Una Mia. ]
There were many floors beneath the unassuming offices of Dr. Adam Nesset. There was the basement complex, which functioned chiefly as storage. It was a drab and dark and arrayed in a confusing, labyrinthine fashion, leading people to getting lost before delivering them to any number of stairs back to the offices above. Great care and planning had gone into the construction of the basement, for the rooms below were not supposed to be there, and the deeper someone made it, the more secrets they unearthed. Adam Nesset liked his secrets. He was not interested in giving them up. .
The morgue was two floors beyond the basement. Dim lights cast uneasy shadows in long hallways, the blue-white bulbs strung together by exposed wiring. Noise went nowhere, dying in the corners with everything else. There were no carpets or signs of comfort. The doors were thick and made of steel, and their locks would have kept all but the most talented of thieves out. Adam Nesset saw the worst of his midnight clients down here. The occasional blood stain marked exposed concrete flooring.
The morgue was at the center of the floor for easy access. Bright light leaked out through the cracks around the edges of the swinging double doors. A powerful ventilation system moved air from the room all the way to the ground floor and back down again, such that the room seemed to ?breath? as though alive, like the slumping, slow beat of a heart at the center of a vast and unreal monster. The tables were numerous and made of stainless steel. Hoses hung from the ceiling in predictable intervals over the tables. Drains lurked underneath, ominous in their necessity. One whole wall was given over to doors of various sizes, starting near the floor and extending across and to the ceiling in columns and rows; cold storage, for the end of liners.
Only one corpse was out, laid on a table in the center of the room The knife sticking from the chest made it impossible to intern. This would have to do.
Una arrived shortly before eleven, when the night was well-established and draped thick and frigid over the city. She traveled via the city?s vilified alleyways, which she considered the scenic route, making pit stops along the way when something proved engaging or warranted more than a glance. Her breath came out white as she walked. Her coat was black and hit just above the knees. The kitten heels on her feet speared through snow and loose asphalt like icepicks.
Arriving across the street from Dr. Nesset?s building, Una settled beneath the awning of a dark storefront, thumb and forefinger shaping the points of her bob back into two black scythes that lay across her cheeks. She watched and listened and inhaled the scent of the cold, decaying wood, old blood, and bodies. Owen had been in the area recently, which wasn?t surprising. Once she?d established the area in her mind, made a sensory map of landmarks she could rely on, she stepped from beneath the awning and crossed the street.
Una circled the building once, then doubled back in the other direction before finally walking inside through the front entrance. At the door to Dr. Nesset?s office, she knocked three times, then took a step back, sliding her hands inside her pockets. Her usual pallor was heightened by the bluish cast to the lighting, and her eyes appeared all the more abyssal for it, as well?that flat, greedy black that stole all the light and never, ever gave it back.
There was always a quiet moment between a knock and the sound of movement behind the door, an unsettling few minutes at most, that often frightened off the least determined of visitors. Just long enough for the second guesses to attack, to drag people back onto the streets and away, away, away from the shady office in the bad part of town, where the medicine man may or may not even hold court. Maybe he?s not in, maybe he?s out. Maybe this is the wrong place. Maybe he?s not even a doctor. Maybe this is a bad idea, a really bad idea.
They needn?t worry. Adam Nesset was in. It was the right place. He was a doctor, and he could attend to their needs.
It was, however, almost certainly a bad idea. On that note they were absolutely right.
Then, a noise from behind the door, light steps followed by the telltale slide of bolts being unlocked. An inch, and no more, of opening, as chains kept the door from swinging wider. Darkness swallowed light and shadows hid the man inside. A thousand distinct smells of antiseptics and bleach rolled out onto Una, and beneath those, things harder to place, distinct but washed out, discordant currents in a chemical sea: blood, rot, death.
A disembodied voice, ?Hands out, please. Slowly.?
Una didn?t appear as if she was having any second thoughts, or even first thoughts, all things considered. She stood in the hallway playing patient statue as she waited, her expression dull and lifeless as she inhaled and exhaled stories she?d never know the beginnings of and most likely would never know the endings of, either. There were some endings here, though, yes: the death rattle of dying breaths and the diminishing plod of final heartbeats. She could smell the desperation and then the antiseptic silence that followed.
As a faint undercurrent to all of that, there was Anton. Just enough for her to know that she was in the right place. And even that was a heartbeat fade; in days, perhaps hours, she?d not be able to trace him at all.
Her vacant study of the ceiling sharpened into focus on the inch of darkness behind the doorway the second the air changed. Without comment or change in expression, she complied with the request, sliding her hands from her coat pockets in tandem and extending them out, a slow flip back and forth between flat palm and smooth knuckles. Her slender fingers lacked their usual decorative silver spangle of rings. In fact, the whole of her seemed stripped of anything one might consider a show of character. There was nothing she could do about her face, of course, the fathomless black of her eyes or the distinctive cut of her hair slicing in twin raven wings along her jaw.
?What else?? She asked, a sigh of sound that echoed restlessly in emptiness of the hallway.
The sheer professionalism was both impressive and concerning. This was a door for the wounded and the hooked, and as Una appeared to neither hurt or addicted, Adam did not open the door further. Instead, he moved into the crack, light barely catching on an emotionless face. In one hand, a cane, while the other hand was behind the door. Something to the angle suggested he was armed.
For some time he simply looked at her, trying to pick her apart, to unravel the mystery of her being at his office, but got nowhere. She?d left him no clues. If this a game, she was out playing him. It made him terribly curious. ?What do you want?? His head ticked, but the eyes did not waver.
Una held no preconceived notions of Dr. Nesset. Owen had given her only a name and an address. No testament of character, no mention of their relationship, no tangential anecdotes by which she might create a foundation for the man standing in the doorway. So she gathered what she could from that one inch wide sliver of a man: the blank set of his features, the cane, the veins in his hand, the way the weight of his weapon pulled down the other; the blue cast of light that the two of them shared?he in his doorway and her in his hallway. Until one of them stepped either forward or back, there?d be no way to determine who was the spider and who was the fly. But that wasn?t a game she intended to play tonight.
Una matched the tick of his head, and gave him a terrible smile. ?You?re holding a body of mine. A man with a knife protruding from his chest. I?d like to pay him a visit, please.?
Adam barely registered a reaction and nothing close to a smile. The twitch in the corner of his mouth suggested a tightly controlled sneer, flesh betraying brain. He found the mime of his tick to be insulting. He doubted she was much impressed by his manners. Her smile annoyed him. His refusal to open the door was flat out rude. Spider and the fly, indeed. Forgiveness would have to be one of the foundations of their working relationship, as he didn?t feel like being caught in her web, and he doubted she wanted to see his.
He closed the door, undid the chains, and opened it again, stepping out of the way to let her through. The gun, if had ever existed, was gone. The cane was not. He put less weight on it then expected, as if it wasn?t completely necessary, or he disliked its use.
?Does Owen know you?re here?? The front office was so boring that it defused much of the situation with its sheer banality. The floor was a series of off-white linoleum tiles. The patterns on the mass produced chairs looked like an awful attempt a Jack Pollock painting on dark blue flannel. A poster of a cat hanging on a tree was so old the laminate was peeling away from the paper at the edges. A jar on the front counter was full of lollipops, and the irony of serving sweets in a doctor?s office was not lost him.
"He doesn't know," Una said, stepping through the wedge of light he made for her and trading the dull repetition of the hallway for something similarly colored but decidedly more engaging. The tips of her fingers skimmed the face of the door as she passed, dropping back to her side just shy of encountering the doctor standing by. "I'd prefer it remain that way. But that's up to you, of course."
Perfectly centered within the ecru sea of linoleum, Una twisted in one direction and then the other, resisting the impulse to slide her hands back into her pockets. The cat poster in particular received a great deal of consideration, as if sussing out the story behind it was of importance. A half minute elapsed in silence before she lifted one hand, forefinger circling the air before the lollipops. "Do they do anything interesting or are they the traditional fare?" It seemed such an odd thing to see on a countertop at close to midnight.
Adam waited out the silence by busying himself with the locking of the door behind her and then, when it continued past that, by watching her examine the room. One could learn a lot in a short span of time, if one knew how to look. A thought set his chin askew, a subtle drop of jaw that so often went conjoined with a hunch or a flash of insight.
Like all things with Adam, it was immediately contained. Flatly, "I am not in his employ. What I do with my time is not his business.? He was quite firm on it, already moving for the hallway. ?They're just sweets for the kids. My nurses are nice beasts. As far as I know they haven't put anything in them this time. But please, feel free to try. Come, let's get you to your corpse." Adam led the wait out of the room and down the hallway. Doors mirrored doors in matching sets at even intervals, waiting rooms he honestly never went into. A window at the end of the hallway revealed a tidy office behind a door with his name on it. The door opposite lead down into the basement.
Una turned to face Adam as he spoke, the cool, coal rake of her eyes over him slow and thoughtful: the cane, his hands, the flat affect of his face. Where his throat vanished behind his collar, the line of buttons that led to his waist. "Literal beasts, or is that a euphemism?" she asked before turning away to approach the jar of lollipops. She might have been asking questions for the sake of filling the room with sound, or perhaps to rile him; it was hard to say. Fingers dove to fish among the jewel tones and emerged with a purple, which she turned back and forth before her eyes before slipping it into her pocket.
She followed along as he led, slowing slightly when they passed his office to peer through the glass.
Adam's response was quick, short, efficient: snort. Sometimes, the only way to win was to not play the game. Efficient motions unlocked the door before him, and while he was forced to wait for her to indulge her curiosity, he studied her openly and without passion. Noticing things other missed. Making notes.
The office was clearly unused. A thin layer of dust had collected on everything. There were unopened letters in a bin, the top of which was at least a month old. A red light blinked on the phone in the corner of the desk, voice messages unchecked and undeleted. The room was for show, not function. "I don't spend a lot of time in there. Most of my work is done below." His way of saying, Can we be moving now?
"Ah," she said simply, and then arched a brow at him. Lead on.
There were many floors beneath the unassuming offices of Dr. Adam Nesset. There was the basement complex, which functioned chiefly as storage. It was a drab and dark and arrayed in a confusing, labyrinthine fashion, leading people to getting lost before delivering them to any number of stairs back to the offices above. Great care and planning had gone into the construction of the basement, for the rooms below were not supposed to be there, and the deeper someone made it, the more secrets they unearthed. Adam Nesset liked his secrets. He was not interested in giving them up. .
The morgue was two floors beyond the basement. Dim lights cast uneasy shadows in long hallways, the blue-white bulbs strung together by exposed wiring. Noise went nowhere, dying in the corners with everything else. There were no carpets or signs of comfort. The doors were thick and made of steel, and their locks would have kept all but the most talented of thieves out. Adam Nesset saw the worst of his midnight clients down here. The occasional blood stain marked exposed concrete flooring.
The morgue was at the center of the floor for easy access. Bright light leaked out through the cracks around the edges of the swinging double doors. A powerful ventilation system moved air from the room all the way to the ground floor and back down again, such that the room seemed to ?breath? as though alive, like the slumping, slow beat of a heart at the center of a vast and unreal monster. The tables were numerous and made of stainless steel. Hoses hung from the ceiling in predictable intervals over the tables. Drains lurked underneath, ominous in their necessity. One whole wall was given over to doors of various sizes, starting near the floor and extending across and to the ceiling in columns and rows; cold storage, for the end of liners.
Only one corpse was out, laid on a table in the center of the room The knife sticking from the chest made it impossible to intern. This would have to do.
Una arrived shortly before eleven, when the night was well-established and draped thick and frigid over the city. She traveled via the city?s vilified alleyways, which she considered the scenic route, making pit stops along the way when something proved engaging or warranted more than a glance. Her breath came out white as she walked. Her coat was black and hit just above the knees. The kitten heels on her feet speared through snow and loose asphalt like icepicks.
Arriving across the street from Dr. Nesset?s building, Una settled beneath the awning of a dark storefront, thumb and forefinger shaping the points of her bob back into two black scythes that lay across her cheeks. She watched and listened and inhaled the scent of the cold, decaying wood, old blood, and bodies. Owen had been in the area recently, which wasn?t surprising. Once she?d established the area in her mind, made a sensory map of landmarks she could rely on, she stepped from beneath the awning and crossed the street.
Una circled the building once, then doubled back in the other direction before finally walking inside through the front entrance. At the door to Dr. Nesset?s office, she knocked three times, then took a step back, sliding her hands inside her pockets. Her usual pallor was heightened by the bluish cast to the lighting, and her eyes appeared all the more abyssal for it, as well?that flat, greedy black that stole all the light and never, ever gave it back.
There was always a quiet moment between a knock and the sound of movement behind the door, an unsettling few minutes at most, that often frightened off the least determined of visitors. Just long enough for the second guesses to attack, to drag people back onto the streets and away, away, away from the shady office in the bad part of town, where the medicine man may or may not even hold court. Maybe he?s not in, maybe he?s out. Maybe this is the wrong place. Maybe he?s not even a doctor. Maybe this is a bad idea, a really bad idea.
They needn?t worry. Adam Nesset was in. It was the right place. He was a doctor, and he could attend to their needs.
It was, however, almost certainly a bad idea. On that note they were absolutely right.
Then, a noise from behind the door, light steps followed by the telltale slide of bolts being unlocked. An inch, and no more, of opening, as chains kept the door from swinging wider. Darkness swallowed light and shadows hid the man inside. A thousand distinct smells of antiseptics and bleach rolled out onto Una, and beneath those, things harder to place, distinct but washed out, discordant currents in a chemical sea: blood, rot, death.
A disembodied voice, ?Hands out, please. Slowly.?
Una didn?t appear as if she was having any second thoughts, or even first thoughts, all things considered. She stood in the hallway playing patient statue as she waited, her expression dull and lifeless as she inhaled and exhaled stories she?d never know the beginnings of and most likely would never know the endings of, either. There were some endings here, though, yes: the death rattle of dying breaths and the diminishing plod of final heartbeats. She could smell the desperation and then the antiseptic silence that followed.
As a faint undercurrent to all of that, there was Anton. Just enough for her to know that she was in the right place. And even that was a heartbeat fade; in days, perhaps hours, she?d not be able to trace him at all.
Her vacant study of the ceiling sharpened into focus on the inch of darkness behind the doorway the second the air changed. Without comment or change in expression, she complied with the request, sliding her hands from her coat pockets in tandem and extending them out, a slow flip back and forth between flat palm and smooth knuckles. Her slender fingers lacked their usual decorative silver spangle of rings. In fact, the whole of her seemed stripped of anything one might consider a show of character. There was nothing she could do about her face, of course, the fathomless black of her eyes or the distinctive cut of her hair slicing in twin raven wings along her jaw.
?What else?? She asked, a sigh of sound that echoed restlessly in emptiness of the hallway.
The sheer professionalism was both impressive and concerning. This was a door for the wounded and the hooked, and as Una appeared to neither hurt or addicted, Adam did not open the door further. Instead, he moved into the crack, light barely catching on an emotionless face. In one hand, a cane, while the other hand was behind the door. Something to the angle suggested he was armed.
For some time he simply looked at her, trying to pick her apart, to unravel the mystery of her being at his office, but got nowhere. She?d left him no clues. If this a game, she was out playing him. It made him terribly curious. ?What do you want?? His head ticked, but the eyes did not waver.
Una held no preconceived notions of Dr. Nesset. Owen had given her only a name and an address. No testament of character, no mention of their relationship, no tangential anecdotes by which she might create a foundation for the man standing in the doorway. So she gathered what she could from that one inch wide sliver of a man: the blank set of his features, the cane, the veins in his hand, the way the weight of his weapon pulled down the other; the blue cast of light that the two of them shared?he in his doorway and her in his hallway. Until one of them stepped either forward or back, there?d be no way to determine who was the spider and who was the fly. But that wasn?t a game she intended to play tonight.
Una matched the tick of his head, and gave him a terrible smile. ?You?re holding a body of mine. A man with a knife protruding from his chest. I?d like to pay him a visit, please.?
Adam barely registered a reaction and nothing close to a smile. The twitch in the corner of his mouth suggested a tightly controlled sneer, flesh betraying brain. He found the mime of his tick to be insulting. He doubted she was much impressed by his manners. Her smile annoyed him. His refusal to open the door was flat out rude. Spider and the fly, indeed. Forgiveness would have to be one of the foundations of their working relationship, as he didn?t feel like being caught in her web, and he doubted she wanted to see his.
He closed the door, undid the chains, and opened it again, stepping out of the way to let her through. The gun, if had ever existed, was gone. The cane was not. He put less weight on it then expected, as if it wasn?t completely necessary, or he disliked its use.
?Does Owen know you?re here?? The front office was so boring that it defused much of the situation with its sheer banality. The floor was a series of off-white linoleum tiles. The patterns on the mass produced chairs looked like an awful attempt a Jack Pollock painting on dark blue flannel. A poster of a cat hanging on a tree was so old the laminate was peeling away from the paper at the edges. A jar on the front counter was full of lollipops, and the irony of serving sweets in a doctor?s office was not lost him.
"He doesn't know," Una said, stepping through the wedge of light he made for her and trading the dull repetition of the hallway for something similarly colored but decidedly more engaging. The tips of her fingers skimmed the face of the door as she passed, dropping back to her side just shy of encountering the doctor standing by. "I'd prefer it remain that way. But that's up to you, of course."
Perfectly centered within the ecru sea of linoleum, Una twisted in one direction and then the other, resisting the impulse to slide her hands back into her pockets. The cat poster in particular received a great deal of consideration, as if sussing out the story behind it was of importance. A half minute elapsed in silence before she lifted one hand, forefinger circling the air before the lollipops. "Do they do anything interesting or are they the traditional fare?" It seemed such an odd thing to see on a countertop at close to midnight.
Adam waited out the silence by busying himself with the locking of the door behind her and then, when it continued past that, by watching her examine the room. One could learn a lot in a short span of time, if one knew how to look. A thought set his chin askew, a subtle drop of jaw that so often went conjoined with a hunch or a flash of insight.
Like all things with Adam, it was immediately contained. Flatly, "I am not in his employ. What I do with my time is not his business.? He was quite firm on it, already moving for the hallway. ?They're just sweets for the kids. My nurses are nice beasts. As far as I know they haven't put anything in them this time. But please, feel free to try. Come, let's get you to your corpse." Adam led the wait out of the room and down the hallway. Doors mirrored doors in matching sets at even intervals, waiting rooms he honestly never went into. A window at the end of the hallway revealed a tidy office behind a door with his name on it. The door opposite lead down into the basement.
Una turned to face Adam as he spoke, the cool, coal rake of her eyes over him slow and thoughtful: the cane, his hands, the flat affect of his face. Where his throat vanished behind his collar, the line of buttons that led to his waist. "Literal beasts, or is that a euphemism?" she asked before turning away to approach the jar of lollipops. She might have been asking questions for the sake of filling the room with sound, or perhaps to rile him; it was hard to say. Fingers dove to fish among the jewel tones and emerged with a purple, which she turned back and forth before her eyes before slipping it into her pocket.
She followed along as he led, slowing slightly when they passed his office to peer through the glass.
Adam's response was quick, short, efficient: snort. Sometimes, the only way to win was to not play the game. Efficient motions unlocked the door before him, and while he was forced to wait for her to indulge her curiosity, he studied her openly and without passion. Noticing things other missed. Making notes.
The office was clearly unused. A thin layer of dust had collected on everything. There were unopened letters in a bin, the top of which was at least a month old. A red light blinked on the phone in the corner of the desk, voice messages unchecked and undeleted. The room was for show, not function. "I don't spend a lot of time in there. Most of my work is done below." His way of saying, Can we be moving now?
"Ah," she said simply, and then arched a brow at him. Lead on.