Bait & Switch (Driftwood Mystery Book 1)

by A. L. Tyler

  I hadn’t involved myself in that dispute, either. Marge liked me. For whatever reason, Beech liked me, too. I wasn’t going to insert myself into anything and screw it up.

  Beech gave me a nod of thanks for the coffee before leaving.

  Marge waited until he was just out of earshot. “And that will give Mother Nature a heart attack.” She fished her can out of the garbage and tossed it into the recycling instead. “Control freak. Thanks for making the coffee run. Sorry it was a PITA.”

  She had no idea.

  I handed over her coffee and sat down at my desk. Marge went back to researching and shredding case files. I turned back to my computer.

  “Oh, I finished the check-in for you.”

  I had completely forgotten. “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Oh!” She swiveled her chair to watch my reaction. “Did you see the kazoo?” She raised and lowered her eyebrows. “The tuba man is back!”

  “Oh, TMI....”

  I swallowed and nodded, praying that she would go back to her work and ignore me while I made unnecessary copies of last night’s murder.

  “Sergeant Bleach, on my case, he’s got a stick between his cheeks...”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Marge’s love-hate nickname for our boss was Mr. Bleach, because it rhymed and a rather unfortunate resemblance between Beech and an iconic cleaning agent cartoon spokesperson. And when he was having a row with her, she liked to rewrite the Mr. Bleach song with her own lyrics.

  “Sergeant Bleach, such a peach...” She paused, trying to find a rhyme. “He elicits lots of ‘eeks!’...”

  “Weak, Marge.” I looked up the recent cases and quickly found the homicide I needed. I hit the print button. “Weak.”

  “Sergeant Bleach, what a freak, friends with the evidence geek...”

  “Now I’m a part of this?”

  “If you’re not going to offer a rhyme, you don’t get to criticize mine, Janet Ann Drifter.”

  I stood up and fetched my papers as the printer started to spit them out. “My middle name isn’t Ann.” And my last name wasn’t Drifter. And my first name wasn’t Janet. Also, most things I said were disinformation, so one never knew.

  “Then what is it?”

  I paused, trying to remember what I had written on the application. “It’s not Ann.”

  Marge made a face. She opened a browser on her computer. “Come here.”

  I already knew where she was going. “Marge, really.”

  “You’re always pushing people away,” she said. “Look. I’m just going to set you up on this site. A lot of people here use it, and it’s really going to help you loosen up and make some friends.”

  “I have friends,” I grunted. I didn’t like social attachments. Having friendships only meant more people to leave behind. “I have you. And Beech.”

  “And neither of us has ever seen you outside of work,” she said. Her gaze drifted sideways. “Unless you’re hanging out with our boss outside of work hours. Ew. Are you having an affair with Beech?”

  I grabbed a fresh stack of hot papers from the printer. “No. Time to lay off the soap opera conspiracy theories, Marge.”

  She was clicking away on the social media site, but I didn’t want to interrupt her distraction. The printer was still working, and I needed her attention elsewhere.

  “Email?”

  “Use my work email.”

  “Bad idea,” she typed it in anyway. “Cell number?”

  “Oh, no. Not giving that out online.”

  She spun in her chair. “Give me your phone.”

  “I’m not putting my number online. No.”

  “I’m just going to install the app.” Her eyes flashed to the printer as it continued spitting out pages.

  Ugh... “Fine. Take it.”

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and practically threw it at her. She gave me a wide grin.

  The printer finally finished. “And really, Marge, it’s probably not a good idea to give your boss an unflattering nickname and make up derisive poetry about him.”

  “It’s a loving nickname,” Marge said with a smile. “But you may have me on the poetry. What the hell are you printing? The encyclopedia?”

  I kept my expression neutral as I tried to think up a lie. Marge got up from her chair and grabbed the papers as she handed back my phone. My nerves were about to come exploding out of my fingertips again.

  I wasn’t made for street work.

  I grabbed the can on the counter and focused hard on freezing it. “It’s...um...”

  Marge looked at the pages and cocked an eyebrow. She cracked a smile at me. “I know. It’s fascinating, right? My money’s on the wife.”

  “Wife?” I stammered. Freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw...

  “It’s always about the S.O.,” Marge said. “Killing looks personal. It doesn’t get much more personal than a wife. Oh, unless he has a mistress! That would be an interesting twist. Either way, enjoy.”

  She handed the papers back to me.

  “I was just...um...”

  Marge waved it off. “You’re morbidly curious, like every other person on the planet. Murder never happens here. I’m not judging.”

  I gave her a curt nod and started to walk into the back for some privacy. “Right. That’s exactly what’s going on here.”

  Chapter 12

  THE ITCHING IN MY HANDS had turned to crawling ants. Freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw...

  POP!

  The contents of the can went everywhere.

  “Shit,” I hissed under my breath.

  “Janet?”

  I turned around, the split can in my hand and drenched in soda. This time, my brain engaged a little faster. “I just went to open it. Must have been a defective can.”

  She bought the lie. I insisted I could clean it up myself, and she went back to the office. After mopping up, I went to the evidence shelf and got the knife.

  I filled an evidence bag with water to replace the can. If Marge saw, I would tell her that I was trying to sooth my injured fingers.

  Then I sat down with the evidence and the case report, and I started to read.

  The victim had died of exsanguination following a knife wound to the throat, followed by several stab wounds from a traditional athame. It had a black handle, and both the runes in the engraving and the single-edge told me this was an old one. Most modern blades had a double-edge and the runes tended to have a finely machined feminine slant, but these were distinctly rough, uneven, and hand-carved. It had a good weight, and the magic held a harmony that told me it had been passed on for at least a handful of generations.

  Why would someone use a knife like this in a murder? It made no sense. As often as not, an athame wasn’t even used for cutting. It was a ceremonial blade. It wasn’t even sharp.

  In any case, using one to draw blood was a perversion.

  The magic carried in an object this old couldn’t be manufactured. It was in the sentiments and memories that the object carried: a sort of patina of the touch left by every owner who had bestowed it with the power of faith—and passed on that belief and that faith from parent to child.

  The breaking of family magic in this fashion yielded a dark energy, and I didn’t want to know what this murderer was going to use it for. Except that all the power was in the blade, and he didn’t have the blade anymore.

  It was all in the athame, because this was perversion.

  I furrowed my brow. Why bother killing for magic, and then leave the magic behind?

  Whoever had done this had to be stopped.

  I took a deep breath, looking away across the room. This wasn’t my problem anymore—it was Nick’s. Once he saw what had been done with this blade, he’d be all over it. People who wanted power badly enough that they’d do something like this were a top priority for the Bleak, because a person only used power like that to do one thing: challenge the Bleak.

  Or, free their wrongly accused father. I shook my head and stretched my
aching, shaking hands. Either way, someone was up to no good.

  I lay my palm on the bag of water beside me and started to freeze it solid, grateful for the release of tension that ran all the way into my bones.

  The case file wasn’t much help. White male, early forties, found dead with thirty-seven knife wounds. Nothing I didn’t already know. The crime scene photos showed that he lived at a healthy level of disarray.

  Not a hoarder, but a lot of stuff. Microwave dinner for one, still on the table. Dishes in the sink. Laundry in the hall. Remote on the couch, and shoes kicked off by the front door.

  And a body, lying by the back door, sprawled over the muddy floor mat with at least a dozen stab wounds in his back and a bloody streak on the linoleum behind him. His dark sweater made it hard to see all the blood, but the autopsy photos held nothing back.

  Fourteen stab wounds on the back, twenty-three on the front. Slit throat.

  I diverted my gaze back to the knife. The dull knife. That knife hadn’t slit a throat, and no other knives had been checked in.

  But this knife hadn’t ended the victim’s life. I could hear it.

  What the eff...?

  I tried to reconstruct the scene in my mind. The killer had slit Gregory’s throat with a sharp knife, and then switched to a dull one to keep stabbing.

  I cocked my head at what I read next.

  No defensive wounds. And the stab wounds had happened post-mortem. But then why...?

  I looked back at the bloody streak behind the corpse. I had assumed he was trying to crawl away, but if there were no defensive wounds, it must have been the assailant trying to drag him. Maybe to dispose of the body? A lot of people assumed moving a body was easy work, but it really wasn’t. A dead lump of human, and especially one weighing a hundred and eighty-seven pounds, didn’t budge easily.

  No head wounds, so he hadn’t been bludgeoned unconscious. He’d probably been drugged, then, but we wouldn’t know until the lab came back with test results.

  A day, minimum, in order to get those.

  So, someone cut his throat. And then they moved him, and waited for death, and then stabbed him a bunch of times.

  Messed up.

  I squinted my eyes and saw a second muddy spot on the floor next to the victim’s shoes, and then glanced back at the dishes to check. Definitely more dishes than a person would use by himself, and while things were disorderly, they weren’t messy. He did the dishes regularly, and he’d had someone else eating with him to have that many on that day.

  Marge was right. There was a significant other, and the fact that the S.O. hadn’t reported the guy missing...

  I stopped, flicking a few pages. Gregory. His name was Travis Gregory.

  Mr. Gregory had someone in his life, but that someone hadn’t reported him missing. That was noteworthy.

  “Janet!”

  I jumped, nearly falling off my chair. “Yeah!”

  “Orsen needs a laptop that came in for case number five-seven-seven-nine-zero-one.” Marge called from the office. “You got that?”

  I swallowed. The itching was going crazy again. “Yeah, I got that!”

  And I would have. I really would have.

  But my cell phone buzzed, and I jumped again, and I lost control for one split second.

  The sparks that shot out of my fingers ignited every page of the case file that I was holding.

  “Shit!” I hissed again. I wasn’t usually one to cuss so much, but given the circumstances, I gave myself a pass. I smacked the pages on my desk several times before throwing them to the floor and popping my bag of water over them.

  “Janet?”

  I looked up. The front office was separated from the secure back evidence room by a door with a service hatch that opened at the top. Marge was staring at me with eyes as big as dinner plates through the hatch.

  “I don’t know what happened,” I lied. “I went to put them by the power outlet, and it sparked, and it just—”

  “Same one that you had trouble with this morning?” Marge asked as she came in.

  Sure. Why not. “Yeah. We should get that looked at. I’ll send Bleach an email. I mean Beech! Damn it, Marge, you have got to stop singing that song...”

  Through the hatch, I saw Deputy Wallace stifle a laugh.

  I whipped my phone out of my pocket to see who had called me, but it wasn’t a call.

  It was a notification that Marge had friended me on PopSnapNow. The app that she had just installed. And it wanted access to my address book and email to “snap” me up with everyone and then some.

  Social media is going to be the death of me. I shoved the phone back in my pocket.

  Chapter 13

  WHEN MY SHIFT WAS DONE, I stuffed the case file into a plain folder and slipped it under my shirt and into the waistband of my pants. Resting against my stomach, it wasn’t noticeable once I zipped up my coat and held my purse right.

  I had to keep my posture painfully correct as I walked down the hall. Once I cleared the doors to the parking lot, I almost relaxed.

  “Janet!”

  I rolled my eyes and stopped dead in my tracks. Damn it, Bailey...

  He walked over to where I was standing. He had bags under his eyes and his brown hair was looking a little more disheveled than usual. Must have been a long day.

  “You’re dating that guy?” he nodded toward my car.

  I shuddered at the thought. I already had too many exes, both real and manufactured. And after Alex, I was really, truly done with dangerous men. “No.”

  “You’re just friends?” he pressed.

  Hell no. “It’s complicated. Why?”

  “He’s been sitting in your car all day.”

  And you’ve been watching my car all day, creeper. “And?”

  “And that’s a little weird.”

  He stood up straighter and crossed his arms. I would have walked away, but I knew there was no faster way to piss off crazy than to walk off before his spiel was finished.

  “You don’t want to get involved with the wrong kind of guy. That’s all.”

  I tried to take him seriously. “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  I took off for my car at a fast clip. I cast one glance over my shoulder at Bailey as I got in. He was still standing there.

  Just what I needed. One more stalker.

  “You got it?” Nick asked. He shoved his cell phone in his pocket and turned the ignition.

  “Yes,” I said, taking another look at Bailey in the side mirror. “Drive.”

  Nick looked at me in irritation before following my gaze. He looked over his shoulder and directly at Bailey. “Problem, Driftwood?”

  “He thinks we used to date,” I said sourly.

  His mouth dropped open in amused disbelief.

  I glared. “It was my first memory spell. I didn’t specify details as well as I should have. Shut up.”

  The corner of his mouth curled a little. “You created a jealous ex in order to escape your jealous ex. That’s some excellent work. I’m sure the Bleak would be proud.”

  He drove. My cheeks were burning. I didn’t like it when people impugned my work.

  Nick held out his hand expectantly.

  “You’re driving.”

  “I’m a vampire. I multitask better than most.”

  I sighed, pulling the case file out from under my shirt.

  Nick did a double take. “You printed it? Why the hell wouldn’t you just put it on a thumb drive?”

  “Thumb drives are disabled on our computers,” I explained. “They don’t like confidential information walking out the door.”

  He glanced at me. “And you didn’t think to burn a disc?”

  “Who the hell—” I went silent, trying to calm myself. Marge was right. Since the invention of secure data file transfers, the only use we had for the back stock of discs was as coasters. “No one uses discs anymore.”

  “And you didn’t bring the knife?”

  “I can only sne
ak out so much at once!”

  He glared at me. I glared back.

  He took the files from me. “I’m losing time on this case, Driftwood. Because of you.”

  He pulled something from his pocket and threw it in my lap. I stared down at an old wallet, brown leather worn down to the suede, buzzing like a broken radio. The spell that had been put on it to generate counterfeit bills was old and degraded.

  I leaned back in my seat, carefully picking apart what remained to silence. “We’ll catch the guy.”

  “You think it’s a man,” he said.

  I looked up. He was really asking me? “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t seen the coroner’s report yet, but with that much blood the cuts are deep. There’re a lot of them. Thirty-seven knife wounds says that took a hell of a lot of upper body strength. It’s a man. Or, a very strong woman to keep going that long when there was the option of any other knife in the kitchen to make it easier.” I paused. “I can’t think of a single spell that requires stabbing a dead guy with an athame, let alone that many times. Blood on the athame, sure. Ending a life with an athame, okay... but this guy was dead before the thirty-seventh stab. That’s something else.”

  “Personal,” Nick said.

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Or psycho.”

  Nick rolled his eyes at my assessment, and I knew what he was thinking—aren’t they all, though? They probably were.

  We drove back to his apartment and he spread the crime scene photos out on his coffee table, reading the case file while I went to make myself an early dinner in the microwave. I ate quietly as he continued to read.

  When I was done, I pulled the old wallet—now fixed—from my pocket. I stared at it, thinking.

  “What?”

  I looked up at Nick. He was watching me with an unblinking stare, and I could practically feel his gaze boring into me.

  “The whole thing is weird,” I said. “I mean, even if you killed a guy with an athame, the power’s all in the athame at that point. Why leave it behind? Did you see any evidence that the murder was interrupted?”