The Dead Won't Let Me Rest

Chapter 4: The First Deal

Instead he sat in the chair beside the embalming table with the intake ledger on his knee and wrote down everything he remembered from the vision. The car park. The sodium lights. The hooded man's build and the way he moved, economical and practiced. The ring. He drew the ring twice, trying to get the proportions right. Heavy band, flat stone, a closed eye carved into the surface with the lashes rendered in detail.

Jewelry was traceable. Custom work especially. He'd learned that three years ago interning at a private investigations firm, the only job he'd ever had that felt like it suited him before they let him go for asking too many questions about a client the senior partners didn't want examined too closely.

He wrote: Vail said find what was taken. Papers scattered in the car park. Something removed from jacket pocket. Small and flat.

He wrote: Handwriting in ledger. Not my father's. Who had access after he died?

He wrote: Same people. Then stared at it for a while.

Around three in the morning the pressure behind his eyes faded, and he fell asleep in the chair without meaning to.

He woke to grey light through the high frosted window and the particular stiffness of someone who had slept upright with their neck at a poor angle. Thomas Vail had not moved. The room smelled the same. Nothing had changed except that it was morning and Kael's mouth tasted like stale instant coffee and poor decisions.

He stood, stretched until something in his back cracked, and looked at the man on the table.

"Right," he said. To himself, mostly. Possibly to Vail. "Here's the situation."

He wasn't sure when he'd decided to talk to the body. It felt less strange than it should have.

"I have a vision of your death, a ring I can't yet identify, and the suggestion that you had papers someone wanted badly enough to kill you for. I don't know who the man in the coat is. I don't know what was in your jacket. And I have no money, no operating license, and a building that's probably going to be repossessed inside of two months."

He paused.

"What I do have is apparently the ability to watch dead people's memories, which is new and not something I'm fully comfortable with yet. And I want to know who killed my father." He looked at Vail's face. Still and waxy and patient. "So. If you can hear me. I'll find your killer. That's the deal."

The room was quiet.

Then Vail's chest rose. One slow breath, deep and deliberate, like a man surfacing from very cold water.

"I hear you," he said. Same voice as before, thick and low and traveling from somewhere distant. "I wasn't sure you'd come back."

"I almost didn't."

"Honest." Something in the body's expression shifted marginally. Not quite a smile but close to the territory. "Your father was honest too. Not always comfortably so."

Kael pulled the chair closer to the table. "Tell me what was in your jacket."

"A drive. Small, black, no label. I'd copied everything off my work system the night before. Records, correspondence, financial movements going back four years." A pause, the breathing slow and measured. "I worked in procurement for a company called Harwick Logistics. On paper it moves freight. In practice it moves other things, and the paperwork is constructed to make sure no one looks at it twice."

"What kind of other things?"

"The kind with a high street value and no legal channel." The voice was thinning slightly at the edges. "I found irregularities eighteen months ago and spent the next year documenting them instead of going to the police immediately, which was stupid. By the time I understood how high up it went, I knew a formal report would disappear."

"So you were going somewhere else with it."

"A journalist. We had a meeting arranged." The chest rose and fell again. "The man who killed me knew about the meeting. Which meant someone in the journalist's network talked, or I was being watched longer than I realized."

Kael wrote in the ledger. "The ring. The man who killed you wore a silver ring, closed eye on the stone. Recognize it?"

A pause that felt different from the others. Heavier.

"Yes," Vail said. "It's not jewelry. It's a mark. The people who run Harwick's back channels use it. I saw it twice in photographs I pulled from the records. I didn't know what it meant at the time."

"But now?"

"Now I think it means they're older than Harwick. That the company is just the current shape of something that's been operating in this city for a long time."

They spoke for another twenty minutes before Vail's voice began to deteriorate past coherence, thinning to a whisper and then to something below that, a pressure in the air more than a sound. Kael stopped asking questions and just sat with it until it was gone.

When the room was quiet again he read back through what he'd written. Harwick Logistics. A drive. A journalist. A ring that was a symbol of something older than any one company.

He closed the ledger and sat for a moment with his hands on the cover.

Something had settled in him since last night. Not calm exactly, but direction. The difference between drifting and moving. He hadn't felt it since his father died and everything after that became noise and grief and other people telling him to let it go.

He stood and tucked the ledger under his arm.

Then he noticed his left hand. The two fingers he had pressed against Vail's skin the night before. There was a faint mark on them now, a thin grey line across both fingertips, like a pencil smudge that wouldn't wipe away. He rubbed at it. It didn't move.

He looked at it for a long moment.

From somewhere below the floor, deep and slow as something waking after a very long sleep, came a sound he hadn't heard before. Not the building settling. Not pipes. Something deliberate. A single knock, from directly beneath the embalming table, rising up through the tile and into the soles of his feet.