Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 15:02:01 EST Reply-To: Russ McMillan Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Russ McMillan Subject: Mortality Rate, Part 2 Mortality Rate, Part 2 by Russet McMillan mcmillan@astro.psu.edi When I first saw the body, I thought it was just a kid. Small, with jeans and a bright red sweater. The head had rolled over into a corner, beneath the highest crimson splashes on the concrete wall. Upside down, lifeless, twisted with fear, the face was nothing you would recognize. It wasn't until I looked at the body again and saw the shape of it under the sweater, and realized that the sweater was really yellow under the blood, with little pink flowers knitted in -- then I knew it was a woman. Lou, the Watcher I had seen before, knelt down next to the body. Very gently for such a big guy, he patted her pockets and slid a couple of fingers under her hip. "No wallet, no ID," he said, shaking his head. Someone else muttered, ". . . told Joe it was asking for trouble to let Them in here --" and Joe cut the guy off with a quick chop of his hand. I shook my head to clear it, and staggered against the doorway. The broken door groaned behind me. "I'm sorry, Joe," I said. "I'll -- pay for the damage." Joe squeezed my shoulder. "It wasn't your fault, Richie. Don't worry, we'll work something out." He took a deep breath. "Well, does anybody know who this is?" Silence. "I saw it," someone gasped. "I saw the guy that did it." Mike Barrett, another of Joe's part-time bartenders, came panting up to the foot of the steps. "He took off that way with a sword or a sickle or something. I ran after him, but he was too fast for me." "Good!" Joe moved to the edge of the dock and glared at him. "What the hell were you thinking about? You could have gotten yourself killed." "Well, I saw the way the quickening went, so I knew he wasn't --" a little late, Mike noticed Barbara standing next to me "-- one of Them," he finished uncertainly. "He was still an armed murderer!" Joe snapped. "Joe," Mike insisted, "why do you think he did this? Why here? He's probably a Wa -- one of Us. Trying to frame you for the killing. Trying to get you in trouble with either the police or . . . Them." Joe puffed his breath out angrily. "Maybe. Maybe. It could have worked, if Richie hadn't been here." "But she had to know I was here!" I broke in. "Her killer didn't," Joe pointed out. "All right. Mike, see if you and the others can get this -- get her out of here and clean up. We'll have to keep this quiet. Right now I have some other business to take care of." He waved at Barbara to go inside before him, looking like he'd rather deal with a dozen headless corpses than talk to her. I started to follow, since I didn't want to stay outside with the body and five angry Watchers, but Joe turned back to me. "Why don't you get away from here for now, Richie. We'll talk later." He frowned. "Unless what you had to tell me was important . . . " "Not as important as this." I tried to think. It made sense for me to split; I didn't want attention from either the police or the Watchers -- aside from the ones that were already here, who were presumably Joe's friends. "If anybody asks, I wasn't here, right?" I glanced from Joe to his friend Barbara, who was hovering in the background, listening to every word. I would have been a lot more comfortable if she had been confused, or upset, or at least asking questions. "Right," Joe agreed, and followed my gaze unhappily. "Barbara, I can explain all this, but it will take a while. Give me a chance, okay?" She nodded, obviously still thinking hard. "You're going to explain about the lightning and -- the head thing?" "Yeah," he sighed. "And Us and Them?" Her eyes flicked back and forth between us. For someone who had probably given this explanation a lot more times than I had, Joe looked flustered. "I'm Them," I told her. "He's Us. It's basically all about this." I held my hand out to her. She didn't get it at first. Then she noticed the spots of blood on my sleeve, and looked at my other hand. I turned it palm up to show her they were both fine. On a reflex I wiped the right one on my jeans again, just over the stains I had left there earlier. "Joe will tell you," I said. "I gotta get out of here." Barbara was finally starting to look confused, which was a little satisfying. "Come back later, Richie," Joe called after me, with an expression like I was leaving him to drown. "Sure," I said, and skirted past the amateur undertakers on the loading dock. All I really wanted was to sit down and get my head to stop spinning. I went back later that night to see if they had found anything out. The neon sign was out -- broken? It looked intact, anyway -- and there was a sign saying the bar was closed for the night, but the good half of the door was unlocked. Inside, Mike was on top of a ladder replacing the lights, and Joe was moving his diminished stock around on the shelves. It wouldn't be so easy to get drunk on the alcohol fumes as it was in the afternoon, but there was still a dizzy sort of bite to the air. "You need another set of hands, Joe?" I asked. He turned around. "Not unless they're carrying a case of fine single-malt. Seems like it was mostly the best ones that exploded." He waved a hand at the bottles behind him. "Did the beer survive?" "Sure." He grinned and drew me a glass. "How you doing, Rich?" "I'm okay." I looked at him, trying to figure out if there was something behind the question. I'm not sure if Joe realizes how hard it is absorbing someone's quickening. I'm not sure if I _want_ him -- and the rest of the Watchers -- to realize it. But on that particular evening, I would have liked to talk about it with a friend. I turned toward a movement in the corner of the room and saw Barbara moving around with a broom and dustpan, getting the last of the glass out of the corners. Her earrings were gone and her hair was tied back, with little tendrils escaping, and she wore jeans and a sweater that were about four sizes too big for her. I raised my eyebrow at Joe. "How come she's still here?" Joe leaned his elbows on the bar. "I'm not sure," he murmured. "She didn't seem to want to leave. I think she might be in some kind of trouble." His eyes followed her around the corner of the stage, and he shrugged. "I guess she'll tell us when she's good and ready." I got the message: no prying. Joe had that protective look on his face. I'd seen it before on Mac's face, and a couple times in the mirror. Barbara Wylie wasn't exactly my type (I mean, aside from her being half again as old as me; you learn not to think about age differences when you turn Immortal) but there's just something about a woman in trouble. Anyway, this was Joe's business. I suspected he was a little bit sweet on this lady, so I didn't say anything else. I just sighed and sipped my beer and watched Mike fiddle with the lights for a few minutes. "So, did you find anything out about the woman who, uh, you know?" Joe's face turned grim. "There was no ID or anything. We tried to figure out what we could from her body. We wrote down her description, identifying marks and so on -- I didn't find any matches in our database. Mike wrote down what he saw of the killer, too." I nodded. "So if the Watchers didn't know about her, she must have been a pretty new Immortal, huh?" "Yeah, I think so. Her body didn't start to disintegrate for a few hours." How fast an Immortal's body turns to dust after death depends on almost as many different factors as the feeling of someone's Buzz, including how old the Immortal is and how powerful the Quickening storm was. The disintegration can be pretty slow if there were no Immortals present at the time of death. A chill went up my back as I remembered the slow, ugly decay of Darius' body as it lay in the back of MacLeod's barge -- and another as I thought of Mac calmly dipping his hands into that dust to spread it over the Seine. That was the only time I really saw the process up close; mostly I prefer to just kill my enemies and get out. "There was some other strange stuff," Joe went on. "I almost wish we could have brought the authorities in on this. I'm no Quincy, but I tried to figure out what I could." "Like what?" "Well, she had no other wounds -- just the one fatal blow. But there were some marks on her knees, dirt on her pants, that sort of thing. I think she died kneeling down." "So she expected it, and she wasn't resisting the killer?" "Either that or she was trying to pick something up, and he surprised her from behind. But I think you're right. I mean, there was no sign of restraint, or a struggle. Whatever the guy did to persuade her to come here, it wasn't physical force." "So, he must have lied to her, or blackmailed her, or threatened someone she cared about." "And she was willing to die to prevent whatever he was threatening? Without even trying to fight him?" I thought about it. "Well, she did trick him by not telling him there was another Immortal here. If the killer was trying to frame you, she ruined his plan." "At the cost of her life," Joe pointed out. "The only way we're going to understand what happened is to find out who she was," said a voice behind me. Barbara leaned her broom against the bar and slid onto the stool next to me. She brushed the hair away from her face, leaving a dirt smudge across her forehead. She gave me a little nod hello. "You're right about that," Joe said with a sigh. "Thanks for helping clean up, Barbara. You want a beer?" "No, how about a gin and tonic?" she asked. She was looking at me, so she missed Joe's surprised reaction. "So, did you, um, learn anything from the . . . what you got from the dead woman?" "Huh?" I looked at Joe for a clue, but he was busy with bottles. "Oh, you mean the Quickening. No, it doesn't really work like that. I didn't get her memories all intact, or anything like that. Just a couple of flashes of images while it was going on." "Like what?" Barbara asked innocently. I tried to think. Usually I'm more interested in trying to forget those parts of a Quickening -- the bizarre thoughts from someone else's mind that just don't belong in my head. But this time they might be a clue to finding out who the dead woman was, and that was something I really wanted to know. "Nothing exciting," I said finally. "Being in a car, at night." "Driver, or passenger?" Barbara demanded at once. I blinked. "Passenger. Does it matter?" "It could." She picked up the drink Joe set before her and took a sip. "Would this be something important, or something that happened to her often?" "Either, I guess. Or it could be just a random memory, or something I made up. It's hard to be sure." Barbara didn't let that slow her down. "She was married," she said positively. "Or at least she had a steady boyfriend." Joe looked kind of impatient. "How do you know that?" I asked. "Men always insist on driving," she said, a little smugly. "A single woman drives herself." "Barbara, it's just one small glimpse," Joe began. "I don't think you can turn this into proof for your favorite theory." "What theory?" I demanded. Barbara glanced at me. "You mean you haven't heard the interesting part yet?" "What's that?" Barbara glanced at Joe, but his mouth was shut tight. She turned back to me. "The dead woman had stretch marks," she said. "Huh?" "All across her stomach. From a recent pregnancy." "That's impossible," I scoffed. "I tried to tell her that," Joe said. "It must have been something else," I said. "Maybe she used to be really fat, and she lost a lot of weight." "No, this was pregnancy," Barbara said. "Trust me -- I haven't been there myself, but all three of my sisters have. I know how it looks." "What do you think, Joe?" I looked back and forth between them. Joe shrugged. "That is what it looked like. Maureen agrees, and she's had two of her own. But I don't see how it could happen." "No way. It had to be something else." "You two are missing the point," Barbara said. "If she _was_ pregnant, she must have seen a doctor. Doctors keep records." A shiver went up my spine. "That's it!" I said. "The other image I got from the Quickening. I didn't understand it -- something about sitting on a cold table in a small room. It could have been a doctor's office!" Barbara grinned and finished off her drink. "Well, this sounds like a chance to find out who she was." =========================================================================