Shadow's Blade, page 3
Missus Barr had continued to work her way through the images, but at that she glanced in my direction. “February? That’s when this started?”
“I haven’t been able to determine exactly when their affair began. The earliest date I’ve been able to confirm is in the first week of April, but it’s possible that they started meeting before then.”
“How old is she?”
I lifted a shoulder. “I’m not sure of her exact—”
“Of course you are. How old?”
I hated this part of my job. “Twenty-seven.”
Her nod was jerky. “Tom has always been a handsome man. And I suppose the money helps.”
I said nothing.
She clicked through a few more images, stopping at the shot of her husband with his hand on the young woman’s rear.
“Damn,” she whispered.
I chanced a peek at her, and regretted it right away. Tears ran down her cheeks from eyes that were red-rimmed and swollen.
“I’m sorry, Missus Barr.”
She swiped at her cheeks, the gesture impatient, angry. “It’s not your fault, it’s his. And mine. I told you to find out everything, didn’t I? I thought it wouldn’t bother me, that I’d sue the bastard for divorce, take him to the cleaners, and be happy to walk away. It’s not that easy, is it?”
“In my experience, it never is.”
A small breathless laugh escaped her. “Am I that much of a cliché, Mister Fearsson?”
I dropped my gaze, cringing on the inside. “Forgive me. That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s all right. That was an attempt at humor.” She closed out of the program she was using to view the photos and ejected the disc. “You have more copies of this?” she asked, holding it up.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s yours to keep, and if by some chance you lose it, or he finds it and destroys it, I can make a new one. And I’ll see to it that the photos are available for the divorce proceedings.”
“Good. What do I owe you?”
“I can send you a bill.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re here now. Let me pay you. Or rather, let Tom pay you. I like the irony of that, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, grinning. “But I had some expenses that I need to tally up. And I was wondering if you might want to keep me on retainer in case you should need more information.”
She hesitated. “I suppose that might be a good idea. How does that work?”
“It’s very easy. We’ve already signed an agreement, and it remains in place until we both agree to terminate it. The difference is, I’ll be taking on other clients and will only charge you for those days when I work on your case a minimum of three hours. And in the meantime, I’ll bill you for those days I’ve worked thus far.”
“Yes, all right. Thank you, that’s . . . I find it reassuring knowing that I’ll have your services if I need them.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She led me back to the front foyer, seeming more composed than she had when looking through the pictures.
“I’m sorry to have been the bearer of bad news,” I told her as she opened the door.
“You weren’t, not really. I hired you because I suspected Tom was up to something. Now I know beyond a doubt. Thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mister Fearsson. I’m fine. Or if not, I will be soon.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m going to call my lawyer, then I’m going to take a nice hot bath, and then I’m going to go out and get laid.”
I laughed.
“You didn’t expect that, did you?”
“No,” I said, and meant it.
“Tom won’t expect it either.”
My cell phone rang before I could respond. I glanced at the screen. The call was from Kona Shaw, my former partner on the Phoenix police force.
“I’m sorry, Missus Barr—”
“No apologies. Go answer your phone. And be sure to bill me soon. That’s one check I’m going to enjoy writing.”
I shook her hand and started back up the path to my car. As I walked, I flipped open my phone. Yes, I’m still the somewhat-less-than-proud owner of a flip phone; I try to keep away from gadgets that are smarter than I am, which these days is almost all of them.
“What’s up, partner?” I said. “Please tell me you have work for me.”
“Private investigating business slow these days?” Kona asked, her voice sounding paper thin through the phone. Our connection buzzed with all the noise in the background, not only the din of voices one hears at any crime scene, but also a prominent hum. It sounded like she was standing by a race track.
“Yeah, a little. Where are you?”
“Just off the interstate. Feel like eyeballing a couple of corpses, maybe telling me if you see magic on them?”
“Sick as it might sound, I can’t think of anything better right now. As long as the case has nothing to do with broken marriages or cheating spouses.”
Silence.
“Kona?”
“Sorry, Justis. Meet me at the burger place, exit 162 off of Interstate 10. I’ll explain everything.”
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?”
