The desperation in his voice speaks of love, which takes me a little by surprise as I was so sure they were just friends. I nod my head. I can’t help Lynesse the way that he wants, but I can damn well help her by catching the man who murdered her.
I don’t know how to break it to him that she is dead. I don’t even know if I am allowed to tell him that. Perhaps Storm would want to tell him himself. Particularly if this guy is a witness.
“Do you know anyone who might have had a reason for hurting her?” I ask him.
“It’s my fault,” he says his voice cracking. He looks down at his hands distractedly. They are trembling violently. He shakes his head as if in denial. “I should never have bought her here. Who is going to look after her now?” He stands up abruptly, looking towards the doorway as if he has heard someone coming.
“How is it your fault?” I ask him hastily. I don’t want him to leave before finding out what he knows.
“I belong to one of the Great Families,” he says. “I’m not allowed to mix my blood. They warned me, but I did it anyway, and now my Zarina is the one who is going to pay for it.”
I frown. Zarina? I had assumed he was talking about Lynesse. I open my mouth to cajole an explanation but then there is a sharp clacking noise and the redheaded woman gives a cry of dismay. She is at the water dispenser machine and water is sloshing out of the little tap and all over the floor.
“Goodness me!” she says in dismay. “Oh dear!”
I go over to see what the problem is, and find that the little plastic valve at the top of the tap has snapped off. Water continues to flow out, forming an ever larger puddle on the floor. The woman fusses, fidgeting with the broken nozzle, trying to stop the water and all the while growing increasingly distressed that her pretty suede kitten heels are getting thoroughly drenched.
I tell her I can handle it, and then fiddle with the remnants of the plastic valve until I am able to grasp it with my nails and twist it. The water stops flowing. The woman fervently thanks me.
I turn back towards Raif, and to my dismay I find that his chair is empty. He has slipped out of the room while my back was turned.
“Damn it!” I murmur, going to the waiting room door to check if he is outside in the corridor.
He is not there. I walk into the corridor and over to the double doors leading to the autopsy room. Perhaps he went inside to demand for Storm to listen to him. There is a glass panel on each door. I peer inside.
The autopsy room seems to be mainly made of steel and ceramic tiles. It is a cold clean place. The most disturbing aspect is a gurney with a body on it. Storm and Leo and a woman who must be the coroner are looking at it, all talking.
I cannot hear what they are saying. I cannot see Raif. He must have left. I sigh. I wish I’d asked for his surname. It is going to be hard to track him down without it.
Meanwhile, whatever the coroner is telling Storm seems to have his full attention. I am too intrigued to resist pushing at the door slightly with my toe. When it moves without squeaking, I push it open a couple more inches. Just enough to be able to hear the conversation.
“…succubus,” the coroner is saying. “It appears she was immobilized, possibly with the aid of magical intervention. She was subsequently bound with ligatures before being savaged with what appears on initial inspection to be a sharp instrument with a short chopping blade, possibly a hatchet or small axe. There are shallower cuts in parallel groupings, as if some effort was made to simulate a set of large claws.”
“Bound with ligatures?” says Storm, frowning.
The coroner nods. “Here and here.” She points with a gloved hand to the ankles and the wrists.
“And Dr Silverstone, the male victim?” says Storm, still frowning.
“No ligatures for him,” says the coroner. “No need. He was attacked first, and from behind. Bashed over the head with a heavy blunt instrument.”
She wheels a second gurney a few feet closer. The body lying on it comes into my field of vision. The head is turned slightly my way. I recognize him.
With a cry of shock, I step into the room. The occupants all turn to look at me. Storm comes towards me, clearly intent on escorting me out of the room.
“Diana, you shouldn’t be here,” he says. He is undeniably jarred by my presence.
I neatly sidestep him. “That’s Raif!” I cry out, unable to stop myself.
Storm’s eyebrows draw together. “You knew him?” he says.
I shake my head. “I saw him in my dream,” I say.
I can’t believe it. He had just been in the waiting room. Alive. I was just speaking with him. And yet here he is, lying on a gurney, his eyes blankly staring at nothing, his skin tinged with grey. I know if I touched it, he would be cold.
It was his spirit, his remnant that I’d spoken to, and I’d not suspected a thing. He’d asked me for my help, but he was already dead.
I only realize I am shaking when Storm places his hands on my shoulders as if to steady me. “Are you alright?” he asks.
I nod my head even though I feel nauseous. There is a horrible smell in here. It must be coming from Lynesse. One glance at her body shows me the red ruin of her torso. It has been savaged, the cuts deep enough to reach into her internal organs. I look away quickly, gasping for breath to steady my heaving stomach. I cannot barf. I cannot embarrass myself like that.
“Diana, we should to talk in the waiting room.” Storm has a firm grip on my upper arm now.
“No. I promised to help Raif.” Pretending that I am perfectly fine, I take a shaky step towards Raif’s body.
“When?” Storm says. “In your dream?”
I shake my head. “Out there in the waiting room. He was there. He spoke to me.”
“He was there?” says the coroner skeptically.
I nod. “Part of him was still there.”
The coroner’s eyebrows rise almost into her hairline. “And here I was thinking I had all of him,” she says.
But Storm seems to have no such doubts. “What did he say to you?” he demands.
I open my mouth to tell him everything but the little voice inside my head snaps it shut. She gives me the moment I need to think. Storm already has more information than me. If I give him what he has asked for, there is no way I will solve the case before him.
“Nothing much,” I murmur. “He was… He wasn’t himself, wasn’t making sense. He was already mostly gone.”
I take another step closer to Raif. It is bad enough to be looking at his dead face, but I can also see the edges of the red gaping wound at the back of his head where his skull has been bashed in.
I want to look away but I can’t. I had seen that damage happen in my dream, but it had been different. The wound had been blue. The blood had been blue. One particular species of otherkind has blue blood.
“He was an incubus,” I say almost to myself.
The coroner consults her clipboard and then shakes her head. “No record of him being an incubus,” she says.
“He was,” I insist. “I saw it in my dream.” When Storm looks like he is about to demand every detail, I say, “That’s pretty much all I saw. I didn’t see the killer. If I had, I would have told you by now.”
“Any chance of confirming it?” Storm asks the coroner.
She shrugs. “It’s difficult. Their blue blood turns red on exposure to air and following death, and this victim has been dead for days.”
“There must be a test,” I insist.
She shakes her head. “That kind of magic isn’t my field. Incubae pretty much have human-seeming physiology after the blood turns red. No way of me knowing unless he was registered as an incubus, and we have no record of that.”
“Otherkind shouldn’t have to be registered,” I mutter.
“I hear you,” she says. “You’re preaching to the converted.”
“It would be helpful though,” says Leo. “In this particular case.”
“Or you could take my word for it,” I
say.
“You can ask Ms Grictor,” says the coroner. “She is out in the waiting room. She’s here to formally identify Dr Silverstone’s body.”
“What’s her first name?” I ask, wondering if the redhead is Raif Silverstone’s beloved Zarina. She couldn’t be though. He seemed to take no interest in her.
“Beatrice Grictor,” she says.
“Is she his girlfriend?” asks Leo.
“She couldn’t be,” I say. “He didn’t care about her.”
It was Zarina he had loved, and so much that she had been all he could think of before he had passed over. He had stayed, clinging on to this existence until I had agreed to help her.
Storm’s eyes narrow thoughtfully. He looks at me with interest. “Did you see that in your dream? Anything to suggest he was Lynesse Jones’s lover?”
I shake my head. “I suppose they mostly seemed friendly.”
I give him a brief recap of my dream. I might as well, seeing as Remi already knows it. I point towards Lynesse’s body. “But it could be that her fiancé thought they were having an affair anyway. A jealous fiancé could be angry enough to do that to her. Make a show of savaging her like DCK would have so we look elsewhere for the killer. The crime scene staging was off too.”
Leo shakes his head. “I spoke to the neighbor. If what he says was true, Jared Everett was out of town on an acting job, accompanied by his assistant and best friend Kris Caprio. That should be easy to verify.”
Storm’s perfect black brows have snapped together. “How do you know the crime scene was staged?” he says to me.
“I was just about to get to that,” says Leo. “I brought her here from there.”
Storm is outraged. He looks like he is about to yell at me, then changes his mind about doing it here. He takes a firm grip of my shoulder and marches me out of the morgue.
Once the door is closed behind us, he rubs his eyes as if he is tired or stressed. I still cannot tell which. He says in an admirably restrained voice, “Why the hell would you do this to yourself?”
I am surprised. I expected him to demand to know what I was doing here. “You mean investigate? Because I dreamed of it. The news said it was DCK. I had to!”
Storm glowers at me, and he looks absolutely adorable doing it. With a hint of impatience, and keeping his voice low, he says, “Diana, we know about the connection between you and Lynesse Jones. This does not look good for you. It’s bad enough you turned up here, but that you trespassed on the crime scene, a private property under Agency investigation, is something I can’t ignore!”
“You could,” I say stubbornly. “Remi and Leo won’t tell if you don’t! So long as the chief doesn't find out, I’m home free.”
He makes a sound that is part incredulous, part annoyed.
I grin. “You know you don’t want to get me in trouble.”
“This wager of yours with the chief is already going to get you in trouble,” Storm says. “I might cover for you this time, but only if you really aren’t involved. Where were you on Friday?”
I gape at him. “Are you really asking for my alibi? I was at my moth… At Magda’s funeral. You know. You saw me there!” My voice wobbles, sounding on the verge of tears. I make an angry sounding huff to cover it.
“And after that?” he says grimly.
“Is that when they were killed? On Friday night?”
That was two days ago. They were already dead when I had come up with my plan on Saturday to save them. I was much too late. Worried about any more emotional wobbles, I clear my throat before saying, “I walked home after the funeral and fell asleep. I was exhausted.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“Just AngelBeastie.”
He does not smile. “So you have no alibi.” It is not a question. He looks frustrated, worried even.
I glower at him. “You cannot really believe that I did it! You can investigate me all you like. It wasn’t me!”
He glowers back. “Tell me how you know Lynesse Jones.”
“I don’t know her!” I protest incredulously. “I never met her in my life. Leo said she knew Dr Carrington, but it was news to me. Is it true?”
“Yes. She was in Carrington’s employment at the time of his death.”
“You mean she was a succubus in his brothel,” I snarl, “And he was prostituting her for his own personal gain.” I am sickened by the memory of the repugnant Dr Carrington, a psychiatrist who had turned his patients into his personal harem and then pimped them out to rich clients. I had been next on his list.
Storm nods sympathetically.
“Did he pimp her out to Jared Everett?” I demand, feeling repulsed. It wouldn't be the first time a famous actor hired a succubus for his pleasure.
“It appears his feelings for her were genuine,” Storm says. “They started dating after Carrington’s death.”
“Some true love,” I mutter bitterly. “Maybe he’s a control freak like Dr Carrington and just wanted to own her. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
“Perhaps. I intend to find out in the course of this investigation.”
A feeling like grief and rage washes over me. That poor woman. She must’ve been so happy to escape Dr Carrington’s clutches. She had begun a new life, not wasted it like I had been. How could this have happened to her? She had been so terrified. Is that why she hadn’t fought back against her killer? I can’t understand it. I had seen what a succubus was capable of.
Over in the waiting room I can see redheaded Beatrice Grictor looking out at us. I realize with a jolt that I had left the door open, and Beatrice, undoubtedly curious about her business partner’s death, has been listening to every word we have been saying.
I lower my voice. “Can I help you?” I plead with Storm. “If we solve this case together you could put in a good word with me to the chief and he’ll give me my job back.”
He shakes his head. “You know I can’t do that. The chief would never have made that wager if he’d known your connection to the case. It took some persuading for me to convince him not to treat you like a suspect. Yet.”
That last word is a warning, but if it is meant to dampen the anger seething inside me, the desire to do something, anything, to make this right, it does not. “A connection,” I scoff. “We’ll see about that.”
“Diana, the best way for you to win back the chief’s approval is to do what he suggested. Train to become a registered Oracle. You would be the first Oracle ever to officially be on the Agency payroll. Do you know what a big deal that would be? Every department would be lining up for your help!”
“If it was so easy I would have done it by now. It takes years! And money I don’t have. And what about this case?”
“Leave this case to me. You have to stop interfering. You will only get in the way.”
I am hurt. “Interfering? Is that what you think of me? You need me!” I point to Beatrice Grictor. “Ask her. I told you Raif Silverstone was an incubus. I bet she’ll tell you that I’m right!”
Storm takes a deep breath as if trying to be patient. “If your alibi works out, I’ll let you off this time. But consider this a warning. I need you to back off. You were right about James Fenway too, and look what happened to him.”
Chapter 10
STORM
Storm leaves the morgue with Leo. In the car park he pauses outside Leo’s car. “Diana has no alibi,” he says. “Can you look into it?”
Leo hesitates. Locating security camera footage and trawling through hours of video is usually the sort of thankless task that falls to team juniors, in this case their new guy Monroe. They both know Monroe would just love to get out into the field, and it would be a valuable learning experience for him.
Leo nods and says, “Sure thing, boss.” He gets into his car and drives away.
Storm gets into his own car. He rolls his shoulders and stretches his neck. It doesn’t do much to ease his tension. He is lucky to have Leo. He knows he should have called Monroe, but
he didn’t want to risk the new guy messing things up. Leo is more likely to persevere until he finds the footage that will clear Diana. It has to be there. Storm knows it.
And Leo knows why Storm sent him too, which does nothing to improve Storm’s mood. His personal feelings should not be getting in the way of his job. Damn Diana Bellona for getting under his skin.
Storm drives to St John’s Wood and parks up outside of Jared Everett’s house. Remi had called earlier to say Everett was going to be escorted back into the house to pack a few belongings.
Storm needs to grab the opportunity to speak to him now. Monroe has checked Everett’s alibi and found it may not stack up. Storm has known enough Hollywood types to know that if Everett feels like it, he might decide to shack up in some luxury hotel and refuse to speak to Storm later, making it harder for the team to investigate.
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