Poor Unfortunate Souls, Chapter Five: To Catch a Shadow
Chapter Five: To Catch a Shadow
Contents and Warnings
Chapter 4: A Great Sadness On Earth
The process of sharing what we knew with the Seattle Police and the opening of an investigation can best be described as necessary tedium. It required several statements, which included trips to the Seattle Police Station, and before we knew it, the case officially belonged to those with the power to make arrests. Our anonymous informant, we were assured by Officer Rayne, who had been assigned to the case, would be perfectly fine and justice would be served to the best of her ability. There was also a developing financial investigation, and the department was busy tracking down the other young women who had been photographed with Grey.
I was almost comfortable leaving the case in her hands. There was still the little matter of whether or not there was magic involved, and of the original case; having determined that Christian Grey was a clear and present threat to Anastasia Steele, it was our duty to keep an eye on whether or not he was trying to slither his way back into her life.
The only complication was that, despite the fact that we knew where she lived and worked, we hadn’t been able to ‘accidentally’ meet her even once. It wasn’t for lack of trying: we took an increasingly suspicious number of walks around her neighborhood, at first to set litmus paper and scan for magic, then just to eyball the place. Something about seeing the apartment building that she shared with Kate still standing was comforting, and we rang the doorbell regularly on the off chance we’d be there at the right time.
After we had met Sophia, Allie had slipped one of our warded business cards under Ana’s door when it hadn’t been answered. Unfortunately, it’s extremely hard to ward an apartment against physical intrusion, and even harder to put protective wards on a person you’ve never even met, not that it could stop us from trying.
Officer Rayne, however, did not know any of the numerous pressing reasons why we should continue to investigate, just a lot of perfectly valid, procedural reasons why we shouldn’t.
[Allie Provides Her Expertise]“Look, the investigation officially opens tomorrow,” she told me over the phone. “There’s already an ongoing fiscal investigation on Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc. that will take over the identity theft investigation. The department would appreciate it if you stuck to investigating for your other client from then on, since it will make procedures less complicated.”
I thanked her, and mouthed ‘tomorrow’ at Allie, who was sitting across the kitchen table waiting to hear the news. “Is there anything we can do in the meantime to speed the investigation?” I asked.
“Yes,” Officer Rayne replied, “do not approach Christian Grey.”
“That’s not part of the plan,” I replied, entirely truthfully. Any watching that we were going to do would be at a respectable distance.
Officer Rayne made a somewhat amused noise on the other end of the phone. “Well, if you have nine years of experience like it says in your ad, you should know that we appreciate the help you’ve already given us but would legally prefer to do without your further involvement, except if we have to contact you to answer more questions. Just out of curiosity, though, why does your ad also say ‘magical advising, investigation and consulting’?”
I’d almost forgotten we’d put that in the ad before we realized that it wouldn’t be taken seriously here. “Oh, that?” I asked, preparing to cheerfully lie through my teeth. “Allie’s a former stage magician. We get jobs like you wouldn’t believe disproving psychics and miracle shows.” I couldn’t manage an entirely straight face, but over the phone it didn’t matter. As I said it, Allie snorted and crossed her arms.
It was true though: we did get jobs that Officer Rayne would never believe.
“How very Houdini of you,” Officer Rayne replied, sounding like she was ready to laugh.
We continued to investigate, obviously. In fact, we met with Franco that same day in a tiny café that was decorated like the inside of a scrapbook. It also had ridiculous prices, but it smelled heavenly.
Franco was about six feet tall, dark haired and grey eyed, and shaped like he had been poured into a mold labeled “underwear model.” He also had an accent so thick that it was sometimes hard to tell what he was saying. After he greeted us, I stepped forward to take over the interview, hoping to cut directly to the chase without having to detangle his vowels for any longer than was necessary.
“Oui, I ‘ave cut ‘air of all zees mademoiselles ‘oo come ‘ere with monsieur Grey.” He said, leaning back in his chair as if he intended to be looked at. “Zey are belles mademoiselles, but zey never return.”
I slogged through the rolling r’s and looked over at Allie, who was staring at Franco with a concentrated expression, almost a glare. I kicked her ankle under the table, earning myself a redirection of the glare, which softened a bit by the time it hit me. I had no idea what it was about Franco that was rubbing her the wrong way, unless of course it was the accent, which was entirely too gooey to be cut with a knife. Maybe a blowtorch.
“How many young women have come in with Grey since you have been employed at Esclava?” I asked, shuffling my notes on purpose. It’s a great tactic: most people sit up and attempt to marshal some form of organization if you look efficient, organized, and most of all busy. I think it’s the secret shame that everyone carries, left over from their mothers nagging them about it through their teenage years.
It didn’t work on Franco: he smiled and relaxed further into his chair, lounging in it like he owned the place. I wondered if he even had a spine, or if he was actually made of airbrushed muscles and nothing else. “Three years I ‘ave been working ‘ere, five mademoiselles come in with monsieur Grey.”
Franco said it with a smile that was entirely too confidential, and I felt my face go hot to the roots of my hair. I forced myself to focus. We knew the names of four of Grey’s most recent victims, but if he could give us any more information…
I glanced at Allie, who had shifted closer to me in her seat, and she didn’t even spare me a flicker of a smile in reply. She was too busy staring at Franco behind a face that was entirely too calm and uniterested.
Sighing internally, I decided to move this along before we were all sitting down with some of Officer Rayne’s colleagues, explaining to them why tables and chairs had suddenly become capable of flight.
“Do you remember their names?” I asked, without looking at him.
“Yes, Zere was… Bianca, tres belle, Sofie en December, Alise, Madeline… and Leila.”
I nodded, and matched the names to those we already had. “Leila - do you remember her last name?”
“Leila Cooper,” Franco replied, after a moment of thought, “’er ‘air was most beautiful.”
I smiled, made an approving noise, and resisted the urge to bang my head against the table. It wasn’t entirely Franco’s fault if he fit every stereotype of the French hairdresser, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that Allie had somehow gotten a bug up her nose about him during the interview. That was on Allie, and I was going to ask her what she meant by it, because even if it did make my toes curl a bit, trying to get into some sort of glare-off with informants was not a good idea.
Even if they did insist on using obnoxious and probably fake accents.
“Do you remember anything else about any of these young ladies?” I asked him. “Perhaps about how they acted around Grey or what they said?”
“Zey were not entirely… how you say… comfortable?” Franco replied after a moment’s thought. “Zis Leila en particular, she seem to me very unhappy, and zis is not right. She should be très excité, not so sad.” He looked directly at me with eyes so grey they were almost silver, and I found that I could hardly move. “All zat I know is that Christian Grey is not a good man,” he said in a low voice, “you must be careful, mademoselles.”
“That’s nice,” Allie cut in dryly, and I twitched around abruptly in my seat. In the last few moments, I’d been so intent on listening that I’d almost forgotten she was there. “I’ll be sure to remember your expert advice.”
Once more, I resisted the urge to bang my head on the table.
Franco smiled unpleasantly. “A wise decision.” His accent had vanished, probably taking the same route as Allie’s professionalism.
It was time to wrap this up, and it wasn’t just because I thought that if the tension in the room was wound any tighter it would snap.
“Would you be comfortable with being contacted again by us or possibly the Seattle Police department?” I asked Franco.
“Oui,” he said, his accent making a surprise reappearance, and I stuck out my hand. Allie crossed her arms and refused, childishly, and I wasn’t anywhere near close enough to give her a discreet kick in the ankle to make her knock it off. Franco shook my hand with surprising strength once, and then quickly took his own hand away. My last sight of him as Allie and I left was of him examining his own fingertips.
“Mind telling me what’s up?” I asked Allie once we were safely outside. It seemed to break her out of her own thoughts. “What exactly is wrong with Franco?” I clarified.
“I don’t know,” she said, sticking her hands in her pockets. “I dunno, I just… had a feeling. Like he was more dangerous than he looked. Maybe it was my imagination.” She offered me a hopeful smile, and I rolled my eyes.
I didn’t think that Franco had looked dangerous. Or rather, he looked like he could put a person in grave danger of buying cologne. “Maybe he’s a mage,” I replied, and Allie shrugged. Either way, Franco got ticked off on my mental list of interviewable witnesses, and on my list of people who presented a mystery that was probably not directly connected to ours.
Our next angle of investigation came directly from the client: Kate e-mailed us from Barbados in a minor tizzy over the fact that one of her college friends had told her that Ana and Grey had come together to his art exhibition.
Fortunately, she had a plausible excuse for us to meet Grey and finally settle the question of whether or not he was a mage; Christian Grey’s parents conducted a yearly charity auction event that her parents regularly received tickets for, and Mr. and Mrs. Kavanaugh apparently had no objections to donating their tickets to a couple of Kate’s “friends.”
Unfortunately, the event was Saturday evening, which gave us only two days to prepare for it and still try to run down new leads on Lelia Cooper.
This time around, Allie got researching duty while I got to run errands, chanting this is a business expense in my head the whole time. According to Kate, the charitable event we were crashing was formal in a way that precluded scruffy private detectives coated in mud up to their knees from going unnoticed. It was, in fact, a masked ball, which was great for us blending into the crowd, and bad for identifying Ana or Grey.
When I returned to our apartment, bearing bags, later that afternoon, she had news: there was a Leila Cooper who had been mentioned in a local paper in Conneticut about a year ago, when she had gotten married. The picture more or less confirmed her identity: she was a slender, brown-haired young woman in her early twenties, with honey-brown eyes a scattering of freckles, and a fresh bob cut. Her new last name, Williams, hadn’t been helpful for searching, and neither had her new husband’s name, Mark, but Allie had managed to turn up two articles. The most recent was from approximately four months ago, listing her as a missing person who had last been seen leaving for the grocery store and begging anyone who had any clues to her whereabouts to contact the police.
Allie didn’t read me the third printout.
“It’s notice that she was recovering in a mental hospital, also about a year ago,” she summarized, “not really any leads.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Recovering from what?” I asked.
Rather than shrugging and telling me that the paper didn’t specify, Allie looked uncomfortable and fidgeted with the printout that she wasn’t letting me see.
“Sit down first, okay?” she said, and I unceremoniously dumped my shopping bags, full of the necessities for our planned bout of spying, on the coffee table, before joining her on the couch.
“Leila Williams,” Allie said quickly, “was first reported missing last year at the beginning of June, and found about three hundred miles from home in a hotel room suffering from an overdose of sleeping pills.”
I heard the words pass through my mind but they didn’t leave any tracks. I just swallowed and nodded, letting her know that I’d heard. I didn’t ask who’d found her. I didn’t ask if there had been an investigation.
I tried very hard not to think how much damage was done in a minute.
Sensing my distress, Allie reached out and pulled me into a hug.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “We’ll find her too.”
It was probably unreasonably optimistic to think that we could find Leila, but I knew my Allie and her stubborn ways. If it was possible, we’d at least try.
For me at least, the next day had an ominous air, and that was even before we found anything worth mentioning.
Allie and I were walking yet another restless circuit outside of Seattle Independent Publishing, which had the twin distinctions of being the workplace of Anastasia Steele and having the most generic business name I had ever seen in real life, the very next afternoon. We had more or less given up on detecting any sort of magic, but went on picking up the litmus paper and putting down fresh strips anyway. The best way to lose clues in an investigation is, after all, to dismiss a lead as unimportant.
Since I was the one who remembered where we’d stuffed the litmus paper, including behind the downspouts in the narrow alley behind the building, Allie was the first to see her.
“There’s someone hiding behind that dumpster,” she told me in a low voice, before standing up and moving to the middle of the alley. There was a scuffling noise as she walked very slowly around the dumpster, and before I could say anything, what I thought was a very small, very dirty old woman scrambled out from behind it and skittered down the alleyway towards me, then stopped abruptly.
Her dark hair hung down in strings to her shoulders and her skin was grayish around the deep bags under her eyes; it seemed to hang on her just like the trench coat she wore, which had its shoulder seams near her elbows and its sleeves rolled up until her pale hands could be seen. The moment I saw her clearly, I decided that she was actually quite young despite the thinness of her cheeks. What was more, her face seemed to be stuck in a fuzzed-over expression of fear and sadness, which didn’t change even as she looked tiredly around between me and Allie. It was only when she looked up and her light brown eyes didn’t seem to see me that I realized who she probably was.
Call it a hunch, but all I had to risk at this point was my dignity.
“Leila?” I asked, abruptly, and that got her attention - she flinched, focused on me, then glanced back at Allie just standing there in the middle of the alleyway and evidently decided that trying to get past me was a better choice.
“Yeah?” she said warily, and took half a step forwards. “Who are you?”
“I’m Lindsay Pilot,” I told her, “that’s Allie Veldon. We’re detectives.”
Narrow as the alley was, there was plenty of room for Leila to bolt straight past me without either of us brushing the wall.
I had just turned around and started to run after her when I heard a gut-wrenching honk. I tore out of the alleyway expecting to see her bouncing off the hood of a car, but to my relief, I saw her disappearing down the sidewalk, coat flapping behind her. By then, Allie had caught up to me - why were we running again? I would have stopped if I’d had more than a second to think about it, but at that moment Leila ran full tilt into someone’s bike leaning against a bike rack, and went down in a skinny tangle of limbs. I winced as we skidded to a halt behind her, talking full stop.
“It’s okay,” I said quietly to her as Allie tried to pry the bike and its overly long chain away, “We’re not with the police and we don’t work for Christian Grey. We only want to ask you a few questions and then you can leave.” A bunch of people had gathered around us by that point, and a teenage boy helped Allie stand the bike back up while I knelt on the ground next to Leila. “It really is okay.”
“Are you all right, miss?” asked a middle-aged man with a briefcase, and Leila flinched away from him.
“All right,” she said to me in a very soft voice, “I guess we can talk.” She wobbled to her feet and led Allie and I to a convenient bench a little ways down the block, ignoring everyone who was clustered around as they dispersed. Then she sat there like a stump.
“You’re Leila Williams?” I asked, and she nodded. “Allie and I are investigating Christian Grey -” Leila flinched at the name, “and would like to ask you some questions about him. If you want, you can remain anonymous, but I’d like your permission to tape this interview.” I held up my recorder and wiggled it as proof.
Leila glanced between us for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah. Go ahead.”
I clicked on the recorder and then found myself unprepared to ask any questions. It was quite clear that Leila wasn’t going to volunteer information on her own. We sat there for a minute until Allie started talking.
“Why did you come to Seattle?” she asked.
“To get away.”
“From Connecticut?” Allie asked, and Leila looked at her sharply.
“How do you know that?” she nearly squeaked, “You are working for him!” Then, she seemed to crumple, and put her face in her hands and her hands on her knees. “I… I don’t care anymore,” she said, though it came out kind of muffled. “Go ahead. Put me away again. I know I’m crazy, but I told her - I told her! Or at least I tried…”
“We’re not going to put you away,” I told her firmly, hoping that she’d understand that I was telling the truth. She just looked at me with tired eyes.
“We’re just going to keep talking to you,” Allie added, “you can walk away at any time.”
Leila let out a small snort. “So talk.”
I made eye contact with Allie, but she seemed to be doing better than I was.
“Why did you want to get away from Connecticut?” Allie asked patiently.
“You know why I wanted to get away from Connecticut.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
“Liar. If you’re not a pair of his flying monkeys, you’re with the cops, and you already know everything else, so why don’t you know why I left Connecticut?” Leila glared at both of us. “For that matter, why are you wasting time sitting here asking me questions?”
“Because we don’t actually know the answers,” I replied, “We’re looking for evidence in an investigation on Christian Grey and all that we know is that you were once in a relationship with him.” And that you’re wandering around outside the building where his current girlfriend works, which isn’t half suspicious. I kept that one to myself; it couldn’t have helped.
There was a sickeningly despairing smile on Leila’s face. “I came here to stop him,” she said, “I’m not going to let anyone get in the way of that.”
“Then let us help you,” Allie said earnestly.
It wouldn’t have worked if I’d said it; Allie had an innate confidence that made people think twice about protesting when she took them under her wing. When people hit rock bottom, they were apt to suddenly see her as a safe harbor, no matter what they thought of her at other times. Right at that moment, she glowed with promises.
After a moment, Leila nodded.
Chapter 6: Anoxic
[Notes]I had to put this chapter and the next through a major edit using the lovely timeline that Gehayi whipped up for me, which is why it’s late.
* I got my information on police investigation procedure from various places. None of it is specific to Washington or Seattle, and it might be contaminated by my longstanding love of NCIS. As always, if I fucked up, give me your sources! I discovered about halfway through that while I know how this works in the world Allie and Lindsay are from, I don’t know how it actually goes in the real world.
** If I fucked up the French accent in any way, assume it’s because it’s fake. J (Sub note: I know that “Franco” sounds Italian and Ana said his accent was Italian, but 1) Ana is dumber than a bucket of bricks, 2) I desperately wanted this easter egg before I got to the heavy stuff with Leila. Anyone who recognizes what crossover character Franco probably is gets a cookie! [And everybody who already knew gets a cookie anyway.])
*** No, the fanwiki does not have Leila’s actual maiden name listed, so I made one up. Thanks to Gehayi, I know that Lelia appears to have 1) gone home to her parents in Connecticut, which was a smart move, 2) gotten married there about one year before the Fifty Shades timeline, then 3) had a nervous breakdown two weeks later, causing her to be hospitalized.
**** I had Leila speak like an actual young American adult (rather than the weird way that James had her talking,) because it just makes more sense, damnit!