by Lyra Evans
Aspen turned to him, her eyebrows pulling together to form a slight wrinkle in the middle of her forehead. Her wide eyes were softened now, looking at him, and Niko felt himself draw back. Why did people look at him that way? Why were they all so concerned about him?
“Perhaps it’s difficult to see in simple notes,” she said, as if giving him an out. “But the damage done to the victim was not haphazard or frenzied. Each different form of torture was applied with precision and detail, and in very particular order.” She pulled a few photos of the body to show them. “For instance, the burns from the cigarettes are located only around the victim’s sides and near his underarms, and they were applied only after the welts from the leather whip or flogger formed. The bruising around the neck was formed before the various incisions, and the burns from the stun gun were limited to the victim’s upper torso, across his pectoral muscles and particularly concentrated around his nipples.” She pointed to each set of injuries one at a time.
“How can you be certain?” Cobalt asked, studying the images closely.
“The amount of bleeding and signs of recovery from the cells, indications of inflammation in the skin, discolouration, and various other details set the different injuries along a very particular and peculiar timeline. All the injuries occurred before death.”
“And what was COD?” Niko asked, certain he already had the answer.
She looked at him, her eyes flashing briefly to his chest, right over his heart. “Gunshot,” she said. “The one to the chest struck his heart. Death was rather quick, thanks to that. But the other gunshots came first, given the amount of bleeding and trauma to the tissue.”
“So the killer unloaded a full clip into his dick before putting him out of his misery?” Coral asked. She eyed Niko a moment, perhaps thinking he was even more depraved than she previous decided, before shrugging as though to remove herself from the conversation.
“Afraid so,” Aspen said. “That and the, ah, sodomy were just before death.”
Niko felt his throat tighten, his stomach rolling. “Was that last?”
Aspen nodded. “It was also the least controlled portion of torture, as I can tell. The application of each of the other injuries is fine and pointed. There’s no indication of a shaky hand or even a weakened assault. Each cigarette burn has a perfectly round imprint on the skin, each incision is of the same depth and length. A surgeon might have trouble accomplishing that level of precision over this many cuts.” She shook her head, flipping to her report on the assault. “But the use of a broken pipe from the surroundings made it difficult to accomplish the killer’s goal cleanly. The damage to the tissue was severe. Lots of transfer from the pipe as well. There are also subtle injuries where the killer struck the victim with the end of the pipe, missing the, ah, target, if you will.”
Starla wrapped her arms around herself, refusing to look at the images. She turned away from the conversation, glancing down the hall every so often as though she expected someone to catch them. Niko didn’t blame her. As much as he hated Sade, this was difficult to look at, to learn.
“No indication any of the injuries were caused by animal teeth or claws?” Cobalt asked. Aspen looked curiously at him. Niko knew he was thinking of the paw prints they’d found out behind the warehouse’s fencing.
“Not that I’ve identified,” she said. “Do you have cause to think an animal was involved?”
Cobalt stared down at the photo of Sade’s chest, littered with raw, fresh injuries and a gaping bullet hole over his heart. On the autopsy table, as he was in the photo, he looked cold and diminished. Like he was never a threat, really. But Niko knew better than that.
“We are as of yet uncertain,” he said, without revealing their discovery. “We are simply looking down every possible avenue.”
Aspen nodded, then after a moment’s hesitation, she said, “I haven’t submitted my report to the Chief yet.”
Niko met her eye, his eyebrow arched. He knew she was particular and thorough, that she would never submit a report until she was certain she’d covered everything possible. But the file in her hands seemed more than thorough. Unless she’d completed it only moments ago, he didn’t understand why she would withhold it.
“Are you not done your analysis?” he asked, but the flickering light in her eyes spoke of something else. He didn’t understand it.
“No, it’s quite complete,” she said. “But—don’t you see it, Niko?” Looking down at the file again, Niko catalogued everything she’d noted again and again. There certainly were many familiar components here, but—“The injuries, the torture—it’s everything he did to you.” Niko stilled. He’d noticed that detail before but had kept it to himself. There were few people who knew the full extent of Niko’s abuse at Sade’s hands. Aspen was one of them. “And not just that—Niko, every injury was done in the order he did them to you. First to last. Even the bullet hole matches perfectly, in terms of dimensions and location, where Sade Hemlock shot you.”
Niko didn’t move or speak, but everyone else did.
“This guy did all that to you?” Coral asked, shock and horror evident in her words.
“Fucking Sade,” Starla said, shutting her eyes. She looked as though she was struggling not to cry or scream.
“That’s what you meant when you said they’d done their homework,” Cobalt said, addressing Aspen. “They knew every detail of what had been done to Niko.”
Aspen nodded. “And there are so few people who know those details, the timelines of how he tortured you, the location of each wound,” Aspen began, looking stricken, “if I handed this in to the Chief—”
“It would only serve as more evidence to convict me,” Niko finished for her.
Everyone fell silent, and Niko took the moment to hear his own thoughts. He rolled his jaw and sucked on his tongue, thinking it all over. His medical records weren’t available to the public, and the casefile was only available to the police. It was also protected for various reasons, meaning anyone who wanted access to it needed special permission. All of that made it difficult to believe someone unconnected to the trial or Sade himself would have found this information. But the handful of people who had seen the full report, or seen all the details of Niko’s wounds, were all working for the police or dead.
“That isn’t correct,” Cobalt said, looking over the file again. Aspen blinked at him, mildly offended. Cobalt pointed to the diagram. “There are two things here that were not done to Niko.” Aspen opened her mouth to ask, but he pre-empted her. “The gunshots to the groin and the assault with the pipe. Sade never did that to Niko.”
Niko, Aspen, and Starla all went quiet a moment. “Well, I imagine the pipe was meant to supplant—”
“Sade did rap—”
“I think all the times he forced himself on me cover the pipe detail,” Niko said harshly. Cobalt shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “The gunshots to the groin might account for the sexual assault and overkill, but if the goal was to make it appear as though you’d done this to Sade, the sodomy stands out. Dr. Aspen, you described it as frenzied. It was violent and uncontrolled, messy and traumatic.” Cobalt read through the file again. “It doesn’t fit.”
“Doesn’t it?” Coral asked, giving him an incredulous look.
“No,” he said, with a pointed look at his sister. Turning to Niko, he met his eye. “After what Sade did to you, would you really do this to him? Would you tear a pipe from the wall and penetrate him with it?”
Niko was caught, forced by his own mind to imagine the scenario. He saw himself, with Sade at his mercy, bloodied and bruised, and could not, for the life of him, imagine himself ripping a pipe from the wall. The ache in his chest, in his core, was more than enough to tell him Cobalt was right. He would never do that. In fact, as he thought about the entire scene, he became aware that none of it fit with something he would do.
Because Niko knew precisely what he would have done if he’d been in a posit
ion to kill Sade himself. He wouldn’t have subdued Sade, wouldn’t have tied him up or tortured him. He wouldn’t even have brought a gun. Instead, he’d force Sade to fight him, hand to hand, and take him down that way. Niko’s hands flexed and balled into fists as he thought about it, like his muscles were searching to prepare. He had wanted to feel the life leaving Sade’s body, wanted to lord it over him that Niko not only managed to catch him and contain him, but Niko managed to kill him. A feat that had eluded Sade when it came to Niko.
“No,” Niko said. “That’s not me.”
Cobalt nodded. “And given the frenzied nature of the attack, I’d say this was the killer’s weakest moment. They gave in. Something took them over, forcing them to forsake their carefully laid plans in favour of the visceral satisfaction of harming Sade in this way.”
“So what are you saying?” Starla asked.
“This is the first important detail of the killer revealing themselves,” Cobalt said. He and Niko shared a look, and something flared in Niko. Having someone match him, on the same page at the same time, hurtling forward in an investigation—it was the kind of partnership he’d long yearned for. But the ache in his chest reminded him that nothing was perfect. And as Coral leaned against the doorframe in a stance both casual and dismissive, he retreated back into himself.
“It’s the deviation from the plan to frame me,” Niko said, forcing his mind back to the most urgent issue. “It’s all we have to go on. We know I wouldn’t do this—so who would?”
Starla turned to Dr. Aspen then as Aspen closed the file and set it aside. “Is there any test you can do to somehow prove Niki wasn’t the killer?”
Aspen considered her, her mouth pulling to the side as she thought it out and frowned. “Proving a negative is rather weak science,” she said. “I could test Niko’s hands for blood residue, I suppose. And gunshot residue. If he has fired a gun in the last two weeks, the test would register it. And if he did do this,” she said, gesturing to the whole of the autopsy file, “then there would definitely be blood residue on his hands.”
“I don’t know about gunshot residue, but blood washes off, yeah?” Coral said with an incredulous look.
Aspen seemed unbothered. “Most superficial testing would indicate that, yes, but the magical experiment I’ve devised can locate even the most microscopic presence of foreign blood.” She held out her hands for Niko to offer his. He hesitated only a moment, his Fae instincts too strong to override immediately. No Fae would willingly offer their hands to another without express discussion of intent and purpose. He trusted Aspen, of course, but the idea of handing himself over to any trade she wanted to make was unsettling in his core.
She took his hands gently, nodding to him she understood his discomfort, then smoothed her palms over his palms, then the backs of his hands. Whatever trade she was making, Niko didn’t feel it. His skin didn’t change it any way, nor did any of his magic or anything else he’d learned to feel after years working for the MCPD. He waited, but nothing at all happened.
“What did you do?” he asked, and she happily removed her hands from his.
“My experiment,” she said. “You didn’t feel anything, did you?” He shook his head, mildly concerned. “Perfect. There were no visible results either. Which means the test could not identify any gunshot residue nor any of the victim’s blood on your skin.” She smiled with a kind of relief in her eyes, perhaps because her test confirmed her belief in Niko. “I narrowed the field of the experiment to only search for Sade Hemlock’s blood, of course. Otherwise it could come up with all sorts of results from any number of circumstances. I do need to adjust the experiment slightly, given the sensitivity, but for now it certainly reaffirms my conclusion you cannot be responsible.”
Niko calmed slightly, running one hand over the other, a self-soothing instinct to ensure his hands were unchanged. He’d known he was innocent, obviously, but relief flickered in both Starla and Cobalt’s eyes. They had told him they knew he would never do this, and perhaps it was just reassuring to have some kind of empirical evidence to support that, but the realization that no one was entirely certain Niko was innocent struck him like a hot poker to the chest.
“So—great! Send the results in to Chief Banyan so she can see she’s a fucking idiot,” Starla said.
Aspen shrunk back slightly. “I’m afraid that won’t help much.”
“Why not? Is this result not conclusive?” Cobalt asked.
Aspen nodded. “Indeed, it is. But the test is unapproved by the department,” she admitted. “I’m afraid Chief Banyan would not take its results as reliable. And informing her I have tested Niko’s hands would, in turn—”
“Let her know you’d talked to me,” Niko finished. “Which would be a crime, given my status as a wanted man. The least she would do is fire you.” Niko shook his head. “You can’t risk that. We were never here.” He nodded to the others.
“Indeed, I’m afraid I will not be telling anyone about your visit,” she agreed.
“Isn’t there another way he could fool the test?” Coral asked suddenly. They all looked at her. Picking at her nails, she said, “Seems as simple as wearing gloves. Or, I dunno, maybe some kind of magic cover to protect from residue?” She shrugged. “It’s what I’d do, if I was gonna torture and kill my rapist and I was a cop.”
Tension followed her statement. Maybe it was only Niko, though. Aspen seemed to be thoughtful. Starla’s eyebrows were knitted together, her gaze focused on nothing. Cobalt, meanwhile, was glaring at his sister.
“What you’d do,” he repeated. “Thought a lot about how to perform the perfect murder, have you?”
Coral ignored him. “Am I wrong?”
Aspen shook her head. “Sadly, no. While regular gloves might only protect from some of the residue, I imagine magically enhanced gloves, or even a very specific set of trades on your own skin might serve well enough to stop the residue of either matter sticking. Clothing would still be subject to traces, though. Unless the same treatment were applied to all items of clothing.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t know of any case where such a protective outfit was employed, but as far as I know, it is not impossible.”
Niko frowned. “But unlikely,” he said. “I’ve never heard of a case like that either. Still, something to keep in mind if we find a suspect who comes up clean too. Can you show me how to perform that experiment, if I need to?” Aspen nodded and illustrated it for him, step by step. She seemed to make trades at the atomic level, adjusting the magnetic pull and polarization of the absolute surface of her hands, which in turn affected the surface of the subject’s hands and forced the tiniest traces of either residue up into the air, caught between her hands and his. Targeting a specific blood type or sample was trickier, as it involved honing in on a magical signature and details so minute they were almost imperceptible to his magical senses. He could see why this was unapproved, and why it might not take off at all. It was precise and meticulous to do, and even applying it once was rather exhausting.
“I think you’ve got a strong enough sense of it now,” Aspen said, glancing at her watch. “Oh dear, it’s late.”
“We should go,” he said. “Thank you, Dr. Aspen. For—for everything.” His throat tight, he couldn’t manage to express how grateful he was. That she believed in him without needing to hear his plea was something he couldn’t ever have expected. That she had withheld her reports from the Chief for fear they would worsen the case against him was entirely beyond him. For someone who never had the words, Niko felt himself helpless and awed in the face of what she had done. Without ever being asked. “Please, submit your report to the Chief. If she thinks you’re sabotaging the case—who knows.”
Aspen agreed. “Yes, I think that’s best. If you are in need of any other help I can provide, please don’t hesitate to contact me. This is my private email,” she said, offering him a small card. Niko took it. “It is encrypted. And, in the meantime, I will continue to search for anything else that m
ight help you,” she said. “If I find anything at all—”
“Tell Officer Fern,” Niko instructed. “He’ll know how to get it to me.”
Aspen nodded, and they left. Niko lead the way with the others at his heels. They checked out the front door, through the windows, to see if the officers on duty there were still under Coral’s sleep instruction. They seemed not to have moved, so Niko slipped out first. At the lack of reaction, the others followed, and they rushed back across the street into the darkness of the alley.
Niko spared little thought for anything around him, his mind sorting through all the information he’d gathered. It was strikingly apparent that whoever had done this, or orchestrated it, intended to frame him. There was rather too much evidence to implicate Niko here. If the case had pointed to anyone else in his stead, he might still question the sheer volume of targeted evidence with so little practical evidence. The effort and time to put this into effect was massive. And it was terrifying.
“Someone really hates you,” Cobalt said, once they’d stopped back in the loading bay behind the office building. Niko wasn’t quite sure what to say. “No one would put in that kind of effort for anything less.”
Starla seemed to come to the same conclusion, though she was far more visibly alarmed than either Niko or Cobalt. “How can you say something like that so calmly? If someone hates Niki that much, to go to all that trouble, who knows what else they could do.”
Cobalt nodded. “Yes. It is a valid concern. Sade’s murder and Niko’s framing may not be the last of what we will have to face. The longer Niko goes uncaptured, the more it will likely rile this person. It could set them off to up the ante.”
“You mean you think they’d kill again?” Starla asked, struck with the possibility. Niko had been wondering the same. The longer he walked free to investigate, poking around where he likely wasn’t meant to, the more anxious the killer was likely to get. They would want to keep the pressure on Niko, increase it as much as possible. The best way to do that was to turn everyone against him—the whole Court, certainly, but maybe all three of them. The police may just have been the beginning.
