“Someone really ought to tell that to the idiot copper downstairs,” Gloom said with surprising venom.
I shook my head as I pulled my sleepers from my chest of drawers. “When it’s a contest between evidence and intuition, David goes for evidence every time.”
“So, rather than do anything about this, you’re just going to turn in for the night?” Onyx asked. "I mean, you're acting very casual, Seraphim."
“That’s what I want David to think,” I said, pulling out another set of clothes. “No sense letting the real killer know that somebody’s still looking for them.”
I was surprised to find that Maude had company when I knocked on the monstrous wooden door. Horace, in all his man-mountain glory, gave me a broad grin that matched Maude’s tooth by tooth. Fraidy took one look at the pair of them and hid behind my legs. I peered down at my fearsome friend. He was going to tangle up the kitty leash with stunts like this.
“Oh, if it isn’t the Fraidy cat of my favorite bunch of kitties,” Maude said, leaning down. “Why so spooked, kitty-kitty?”
“”From what Ha—hic!—Hattie tells me,” Horace chimed in. “There t’aint much what won’t spook this ‘un.”
Fraidy carefully poked his head around my ankle as Maude reached into her pocket. She pulled out one of her trademark kitty treats. One sniff from Fraidy and all of my timorous cat's imagined monsters fled the vicinity.
“A little less afraid now?” Maude asked, bringing the treat close to Fraidy’s nose.
He took three times longer than any of my other cats would have to take action. Then he made the salmon nibbly disappear in one small bite. Maude gave him a quick scratch on the head before standing back up.
“You wouldn’t be here, by chance, because you happen to disagree with our dear Chief’s conclusion about Dr. Ravena Valley, would you?” the ghoul coroner asked. She's heard then.
“I sure as the hells don’ believe it,” Horace asserted, the outrage he was feeling apparently sobering him up. “The chief’s a good—hic!—good man, I swear tha’ ta anyone. But it don’t make him right always.”
“Well, in fairness, the Chief's not at his best right now,” I affirmed to the both of them. “But, yeah, this is one of those times I’m pretty sure he’s wrong. But I need evidence to help prove my case.”
By then, Fraidy had finished his treat completely and he was looking up at Maude for another handout. A lifetime—or I guess several lifetimes, in his case—of paranoia had made him a quick eater. But, for once, he actually didn’t go into one of his usual 'Is it poison' freak-outs. I guessed after Goddess knows how many years, he was actually beginning to trust our coroner.
“Looks like you owe me ten Sols,” Maude said with a playful poke of Horace’s ribs as we all went inside.
“Gimme a night or two ta come up wit’ it,” Horace requested as we went down the corridor. Fraidy dragged his paws and waddled after us as slow as molasses.
“If there’s one thing I share with my fellow residents, Horace dear, it’s that I always have plenty of time.”
“So, what was the bet?” I asked as we went into the examination room. I noted that the whole floor was now covered with rubber padding.
“Oh, Horace had this silly notion that he alone knew that something was rotten in the state of Chief Trew’s investigation,” Maude said, a laugh bubbling right below the words. “But I know you way too well, girlfriend. So my bet was that you’d show up right after the Chief Para Inspector did with his preliminary evidence.”
Muerte was sitting in his usual corner, but his arms and legs were strapped to the chair. His head and feet were hooked up to some elaborate EKG that sparked at the electrodes every couple of seconds. That was too much for Fraidy. He curled around my left calf like a leg warmer. Guess he’d exceeded his courage quota for the day.
Pointing at the strapped zombie, I started to ask, “Is he—“
“Oh, perfectly fine,” Maude assured me. “When you’re dead, you have to really work at the grievous bodily harm angle. Still, seeing as Hector’s still super-charged with all that electricity, we’ve had to take some safety measures for the time being.”
Muerte gave a pitiful moan that made Fraidy curl up even tighter around my leg. I ignored the kitty claws and said, “So, uh…is there something bothering you about Ravena being charged with Millicent’s murder?”
“Aye, did ya nae hear a word—“
“That’s just Hattie’s way of asking about the evidence, Horace,” Maude said, putting a gentle hand on his chest. It was like watching a butterfly land on the face of a coastal cliff. “Everyone in this room is in agreement on Dr. Valley’s innocence.”
I wasn’t so sure Maude was speaking for Fraidy, who just wanted to go home, or Muerte, who looked like he just wanted to sit in the corner and quietly eat cauliflower. “That electricity you found in Millicent’s body. Were you able to get a sample of it from Hector?”
“My poor assistant has been pumping it out like a power turbine,” Maude said, rifling through her usual stack of un-filed reports. “As a matter of fact, I was just going to compare that data to a report that, ironically enough, our murder suspect provided to Chief Trew just before her arrest.”
Her tone told me that it was the report which had convinced her of Ravena’s innocence in the first place. As she handed the report to me, Horace looked a little uncomfortable. “I, uh, I really wish I could help out right now, ya know.”
I could see the calculations flashing across Maude’s purloined eyeballs as she glanced at Fraidy. “Come to think of it, I was wondering if you could show Fraidy to the safest place around here.”
The mention of safety got Fraidy to mercifully unclench my leg and look at Maude. “Where’s that?”
“The boiler room. Your brother Carbon sleeps there all the time. Normally, he’d get there himself under the door, but, no offense, I somehow doubt that you have your brother’s flexibility.”
I was expecting the mention of a boiler to make Fraidy grab my leg again in a death grip. So I was a little surprised when he let go all the way and walked up to Maude. “Doesn’t having Carbon around a live flame make that a dangerous place?”
“’ell, he t’aint around right now, is he?” Horace asked, getting down on his tree trunk haunches to be closer to my cowardly kitty.
Fraidy considered it. Finally, he said, “You know .... anywhere’s better than here.”
He let Horace scoop him, and my scaredy-cat rode on the bartender’s shoulders as they stepped out of the room. Maude sighed and said, “There, now. It’s just us girls.” The coroner giggled like one.
I held up the autopsy report. “You do know I don’t understand what you’ve written without your translations, right?”
“I was getting to that,” Maude said, tapping the bottom of the report. “When I isolate some of the current running through poor Hector—“
Muerte gave another sympathetic moan at the mention of his name. Maude blew him a kiss from her rotting lips and continued with, “I found that there was a high concentration of unusual particles mixed in with the usual electrons, positrons, neutrons ... you know, all the typical ingredients for electrical activity?"
“But you didn’t know what those unusual particles were until you read that report Ravena gave David,” I deduced, pointing to the multi-page document still sitting on her table.
"And which David then gave to me," she asserted. She looked back at the document. “Never would have guessed tachyons. But then, being a forensic scientist, I don’t guess as a general rule.”
“And there’s something in this evidence that makes you think that Ravena’s innocence is more than just a guess on your part?”
“We actually have my experiment to thank for that,” Maude said, picking up another paper from her report pile. “The voltage I was using on poor Hector came out to about 200,000 volts, the minimum charge put out by a lightning strike.”
I winced, thinking about the cut-rate Frankenstein scene. “Th
at seems a little excessive.”
“When it comes to data collection, dear, there’s no such thing,” Maude said, wagging her finger back and forth. “How else was I going to be able to determine that the Lichtenberg figures on Millicent were consistent with that type of juice?”
“But would that be true even with the tachyons thrown in? Couldn’t a Taser have done the same damage, if the charge was loaded with tachyons?”
Maude shook her head as she went to the storage freezers. “Tasers only have a maximum charge of 50,000 volts and only 1,200 of those ever go into the human body. True, the tachyons soften up the human body’s resilience to electricity. But Hector and I found out that even with that electrical accelerant, it still doesn’t leave anywhere near the damage we found in our dear Ms. Ponds.”
Muerte moaned. It seemed he might disagree with Maude.
“I’m not making fun of you, dear boy,” Maude called out to him as she opened the freezer. “Just letting you know that your sacrifices have not been in vain.”
She uncovered the sheet to reveal the charred face of Millicent. Then she pulled the cover down to the breastbone, right where the unblemished outline showed.
“Once I managed to make my lab Hector-proof,” Maude said, pointing to the spot. “I managed to spend a good deal of my time studying this area for further clues.”
“Well, let me solve one part of the mystery,” I said. “Millicent had a chunk of black diamond hanging around her neck at the time she was electrocuted.”
Maude’s nonexistent eyebrows went up at this news. “Well, well…that does explain a few things.”
“Like the tachyons?”
“And the condition of the location Millicent was found in. Or didn’t you notice that the only thing that was charred was her?”
“I…didn’t really consider it.” Nor did David. How long had he been feeling under the weather, I wondered?
“If it were an actual lightning strike, the immediate area should have superheated by nearly 20,000 degrees Celsius…which just happens to be hotter than the sun.”
I got it right away. “The vegetation would have been burned away. The sand would have been glass. Could she have been dumped there?”
Maude just laughed. “As if that wasn’t the first thing I checked when they brought the corpse in. No, there were enough un-scorched particulates on her body to determine that she died where she was found.”
“So how does this go back to what you found on that part of her body?”
“Well, it suggests to me that she was hit with a very controlled, directed electrical strike that used some unknown material—which I now know is the black diamond you mentioned—as a bullseye. A lightning strike spell would fit the bill as our murder weapon.”
“The black diamond was never recovered from the scene, right?”
“Or found anywhere else,” Maude confirmed. “Chief Trew did mention something about getting a search warrant for Dr. Valley’s home in the morning. It’s a safe bet that our missing precious stone will be one of the things he’ll be looking for.”
Playing a hunch, I asked, “Did you notice any unusual skin cells on that un-blasted part of Millicent’s body…the sort of cells that looked like they belonged to someone else?”
Maude’s smile came back as she held up her pointer. “Funny you should mention that. When Chief Trew came by for his impromptu visit—and rather rudely waved off any questions I had about your absence—I was just in the process of testing just such a sample.”
She waved me back to her lab station. A petri dish was bubbling with some unknown liquid under a transparent lid.
“I’m kind of surprised you’re working while you’ve got Horace around,” I noted.
“Oh, it’s more waiting than work when you’re using the process I'm using for this experiment," she said peering into the petri dish. "I’m using some good old-fashioned sympathetic magic to separate out Millicent’s skin cells from that of the mystery ones. It’s a thorough process, but it takes a couple of hours. More than enough time to enjoy Horace’s rustic charms and his dance skills.”
Maude did a surprisingly graceful twirl on her two left feet. I clapped. I had to really. To see her face lit with joy at such a simple pleasure as dancing? Well...
The bubbling in the petri dish subsided, which gave me something else to focus on. Without missing a beat, Maude put the petri dish under the microscope and started fiddling with the dials. Several minutes went by as she adjusted the zoom, made loud thinking noises and wrote down notes on a paper next to her without looking away. I was going have to ask her about this trick; it looked like it came in handy. I know it was magic, but it seemed harmless enough. It actually looked useful, more than anything. Like the Authoria charm. Finally, Maude looked up and nodded.
“The cells are definitely from another person,” she said, turning to look at me. “In fact, given how every last one of those cells has moved over to one side of the dish, I would say that we are looking at Fae organisms here. Even the most pristine human cells wouldn’t have been that reactive to the magic.”
“So how did Fae cells land upon Millicent Pond?”
“I was wondering that myself until you mentioned the black diamond. The extremely tight subatomic structure must have cut off a few skin cells at the molecular level, which, in turn, wound up on the preserved portion of Millicent’s skin.”
“You mean like a cut?”
Maude shook her head as she grabbed a report form. “More like the natural shedding of the skin while in contact with an object." She shook her head again. "Very, very careless. But then, what do the Fae know about forensic science?”
I frowned a bit. “So they hate science?”
Maude’s eyes stayed trained on her notes as she made out the new report without looking at what she was recording. “Not especially. They just have no understanding of it.”
She let out a long breath. "Maybe that's because they don't need it because their magic is too strong."
That ruled out Ravena being the Huldra, then. She had the credentials of Nikola Tesla, practically. And I had seen enough of her work to verify she understood science the way I did herbs. In short, Ravena Valley was science.
“I have to say, though,” Maude said as she finished her report. “These cells do possess one peculiarity that isn’t necessarily endemic to the Fae as a whole.”
“What's that?”
Maude pulled the petri dish away from the microscope as she looked at me. She tapped the side of what I assumed were the Fae cells. “Well, the cells were unusually rich in calcium. Had this been in a human body with just the right physical condition, it could have caused a good many health complications.”
My eyes widened. “Like seizures?”
Maude looked at me curiously. “I suppose so. But what would—“
“Is there any way you can scrape enough of those cells together so that Fraidy could get a taste of them?”
Maude still looked mystified, but she nodded. “Give me a couple of minutes to scrape some off and apply a Cell Bloom enchantment on them, but sure.”
“After that, check those Fae cells to see how they react to the tachyon particles you isolated.” I looked at the coroner. "Let's see if Fae energies can withstand tachyon energies."
Maude chuckled as she threw me an ironic salute. “Aye, aye, captain. Sounds like someone has just figured out what’s really going on.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t like to guess any more than you do, ghoulfriend.”
"Well, then, let's sprinkle this experiment with Fairy dust."
Esme Discord glowered at the sight of Fraidy and me approaching her desk. “And here I thought that you actually understood the value of a good night’s sleep.”
“Special circumstances,” I said, giving her an even stare. “Is Chief Trew in?”
“Sure, but, just like last time, he’s not available,” Esme said, getting up from her desk. It was like watching a boulder float to t
he top of a lake. “So why don’t ya—“
“Oi, Sarge,” a voice from just past the desk called. Constable Phillips walked up with a raised hand which he put on my shoulder.
“Chief Trew wanted me ta get Ms. Jenkins in right away when she showed,” he said.
“And why didn’t he tell me this himself?” Esme growled.
“Ya know he’s busy, like. That’s why he was sendin’ me over when Ms. Jenkins here just happened ta show.”
Esme’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“’Course, if ya wanna take it up wit’ the Chief, we could do that, I suppose,” Phillips continued conversationally. “Still, him being such a busy man right now an’ not inclined much ta have his time wasted—“
“Oh, go already,” Esme said with an abrupt jerk of her head. “But the Chief had better back your story up later, Constable.”
Phillips gave a tip of his hat, even if he wasn't wearing one, and guided Fraidy and me into the station. Despite it being near the dead of night, the place was buzzing with activity. Fraidy’s eyes were darting everywhere, looking for the approach of danger, but somehow he managed a steady pace by my side.
“So was Chief Trew really expecting me?” I asked in a low tone.
“Naw, but I’m sure he’ll be glad ta see ya,” Phillips said with a sly wink. “He’s in the back wit’ some high muckty-muck and his woman bodyguard.”
“Couldn’t that woman be his secretary?”
“With that height and them muscles? Don’t think she was hired for her shorthand, if ya know what I mean.”
So Gideon and Ms. Falk had made the trek from Cathedral to talk things over with David. That was actually going to make this next part easier than I’d originally thought.
“Well, the Chief ain’t the only busy man here tonight,” Phillips said, dropping his hand. “I point ya in the right direction; ya can find yer way, right, miss?”
I smiled. “You know it, Constable.”
Phillips tipped his imaginary hat to me, and I rather nervously walked to David's office. I saw them through the glass. David talking things over with Gideon while Ms. Falk stood to the side. She seemed almost bored by what was going on around her, her fingers tapping impatiently against her gold purse.
The Infiniti Investigates: Hattie Jenkins & the Infiniti Chronicles Books 1 to 5 Page 74