The Truth About Night

by Amanda Arista

  “Either way, magic was used and a woman is dead.”

  The deal between us ran across my brain. “And if it’s magical, it’s yours. If it’s not, it’s mine. Are you going to go to the pack?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “It’s not enough. They would crucify us and we’d never be able to find the truth of what happened to Ethan.”

  Part of me was relieved that he wasn’t going to fight me on staying with this story. Not that he could have really done anything to keep me from investigating. Not that anyone or anything could keep me from chasing this story.

  “Since you can’t go to the pack, do Wanderers have books? Those dusty grimoires in all those movies?”

  He sighed. “It’s not all like the movies, but yes, we have our own references.”

  “Great. Then research what would do that to a body. I’ll stay here, call Rutherford.”

  He leaned against the car. “You need sleep. You’re frayed around the edges.”

  I scoffed. “How the hell would you know?

  “Call it a perk.” He looked one last time at the apartment. “No matter how hard you think you are, Miss Lanard. Even you need to rest. Any maybe something to eat that isn’t rabbit food.”

  What was it with the men in my life making sure that I ate? “After the cops, I’ll go home, get some sleep, and then I’ll follow up with the M.E. and see what she can get from the body.”

  He grumbled, but eventually stood, luckily upwind of me. He still smelled like the woods, the pines that he had probably brushed up against. “Call me when you have something.”

  Natasha was the prettiest M.E. technician I had ever worked with. She was blonde and tall and thin and wore shades of pink that left streaks across my retinas. It was late enough in the morning that people were actually beginning their work for the day and short staffed enough that no one notices a civvie sneaking into the building.

  “Hello, Merci,” Natasha chirped as she slid a body into a locker and shut the door.

  “How do you shove around these bodies in those heels?”

  Natasha smiled and regarded her pink shoes lovingly. “You get used to it. Even have special soles so I don’t slip.”

  I plodded after her in my boots as she bounded across the lab to her walled-off office. Even her office had way too much pink for my taste. But despite all the blush tones, Natasha loved to tell the stories of the dead. It was why she was down here instead of on a pediatric ward cheering up the entire floor. It was why she was a kindred spirit.

  We sat down across from each other, like we had a hundred times before.

  “How are you doing, Merci?” Natasha asked. “I made sure they handled Ethan with care. I wish I could have done more.”

  Everything within me tensed at seeing his body again in my mind’s eye. Imagining him wrapped up in that cold bag, under a sheet like the one yesterday. Each time it happened a little faster, the fresh sting got a little duller, being slowly replaced by the cool sadness of loss.

  “It’s okay, Natasha. I appreciate all you do.”

  “So what brings you to my level of the underworld today?” She smiled.

  “Rutherford sent over a dead body yesterday.”

  “Tiara Henderson?” Natasha cocked her head. “You usually don’t want to hear about the weird stuff, Merci. You’re more of a just-the-facts-ma’am.”

  The skin between my shoulders tingled, and it wasn’t just as her very bad impersonation. “Life has been strange enough lately for me to want to make the leap, but you’ve seen everything under the sun. What makes her death weird to you?”

  Whatever I said turned on a light behind Natasha’s already bright blue eyes. “To get the full weirdness, we don’t start with Tiara Henderson. We need to go back a week.”

  Natasha fluttered her hot pink nails over her computer keyboard, bringing up her database of the dead. “Last week, John Elroy Mitchell was found on a doorstep in a residential neighborhood.”

  “Wait. I know that name.” Why did I know that name? I flipped through the mental Rolodex in my head of informants, but came back blank.

  “He had a picture of a family in his breast pocket. No names on the picture but a family. A wife and two kids. Wouldn’t know it by the gross examination. He was emaciated, to the point his teeth were falling out and they couldn’t even match a dental. His skin was leathered like he’d been in the sun for years. He was marked as a drug overdose, but his clothes were fairly intact and this picture was in perfect condition.”

  I frowned. “His family never reached out to find him?”

  “You’re not getting it. The picture was perfect, like brand-new. Not even old enough to be considered a missing person.”

  Natasha turned the computer screen to me and I stared at the man from the other night at the bar. The one who had attacked me and ripped off my bandage.

  “He’s a reporter for The Teller. I had a fight with him last week.”

  Natasha nodded. “I know. Before and after,” she said as she clicked the arrow key on her keyboard and I was face-to-face with something from National Geographic’s Ancient Egypt explorations. It was Tay-Tay all over again. The weathered skin, the strangely perfect hair and the sunken eyes not even juicy enough to wink.

  “The same thing happened to him?”

  Natasha nodded. “Now do you understand the weird?”

  I was beginning to understand it with every passing minute of this week.

  “Why didn’t you call me about Mitchell when you found out he was a journalist?”

  Natasha pressed her lips together, and her eyes went soft and doey. “I thought you might need your space after Ethan, and I couldn’t bear to call you with another dead reporter.”

  Poor thing did have a point. The normal human reaction to a loved one’s death would be to grieve, not hunt down dead bodies in the middle of the night. But I’ve never been a normal human.

  “Do you have pictures from the Mitchell scene?”

  “I do.” She searched around more in the file and found the wide shot of Mitchell’s body.

  I leaned in to study it, still remembering the horrifying stench that had emanated from Tay-Tay’s. Same strange position, same strange freeze-dried clothes.

  Same ugly plaid sports jacket that he’d been wearing the night that we had fought. I leaned back in my seat with a thud.

  “I saw him last Wednesday night. I had a fight with him at McTaggert’s. He accused me of lying about Ethan’s death.”

  Natasha’s eyes went Betty Boop wide. “You might have been the last person to see him alive, Merci. They found his body Thursday morning.”

  “Seems to be a running trend with me.” I rubbed my suddenly very cold arms. “Tiara Henderson had a mark on her arm. Got anything on Mitchell’s?”

  Natasha turned the screen back to her and clicked through a few things. “There was something. Couldn’t really make it out during the examination.”

  Two bodies with two potential magical marks. This did not sound good at all. “Anything else about Tay-Tay?”

  “The general state of the body was closer to something you’d see in a hot, dry climate. Dehydration beat out decomposition. But she had only been dead for a day or two max.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I found a cell phone in her bra, still had a charge.”

  A cell phone with a charge would have a potential phone number to Benny. Electricity ran up my spine, through my already tingling shoulder blades and settled in the crown of my head.

  I needed the numbers off that cell phone. Natasha had helped me tell the story of the dead a hundred times. Printing extra pictures was one thing. But a cell phone? This was a chain of custody thing that could get Natasha fired, and I didn’t want that. So I gave her a bit of my truth to make my case as delicately as possible.

  “Tiara Henderson’s boyfriend is a suspect in Ethan’s death.”

  Her eyes went wide again. “Oh my, Merci.”

  “Is there any c
hance her phone is still here? That you could help me solve Ethan’s murder by seeing if there is a contact for this guy?”

  I waited for her answer, waited as I watched her eyes search mine.

  “Cops haven’t picked up the evidence bag yet. Let me get you some gloves.”

  Pulling the phone numbers out of Tay-Tay’s phone was surgery, a precise execution of gloves and sterile environments. I’d hovered over Natasha’s shoulder as she opened up the phone and found a few potential numbers that I snapped pictures of with my own camera phone.

  She didn’t breathe again until she put the phone back in the plastic bag clearly sealed with ME tape.

  I flipped through my notebook to see if there was any loose ends. There was nothing pertaining to these dead bodies, but my pages were still filled with the lost and missing. “What kinds of records are kept on those without autopsies?”

  “Officially, not much. Time location, COD, and that’s about it. But I remember all of them. Someone has to remember the unnamed.”

  “All of them?” I almost didn’t believe her, but I saw the truth in Natasha’s eyes.

  She nodded as she reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a pink water bottle. Her fuchsia lips pinched around the straw and she took a long sip.

  “So then our John Does that come through here, you remember those?”

  Natasha nodded and her blond ponytail bobbed.

  She didn’t go to the computer this time. She rolled over to a tall filing cabinet and opened the second to last shelf. She pulled out a folder, which struck me as odd; everything officially on record was in the database. This wasn’t official. This was an unofficial Natasha file, and by the size of the cabinet, there were a lot of unofficial things in there.

  She handed the original file over to me without needing to look into it. “For example, John Doe, August Fifteenth. Official report chalked it up to exposure.”

  I flipped through the pictures. Stained clothing. Worn shoes. The body didn’t have the same dehydrated look to the resent ones. It wasn’t freeze dried or in a strange position. He was just dead, face down on a checkered tiled floor. “And the unofficial report?”

  Natasha pieced her words together and her eyes darted through the files I knew she had stored in her mind. “Exposure seemed likely at the time, but it was August and the conditions of the body were not exactly conducive for that particular determination.”

  “How not conducive?” I asked as I flipped through the photos to find one of the face, to gain the identity of this lost soul.

  “You know how you wear a pair of pants a few times and the knees stretch out?”

  I nodded.

  “The body was like that. Loose. Like it had been a man suit.”

  I shivered at the mental pictures. But I could see it in the eyes of the autopsy photos, like there was an extra gap between his gums and his lips, between his eye and his eyelids that looked stretched. “If you were a gambler, would you this John Doe is connected to my two?” I asked.

  “No. Definitely not. I just wanted to let you know there has been a noticeable uptick in weird over the last six months.”

  “When you say uptick? What do you mean?” I asked.

  Natasha looked over her shoulder. “I’m going to have to get a new filing cabinet.”

  I eyed the thousands of stories in those filing cabinets like a hive of questions waiting to be answered. “Have you mentioned this to the police?”

  “Of course. It’s my duty to get these people’s stories told.”

  “Did they do anything about it?”

  “Not exactly,” she said simply.

  “Then why didn’t you tell me about some of these?”

  Natasha sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, Merci. You fight for this city, but even you can’t solve every mystery in the world.”

  She wasn’t lying. I couldn’t do everything about all the dead, but I could do things about some. Specifically those who were connected to Ethan’s death. I had two dead bodies to work with. This new lost soul was just going to have to wait until another day. I closed the file and put it back on her desk.

  “I’m going to keep digging, keep figuring out what is going on. See that Tay-Tay gets a proper burial. Let me know if the family doesn’t cover it and I will.”

  I walked out of the M.E.’s with two very strange cases, complete with pictures. I headed straight to the newspaper office. I’d missed evening pitch by about an hour, but at least I had one story that I could get words on. I needed a reason for Hayne to stop tiptoeing around me like I was a glass vase teetering on the edge of a shelf. I needed to show him I was back in the game.

  After completely freaking out some poor newbie in the copy room as I printed out the pictures from my phone, I did every special trick in the book to try to figure out what was on Tay-Tay’s and Mitchell’s arms. The deterioration just made it too hard to see what had been there. My two tricks with photos and computers were nothing compared to what Ethan could have done with them. He could have re-pixelated and contrasted and brightened the pictures within three seconds and gotten me the image in three second.

  I closed my eyes and just let the sadness watch over me, float around for three seconds in the abyss of loss. Yes, he had kept huge things from me. But he was still a part of me, a part of this team, and this half of the team needed help.

  I tossed the photos of the bodies on Hayne’s desk.

  He jerked back like I’d thrown a rattlesnake before him. “Jesus Christ, Lanard. I was about to eat.” Hayne tossed the Reuben he’d apparently been halfway through eating back into its paper tray and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “What is this?”

  “Two dead bodies that the police are shoving under the rug.”

  “And you want to investigate?”

  “I want to find out why every strange death in this city gets labeled as homeless and forgotten about.”

  He lifted and eyebrow. “You’re going with a corruption story?”

  I shrugged. Difficult to say at this point, but at least I had a lead. “Maybe. Can I run with it?”

  Hayne frowned. “I thought you were digging into Ethan’s death?”

  “One of the bodies is the girlfriend of the informant we were meeting.”

  Hayne paled as he inspected the pictures for a moment then up at me. “Did you eat today?”

  I pointed at the pictures. “I’m thinking it might be connected to the gang story that we were working on. Natasha said there’s been an increase in unexplained deaths and we still have the missing sex workers.”

  “You’re avoiding the question. Did you eat today?”

  I shook my head.

  Hayne pushed the sandwich toward me.

  I sighed and sat in the chair across from him. If I was going to eat his sandwich, I might as well take a lecture from him as well. The minute I had the warm sandwich in my hands, my mouth began to water.

  “So two bodies?” Hayne slid the photos around on his desk.

  “The other was a journalist. John Mitchell from The Teller.”

  Hayne looked up at me with an arched eyebrow. I loved that arched eyebrow. It meant that I was going to get approval to work on the story. It meant that Hayne saw something worth investigating as well. It wasn’t just my compulsions

  “With Ethan, that makes two people related to newspapers have been killed in two weeks?”

  I nodded, then took a bite of the warm sandwich and my eyes closed, as the one bite filled every inch of my suddenly starving frame.

  Hayne frowned at the pictures. “Did you see these two were found in the same position?”

  Honestly, no. I was too busy focusing on the alleged magical marks on their arms.

  “It’s an odd angle at best, not one that would have naturally occurred through a fall or a collapse and definitely not one that the person would have laid down in to die.”

  I stood up and looked over at the photos spread across his desk.

  He lined up the pictures up to highl
ight their similarity.

  I went to set down the sandwich, but Hayne blocked my hand and pushed it back at me. Then he grabbed a pen and a page from his printer. The stick figure wasn’t exactly Picasso, but it matched the odd position of all the bodies. A strange T-shape with a diamond for the bottom.

  I took another bite as I stared at the symbol. Why did that look so familiar? What was it about the shape that resonated in the back of my head? What did it remind me of?

  “I’ll call The Teller, see if I can convince that son of a bitch Rex to tell me what Mitchell was working on.”

  I licked my lips of the thousand island dressing. I knew exactly what he’d been working on: a story about me. “No need.”

  I snatched the drawing from Hayne and gathered the photos, the sandwich still clutched in my other hand.

  “Thanks, Hayne!” I yelled as I went back to my desk in the open newsroom.

  My instinct was to reach for the phone and call the only person who I knew spoke this sort of crazy. When you needed information, you went to an informant.

  My hand hovered over the phone. I was being ridiculous. This was work. I needed him for work. But it would mean I would need to see him again, see the eyes that had invaded the five hours of sleep I’d gotten today and threw my entire reality askew.

  I pulled my hand away. There was one more place that I could look before I resorted to that. No one had ever accused me of not being thorough and double-checking my facts.

  Officer Julian Rutherford rolled his eyes when he saw me coming toward him. He’d been watching a pick-up game across the park, nimbly flipping a silver coin through his fingers. He quickly slipped it back into his pocket as I joined him.

  I offered him the coffee and he looked down at it for a long moment before he took it. “You were the last person I saw on the last shift. Why are you the first person I see on this one?”

  I loved the pinched rumble of Rutherford’s voice when he was annoyed, which was pretty much all the time with me. “Why do I have to want something? Why can’t I just enjoy a nice chat and cup of coffee with my neighborhood cop?”