Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel

by Kalayna Price

  “I’d offer you a penny for you’re thoughts, but they look more valuable than that,” Tamara said, and I startled, sloshing hot coffee on my fingers.

  I didn’t yelp, or curse, but it was a near thing.

  “Napkin?” Tamara held out something I could barely make out, and I accepted the napkin. As I dabbed at the spilt coffee, Tamara said, “So you were pretty deep in thought.”

  I shrugged. “It was—” I waved a hand, not finishing because I didn’t want to talk about Death and I couldn’t lie and say it was nothing. “But you were going to tell me the date you and Ethan picked.”

  For a moment I didn’t think she was going to let me get away with changing the subject, but then she said, “Well, after much debate, we’ve settled on October fifteenth.”

  I nodded, my lips pressing together as I considered the date. “That gives us a little over a year to plan the wedding. This should be fun.”

  Tamara was so silent the very air in the room stilled. I squinted, trying to see her expression. I couldn’t.

  “What is it?” I asked. Silence. “Tam?”

  “Not October of next year,” she said, her voice quiet. Too quiet. “This October.”

  “That’s less than a month away.”

  “Well, you would have known sooner if you and Holly hadn’t stood me up for dinner last week.” Her voice was most certainly not quiet anymore.

  I cringed. “It wasn’t intentional. Something—”

  She cut me off. “Came up. I know. I heard the excuse already.”

  A lump of guilt settled in my stomach, and the coffee that had smelled tempting a moment before no longer held any appeal. Everything was so complicated these days. I opened my mouth to tell her about the trips to the Eternal Bloom, of how time sometimes got a little screwy—she already knew the VIP room was a pocket of Faerie. I’d told her that much after losing three days there a few months back. But the reasons we were going was Holly’s secret, not mine, and it wasn’t my place to share. I snapped my mouth shut so hard my jaw clicked, and Tamara turned back to the file on her desk.

  I changed the subject. “So after five months of being engaged, why the sudden rush?”

  Tamara’s chair creaked, the sound loud in the suddenly thick silence.

  “You’re not—” I started, but she cut me off.

  “I see only one abnormality in this autopsy.”

  I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. “You are. You’re pregnant.”

  Again her chair squeaked, and even if I couldn’t see her features, I could feel her glare. “Do you want to hear about Kingly’s autopsy results or not?”

  “Yes, but…” I suddenly didn’t know what to say. It seemed we were all keeping secrets, and I’d just blundered into Tamara’s. She and Ethan had been living together since they got engaged, but once he’d popped the question—and claimed half her closet—he’d proven reluctant to agree on a date. But how could Tamara be pregnant? I could feel the charm that protected against both STDs and pregnancy near her left foot, where it must have been attached to an ankle bracelet. It was easy to pick out because I wore the exact same charm on my bracelet.

  Tamara sighed, and as if sensing my thoughts said, “No charm works perfectly all the time. Now do you want to get back to Kingly?”

  I gave her a minute nod, and she pulled the file in front of her, running her finger down the page. “The only odd finding in autopsy was that James Kingly’s glycogen stores were low, as were his red blood cell count. If he hadn’t killed himself, he might have eventually died of inanition.”

  I cupped my mug of coffee and frowned. “So in English, what does that mean?”

  “Basically, he appeared to be starving to death. Which is odd, because his stomach contents included veal, haricot vert, escargot, and a really expensive cabernet sauvignon—not any beer, by the way, no matter what his shade claimed. Kingly also had digested food in his intestines, so he was definitely eating. I’d guess he had some sort of wasting disease, though I didn’t find any mention of it in his medical records. He had to know though. When he went in for a physical two months ago he was pushing the top of his ideal weight range for a man of his age. He’d lost nearly seventy-five pounds since then.”

  “That’s odd. His widow didn’t mention anything about the rapid weight loss.” Or about a disease. And the ghost certainly didn’t look like a man wasting away, though that didn’t mean anything as he may not have accepted the illness as part of his identity. “Did you send blood work off to find out what was killing him?”

  I could almost feel Tamara frown. “Those tests are expensive and the lab is constantly backlogged. The man jumped off a building. Why? Maybe he realized he was dying anyway. Maybe being a father late in life terrified him. I don’t know. But regardless of his reason, his cause of death wasn’t a mystery. It still isn’t. He died from massive blunt force trauma when he slammed into that car.”

  She had a point. I considered questioning the shade again, but it was getting late and my eyes were only just recovering. Another ritual so soon would compound the damage. I could ask Mrs. Kingly, or James himself as I was sure he was still following his wife around. Of course, none of them may know if the anomalies weren’t from a disease but from a spell. I ran the idea past Tamara and she sighed.

  “I guess I’ll have to send a sample to the lab now because I take it that you’re going to tell Mrs. Kingly all of this.”

  I gave her a sympathetic smile that verged on a wince. “That’s what she hired me to do. But even if the near inanition thing was caused by a spell, it wasn’t what made him jump off that building.” The darkest of magics could kill, and compulsion spells could make people do terrible things, but no compulsion spell could overcome the will to survive and make someone jump off a building. “Did any spells show up during the autopsy?”

  I still couldn’t see clear enough to make out Tamara’s features, but I could tell by the way the brown of her hair filled the space where her face had been that she’d looked away. “I had several bodies from major cases when Mr. Kingly arrived. The detective in charge was already convinced Kingly was a jumper, and I sort of deprioritized him. If there had been any spells, they were gone by the time I examined him.” She paused. “Is it possible this is some kind of elaborate scam? Could his memories have been erased after he died?”

  I chewed at my bottom lip. “I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but it would take some major magic. If dark magic was used to erase a living person’s memory, it would be a spell aimed at the core of the person. But once the soul is gone and the STOP button is hit on a body, the magic would have to change every single cell in the body. I was at the scene within a minute or two of Kingly’s death. If someone had worked a spell like that, I’d have felt it. I saw them take the body away, theoretically directly to here, so if a spell was cast on Kingly, it would had to have been during transport. But, the ghost’s story matches the shade, which pretty much guarantees the shade wasn’t tampered with postmortem.”

  “James Kingly could be in on the scheme,” Tamara said, and while I had to agree it was possible, it didn’t seem likely. “Or the memory wipe could have been activated while Kingly was falling from the building. That would explain the shade and ghost both having the same memory, right?”

  It did. But memory wipes were nasty spells, and I surely would have felt it while at the scene. Of course, I might be a sensitive, but I was far from infallible. I’d also been distracted by Death’s presence.

  Still, whatever had happened, this case was definitely more complicated than a simple suicide. And I was starting to agree with Nina Kingly—it looked a hell of a lot like murder.

  Chapter 7

  My eyesight had improved to a passable level by the end of my second cup of coffee, and, after promising that I’d help Tamara shop for wedding dresses later in the week, we said our good-byes. Then I took the elevator up one floor to Central Precinct proper, went through security again, and made my way to
the office of my favorite homicide detective.

  “John, you busy?” I asked as I knocked on his slightly ajar door. Then I peeked my head inside.

  John Matthews, a bear-sized man with a spreading bald spot and a mustache that up until recently had been red, looked up from his desk. “Alex, girl, what are you doing here?” he asked as he hastily shoved the papers on his desk into a large file folder.

  I took that as an invitation and stepped inside. “Mrs. Kingly hired me to—”

  John made a rude sound before I could finish the sentence. “That woman. She just can’t accept her husband bailed, in the final sense.”

  Wow, my client had certainly made an impression around here. Not that I liked her any better, but the fact she was an overly opinionated bigot didn’t mean she was wrong.

  “Actually, I think she’s right, John.”

  He harrumphed under his breath. “Yeah, Jenson said you’d given a report to the first responding officer at the scene. Said you’d claimed to have spoken to the man’s ghost and he said that he hadn’t jumped. Alex, as much as that woman might not want to face the facts, the case for suicide is rock solid.”

  “Unless magic was involved,” I said, sliding down into one of the chairs in front of his desk.

  John shook his head and opened his desk drawer. He drew out a folder and passed it to me. “The day James Kingly jumped, the OMIH was surveilling a business that had been reported for gray magic. When the investigator saw Kingly climb over the railing, he snapped some photos. Kingly was alone. No one made him jump, and even I know compulsion spells can’t overcome the will to survive.”

  The “even him” was because John wasn’t just a norm, he was a null—completely devoid of any magical ability.

  Perfect. I had a pretty good idea what business had been under surveillance. The damn matchmaker I’d reported. Well, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

  I opened the thin file. It included little more than the responding officer’s notes, a brief of the autopsy report, and two pictures, each showing a skeletally thin man. In one he was halfway over the railing. The next he was in the air and definitely not pushed because he’d jumped upward. I returned the photos and handed the file back to John. I had to admit that they were rather damning. And yet, I still had my doubts. Not just because of the shade’s missing memories. The weight loss, and the fact the Kingly’s hadn’t mentioned he was ill, bothered me.

  “I don’t know how it was done yet, but the pieces don’t add up,” I said, and told him about the shade and the ghost missing three days of their memories, about the abnormality Tamara had found in the autopsy, and about the theories Tamara and I had batted around. None of which had a satisfactory answer. “It’s worth looking into at least, isn’t it?”

  John ran a hand over his haggard-looking face. “Alex, I’m running a joint task force with narcotics on a triple murder. I don’t have time to look into a suicide just because a shade has memory loss.”

  “But I don’t think it was suicide.”

  “You have no evidence that it wasn’t either.”

  I frowned but was forced to shake my head. If the shade had said he’d been murdered, a case would have been opened, but the shade not knowing what happened just muddied the water. With physical and eyewitness evidence pointing to suicide, I didn’t have anything that could definitively prove James Kingly hadn’t simply freaked out about being a father, gone out on the town for a couple days, then in a fit of guilt had someone erase his memory of the time. But when would the spell have been cast? And how? It could have been a potion he drank as he fell, or maybe something time-released? John was right, while it was suspicious, I couldn’t prove anything.

  I pursed my lips and glanced at the large folder on John’s desk. “If I look into your triple—no charge—will you at least reopen the Kingly case?”

  John looked away, his eyes fixed on the mostly empty pen holder on his desk. “Alex, it’s not like I don’t want to help, or that I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for the department in the past—God knows we’ve closed some cases we’d have never done without you, but I can’t let you in on my current case.”

  I blinked at him for a moment. I’d met John by chance during my first year of college. He’d seen me in a cemetery chatting with a shade and asked if I could talk to murder victims as well. He’d cut some red tape to get me on the books as a consultant, and in all the years since, he’d never once refused my offer to help, especially if I waived my fee. And a triple homicide? That was big. Why would he possibly…?

  His eyes cut to me for a moment before darting away, and he leaned forward to straighten his stapler. “It’s not personal, Alex,” he said, his mustache, now nearly white, tugged down as he frowned. “It’s not that you’re exactly a persona non grata in the department, and you know I care for you like you’re my own daughter, but you’ve been neck deep in two of the largest murder cases any of us have seen in as long as I’ve been on the force. Hell, they were my cases and I’m not even privy to all the details, I’ve just been told they’re closed and to stop investigating. A gag order from the governor himself. All anyone here knows is that you were found in the center of two very nasty-looking ritual scenes. It hasn’t exactly engendered you with the brass.”

  “So what you’re saying is that I’m no longer on retainer for the NCPD?”

  He straightened the pile of folders, pushing them up beside the stapler, and I noticed that he was, either consciously or subconsciously, building a wall of office supplies between us. “It’s more that we’ve been told to consult you only as a last resort. We have a witness to the triple—if he ever comes down off whatever drug cocktail he’s on. And there’s still physical evidence to process.” He added a coffee mug to the growing line of supplies. “And to complicate your position, the first round of appeals just went before the court for the Holliday trial. If they throw out the testimony of the shade, it could bring any evidence found or warrants issued from evidence shades have provided into question.”

  I forced my back straighter, lifting my chin, because the only other option was to slump into a miserable pile in John’s chair. I was still cold from my contact with the grave, but that didn’t stop burning heat from building behind my eyes, threatening to turn into tears. Two months ago I’d raised the shade of Amanda Holliday. The five-year-old’s shade was the first to ever be used as a witness in the victim’s own murder trial. We’d gotten a guilty verdict, and I’d known it would go through appeals, but I thought it would get me more business, not less. As for the sealed cases, I sure as hell hadn’t meant to get involved in them, and wasn’t I already paying a price for that involvement?

  It had been several weeks since John called me in on a case, but that happened sometimes. I wasn’t a shortcut for good police work, especially since the department’s already overtaxed budget had to pay my fee. Sometimes a month or two passed before a case hit a wall and John called me. I’d also considered that maybe he’d heard I was recovering and was giving me time to recuperate.

  It had never occurred to me that my position with the police had turned precarious.

  Giving John a curt nod, I pushed out of the chair and said, “Well, I guess that’s that. I’ll get out of your way.” Then I turned on my heels and marched toward the door.

  The heavy office door was swinging shut behind me when John called my name. I stopped, trying to keep my face neutral as I turned and stuck my head back inside. “Yeah?”

  John slumped in his chair, looking like what he needed most in the world was at least one good night’s sleep—which it didn’t look like he’d had in a long time. When he heard my voice he glanced up, finally meeting my eyes. “It’s been a long time since you came by for Tuesday dinner—hell, I’ve missed quite a few myself, but I promised Maria I’d make it this week. Why don’t you join us? You can bring what you’ve dug up on your suicide case. Maria will kill us if we discuss cases at the dinner table, but I’ve a nice bottle of Scotch.
We can break it open and look over what you’ve got.”

  I stood there a minute, studying the weary lines in his face, and I was struck once again by how much he’d aged in the last few months. After a long moment I nodded, accepting the verbal olive branch he’d offered. “I’d like that.”

  John smiled, making his mustache twitch. “Good. It’s set then. But, Alex,” he said, his smile slipping. “Call first. Regardless what I promised my wife, if a new development occurs, I might not be able to break away from my case.”

  I nodded and waved good-bye. Then I left Central Precinct feeling only slightly less dejected by my dismissal.

  I called Holly as soon as I reached the sidewalk. Central Precinct was a multipurpose building. As well as the morgue in the basement and the central police station on the lobby floor, the building housed the crime lab on the second floor, and several floors of offices, including a suite devoted to the district attorney and his staff. As an ADA, Holly would either be here or a few blocks away at the courthouse. I’d lost track of time while waiting for my vision to clear and then talking to John, and now taking the bus was no longer an option if I was going to make it back to Tongues for the Dead by six. Which meant catching a cab—not a cheap trip from the middle of downtown to the Quarter—or catching a ride with Holly if she was still around. She rarely broke away from work on time, so I gambled that there was a good chance I could skip the cab.