Bait & Switch (Driftwood Mystery Book 1)

by A. L. Tyler

  Nick shrugged. “No, but I wasn’t looking for it. The guy was murdered. You said it yourself. Thirty-seven stab wounds kind of speaks to having time on your hands.”

  I shook my head. I eyed Nick warily. Back when I was working for the Bleak, being able to think like a criminal made me good at my job. Now it just made me a shady person.

  “Spit it out,” Nick said.

  “If I was going to kill a guy,” I started hesitantly. “Like, if I had a spell that required that kind of blood and energy, I’d make damn sure it didn’t get interrupted. If it gets screwed up, it’s not like you can run out and get another victim to sacrifice at the grocery store.” At least, I hoped not. “I’m going to be honest here, because I don’t know what we’re looking at. This guy might have blown it. And in that case, he’s probably out looking for a new athame. And after that...”

  “A new sacrifice.” Nick nodded. “Likely.”

  Chapter 14

  “SHIT.”

  When I walked into the evidence room the next day, Marge was already on the warpath.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” She pushed past me and into the hall. I glanced out and saw her standing in front of the break room. “Buccal swabs in plastic, people! You’ve been freaking warned before!”

  I sighed and shook my head. At least she’d used the more appropriate f-word. Use of the other f-word had landed her in hot water with Beech before.

  “Officers Halle and Weiss, you’re now on my list!” She waved the evidence bags in the air. “You put this shit in paper, or it molds! Mold means the DNA is no good anymore and I’m sitting next to asshole criminals who should have been convicted while I’m trying to enjoy my damn cheeseburger at the fast food joint!” She slapped the bagged swabs against her palm. “Paper, people!”

  She stormed back into the evidence room and I followed her to the secured back area. She clapped the door shut behind her. ‘Shit’ and ‘asshole’ had also been previously discussed as inappropriate for the workplace, but now didn’t seem to be the right time to remind her.

  “Rough day?” I asked. Whatever she was going through, I was willing to trade. Marge wasn’t about to be sentenced and executed for grand theft magic.

  Marge took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Beech filed the fucking paperwork. Excuse me, freaking paperwork. And it wasn’t just about the freaking disc coaster incident, because apparently, he’s been tracking my arrivals and departures for a few weeks like a freaking PI. And because I’ve been late a few days...”

  More than a few days.

  “...and sometimes I take a long lunch...”

  We both did. More than we probably should, but we always made up the hours.

  “...he’s saying I was effectively stealing money from the city. I’m probably going to get fired. Awesome, right?”

  I turned away before rolling my eyes. “Totally. Stop being dramatic. He’s not going to fire you.”

  My eyes scanned the check-in lockers. Check-in was done. Crap. What was I going to use as my excuse to stay back here and get that knife?

  “And you know that how?” Marge asked. “Did he say something?”

  “Nope.” I turned back to her. “I know that because he hates paperwork and interviews generate a hell of a lot of it. Job posting. Applications. Resumes. Interview questions, background checks, testing scores... And then he’d have to train someone. I remember how thrilled he was to train me—” He wasn’t. “—and he even likes me. Trust me, Marge, he’d rather have the devil he knows than the one he doesn’t. You don’t require procedure training, and that’s job security.”

  Marge shrugged a little. I saw my opportunity to change the subject.

  “So, hey, did anything new come in on the murder? Did they find the guy’s wife yet?”

  “No!” Marge’s eyes lit up. “But oh my God, Janet, you have got to hear this—they think the guy has a kid!”

  I blinked in surprise. I vaguely remembered seeing some fridge art, but the house was too orderly otherwise. No toys. No jackets on the floor.

  But then I thought about all the dishes in the sink, and the extra dirty spot left by shoes near the door.

  Absent shoes.

  And the fact that while someone had clearly been staying there with this guy, no one had reported him missing.

  “Where’s the kid?” I demanded. “How old?”

  “Neighbors are saying about ten,” she said. “But they aren’t sure. Some sort of hippie-dippie home schooling situation and they never really saw them much. But the kid’s gone. They still haven’t found the wife—who’s also the mother—yet. Neighbors weren’t sure if she even lived there because they never saw her. I’m telling you, this was probably some divorce custody shit and she killed the guy and took her kid and ran.”

  Missing child. And the murderer potentially needed a new sacrifice.

  My heart hammered in my chest.

  I took a deep breath. I couldn’t lose my head now. Especially when losing my head meant I would actually lose my life.

  The knife. Nick needed the knife, and once he had it, he could take it to the Bleak and...

  What? I knew from personal experience how the Bleak viewed children.

  I couldn’t risk that Nick was only in this murder because he wanted the bounty the Bleak had set on me. Ringing the alarm bell and possibly bringing every handler and bounty hunter in a three-state radius here worked against his self-interest.

  “Did they put out an Amber Alert?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice casual, but every muscle in my body felt like a tense rubber band about to snap.

  Marge cocked an eyebrow at me. “Duh. Haven’t you watched the news, like, at all today? This story went national last night. I know they were asking around for anyone who knew the wife. They’ll find them.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. People knew. They were watching.

  And it made my situation a hell of a lot more complicated. If the murderer already had his new sacrifice—the kid—then he was gone. He wouldn’t hang around and wait to get caught on his botched first try. If the murderer was never caught, it would get pinned on me.

  The plan’s changed. Run.

  Nodding, I went back to my computer while Marge went on properly storing the mis-bagged buccal swabs.

  I stared at my glowing screen for a long time.

  I looked up bus schedules. There was a major hub not far from the police station, and if I could give Nick the knife over lunch, I knew he’d be busy this afternoon.

  Marge came back into the office as the ticket popped out of the printer.

  “Bus ticket?” she asked. “St. Louis? Are you going on vacation?”

  I exhaled a shaky breath. “Uh... Family emergency. I just got a text that my aunt had a stroke.”

  “Oh...” her face contorted. I tried to run a quick mental check on if I had an aunt and if I’d ever said anything about where she lived. “That’s terrible. Did you talk to Beech yet?”

  I picked up the ticket and started for the door. “On my way.”

  Beech liked me. He would offer to give me a ride if I said I’d loaned my car to a friend. And no one—not even a handler—would try to nab me with a police presence. That was a hell of a lot more than the Bleak wanted to deal with. Police were tracked. By their radios, by their cell phones, by their body cams, by GPS tech in their vehicles... That was too much data to simply disappear.

  Funny that we had reached an age when erasing someone’s memory was the easy part.

  When I got to his office, the door was closed but not latched. I pushed it open just enough to see that Beech was on the phone. He waved me in and gestured for me to sit.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t have any new details, and we can’t comment further on this case at this time.” He hung up the phone, turning his gaze on me. “Need something?”

  I had my ticket folded in my hands. The lie was on my lips, and all I could do was stare at the phone. “There’s really no new information? Or just nothing we
can give the press?”

  He shook his head, looking down. “Both, Drifter. The wife and daughter haven’t been seen since the murder. The wife doesn’t have a job, she doesn’t have a driver’s license, and honestly, I’m giving up hope that we’re going to find her. Her name’s Mary Smith. Do you know how many Mary Smiths there are in the database? If that’s even her real name?”

  I clutched my ticket tighter. “Birth records. If she’s really the mother, then—”

  “Home birth, according to the neighbors.” He looked as desperate as I felt. “Kid never went to school. As far as I can tell, she never visited a doctor. No social security number. We’ve got what the neighbors told us and this. That’s all.” He lifted a picture from his desk. Beech grunted. “She may as well be a ghost.”

  A little girl wearing a red polka dot sun dress, a parent on each side. She had her father’s hair and her mother’s eyes. Dark brown eyes, and they stared deep into my soul.

  Her father was gone now, and while everyone thought her mother had committed this crime, I knew better. If there was a warlock involved, her mother was probably dead somewhere, too. Warlocks loved sacrificing children. This wouldn’t be the first case I’d seen, and maybe that had been the point all along: it wasn’t about the athame. It was about the child.

  A carefully selected child that this twisted warlock knew would be hard to find.

  I shuddered. Warlocks like this were usually serial offenders. If he got away, there would be more.

  “What did you need?” Beech asked again. His phone rang and he rested a hand on it, watching me in anticipation.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It can wait.”

  He gave me a nod as he answered the phone. I stared at my ticket as I walked back to the evidence room., but I wasn’t actually looking at it. All I could see was that little girl, and her parents, and the fact that everyone was looking for a woman who hadn’t committed these crimes. No one knew the truth but me.

  And her, I reminded myself. Somewhere, that little girl knew, too, and it twisted my gut to wonder if she had been present during her father’s death.

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. Being abandoned on a porch suddenly didn’t seem so awful.

  I gritted my teeth and tore up my ticket.

  When I looked up, the front receptionist was watching me.

  Chapter 15

  “CAN I HELP YOU?” I shouldn’t have started with her. Maybe I did it because I was feeling on edge, what with the Bleak breathing down my neck and a little girl who was alone in the world and about to die a horrible death.

  The front receptionist, Charlene, was a nosy woman who was always asking me too many personal questions. “Oh, honey, Marge told me about your aunt. Are you leaving soon? Do you need a house sitter?”

  Never in a million years. Also, thanks Marge. “Um, I think I’m going to be staying. I talked it over with my sister and she’s going instead. Thanks for the offer, though.”

  I turned to go into the evidence room.

  “Oh, you have a sister? I never knew. Are you two close?”

  Well, she’s imaginary, so... “No, actually. I mean, it’s not like we’re on bad terms. She doesn’t live here so we don’t cross paths much.”

  “Really? Where does she live?”

  Oh, for freak’s sake... I did a quick mental check, because Charlene liked to vacation almost as much as she liked to talk about vacationing, and she’d been everywhere. And I didn’t want to hear about how it was wherever my fake sister lived. Where do people not go to vacation...?

  “She lives in Podunk. In Michigan.”

  “Seriously?” Charlene’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s so funny! We did a road trip a few years back and passed through Podunk, New York!”

  Seriously? “Wow. What are the chances?”

  “I know, right? It was on my bucket list. People are always talking about how nothing happens in Podunk, and I thought, I just have to go and see it—”

  “Yeah. That’s great. Sorry, but I really need to get back to work.”

  “Oh, of course.” She held out her hand. “Can I recycle that for you?”

  I held the ticket in my hand a little tighter. I wasn’t sure why, but all of Charlene’s prying really set me off.

  “No, it’s cool, thanks though.” I spun on my heel and went straight into the evidence room.

  I nearly walked into Bailey.

  “Watch it!” he hissed.

  I side stepped and avoided making eye contact. I didn’t want to touch him any more than he wanted to touch me.

  Didn’t want to risk his asshole attitude rubbing off on me.

  “Hard at work, Drifter?” he grunted. “How’s your new friend?”

  I went to drop the shredded ticket in the waste basket, but the way Bailey’s eyes followed my hand made me think better of it. I shoved the ripped paper into my pocket. He narrowed his eyes at me.

  “Leave her alone, she has a family emergency,” Marge said dismissively. “And I’m staring at the report now, Bailey. No prints found on the knife. Nada. Nothing. Sorry.”

  “I need to see the knife.”

  Marge spun in her chair. She gave him a serious look. “Why?”

  Bailey shifted his weight, and I could see his ire rising. “Because I spent all morning trying to track down the woman who killed him, and I feel like it might help.”

  I rolled my eyes. Bailey shot a glare at me.

  “Something to say, Janet?”

  I should have stayed out of it. Self-righteous idiots have a way of getting under my skin. “A woman didn’t do this.”

  He leaned his head to the side, narrowing his eyes. “Because you’re an expert? How many murders have you seen, exactly?”

  “More than you, because she sees the whole damn record of every case ever, and you only see yours,” Marge said matter-of-factly. “If you want the knife, I’ll need you to sign it out.”

  He sighed in exasperation. “I’m just asking to see it!”

  “And I’m asking for documented chain of custody, which means you write your name on a piece of paper that goes in a file for the courts and God and everyone else to pull up if they need it. If you haven’t got a good enough reason to fill out the form and let Sargent Beech and the rest of the world know, then no, you haven’t got a good enough reason to see the damn knife. Also, it’s already checked out. So, no.”

  It looked like Marge wasn’t going to be the only one dropping an F-bomb that day, but I was wrong. Bailey glared at each of us in turn before stalking out of the office.

  “Idiot.” Marge shrugged at me, a disgusted look on her face. “I’m in a bad mood, too. I should report that. Too bad the guy I’d have to report it to is being an asshole to me.” She stopped and shook her head. “He’s being not nice to me. Sorry. I called some not-handicapped guy a douche bag earlier for parking in the handicap spot and some other guy from HR happened to be standing right there—story of my damn life—I’m trying to clean it up. Sorry.”

  I tried to suppress my grin. Marge and her crusades to make the world a better place by telling off one person at a time never failed to make me smile. “No apology needed. And I won’t be taking time off. My sister’s going instead.”

  “Huh. I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  I paused. “Yeah, she has kids and a husband. She stays busy and we don’t talk much.”

  Marge smiled a little. “Must be nice.”

  She had a tempestuous love life, owing in part to her colorful vocabulary and her love of horror films. She also had a tendency to discuss gory cases at length, and I knew she’d been ditched at dinner on at least two occasions after setting into a discussion on how pets would eat their owners if food wasn’t available and no one found the body in time.

  It was very interesting from both the science and psychology angles. Not a great topic for dinner conversation.

  “Is the knife really out?” I asked. If it was, I needed a new plan. A kid’s life was on the line.r />
  Marge’s eyes flicked to the door before going back to her screen as she closed out of the case file. “No. The lead investigator had it, but it was checked back in half an hour ago. I just didn’t want to fight with him over the rules because he thinks he’s some hot shot Hollywood hottie detective on television. The investigator had the same question, though. Wanted to double check that nothing had been missed.”

  I nodded. “Huh.”

  I went back and got the athame when Marge went to the restroom. It was a risky endeavor, surrounded by so much evidence, and a lot of it stored in very flammable paper bags and cardboard boxes, but I had to try.

  The duplicate glowed to life in front of me, made of light and shadow at first, and then filled in with color and slight defects as I noticed them. It sang harmony with the real knife as I tweaked and pulled and nipped the notes into a perfect chorus of a match. Items like knives were always placed in a fitting cardboard box for storage, to reduce the chance of contamination and injury in handling, and they were often held in place by one or two zip ties. I studied the knife, and every drop of blood on it, until my replica was visually perfect. The lab had already checked it for prints and DNA samples, so the visual was really all I needed to worry about now.

  I would return the real knife, if I could, after I had caught this child-sacrificing sicko.

  I used magic to break the zip ties and tucked the real blade into the back of my pants. I got new ties and put my replica in the box.

  “Fuck my life...”

  I jumped, peering out of the aisle as Marge walked in. I quickly tucked the broken zips into my pocket and shoved the extra knife box onto a shelf.

  “Janet, did Bailey ever respond to that email about that hold up spree we’re trying to get rid of? Because seriously, I want that cash out of this room. We need the shelf space. Damn it. He was just here, I should have asked him...”

  I breathed deeply, steadying my nerves. Luckily, the energy from having to create the replica knife kept my palms from going itchy. “No, I didn’t see a response yet. I think he’s been busy with the murder.”