by RJ Blain
At almost two thousand dollars, the latest and greatest better last me three years without a single hiccup. The case dinged me an extra hundred dollars, but it was leather and designed to look like a book. Fleeing the store, I returned to Beatrice’s office long enough to snatch one of her business cards while showing off my new toy. She gave me two thumbs up while listening to someone on the phone, and I staged my exit to indulge in some time among the books before beginning the tedious process of protecting myself—and my fellow librarians—from being booked for murder.
Snooping into police investigations took skill, and the work began with the media. Often, the media helpfully provided the name of the investigators looking into the death of a prominent member of society. With the investigators’ names, I could use some of my less savory skills to poke my nose where it didn’t belong.
According to the media, the investigation was a joint effort between the local NYPD and the FBI, which would complicate matters for me. Snooping on the cops would cost me twenty minutes, as their internal network was about as secure as using a laundry basket to protect Fort Knox. The FBI took their cyber security seriously, making tunneling into their systems difficult at best.
I took over one of the public computers, logged in with a throwaway public account with ‘accidental’ administrative privileges, and installed the software I needed to tunnel into a different computer in the system. I repeated this process five more times before selecting an unused computer on the other end of the main computer room. From there, I tested an old login I’d pilfered from a cop while working for Bradley to discover it still worked.
Someone needed to tell the cops they needed to change their vpn logins at least every few years.
If the cops had a good system administrator, they might notice my login, so I got to work, checking the most probable places I could think of for information on the senator’s murder.
The active case log had six similar cases including a brief about Senator Godrin. I prepared a copy of those records to send to one of the more popular printers in the place. Pretending my computer had issues, I skipped to the one beside it and printed out a reference list for myself of flooring materials, starting both jobs at the same time to help cover my tracks. Then, because I had issues, I sent a print job from one of the in-use computers to give me a reason to shuffle through the papers being printed.
On the system with my login active, I added one more print job of the newest upcoming fiction releases, a copy of the contacts for our renovators, and a few other printouts I’d need to give my branch a facelift.
As a wise woman covered her tracks, I went back into all of the systems I’d used, erased the evidence from the logs I’d accessed with my throwaway account, and inserted a log showing I’d logged in with my library account. Once I logged out of the two systems I’d openly used, I limped to the printer and began the tedious process of separating my prized records, my renovation sheets, and the extra jobs I’d run to give myself a reason to sift through the papers. The extra jobs went into the pile meant for patrons to retrieve if someone beat them to the printer. To add to my good fortune, someone had printed a research document, which showed up on the heels of my renovation papers, allowing me to better hide the police records. I waited for the research job to finish before handing a rather tired teen his stack, taking a moment to look over his citations.
At maybe sixteen and more concerned with his hair than his schoolwork, I figured he had good reason to be tired and fidget. Still, he’d done better than most I’d seen take on the task of citing sources. I offered him a smile. “You’re using the wrong format for your citations. You need to list the last name of the author first. Last name, then the author’s first name or initials before continuing with the rest of the citation. Beyond that, you got the format right, but you’ll want to fix that before turning it in.”
The teen’s eyes widened, and he stared at his sheet. “You knew that just from glancing at my papers?”
“I just happened to recognize one of the author’s names,” I replied, which was the truth. “It should only take you a few minutes to fix, and it’s definitely worth printing out a new copy. Just recycle the old one there.” The recycle bin, tucked in a corner beside the printer, usually failed to catch the attention of library patrons, so I pointed at it.
He chucked the sheets into the bin, mumbled a thanks, and bolted back to the computers.
I grabbed all of my papers, confirmed I hadn’t left any stray police records lying out on the printer, and put them in my briefcase, careful to keep the police records covered the entire time in case one of the security cameras recorded my activities.
My next stop, to further add to my disguise as a busy worker bee on a mission to renovate a library branch, involved a tour of the entire library with a notepad, jotting down ideas of what we could do with our empty floors to transform my small branch into a work of art. While I wanted to head home and learn more about Senator Godrin’s death, I needed to work a different sort of magic, the kind that convinced watchful eyes I was just a cripple with a job to do. In some ways, my cane and limp helped more than anything.
I made people uncomfortable.
Two hours and ten pages of notes later, I paid Beatrice a visit, knocking at her door.
“Enter,” she answered.
I let myself in and dodged her stacks of books and papers, dumping my notes on her keyboard. “Thoughts?”
As she liked when I didn’t waste her time, she skimmed my notes, her eyes narrowing. She snatched a pen and circled a few of my ideas. “I think you’re onto something. Do you have our contractor list?”
“I printed it out downstairs, along with some ideas for style from one of the public computers. I’ll do more research when I have access back to the library, but I think I can get started. I can go pay a visit to one of the contractors in person to discuss the job. I can get one of the other staffers to send me photographs of the spaces.”
“Especially now that you’ve joined the modern world,” she muttered.
“It seemed like a good time to get a phone. I didn’t really need one before.”
“You were, until today, the only staffer without one.”
I grinned at that. “Yeah, I was a little slow to get onto that bandwagon, wasn’t I?”
“A little?”
Laughing, I sat and stretched my aching legs out. As always, my foot hurt, but in the grand scheme of things, it was a better day than most. “Okay, a lot slow. Turtles lapped me.”
“Turtles are usually better racers than rabbits. Sure, they’re slow, but they get to where they’re going. The rabbits run around in circles and tend to lose the race because they don’t head for their goal—or the goal others set on them. I watched a rabbit versus turtle race once. The rabbits lost horribly. But they lost adorably.”
I could trust Beatrice to find weird shit on the internet. “Well, there goes that saying.”
“I was really expecting the rabbits to win. I felt like my entire childhood was a lie.”
Mine, too, albeit for entirely different reasons. “Any news about Godrin?”
“Beyond that he’s deader than a doornail, nothing. It’s being investigated. In good news, none of our people have been formally accused, but they’re being required to go through a rating evaluation.”
I sucked in a breath at that. “They’re making them all do a rating evaluation?”
“Yeah. Nobody is happy about that. You won’t need to undergo one; your evaluations are recent enough the investigators are satisfied you couldn’t have possibly developed the necessary rating since your last testing to be a culprit.”
Damn. When it rained, it poured, and all the good luck headed my way could only mean one thing: I’d be deluged with horrific luck sooner than later. I could think of a lot of things that could go wrong in a hurry.
I could run into Bradley. Up close and personal, I doubted my long hair, glasses, and attire would fool him for long.
&nbs
p; A vacation sounded nice. A vacation somewhere far away might prevent me from a head-on collision with disaster. I’d had enough disasters to last me a lifetime.
Oh, well. What was one more?
I sighed. “Beyond work on the renovation project, is there anything I can do?”
“Stay out of trouble,” Beatrice grumbled. “We’ve had enough trouble for this year already, and this mess is only just beginning.”
With nothing else to do, I returned home, grimacing over the cab fare but acknowledging I wouldn’t be able to walk at all tomorrow if I attempted the multi-mile hike. Ajani bannered her tail and greeted me with purrs, the only clue I needed to identify my stray wanted her dinner and possibly another round with the brush. If I provided sustenance to her immediately, she might even forgive me for leaving her alone. I did my duty as her provider, standing on one foot while leaning against my kitchen counter to convince my fluffy goddess she could eat without worry of some predator swooping in and stealing her food.
Like me, my fluffy goddess had issues.
In her case, her issues only manifested when I dared remove her from her second home at the library, where she had many servants to wait on her when it was time for her breakfast, snacks, or dinner.
While I waited for Ajani to finish her meal, I perused the police records I’d pilfered, beginning with the earliest of the exsanguination cases the cops had flagged as a potential connection. One thing caught my attention: I’d been out west in the hospital for the first two instances, which did a damned good job of eliminating me as a suspect.
All of the cases shared alarming similarities, marking the crime as a chain of copycats or a serial killer out for the blood of politicians who’d been a little too open about their general prejudices. The records included their full suspect list, which consisted of all known registered exsanguinators in the country. I grimaced at my real name, although the notations made it clear the police doubted someone in a coma for two of the murders could be responsible. Even after I’d emerged from my coma, I’d gotten a listing as an invalid incapable of committing the crimes.
The invalid part stung, and once I’d disappeared from the west coast, my notation had become missing and presumed dead.
That got a snort out of me. Why would anyone presume I’d kicked the bucket? I flipped through the sheets in search of additional information to find short biographies and timelines of each of the suspects, myself included. According to my short biography, which included my age at presumed death from suicide, I lacked the appropriate magical talents required to create the cranial compound fractures found in all victims, including Senator Godrin. In later notes regarding the cases, particularly flagging the minimal file regarding Senator Godrin, the police weren’t even convinced an exsanguinator had done the deed.
In their opinion, there were too many red flags, the kind that led them to believe someone wanted exsanguinators to take the fall for a crime they may not have committed. While that boded well for me, it didn’t bode well for several of my co-workers, who possessed the type of abilities potentially able to mimic an exsanguinator’s unusual magic. Telekinetic powers, when used correctly, might be able to do the job; they’d be able to use their magic to punch a hole through the skull from the inside, which would allow for a rather impressive spray of blood.
It would take a great deal of finesse, but compared to the power it took to crunch metal, it wouldn’t take as high of a rating for an exsanguinator to create a similar effect.
Mickey might know what combination of abilities it would take to realistically murder someone in such a flamboyant fashion, assuming I could ask him without dropping him into a dead faint at the mention of blood. I sighed, shook my head, and skimmed over the rest of the police records, which told me a whole lot of nothing.
They didn’t know jack shit about the murders beyond eliminating the registered exsanguinators as either incapable, indisposed, or in prison during one or more of the crimes. Of them all, I had the tightest alibi.
Being in a coma or being flagged as dead due to probable suicide helped with that. Really, I thought the probable suicide flag to be a bit much. Just because I couldn’t function as a bodyguard didn’t mean I’d just go off myself. I wrinkled my nose, shook my head, and debated what to do with my copy of the police records.
With a whole lot of nothing to go on beyond the police being aware the probable suspects weren’t suspects at all, there was zero point in keeping files I could retrieve again if needed.
After a few minutes of consideration, only some careful application of fire would do. After I turned the sheets into scrap, I’d turn the fan on over the stove and make use of my incense burner, something the neighbors wouldn’t think twice about when they smelled hints of smoke from my apartment.
Incense soothed me sometimes, and my neighbors looked the other way since I wasn’t lighting up some form of drug or another. It annoyed me they expected me to do just that, as though my inability to walk like them automatically meant I delved into illicit drugs.
Oh, well. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them and would allow me to hide the evidence of my crime, which did involve pilfering a sleazy cop’s login details long enough to pilfer investigative reports. I got out a pair of my long-burning cones, lit the first one up, and began the tedious process of cutting the paper into burnable pieces, lighting an unscented candle, turning on the stovetop’s fan, and destroying the physical proof I’d been naughty at the library.
It took me an hour to get the job done, and my cat didn’t even mind my delay of her second brushing of the day. Once finished, I lit a third cone, turned off the fan, and cleaned the ash away, flushing it down the toilet to further rid myself of any evidence.
If someone like Bradley came to my apartment and checked the stove and candle, I’d be in serious trouble, but they’d have to know what to look for. As long as nobody figured out I’d printed the records and burned them on my stove, I’d be all right.
Mostly. Maybe. Probably. Hopefully.
Damn it, my life had become complicated. My brows furrowed, and I considered the police record about my probable suicide. Who had made such an assumption? Why? I’d taken steps to make my new identity as ironclad as I could, considering my circumstances, but I hadn’t thought I’d been so thorough as to disappear to the point I was presumed dead.
My status as presumed dead would complicate things should anyone figure out I’d skipped the whole death part of the equation. No one would question my comatose state; the police record had included references to my medical file. Making certain my ex-boss didn’t realize I was still around and kicking would be my top priority, although I doubted I’d be able to maintain the ruse for long.
The longer he poked his nose around the library, the more his magic would tell him about who frequented the place. My limp would betray me, as he knew which foot I’d mangled during the wreck.
He’d been there. Hell, he was likely the reason I’d survived the crash at all.
Any other day, I would’ve considered quitting, but I couldn’t. If I did, I’d leave my fellow librarians out to dry.
They had book smarts, some magic, and a relentless drive to help the community. I wouldn’t abandon them, not after they’d accepted me for all I was and wasn’t—without having any idea of the truth.
They were a lot of things, but I refused to believe any one of them was capable of a murder as horrific as Godrin’s. But with several years separating the first brutal murder of a politician with a magic eerily like mine, I worried that law enforcement would seek out the easiest to blame rather than the true culprits.
Then an innocent—or innocents—would pay for the crimes of another until the next body showed up, sprawled and bloodless on the steps of yet another publicly funded building, beginning the cycle all over again.
From my perch in the ivory tower, I’d witnessed that time and time again. To make the bad publicity disappear, an innocent would take the fall for another’s crime.
In some cases, nobody learned the truth despite the whispers among the adept. People like Bradley found the truth.
People like me, when ordered, buried it.
I’d been fortunate. Bradley hated burying the truth, so he’d never asked it of me, but I’d gotten my hands dirty a time or two. My most common sin involved making his unpaid parking tickets disappear on the days he slipped off without me.
I had never parked his prized vehicle where a cop might have an excuse to sully her with a ticket. I wrinkled my nose, wondering how many unpaid tickets he accumulated before finally being bothered to deal with them. That sort of thing tended to make the rounds among the adept, who found some way to turn the tickets into a joke.
Bradley hated when people laughed at him.
Then again, the first time someone laughed at him over a parking ticket, I expected he would do his best to never get one again. He went to extremes like that, something I’d found amusing and endearing.
Damn it all to hell, I wasn’t supposed to miss the ivory tower.
I had a new life, and I’d sworn to enjoy it without dreaming of my unfortunately sexy ex-boss, his fast cars, and all the little things that’d made being his for life bodyguard worth my while.
I’d already given him the best of my life, and if he wanted any more of it, he’d have to fight me for it.
I’d sacrificed enough already.
Five
The pre-coffee blur made it much easier to play stupid.
The following morning, a knock at my door woke me before my alarm had a chance to go off. Still dressed in my pajamas, I grabbed my glasses, shoved them onto my face, and limped across my apartment, my fluffy goddess mewing complaints at my heels. I picked her up before dealing with the deadbolt and opening the door to discover my ex-boss, my current boss, and a police officer crowding the hallway. Standing on one foot while managing my cat took more out of me than I liked, and I yawned without bothering to cover my mouth, hoping my severe case of morning breath would drive them away.