by Faith Hunter
Before I went down the hall, I took a moment for a good look at the kitchen and the huge room beyond it. There were white marble countertops and an island covered with bags of commercially made bread and buns, wilted lettuce, and tomatoes. There was a huge copper farmer’s sink, a heavy-duty breadmaker’s mixer, a copper-clad baker’s oven, and a six-burner gas stove. The glass-fronted upper cabinets went to the tall ceiling, displaying white dishes; copper lights descended in strategic locations; and the floor was pristine interlocking white vinyl tile.
Through a cracked-open door I spotted private stairs up to the second story. I figured they gave direct access to the bedrooms for midnight snacks.
The gathering room had comfy, squishy green furniture, lots of pillows, and a fireplace big enough to roast a small hog. Stella Mae’s home was beautiful, like one in a house design magazine, but everything looked utilized, not just for show, the sink with lizard-skin patina, the copper on the oven showing indications of heat.
The kitchen and gathering room struck a chord of lust in my heart, the sin of covetousness the churchmen always talked about. Thinking about my own home and the discord waiting for me there, I turned down the spacious hallway with natural plank flooring and wide doorways. At the end, near the staircase, the stench of death hit me and I slowed. The smell circulated on the air, ripe, foul, sickly sweet. As if they didn’t smell it, there were clumps of chatting LEOs—law enforcement officers—uniformed, plainclothes, and one member of my team. Occam looked up, wearing his cop-face expression, and my heart gave a little jolt of joy.
“Ingram,” he said, the smile in his voice telling me he really meant, Nell, sugar. The scarred skin pulled around his lips and his amber-hazel eyes crinkled with happiness as he excused himself from the officers and strode toward me, meeting me midway down the hall.
His hair had grown back blonder and he wore it longer than before he’d been burned, to cover up the patchy, hairless scars above his ear. “You made good time from Knoxville,” he said softly, his tone saying so much more. “You run lights and siren in your new official vehicle?”
I wrinkled my nose at his teasing. “I did not. But I did discover the joys of cruise control and audiobooks. What we got?”
Occam’s eyes went warmer and tender and my middle melted. “You mean between us?” he murmured.
My heart sang at his words and I resisted the urge to rub my curled fingers along his jaw. Wereleopards adored physical affection, and a cat-claiming face rub was especially pleasing to my cat-man. “The case, if you please? And why I’m here?” I managed, sounding far too prim.
Occam’s expression slid to business-serious. Softly he said, “Three dead, two days after the end of Stella Mae Ragel’s last concert tour. Her band, production crew, manager, and grips were supposed to meet here at ten, unload and organize gear, then eat lunch together and discuss the financial results of the last tour. Which I understand were better than expected.”
“Money,” I said, naming a common reason for murder.
“Yes, ma’am.” His Texan twang was moderated, the way he talked in public, just as my church-speak was moderated. It was a shame, but some idiots seemed to think Southern dialects were a sign of lack of intelligence, when in reality they were a sign of location-location-location, culture, history, immigrant influxes, and location. “Her crew last spoke with Stella at nine a.m. to confirm the meeting time, and she told them she and Verna Upton, the housekeeper, were heading down early to start work.”
“Down?”
“Basement studio with work area, lounge, and sound production room. About two thousand square feet of expensive sound equipment, instruments, and liquor. Stella has a stellar liquor collection.”
What I knew about alcohol could be written on my little fingernail in longhand, but I nodded for him to continue.
“The crew—band and roadies—started arriving, but no one answered the door. After twenty minutes, they used the hidden key and found the two women in the basement, dead. They called nine-one-one immediately.”
“COD?” I was asking for cause of death, still thinking murder.
“No idea. No blood spatter, no obvious signs of trauma, no signs of illness. Looked like they fell where they stood. But they also looked as if they died days or weeks ago instead of an hour.”
“Was someone impersonating them on the phone?”
“The band members insist not. They say it was Stella and she sounded fine, which, if correct, means extremely accelerated decomp.”
Which provided one small reason why a PsyLED special agent might have been called in, but there were now three on the premises.
Occam continued. “Within seconds after her crew called the police, Stella’s personal assistant, Monica Belcher, arrived and opened a shipping box of new tour T-shirts. She fell, dead when she hit the floor. She was still holding a wad of the new shirts. The bass player and the drummer ran to her but started feeling sick, and the band and roadies evacuated the basement and called nine-one-one again to request paramedics. Local PD, Sheriff Jackett, and Tennessee FBI were all here in less than twenty minutes, and medic units from Nashville in thirty.”
That was fast, even for murder. “Fame has its benefits,” I said, hearing unfamiliar sarcasm in my tone. I wondered if my derision was a remnant of kitchen-envy. Or maybe farm-envy. Or maybe just pure old envy-envy.
“By the time the first LEOs and medics got here, Belcher’s arm—holding the shirts—was showing signs of rapidly advancing necrosis. It looks as if her flesh is rotting in time-lapse photography. Faster even than Stella Mae and Verna Upton.”
“Why was someone opening a box of T-shirts when her boss was dead at a crime scene?”
“They say Monica Belcher was one of those people who can’t sit still, always had to be doing something. She freaked out when they found the bodies and she started opening and storing gear in a frenzy. There may be more to it. We’re still in the early stages of questioning. They’re all pretty shook up.”
“And the bodies are all three necrosing at an accelerated rate,” I said, just to be clear.
“Yup. And listen to you talking cop-speak, Special Agent No-Longer-a-Probie Ingram.”
I chuckled quietly, as he surely intended. I wasn’t a probationary agent anymore, but since some of my time in the unit was spent as a tree, I was still a rookie. The more experienced unit members still babied and teased me. I teased back, “What more you got to tell me, Special Agent Cat-Man?”
“Only that I’d like nothing better than a beer in that hammock out back, but that’s just me.” Occam’s lips lifted on one side, his still-scarred face pulling down on the other, and his one good blonde eyebrow waggled up and down. “It’s a two-person hammock,” he added.
“Uh-huh. The case, please?” I said, sounding all starchy.
Occam went on. “Yeah. All three bodies are decomping abnormally fast. So far they only got the housekeeper out of here and she had to go in a cooler. They scooped her up with shovels and spoons.”
That explained the stench on the air and the boxy shape in the biohazard cadaver pouch. A cooler. With a rotting body in it. But awful as it was, accelerated decomp was not a good reason for three PsyLED agents to be here. The stench in the hallway suddenly got worse as the air-conditioning came on. Eye-wateringly horrid.
“Why did the locals decide to call PsyLED for a paranormal workup instead of just a biohazard biological workup? And while you’re talking, some indication why I’m here?” Because I had lots of skill sets that could be done by the agents already on-site, and few that were mine alone: in the office it was paperwork, research, and summations, and in the field it was getting along with vamps and reading the earth. Vamps usually liked me or thought I was amusing, mostly because I wasn’t afraid of them when I likely should be. Reading the earth was an arcane ability, part of my nature magic, and was the usual reason I got out of my cub
icle.
“A backup singer and musician, one Catriona Doyle, member of the Doyle witch family from Ireland, was here before the local LEOs got here and started a seeing working. She’s an earth witch, and says there’s some funky magic going on in the house. She speculated that a strange kind of death working was taking place. That’s why PsyLED was called. T. Laine was on the way to Bowling Green for a reading and FireWind hijacked her here instead. She’s still downstairs and she says it’s magical, but not like any magic she’s ever seen before. Something different and real bad. Hence our backup.”
T. Laine Kent was Unit Eighteen’s resident witch, and doing readings had become one of her specialties: reading DBs—dead bodies—reading crime scenes, and reading other magic users. Using a seeing working, along with a psy-meter 2.0—the highly sensitive, upgraded model—and her field experience gained at some really awful crime scenes, she could detect and identify blood magic, dark magic, and Blood Tarot spells better than the rest of us put together.
Occam pulled his phone and read his notes, his face losing its humor, his voice all cop-emotionless. “Along with local hazmat, Kent initiated CBRNEP workup.” It was pronounced ky-ber-nep, but CBRNEP was the crime scene protocol for chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear, explosive, and paranormal materials, a protocol developed by the Center for Domestic Preparedness. “So far, we’re clean on chemical, radiological/nuclear, and explosive causation. Still holding out on biological, para, or combo.”
My eyes met Occam’s and his one good eyebrow lifted in agreement with my thoughts. Biological causation would be bad. A combo would be terrifying. PsyLED brass and the military had been creating response strategies involving militarized magical energies coupled with all the other elements of CBRNEP. None of the scenarios had resulted in manageable outcomes.
Occam went on. “Kent doesn’t have a probable COD yet, but the drummer, male, and bass player, female, who started feeling sick in the basement, are on the way to UTMC-Knoxville for monitoring in the para ward.
“The coroner and Putnam County medical examiner are on-site, down there now with T. Laine, dressed in blue unis, each holding a null pen, debating how to transport the other two bodies. Current plan is to find some null biohazard HRPs for transport to UTMC. Otherwise it’s possible the bodies will be fully decomposed by the time they get there.”
Everyone, alive and dead, was going to Knoxville. It would be handy to have all the victims—patients and DBs—in one place. Even more than sixty years after the paras leaped out of the para closet, medical professionals who treated or worked on paranormal creatures were few and far between. UTMC had long been on the cutting edge of para studies.
I drew a little circle in the air with my finger. “And why does your face look like that? So unhappy underneath the cop-face mean.”
“As soon as the sheriff arrived, he called in the local FBI. The feeb SAC took Catriona in for questioning. In cuffs. She was gone before T. Laine got here.”
“Why in handcuffs? Because she’s a witch?”
“Witch. Woman. Foreigner. Young. Pick one. Or pick ’em all. From what I gather, the special agent in charge of the local FBI office hates most everyone.”
Tennessee PsyLED and FBI had not healed our professional relationship since the state’s FBI director had been outed by us as a gwyllgi—a devil dog. Not that they wanted a devil dog in charge, but the FBI embarrassment of having a deadly paranormal creature under their noses and giving them orders had been hard on the whole department. Now it was tit-for-tat at the higher levels of the state organization. The younger feebs seemed okay, but upper management and the older entrenched agents were often a problem. Occam nodded a greeting over my shoulder.
Before I could turn, T. Laine said, “Your hair is gorgeous. I officially hate you.”
The hate comment meant she was jealous of my hair—which had gone a strange shade of metallic scarlet a few months back and become wildly curly, thanks to my becoming a tree for a while. The color and curls were fading now, but T. Laine still had hair envy. I stepped at an angle to include her.
Lainie looked tired, her skin pale, purple smudges beneath her dark eyes, and her dark bobbed hair was snarled and squashed flat from the elastic strings of a bio face mask. T. Laine needed another witch in the unit to share the witchy duties, but witches who were willing to go into law enforcement were rare as hen’s teeth.
“Update, to make sure we’re all on the same page. I drove here and tested the site,” she said. “It isn’t a typical witch working or curse. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Just looking at the scene, it fits some of the parameters of a death working but falls totally outside on the psy-meter, and it’s everywhere downstairs, especially in the swag storage room, where the third victim, Monica Belcher, fell and died. That room reads so strong of these death energies that, so far, I haven’t found a way to stay inside safely, and the two city cops who went in to take crime scene photos before I got here were contaminated. They just arrived at HQ to sit in the null room for a while, in case that helps.”
“What kind of psy-meter reading?” I asked. Every species of paranormal creature had its own specific levels, even me. And magical workings and magical energies always read on the psy-meter.
“All four psion levels are up, but they bounce up and down, as if the energies are being affected by something else, like compasses going haywire over the Bermuda Triangle. Almost everything in the basement is showing signs of disintegration, not just the bodies.” T. Laine rubbed her hand through her hair, a gesture that was part frustration, part something else. Maybe headache. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she repeated, “and I don’t know where to look to help me categorize it since no one up-line has answered my calls yet.”
Her eyes cleared slightly and she gave me a wan smile. “No maggots yet, though.”
“Ha-ha,” I said. Vampires called me Maggots or Maggoty, or Little Maggot Girl. The nicknames were a thing of perpetual amusement to my coworkers. “What’s a swag storage room?”
“It’s storage space for promotional merchandise and display stands.”
“What do you need me to do? Why am I here? This thing is in the house, not the earth.”
“FireWind requested you on-site.”
“Oh.” FireWind was the new up-line big boss and he scared the pants offa me. Being scared made me mouthy and so Ayatas FireWind and I had not gotten off on the right foot, if there was a right foot with him.
“FireWind is on the way from New Orleans. For now? Familiarize yourself with the site. Then you can start organizing the electronic file tree for PsyLED’s inquiry, take photos and notes, hand draw the crime scene, and start the prelim witness interviews.” She took a breath that ended in a frown. “Let’s take a quick tour of the basement. That’s a vision that’ll melt all the red off your lollipop.”
I would never understand what lollipops had to do with dead bodies. I followed Kent through the gaggle of officers at the end of the hallway and down the stairs to a landing where the stairs turned. There was a narrow window there with three houseplants on the ledge, and a table stacked with sky blue unis. Under the table was a huge plastic container for contaminated unis. I opened one of the super-strong mints and placed it on my tongue before we both dressed out in the null P3E unis. The one-piece biohazard uniforms had been designed for contact-based biological pathogens and had then been altered and spelled by the Seattle coven against magic. They covered the wearer from head to toe, starting at the oversized booties, rising up our legs to a waist that never fit, to the head cover that could be cinched over forehead and chin. To go with the unis were extra-thick spelled nitrile gloves and darker masks, which could be fitted to our faces to create a seal so that all air exchange had to pass through the specially treated null cloth.
The stench coming up the stairway was enough to make me nearly gag, even with the mint. Some people said they breathed
through their mouths when they encountered bad smells, but that left my tongue coated with a nasty smell/taste sensation. That perception lasted longer than the smell alone and made me not want my dinner.
On Unit Eighteen I had gotten sort of used to foul smells, but this stench was in a category all its own. If I could have stopped breathing entirely, I would have. The scent was a sweet, sick reek of advanced rot mixed with . . . I didn’t know what. Mixed with other things I couldn’t identify. When we were dressed, T. Laine handed me a null pen to protect me from the paranormal energies and a cloth handkerchief with mentholated vapor rub on it. I took both and tucked the cloth inside my mask, near my nose, and the pen into a chest pocket of the uni.
The stairway ended in a landing centered in the tan-carpeted basement. Musical instruments were everywhere, hanging on the walls, on stands in rows along the walls, in cases stacked in a corner. Set up as if to play or practice were three sets of drums and several types of cymbals; a rack of things that looked like kids’ rattles; three electronic pianos and organs; a series of bells, xylophones, and glockenspiels; and a white baby grand with the Bechstein logo above the keys. There was a body in a spreading wet circle in front of one case of instruments and a larger wet place in the carpet near her, the dampness extending beyond the taped outlines applied by the local LEOs.
“Stella Mae Ragel,” T. Laine said, identifying the DB.
I walked closer to the body and paused before taking three steps back. I did not need to see it again. It reminded me of bodies pulled from rivers, the skin slipping away from gooey, almost soapy tissue beneath.
