by Kim Harrison
“Good God,” Ivy said, her smile widening. “It’s like you gave her a bag of candy.”
“It’s a paying job, right?” I said, words almost falling over themselves as the thought came and went about getting that Were crew back out and working. “Real money, yes? Not an IOU. Jenks and I have a church to rebuild.” Finally. A job that didn’t involve Trent. I mean, I appreciated the work, but it was beginning to feel like charity, and I had my pride.
“Real money.” Edden touched his mustache, his eyes bright in amusement. “So keep track of your time.”
“You got it,” I said, not caring if he knew how relieved I was.
“If we’re done here?” Ivy said, and when Edden nodded, she touched my shoulder and turned away, walking to the back gate and her car, her hips swaying. “See you later!” she called over her shoulder, clearly in a good mood at still being able to jerk my libido around like a little dog on a string.
Yeah, she would, and I chuckled, glad we were okay and nothing had changed.
Excitement zinged down to my toes as I faced Edden, and as I tightened my mental grip on the nearest ley line, I heard a lion make a coughing roar. “Do you want to split one of those animal-shaped sugar cookies on the way out?” I asked, and he laughed, a heavy hand landing on my shoulder to turn me to the front of the zoo.
It was good to have friends.
CHAPTER
3
My arms swung confidently as I walked through the low-ceilinged FIB halls with Edden beside me, feeling at home among the uniformed men and women who had dedicated their lives to upholding decency and fairness among Cincy’s diverse needs and demands. I loved the scent of paper and gun oil that meant get-the-job-done, and though I noticed the occasional resentment directed at me—a witch-born demon walking among them—I was, for the most part, recognized and accepted. They’d seen me at my worst and best, but mostly my worst.
Which made me glad I’d dressed up today, even if it hadn’t been for them. Bobbing my head at two approaching officers, I got a respectful head nod in return as they went by.
“Phew-w-w,” I heard one whisper, and my good mood faltered. Clearly eau de zombie was still with me. I’d definitely wedge a shower in before seeing Trent at the park.
“Try rinsing your hair in tomato juice,” Edden said, grinning as he swiped a packet of papers from a desk and handed them to me. “Jack and Jacqueline,” he said, his voice shifting to a familiar bullpen cadence as we continued to his office. “A neighbor heard the fight and called us. He had her on the kitchen floor by the time we got there.”
Edden lurched forward to get the door to his office, and the scent of Old Spice washed over me. “He says she attacked him first, but we found him standing over her, dazed and with a slap mark on her face.”
I hesitated just inside his office, not sure where he expected me to sit. The room was cluttered, but it was the sort of clutter that spoke of dedication. I liked it. The only chair apart from the one behind his desk was covered with stacks of papers that still smelled like the copier. “She’s in the hospital?” I said as I looked at the top page and their mug shots: messy hair, no makeup, stubble. I could almost see the morning breath. But no massive bruises or cuts. “Why?”
Edden’s jaw tightened as he shut the door but for a crack and swooped forward to clear off the chair. “He claims he struck her only once,” he said, letting the files hit his desk hard enough to make the skirt on the hula girl beside his monitor move. “She’s only got the one bruise on her face, but she’s in the hospital because she doesn’t remember it. Anything. No sign of concussion.”
“Mmmm.” I sat down and studied their pictures. Jacqueline looked confused, a lost expression on her as she stood in her nightgown. Jack was untidy, angry, and frustrated. No wonder the FIB had held both of them.
“Yep.” Edden sat down and moved a cup of nasty cold coffee to the edge of his desk so he could spread his elbows wide. “I’d write this down as a simple domestic dispute but for the fact that between us and the I.S. we’ve now had four in as many days, all but this one ending in someone being dead. We were lucky that he didn’t kill her before we got there. But it’s harder for a human to commit homicide.”
My lips parted. “I beg your pardon.”
Edden’s eyes widened. “I don’t mean emotionally,” he said, a light flush to his cheeks. “Physically. It’s easier to kill someone with magic than with your bare hands unless you’re a vampire or Were, and even then you need the element of surprise, but that’s one of the few things the crimes seem to have in common. Not one seems to be premeditated, their doubtful motives aside. It makes the crime scenes . . . messy.”
I relaxed, willing to take that at face value as I leafed through the rest of the reports, seeing ugly pictures of once-living people beside household objects used as weapons: lamp, knife, extension cord. They were I.S. records by the letterhead and the familiar DO NOT COPY stamp. “Messy is the word,” I said, blanching at the destruction of the vampire’s apartment. Dude.
“Messy and spontaneous.” Edden waved off someone who poked their head in, wanting to talk to him, and then he stretched his leg out and shut the door, cutting off the comfortable office chatter. “Whatever was at hand. And viciously fast apart from the vampires. That one there? The vampires? It took fifteen minutes according to a downstairs neighbor. No one called nine-one-one because apparently it’s hard to tell the difference between murder and especially vigorous sex play.”
“That’s what I hear,” I said, feeling myself warm as I shifted the pages about. “Anything else in common?”
“Not much.” He hesitated, and I glanced up. He looked good behind a desk, but I always thought he looked better out in the field, where he wanted to be. “They all have different socioeconomic statuses. Education is all over the map. We’ve got three in the Hollows, one in Cincinnati. Ages range from twenty-five to sixty.” His eyes went to the new-smelling files on his desk. “Most have been in Cincy their entire lives, but not all of them. The only thing they have in common is that they are all in their pajamas.”
He said it like it was a joke, but it rang in me like a Klaxon. “No kidding,” I said, then flipped back to the mug shots, seeing a hint of bedroom lace, a swath of flannel. Bed hair. Lots of bed hair. Frowning, I crossed my knees and paged back and forth for the estimated times of the crimes. Sure enough, though they took place at different hours, the times were consistent with the various species’ sleep schedules. The witch attack was shortly after three a.m., the Were was a little later at dawn. I flipped to the front page. Jack, the guy Edden wanted me to talk to, was predawn. Sighing, I lowered the papers. What was it with humans and elves getting up before dawn?
“Crimes of passion?” I guessed, and Edden frowned to make his mustache bunch up.
“Perhaps not. We haven’t gotten in to talk to Jacqueline for motive yet, but according to Ivy, all the Inderlanders involved seem to have lost it over something that happened in their past. The motives are old. So old they don’t have any merit.”
He stood seeing my quizzical face, coming around to take the wad of I.S. reports from me. “The witch couple, here?” he said, handing it back with the pertinent report on top. “The one who killed her boyfriend with a suffocation charm? She said she got mad about him dragging her out of drug addiction three years ago.”
“That’s weird.” I looked down at a shot of a clearly dead twenty-something witch, his brown eyes bulging and nail gouges at his neck. Self-inflected, according to the report. “Maybe she started up again, and he was giving her grief?”
“Toxicology says no.” Standing at my shoulder, Edden looked at the photo, his eyes tired. “The woman is clean. She’s devastated for having killed him, but clean. She says she was mad at him, but she isn’t mad now. Says she doesn’t understand what happened.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Same thi
ng with the vampires.” Edden held his hand out, wiggling his fingers, but I flipped the pages myself, stopping at the photo of a torn-up open-floor-plan apartment done in tasteful grays and blues. There was no body under the dent in the wall covered in photos of smiling people, but there was a chalk outline. The woman had undoubtedly been whisked away to a light-tight morgue where she could turn in safety. From the mess, it hadn’t been a fast or easy death. “Man killed woman because she had a shadow. Jealous rage,” Edden said shortly.
“And . . . ,” I prompted, not seeing why this was considered weird. Wrong and stupid, but not weird in the jealous lives of living vampires. Shadows were generally entrapped humans who followed the vampire who’d bitten them like a puppy, jonesing for their next bite, hooked on the feel-good pheromones vampires gave off to turn pain into excruciating pleasure. Not that I had any experience there. Much. They were probably pretty annoying when you were trying to get a bite in edgewise with your intended, but the usual remedy was to move and not answer your phone, not kill the vampire who made the shadow to begin with.
“He found out about the shadow three years ago. They were both hauled into the I.S. for disturbing the peace at the time, but they worked it out and have been living quietly together since,” Edden offered. “He’s really upset, and Ivy tells me we might get a little more in a few days when the woman wakes up from the dead. There’s a lot of damage for the virus to repair. Then there’s the Were who killed her husband because he once belonged to a rival pack,” he added, and I shuffled the reports.
“How could she not know?” I asked, wincing at the bloodied extension cord. “Don’t they have to disclose that kind of thing on marriage certificates, like previous marriages?”
“They do.” Edden leaned back against his desk, arms over his chest. “Ivy tells me it’s been hard to get anything out of her, but the woman claims she’s always known, but something in her snapped. They’ve been married for over twenty years, and it never bothered her before.”
“Huh.” I flipped to the top report and the picture of Jack and Jacqueline waiting for me. To be honest, I was relieved it wasn’t just an Inderlander crime spree. “Crimes of passion for events that happened so far in the past it shouldn’t matter,” I said softly. “Things that both parties know about and have worked through? I don’t get it.”
“Neither do the people doing the assaulting.” Edden’s focus was distant in thought. “Ivy tells me they’re all distraught, bewildered at their actions. The Were woman is on a suicide watch, actually. It’s like something wormed into their brain and pushed them into it. You want to talk to Jack?” Edden finished unexpectedly, and my head snapped up. “We still have him in interrogation.”
“Absolutely.”
Edden gestured for the door, and I rose. The office noise spilled in when he opened it, luring me into the comforting bustle of wrongs being righted with the slow grind of bureaucracy. “And it’s not a banshee,” I said, meeting his pace as we headed for the interrogation rooms.
Edden shook his head. “Not according to Ivy.”
“Well, she’d know,” I said faintly. “It sounds Inderland-ish, though,” I added, then noticed Edden’s closed expression. “What?” I said flatly, and he shook his head.
“I appreciate you talking to Jack to give us your Inderland opinion,” he said, but I thought it was more for the passing officers than for me. “The news has figured out it’s more than a wave of especially nasty domestic crime, and I’d like to lock it down before their guesses start putting innocent people in danger.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” I said, startled when he put a heavy hand on my shoulder to stop me shy of an interrogation room door.
“Be careful,” Edden said, his dark eyes serious. “He’s been reasonably cooperative so far, but don’t let him touch you. We don’t know what’s causing this, and it might be biological.”
“It’s not food poisoning,” I said, remembering the news on the radio, and he chuckled.
“No, but be careful anyway. You got your truth charm?”
I held it up, the wooden amulet disguised as a key fob decoration. It was old, but still worked. “Edden, you know those are illegal without a lawyer present,” I said, and he smirked as he reached to open the door for me.
“Ah, I’ll be watching. If you need some help . . . I don’t know. Tug your ear.”
I smiled, resisting the urge to touch his nose, give him a hug . . . something. It was nice feeling as if I was part of a team. “I’ll be fine,” I said, “but thanks.”
He dropped back as he opened the door, and I went in. The stale smell of old coffee, the dusty linoleum tiles, and the hum of fluorescent lights were ugly but familiar, making me wonder if this was the same interrogation room in which I had blackmailed the coven into agreeing to rescind my shunning. Sometimes it was only the dirt we had on others that kept our asses above the grasses.
Lips pressed, I gave the man sitting at the table a neutral smile when he looked up.
Frustration pulled at the corners of his eyes as his gaze went to the sprig of yew poking from my front shirt pocket. As Edden had said, he was still in his pajamas, the flannel pants looking odd with the orange top they’d given him to wear. He sat up to acknowledge me, but my bland expression froze when his nose wrinkled. Saying nothing, I sat, trying not to push the air around. I was definitely going to have to fit a shower in before going out to the park.
“When can I see Jacqueline?” Jack asked, a mix of belligerence and dissatisfaction.
I set the paperwork on the table, his and Jacqueline’s mug shots front and center. “She’s your wife, yes?”
“Yes, she’s my wife,” Jack said angrily, his attention pulling from the photo. “I only slapped her to snap her out of trying to kill me. Why am I the one in jail? What was I supposed to do? Let her stab me?”
His cuffs chained to the table clinked, and I leaned closer to hammer my words home. “Because you were standing over her, Jack, and she was crying on the floor, and cops always side with the scared woman if there’s an angry man in the room with a knife.”
A little bad cop never hurt, and sure enough, Jack’s expression lost its aggression, showing me the fear that it had sprung from. “Just tell me if she’s okay. Please?”
I leaned back in my chair to see the truth amulet in my lap. “She’s shaken up, but okay.”
Exhaling, Jack slumped in relief. The charm on my keychain agreed.
“Is she on any medications? Any recent changes in them?” I asked, fishing.
“No,” he said, quick enough to tell me someone had already asked him. “She has no history of ever doing anything like this before.”
But I had seen guilt, and charm tight in my hand, I leaned forward again. “I’m not the FIB,” I said, and his eyes came to mine. “Talk to me, Jack. What happened?”
He looked at the one-way mirror behind me. “I already told the cops who busted my door. She attacked me,” he said. “I don’t know why,” he added, voice breaking. “She went nuts.”
But the muddy green and red of my charm said there was something else. “I’m all you got, Jack,” I said, and he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “There’s an entire building of cops out there who only see a wife beater.”
“Are you a counselor?” he said, and I let a half smile curve up my lips.
“No. I suck at consoling people. I’m more of a knock-them-down-and-get-to-the-truth kind of person. And I’m listening. Talk to me, Jack. There might be something you forgot that will help me figure out why Jacqueline attacked you.” And then doesn’t remember anything about it.
His gaze went to that sprig of yew in my front shirt pocket again, and then he exhaled, breath shaking. “I woke up early,” he said, tired, as if he’d repeated it too many times. “I had a job across the city, and I wanted to get there before traffic got bad. I hit the alarm, and ro
lled over to give Jacqueline a kiss to go back to sleep. Her eyes were wide-open. Staring. I said something to her. I don’t know what, and she just started hitting me. Screaming that I didn’t deserve her.”
The amulet in my hand was a nice steady green, unlike Jack, who was getting agitated.
“I got off the bed, and she followed me,” he said, voice becoming higher. “She backed me right up into the bathroom. I’m kind of laughing and telling her to stop because it’s crazy, you know? And she’s yelling at me that I was a jerk and didn’t deserve her, and then she went into the kitchen for a knife, I guess, because when I followed her, she tried to stab me with it. That’s when I hit her.” His jaw clenched, and he hid his hands under the table, cuffs clinking. “I was only trying to get her to stop,” he said, pleading for me to believe him. “She dropped the knife and started crying. That’s when the cops broke my door. Shoved me to the floor. Cuffed me. Dragged me into the street.”
His reddening eyes filled, but he never touched them as he looked down. The amulet in my hand was green, but something felt off. I knew grief, having walked beside it as my steady companion for the first fifteen years of my life, and because of it, I paid attention to the little things that those expecting to live to see the next spring never see.
“She said that to you before, didn’t she?” I said, and his eyes flicked to mine. “That you didn’t deserve her.”
He blinked fast, and I held my breath, waiting for it. “I cheated on her while we were engaged,” he said, clearly embarrassed. “I was stupid, and it took a long time for her to forgive me. Maybe she never did. She said she did.”
And there it was, the motive that should have been safely in the past, and my gut tightened. An Inderlander was behind this. But why and, maybe more important, who?
Jack’s jaw tightened, the confusion under his anger easy to see. “We’ve had arguments before, but not like this. And I’ve never hit her. I was only trying to stop her from trying to stab me. Even when she caught me cheating on her, she never tried to hurt me.”