out of him.

“I’m sorry,” Mick said. “You wanna tell me what I did?”

“You were just being your usual charming self. I’m sorry. Shouldn’t’ve flown off the handle like that.”

“I don’t mind. Except you usually don’t. It’s more my speed, isn’t it?”

Jamie thought of some of the tantrums Mick had pitched and grinned reluctantly. “I just . . . she’s not a nice old lady, you know.”

“Parker gave me the highlights,” Mick said, rather dryly. “But I don’t see why that’s got your tail in a knot. You caught her, you know. Justice will be served.”

“Yeah, but she was right.”

“I’m sorry?”

“All those people walking past her every day. Probably most of them ain’t nice, either. Who says they have any right to good clothes and a warm place to sleep? Who says they deserve it more than her?”

“Nobody,” Mick said. He was eyeing Jamie cautiously now. “You still feeling like yourself, Keller?”

“It ain’t that,” Jamie said and started pacing again. “It’s just, how come she ended up the villain here?”

“Because she started killing people.”

“You said it yourself. She’s crazy. And she’s crazy because somehow she got fucked over and spat out in little pieces. Blame The Victim isn’t a nice game, Sharpton.”

“Nor is Pin The Blame On The Donkey.” Mick slid off the bed, gawky and angular in the clinic’s ugly gown. He approached Jamie slowly, put one bony hand on Jamie’s biceps. “Jamie, it isn’t your fault.”

“I know that. Nobody’s fault, really. Or everybody’s. Just another clusterfuck of modern life.”

“We do the best we can, instead of the worst,” Mick said. “That’s all we can do.”

“I know,” Jamie said, not turning to face Mick, because he knew the particular kind of courage it took for Mick to offer comfort and just how fragile that courage was. “I just hate it that that’s not enough sometimes, you know?”

“Yeah,” Mick said, his hand warm and heavy and vital on Jamie’s arm. “I know.”

Sarah Monette lives in a 106-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, and one husband. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchillís Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. The Bone Key, a 2007 collection of interrelated short stories, was re-issued last year in a new edition. A non-themed collection, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, was published in 2011. Sarah has written three novels (A Companion to Wolves, The Tempering of Men, and the soon-to-be-published An Apprentice to Elves) and several short stories with Elizabeth Bear. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.