The coroner nodded, looking up at me.
His gaze sharpened on my face.
I had that affect on some of the older guys.
I think how I looked maybe bothered some of them. Or possibly my sex... or my age, even though I’m thirty years old. Or maybe it was the lack of scientific letters after my name. Or how blunt I could be.
Whatever it was, they never expected me to clinical-speak them, or say things without a nervous question mark at the end. They also never seemed to expect me to have a brain, and seemed deeply suspicious of me once they realized I did have one.
“I don’t know about ‘cosmetic,’” he said, his voice gruff. He sniffed in some emotion I didn’t bother to pin down. “But,” he conceded more grudgingly. “You’re correct in that the evidence doesn’t suggest an immediate reason for some of her non-fatal injuries, and at least one of them appears to have some meaning. In fact, quite a few of them are post-mortem... so the possibility that he did them for more psychological reasons presents a reasonable theory, even apart from the symbol we found.”
He hit the word theory a tad hard, I noticed.
I ignored that too, nodding.
I found myself lost in thought, staring down at the cuts along the ribs and belly of the dead girl. Mostly, though, I found myself staring at the symbol the coroner had just referenced. A series of three spirals, it mirrored the same exact symbol Nick showed me just a week before on the bodies of all of the victims found at Grace Cathedral. About the size of my palm, it had been carved in the same place on all of the victims as well, right in the middle of their chests, almost like some kind of chakra or ancient heart symbol.
“This one happened while she was still alive though... right?” I said.
“Correct,” the coroner said. “Same as with the other victim. Since the design is perfectly symmetrical and the exact same size in every case, we think he used a custom-made implement to leave the mark. Probably made of something like razor blades... or a scalpel. Roughly that type of edge. It’s too fine to have been done with most knives.”
I nodded, still staring down at the precise cuts.
Nick’s voice startled me out of my trance, bringing my eyes sharply up to his.
“Any theories on why that’s important, doc?” he said softly. “Related to today, I mean?”
The coroner gave him an annoyed look.
I wanted to laugh when I realized he was offended Nick was implying I was a real doctor.
I didn’t though. Laugh, that is.
I shook my head. “Not really. Not yet.”
“Liar,” he chided, softer. He gave the coroner a brief glance before leaning closer to murmur in my ear. “You’re hiding something from me, Miri... .I want to know what. And why.”
I rolled my eyes, giving him an irritated look. “Hardly,” I said.
“Then you’re not sharing something,” he rephrased, speaking in his normal tone of voice. “...Which is the same thing. You’ve got something you’re following here. Spill it.”
Sighing, I smoothed my hair with the back of my wrist to avoid touching it with the gloves. I’d put it into a ponytail to come in here. Glancing between Nick and the coroner, I thought for a minute more, then more or less told them both the truth.
“That man you had me talk to,” I said, aiming my words at Nick. “The one calling himself Quentin Black. There’s something about his personality that doesn’t mesh with this. With the way the murder took place, I mean.”
Nick frowned. I could tell he hated this theory already.
All he said was, “Go on.”
I shrugged, throwing up a hand. “There is no ‘go on.’ Not at this point.”
“You have something, doc. Why do you think that?”
“It’s nothing substantial. I’d prefer to wait.”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t.”
Sighing, I gave him another look. Then I gave in.
“All right,” I said, turning slightly to face him. “The man I met today didn’t strike me as theatrical, Nick. Not in any way. Quite the contrary. He’s hyper-practical. Goal-oriented. Not a time-waster. It feeds into his narcissism, I suspect... or self-importance, at least. He views his time as infinitely too valuable to spend on anything not directly related to his immediate ends. I suspect he views his time as worth significantly more than that of most people... and his goals as more important certainly. Perhaps even ‘save the world’ important. Certainly well beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of us mere mortals...”
“But not you,” Nick said, studying my eyes.
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, I’m sure I make the list too. He was entertaining himself with me. But I wouldn’t say that put me at his ‘level,’ in his eyes.”
Seeing Nick frown, clearly disagreeing, I shrugged.
“...Anyway, if I’m right, the profile doesn’t fit,” I said, my voice carefully flat. “While I would definitely believe him capable of murder, I don’t see him cutting up a girl for fun... much less dressing her in a wedding outfit and posing her the way this one did. That implies passion. Eroticism of some kind. Revenge at least, or some form of sadism... even religious fervor possibly, given the odd symbol and its placement. Black might be a sociopath... and he’s likely a narcissist. But I don’t think he’d...”
I paused, still thinking aloud as I waved a hand over the body of the dead girl.
“...Lower himself to playing with his food. Understand?”
“No,” Nick said. He shifted his weight on his feet, folding his arms. “No, I don’t understand. What the hell are you talking about, Miri?”
I sighed. “I said it was just a theory.”
“What makes you think the whole ‘ritual’ of this isn’t part of Black’s goals?” Nick said, which told me he’d been listening to me at least. “You said he wouldn’t waste time on something not a part of his whole ‘thing,’ right? What if this is his thing, Miri? What if it means something to him? Something we just don’t understand yet?”
I met his gaze over the body of the dead girl, then shrugged.
“It’s possible,” I conceded.
“Possible? But you still don’t think so?”
“No. Not without evidence to actually suggest that, Nick.”
“Why not?” he said, his voice openly frustrated. “You aren’t even going to entertain that idea a little bit, are you, doc?”
Looking back down at the girl, I found myself focusing on the heavy coating of make-up on her face, all the way down to her neckline.
It must have taken time to apply.
There was so much of it, and it was so flawlessly smooth on her cheeks and forehead and around her eyes, it made her look like a porcelain doll. Or really, paradoxically, like a child. It wasn’t sexy make-up, by any means. Rather, it seemed to age her downwards, implying a kind of flawless beauty more associated with pre-pubescence.
The only thing breaking the illusion was the few spots of blood that made it above her neck, and the smear on her throat which probably happened when they moved her. Still staring down at her face, feeling a sudden pain in my chest as I realized how young she was in reality, I shrugged. Her true age had been partly obscured by the half-inch of foundation and blush and powder, as well.
She couldn’t be more than twenty-five.
“I’m not ruling anything out,” I said.
“You sure about that, Miri?”
The sharpness in his voice caused me to lift my eyes a second time. When I spoke next, my clinical voice had more bite.
“Reasonably sure,” I said, leveling my stare. “But I’m not going to spend a lot of time on leads that you like simply because you’re too attached to your current suspect, Nick. Especially when I can tell your emotions are coloring your view of him.”
Nick made a disbelieving sound. “My emotions?” he said. “Coloring my view, doc? You sure that’s what’s going on?”
“You asked for my opinion,” I said coldly. “My clinical opinion.”
“And is that what I’m getting?” he said.
I blinked at him. I glanced at the coroner, who was watching and listening to the two of us. He pushed his dark-rimmed glasses up his nose before he re-folded his arms, smirking at me. Seeing the smug look behind those thick lenses, I focused back on Nick, deciding to ignore it.
Guy was obviously kind of a prick.
“I’m just not sure it’s his style, Nick,” I said, letting some of the cooler, more clinical tone drop from my voice. I decided to be more honest, talk to him more as my friend. “I can’t explain that fully yet, which is why I wasn’t trying... but I strongly suspect you might need to at least look for a possible accomplice. If you hadn’t pushed me, I would have waited until I had something more concrete in that regard, okay? As it is, you’re just going to have to trust me that I’m looking at this objectively. Or pull me off the case and find another forensic psychologist.”
There was a silence.
I’d been trying to crack through that more suspicious thing of Nick’s, to hit him with sincerity in an attempt to get him to lower his guard.
When I studied the gaze of Homicide Detective Naoko Tanaka through that silence however, I found myself thinking that I’d taken the wrong approach.
In fact, my words had the exact opposite effect from what I’d hoped. A warier look had risen in the background of his stare. I also saw the cop veneer harden over his expression, and the more concentrated scrutiny he aimed at me as a part of that.
He thought I was managing him.
He thought I was using my intellect and training to snow him into backing off.
Hell, he might even be right.
Moreover, I got a glimmer of exactly what lay behind his sudden re-appraisal of me.
Realizing as I did that my “glimmer” might have been exactly what Mr. Quentin Black had been accusing me of inside that interrogation room, I shut that down, too, but not before the memory of our exchange heated my face.
Unfortunately, Nick saw that, too.
He also took my sudden blush in decidedly the wrong way.
I could feel it... even though I didn’t want to.
Then again, I’d always been able to feel a lot more than I really wanted to.
Four
OFF THE CASE
I GUESS IT’S time for a confession from me.
It’s not the easiest thing in the world for me to admit, but for the sake of full disclosure... I already knew there was something different about me.
Before Quentin Black, I mean.
One way to put it might be this: ever since I was a kid, I’d known things that most people didn’t know. Things a lot of people would argue I couldn’t know.
Things others would say I shouldn’t know.
When I was a kid, the tough part wasn’t figuring out that I knew those things. The hard part––the part that caused me the most confusion and loneliness and grief––was figuring out that most people didn’t know those things.
Thank God I had my sister Zoe.
Maybe that’s why I missed her so much now. She’d been like me, too. We practically had our own language growing up, since it was through her as much as on my own that I realized how “different” we were from other kids.
Even so, I was the oldest, so I learned a lot of those lessons first. Like, for example, how mentioning anything I heard or saw in other people’s minds would get me a lot of blank stares, cocked eyebrows, deafening silences... and fear.
Mostly fear.
Including from our own parents.
I learned to keep my mouth shut about what I could feel, sense... and yes, sometimes hear... off the minds of people around me. I taught Zoe the same, once I knew she was like me. It was a survival skill we both learned young.
Moreover, it wasn’t enough to simply not mention that we could hear and see those things. We also had to be extremely careful not to act on the things we knew, at least those things where a reasonable explanation couldn’t be found for how we knew them. We had to be extremely careful not to change our behavior in incriminating ways.
Sometimes that was really, really hard to do.
It got a lot harder after Zoe died.
It also got a lot more lonely.
Psychology was a logical choice for me in school, for that reason alone. If I could figure out how regular people worked, I’d be able to fit in with them easier. It’s also why I would have preferred doing pure research, as opposed to getting paid to sit and listen to people lie to me all day while I had to smile and nod politely and pretend not to notice.
I hated even the word “psychic,” much less all the New Agey crap associated with it.
But yeah, I guess it fits.
I, Miriam Kimi Fox, am a psychic.
Truthfully, the thought gives me hives.
It was a lot easier to bear when Zoe and I could joke about it. Since Zoe died, I’d run into other so-called “psychics” over the years too, of course. Fortunately, most of them had absolutely no idea what I was.
In fact, before Quentin Black, I only remember one woman who stared at me particularly hard, then asked me what the hell I was doing with my mind. She complained that she couldn’t read a damned thing off me. She was an older woman, kind of witchy in terms of her clothes and her long braided gray hair and all the crystals she wore.
She was also really blunt.
She told me there was something very different about me. She also said, somewhat accusingly as I recall, that all she saw around me was a bunch of “smokescreen bullshit” I’d put up to hide my mind from anyone who might be looking.
She was right, of course.
Because the thing with being a mind-reader is this: even if you sort of know no one else can probably do it, the fact that you can do it makes you paranoid. When I was a kid, especially––before I figured out that those voices and pictures and whispers of emotion didn’t register for the vast majority of normal people––I pretty much assumed any thought I had, I might as well be shouting it in a crowded room.
Since Zoe could hear me, it seemed logical that others could, too.
Perhaps obviously, as a result, being psychic also makes you careful about what you think.
The truth is, you stay paranoid to some degree, even after you figure out that it’s unlikely anyone else will hear you. You still wonder. It still crosses your mind. Like speaking a foreign language around people from another country, you still hesitate now and then, wondering if maybe they do understand you. One or two of them, anyway.
After all, you can.
It stands to reason that others must be able to hear you, too.
Totally opposite to me, most of those other “psychics” I encountered wore their psychic creds loud and proud. Some even made a living at it, hanging the standard glowy handprint on storefront windows and scattering eagle feathers and crystal balls and Buddha statues around their incense-filled caves beyond a purple-curtained door.
Some even worked with the cops like me, although not exactly in the same capacity. None of the ones I ran into had much more than a low-level ability, though. At least not apart from the witchy woman who glimpsed the edges of my shield, and I’d never managed to find her again after that one time we crossed paths.
Some were out-and-out scammers.
I never told anyone but Zoe what I could do. I lived in San Francisco though, so I couldn’t avoid the psychic thing entirely. The yuppie-tech takeover was almost complete at that point, but San Francisco still had the remnants of its New Age hippy culture, especially in some parts of town. So I just ignored it. Played normal.
I was able to ignore it too... the vast majority of the time.
No one could see me. Which was just fine with me.
Another big advantage to having an ability that pretty much no one else has? No one else has any way of knowing you have that ability either.
Well, as long as you keep your mouth shut and act like everyone else.
“HEY, MIRI.”<
br />
I looked up, frowning a bit from behind the bluish glow of my laptop screen.
It was the next morning.
Early, like it had been that first day.
Early enough that I was tired, even though I’d at least finished my first cup of coffee. Ian was out of town for work so I’d spent the night alone, which maybe didn’t help. Even though Ian and I still had our own places, we shared a fair bit of closet space and I usually slept at his house in China Beach when he was in town.
Ian and I fought again the night before too... on the phone that is, and mostly about how much he was gone. Now I felt guilty about the argument, in addition to everything else. When I’d woken up about three hours before my alarm went off, I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, despite working myself hard in sparring class the night before.
Pushing my laptop away from me a little bit, I folded my hands on the top of my desk, quirking an eyebrow at Nick, who stood in the doorway, looking a bit sheepish where he held two large cups of coffee from the Royale Blend.
I didn’t fully buy the “aw shucks” look on his face, but I noted it.
He’d decided to take this approach. I got why he was going this way, but I could clearly see the cop watching me from behind that stare.
I also knew exactly why he was here.
“So,” he said carefully, still lingering by the door. “I think I really do need to boot you off the case, Miri. The wedding one.”
I let out a humorless sound, folding my arms.
Feigning surprise, I smiled at him.
“Oh?” I said only. “How did I get off so easy? You know my birthday’s not for a few more months yet, right?”
There was a silence.
Then Nick grinned.
That time, the relief in his eyes looked and felt a lot more genuine.
He walked over to me at once, plopping one of the coffee cups he carried on my desk next to the laptop before he dumped his muscular bulk into the worn chair that squatted across from my desk. I watched him relax into the dark red leather as it squeaked against his leather-jacketed shoulders.
“I decided to take pity on you,” Nick grinned, after he took off the plastic hood of his coffee cup and balanced the cup between his thighs.
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