CHAPTER 3
The Interstate was already filling up with end-of-work traffic, but I made decent time through the city. The burger place wasn’t too far from where I lived in Chandler. I felt a little like a yo-yo, driving up and down I-10.
Even before I left the freeway, I saw the crime scene. There must have been a dozen police cruisers in the restaurant parking lot, all of them with their lights flashing. I exited and crawled through the crowded roadways until I reached the lot. One of the cops there tried to stop me from pulling in. I took out my wallet and opened it to my PI license. But once the cop got a good look at my face, he waved me in without bothering to check the license.
Fame had its perks.
Since late spring, when I killed Etienne de Cahors, the reanimated spirit of a medieval druid from Gaul, who had been responsible for the infamous Blind Angel Killings, I had been something of a celebrity here in Phoenix. My role in solving a second set of murders this summer only served to cement that status. A part of me wondered if at this point I could have gotten myself reinstated as a detective in Homicide. But the problems that first convinced the higher-ups in the PPD to fire me—the phasings, and the fact that I lose my mind for three days out of every month—hadn’t gone away. I was still a weremyste, and thus still subject to the moon’s influence on my mind and my magic. Plus, I had come to enjoy my work as a PI, despite its many drawbacks. Mostly I liked being my own boss, and with wealthy clients like Helen Barr now seeking me out, I was starting to make decent money.
I parked and soon spotted Kona and her new partner, Kevin Glass, standing by the doors to the restaurant. Kona raised a hand in greeting and then beckoned me over with a waggle of her fingers.
No matter where she was, Kona stood out in a crowd. She was tall and thin, with skin the color of roast coffee, the cheekbones of a fashion model, and tightly curled black hair that she wore short. With her thousand-watt smile and her tasteful fashion sense, she might well have been the most beautiful woman I had ever met. Predictably, though, she wasn’t smiling now. Neither was Kevin, who was also African American and attractive. Together, they were every bit as stunning as the weremancers who had attacked me earlier.
I passed a body as I walked to where they waited for me. It was covered with a white sheet, and a pair of uniformed officers were keeping people at a distance. I slowed as I walked by. A woman’s hand, with nails painted bright pink, peeked out from beneath the sheet. I continued to where Kona and Kevin were waiting.
“Thank for coming, partner,” she said, her expression grim, her voice flat. “I’m sorry if I pulled you away from something important.”
“I can’t even begin to tell you how you didn’t. Hey, Kevin.” I held out my hand and Kevin gripped it.
“Good to see you, Jay.”
I glanced around the parking lot and then tried to see inside past the reflective glare of the restaurant’s glass doors. “What have you got?”
“Two dead, three more wounded, one of them critically, and a whole lot of frightened people who can’t make up their minds as to what it is they saw.”
“What do you mean?”
Kona scanned the lot before tipping her head toward the door. “Come inside and we’ll talk.”
“You don’t want me to take a look at the body over there?”
“Oh, you will. But I want you to see the one in here first.”
That didn’t sound good at all.
I followed Kona and Kevin inside, and halted, taking in the damage. The place was a mess, the floor littered with half-eaten burgers and torn ketchup packets, french fries and plastic utensils, paper wrappers and brightly colored cardboard, all of them soaking in spilled sodas and shakes. I took a step and heard something crunch beneath my shoe.
“Careful,” Kona said. “There’s glass everywhere.”
I examined the windows, frowning. None was broken. “From what?”
She pointed at the ceiling.
Craning my neck, I saw that the recessed light bulbs above us had been blown out. All of them.
“Geez,” I whispered.
“No kidding. Any idea what might do that?”
I shook my head. “None.”
“I was afraid of that. Follow me. There’s something else I want you to see.”
We walked around a condiment station and a trash can, placing our feet with care. I was wearing tennis shoes, and didn’t much care that I was walking through a shallow lake of cola, lemonade, and root beer. But I could tell that this was killing Kona, whose love of nice shoes was exceeded only by her love of bright, dangly earrings.
She led me to a table that was as much a wreck as the floor. A body lay beside the table and its fixed chairs, the sheet covering it soaking up the spilled drinks.
“They wanted to move him,” Kona said, reaching down to pull the sheet away and wrinkling her nose, “but I insisted they keep him as he was until you could see.”
“Thanks, I think.”
I squatted to examine the corpse more closely. He was a big man, tall and broad, with nondescript features. His eyes remained open, and his teeth were bared. Forced to guess, I’d have said he died in pain. He might have been a runecrafter in life, but I couldn’t be sure. The blurring effect that I could see in the faces of weremystes died with the sorcerer.
I could tell, though, that magic had killed him.
The front of his shirt was blackened and there was a hole in the cloth where the spell had hit him. The skin beneath was scorched as well. And a sheen of glowing magic clung to his shirt and blistered flesh, warm reddish brown, like the color of the full moon as it creeps above the desert horizon.
All spells left a residue of magic that manifested itself in this way, allowing a trained weremyste like me to do a bit of magical forensic work. Every sorcerer’s power expressed itself in a different color, and faded at a different rate. The more powerful the runecrafter the richer the magic and the faster it vanished. The russet I saw on this corpse was a powerful hue; having not seen the spell when it was first cast, I couldn’t determine how much it had faded, but I was guessing that it had been a good deal brighter an hour ago.
“Well?” Kona asked, watching me.
“Yeah, he was killed with magic.” I pointed to his chest. “It hit him there.”
“I could have told you that,” Kevin said.
“I don’t know what kind of spell it was.”
“People described it as bolts of lightning,” Kona said. “They say it flew from her hands, like in the movies. That’s what one guy told the uniforms who took his statement. ‘It looked like something out of the movies.’” She chuckled, dry and humorless, and shook her head. “That’s not all, either. When she attacked them—”
“Them?”
“Yeah,” Kona said. “John Doe here had a partner. The second guy was hit by the same magic, but somehow he survived, at least so far. The EMTs couldn’t say why. He was in bad shape when they took him; they said the odds of him recovering were no better than fifty-fifty.”
I nodded. “Okay. You were going to tell me something else—something that happened when he was attacked?”
“Right,” Kona said. “That was when the lights blew. They flickered and then popped. People said there were sparks everywhere.”
I eyed the broken light bulbs again. I’d never heard of magic drawing upon electricity, but there was a first for everything, right? “Tell me about the woman.”
“Dark hair, dark eyes, most agree that she appears to be Latina. About five feet, five inches and one hundred and twenty pounds. Witnesses say she’s attractive. And every one of them confirms that she has two little kids with her: a girl of about eight, and a boy of four or five.”
I straightened, my eyes never leaving Kona’s face. “A mom did this?”
“A magical mom, from what you’re telling me.”
“Damn.” I rubbed a hand over my face. “You called this guy John Doe. He had no ID on him?”
“None. And neither did his companion.”
I gazed down at the body again, taking in the expensive clothes and shoes, the nondescript features. “Well, this is a little weird.”
“This is nothing,” Kevin said. “Wait until you see the woman outside.”
We left the restaurant and walked to where the second body lay.
“Accounts of what happened out here are a little sketchier,” Kona said. “Apparently our magical mom brought her kids out of the restaurant and they were confronted by two people. One was young, blonde, about five-ten. The other was older—mid-sixties, maybe—silver haired with a trim beard and mustache. From what we were told, it seems he’s our second killer.”
Kona bent and pulled back the sheet covering this second corpse. The woman on the pavement was perhaps in her mid-thirties. She was heavy, with light brown curls and a wedding band on her left hand. She wore jeans and a Diamondbacks t-shirt. I could see no obvious cause of death, no marks on her face and neck, no tears or cuts in her clothing, no blood trail from a wound on her back or head. Her facial expression was as different from that of the first victim as one could imagine. Her eyes were closed, her features so composed she could have been sleeping.
One mark on her t-shirt did catch my eye: a stain on her left shoulder, about the size of a fist and located at the seam where the sleeve began. The shirt was red, so I couldn’t be certain, but it might have been dried blood. Not a lot—not enough to have killed her—but enough to draw my attention.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the spot.
“That’s what we want to know, too,” Kona said. “It’s the only wound on her.”
“So there is a wound under there.”
She nodded. “But not like one I’ve ever found at a murder scene.”
“Can I look?”
Kona glanced at Kevin, who was already watching her. He shrugged.
“Knock yourself out,” she said. “But don’t do anything stupid to my crime scene.”
Right.
I didn’t have gloves, but I did have a pencil—the one I used to take notes when questioning clients and witnesses. I took it from my pocket and gently slipped it under the dead woman’s sleeve. Using the pencil as a lever, I lifted the sleeve and peered beneath it. I couldn’t see the entire wound this way, at least not without allowing the pencil to touch the victim’s skin. But I could see enough.
The skin hadn’t been broken, but it was discolored. At first glance I thought it nothing more than a simple contusion, darker than most, but not strange enough to draw my notice. If Kona hadn’t mentioned how unusual it was, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance. But as I examined it, I saw that she was right. The skin on and around the “bruise,” for want of a better term, was raised and puckered, and the subcutaneous darkening was uneven, almost dotted, as if . . . Well, I didn’t quite know how to finish that thought.
“Witnesses?” I asked, still examining the injury.
“Several, but their accounts don’t help much. Our silver-haired perp laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder, kept it there for maybe half a minute, and then let go of her. When he did, she fell to the pavement and didn’t move again.”
I frowned. “He did this with his hand?”
“That’s what they say. I’m assuming there was magic involved,” she said, dropping her voice.
“None that I can find.”
“Say that again.”
I eased the pencil out of the sleeve and straightened once more. “There isn’t any magical residue on the woman at all. If the perp was a weremyste, he didn’t use a spell to kill her or direct any magic her way.”
“Well, damn,” Kona said, staring down at the body. “I didn’t see that coming.”
“Do you have any idea what the cause of death was?”
She shook her head. “That’s what I wanted you to tell me. Now we’re going to have to wait for the coroner’s report.”
I didn’t answer at first. I faced the restaurant and surveyed the parking lot and sidewalk, trying to reconcile what I had seen inside with the wound on this corpse lying at my feet. The restaurant grounds were as much a mess as the interior. Two large trash containers had been overturned, strewing garbage everywhere. I walked to the nearer of the containers and squatted beside it. Rust-colored magic danced along the edge of the faux-stone plastic, bleached by the afternoon sun, but obvious now that I knew to look for it. The same magic shimmered on the other container as well.
“The woman with the kids was trying to get away,” I said.
“She did get away.”
I faced Kona. “I get that. What I mean is, these other guys came after her. The dead guy inside and his friend, the silver-haired man out here. They were after her for some reason. She attacked the two inside directly. Out here . . .” I gestured at the mess. “For some reason she didn’t go after the older man and his partner in the same way.”
“You know this, or are you guessing?”
“I’m guessing,” I said. “But there’s magic on these trash cans.”
Kona’s eyebrows went up. “All right. So why wouldn’t she use the same mojo here? It worked well enough the first time.”
I considered the question. “There are a number of possible reasons. Maybe she didn’t want to hurt or kill the guys outside. Maybe she knew them, cared about them, and so she held back.”
“That’s one possibility. What’s the other?”
“I can think of two others. The first is that the casting she used inside wouldn’t work out here. It seems like she found some way to tap into the restaurant’s electrical system, and she might not have been able to replicate the spell once she was outside. But that reasoning breaks down pretty quickly. A sorcerer powerful enough to use magic like that inside would be able to come up with some other attack.”
“All right, then what about third?”
“Well,” I said, “if I found myself face-to-face with a sorcerer I knew I couldn’t beat, someone so powerful that any attack spell I tried was bound to fail, I’d go to a different sort of attack, something that a normal warding might not stop.”
“Like dropping a garbage can on him,” Kevin said.
“Exactly.”
My eyes met Kevin’s, and apparently Kona didn’t like what she saw pass between us.
“The woman killed a man,” she said. “At least that’s what my witnesses are telling me. For now at least, she’s as much a murder suspect as the guy with silver hair.”
“Even if she was protecting herself and her kids,” I said.
“Even if. And what’s more, you know I’m right. You haven’t been off the job that long.”
She was right. For the most part.
“Not that long, no. But the fact is, I don’t have a badge anymore.”
“Aside from the PPD, you don’t have a client, either.”
“The PPD isn’t a client, and you know it. I do this to help you out, and because, sick as it is, I still love working a crime scene. But I’m not bound by the same rules.”
“Justis,” she said, a warning in her tone.
I stepped closer to her. “Think about it, Kona,” I said, my voice low. “Procedure might be telling you one thing, but your head and your heart are telling you another. The woman had kids with her, little kids. She wouldn’t have gotten into a magical battle unless she had no choice.”
“That a new magic you’ve learned?” she asked. “You can listen in to what’s going in my head and my heart?”
I held her gaze, saying nothing. After a few seconds of this, she rolled her eyes.
“Fine, it might have been self-defense. Be that as it may—”
“You invited me in,” I said, “but I have no official role here. So wouldn’t it be helpful to you if I dug around a little bit?”
“That depends.”
“It’s not like I’m going to help her slip out of the country. But the magic is pointing me in a clear direction: She’s a victim, or would have been if she hadn’t gotten away. So let me work that angle. Maybe I can find her. And maybe through her I can find your silver-haired killer.” I pointed at the second corpse. “And figure out how he killed that woman.”
For a long time, Kona didn’t respond. She pursed her lips, her eyes trained on the ground in front of her, and after a while she began to shake her head, which told me that I had won.
“She’s driving a minivan, silver, late model. We have conflicting reports on whether it’s a Toyota, a Mazda, or a Honda. She was last seen turning onto the southbound entrance ramp.” I thought she might say more, but after a moment she closed her notepad.
“What else, Kona?”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“Probably?”
She raised her eyes to mine. “A couple of witnesses said that her van nearly tipped over as she sped away. And one of them was convinced he saw the silver-haired guy hold his hand up, like he was pointing at the van. This was before the woman he was holding died.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. I went back to the corpse and again used the pencil to uncover the wound on her shoulder. There was one possibility that explained the wound and what the silver-haired man might have been doing. It might even have explained why there was no trace of magic on the dead woman. The problem was, I didn’t believe what I was contemplating could be possible. Didn’t believe it, and didn’t want to.
“What’s on your mind, Justis?” Kona asked from behind me.
I shook my head, and stood once more. “Nothing. I’m . . . nothing.”
“Uh huh.” No one could pack more sarcasm into two syllables than Kona.
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” I said. “You’ll do the same?”
“As much as I can.”
It was, I knew, the best she could offer.
“All right. See you around, partner. Kevin, take care.”
“Later, Jay.”
I made my way back to the Z-ster, got in, and started her up. After idling for a few seconds, I pulled out of the parking lot and steered onto the interstate. But rather than heading back north into the city, I drove south. I couldn’t say why. I didn’t think I could track the woman by her magic, though to make sure I cast a spell that, at least in theory, might have worked.
Seven elements: the woman, her minivan, her kids, her red-brown magic, the freeway, me, and a magical trail connecting all of us. I felt the power of my spell dance along my skin as I drove, but I saw nothing.
Still, I drove for a while, emerging from the sprawl of Phoenix into the flat open desert of the Gila River Indian Community. The reservation covered close to six hundred square miles, and had been, since the middle of the nineteenth century, home to the Akimel O’odham and Pee-Posh tribes, also known as the Pimas and the Maricopas. As with so much Indian territory in the state, there wasn’t much to look at on this land. Even back in 1859, the Federal Government had already gotten very good at picking out the least valuable lands for the tribal nations. There were few landmarks along this stretch of highway beyond a small airfield about three miles south of the restaurant.
I tried the tracking spell a second time, but was no more successful than I’d been before. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to turn around. I drove forty miles through the heart of the territory and beyond its southern boundary, until I reached the outskirts of Casa Grande. There, finally, I took the exit and reentered the freeway heading north.
I’d wasted some gas and some time, but I didn’t mind that. What bothered me was the sense I had after starting back toward Phoenix that I was now heading in the wrong direction. My spell hadn’t worked, and I couldn’t explain what I was feeling. But I had been a cop and a weremyste for too long to dismiss it.
I resisted the urge to head south again, and made my way back into the city. The one blessing in all of this was that I was driving against the worst of the traffic. Before long I had pulled up in front of Billie Castle’s house in Tempe.
Billie and I met during my investigation into the last of the Blind Angel murders. The killer’s final victim, a girl named Claudia Deegan, was the daughter of Arizona’s senior U.S. Senator, Randolph Deegan, who had established himself as the most powerful politician in the state. He was about to be elected governor in what everyone, including his opponent, knew would be a landslide, and many believed he had presidential ambitions. Among those who believed this was my girlfriend. Billie was a journalist. To be more precise, she was what many in the business call an opinion shaper. She maintained a blog called “Castle’s Village,” which attracted a wide readership throughout the Southwest.
When we met, she was digging up information on Claudia’s murder, and I was less than forthcoming with what I knew. Eight years on the Phoenix police force had left me with a healthy aversion to the press.
But in addition to being tenacious and smart as hell, she was also charming and beautiful, and for some reason surpassing understanding, she wound up being drawn to me as powerfully as I was to her.
Notwithstanding a few preliminary bumps, our relationship had been developing steadily ever since. It took her a little while to believe in the magic I wield, and a bit longer to accept that my ability to cast spells was worth the cost of the phasings. To be honest, I’m not sure that she’s convinced of this yet. There are drugs that a weremyste can take—they’re called blockers—that would blunt the effects of the full moon and probably keep me from going insane later in life. But they do this at the expense of my runecrafting, and that’s not a trade I’m willing to make. At least not yet. But I was convinced that if Billie had her way, I’d be taking them.
Aside from that, though, things have been great.
Well, mostly. Being involved with me did almost get her killed during the summer, when Saorla threw the magical equivalent of a bomb at a Mexican place in which we were having lunch. Billie’s injuries were severe: broken bones, concussion, a collapsed lung. But she’s better now.
Yeah.
I have no idea why she is still with me. If I had been in her position, I would have run screaming from this relationship months ago. I was a lucky man.
I parked out front, pulled the Glock from beneath the seat and slipped it into my jacket pocket, and approached her front door. Before I was halfway up the path, the door opened and she came outside looking none-too-happy.
“Thank God,” she said. “I’ve been calling you, texting you; I even tried email.”
“I was driving. What’s up?”
“Your friend’s here. He’s doing that silent immovable thing and it’s driving me nuts.”