Destroying Angel, page 1
DESTROYING ANGEL
A FOX COUNTY FORENSICS NOVEL
CARA MALONE
Copyright © 2023 by Cara Malone
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
CONTENTS
1. Julia
2. Emery
3. Julia
4. Emery
5. Julia
6. Emery
7. Julia
8. Emery
9. Julia
10. Julia
11. Emery
12. Julia
13. Julia
14. Julia
15. Emery
16. Julia
17. Emery
18. Julia
19. Emery
20. Julia
21. Emery
22. Julia
23. Emery
24. Julia
25. Emery
26. Julia
27. Emery
28. Julia
29. Emery
30. Julia
31. Emery
32. Julia
33. Emery
Epilogue
Angel of Mercy
1
JULIA
“Earth to Julia!”
She snapped out of her daydream, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that her new boss, Tom, had been calling her name – what now passed as her name – for some time. And the entire department was now staring at her.
Nightmare fuel.
“Sorry,” the detective known as Julia Taylor responded, color flooding her fair cheeks.
“Are you a homicide detective or a space cadet?” one of her fellow new recruits, Renee Duvall, asked.
Ugh. She’d only been on the job for one week, mostly doing onboarding and other dull training materials, but she could already tell she and Renee were not destined to be work wives.
“Get enough sleep last night?” Julia’s other boss, Arlen, asked. At least that seemed like a question born of genuine concern, but if she had it to do over again, Julia would have just answered to her damn name and avoided all this in the first place.
She was going to need more practice at that.
“I did, thanks,” she said. “I was just… thinking about an article I read on narcotics-related deaths.”
That was not what she was thinking about, but the article was real enough. She’d transferred to Fox County PD from Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city with a similar population size but a vastly different crime profile. There wasn’t nearly the opiate epidemic there that Fox County was dealing with, and she’d been brushing up.
“Anything illuminating?” Tom asked.
“Well, less than one percent of all overdoses are homicides, so we probably won’t be working many of those,” Julia said. “But there are significantly greater instances of narcotics-driven violence, so we probably will see that type of scene often.”
Tom looked unimpressed, but Arlen said, “Glad to see you’re doing your homework on our population.”
“Anyway,” Tom said, “if we can get back to business…”
Julia’s cheeks colored again at the reminder that she was to blame for the interruption.
“Taylor, you’re going to be with me today,” he said. Oh, great. “Duvall, you’re with Detective Rose. And the rest of you – desk duty.”
The other three new recruits clustered around Tom and Arlen’s desks stifled groans, and Julia tried to suppress a smile at having been chosen on their first day on duty. Renee made no such attempt – she was grinning from ear to ear.
“What are we getting into, boss?” she asked Arlen.
“I’m in the middle of investigating a death reported as a slip-and-fall that turned out to be a homicide,” she said. “We need to talk to the wife.” She turned to the other three newbies. “You all can start looking through the open cases – see if you can close some of them.”
Arlen left, Renee trailing after her, and Julia turned to Tom. “What about us?”
“We’re on deck if a new call comes in,” he said. “Otherwise, same as these grunts. Case review.”
If the others objected to being called grunts, they didn’t show it. Probably too damn grateful to be here to start complaining already.
All five of the new detectives were women, which by itself was a major upset to the status quo. And if Julia’s gaydar was functioning properly, she was not the only queer one in the bunch. Even before she started thinking about getting a new job, she’d heard near-mythical tales of the police department in Pennsylvania that was not only LGBTQ+ friendly, but staffed largely with gorgeous queer women.
The promised land of policing.
Now that she was here, it was turning out to be every bit as true as the rumors said, and if her fellow new recruits were here for the same reason, they’d probably be happy to do all the grunt work in the world for the privilege of carrying a Fox County badge.
Julia followed Tom and the others to the file cabinets that lined one wall and he showed them where to start. She took a small stack of case files and went back to her brand-new desk, Detective Julia Taylor freshly engraved on her nameplate. Yep, this was her life now, her name, her identity.
She could get used to it.
2
EMERY
“Please don’t…”
Emery Ellison’s life – and career – flashed before her eyes as she watched a fifth grader make a screaming leap at a low-hanging grapevine.
In her mind, the thick but dry vine was about to snap under the kid’s weight, but not until the apex of his swing. He’d go flying, crash down on one of the many jagged shale boulders on the trail, and crack his head wide open.
There’d be blood everywhere…
Crying children…
She’d lose her job…
Her warning had been soft and tentative. Who knew if the kid even heard her, or if he just saw her for what she was – a grown-up with very little authority over him who could easily be ignored.
In any case, he was swinging around like freaking Tarzan now, and she was just waiting for that vine to snap, making more ineffective suggestions like, “Excuse me, can you please get down…”
“Mason, get down from there this second!”
His teacher finally noticed what he was doing and the tone of her voice was enough to give Emery the impulse to freeze and apologize. It did the trick – Mason immediately dropped back down to the ground, safely on his feet again.
The teacher – Mrs. Cardone – scowled at Mason until he was sufficiently psychically beaten, then turned to Emery.
“I’m so sorry, Miss Ellison,” she said. “We talked about listening to adults before we left school today.” She leaned a little closer and said under her breath, “You really gotta work on your ‘hey, you little shit’ tone. It’s the only thing some of them respond to.”
“Noted, thanks.”
Emery worked for a university, primarily doing research, so her surprise was justified when her job duties expanded to leading field trips for kids of all age ranges and all over Fox County. She’d take them into the woods around the university and teach them about the mushrooms and other fungi that grew there.
It was a community outreach program designed to raise the university’s profile and get kids interested in science. And when the previous community outreach liaison retired, Emery’s boss had promised her that this arrangement would be temporary.
He also promised it’d get easier the more practice she had.
It’d been a full school year and she’d led about half a dozen field trips, and she was no closer to learning how to control a rowdy bunch of kids who were so excited that it was finally warm enough to go outside again that all they wanted to do was run roughshod over the forest. Emery worried constantly – in equal parts about them injuring themselves and injuring the delicate ecosystem they were so hell-bent on trampling.
And her ‘hey, you little shit’ voice was admittedly not good.
There was one thing she was pretty damn good at when it came to these field trips, though. And she quite enjoyed it, too.
“Everyone, can I get your attention?”
Not a single child looked at her.
Mrs. Cardone took pity. She whistled through her fingers and shouted loud enough to make Emery wince, “Listen up!”
Now, two dozen sets of eyes were on Emery, and she had to take advantage of their attention while she had it. She’d been leading them around the forest for about twenty minutes now, and she’d finally found what she’d been hoping for.
“Have any of you heard of the destroying angel?” she asked, and saw the expressions in all their eyes change. Obedient attention became genuine intrigue as she listed off a few more nicknames. “Death cap. The fool’s mushroom. Amanita bisporigera. The most toxic genus of mushroom in the world… and it grows right here in Pennsylvania.”
She pointed to a couple of large white mushrooms poking out of the rotting leaves on the forest floor, about ten feet off the trail. She’d been keeping her eye out for them the whole hike, and at this time of year, it was pretty much guaranteed they’d spot at least one.
“Come closer, let’s take a look,” she said.
The kids looked at her like she was inviting them to stick their arms in a tiger cage. She shouldn’t enjoy it as much as she did, but it was nice to get a
“It’s safe,” she promised, waving them on as she approached the mushrooms. “You don’t want to touch them without thoroughly washing your hands after, and you never, never want to eat one. But you can look.”
Mrs. Cardone stayed on the trail while the kids tentatively approached Emery. She crouched down and they all followed her lead, gathering around while she taught them how to identify and steer clear of destroying angels.
She may have gone a little heavy on the description of what happens if you do eat one – payback’s a bitch, Mason. But one thing was for sure – none of these kids, no one who’d ever taken a lesson from Emery Ellison on mushroom identification, would make the mistake of eating one of these.
3
JULIA
The stack of open cases on Julia’s desk was ever so slightly shorter by the end of the day. She’d read through two of them as thoroughly as she could and decided that there were no loose ends or unfollowed leads, so they’d have to go back in the file cabinet again.
Most cold cases didn’t get resolved unless new evidence came to light on its own – like when technological advances allowed DNA to be identified where it hadn’t previously been possible, or when the perp committed a new crime and ended up being tied to old ones as well.
Just looking through files, hoping for something to jump out at you, was generally a fool’s errand, but it was part of the job – especially when there was nothing else to do. And on her first day on duty at Fox County PD, it appeared there was nothing else to do but due diligence.
She’d gotten to know the other new hires a bit better during lunch. The five of them had been doing onboarding together for a week, but a lot of their training had been remote learning modules so they hadn’t gotten to talk in person much until now. Today, they went down the street to a diner Arlen recommended when she and Renee got back from their investigation.
They had sandwiches and got to know each other. There was Tate Macawi, a transfer from small-town South Dakota looking for a city with a bit more action where she could prove herself. “I’m here to climb the ladder,” she said, completely unafraid to state her intentions. “I’m aiming for chief someday.”
“Here?” Julia asked.
“Wherever I can get the job,” she said.
“Well, I’ll just be happy to be a good homicide detective,” Ariel Sterner answered. She was local and had been recently promoted from patrol, which was the same story as Lena Wolf, the fourth member of their new team.
And then there was Renee Duvall.
An experienced detective like Julia and Tate, she’d transferred from the missing persons department into homicide. And she’d taken an immediate dislike to Julia for no reason Julia could determine.
The feeling was now mutual.
“I haven’t decided where I ultimately want to end up,” Renee said. “Missing persons was interesting for a while. Homicide ought to be a challenge. I like to keep pushing myself.”
“You don’t want to settle down?” Julia asked.
Renee’s eyes bore into her. “Seems like you know something about that. You left Grand Rapids pretty quick, didn’t you?”
The table went silent for a few beats as heat rushed into Julia’s cheeks and she tried to think of an answer. The whole reason she left Michigan was so that she wouldn’t have to talk about her past. The last thing she wanted to do was invite it to follow her here.
Then thankfully, Tate announced, “Looks like our lunch hour’s almost up. Ready to head back?” and the conversation moved on.
In the afternoon, they all kept reviewing cold cases and learned a little more about their two superiors, Tom Logan and Arlen Rose. Tom was a man of few words, serious, focused on his work and pretty resistant to the attempts Julia and the other new hires made to draw him out.
Arlen was chattier and more open, and Tom was friendly with her, at least. By the end of the day everyone knew that Arlen desperately wanted to propose to her girlfriend, who worked at the medical examiner’s office, but she was also determined to get it right. This meant that even though Arlen decided to propose three months ago, she still hadn’t popped the question.
“Do you think you’ve changed your mind so many times because you’re nervous she might say no?” Tom asked.
Julia was doing her best to appear to be working rather than listening. Renee was making no such attempt.
“How long have you been dating?” she asked.
“About a year and a half,” Arlen said, then turned back to Tom. “I don’t think she’ll say no… I just want it to be perfect. You only get one shot to make that memory, you know?”
“Ideally,” Tom grunted. His desk phone rang and he answered it with a gruff, “Logan.” Julia perked up, no longer pretending not to listen. She was on deck, after all. When Tom hung up, he looked at her. “We just got a call.”
Tate looked at the clock on the wall – now just fifteen minutes til the end of the shift. “Overtime on your first day – lucky duck.”
“Come on,” Tom said, grabbing the FCPD-logoed jacket slung over the back of his chair and not waiting for Julia to catch up as he headed for the elevator.
Most of the employees around here took the stairs – the building was only three floors – but Tom walked with a subtle limp. Julia knew from some gossip Renee shared at lunch that he’d been involved in a shooting a few years ago, though Renee hadn’t provided the nitty-gritty details. Not that Julia was in a position to pry into people’s backgrounds.
She hopped on the elevator with Tom just as the doors were sliding closed. “Where we going?”
“Hospital,” he said. “Acute liver failure on an otherwise healthy twenty-five-year-old.”
“Very unusual.” Her mind was already whirring with the limited medical knowledge she had about liver failure. Acute, that meant it was a recent development, and healthy twenty-somethings didn’t generally have livers that just quit working on their own. “Dispatch say anything else?”
“Nope,” Tom said. Man of few words indeed – Julia tried not to take it personally.
They went down to the parking deck and got in Tom’s behemoth of an unmarked SUV. He drove them to Fox County Hospital and found their decedent in a private room in the intensive care unit.
“Take notes,” Tom said at the threshold of the room. “I know you got three years under your belt in Michigan, but I don’t know you from Adam so you gotta prove yourself just like everybody else at FCPD. You’re second on this case til I say otherwise, got it?”
Julia swallowed her annoyance. She had a long list of commendations and achievements from her time in Grand Rapids, but she’d been forced to leave her entire history behind in order to get the anonymity she needed. No one on her new team knew what her career was like. To them, she might as well be fresh out of the academy.
She pulled out her notebook and followed Tom into the room.
The decedent was lying in the hospital bed, a white sheet pulled up over his head. There was an investigator from the medical examiner’s office in the room, unfolding a black body bag in preparation to move the body, and she smiled when she saw Tom.
“Oh good, you gonna help me do the transfer so I don’t have to flag down a nurse?”
“Not with my bum leg, Ross,” Tom said.
The investigator, a fit brunette with a tan complexion, rolled her eyes. “Why is it that injury always gets more severe whenever you’re trying to weasel out of something?”
“It doesn’t,” Tom objected. “Taylor, you wanna jump in?”
