Chapter 52

Water darkened the hair along Brutus’s muscular forearms, his skin wet to the elbows. The bear-kin’s ears were gray around the edges. His blue scrubs were sprinkled with spots that Michael didn’t want to know the origins of as he cleaned up.

Michael leaned back on an examination table, ankle-length black overcoat on, Bureau badge clipped prominently on the left breast pocket.

“So. About the raccoon-kin,” the smaller man announced, mousy ears twitching at every sound in the morgue.

His friend of five years shut the water off and dried his hands thoroughly.

“Amadeus Vale. Forty. Television show, books on the bestseller list. Women packed the theaters. Healthy as a man of his age could be,” Michael recited from memory.

“Heart attack. That’s what they want me to put on the form,” Brutus replied.

Michael lit a cigarette and handed it to Brutus. He waited as his taller friend took a drag.

“To be honest, I don’t think it was a heart attack.”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw something like this in the war. Our general dropped dead while visiting the field hospital. Forty-eight, healthy as an equine bruiser troop. They called it a heart attack and closed it. I opened him up anyway. Residue in the blood and on the heart wall. Clear and oily. I passed it up. They told me to let it go.”

They both took a puff from their cigarettes. Smoke drifted under the fluorescents.

“Same stuff with our celebrity. Ran it twice.”

Michael had heard the same story. Another country. A man working on the lunar program, dead of a heart attack, only in his twenties. The report had come through B.A.G. communications. To Brutus, Michael was Bureau, a friend who worked for the government and played poker with the boys. That was the job that existed on paper.