The Deer Prince's Murder: Book Two of 'Fantasy & Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 2)

by Michael Angel

  Destry tsked. “This chieftain of yours? He is quite cross, and only just able to control himself. And see the woman on the end there? She is pas content over that last comment.”

  Indeed, the second woman, the one with a bouffant hairdo at least thirty years out of style, narrowed her eyes as she looked across the room at McClatchy. It was only a quick flash before she hid her expression, but Destry had called it. Maybe I could play that angle up, get Bob to make a few more errors.

  “I sincerely appreciated the protection,” I pointed out, “but I think this was a simple miscommunication; no one had told me how long I was supposed to have an escort. I left the M.E.’s office without anyone telling me I was supposed to check in with your men. You may not be aware of this, but even though I’m a woman, I do know how to take care of myself.”

  “You only think you do!” Bob shot back. “Like most women, you have no idea how to take care of yourself!”

  “Oh, my,” Destry chuckled, as the woman with the bouffant shot daggers at McClatchy with her eyes. “Now she is quite angry with your friend, quite angry indeed.”

  I shook my head. “You and I will have to disagree on that point. Like I said, I didn’t know when and how to interact with your patrolmen. How can you hold me accountable for that? If this was so important, why was I not given explicit guidelines?”

  “If it was so important?” McClatchy growled. “How would you know what ‘important’ means? This probation meeting was certainly important. And you showed up late.”

  “The man on the panel,” Destry put in, “he is thinking about the crashed cars he spied upon the road this morning. The sign by the road, it showed a number ‘10’.”

  “That wasn’t my fault,” I said dismissively. “There was a pileup on the Pomona freeway. I got stuck in the traffic jam just like everyone else.”

  “Not your fault?” McClatchy’s voice went up a notch. “That’s ridiculous! You don’t use the Pomona freeway to get here from your house!”

  “You are making him boil,” Destry said. “I would push him on this.”

  I cocked my head at McClatchy. “Who said I was coming from my house?”

  “Then where the hell were you?” McClatchy demanded.

  “I do have a social life, you know. I had a date that turned into something more suited for private conversation. Or did you want me to recite the play-by-play?”

  “Don’t be insolent! If I want the play-by-play from you, then you’d damn well tell me every last detail of your pillow talk!”

  A bang as the bouffant-haired woman slammed her notebook shut. She stood, red-faced, and leaned forward on the table.

  “That is quite enough, Deputy Chief McClatchy!” she stated firmly. “You are asking questions that could fall afoul of our policies on sexual harassment!”

  “I concur,” the other woman chimed in. “And the rest of this hearing has been a waste of time. All of the accusations I’ve heard today fall under the category of ‘personal squabbles’. They’re certainly not about violating the LAPD’s professional standards.”

  The sallow-faced man let out a gasp of protest. “But…there is still the issue of unresolved overtime incurred by two of McClatchy’s officers.”

  “Even so, it does appear to have been caused by a simple case of miscommunication. Three weeks of probation and a note on the contractor’s employment record seems appropriate punishment to me. And since Ms. Chrissie has spent three weeks on probation already, I believe she’s ‘served her time’. Given our chronic shortage of personnel in the forensics department, I recommend that she be reinstated to full privileges in the M.E.’s office immediately.”

  After a moment, the man said, “I guess I’ll second that.”

  “Furthermore, I recommend that Deputy Chief McClatchy re-take our department’s training program on Sexual Harassment Prevention.”

  “I will certainly second that,” the bouffant-haired woman huffed, and the man echoed his agreement.

  Having made their pronouncement, the three beige-clothed panelists frostily thanked both me and McClatchy for attending. A not-so-subtle way of dismissing us as they wrote up their final report, but all I wanted was to get out of that meeting room before anything else happened.

  McClatchy paused when we’d shut the door to the meeting room. “I don’t know what just happened in there,” he said sulkily, “but I’ll be watching you like a hawk from now on.”

  “You’re all sunshine, Bob,” I replied.

  “Again with being a smart-ass. Do you know any other tricks?”

  “It’s not my fault that you give me so much material to work with.”

  He gave me a venomous look. “Just remember, Chrissie: Any screw-up, and I’ll be on you like fleas on a dog.”

  He grunted and stormed off.

  Normally, I felt pretty darned good about beating McClatchy at his game. But this time, I got a bad feeling. And it didn’t go away when Destry appeared by my side.

  “There is something très mauvais with that man,” he remarked. “He truly believes that the world is out to get him. To hold him back from whatever he believes he is destined for.”

  I shuddered a little at that, but there was nothing I could do to remedy the situation.

  “Come on,” I said, “I’ve got work to do, and I can’t think of a better time than now to do it.”

  Destry followed along in my wake down a series of slate-gray corridors until I got to the Chem Lab. While the facility’s older Ballistics Lab reminded me of a cross between a badly run machine shop and a sleazy cafeteria, this room at least was a tiny step up. Aqua blue tiles and bright orange plastic chairs gave this lab the cheesy, halfway cheery look of a down-at-the-heels fast food restaurant.

  I greeted a couple of the technicians I sort of knew in passing, as I worked my way over to the far corner of the room. A bank of examination equipment and a length of counter space lay open for the taking, and I immediately put it to use. Destry watched, fascinated, as I put on a set of pale green gloves, face mask, and scrubs. I slid a protective visor over my eyes and then pulled out the cloth bag. I poured out a sample of the dust Galen had collected into a clear Lucite sample tray, and slipped it into the correct machine. Next, I followed the same procedures with the hair, tissue, and blood sample I’d stored in the plastic bag.

  “Intéressant,” Destry remarked. “The dust, she has a certain…scent to it. Magic has been done on it, no doubt. But the rest of what you are doing, I simply do not comprehend.”

  “The machines of my world can’t detect magic,” I explained. “But they might be able to tell me other things. For example, I placed the dust inside a mass spectrometer. It should tell me what that dust is made of, whether there is any organic matter inside. The blood, hair, and tissue went into various kinds of gas analyzers, to determine which poison tipped the darts that killed Vazura.”

  “Poison? Are you sure? That is a vile way to kill someone.”

  “I’m ninety-nine percent sure. Whatever killed Vazura, it did so almost instantly. The darts aren’t anywhere nearly long enough to have ended his life any other way.” I looked over to where the equipment hummed along, and then made sure that no one else on the other side of the room was watching my conversation with my pooka companion. “This shouldn’t take too much longer. In the meantime, I want to take a look at our murder weapons.”

  I pulled out the wooden box and used a pair of forceps to place each dart into its own Lucite tray. Destry moved closer to the table, his muzzle almost touching one of the little missiles. He sniffed at one dart, then the other.

  I took the trays from him and began to go over each dart with the microscope at low power. Vazura’s blood hung in a bruise-colored dab at the end of a hellishly sharp point. I moved the scope’s viewer along the weapon’s shaft, confirming that it had been made by a set of five individual pine needles, wrapped and braided around each other to form a strong, pliable surface.

  “Anything, Dayna?” Destry asked, as
I leaned back from the scope.

  “Nothing we don’t already know,” I grumbled. “We’re going to have to wait to see what the other machines tell us.”

  “It is truly amazing, what you can do here. Even though I am of this world, I know nothing of these things except from what I have seen in dreams.”

  “Really? What kind of dreams?”

  “I have seen bad dreams about waking up on a coroner’s table, as you might guess. Rather, I mean that Reveé has shown them to me. I could not view these things on my own.”

  That got my attention. I gave Destry a look.

  “You couldn’t see these things…of course, this must relate to the problem I’m supposed to solve for you.” I sighed. “I’m sorry I haven’t tried to help you yet, there’s a lot on my mind right now. Reveé said that you couldn’t perform your function. Which I assume has to do with delivering bad dreams.”

  A nicker. “That is a fine assumption, chérie. It is a defining characteristic of the pouquelaye.”

  “Complete inability to deliver nightmares…it must really bother Reveé, if she’s brought you to me.”

  “I can deliver the terrors of the night,” Destry added. “But not at night, which is really when they should take place, yes?”

  “So you can do…daymares?”

  “Unpleasant daydreams, really. But most daydreams are cute, or hopeful. At most, they are filled with vague unease. This makes my sire and dam furieux, as you might guess.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, looking at him straight on, “why can’t you deliver dreams at night?”

  Destry shied a bit. When he spoke, his voice was soft, embarrassed.

  “The truth, Dayna…is that…I am afraid of the dark.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Until that moment, I never thought that a big, scary-looking equine could look ashamed. Especially one from a breed that had ‘delivering bad dreams’ as their raison d'être. But the way Destry hung his head and lightly stamped his feet made it clear that he wasn’t happy at all with the way things had turned out for him.

  And the irony of his problem wasn’t lost on either of us.

  “It crosses my mind much,” Destry stated. “What use am I, when the very core of my self turns to jelly and quakes at the thought of moving but a single step in the dark?”

  I took a seat. The lab equipment hummed away, heating the test sample and sniffing it for chemical traces. The smell of warmed-up plastic curled up my nose, and I breathed it out before it made me sneeze.

  “What about when you appeared in my room?” I asked. “It was pretty dim in there, and yet it didn’t seem to bother you.”

  “It did, but not enough to truly unnerve me. Only in the complete and true darkness of the night does it reduce my stallionhood to trembling fear.”

  I gave some thought to the experiences of my friends. Considered how there might be a hint of how to deal with this. Shaw’s issue had revolved around age; Destry was fairly young, so it didn’t sound like there would be a parallel. Like the pooka, Liam had also lacked a critical magical component of his species, but he’d been driven into exile. Destry’s people were still trying to help him, so that was out. And then there was Galen. The centaur’s issues involved bad experiences with his Dad about his chosen discipline. It still wasn’t much of a match, but I tried to follow up along the same lines.

  “Destry, did you ever have a bad experience involving the darkness?”

  “Ah, yes. Every single time, there was a bad experience.”

  “Actually, I meant: when did you become afraid of the dark?”

  He cocked his head to look at me. “I do not understand. The darkness is as always, no?”

  “No. I mean, yes,” I said, trying to keep up with the pooka’s distinctive speech patterns. “Yes, the darkness is always…well, dark. But you couldn’t always have been afraid of it.”

  “Pourquoi pas?”

  He had me there. Why not, indeed. “Maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle.”

  “Perhaps. I hope you do find this right ‘angle’. Otherwise…it seems that my sire and my dam will have no choice but to unmake me. It seems sad to me, when there is so much I feel that I have not partaken of in life.”

  Destry pawed at the floor again. I felt for him; I had no idea what ‘death’ would be like for a creature like a pooka. But while Galen’s father had disowned him, there had been no talk of ‘unmaking’. And that stuck in my craw something fierce.

  “Have faith,” I said firmly. “I’m not finished with you yet.”

  “One hopes not.” I could have been imagining it, but Destry looked halfway hopeful. “Dayna, I am curious as well: why do my elders think you can help me?”

  “Well, they said I was a woman of science…but I don’t think that’s really it.”

  “No?”

  This time I shook my head. “It’s because the story’s gotten around that I helped a centaur, a griffin, and a Fayleene overcome similar obstacles. They’re good friends of mine now, and they’re a crack team I can call upon when I need them.”

  “Then I am reassured. Maybe the elders made a good choice putting me in your hands,” Destry said, with a bow and a nicker. He raised his head and added, “Someone approaches who knows you. I see your image in her mind.”

  I glanced to one side and saw Shelly enter the Chem Lab. She spotted me and made her way over quickly, a wicked smirk on her face. She leaned an elbow on my section of counter space as she spoke in a conspiratorial tone.

  “Word’s going ’round the department like fire in dry grass! I’m hearing that Bob McClatchy came on to you, or at least said something nasty. They say that he’s got to sit in on sensitivity training again or he’s out of the running for Chief of Police!”

  “Ah, the infamous ‘they’, again.” I rolled my eyes. “It wasn’t all that everyone’s making it out to be.”

  “That may be.” Shelly’s face got serious. A quick glance confirmed that the lab had gone empty for a little bit. “But make no mistake, you just made yourself a grade-A enemy, Dayna. Watch your back, is all I got to say.”

  I nodded. “That’s becoming my personal motto as of late.”

  One of the gas analysis machines chose that moment to go ping as it finished its task.

  Shelly looked at the machine, and then back to me. A frown creased her face.

  “You’ve been reinstated what, half an hour ago? How is it that you’ve already got a case to work on?”

  “It’s complicated,” I hedged. “Sort of a private matter.”

  “That was a bad answer,” Destry reproached me. “Your friend, she knows you are lying, but she does not wish to report you out on this.”

  “It’s okay,” Shelly said. She straightened up, tugged off her pince-nez glasses and let them hang by the chain about her neck. “You don’t have to tell me anything. But just remember: I didn’t go to school on the short bus, and I ain’t blind, neither.”

  I stood too. Reached my hand out to touch her arm. “Shelly, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

  “No one ever ‘means to’, Dayna.”

  “Look, I appreciate everything you’ve ever done for me,” I said sincerely. “This just isn’t the right time for me to lay all of my cards out. When it is, I promise you’ll be surprised.”

  “Well…” now it was Shelly’s turn to look halfway hopeful. “Does it involve that hunky friend of yours showing up again?”

  “As a matter of fact, it does.”

  “Then I can wait for that blessed day.” Shelly gave my hand a friendly squeeze before she walked off, heels clicking loudly in the sudden silence of the room.

  “That one, Shelly,” Destry said, “she cares for you like a petite fille – how you would say, a ‘little daughter’?”

  “If so, then I’ve been a pretty poor one,” I sighed. I hit the ‘print’ button on one machine, and then the others as they began to spit their results out in long spreadsheets of chemical signatures and equations
. Destry craned his long neck over my shoulder to see some of the diagrams.

  “I wish I knew what these symbols meant,” he complained. “But do you have what you were looking for?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed, as I picked up the small bunches of paper. The sheets felt warm in my hands, still a touch moist from the printer. I grabbed a nearby paper-clip holder and shook out a couple of the larger clips. “Destry, I take it that you can follow me on your own if I return to Andeluvia?”

  “Mais bien sûr, it is what my kind do. Shall we leave this instant?”

  I frowned as I read the readouts on the top sheet. “No. I need to go home one more time.”

  “Ah. Another change of clothes, perhaps? This time, I shall face away, resolutely.”

  “Yeah, another change,” I said, as I got up. “And to get my shoulder holster.”

  “You expect some serious problems?”

  “Maybe.” I ruffled the papers in my hand. “Like my friend Shelly said, I had better start watching my back.”

  * * *

  I arrived in the tower room of Fitzwilliam’s palace with a flash-bang of light and a heave of my stomach. Before I even had time to stumble, I felt a strong, warm wall of hair press up against my side to steady me. I clutched at it as I blinked, and then straightened up.

  “Don’t worry, I have you,” Liam’s voice said. Once he was sure that I would remain upright, he took a step back. He glanced at my attire of slacks, no-nonsense blue work shirt, and a dark brown leather jacket. “I like your latest outfit. It reminds me of the one you wore when we took down Magnus.”

  “Thanks,” I said, though I’d chosen the attire to handle the Andeluvian weather, as well as to help hide the shoulder holster. I broke out in a smile as I gave him a closer look. “You’ve grown some more!”

  “Indeed,” he said, somewhat abashedly. He pawed the stone floor in front of the darkened hearth, where the fire had been put out. “I only hope that I stop growing before I get beyond my prime.”

  “I somehow doubt that. This magic seems to know what it’s doing.” Liam’s legs had lengthened, boosting his height another couple of inches, and his torso had continued to fill out. The fourth tine on his right antler had completely grown in, and the ‘buds’ on his left had begun to reach out, like stems on a plant.