by Amir Lane
“Like what?” he asked.
Okay, it was definitely too early for this.
“Just trust me on this. If I find it, I’ll let you know. If I don’t, then it’s not important.”
“Look, I’ve been working this case since day one, and if you think you can just come in here and take over like you have any idea what you’re talking about—”
“I’m the one who actually talked to the guy. I’m sure you’d rather be working with an actual cop—”
“I would.”
“— and I’d rather be manning the phones. But here we are. Let me help.”
“How could you possibly help?” Dick snapped. “You’re an operator. And— How old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen?”
Lindy narrowed her eyes and decided to take it as a compliment.
“Twenty-two.”
“No offence, but I’d be better off working this alone.”
“None taken. But you wouldn’t. Hey, slow down here. A big-ass truck is about to run a red.”
“What?”
“I said, slow— Slow down!”
Her hand flew to the door. Oh, Jesus, they were going to die.
“It’s green!”
Dick motioned to the streetlight for emphasis. His ears and neck were turning red.
“For the love of fucking God, slow down!”
He let out a frustrated sound but did as Lindy ordered. They were barely to the intersection when a blue truck sped through, despite the fact that their light was still green. At the speed he was going, it wouldn’t have been a collision that they could have walked away from. Lindy let out a relieved sigh and pushed her hair back. One of her rings got momentarily caught in the light strands, but she tugged it free without much trouble.
“How did you see him?” Dick asked.
He breathed slowly, obviously trying to control his reaction, to keep his voice from shaking. Lindy only just managed to keep from letting out an, “I told you so.” She would save it for later.
“I take it no-one told you why they really want me working with you?”
And why would they? It was insane. She still felt insane saying it out loud. She had to assume no-one told him. This was hardly a regular occurrence. If Ice Breaker had arranged this, though, she must have known what Lindy was capable of, even if most people didn’t.
“Not in any fine details,” Dick said.
She hesitated. Should she tell him? He wasn’t a witch, and Ice Breaker hadn’t told him. But she couldn’t think of how she would be able to keep it from him.
“I’m a Seer.”
“A what?”
“I see futures and shit.”
Dick snorted, but kept his eyes on the road.
“Like a psychic?”
Lindy grimaced. It wasn’t Dick’s fault, she told herself, he just didn’t know any better.
“No. Like a Seer. Psychics are just Normals who pretend to be Seers.”
“Normals,” he repeated.
There wasn’t a word for non-witches besides, well, non-witches. At least, not in English. So she’d picked one and stuck with it. At the time, all the witches she’d known were counterculture. Goths, punks, metal heads. The weirdos. Everyone else was… normal.
Dick didn’t seem to hold much interest in what she was saying. But maybe that was just because he was focused on the road.
“People who don’t see futures and shit.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you should know I don’t believe in any of that crap. I don’t believe in psychics or whatever.”
“Good for you.”
Most people didn’t believe in what they did to begin with, which made the whole keeping it to themselves thing pretty easy. Lindy had never gone to extremes to keep her own thing to herself, she just didn’t bring it up much. Again, because most people didn’t believe in it, and she didn’t care enough to convince them. Some people took the ‘secret’ aspect way more seriously than she did. Especially the ones from places that did believe in magic and did not approve.
“If you’re really a psychic—”
“Seer.”
“Same thing.”
Lindy shook her head.
“It’s really not the same thing,” she insisted.
“Fine. If you’re really a Seer,” he sneered, “why can’t you just see who keeps calling you?”
She sighed and rolled her eyes, distracting herself with what was left of her coffee. This was so not a conversation she felt like having this early in the morning.
“It doesn’t work that way. I don’t always see everything.”
“Why not?”
She couldn’t tell if he sounded curious or offended, though why he would possibly be offended was beyond her. Maybe it was something more like disbelief. She wasn’t really sure. She didn’t really care.
“The same reason you don’t. The human brain can only process and hold onto so much. So it shuts out things that it doesn’t think is important.”
“This is kind of important.”
“Well, my brain is more focused on trucks running red lights,” she snapped. “My point is, sometimes the things I see get filtered out. Like how you don’t see your nose, or you stop hearing your watch ticking.”
Those examples usually got the point across. Dick nodded.
“And even if I didn’t filter, there are some things that I just can’t see. There are ways to block it.”
“Assuming you’re not jerking me around, wouldn’t you have to be a… something to do that? Hardly seems like something a Normal could do.”
Lindy hesitated. She didn’t want to commit herself to an answer, and she didn’t want to give away more than she had to. They were protective of their secrets for a reason.
Magic wasn’t something that Normals should have had access to. It happened, of course. People could buy spells and hexes if they wanted to and if they knew where to look. It could get expensive, especially for a Normal who might have to buy a half dozen spells just to make one work. But even if they were willing to put the money into it, most Normals didn’t know where to look. Best case, they might get a name. Hex Witch, or Paper Crane, or Iron Widow. But the odds that they knew what to do with those names were slim to none.
Unless they knew another witch who could show them.
She hadn’t considered that possibility yet. It opened a whole other set of options. But no witch in their right mind would help a Normal knowing that they were killing other witches. So maybe they didn’t know. Or maybe they were doing it on purpose.
The whole thing was making her head ache. There were too many possibilities. She didn’t have enough information yet. Maybe when they went to the crime scenes…
“Well?”
Dick tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. He was either impatient for her answer, or for the light to change, or both.
“Maybe. I won’t be able to tell you until I have more information.”
He huffed, but he didn’t say anything else until they pulled up to the precinct. He ignored Lindy’s insistence that she needed to see the scenes, only grunting out a curt, “Later” in response. She had half a mind to just punch him and be done with it, but assaulting an officer wasn’t on her To Do list. She would save that one for later.
Venom Fist was behind the reception desk today. He offered Lindy a bright smile that she couldn’t help but return.
“Here’s your security pass,” he said.
She took the laminated plastic and hooked it to her belt without so much as peeking at the picture she’d had taken before leaving the day before. Venom had shown it to her after it had been taken, and she doubted it looked any better today. Despite his assurance that it was fine, she hated the way she looked without her piercings, and her smudged eyeliner made her look like a raccoon, but at least she didn’t have any pimples like on her driver’s license. She needed to get that renewed before it expired.
She followed Dick wordlessly up the stairs. Every step had her wincing with the ec
hoes of her heavy boots bouncing off the walls. She managed to slip past the door before it closed on her.
“Sorry,” Dick mumbled.
Lindy almost wasn’t sure if she’d even heard him or if she just imagined it. Neither would surprise her at this point.
7
It wasn’t until two days later that they finally finished sifting through the small pile of evidence on Dick’s desk. They were mostly photographs of the two scenes they had so far. The footprints left through Annalise Duplantier, the first victim’s garden were a size ten men’s, the same as most adult men in the country. They were fresh, and dirt led up the concrete steps to the front door. The prints matched the ones left across the second victim’s driveway. There weren’t any patterns in the blood spatter from either scene. It was just… spatter. Dick wouldn’t let her hold the bullets, but she could at least look at them through the evidence bag. She’d managed to get a few small flashes of information from some of the pictures but beyond a mild urge to be sick, it wasn’t enough to go on yet. There was something that kept coming back, though: A woman walking up the steps to a house, her hands tucked into her jacket pockets. She turned her head to check if anybody saw her but at the last second, the image faded out, and Lindy couldn’t see her face. She could practically feel Dick becoming more and more doubtful of her use.
“I’m not here to prove myself to you,” she told him.
“Frankly, I can’t tell what you are here for. You shouldn’t be more than a witness.”
She ignored the comment and went back to re-examining a set of photographs while Dick looked over the 9-1-1 transcripts that he’d gotten from Kevin. He rubbed his face and groaned. How many times had he looked them over, she wondered.
“What does Bad Omen mean?” he asked.
“It means none of your business.”
Her words came out before she really meant them to.
Dick let out another grunt that seemed to be half his vocabulary.
“You know what it means,” he said.
Was there a pattern in the blood-spatter? Besides the usual blood-spatter pattern, obviously. Assuming she knew anything about usual blood-spatter patterns. Lindy pushed her glasses into her hair and squinted down at it. Nope, that just made it worse.
“I never said that.”
“I am a highly trained detective. I know when someone knows something that they aren’t telling me.”
She set the picture down with a sharp exhale. She might not mind revealing that Bad Omen was her handle to him so much if he wasn’t so dismissive. He didn’t have to believe her, but it’d be nice if he wasn’t such an ass about it.
“I know a lot of things. None of them are relevant.”
“Is this a joke to you? This is serious. If you know something — anything — you have to tell me.”
She pressed her lips together, more in contemplation than annoyance. Dick’s shouting was starting to get some attention. She turned her eyes back to the array of photographs taking up half of Dick’s desk.
“Look, I can barely even see these. They’re tiny, and these lights are killing me. Do you have any bigger pictures?” she asked.
“No. That’s it.”
Great. Lindy pushed them aside and squeezed her eyes shut against the sharp ache. Even the new prescription wasn’t keeping her eyes from becoming strained. To be fair, she was trying to focus on tiny details, but still. This was getting out of hand.
Now wasn’t the time to worry about that, though. Now was the time to worry about the images at the back of Lindy’s mind that had nothing to do with the ones on the desk.
“How important do you think it is for this guy to talk to me after a murder?” she asked. “I mean me specifically.”
“It seems to be pretty important. Why?”
“We know for a fact he called me after every single one of these?”
Well, all two of them. She could see Dick nodding, even with her eyes closed and her back to him.
“Yeah.”
“He always called me on my work line. What’s he going to do when I’m not at work?”
A long silence followed as they both struggled to come up with an answer for her question. When Dick finally spoke up, nearly a full minute later, it was slow and cautious, as if he was unsure of what he was going to say.
“I think he might either not call you anymore, or he could just talk to any other operator. There’s no saying that he hasn’t before. It could go either way.”
“Or he might just stop killing, period.”
It was optimistic, but she couldn’t fault herself for it. Didn’t everyone hope that their problems just went away on their own?
“Doubt it,” Dick said. “He looks pretty committed to continuing. Are you sure you don’t know who he is? With a guy this fixated on you, you must know him from somewhere.”
“If I had any idea who this lunatic was, don’t you think I’d have told you by now?”
She turned around, jabbing a finger into Dick’s chest. If his expression was any indication, he didn’t think that at all. For a split second, she saw the distinct lack of trust in his expression before he smoothed it out. It wasn’t like she expected him to trust her; they both knew she was keeping secrets. Except, they weren’t her secrets to tell. Not entirely.
“He certainly seems like he knows you. What’s he saying about your medication?”
Lindy shook her head. She pretended that the nauseous twist in her stomach was from her period and not from Dick’s words.
“I didn’t recognize his voice. Nobody calls me Dietelinde and the way he says this is stalker talk.”
“What I can tell is that our guy knows some pretty intimate details about you.”
She cracked each of her knuckles without quite realizing it until a particularly loud crack made him wince. It was a nervous habit that had little to do with her occasional desire to leave some nice ring prints in Dick’s face.
“Look, I…. There is one thing. I don’t know if it’s related, but it’s the only thing I can think of.”
Dick motioned for her to continue.
“My brother, Dieter was… involved in a murder-suicide a year ago. A physics professor and his wife. He was a witness.”
“I heard about that.”
She nodded. This wasn’t something she liked to talk about, especially not without Dieter there. But it was probably going to come up eventually.
“The professor was sleeping with him. She found out and— Well, you know how that turned out.”
She decided to leave out the part about Alistair Cudmore, the guy who had pushed Dieter into Necromancy, using the two spirits under his control to make the professor’s wife stab him.
“The wife died of a broken neck, though. Didn’t she?”
And the part about Dieter’s spirits breaking her neck.
“Yeah, she fell when one of her shoes broke. Dieter was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Dick didn’t seem to believe that. Most people didn’t. But the investigation was thorough. There was nothing to suggest that Dieter was responsible. And even if somebody did suspect that Necromancy was involved, nobody was going to be the idiot to bring it up. She supposed that was the one advantage to it over other forms of magic. It was so uncommon that nobody believed it was even a thing anymore. Even in their circles.
“Maybe our guy thinks that Diederich—”
“Dieter,” Lindy corrected.
The nicknames were way easier than their full names. Most people didn’t even pronounce them right. It was usually either Died-er-ikhhhh or Diet-lind instead of Dee-ed-er-ich and Dee-et-e-lind. But what else were they supposed to expect with old – very old – German names? The nicknames were easier.
“Maybe our guy thinks that Dieter had something more to do with it.”
“Maybe. But why is he going after other, seemingly-random people instead of him? And why call me? I had nothing to do with it.”
Because nobody in their right
mind would try to take on a Necromancer with four spirits, that was why.
But Dick didn’t know that.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. Really, what did he know? Not much more than she did, from where Lindy stood. “Why do you say ‘seemingly’ random?”
“I don’t know. Don’t most serial killers have a pattern? I thought they picked their victims for a reason.”
Dick’s nostrils flared, but she couldn’t tell why. Wasn’t that observation a good thing?
“No, you’re right. I just can’t figure out what the connection is…”
“Maybe…” She let out a loud sigh. “I might know. But I can’t say for sure until I see the scenes.”
“Is it a ‘magic’ thing?” he asked, complete with air-quotes.
“It might be a magic thing.”
Dick let out a sigh that could only be described as full of pain and resignation.
“We’ll check out the scenes tomorrow,” he said, somehow even stiffer than usual. “I’ll need to make the arrangements first. In the meantime, tell me everything you know about this whole… magic… thing.”
Lindy raised an artificially dark eyebrow.
“Everything? Are you sure? Because I know a lot.”
He grunted, clearly unamused.
“The important things.”
She glanced around the precinct floor. There wasn’t anyone near them, with most people running leads or poring over paperwork in quiet corners. But it was still more than she was comfortable with.
“There’s a good Middle Eastern place near here.”
Dick hesitated, but grabbed his jacket and motioned for her to lead the way. She wasn’t sure about him, but she hadn’t eaten in hours. Whatever else was going on in the world, they still had to take care of themselves. It was the only way to keep functional in their lines of work. If she’d learned anything in her years as an operator, it was that.
They were seated in the back of the restaurant and left with menus.
“I’ll give you the basics. In general, witches are broken into four categories: Necromancers, Seers or precognizants, animal witches, and everyone else.” She ignored Dick’s snort. “Seers can be broken down further into clairvoyants, diviners, prophets, and oracles.”