by A.M. Burns
3
The city morgue is not my favorite place in the world. Actually I think the only people who really enjoy city morgues are the people who work there. It goes without saying that some of those people are unusual, even in my way of thinking. Dusty and I walked in from the hot humid air that non-Dallas natives claim is almost as bad as some of the coastal areas, to the sterile cool dryness that’s almost crisp by comparison. Like a lot of morgues, this one’s in the basement of the major hospital in town. Luckily for me, it wasn’t far from the office. After a short call to Diane Thompson, the Council agent at the morgue, to confirm that I could get a look at the body, we arrived within minutes. Diane met us at the door to the morgue, which was the last one down a long hall.
“We have to be quick,” she said, rushing us out of the hallway. “Shift change is in about twenty minutes and you need to be out by then.”
The Council had eyes, ears and hands in the right places. The world as a whole had no knowledge of the existence of the paranormals and the power we possessed. The Council had a whole group that took great strides to keep it that way. Diane covered up any unusual deaths that might occur due to paranormal activity. I knew for a fact she’d cremated the supposedly wrong body a time or two to cover up a shape-shifter attack and altered a few blood samples to make sure people didn’t look too closely. Once in a while she smuggled me in to look at a corpse or two. She’s a nice little empath that liked working with the dead since they didn’t have any emotions she had to screen out. She tried to be absent when families stopped by to identify remains.
“Thanks Diane, we owe you one for this.” I flashed her a big smile. “So what do you know on this one?”
“I'll put it on your tab big guy. Well it is fairly cut and dry, from all angles that the coroner could find. No drugs, just a bit of nicotine and a trace of alcohol.” She escorted us back to the room with the body drawers. “Cause of death’s repeated blows to the head with a blunt instrument. There’re a few splinters in the lacerations fairly consistent with a baseball bat.”
She opened up drawer eleven. The body in the tray was fairly large, and though the blood had been cleaned up, the damage to the head was obvious. It looked like someone with remarkable strength had pounded on him enough times to cave in a good part of his skull, completely disfiguring him. From the odd angle and the bone protruding from the right shoulder, she missed at least once.
“One interesting thing about him,” Diane said after giving us a minute to stare, “and mind you, this isn’t something that will show up in the official report. His blood test came back psi positive.”
“So he’s one of us.” I thought over the implications. “That fits with some of the information we have from the case we’re investigating.” It was fairly common for a psi to go their whole lives without hearing about the Council. The recruiters tried to get out and find everyone they could, but it’s impossible to find them all. The neo-pagan movement attracted the ones who didn’t know better. Like a lot of others, he ended up in a coven to explore his abilities, not realizing there were other options available to him that would be a lot less dramatic and give him access and control of the power he felt within him.
“So what about the girlfriend?” I asked. Then, I realized that Dusty’s sniffing near the body. “What have you got?”
“Not entirely sure. But I can tell you this, there’s a smell that’s definitely not normal on him. I’ve never smelled this before.” Dusty looked confused. It made his handsome face just downright cute. “It smells almost like Denver Eden, but not quite.”
Denver Eden. I sighed. One high-powered lawyer who always seemed to pop up where he wasn’t wanted or needed. He always had his hand in the wrong cookie jar at the right time to never get caught with anything. He was officially registered with the council as a resident of Fairie, but I suspected more. The guy was more than a little bit sleazy and more often than not, he seemed to skate just on the edge of breaking any number of Council rules about exposing the paranormal world. And on the cases where some ODs were caught doing something, he was the lawyer they called. He always got them off.
“So something like an elf?” Diane asked before I could.
“Yes and no,” Dusty replied. “I've meet a couple of elves, Denver included. This is almost but not quite. It doesn’t have the fresh smell of an elf. I'll have to think on it.”
“So back to the girlfriend,” I said, turning my attention away from the body.
Diane shook her blonde head. “Don't know much there. I know they have her in custody. She was found standing over the body with the baseball bat. I do know that to have done the damage we see in the head here, she must either be incredibly strong or incredibly angry, angry enough that all her focus was on striking him. You know like the ninety-pound woman that lifts the minivan off her trapped child. If someone had that kind of focus to do that kind of harm to someone, it would be feasible. The only problem is that normally a person's moral senses kick in and stops them before it goes as far as killing someone, particularly someone you are supposed to be fond of.”
I nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. But even hypnosis or mental suggestion wouldn’t explain this type of reaction.”
“But would mental suggestion let someone take too many of the wrong type of pills?” Dusty beat me to the thought that just crossed my mind.
“It would but…” Diane's watch beeped.
“Lovely chat guys, but you need to get. Shift change in five.” She started shooing us toward the door.
“Thanks for the help Diane,” I said as Dusty and I hurried into the hall.
“Let me know what you find out,” she called after us.
I made a quick call to Tiffany to check on any developments. She and Tech were still working on the computer, so we headed off to the police station where Barry Crabtree's girlfriend had already been booked and awaited bail.
Tiffany didn’t have a whole lot of information, just what Tech managed to pull out of the police database from the backdoor he maintained for just such a need.
“The girl's name’s Alexia Rosenbloom, she’s eighteen, lives with her mother, Penelope Gross, works at a small locally-owned bistro and has no police record,” said Tiffany, clicking off the information in her usual business-like manner. “Neither she nor her mother shows up on any of the Council's records. Her mother has a well-documented history of mental illness being in and out of several institutions over the past fifteen years and associated with several known habitual criminals over that time as well.”
“Well her mom sounds like a real winner,” Dusty said as he closed the phone after Tiffany hung up.
“Yeah, but none of it explains how she did the damage we saw to the boyfriend,” I muttered. “Does this tie in with Magee Reyes? Or is it just coincidence?” The late afternoon traffic caught up with us and we slowed to a crawl as we entered the heart of downtown Dallas. The only lucky thing about the timing is that the stopped traffic was the stuff heading out of downtown. The folks heading into downtown just moved slowly.
Parking at the police station was not as horrible as I feared and we found a parking spot pretty close to the main doors. With a good working knowledge of the police station, I easily found the detective in charge of the case.
Detective Steven Pearson was a tall man, and when I say tall, I mean tall. I’m six foot two and this man was at least six foot seven. He had to duck into most doorways to avoid scrapping his blond crew cut on the frame. Lean and limber, the black t-shirt he wore under the gray tweed sports coat was tight enough to show off his broad hard chest and washboard abs. No donuts and coffee for this cop. He obviously worked out a lot. I knew from PI-to-cop gossip that he didn’t have a home life as such and spent most of his time at the gym when he wasn’t working. I often wondered who he kept the body for, but we’d never really made friends to the point that I would ask. Dusty always said that the man seemed frustrated about something when we were around. He was never openly hostile, which caused me
to wonder, but I just don't probe into other’s minds for such trivial things. But I do keep my ear out on the gossip line.
“Detective Pearson,” I said, as we approached the desk he bent over. I almost wished we had come up from behind because I knew his ass was as good as the pecs.
“Peters and Davenport.” The annoyance in his voice said more about him being busy than us just being there, at least that’s what I hoped. “What do I owe the pleasure of your visit today?”
“I'd like to speak with someone you just brought in. It has to do with a case I am working on,” I replied in my best neutral voice.
“Hmmmmmm, the Rosenbloom girl?” He sat back in his chair and motioned us to sit in the chairs opposite him.
“That's her,” I said. I lowered myself into the hard metal chair. I personally thought that the chairs on the other side of police desks were like the ones in school principal's offices, designed to keep the inhabitants uncomfortable and off balance so they’re more likely to screw up.
“What do you need with her?” Pearson took out a pen and began making notes on the legal pad in front of him.
“I need to know what she knows about Magee Reyes.” No sense in telling too much, but that was one of the reasons I was there.
“The suicide from last week?” Pearson looked interested now.
Not for the first time, I wished that Paul Ramirez, the Council's inside guy on the police force, was there but he was out on family leave while his wife had their first child. Paul’s a werejaguar and would have just eased us in like Diane had at the morgue. “Yeah, the suicide from last week. We’re checking out some of her friends for her husband.”
“Yeah I heard from the guys working that case that the guy’s a little on the odd side,” Pearson said. “Actually one of the female officers said he came on to her so hard that she almost brought him in on charges of inappropriate behavior with a police officer. But they closed the case real quick. Nothing to it. Just an overdose of pain killers or something like that.” Pearson sounded almost bored. “So, other than this girl being one of her friends, how’s it tie in?”
“You know they’re all Wiccans, right.”
Pearson looked puzzled and flipped through the file under the legal pad. “Not mentioned here, says the girl’s Jewish.”
“Well you know a lot of Wiccans are still in the closet like some gay guys.” I knew it was a cheap shot but I took it anyway.
Pearson blinked, just a slight movement, but nothing else. “Yeah I have heard that, particularly in this part of the country. So you think she’s a closet Satanist?”
“He didn't say that,” said Dusty, speaking up for the first time. “He he said Wiccan. Wiccan's don't believe in Satan or Jesus. They have their own Gods,” He has a shorter fuse with ignorant comments than me. That, and he had an issue with Pearson. I think something happened between them at some point in the past, but Dusty had never said anything about it. One of these days I’m going to pin him down and ask him, but not today.
“So you think they’re part of the same cult and that the two deaths are part of some cult ritual.” Pearson's pen flew across the legal pad.
I stifled a sigh. Steven Pearson always jumped to the wrong conclusion whenever something out of the ordinary happened. Why do the really handsome guys, other than Dusty, always have to be as dumb as a box of rocks? However, there are certain advantages to dealing with slow people. I waited to respond until his pen stopped moving and he looked up. His sky-blue eyes met mine and I reached out with my mind.
“Steven. There are no cults in the area.” I pushed against his mind as I whispered just loud enough for him to hear. “You need to let us in to see Alexia Rosenbloom. It’ll need to be a private room.” Short sentences, easy orders always worked best when using mental manipulation. I almost felt bad about manipulating him, but he’d made the jump from Wiccan to cult and I needed to curb that line of thinking. The Council prized itself on keeping things like that under the rug, so to speak. They wouldn’t be happy if the police suddenly went off looking for a cult in the middle of Dallas, particularly with Paul Ramirez away from the department where he could have stopped it cold. And I really wanted to stay on the good side of the Council. Otherwise things could get sticky.
Steven Pearson blinked as his mind drifted under my gaze. “Give me a moment to get a clear room for you,” he said. His voice sounded completely different than it had moments before, softer, almost lusty. He stood and walked across the room.
Dusty cast a quick glance to make sure no one saw anything, and then using a bit of his werewolf speed, removed the top piece of paper from the legal pad where Pearson had written his notes about cults. He moved fast enough that even the constant video surveillance wouldn’t have caught the movement unless they inspected frame by frame.
“Good job.” I smiled at him and patted his knee.
“Thanks.” Dusty smiled back. “Let's just get this over with so we can get out of here. I never realized Steven had an issue with things, but part of that may be more about what he is hiding. You know he started sweating when you made the closet crack.”
Trust Dusty's nose to pick up a man’s sweat. I chuckled lightly and nodded as Steven returned.
“She is being brought to conference room two. The guard will have to wait outside the door with me.” The detective's eyes were still slightly glazed over from my mental manipulation. He gestured for us to follow. We got up and trailed behind those large tweed-covered shoulders.
