by Stacia Kane
“No,” she said, amused in spite of herself. Not uproariously so, no, but it was hard to take real offense when he was working so hard to make sure she knew he was joking. “She doesn’t.”
Genuine relief showed in his smile. Relief because Blue was single, because Chess had gotten the joke, or because he’d truly been worried that Terrible might pay him a visit? “So maybe you could put in a good word for me, then. Just, you know, tell her what a great guy I am. Honest, hardworking, loyal, smart…modest…”
Blue might really like him. He was her type: smart, funny, clean-cut, probably shopped at Ralph Lauren or J. Crew or whatever other preppie Northside stores Blue sometimes dragged her to. She’d never heard any gossip of a “He talked her into bed then never called again” nature about him—of course, she didn’t hear a ton of gossip, especially about people who didn’t work in the main building, but still. “Okay. I’ll talk to her. But I can’t guarantee anything.”
“Cool, thanks.” He looked over his shoulder again—at Blue, she realized, who was on her phone—and then at the Body Removal Crew, almost ghostly in their pale blue suits. “What a story we’ll have to tell our grandkids about how we met.”
Yeah, she wasn’t touching that one. What she would touch, though—so to speak—was the case itself. No, it wasn’t hers, and she had no business thinking about it, but she couldn’t help herself. It had been so long since she’d had an interesting case, and there she was right in the middle of one and she couldn’t do shit about it except in her head. Frustration churned so strong in her stomach that even the leftover effects of her pills—the whole “waitress inferno” thing had pretty much killed her buzz—weren’t keeping it down. What had happened? How the fuck had it happened, and why?
Some kind of magic had to be at work there, a seriously advanced kind of magic done by seriously twisted people. What had Ella been doing in her personal life, to become their target? Sure, it could have been something as simple as not bringing their food piping hot or failing to treat them with the sort of deference assholes always thought was their due—entitled shitheads could go redline over the stupidest things—but it could have been, probably was, something a lot deeper. If nothing else, how had someone been able to slip a fire spell onto her person?
It couldn’t have been anyone in the restaurant at the time of the fire, because Chess had managed to get a feel for all of their energies as they waited for the Squad to arrive and none of them felt like they had any kind of magical ability at all, much less enough power to reduce a living human to carbon.
Along with all of her clothes and everything else, which sucked. Will probably wouldn’t find any evidence at all in the ashes; thanks to Waitress Number Two and her clever water-bucket plan, anything of magical significance or usefulness would have been destroyed.
“So,” she said, hoping it sounded casual. “What do you think, anyway? Got any theories?”
“About our grandchildren?” Oh, right, he didn’t know what she’d been thinking, did he? He caught what she meant after a second or two, though; maybe her raised eyebrow and thinned lips gave him a hint. “Oh, the case. Yeah, I have a theory. A loose theory, anyway.”
She waited. He didn’t continue. “Okay, so? What is it?”
He glanced around the restaurant, and leaned forward. “I’ll tell you, if you agree to be honest about what you think.”
Like she was going to say no to an opportunity like that. “Okay.”
Another glance around. A deeper lean. He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “Spontaneous human combustion.”
2.
SHE LOOKED FOR THE JOKE on his face. There was none. “Are you serious?”
“Honestly? I don’t know.” He raised his hands, a “hear me out” gesture. “Last week another woman died exactly like this. We didn’t have any evidence there, either, and the one lead I had really didn’t give me anything. But there was zero proof that the victim there was doing anything magical, I mean, she had a couple of store-bought spells at her place. One of them was even decent, but they were all old. And she didn’t have any enemies that I could dig up. So why would somebody want her dead? I couldn’t find any reason.”
“That doesn’t mean her body caught fire just because, with no source.”
“No, but it does mean my options were kind of limited. And I’m not sure this new incident changes that very much. Our check on the first vic was thorough as hell, and this waitress’s name was never mentioned. No connection other than working on the same street here. One might turn up, sure, but I’m not counting on it. I couldn’t even discover that my first victim ever even ate here.”
This was getting more and more intriguing, much as she hated to admit it. Funny, she spent so much time bitching about complications in her cases, but it turned out she kind of missed that. At least, she missed the complex cases where her life or the lives of people she loved weren’t in danger. Those were pretty rare.
“There has to be something,” she said. “Something they came in contact with, or someone they met.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but if that was the case, wouldn’t there be more victims? If they just brushed against some sort of flammable spell ingredient, how were they the only people who did? And why a week apart? If they met and offended somebody who likes to burn people to a crisp, why are they the only ones?”
“Boyfriend? Maybe they turned some guy down and he—”
“Nope. The first victim was in her fifties. No way the same guy is chasing both of them.”
“So what are you missing?” she asked, before she realized how it might sound. “I mean, not that you’ve missed some—”
He waved his hand, letting her know he wasn’t offended. “Go on.”
“Okay. What happened at the first scene? Maybe a witness left before you got there, or there was somebody you didn’t get to talk to?”
“Nope. Only four people in the room, and one of them burned to a crisp. The third was my best chance at a suspect, but that person wasn’t here today, or anywhere near here, as far as I could tell. So no, nobody got skipped over.”
“Maybe one of those people didn’t think to mention something they didn’t know was important.”
“Possible,” he said, “but I’ve been back there twice since it happened. I’m pretty sure I know every detail of the victim’s life in the last few weeks, and none of those details lead to fire.”
Might as well go for it. “How about you show me the file? We can look at it together.”
Damn. He started shaking his head before she finished the second sentence. “I’d love to—I honestly would, you’re a good investigator—but you know I can’t share case information with people outside the case. The only way I could let you examine the file is if we get official permission for you to work cross-department.”
Right. Official permission he’d have to ask his superior for—thus admitting he couldn’t handle it on his own, which he probably wouldn’t want to do—and, more importantly, official permission she’d have to ask Elder Griffin for. Damn it. Her chances of getting that were about as good as her chances of growing a third leg. Not that she wanted a third leg. Which was okay, because she sure as fuck didn’t want to ask Elder Griffin to loan her to the Squad, either.
Push it, or not? She probably shouldn’t; she didn’t need the Elder Chief Inquisitor hearing that she was trying to get his brother to bend the rules. But she couldn’t help herself. “Oh, come on. You don’t have to let me take it home or anything, just let me have a look. Five minutes with it, and you can sit here with me the whole time. I bet we can find something.”
“I don’t even have that file with me, the first victim. It’s back at Church, locked in my desk.”
Damn. “But we can at least look over what you have on this case, right? The witness statements, the background you have so far? And we can talk about how they compare.”
For a second she thought he was going to agree. Something in the shifty way he checked the
locations of the other Squad members—they were all chatting in small groups or wandering around outside—and the hesitation in his eyes made her convinced he was going to agree. He definitely looked like he wanted to agree. Her heart gave a little jump of anticipation, almost like the little jump it gave when Terrible gave her a certain dark-eyed look or took his shirt off or, well, really anytime she saw him.
Unlike those times, though, it seemed she wasn’t going to drift off in a daze of blissful satisfaction, because Will shook his head. “I can’t.”
Bullshit. Why digging in and seeing what he had so far had suddenly become so vital she didn’t know, but it was and she was going to fucking do it. She fixed her most innocent expression on her face, batted her lashes a little, and said, “Oh, that’s too bad. What was it you wanted me to tell my friend Blue there? That you’re a sleazeball with a couple of illegitimate kids running around spreading ringworm? Or was it about your tiny dick, or—”
“Okay, okay,” he said, practically jumping out of his chair and giving the rest of the room a panicked once-over. “Just—okay. But you can’t tell anyone. And you can’t tell Blue that.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t do a thing like that, Will. Where’s the file?”
☠
SHE WAS STILL THINKING ABOUT it as she turned into the small private parking area behind Terrible’s building. Behind her building, actually, but she was still getting used to that. She’d only been officially living there for about two months; well, she’d been unofficially officially living there, since unmarried Church employees weren’t allowed to “romantically cohabitate,” as the Church put it.
But the odds of Terrible and herself getting married one day were pretty damn slim, since he didn’t have a real name or birth certificate—or school records, or medical records, or anything else. How was the Church supposed to license a marriage when one of the parties technically didn’t exist? He had a few forms of ID in various names, and they maybe could have used one of those, but she gathered—she’d never asked—that those names had belonged to actual people who were no longer living, and nobody wanted the Church to run checks on them.
So they were “romantically cohabitating,” and if they were caught Chess could be suspended. Probably for quite a long time, given that her department head didn’t seem inclined to advocate for her. She’d be looking at a forced six-month vacation, at least.
Worth it. The risk was worth it, and the extra work to mitigate that risk—picking up mail at her old place, stopping by there once every week or two to dust and move things around, having a couple of Bump’s people go there daily to turn lights on and off and run water so her bills reflected utility usage—was also worth it. Especially when she got out of her car to see Terrible there.
Half of him, anyway. The lower half—mmm, almost as nice as the upper half—protruded from beneath the front end of his black 1969 BT Chevelle, which was propped up with its fat black tires on orange steel ramps. It looked almost like the car was trying to leap over him, like it was trying to fly away. It reminded her of a lion’s head in profile, with its mouth open and its teeth bared, the cement beneath it as the lower jaw and the car itself the upper. The ramps could have been fangs, poised to sink into flesh; the military-green lantern hanging from the center of the open hood could have been a narrow, gleaming eye.
Metal clanked against cement. The low rumble of plastic wheels followed it, and Terrible’s upper body and head appeared, resting on the wooden platform thing—well, how was she supposed to know what it was called?—he lay on when he worked under his car. A couple of smudges of grease marred his snug white t-shirt; his hands were black with it, and another faint streak decorated the left side of his neck just below his thick muttonchop sideburn. Sweat glistened on his skin and dampened his shirt enough to make the fabric slightly see-through. Or maybe that was the fact that it was old and thin anyway. She didn’t care. What mattered wasn’t why it was slightly see-through. What mattered was that it was slightly see-through, especially as he stood up. Mmm again.
“Hey, Chess,” he said, interrupting her vaguely pornographic reverie to give her a brief kiss, leaning over without touching her so he didn’t accidentally smear grease on her. “You right? Figured on you bein home before.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Ugh, she didn’t want to start thinking about the whole mess again. “Our waitress caught fire and burned to death, so the Squad came and—”
“What?” While she was speaking he’d grabbed a tattered rag resting on the Chevelle’s front quarterpanel and started wiping his hands with it. Its dingy grayish color—the result of years of engine-related cleanup no washing machine could completely erase—suddenly reminded her of Ella’s charred remains, of the stain her ashes had left on the white tile floor and the flakes of them that had smeared the gloves of the Body Removal crew.
It didn’t help that Terrible clenched the rag in his fist, a reflexive movement she’d become familiar with. His job as chief enforcer for the Lord of the streets west of Thirty-fifth meant his first instinct when faced with any sort of problem was to solve it with violence—especially when the problem involved her being scared or endangered. Normally she barely noticed. But at that moment she saw ash-carved fingers curled into claws by the fire’s raging heat; she saw pale dead skin covered with coal-black water drying into a gray film.
With effort she dragged her gaze back to his face. It wasn’t a face that comforted most people, with its dark, deep-set eyes, its nose permanently crooked from too many breaks not properly reset, its scars and heavy brow and thick muttonchops. Most people ran from it, especially if they were confronted with the expression he now wore.
Most people were idiots, though, and most people didn’t get to see him the way Chess did, unguarded and open. They didn’t see him smile or feel his lips on theirs—which was a good thing, really, because not only would it harm his ability to do his job but it would piss her right the fuck off—or have him look at them with more love than she’d ever thought possible, or with passion and desire so hot even the briefest memory of it could make her light-headed. They didn’t know him the way she did. They definitely didn’t love him the way she did.
“Our waitress caught fire and burned to death,” she repeated.
His brow furrowed. “You meaning like problems with them wires in the kitchen or aught like that? Or—”
“No.” The summer breeze, barely cooler than the air itself, felt cold there beneath the roof covering the parking lot. Or maybe it just felt cold to her.
It was relative, anyway; she was still sweaty. “Like she just caught fire, in the middle of the floor. No matches, no sparks, nothing to set it off, just…all of the sudden she was on fire. The Inquisitor in charge of the case says it’s the second time in a week that it’s happened.”
“You thinkin it magic? Some witch wanted em dead?”
“Well, I think it’s magic, probably. Will—he’s the Inquisitor in charge, nice guy—thinks it’s spontaneous combustion.”
His eyebrows rose. “Aye? True thing? Thought that weren’t for real.”
“It’s happened before,” she said. “Just not very often, and most of the alleged incidents were BT so we really don’t know much about them. We know at least one of them was real, though, the old government had some files on it that the Church found. Only—it’s really rare. Even if all the cases ever suspected were real, it’s still seriously fucking rare. So for there to be two occurrences in Triumph City alone, in eight days…”
“Maybe ain’t so spontaneous, aye.”
“And that’s only the ones we know about. There could have been more here in Downside, right? How many fires have there been?”
He considered it for a minute, absent-mindedly reaching into the car to grab his cigarettes and, after a quick nod from her, lighting two. “Damn. Two I got knowledge of, our side. Weren’t our buildings, dig, an ain’t had any asking us on who were inside em, so we ain’t done any lookin on it.”
She took a cigarette, and leaned against the car beside him, where she could smell the dusky, silvery scent of oil mixed with his sweat, his skin. Smells that made her feel safe. “Will—he was a year ahead of me in school, we had a couple of classes together—let me see the witness statements he took today, and the preliminary background info he got. The waitress lived in Cross Town with her boyfriend. Her co-workers didn’t know of any health problems or anything. One of the customers was looking right at her when it started, and he said she just stood still, got this weird look on her face, and burst into flame. She didn’t scream or anything. She didn’t even look like she was in pain, he said.”
“Fuckin crazy, aye.” He considered that for a second and she waited, knowing he was turning it over in his mind, considering all the angles, all the possibilities, before he spoke. “It like that with the first dame, too? With witnesses an all, dig. They gave the same tale?”
“I don’t know.” Damn it. “I didn’t get to see the file on the first case. I don’t even know the victim’s name—honestly, Will wasn’t even supposed to let me see the stuff he did show me. It’s not a Debunking case, it’s a Squad case.”
“Ain’t so bad, aye?” The look in his eyes told her he saw her disappointment. “People burnin up an no warning, don’t seem so safe to be lookin into. An iffen some dude out there’s setting em afire by magic or whatany, don’t seem safe that way, neither.”
She managed a small smile. “Maybe not, but it seems pretty interesting. And it’s not like Debunking is so safe. At least not for me.”
His answering smile lifted her spirits. It always did. “Causen you the only one good enough for them hard cases.”
Her face warmed. “It’s just frustrating. I was there, you know? I saw it happen. And now I have to just sit back and let Will—he asked Blue for her number, too, and she gave it to him—find out what happened, and maybe he’ll tell me when it’s all done. Maybe.”
