He probed the wound further, and his forehead furrowed. “Hmm. That’s odd.”
“What?” I said. Kronen finding things “odd” was never good. After twenty years as a Nocturne City ME, he was about as hard to rattle as an android.
“Her heart,” he said. “It appears to be missing.”
“You mean it’s hacked up?” Lane said. “That wound looks pretty severe. Maybe she got impaled on something.”
“No,” Kronen said. “Her ribs have been cracked. Her heart is not damaged. Her heart is gone.”
I cocked my head. “Gone? ” Just when you think you’ve seen everything.
“That’s what I said,” Kronen agreed mildly. “I think we’re done here. Zip her up and I’ll get her back to the morgue.”
“I want her autopsied ASAP,” Lane said. “This isn’t some hooker we’re dealing with. This is somebody’s daughter.”
Kronen gave a stiff nod and gestured for the coroner’s assistant to zip up the body bag.
Lane noticed me glaring at her after a second. “What?”
I crossed my arms. “A hooker is somebody’s daughter, too.”
“You know what I meant,” Lane said. She at least had the grace to turn colors under the sodium lights.
Just because the body leaves the scene doesn’t mean there isn’t still a crapton of work to do. The rest of the SCS trickled in, and I assigned them each to a sector of the scene to process it.
David Bryson, whom I’d known in Homicide, looked rumpled and red-eyed from lack of sleep. Andy Zacharias, a rookie detective who’d been initiated into my squad by being the hostage of a bunch of off-the-reservation Thelemite cultists, looked like he’d either been awake waiting for my call or mainlined a whole lot of caffeine.
“Andy.” I corralled him, as Bryson and Batista started looking for tire tracks along with a CSU tech.
“You look nice, ma’am,” he said, gesturing to my upswept hair and makeup. “Date interrupted?”
“None of your damn business, Andy,” I said cheerfully. “I need you to find the security office and pull their footage for this part of the port. If we’re lucky, everything is on tape and we can wrap this up before the weekend.”
Hunter Kelly was the last to arrive, and with Andy shooed away from anything that would actually get him into trouble, I caught him at the yellow tape. “I need to ask you something.”
Kelly, who’s built like a surly Irish tree trunk and about as expressive, grunted. “Shoot.”
“Is there something that a witch would need a human heart for?” I said. Kelly was a warlock, a battle witch, and I figured if anyone would know about the icky, slasher-film stuff he would.
Kelly shrugged. “Lots of things. You can eat your enemy’s heart for prowess in battle. You can preserve it to bind someone to you in spirit for eternity. And it’s a punishment.”
“That, I agree on,” I said. “Losing internal organs usually isn’t a fun, lighthearted romp through the park.”
“It’s a punishment for betrayal,” Kelly said. “Cut out the heart of the one who broke yours. That sort of poetic bullshit. Never put much stock in it, myself.”
That I’d buy. Kelly was many things, but he wasn’t a romantic. “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I have to head to the morgue for a body ID. Have Batista call me when you’re finished here, and keep an eye on that bright-eyed moron from SVU. She’s way too eager.”
“Got it,” Kelly rumbled. I took one last look at the pier and the black water beyond as I walked back to my car. What had brought the girl here?
And with her missing heart, who the hell was I chasing for her murder?
CHAPTER 2
The morgue at night is the sort of place you’d expect zombies to congregate, or maybe a pack of particularly lame Goth vampires, if such a thing existed. In a city where Wendigo, werewolves, magick-users and trolls all shared space, it was sort of refreshing to know I didn’t have to worry about Dracula sneaking up and making me into a Slurpee.
I found Kronen in scrubs, washing his hands in the steel sink off of the autopsy bay. “Before you cut her open, I need to notify her parents. Can you give me an hour?”
Kronen kicked off the water and nodded. “It would be prudent, I think. She’s very young—I checked her mouth for trace and her wisdom teeth aren’t even close to erupting. I’d put her age at perhaps fifteen.”
Even with my job, there were times I wondered what the world was coming to, when magick-users ripped out a teenage girl’s heart and left her for the sea to take.
“Mind if I use your computer?” I asked Kronen. He graciously pretended not to notice my grim expression.
“Please. I’ll ask an attendant to take our poor girl to the viewing bay, shall I?”
“Do that,” I said, pulling up the department search utility. The Dubois family wasn’t hard to find—Nathaniel and Petra. A Cedar Hill address and no criminal records. The slick, pretty faces on the DMV photos didn’t look like they even had a daughter, never mind one who would end up dead on a city pier.
I picked up the phone on the morgue wall, anyway. Looks weren’t everything—to the casual eye Iwas a too-tall, dark-haired, reasonably pretty thirty-something woman. There was no clue to what was lurking under my skin, until the monster came out, in my eyes or my teeth or my claws.
“Hello?” A groggy answer, with a Latino accent. I looked at my watch. It was almost one A.M. I worked nights when I was in Homicide, and time has always been fluid for me, anyway.
“Hello. This is Luna Wilder, with the Nocturne City police. I need to speak to the Dubois family.”
“Okay, okay. Hold, please.” The phone was set down with a clunk and a moment later a male voice came over the line.
“You people better have a damn good excuse for calling me in the middle of the night.”
“Mr. Dubois?”
“Who else would it be?”
Oh, he was leaving himself wide open there. The gravity of the news I had to deliver stopped me from saying anything grossly unprofessional, but I can’t say it wasn’t tempting. “Mr. Dubois, I’m afraid I have some bad news. I need you and your wife to come down to the city morgue as soon as possible.”
A slow breath on the other end of the line. When Nathaniel Dubois spoke again, he was subdued, almost scared.
“Could you tell me what this is regarding?”
I was going to tear Natchez a new windpipe if he was wrong about this. “It’s about your daughter, sir.”
“Lily? What? What’s happened to Lily?”
So that was her name. Not Lisa or Lila. Lily.
“Sir, I think it’s best if I speak to you and your wife in person.”
Dubois was numb now, and I could hear him panting into the phone. “We’ll be right there.”
I headed out to the waiting room, the public face of the morgue, where doors and curtains hid the procession of the dead from unsuspecting eyes. A familiar form was sitting in one of the butt-deadening institutional chairs, and I looked again, surprised, even though I shouldn’t be. He always knew how to be in the right place at the right time. “Will?”
“Hey, doll,” he said, sliding to his feet. “I figured you weren’t going to come home to me, so I came to you.”
“I was going to call,” I said. Will smiled.
“Yeah, but this is so much better.” He came over and planted a slow kiss, and I let myself relax into him, for just a second. I don’t like dead children. There’s something so unnatural about seeing a small body, still and lifeless, that makes you want to rush home and reclaim life any way you can.
“Bad one?” Will whispered into my neck.
“About as bad as they come,” I said. He stroked my cheek with the back of his knuckles and stepped away, holding me at arm’s length.
“Don’t let it eat at you. Think you’ll be home for breakfast?”
“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. Will stroked the back of his fingers along my cheekbone.
“I’ll go
to the market and get the stuff for omelets. I’m an optimist.”
The elevator from the lobby groaned its ancient way toward us, and my guts went cold. “That’s got to be my ID, Will.”
He nodded. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” Dropping a quick peck on my cheek, he headed for the loading bay and the street exit.
I watched him go, avoiding thinking about the Duboises until they actually appeared. Will was a damn near perfect guy—considerate, funny, handsome, great in bed. I wasn’t used to perfect and it freaked me out a little bit. I kept expecting to find out that this was all an elaborate cosmic prank.
Or get bored. I tend to go for men who are so heavily broken they might as well be on the scrap heap. Will was a conscious effort to break the pattern. Even though he carried a curse in his veins the way I carried the were in my DNA—a curse worked on him by a vengeful witch almost four hundred years ago—aside from his pesky immortality, he might as well have hopped out of a cheesy romance movie.
“Excuse me.” The gravity in the voice was the same from the phone. I turned and faced the Duboises. They were less polished than the DMV photos, but only marginally. Petra was blonde, probably originally closer to my blue-black brunette if her coloring was any indication. Nathaniel was tall, boxy, brown hair swept back into a playboy wave.
Both of them scented of were. I knew it was coming, but it still sent a faint quiver of unease through me. I’m an Insoli, a packless were, and the Duboises most certainly ranked higher in the natural order than I did.
I tried not to let it bother me overmuch. I belonged here, doing my job. This was my territory. “Mr. Dubois, Mrs. Dubois,” I said. “Thank you for coming down.”
“Are you Lieutenant Wilder?” Petra asked. “What’s happened to Lily?”
“I am,” I said, reaching out my hand. She looked at it, her nostrils flaring, and didn’t offer her own. The pushpull for dominance had already started. Great. “There’s no easy way to say this,” I told the Duboises. “A person we believe to be your daughter was discovered earlier tonight in the water, in the Port of Nocturne.”
Nathaniel passed a hand over his face. “Discovered? What does that mean?”
“It means we have a body,” I said softly. “And we need you to take a look at it and identify your daughter.”
Petra fell against Nathaniel’s considerable chest with a sob. “No,” she whispered. “No, no, no. It’s not Lily.”
“Sweetie,” he said, stroking her hair. “Sweetie, we have to look.”
“No. ” Petra shoved away from him and wrapped her arms around herself.
“Are you sure, Lieutenant?” Nathaniel said to me, a quiver just evident in his hands, his voice. He was trying to be strong, be the husband and the alpha male, but he’d shattered from the inside and his eyes were empty.
“We’re fairly sure, yes,” I said quietly.
“What does that gutterwolf know?” Petra spat. “The police make mistakes all the time!”
I ignored the slur for the moment and gestured to the viewing room. “If you’ll both come this way?” I hated body IDs with every fiber of my being. I hated being the one to spread the bad news, hated to be there in someone’s worst and most private moment of grief.
But it was my job, so I buzzed the viewing bay to make sure the morgue attendant was ready and then pulled the curtain back.
The girl was under a sterile sheet that covered the gaping wound in her chest. Her lank, light hair, like dead seaweed, spread around her on the steel table. Kronen had closed her eyes. He was a lot better at this sort of thing than I would ever be.
Petra Dubois let out a strangled sound, her knees buckling. Her husband caught one side and I caught the other.
“Mrs. Dubois?” I asked softly.
She looked up at me, fresh makeup streaked with tears, black runnels in her perfect mask. “That’s her. That’s my little girl.”
“Thank you,” I said, suddenly very tired. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” I should have been sound asleep right now, Will’s body curled around mine. I shouldn’t have been here, in the stuffy viewing room. I pulled the curtain and ushered the Duboises out.
“How did this happen?” Nathaniel asked me. “Who did it?” His jaw was jumping, the muscles knotting in a rage I recognized too well. It was the same one that boiled out of the pit of my animal brain when my were recognized a threat or predator.
“That’s what we’re all trying to find out,” I said. “Mr. Dubois, given your … status in the community, the Supernatural Crime Squad is handling your daughter’s homicide.”
“So it was murder.” Petra’s voice was deathly cold, colder than the freezers waiting for me back in the morgue.
“My pack will tear him to shreds. He’ll see death coming and he’ll have time to scream.”
“Let’s not be hasty,” said Nathaniel.
“If you don’t mind right now, there are some questions…” I said, trying to stall the inevitable “pack justice” track Petra Dubois’s mind was taking. Weres don’t tolerate outsiders dealing with violence against one of their own. They have a cockeyed vigilante system dating back to the time before police, when villagers were likely to pick up pitchforks and go after any were they met.
“Can’t it wait?” Petra cried. “Can’t we have just one night for our little girl?”
“I’m very, very sorry,” I said, so softly I was worried I’d have to repeat myself. “But the faster we can get our investigation moving, the better the chance of us catching your daughter’s killer.” Most homicides are solved within the forty-eight hours immediately following the crime, and I was already an entire day behind schedule.
“All right,” said Nathaniel. “Go ahead. Ask your questions.”
“Who had a reason to hurt Lily?” I said. Direct approach works best with weres. Most don’t appreciate beating around the bush.
“No one,” Petra said. “She was a wonderful girl. Star of the choir at her prep school, got excellent grades…”
“Petra.” Her husband’s voice was heavy. “You know and I know that’s not the whole truth. Not anymore.”
She turned on him with a snarl. “I am not discussing this right now, Nate.”
“The detective wants to know if someone could have hurt Lily,” Nathaniel hissed. “Someone did hurt Lily. Are you honestly going to keep her in the dark?”
I didn’t correct him that I was actually a lieutenant. “What do you mean, Mr. Dubois?”
“Lily was having problems in school and problems with us,” he snapped. “She was a handful, even for a fourteen-year-old girl.”
Fourteen. Even younger than Kronen and I had suspected. “A handful how?” I said.
“We found pills in her bedroom,” Nathaniel said. “It’s my fault. I didn’t pay attention when her grades started slipping. She had to leave Alder Bay Prep and go to public school, here in the city.” His words tumbled out like cars rushing by on the freeway, fast and blurred, trying to make up for lost time.
“Stop it,” Petra whispered. “Stop making this about you, and stop blaming Lily.”
Nathaniel bared his teeth. “Then what the hell do you want me to say, Petra?”
“Lay the blame where it belongs!” she shouted. “For once in your fucking life. Lily had a boyfriend,” she said to me. “A much older, scumbag boyfriend.”
“Russ wasn’t to blame for everything…” Nathaniel started. “Lily only met him after she flunked out and came back home.”
“The drugs started after she met him,” Petra said, cold enough to shatter. “The partying, and the lies. He’s a wretched, ugly piece of trash and we forbid her to see him.”
“Did she listen?” I asked.
Petra snorted. “Did you listen to your mother at fourteen?” She had a point. At fourteen I’d been sneaking my father’s cheap scotch and smoking pot. The inappropriate boyfriends, too. One of them was the reason I had a monster in me now. A beach bonfire, a bite on the shoulder and a month later, the moon
had pulled it free.
“One more thing,” I said. “Our preliminary findings indicate that magick may have been a factor in your daughter’s death. Was she associating with any magick-users that you knew about?”
The parents traded looks. Dating a witch was tantamount to spitting on your parents’ shoes in were packs. “No,” Petra said. “Just that son of a bitch, Russ. Russell Meyer. He lives somewhere over in Highland Park.”
“Thank you,” I said, making a note of the boyfriend’s name on my BlackBerry. “You can go home now … I’ll have the medical examiner call you as soon as your daughter’s body is released so you can make funeral arrangements. I also have the name of a departmental grief counselor…”
“We don’t need a counselor,” Petra snapped. “We need the bastard’s head.”
Petra started for the elevator, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. Nathaniel followed her, and then turned back to me, halfway between the doors and where I stood in the entrance of the viewing room.
“You have to find who did this,” he said. “You’re a were. You find him and you give him to us. It’s your duty.”
“I have to find who killed Lily,” I said. “I have to give her justice for what happened. I don’t have to do a godsdamned thing for your pack.”
“I’d rethink that attitude, Insoli,” Nathaniel said with a sad smile. “Before you become a bigger problem then you’re worth.”
“Mr. Dubois, it’s been my experience that people under intense strain or grief say things that they don’t mean. I’d take that to heart, if I were you.”
Petra came and plucked at his sleeve. “Can we please just go home, Nate? I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“You remember what I said,” Nate Dubois said as the elevator doors closed on them.
“Oh,” I told the empty morgue. “I will.”
CHAPTER 3
I couldn’t interview Russ Meyer in the middle of the night, so I went to Fagin’s loft instead, slipping into bed next to him and wrapping my arms around his slim, strong frame. “Hey, gorgeous,” he murmured, and fell back to sleep almost instantly.
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