Mortal Sins, page 26
part #5 of World of the Lupi Series
She didn’t push herself until the last mile, so was able to fill Rule in on where the investigation was headed. Laying it out for him cleared her head, too. By the time she was in the shower, washing off the sweat, she’d figured out what the next step needed to be.
They’d soon have a list of graves to be salted. Headquarters was working on it. That was one great thing about turning fed—she could get information a helluva lot faster, even when she needed data from several jurisdictions.
The hundred-mile radius around Halo included multiple North Carolina counties as well as parts of South Carolina and Virginia. That was the problem, Lily thought, with these dinky little eastern states. A hundred miles this way or that, and you ran right out of state. Plus they needed to sort by sex—the ghosts were consistent about calling the wraith “he”—and time of death. The major power wind of the Turning had hit at 2:53 EST, so they were excluding deaths after four p.m. that day.
They’d received the first list well before Lily left for dinner: eighty-two deaths that might have produced the wraith. Unfortunately, it turned out to be incomplete. After a great deal of thinking, pacing—and the occasional sketching of arcane symbols in the air, which worried the cops in the room no end—Cullen had declared that the spell casting could have taken place up to two days after the death. Blood retained a magical connection to the deceased for that long. He thought it likely the spell had been cast very soon after death, but they had to look at deaths over a period of two and a half days.
Lily had had to call headquarters and get them to start over. With luck, though, the expanded list would be waiting for her when she booted up.
Narrowing that list was going to be a lot harder. “Get the name,” Cynna had said. She was trying.
They had no criteria for eliminating any of the male decedents over that three-day period, so they had to go after the human end, the practitioner who’d created the wraith. That practitioner, according to this Baron spirit, was a medium. A woman.
Next step, then, was hunting a medium among all the people who’d had contact with one of the deceased at or near the time of death. That was going to take a while. Lily could tell by touch if someone was a medium. Cullen could see a person’s magic, but couldn’t always tell what their Gift was. Sometimes, yes, but not always. This morning on her run, she’d figured out how to use him anyway.
And the press would help.
She got to her temporary field office at 7:10, booted up her laptop, and got to work. The list was there—and hallelujah, it was sortable. It made sense to start with the deaths on the day of the Turning and those in or very near Halo.
When Brown—the older, grumpier Brown—arrived at seven thirty with Jacobs—white, male, ten years with the Bureau, seldom spoke—she had a lot of white thumbtacks stuck into the map they’d pinned to the wall. That map already had red and green pins in it, showing where dead animals had been found.
The dead animals were noticeably clustered on the west side of town.
“Whatcha got?” Brown asked, sipping from an oversize foam cup of coffee.
“The list of deaths. We’ve got more animal deaths on the west side of town.” She gestured at the map. “We’ll focus on deaths on that side first.”
“Hospital’s on the west side.”
Which meant it included the majority of deaths. “We’ll need to check hospital personnel anyway. Here’s the plan. You know we’re looking for a medium, which means we’re looking for a woman.”
Brown grunted. Jacobs actually spoke. “Problem is, you’re the only one can tell.”
“That’s right. And I can’t testify about what I learn, but we’ll jump that hurdle later. For now we just need to find her.”
“You’re buying all that voodoo stuff?” Brown said.
“I trust the agent who collected the information, so—yes. We’ll assume for now it’s accurate, so we’re looking for a woman who had access to the body. She needed blood for the spell. Brown, you’ll divvy up the list of decedents and make the assignments. I want to know everyone who had access to these people just before, after, or when they died.”
“Male and female both?”
“Yeah, get both. We’ll look at females first, but we might need the others as witsnesses. I’ll be visiting funeral homes and the hospital.”
Brown nodded glumly. “Better look at paramedics, too. Ambulance drivers. Cops.”
He caught on quick. Emergency personnel, like hospital workers and morticians, had plenty of access to the dying and the dead. “Good point.” She grinned. “Careful, Brown. I might start liking you.”
He managed to control his enthusiasm.
“When you’re divvying up the deaths to investigate, leave yourself out. I’m going to give a press conference.”
“Shit. You’re not asking me to—”
“No, I’ll talk to the reporters. Locals only, emphasis on TV and radio. I’ll ask that anyone who knows someone who died on the day of the Turning come to the sheriff’s office and speak with us. You’ll interview those who turn up. You and Seabourne.”
Now he looked horrified. “You’re pairing me with that—that—”
“I am. You’ll take names and addresses, relationship to the deceased, and ask who else was around at the pertinent period. He’ll spot any who have Gifts. He may be able to tell if one is a medium.”
“Somehow I don’t think our perp will trot herself down here to chat.”
“If she doesn’t, we’ll still have more information than we do now. We’ll be able to cross off some of those connected to the deaths on our list because they lack Gifts.”
He sighed heavily. “Putting her on notice, are you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Might shake her up a bit.” She grinned at him, her blood fizzing. She had a line on the human perp now, and a way of hauling in that line. It was just a matter of time.
THE next two and a half days were as frustrating as any Lily could remember. The high point hit Saturday afternoon when she found a medium who worked for one of the mortuaries. Sandy Kaufman dressed the hair of the dead and she was very, very blond—in every sense of the word. Her lights were several bulbs short of a string, in Lily’s opinion—but she was a fairly strong medium.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t dressed the hair of any of the dead from the Turning. She’d been in Hawaii, basking on the beach with her boyfriend, her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her mother’s boyfriend’s mother.
Lily heard from Dr. Alderson on Sunday. The rats they’d fed the contaminated meat to were doing fine. No detectable brain damage.
On Monday at four thirty she was alone in the conference room. In the last three days she’d checked out every person who worked at the town’s two mortuaries and all but two of the EMTs, paramedics, and ambulance drivers; those two were on vacation out of the state. She was about a third of the way through the hospital personnel who might have had contact with any of the dead.
In addition, seventy-two people had come forward in response to her press conference. Cullen had spotted four Gifted women, three of whom Lily would need to check. The fourth had an obvious Fire Gift, he said.
Takes one to know one, she supposed.
It was a good thing she was patient. You had to be, if you worked in law enforcement. There was so damned much waiting involved, so many wrong turns, dead ends, false trails. They had the names and locations of 181 graves that might or might not hold the remains of one of the scattered dead. They did not have permission to pour salt on those graves.
Judges were not known for consulting with spirits. They were also not keen on anything that smacked of the desecration of graves. The U.S. attorney Lily had contacted had passed the job to an assistant, who’d been dragging his feet. Lily couldn’t really blame him, but she’d sicced Ruben’s secretary, Ida, on him anyway. No one withstood Ida for long.
At the moment she was going over the reports on Hodge and Meacham one more time while she waited for her phone to ring. Rule, Alicia, Toby, and Louise should be in the judge’s chambers by now, with their attendant lawyers.
Lily had offered to go, in spite of the case; Rule told her she wouldn’t be needed. This meeting with the judge was a formality. He and Alicia had already drawn up and signed a custody agreement giving Rule sole custody of his son. The judge simply had to approve it.
She hoped he was right. Of course he was right. There was no reason to deny the change of custody other than the most blatant prejudice against lupi, and judges were generally sensible, levelheaded people.
Except for the few who were complete bobble-heads. She’d run into a few so persuaded of their judicial invincibility—and for so little reason—that they’d rule against Mother Teresa if they were in the mood …
Focus, she told herself, and returned to her reading.
She was going over everything they had on Meacham’s and Hodge’s backgrounds one more time. There had to be something the two men had in common other than a Y-chromosome. Something that had caused them, rather than two others, to be possessed by the wraith.
She finished the physical findings and set them aside. Nothing helpful there. Meacham had AB positive blood; Hodge had O negative. One drank; the other was a teetotaler. One was of European extraction; the other, African American. Neither smoked, but that was true of too many others to be useful.
Moving on to the statements from friends and relatives, she found that Meacham had spoken of being allergic to cats. Nothing about any allergies in Hodge’s records, but she made a note to find out. Unlike Meacham, Hodge was still alive, so they could just ask him.
Though he was showing signs of neurological damage—slight, but it was there. Just like Meacham. Just like the dogs.
She started slogging through a long account by a woman who’d known Meacham since he was a kid and had felt compelled to share everything from the third grade on up. Meacham hadn’t gone to the same school as Hodge, not until high school, but the town had only one high school, so that wasn’t significant.
Sounded like Roy Don had been something of a hell-raiser … several tickets for speeding, and the woman said he’d totaled his car when he was seventeen, and … wait. Wait. Might be something here.
Quickly she shuffled back through the official medical reports. Yes, there it was—a record of the emergency room treatment he’d received. It took her a moment to translate the doctorese, but it sounded as if the impact of the steering wheel had bruised his heart, causing fluid to build up. His heart had stopped beating briefly.
Hodge’s heart had stopped, too. Wasn’t that what the chatty Dr. Patel had said? Last year Hodge had a heart attack on his way to the operating room, and his heart had stopped beating.
Check it, check it. She dived into another stack of papers, rummaging for the medical report on Hodge.
Her phone rang in her jacket pocket. Beethoven’s Fifth. She grabbed it. “Yes?”
“He’s mine.” The relief and joy in Rule’s voice jigged her heart into a quick flip. “The judge signed off on our custody arrangement. Toby is fully mine now.”
Yes! No bobble-heads in that courtroom! “We’re celebrating, right?”
“With dinner out. I know it’s hard for you to get time clear right now—”
“I’ll be there. Unless someone else gets killed, I will absolutely be there. Um … there’s that Leidolf deal tonight.” The secrecy bug was catching. Even though no one was in the room, she avoided saying anything specific about clan stuff. “Maybe we could have dinner a little late and go directly there after?”
Rule suggested seven thirty. The door opened and Brown Two marched in, brimming with purpose and urgency.
Lily said a quick goodbye and disconnected. “What?”
“One of the graves on the list has been disturbed,” Brown Two said crisply. “The groundskeeper notified the local police, who are out there now.”
THIRTY-ONE
“SO it was just kids doing a little freelance gardening?” Rule asked.
“Yeah.” Lily sighed. “They messed with several graves, not just the one that’s on our list. That’s the problem with going to the public for help. Before you know it, a few enterprising teens decide we’ve got a zombie outbreak on our hands and they’d better plant garlic on graves at midnight. Garlic.” She was disgusted. “They couldn’t even get their myths right. That’s for vampires, who also don’t exist.”
“Zombies aren’t a myth,” Cullen said from the driver’s seat of Rule’s Mercedes. “They aren’t affected by garlic, but they aren’t a myth.”
Lily stared at the back of his head. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Rule sat in the backseat with Lily. It wasn’t his preferred spot, though being able to put his arm around his nadia was welcome. But the dignity of his role tonight required some touches of pomp.
Cullen was acting as chauffeur, Alex as bodyguard. Normally Cullen would have been seriously unwelcome at a Leidolf ceremony, but with the Rhej unable to attend, the families had been glad of Cullen’s offer to provide the ardor iunctio. The magical fire wasn’t essential, but it was traditional.
“No one makes zombies,” Cullen was saying, “because they’re entirely too much trouble. It takes an ungodly amount of power and the spell’s a son of a bitch, and what do you get? A shambling corpse that stinks to high heaven, loses fingers and toes, and doesn’t come with a remote control. What good is that?”
“You haven’t. Tell me you haven’t tried.”
Cullen snorted. “Am I an idiot? Of course not. Like I said, too much power, time, and trouble for very little results. What would I do with a zombie once I raised one?”
“What would anyone do with one?” Alex asked. “Someone must have thought they’d be useful. They created a spell for it.”
“People keep trying to use magic to skip over death the way you can skip commercials with TiVo. It keeps not working. Whoever created the first zombie-raising spell back in the pre-Purge days wasn’t trying to raise a corpse to make it walk. They wanted to bring the dead to life.” He shrugged. “Not all sorcerers were as sane and sensible as yours truly.”
Rule grinned. “Everything’s relative. Turn’s coming up on the right.”
They were winding along a narrow gravel road, headed for a parking area near a campsite. The others would already be there.
They’d celebrated Rule’s custody victory at the local pizza place, an incredibly noisy place with arcade games and truly wretched salads. Toby’s choice, obviously. Alicia had behaved with great dignity in the judge’s chambers; afterward she’d asked to spend some time with Toby before she headed back to Washington. Of course Rule had agreed. Toby wanted his mother to be part of his life. He needed that.
Tonight, though, Toby was home with Louise. Children did not attend a gens compleo.
It would be held inside the Uwharrie National Forest in a picnic area where hikers were allowed by day. Technically the area was closed at night, but one of Leidolf’s members was a senior ranger. They wouldn’t be bothered.
Not that Rule had explained this in detail to Lily. The informality of their arrangements—which hadn’t included applying for permission—might worry her.
“You’re jazzed about this ceremony, aren’t you?” Lily asked softly.
He had one arm around her, the better to play with her hair when the mood struck. So he did. “The gens compleo is a joyous occasion. I’ve performed it once before, standing in for my father when he was healing. Ah, not the most recent healing, when we met.” Which had been the result of an attempted assassination by Leidolf. “This was years ago.”
“And it’s joyous even when it’s Leidolf.”
He knew the point she wanted to make. “I haven’t rearranged my thinking yet, but it is … changing. And the mantle is in no doubt. It rejoices.”
“You make it sound sentient. Like it knows about the ceremony.”
“It isn’t sentient, but it isn’t precisely not sentient, either.” As usual when trying to describe a mantle, he ran out of words. “It … recognizes what is to happen. Lily, I haven’t thanked you for making time for this tonight. I know it wasn’t easy.”
“No, it wasn’t, but this is what we came here for. This and Toby.” She gripped his hand and squeezed once. “Who is now ours.”
“Another place where I must rearrange my thinking,” he murmured. “When I called you, I said Toby was mine.”
“According to the court, he is.”
“But I like the sound of ours better.”
“Well.” Her voice went low and quiet. “So do I.”
The car slowed and pulled into a small, bare-ground parking area. It was full except for the section reserved for Rule’s vehicle. Two men waited there, dressed in the preferred lupus style—jeans, no shirt. Cullen kept the motor running while Alex got out and spoke briefly to the men, then motioned for Cullen to park.
“More guards?” Lily said, eyebrows lifting. “I thought you were safe.”
“I am. No lupus, Leidolf or otherwise, would attack a Rho—and for tonight, I stand in place of a Rho—at a gens compleo. ” Rule waited for Alex to open his door. “It would be deeply insulting if I appeared without guards, however.”
Cullen opened Lily’s door and bowed—overdoing it, of course. Alex opened Rule’s door without flourishes.
“The guards are ceremonial, then?” Lily asked when he joined her. “A way of marking the importance of the ceremony?”
“In part. More, though, to appear without them would be like saying I didn’t think any of them could pose a threat.”
“But they aren’t a threat. You just said they wouldn’t attack.”
“There’s a difference between wouldn’t and couldn’t. The presence of guards acknowledges that they could.”
“Lupus psychology,” she muttered. “Is there any part of it that isn’t based on who can beat up who?”
Cullen grinned. “There’s also sex. Can’t leave that out.”
