by Jasmine Walt
“Watch it,” Brennan growled. “She’s still your mother. And my big sister.”
Greg held up his hands. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
Brennan could feel that truth, which stung worse than the words themselves. He had no idea that his sister’s condition had deteriorated to such a level. Or maybe he had simply not wanted to see it.
“So one night,” Greg continued, “I was curious. I took one of the patches from her nightstand when she was in one of her stupors. It was incredible.” His voice became mystified as he recalled the memory. “The room started swirling, like when you get the spins from drinking too much—”
Brennan gave him an even look.
“—which I would have absolutely no idea about.”
He gave a skeptical harrumph.
Greg’s eyes glazed over. “And when you’re patched, it’s like—you’re free of everything. You see the world not for what it is but what it should be. The perfect world. You’re a free spirit.” The mystified tone left his voice. “Then that world breaks apart, and you’ll do anything to get back to it.”
Brennan lightly shook Greg’s horribly burned arm. “This is the price for that ‘perfect world’,” he said dryly before releasing his grip. He stood up and backed away from his nephew.
If what his nephew said was true—and he knew that it was—then the patch had made a fantasy world for Maddy to escape to, even as it caused her real life to crumble around her. She was in that world even now.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?” Greg asked.
“Mad?” Brennan supposed he should have been, seeing as how he was the only real adult in the kid’s life, a life which was on the verge of being hopelessly wasted. “I’m not mad. Disappointed, I should say. You’re a bright kid, Greg, when you aren’t repeating your mother’s mistakes.” It hurt to speak ill of his sister, but he had to be honest with himself; she had made some terrible choices, and her son was now flirting with following that same path.
Greg, for his part, mostly just stared down into his lap. He chewed his lip and went to bite his fingernails several times, always checking the motion before his hand reached his mouth. Brennan realized that he was probably itching for a patch, even now.
“I’m taking all of the patches you have here,” Brennan said. “Now.”
“What?” Greg looked up in alarm. “Why?”
“Really? You’re really asking me that?”
Greg stood, and though he was a full head shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, he stared directly into Brennan’s eyes. “I don’t have anything here,” he said.
False.
Greg’s eyes wavered, unable to keep focused on one spot for long, and they darted to one side as he licked his lips. Brennan raised an eyebrow and started walking in the direction of his nephew’s nervous gaze. “There’s nothing here,” Greg repeated, a hint of desperation in his voice.
The apartment was small, and space was at a premium. Chairs and tables were arranged in just the right way to allow for legs to pass by, yet Brennan noticed a wide-backed chair positioned strangely against one wall. Sitting in it would have been awkward for conversations, and it didn’t directly face the television, either. Ignoring his nephew’s plaintive noises, Brennan grabbed the back and one arm of the chair and shoved it aside. Behind it, set low in the wall, was a black metal ventilation grate no larger than his hand.
“See? Nothing,” Greg declared quickly. “What are you—?”
Brennan silenced him with a raised hand and knelt down to peer into the vent. It was dark, but he could just barely make out the shimmer of plastic about a foot inside. His fingers looped around the fine metal filigree and pulled, and the vent pried free of its casing. He reached in with one hand, cringing as he broke a fresh spider’s web, and tightened his hand around the small bag inside. It was full of two-inch square patches.
“You can’t just come in here and take my stuff!”
“I’m a cop, Greg. You’re lucky I’m not arresting you right now. That’s what would be happening if it were anyone but me.”
“This is an illegal search and seizure,” Greg argued. He made a grab for the bag of patches, but Brennan held him back with a stiff arm.
“No, this is a concerned family member holding a cold-turkey intervention.” He marched into the kitchen and tossed the patches into the trash bin, then lifted the trash bag out and pulled the elastic bands tight. “Is this everything?”
Greg nodded sullenly.
“Say it out loud.”
“Yes,” he said through gritted teeth.
True.
“Good.” Brennan felt the tension easing out of his face, and he placed a fatherly hand on Greg’s shoulder as he looked his nephew in the eye. “I’m serious about this. You cannot go near this stuff. It’s toxic, and I can’t let you follow your mother’s path.”
“I’m not having nearly as much—”
“Greg! This is not a negotiation. What your mother is going through…” His voice trailed off as he shook his head. “I should have been looking out for her. It’s my fault that she is the way she is now. I won’t make that mistake again.”
His heart chilled slightly at his own revelation. He had never admitted, never recognized before, that his sister might not have been Fractured if only he’d been more attentive. Even if it was just a speech to set his nephew on the right path, there was a vein of truth to it as well.
“There’s something else you should know,” Greg said quietly.
“What is it?”
“I told you how it feels to be patched, right? How liberating it is? Well, it also made me see things…”
“It’s a hallucinogen, Greg. Whatever you saw was just an illusion.”
Greg bit the corner of his lip and frowned. “That’s just it, though. It felt so real, and it concerned your partner, the lady cop.”
“Bishop?” His eyebrows stitched together in confusion. “Why would you be hallucinating about her?”
“I’m trying to tell you, I think it was more than just the drug!” Greg ran a nervous hand through his hair. “She was lying there on the stage, surrounded in blood. Her clothes were drenched with it, and she was holding her hands against her stomach like she had been shot.”
Brennan wasn’t sure what to believe. It sounded like a horrible trip, except his power was telling him that Greg’s story was true. “You think you had some sort of…what? A vision?”
Greg shrugged. “Maybe. There are always psychics claiming to know the future, right?”
“They’re always charlatans, though,” Brennan said, perfectly aware of his own hypocrisy. Here he was, a human lie-detector, denouncing the possibility of psychics. “Bishop is fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Greg nodded slowly. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said. He didn’t sound entirely convinced. There was a long, silent pause.
“You mentioned a stage?”
“It looked like some kind of theatre,” Greg said, with another one of his patented shrugs.
“We’re in luck, then,” Brennan said, suddenly grinning. “Bishop hates the theatre.”
A reluctant smile formed on Greg’s lips. “How fortunate. Still, if you two do see a play or something, maybe you should go in first.”
“That doesn’t sound very gentlemanly of me.”
“Is that a word? And chivalry is nice and all, but it might get her killed.”
Brennan looked at his nephew for a moment before forcing a smile. He hefted the trash bag over his shoulder as he turned to leave. “Get some sleep,” he said. “And take care of yourself!”
“You should sleep, too, Uncle Arty. You look like death.”
“Hey, death wished—ah, forget it.”
Brennan awoke the next morning to a message in his voicemail.
“Arthur, it’s Noel. Sorry for the late call, I figured you’d be awake. Guess you needed the sleep, though. God knows we both do.” There was a small laugh. “Anyway, I visited the p
harmacy where Nettle worked. Turns out he had had a casual girlfriend, but she’d only come by once or twice, and not a word of her in the past few months. I asked around, but nobody knew any more than that. Sounds like they were over a while ago, which leaves us back at square one. I’m going to grab some zees before I go mad. See you at the station.”
Brennan hadn’t meant to fall asleep in the first place, and he rubbed the crustiness from his eyes. In the bathroom, he wiped a wetted hand across his face and stared at himself in the mirror. The sleep had been dreamless, and he felt as if he had gotten no rest at all. The clock indicated it was a quarter to eight. He thought about what Bishop had said in her message.
No ex-girlfriend, at least not recent enough to make a real suspect of her. It wasn’t much, but it narrowed down the direction of the investigation. If it wasn’t a domestic dispute gone wrong, then there was something much more sinister afoot. But there were too many inconsistencies to make heads or tails of what happened that night.
Brennan shaved, changed clothes, and walked across the street to the station. Odols Police Department was housed in a squat, ugly building that was dwarfed by the high-rise apartment complexes and business offices that rose up on all sides. This late in the morning, nearly everybody was already at work. Bishop looked better rested than she had in days. The change a few hours of sleep could make was a minor miracle.
“What happened to you? Did you sleep on the curb?”
“Good morning to you, too, sweetheart,” Brennan said to her, affecting his best impersonation of Sam.
Bishop shuddered. “Don’t you start on that. If you ever asked me on a date, it would be too weird.”
“You aren’t my type.”
“Strong-willed? Independent? Blonde?”
“Short.”
“Go to Hell.”
“Not yet! I’m not quite ready to die.” He poured himself a steaming cup of what passed as coffee and joined Bishop at her desk. She had the Zachariah Nettle files open on her desk.
“I’m assuming you got my voicemail,” she said, and he grunted the affirmative. “I’ve been looking at these files all morning and there is one thing I’m confused about.”
Brennan raised an eyebrow. “One thing? I looked at these all day yesterday and turned up nothing. In fact, since you ruled out the girlfriend angle, I think we’ve actually lost ground. Nothing seems to add up.”
Bishop smiled ruefully. “That’s what I thought at first, too. Inconsistencies abound with Zachariah. He should have been poor by all rights, just scraping by on his pharmacist’s salary, but the things he had in his apartment said otherwise.”
“Actually, I looked into that,” Brennan said. “Pharmacists pull in a lot more than we thought. Six-figure salaries, and that’s just within a few years out of college.”
“Really? Maybe I should change careers,” Bishop mused aloud. “But still, without financial help from his parents? Nettle should still have had student loans to pay off. That kind of education wouldn’t come cheap.”
“He was living pretty luxuriously, from what I saw.”
“Exactly. And as far as we can tell, nothing was stolen, so burglary isn’t a likely motive. I think whoever came to visit Zachariah already had murder in their heart, and I’m relatively certain it has something to do with the extra money.”
Brennan scratched at his chin; he had missed some stubble. “If that’s true, then we’re looking at some pretty serious suspects. Mobsters, gangsters, junkies and their dealers, loan sharks—the list goes on. Anybody who had money to give and the means to take it back when the time came. We could search half the city and not find our guy.”
“True,” she allowed, “but the suspect pool gets a lot shallower once you look closer at the victim’s body.”
“Did our guy leave behind fingerprints? Or some stray hair?”
Bishop sighed. “Unfortunately, nothing so obvious. But we can be reasonably certain that Zachariah knew his killer, and that the attack was induced by some horrible fit of rage. When we saw that Nettle’s eyes had been removed, I thought it had to have been someone who was ashamed to be seen by the victim as a murderer. That profile pointed toward a family member or intimate lover.”
“Both of which we eliminated,” Brennan pointed out.
“Right. But once those options were gone, it left the question of why the killer took the eyes. And then it suddenly dawned on me!” She swiveled in her chair and brought up the computer screen. She spoke while she typed. “I asked the lab techs to analyze a tissue sample of the skin around his eyes, where we saw…ah, here it is. Remember the skin irritation we saw at the crime scene? It was caused by some kind of corrosive substance, not a result of the knife gouging the eyes out.”
Brennan followed her train of thought. “So we don’t have a motive yet, but you think the killer removed Nettle’s eyes because he was covering his tracks?”
She nodded. “Whatever the substance was, our killer thinks it can be traced back to him.”
“Was the lab able to determine what exactly we’re dealing with?”
“Unfortunately, no. There wasn’t enough tissue to work with. But considering Nettle’s profession, I’m thinking it’s something you might find in a pharmacy.”
“Something you’d find in a pharmacy,” Brennan echoed. “So if there’s something missing from Zachariah’s workplace—”
“Then we can find out what burned our victim’s eyes—”
“And follow the clues back to our murderer!” Brennan finished triumphantly. His grin was mirrored on Bishop’s lips, and they stared at each other in mutual excitement.
“Well, aren’t you two just adorable?”
Brennan was surprised by the familiar voice. He looked up to see Sam leaning casually against the glass divider with the hallway. Sam was watching them with an amused look sprawled across his face.
“Sam,” he said. “What are you doing here? Don’t get me wrong, it’s always a pleasure, but…”
“But you didn’t call me, I know,” Sam finished. He gestured to Bishop. “I’m actually here to pick up that one.”
“Noel?” Brennan’s eyebrows reached for the ceiling as he turned to her. “You asked him to come here?”
Bright crimson flowed high into her cheeks, though it was impossible to tell whether from anger or embarrassment. “We are working together on the case, so yes, I asked him to come as a consultant. Only to consult on the case,” she stressed, looking Sam pointedly in the eye. He nodded, his solemn expression belied by his amused, dancing eyes.
The light perfume, revitalized energy, and visibly happier demeanor all suddenly made sense. Brennan glanced incredulously between the two of them.
“You two are going on a date?”
Sam held up his hands. “Hey, I’m just a paid consultant. I wouldn’t know a date if it called me up out of the blue and asked me to brunch. Certainly not after impromptu drinks together the night before.”
The blush in Bishop’s cheeks deepened.
Brennan shook his head. “This is a dream. A crazy, delusional dream and the Sleepers are coming for me soon.”
“It isn’t a date,” Bishop said firmly. “And I needed a strong drink after the day I had yesterday. Sam happened to be there, and he offered to pay. Then I walked home, alone. Which is exactly what will happen today,” she finished, directing the last part at Sam.
True, chimed the little voice in Brennan’s head.
As he watched them go, his right hand fell unconsciously over his left, where his fingers touched upon the smooth metal of his commitment to Mara. His heart still ached for her after so many years. He waited until Sam and Bishop were out of sight before collecting his things and heading back home.
10
Jeremy had never let go of a dream so reluctantly.
He had been reliving a memory, one very familiar to him.
In the Jardin des Anges he stood, admiring the beautiful flowers as an equally lovely specimen of a woman, her
arm looped in his, leaned gently into him and rested her head against his shoulder. A harpist played soothing music from an obscure corner of the gardens, the notes dancing softly in the air as they were carried by the wind.
“Annabelle,” he said.
The blonde, blue-eyed girl stirred from her reverie and looked up at him with the most heart-warming smile. “Yes, my love?”
“I think this is the best date we’ve ever been on.”
“Really?” she asked, her smile deepening. “You aren’t bored to tears yet? I was sure that a visit to the Jardin des Anges would finally scare you away.”
“I never said I wasn’t bored,” he grinned, pulling her in for a kiss that lasted several seconds. “But I love you.” Her eyes glittered in response to that. “I love you, and you will have to try so much harder to dissuade me.”
“Mmm. Maybe I don’t feel like trying all that hard,” she cooed, melting into his embrace.
“Good.” He kissed the top of her head.
They started walking toward the exit of the Jardin.
“I’m just glad you didn’t get down on one knee,” Annabelle said. “If I get proposed to someday, I want it to be an intimate moment, not surrounded by strangers.”
Jeremy had his free hand stuck deep in his pocket. He toyed with the small, velvety box that hid there, secreted away until the perfect moment. He feared that moment had just passed.
“A proposal? In the Garden? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
With a jarring transition, Jeremy awoke into the present. He was delirious for several moments as he took stock of the room. The fire had died down to smoldering embers, and the warmth of the room had greatly diminished with it. His head pounded and he was reluctant to leave the embrace of his bedcovers. He probably would have succumbed to the allure of further sleep if he hadn’t smelled breakfast cooking.