Shelly paused for a moment to take everything in. Then she shook a finger at me as she said, “See what happens when you clam up and don’t tell people everything? Bad stuff. Like you feelin’ like you’ve been left to dry out alone on the line. Like me goin’ more cuckoo than a dang clock factory.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. Shelly did have a unique way of putting things. And she was correct, when all was said and done. I’d kept Esteban in the loop, as I had decided to rely upon him. But now, events had temporarily separated us. I needed Shelly’s support more than ever, and she deserved to know everything that had happened.
“You’re right,” I admitted. “Even after you helped me with the Albess…I guess I didn’t want to bother you with my problems. You were still getting over a whole mess of things yourself.”
“I was, but you should’ve come and told me. For a couple of reasons.” She crossed her arms as she added, “For starters, you need my perspective.”
I nodded. “I do. I should’ve thought of you from the get-go. I’ve just ended up with more and more mysteries piling up in front of me. Like unwashed lab ware in the sink.”
“It’s because you’re actin’ like a handyman who’s just gotten a brand new set of tools,” she said sagely. “Those tools being your three main friends in Andeluvia. Between ‘em they’ve got the ability to fly, cast spells, and track magic. You figure that you have the science and forensics side laid out and dried on your own. But how often do we do that kind of work solo, back at the OME?”
I had to admit that she had a point. I often conferred with other medical examiners, other crime scene analysts, even non-specialists like Hector. “You’re right. Bouncing ideas off each other has always been valuable in the past.”
Shelly practically beamed at that. “And it’ll be that way now. For starters, I’ve already spotted one lead I bet you haven’t even thought of.”
I spread my hands. “I bet I haven’t either, then.”
“You just finished tellin’ me how Liam, your ‘magic deer’ friend, used his magic on a bullet to track down the location of a gun. And then he did the same thing on a crystal shard that sent you out to the Juniper Valley recycling plant.”
“I follow you so far,” I said. The abandoned recycling furnace had been ground zero for a murderous fight with Korr of the Seraphine. “After we handled Korr, we found more shards deeper inside the plant.”
“Then you ought to have Liam test those shards the same way.”
I stood stock straight in amazement.
“You’re right!” I exclaimed. My brain made a soft ‘click’ as I kept on talking. “Whoever placed those shards there…did so on purpose. They wanted us there. They wanted Korr there. They wanted us to confront him, to fight it out. And those shards could lead Liam – and us – to whomever set that fight up.”
“That’s what I’m thinkin’. But I’d put a stack of greenbacks on who I think you’ll find.”
“Who?”
Shelly smiled mirthlessly. “You’ll find Grayson Archer at the end of this trail, I bet.”
I stared at her. “Why him?”
“You ever stop and think how conveniently that fight of yours was set up? Those shards led you to a spot that had everything you needed to kill somethin’ that was damn close to immortal. A plant with a quick-heat furnace and a fire suppression system. And more importantly, a plant that had been shuttered.”
“Right,” I agreed. “No witnesses to see creatures from Andeluvia duke it out.”
“More than that. No bystanders there to get hurt.” Shelly waggled a finger at me as she added. “That plant was closed down, not abandoned. There were tons of valuable equipment sitting right out in the open. Where was the night watchman?”
I had no answer, so Shelly went on.
“That must be Archer’s doing.” She held up a hand, forestalling my objection, as she added, “I know, he’s dangerous. He might be the one behind Cohen’s murder, or the mayhem back in that other world. But think back to what happened at the psychiatric ward. When he coached me in order to bluff you.”
I finally understood her point. “Archer went out of his way to ensure you weren’t harmed. Just like whomever led us to that plant so we could combat a literal firebird without hurting other people.”
“I think so.” Her face took on a wistful look. “That phoenix you fought, he must have been quite a sight.”
“He was. Korr wasn’t a nice person. Phoenix, whatever. But he was still a thing of incredible beauty.”
Shelly’s voice dropped as she spoke again, this time more quietly.
“Dayna…do you think I’ll ever be able to see Andeluvia?”
Her question surprised me. Esteban had asked me the same thing a while back. I still got the same worried flutter in my stomach as I thought of how Andeluvia, for all its beauty, could be a death trap for the unwary.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “And with this conflict going on…I don’t know how or when it could happen.”
“But it still might. Because of this conflict, I’ve been exposed to magic in the most personal way. More than once. I’ve been changed by it, haven’t I?”
I couldn’t deny the truth.
“Yes,” I acknowledged, with a lump in my throat. “You’ve been touched by two of the most powerful beings I’ve met. Destry of the Pouquelaye and Albess Thea of the Hoohan.”
“Then I reckon that I’m part of this now,” she said, in soft but unshakably firm voice. “I’m part of this contest between Light and Darkness. I’ve always wanted to help others. I’ve always wanted to stand for the right and fight against the wrong.”
“It’s why we do what we do.”
“Then I want it made official.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
To my utter astonishment, Shelly moved to stand before me. Then she knelt on the hard kitchen tile, head bowed, hands clasped together at her chest. Her voice shook when she spoke next.
“Dayna, I want you to dub me.”
For a moment, all I could do was stare. I tried to speak, found I couldn’t, and then tried again.
“Shelly…I don’t even know if I’m allowed to.”
“Of course you are, you’re a Dame now. I saw how Albess Thea honored you.”
My brain was still trying to play catchup here. “She was, ah, just being polite.”
“Oh, horsefeathers! You’re sayin’ that you could bind a centaur king to your word, but you can’t dub someone a knight?”
I blinked. She had driven her point home. Magnus had sworn a binding oath to me without hesitation. He’d even acknowledged me as a fellow member of the nobility.
“Dayna, please,” Shelly whispered. “Don’t make me beg you.”
I didn’t have a sword handy to dub my friend. Instead, I used what was close at hand. I picked up Shelly’s prized gravy ladle from where it sat on the counter. I held it gently, handle resting in one hand, the utensil’s curved bowl in the other. I could make out the distorted image of my face in the brightly polished silver.
I spoke sternly as the words of my investiture flooded back into my mind. Most of the words, anyway. Enough to make this as official as I could. Nothing less would count, at least in my friend’s mind.
“I speak to thee now, Rochelle of the Land of the Angels. If thou wouldst serve Dame Chrissie, the Lady of the Tower, then thou must make an Oath of Fealty.” I paused, and then added, “Um...say ‘I so swear’.”
“I so swear!” Shelly said reverently.
“Thou must promise to be faithful and pay homage to thy lord. Thou must mete out justice, give mercy, and defend the weak with honor. Swear it now.”
“I so swear!”
“Thou must observe all customs and laws of the nobility. And should you be called upon to use thy fortune, property, or skill in service of thy lord, thou must do so dutifully and without hesitation. Swear it now.”
My friend’s hands shook as she spoke. “I so
swear!”
“Then I, Dame Chrissie, in service of King Fitzwilliam of the line of Julian the Conqueror, shall do my duty as a knight of Andeluvia.”
I changed my grip on the ladle, tapping the bowl gently but firmly on each of Shelly’s shoulders. Even though I was being a lot gentler than Fitzwilliam had been with me, I decided to forego the final whack along the side the head. There was no need to give my friend a headache.
“Rochelle Richardson,” I said triumphantly. “Rise, for I dub thee knight!”
Shelly got to her feet unsteadily, tears streaming down her face. But a smile as broad as I’d ever seen accompanied the tears.
I grinned at her uncertainly. “Um…what do you think?”
“I think I feel complete now,” Shelly said gratefully. “And one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
She pointed to the stove. “I think the beans are starting to burn.”
I dropped the ladle and picked up the wooden spoon, doing my best to stir the rapidly hardening crust atop the mixture. Shelly stayed at my side, coaching me while simultaneously slicing up the pork tenderloin into slices of swirled red, pink, and white.
For once, my luck didn’t step outside for a smoke at the critical moment. We were able to save everything just before it was too late.
The results might have been a little overcooked. What came out at the end might not be to everyone’s liking. But I was happy with it.
In fact, everything tasted delicious.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I reached a new and unexpected milestone at work the following day.
At around nine in the morning, I finished signing and stamping my way through a thick manila folder of files. I hefted the folder into the wire-framed ‘OUT’ basket, which really existed to remind me which files I had to drop back at the labs or the admin section. And that’s when I saw it.
A small, triangular patch of empty desk.
Between my Mad Hatter ginger cookie tin and the ever-growing piles of paperwork, I hadn’t seen the desk itself in months. Part of me felt like I should have poured a toast to the occasion, especially since it was to be very short-lived.
Short-lived being about ten seconds. That was how much time it took me to grab the Wainwright case files and move them from my guest chair and onto the desk where they belonged. A little ‘puff’ of dust whooshed out as I set the new folder down and opened the contents with a sigh.
New information. That should have been a ‘yay’ moment.
But there wasn’t anything particularly enlightening anywhere in the file.
The coroner over at Sun Valley had acknowledged receipt of all ‘organic evidence’ from the crime scene. That covered both the relatively intact body parts, as well as a vacuum tank of liquefied remains. But that was it – no word on visual inspection, toxicology, or even a planned schedule to perform these procedures. That annoyed me, but not as much as the prepared reports from the evidence techs and the chem lab.
Myun-Hee had put a pair of techs to work scanning the mound of shattered kitchenware and glass that I’d brought back. Unfortunately, the only usable prints they could find matched up with the victim, Mose Wainwright. Which wasn’t much help, to put it mildly.
The chem lab’s report was even less useful. The swabs of various surfaces I’d taken around the house hadn’t revealed anything beyond the usual mix of pollen, dust, and human hair. Given the location of the house and the upper-crusty nature of most Los Angeles social circles at that level, I at least expected to find traces of recreational drugs.
Best of all, the report came back on the white powder I’d sampled from the twin lines in the back yard. Surprise, surprise – it was salt. The technician highlighted a ‘point of interest’ on the report, citing that the material had come in relatively large flakes as opposed to the normal itty-bitty cubes. Also, they confirmed that the sodium chloride in the salt was slightly less than pure. It had been mixed with a sprinkling of calcium silicate and yellow prussiate of soda.
This told me two things. First, I was looking at a variety of kosher salt instead of table salt. Second, that the technician in the chem lab had no idea the two substances he’d found were common anti-clumping agents added to salt to make it pour evenly.
Kosher salt wasn’t quite as common as table salt. But there were dozens of brands that sold it, in millions of stores all throughout the Los Angeles city limits.
A dead end, in other words.
The phone on my desk rang, startling me out of my growing frustration. The extension listed on the screen told me the call came from the photo lab. Mentally crossing my fingers, I reached for the handset.
“Talk to me, Hector,” I said. “And only good news today, please.”
“Don’t know if I have anything good,” he replied. “But I have some stuff for us to look at. You got a minute?”
“For you? Anytime.”
He let out a good-natured guffaw as he recognized his own signature line, given right back at him. As soon as I ended the call, I grabbed my jacket in case the man’s favorite hangout spot had restored its over-eager air conditioning system. Then I headed towards the elevators at a brisk walk.
The downstairs photo lab frequented by Hector Reyes had been stashed in the brand new wing of the OME building. While you couldn’t get high off the smell of the latex paint anymore, it still gave off the faint smell of colored markers. I pushed my way through the heavy door into the lab and spotted the man hard at work in front of a computer monitor larger than my office window.
The faux-leather chair covers squeaked like a stepped-on mouse as I pulled up a seat. Hector nodded to acknowledge my arrival and continued to focus on his typing. A few moments later, the monitor turned solid black. Then it slowly filled as the computer began to re-draw the objects and background of a room on the screen.
“I’ve been going over the photos from the Wainwright house,” Hector announced. “Been looking at ‘em for hours now. There’s absolutely no evidence of a break-in anywhere. Not on the entry doors, not on the windows, not even coming down the chimney.”
“Well,” I said wryly. “That rules out Santa Claus as a suspect.”
“That’s a help, in that it takes someone off the ‘naughty’ list,” he said with a chuckle. “But we’re back to our original theory that whoever shot our victim was a guest, not a burglar. I’ve been trying to spot anything at the crime scene that’s particularly extraños. You know, strange. Out of place.”
“You wouldn’t have had me down here at a run unless you found something,” I said, in a hopeful tone. “No matter how small it is, I want to hear it.”
He pointed at the screen. “This is a digitized model of the first floor of the Wainwright house. I’ve put the camera about three feet behind the shooter’s perspective.”
Just as he finished speaking, the images finally winked into focus. The computer had rendered the back of the bar in the recreation room, right down to the scratches on the bar top. The position of the victim’s body had also been lovingly digitized, right down to the last blood splatter. The three bullet holes in the far walls gazed back like sightless eyes.
“Okay,” I acknowledged. “I’m with you so far.”
“Check out the lines-of-sight from the shooter’s position when I plug them in.”
A tap of the key, and a stylized image of a weapon’s muzzle appeared over the bar top. Three red lines extended away from the muzzle, each connecting with a hole. Hector then spun the view of the scene about ninety degrees to the left so I could see the shot trajectories in profile.
I squinted a bit before I saw it. “The trajectories are all going down slightly.”
“Yup. And the angle of depression is exactly the same for each shot. It’s not much, but it’s measurable. Call it two, three degrees at most.”
“Kickback from the gun?”
“Doubt it.” Hector sat up, pantomiming the holding and firing of a large weapon with both hands. He rocked back s
lightly as he did so. “When firearms kick back, an inexperienced user will normally end up raising the barrel.”
“But I thought we concluded that the variation in the shots were caused by kickback,” I objected. “By the shooter losing control over the weapon.”
“I still think that’s the case. If the shooter had extremely strong forearms and a sturdy grip, he could prevent the up-and-down movement. But he may not have been able to control the side-to-side motion of the gun as it continued to fire.”
I nodded. “That makes sense to me.”
“It does? Good. Then maybe you can figure out why there’s a consistent angle of depression at all.”
I thought about it. I recalled watching Esteban at the firing range. He normally shot a handgun while standing. But at one gun range, I’d watched him try out a couple of different hunting rifles from a sitting position. How a person held a gun might vary, but there was one thing they couldn’t change.
One weird little ‘click’ in my head, and it came to me.
“We know the shooter was behind the bar,” I said. “What if they were sitting in the chair I saw behind it? And if they were particularly tall? Couldn’t that result in a change to the angle that the weapon would be held and fired from?”
“You might have something there.” Hector typed in a few parameters and got the answer surprisingly fast. “I just put in the height of the chair’s seat set against the angle of the shots. Looks like the shooter would have to be at least six-foot three to give us the results we saw.”
I considered for a moment. “It’s beyond a shadow of a doubt that Wainwright was visited by the man who brought our mystery weapon. That would be Karl Nystrom, inventor of the Demon. Did you get any info on him yet?”
“I didn’t get a chance to look yet.” Hector swung his chair around and leafed through a file sitting next to him. After a few seconds of digging, he handed me a sheet of paper. “Here it is.”
Trafficking in Demons Page 13