“According to our records ‘she’ is.” He gave me a smile that wasn’t exactly oily, but I didn’t have a better word for it. Slippery, maybe. He was nice-looking, if tiny—he was probably five or six inches shorter than me, very slim throughout, with curling black hair and chiseled features that verged on pretty. Not my type, even if he wasn’t an insurance agent, and I didn’t trust the smile. “But there’ve been some irregularities in your insurance claims this year, and I’m here to inspect the vehicle and spend a day or two with you so we at FAHI can get a better feel for your daily usage and what might be the appropriate insurance coverage.”

I caught a “Like hell you are!” behind my teeth and kept it there. Belligerence rarely did any good with insurance adjusters. Or cops, for that matter. When I released the words, they were an as-polite-as-I-could-make-them “Petite’s a 1969 Mustang and I consider her worth the cost of maintaining full coverage, Mr. Doherty. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that the premium I’m paying actually covers acts of God, so I’m really not sure why you’re here.”

“Your insurance is comprehensive.” He managed to make it sound as if I should be given a gold star for knowing that. What a good little driver I was. “But you’ve had some extraordinary claims this year, have you not?”

“I have. My car was vandalized in January—” by a god, no less, but the insurance did cover acts of gods, dammit—not that I’d put it down as such in the paperwork, because that would be insane “—and I was unlucky enough to be at Matthews Beach Park when the earthquake hit in June. Petite slid into one of the fissures and had to be winched out.” With a helicopter.

“These things do happen,” Doherty said with sympathy, except it didn’t go anywhere near his eyes. “Curiously, though, you submitted no mechanic or bodywork invoices, and your driving record has been spotless up until this point.”

That was because I was a very very good driver, and Petite could outrun any cop car you cared to pit her against. I didn’t say that out loud. I gritted my teeth, pushed my face into a smile and said, “Actually, I did submit mechanic and bodywork-fee paperwork. I’m a mechanic by trade, and—”

Doherty looked at me, looked around the detectives’ office I was in, looked at the nameplate on my desk with my name on it, and looked at me again, all with an air of mildly amused but polite disbelief.

I had six inches’ reach on the guy, easy. I could break his nose before he even knew I’d thrown the punch, and then I could put a hand on top of his head and watch him swing like a little kid. I fixed my smile harder into place. “I’ll show you my résumé, if you like. I only joined the force recently. Every other job I’ve had is as a mechanic, and Petite’s my pet project.” My face felt like it would freeze in its smile, which is presumably not what mothers all over the world meant when they gave that warning. “All of this is in the paperwork.”

“I’m sure, but you understand that after such an exemplary record, coming on several expensive discrepancies in six months looks a little strange. We only want to provide you with the best possible service, Detective, and we need to have full and complete records to do that.”

“It’s taken you almost ten months to decide you needed to look at the case a little more carefully? I have full coverage. I don’t see the problem. Perhaps I should be talking to your competitors instead of you, Mr. Doherty.” My smile was getting a little strained. Maybe a lot strained. There was probably a rule against leaping on insurance adjusters and ripping their throats out with your teeth.

“You’re welcome to, of course, although I think you’ll find our rates are competi—”

His tone of utter reason did me in. My short fuse, let me show it to you. I leaned across my desk and his briefcase and snapped, “Oh, go to hell. I’m not scamming your damn company. I’ve submitted my invoices. I don’t even charge for my own time—” Belatedly, I realized that could be the problem. “Would it help if I did? Would I seem more legitimate then? Would you be happier if I was asking for five times as much money? I thought I was asking for plenty already, but if you want to pay me for my efforts, I’m not going to object. Otherwise go away and cut me a check. There are people committing real insurance fraud out there. Go harass them.” I wanted my coffee. I wanted dainty Mr. Doherty to leave me alone. I wanted all kinds of things.

It’s good to want. Billy blew in through the front door—I didn’t even know he’d left—and thrust a cardboard coffee cup in my hand, then grabbed my coat. “Drink up. We gotta go.”

“What? Where?” I shot Doherty a look and put the coffee down to take my coat from Billy and fumble it on. Amaretto’s distinctive scent rose from the cup and I nearly wept. “Thank you. This is manna from heaven. I’m unworthy of its gift, and yet I immerse myself in it.” I got my coat on and scalded my tongue on the first blissful sip of coffee. “What’s the rush? Where’re we going?”

“The Museum of Cultural Arts. C’mon, you’re driving.” He threw the keys at me next, and I snapped a hand out to catch them.

“What, the café there has just opened a new coffee-and-doughnuts express line? I don’t want to spend my lunch hour admiring old spearheads and meaningless blocks of color on contemporary paintings.” I took a slow, glorious drink.

Billy scowled. “Good, because we’re going to spend our lunch hour investigating the murder they’ve just called in.”

The museum was a new building, funded by one percent for the arts and, much more helpfully, by a big fat grant from Seattle’s favorite multiconglomerate powerhouse. I wished I thought that was noble and wonderful, but mostly I thought it was a tax write-off. Still, at least some good had come out of the evil that corporations do.

I didn’t consider myself much of an artist, but even my eye took in the curved sweep of the museum building with its slim arched wing rising into the air and grasped that I was looking at the architectural representative of a killer whale. It was white, not black, but it worked, and made for a very pretty modern building.

Inside was considerably more open and airy than I expected from a killer whale’s belly. Billy’d read the museum’s mission statement aloud on the way over, so I knew the left wing—the tail—held the permanent Seattle display, with cultural material on loan from local tribes, fragile bits of the past preserved behind glass. I’d suggested, brightly, that if we came up dry with our research on Halloween murders, we could visit the museum’s bits and bobs and try getting psychic readings off them. There were people who could do that, though Billy and I didn’t number amongst them, and I’d probably deserved the dirty look he gave me.

We were met by the museum director, a tall man who looked more like the rugged-adventurer type—scruffy, slightly battered clothes, good solid boots, that kind of thing—than a behind-the-desk fund-raiser. He introduced himself as Saul Sandburg and ushered us into the right wing, the killer whale’s head, and I suffered a moment of one of these things is not like the others.

Actually, two of those things did not belong. The second was the security guard lying on the marble floor. His head had lolled to the side, showing clearly how the back of his skull was broken in. Blood had caked on his ears, making his head seem even more mis-shapen, but worse, it was smeared in a wide brownish circle around a display unit. I was pretty certain bits of bone and brain were squished through that smear: he’d pretty clearly been dragged around the whole room. Everything stank of blood and other body fluids.