Nothing seemed out of place, immediately. There was no sign of a forced intrusion, no sign of a struggle, nothing to suggest anything bad had happened in this room. There was an ash tray on the coffee table in front of the TV with a single, entirely ashen cigarette balanced in one of the grooves. I noticed a pile of clothes in a hamper next to the sofa, an open can of soda, also on the coffee table, and a set of shoes by the front door.
“The stiff is in the bedroom,” Officer Evans said, “If you wanna start there…”
Damon turned his eyes on me. “Do you?” he asked.
“She’s in charge?” Mendez asked, looking at me like I was some kind of new and disgusting bug.
Anger flushed into my chest, but I couldn’t speak up.
“Yes, she is,” Damon said, “So, I suggest you do what she says for the remainder of this hour. Understood?”
Both NOPD officers nodded in unison. “We’ll wait outside,” Evans said, and then they left, shutting the front door behind them.
“Good use of magic,” I said.
“What I just did there wasn’t magic, I just put them in their place.”
“I should have guessed.”
“You’ve never tried it before?”
“Putting people in their place? I don’t know. I can’t see myself doing it. If you’re suggesting I do it to you, I’m not even going to try.”
Damon squared up to me and looked down into my eyes. “That’s because you can’t.”
I swallowed. My heart had started to race at his sudden advance, like an animal sensing its own imminent death—or at least a great deal of physical pain—at the teeth of a larger, faster, more dangerous predator. I breathed the tension out of my lungs and stepped away, unknowingly moving toward the only closed door in the single-bedroom apartment. Behind that door there was a corpse, and I was about to see it.
Glancing at Damon one more time, searching his eyes for approval but finding nothing besides this is all your call, I turned the doorknob and pushed it open. There it was, laying on the bed. A man, maybe in his early thirties, brown, Hispanic skin, short, black hair, pronounced jawline and thick, eyebrows. It had been hot last night, and his bedcovers were all pooled at the foot of his bed, leaving him completely exposed. That same chill I had felt upon setting foot into the apartment hit me again, only this time it got into my bones and forced a shudder to run through me.
I approached slowly, circling around his side of the bed, trying my best not to look at his, cold body, looking at anything but, in fact, and failing miserably. An image flashed into my mind from within the recesses of my memories, and for an instant he wasn’t the—once—healthy thirty-something year old man who had had a heart attack the night before, but the bloated, fat, purple thing I had seen in the river that day so many years ago. I blinked hard, and the image disappeared.
I had thought maybe seeing the body, being close to it, would trigger some sixth sense to activate, something that might help me piece things together for myself, but that didn’t happen. It was just me and the corpse, it dead and unmoving, me alive and breathing rapidly. I scanned the room, giving it a once over for anything that might stick out, but again, nothing was out of place in here.
A stack of neatly folded clothes sitting on a chair in the corner of the room, next to an ironing board, suggested this man was very meticulous about the way he looked. On top of a dresser which sat underneath a wall-mounted TV, there were many candles, some of which were scented, and used. I found a small lockbox which didn’t look locked at all, but I didn’t touch anything anyway because I wasn’t wearing gloves.
There was, however, something else on the dresser which I did find interesting; there were pictures of people on it, and I don’t mean a stack of snapped Polaroid shots in a pile, I mean real, framed pictures arranged in a pleasing way. They all involved the dead man, but he was never alone; there was always at least one or two other people in the shot with him.
This guy was popular.
“Anything?” Damon’s voice was almost too loud, too close. I jumped, nearly knocking over one of the picture frames on the dresser.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, my hand flying to my chest, “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Sneak up on me. There’s a dead body right there.”
“Did you think it was going to get up?”
“You know, I don’t know what to think anymore, so maybe.”
“It won’t. I’m sure of it.”
“Well, that makes one of us. And no, I haven’t found anything yet, but I’m still looking.”
“And the body?”
“What about it?”
“Did you learn anything from it?”
I glanced over at the body. “Well, I’m not a doctor, but I think he’s dead… that’s about as much as I can tell you about it.”
“His name was Trevor Rodriguez, and he was a doctor.” Damon handed me a set of blue latex gloves and I slipped them on.
“Four people,” I said, staring at the corpse, “Four people in seven days, all dead from heart attacks and nobody knows why or how. It’s bizarre.”
“It’s a mathematical impossibility, is what it is. We’re not dealing with natural causes here, there’s something at work, and we need to figure out what it is.”
“Is it magic? I mean, that’s your area, not mine.”
Damon shook his head. “I’ve ruled magic out. If it was magic, I would have been able to sense it even if you couldn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mages who learn how to hone their senses can, over time, detect traces of magical residue left on a person, or a place. If someone is hit by a spell, or if magic is used in a place… think about magic itself as paint, and the Mage is using a big, fat brush to paint, but he isn’t painting, he’s just dipping his brush into the pot and swinging it at people, or at places. It’s going to leave splash marks, and some of those marks will linger for a long time. Weeks, maybe even months.”
“And you aren’t sensing any?”
“None. If a Mage had killed this man, considering how quickly we’ve been alerted to it, I would have known.”
“Unless someone was able to hide the splash marks from you?”
“That is the one power no Mage alive has ever been granted.”
I exhaled deeply. “Okay, so, ruling magic out, where the hell do we start?”
“How about you tell me? This is your case, and your scene, after all.”
I let my attention wander for a moment while my thoughts collected themselves. “Let’s go back into the living room.”
Damon turned around and went to move toward the door, but we both went for it at the same time and bumped into each other in the door-frame. I stepped away to let him through, knocking the dresser hard enough to make everything on it start to wobble. I spun around and watched, horrified, as one of the pictures on it tipped on its front, then toppled over the edge and fell to the floor, the glass shattering.
“Fuck,” I cursed, my hand flying to my forehead.
“It’s fine, let’s just pick it up,” Damon said.
I walked over to the fallen frame sitting on top of a small pile of shattered glass, picked it up off the floor, and the whole thing came apart in my hand like it was made of paper. I plucked the picture out of the completely destroyed frame and held it up. “At least the picture’s ok,” I said, and then I noticed something. The men in the picture… I had seen both of them before.
One of them was lying on the bed not five feet from where I was standing, about as dead as they come. The other… my hand started to shake.
“What is it?” Damon asked.
“This man…” I started to say, “Him, he’s… he’s the one…”
Damon walked over to me and took the picture from my hand. “Andi, what’s going on?”
“It’s him, Damon,” I said, “Him, right there—he’s the guy that was… he was with Lucia that night, in the tunnel.”
&
nbsp; “What? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I was close enough to get a good look at him that night and… Christ, I’m shaking. How is this possible?”
“I don’t know, but we need to take a moment. There has to be an explanation for this. You’re absolutely certain that this man,” Damon tapped on the photo, “This is the man you saw in the tunnels the other night.”
Trevor had his lips pressed against the cheek of this other man, who had one arm around Trevor and was smiling brightly into the camera. Both men looked happy, really happy. One of them was dead now, and maybe the other was too after what I’d heard that night.
“I’m sure, Damon… I’m sure.”
Damon nodded. “Alright, in that case we need to start looking for more. There has to be more.”
“More what?”
“More anything. We still haven’t identified any of the people who were down in the tunnels except for Lucia. This could be the way we do.”
“But we aren’t supposed to be investigating the Circus.”
Damon’s eyebrow arched. “No, but a link has just presented itself. Call it fate, call it luck, call it whatever you want. We have to follow it.”
Luck had a way of following me around, didn’t it? That was something I’d learned about myself over the past week or so. Another thing I had learned was that the luck that followed me around wasn’t always the good kind. It was neutral, and I really didn’t have a way of manipulating it, not that I knew of at any rate.
Early last week I had decided to test this luck of mine by walking into a convenience store I had never walked into before and playing the scratch cards, something I never did. I figured, if I was so lucky, maybe I could win a couple of million dollars? Hell, a twenty to cover the cost of the stuff I had bought would have been nice. But it didn’t work that way. In fact, I lost money playing the scratch cards that day, there was something I’d never be repeating.
I didn’t know how it all worked, but the way I saw it, fate, or luck, tried to put me in the path of some things, and out of the path of others. Usually, it tried to keep me out of the path of physical harm, and it wanted to put me into the path of something important, whether good or bad, beneficial or not. The only question now was this: was luck trying to keep me out of the way of physical harm, or put me in the path of something important?
Hopefully both.
“How are we going to figure out what this guy’s name is from a picture?” I asked. I turned the picture around, but there was no writing on it.
Damon shrugged. “How does anyone find anyone these days?”
Facebook, that’s how. “His laptop! Have you seen it?”
He gestured to the living room with his head, then moved through the door. I followed, and then I saw it, sitting on a small table in the open plan kitchen. This tidy little space must have been where he had his breakfasts, his dinners. The kitchen like the rest of the apartment was tastefully decorated; the counters were white marble, the cabinets and cupboards brown. All of the appliances looked brand new, digital, and expensive. I didn’t think he’d been living here long, the small garden of relatively young plants arranged just under the kitchen window helped further this theory along.
I set the picture down on the small table and opened the laptop, turned it on, but right away it flashed up with a password requirement. I checked for a thumb-pad, a bio-reader, but there wasn’t one. Of all of the things in this apartment that had to be a little older, a little less sophisticated, it had to be the guy’s laptop, didn’t it?
“We won’t be able to get into this without his password,” I said, “And we don’t want to go entering random ones just in case we end up locking it.”
“We’ll get it to Eli. He’ll have a way of extracting data from it.”
“Didn’t you say we couldn’t take anything?”
“I’ll make a phone call.”
Damon turned around, pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket, and put it to his ear. “Call the DPA,” he said, presumably to Siri, while moving away.
I stared at the screen, then at my own reflection in the glare. For an instant, a fleeting moment, it almost looked like a dark shadow slipped around behind me. The hairs on the nape of my neck went up. I turned around, but there was nothing there—only the breeze flowing in from the open kitchen window, and the smell of fresh flowers; flowers that needed watering.
While Damon was on the phone, I poured a little water from the faucets into a cup, then fed each individual plant pot a decent amount of water. I also opened the window so they could get a little sunlight, and a little air. I didn’t know when someone else would be back to check on them, if ever. They would probably die at some point, but prolonging their lives gave me a little satisfaction at least.
When I realized what I was doing I set the empty cup down, confused as to why I had even started doing it in the first place, but before I could question myself, Damon spoke again. “We can take it and anything else we need to. This isn’t being treated as a crime scene, and in any case, Trevor isn’t a suspect or a POI, so his stuff is fair game, especially if it helps us figure out how he died.”
I nodded. “So, we’ll take his laptop then, I can’t think of anything else we should take right now. I think I want a set of keys to his place, though… just in case we need to come back.”
“I’ll go and ask the officers to give me theirs, but that means I’ll need to wait for the coroner myself. Take the laptop back to the house and see if Eli can get in. I’ll let you know if anything develops here.”
I stood, shut the laptop, and picked it up. Then I walked past him, but not before touching his arm and squeezing it. I wasn’t sure why I had done that, but it had felt right to do it at the time, and when I left him there, in the house with a dead man, I happy having done it. Another action I couldn’t explain.
The officers eyed me up as I went to leave, but neither of them spoke to me. All the way down in that musky, hot elevator, I prayed, hoped, nothing had happened to Eli’s car. As I stepped out of the building I noticed the teenagers I had spotted earlier were hovering around the bum, who had sat back down and reclaimed his spot. He was talking to them, and as they were talking, I noticed one of the teenagers offer him a small stack of bills. He thanked them, and they walked off down Canal Street.
Maybe I was wrong about them.
Eli’s car was exactly where I had left it, and there wasn’t a scratch on it. I breathed deep as I approached, exhaling the anxiety, and quickly got settled into the car, successfully pulling it out of the parking lot and feeling much better once I was on the road and back on my way to the Garden District.
For my first investigation, that hadn’t been bad. Granted, it hadn’t been a particularly challenging crime scene, as far as crime scenes went. There was no cause of death to figure out, no signs of forced entry to analyze, no threads to unravel, but there was a killer to catch, because these people weren’t just dying. They were all healthy, all young. There was no reason as to why they would be suffering heart attacks to begin with, I was certain Trevor’s medical history would probably also come back clean.
So, why were they dying? What was killing them, and how?
Don’t be stupid, Andi. You know where that link is going to go…
CHAPTER FIVE
Eli and I were alone in the house, the remnants of our Chinese takeout scattered between us on the dining room table. He had Trevor’s laptop in front of him, and his face was bathed in the soft, blue glow of the screen. I was staring, I couldn’t help it. Eli was devastatingly handsome. He had perfect bone structure, gorgeous brown skin and a set of the deepest brown eyes I had ever seen in my life, and I was alone with him. Damon wasn’t back yet, and Logan was keeping an eye on the perimeter, whatever that meant. I had an image of him skulking around wearing black clothes and a matching balaclava, but that was probably really far from the truth.
“How is it going?” I asked Eli.
“I’m no hacker,”
he said, tapping away at the keys, “But it isn’t too hard to bypass laptop security as thin as this; a few lines of code should do it.”
“And you’re sure this isn’t illegal?”
“If we suspected Trevor of having committed a crime, then sure if we hadn’t obtained a warrant to grab the laptop. But Trevor is the victim, and we’re using his laptop to try and find a link to the killer, if there is one.”
“There is. These people aren’t dying because they want to.”
Eli glanced at me. “I know… I just like having facts before I make conclusions.”
“You and Damon are the same that way.”
“We are.” A pause. “He’s always been a lot higher strung than I am.”
“Always? How long have you guys known each other?”
Another glance. This time he arched an eyebrow. “Do you really want to know about that?”
I nodded. “This past week it’s all been about… well, everything that’s been going on. We’ve all talked, but I don’t know much about how the three of you met or anything.”
“Damon was the agent assigned to the case when I came into my powers.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the DPA gets notified when weird stuff goes down, right?”
“Yes.”
“Damon happened to be in Louisiana when the DPA got wind of a… concentrated burst of spiritual activity, as they called it.”
“Okay? What does that mean?”
“It means the spirits went crazy one night, so crazy they showed up on the DPA’s radar pretty much instantaneously. It was like I’d called up the Mardi Gras of the dead without even meaning to. The whole French Quarter lit up in the middle of august, music was playing, lights were flashing, and people were seeing sightings of ghosts everywhere. It was insane.”
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