City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  I dig around for my wallet so I can pay for Lassiter’s considerably expensive meal. “To each his own,” I reply. “If mundane works for you…Lassiter?”

  He’s staring out the window, suspicion written into his narrowed eyes. “You got a tail, Kinsey. Between the bank and the hardware store.”

  I freeze up, wallet half open in my hands, and slowly look toward the indicated area. Sure enough, at the end of the block, between the Bank of America on the corner and the new hardware store next door, the figure of a man stands stagnant on the sidewalk, facing Dot’s diner, his angle lined up perfectly with the window for our booth. But Lassiter, new to this whole supernatural shtick, is missing one important detail about my supposed “tail.”

  “That’s not a living person,” I mumble.

  Lassiter responds with a sharp, “What?”

  I drop several large bills on the table without counting and slide out of the booth as quickly as I can, grabbing my crutches without taking my eyes off the familiar man in the distance. I’m afraid if I do, he’ll disappear for good. “That’s a shade, Lassiter,” I say in the same low tone, “a ghost. And I’ve seen him before.”

  It’s the shade who escaped from Slate’s basement that day I accidentally blew up the clocks. I got so wrapped up in all that happened after—the kidnapping, the summoning—that I completely forgot about the one shade who refused the Call to vanish into the Eververse. And here he is now, within my reach, but also far enough away that he could very well evade me again.

  “I need to talk to that ghost. Now.” Maybe this guy could shed some light on the remaining mysteries surrounding the Ammit summoning. The names of any other conspirators. The truth behind the ‘enemy.’ There’s still far too much we don’t know.

  Lassiter leans in close to my ear. “Um, Kinsey, can ghosts talk?”

  “They sure can, if they’re powerful enough. And that one’s been hanging around Earth too long after death to be weak.” Sticking my crutches under my armpits, I attempt to back through the same obstacle course of tables that almost tripped me earlier—and immediately ram my ass into a chair. Ow.

  Lassiter gawks at me.

  “Okay, let’s try this another way.” I point a finger at him. “You watch the ghost, and I will walk forward instead of backward so I don’t fall and break my neck. If the ghost moves at all, tell me immediately.”

  The detective frowns, annoyed, but relents. “All right. Whatever.”

  We make our way out of the diner at a snail’s pace thanks to my broken leg, but to my surprise, Lassiter never pokes my shoulder to inform me the ghost has disappeared. When I turn the corner of the restaurant, I locate the shade in the same place he was four minutes ago, back against the brick wall joining the bank to the hardware store.

  A living person, a woman, at the bank’s ATM, grabs her money and marches right on past the ghost without giving him a second glance. In the dim light of the cloudy day, I can see the shade is slightly transparent, but it’s not obvious enough to be noticed by preoccupied passersby.

  The ghost man must have practiced for this—appearing to me today.

  But why? Why me? Why here? Why now? Why…?

  It suddenly occurs to me that the shade might want to lead me somewhere. Ghosts are the silent types; they have a long history of showing more than telling. It’s a quirk that even the best ghost researchers don’t quite understand—possibly a consequence of some effect death has on the human psyche.

  If this ghost wants me to follow him somewhere, then it’s possible he’s spent the time since his release from the clock training himself to stay visible long enough to make the trip. That would take a considerable amount of power for a shade, especially if the destination is a significant distance from the diner.

  When I’m about thirty feet from the shade, Lassiter a few steps behind me, the ghost man suddenly turns on his heels and walks off down the street, to the nearest intersection. His pace is slow, measured, and he checks over his shoulder several times to see if I’m following. After the walk light turns green, he crosses the street, and I hurry along on my creaking crutches to keep up with him. I hear Lassiter pause behind me, unsure if he wants to follow a ghost to some unknown location, but he sighs and gives in, catching up to me with a jog.

  Maybe he cares about my well-being.

  Or maybe he finds this supernatural “crap” more interesting than he cares to admit.

  Regardless…

  We trail the ghost for eight blocks, until we reach the edge of a wooded area that separates the last vestiges of Aurora from its nearest suburb. The ghost then turns onto a narrow bike path and strolls into the woods.

  Huffing and puffing at the exertion from walking eight blocks on crutches, I hesitate at the beginning of the path, which is covered is fresh, deep snow. But after just six seconds, the shade stops walking and looks over his shoulder again. Waiting for me.

  As I glare at him, irritated, an odd realization strikes me: the distance between us is still roughly thirty feet. It’s like he wants to stay close enough for me to see him but not see him well. What could that mean? Is he someone I know?

  A chill creeps up my spine at the thought, and I drive my crutches into the snow, continuing forward. The shade resumes walking a second later.

  Lassiter groans. “Are you serious, Kinsey? This thing could be leading us into a trap.”

  “No,” I say, “he’s not.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  I don’t know the answer to that question, but I have a feeling—a gut feeling, not like that flaky déjà vu. There’s a revelation here, on the tip of my tongue, at the edge of my mind. Something obvious I’m missing. Something important this ghost is trying to get me to understand. “I can’t be sure,” I admit to Lassiter. “So if you want to back out, be my guest.”

  “Aw, hell. I see where this is going.” The detective shuffles into the snow behind me. “Got a hunch, don’t you? One you can’t ignore?”

  “That a standard detective quirk?” I keep my eyes peeled on the shade, who’s now curving around a bend in the path.

  “Well, I’m no Sherlock, but I’ve had my fair share of light bulb moments during my career.” He chuckles dryly. “Happens sometimes to all detectives, after they’ve been at the Homicide table long enough. Experience begets knowledge, and knowledge begets hypothesis, and hypothesis begets conclusion. Or something like that. My old partner Frank had a better way with words than me.”

  “Old partner?”

  “Yeah, old and gray. He retired last year. Got a rookie by my side now, who—”

  “Wait!” I hold up my hand to signal him to stop.

  Up ahead, the shade takes a sudden turn off the bike path and descends a hill toward what appears to be a wide, half-frozen stream running through the woods.

  “Looks like we’re going off road.” Picking up my pace, I hobble to the turnoff point. I reach the top of the hill at the same moment the ghost reaches the bottom. Without stopping, he whirls to the right and starts trudging along the edge of the stream in a northerly direction.

  “Uh, Kinsey?” Lassiter parks himself next to me. “You sure you can make it down there? Hill’s a bit steep for a guy on crutches.”

  “Watch me, Detective,” I retort.

  And he does watch me.

  Trip three steps in and roll all the way down the hill.

  When I come to a stop, next to the stream, my face planted in the snow, Lassiter calls out, “That was quite the show, Kinsey. Thank you for the entertainment.”

  Ass.

  Lassiter slip-slides his way over to me, recovering my misplaced crutches as he approaches. After I sit up, the detective hands me the crutches and helps me stand. I brush the snow off my clothes, but the cold moisture has already seeped into the denim of my jeans and the fabric of my socks. As we resume our pursuit of the shade, I have to deal with the audible squishing of feet in damp shoes. Great.

  Luckily, it appears this impromptu walk is comi
ng to an end.

  Unluckily, it’s because there’s a corpse floating in the stream.

  Lassiter spots it first and stops short. “Shit.”

  Nearly running into his back, I peer around his arm and follow his line of sight. To the partially decomposed body sticking out from underneath the icy cap on the water. Most of its skin has either rotted away or been stripped off by forest scavengers, its once nice, navy suit in tatters. Gray hair still clings to what’s left of its scalp, and there’s just enough flesh remaining on the face to determine the body is male. Middle aged, creeping toward elderly.

  The shade stands half a foot in front of this body.

  And it’s in this terrible moment, where Lassiter and I, for the first time, draw close enough to the shade to see his face, to see his grief, to see his horror, to see his desperation…It’s in this moment that three undeniable truths land heavy on my shoulders:

  One: the body has been here for several weeks.

  Two: the body and the shade are the same person.

  Three: that person is…

  “Oh, my god,” I say, “it’s Arthur Slate.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Medical Examiner Natalie Schultz is not a woman to be trifled with. She loathes the supernatural almost as much as she loathes normal people, and she’s not afraid to show her displeasure in her words, actions, and petty attempts at revenge. So when Lassiter and I pull up to the front door of the city morgue in his Crown Vic at half past one, hurry into the lobby, flash our credentials at the secretary, and demand to speak with Schultz immediately, she has no problem whatsoever storming through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door, click-clacking over to us in her high heels, and screaming in our faces:

  “What the hell do you two morons think you’re doing interrupting me on my lunch break?” She shoots us her best glare. Which would be more effective if she wasn’t wearing pink-rimmed glasses and cute earrings shaped like teddy bears.

  Sometimes, the personality doesn’t match the style.

  Lassiter speaks first. “We need to see Arthur Slate’s body immediately.”

  Schultz recoils. “Huh? Why? I sent my cause of death write-up over to DSI and Burbank’s office last week. Are you insinuating I missed something?”

  Lassiter and I exchange nervous glances.

  “So,” I reply, “you’re saying that Slate’s body is definitely still in the morgue, right?”

  “What?” Schultz’s eyebrows draw together in confusion, and her tone degrades toward anxious. “Of course. The tech on duty this morning inspected all the bodies in storage first thing, per the procedures we put in place after”—she fake coughs—“a ghoul broke into the building and ate two of my bodies a year and a half ago. Slate’s body got a check mark like the rest. He’s in his bag, on the tray, in the fridge bank, where he belongs until Burbank signs off on his funeral prep.”

  Lassiter clears his throat. “Do you mind if we…double-check?”

  Schultz eyes us with suspicion. “What’s this about?”

  “We’ll explain after we see the body.” I nod toward the double doors. “Please?”

  She taps her shoe on the tile floor, then sighs in frustration. “Fine. But make it quick. I’ve got three autopsies this afternoon and a hot date tonight, for which I would prefer to shower beforehand.”

  Yikes. Can’t say I disagree with that reasoning.

  She leads us into the employee-restricted area and down a drab gray hall, until we reach a room that requires a keycard to enter. She swipes her card and yanks the door open, gesturing for us to step inside.

  The autopsy room, complete with the aforementioned “fridge bank” attached to the left-hand wall, is almost as cold as it is outside, to dampen the decay rate of the bodies. There’s a bare rolling table situated off to the right, several drains cut into the floor, and a large glass cabinet on the far wall, filled with all sorts of new, packaged autopsy supplies, including scalpels and saw blades. Only two of the ceiling lights in the room are on, so it’s much darker (and creepier) in here than the hallway.

  Lovely.

  Schultz marches over to the fridge bank and slides her hand across the numbered stickers near the top of each square door. She stops at the chamber labeled 15. Reaching down, she grabs the handle, twists it until the latch clicks, and pulls open the door with an echoing screech of old hinges, revealing the tray inside.

  The empty tray. Where a body should be.

  The medical examiner stares at the tray, perplexed. “Okay,” she says after a long, uncomfortable silence, “you two want to tell me what’s going on?” She glances over her shoulder, expression mired with palpable fear. “How did you know he wouldn’t be here? In fact, how the hell is he not here? He was here eight hours ago. And yesterday. And the day before that. And every day since I picked him up at Jameson’s the morning after he was murdered.”

  Lassiter scratches his chin. “You’re a hundred percent sure about that?”

  “Yes!” Schultz cries out, slamming the chamber door shut. “I’ve seen him myself, two dozen times since he was brought in. He was definitely here. Until now.”

  “And,” I say, shifting back and forth on my crutches, “the only thing wrong with his body was his slit throat, right? That was the injury that killed him?”

  “Ah, yes.” She curls in on herself, suddenly unsure. “Like the report said. Time of death was between two and three AM the day he was discovered at Jameson’s. Single, deep laceration to the throat, caused by a sharp, curved blade. Severed his carotid artery. He bled out. Simple as that.” Her attention flicks from Lassiter to me. “Or was it not? What do you two know that you aren’t telling me?”

  Lassiter holds up his finger, asking her to wait a moment. “This doesn’t make sense,” he says to me. “The body in the woods was definitely Slate, right? But that body was far too old to be the one found at Jameson’s, even if it was left outside for a period of time. It’s been too cold lately for outdoor exposure to have accelerated decomp that much. So…what the hell? What’s going on here?”

  “That’s what I would like to know too,” Schultz mutters. “What body in the woods?”

  My mind reels with the jumble of clues, trying to straighten the details out into a logical series of events. I close my eyes and concentrate, recalling every piece of evidence my team uncovered, and cross-referencing that evidence with every unanswered question.

  If Slate’s body was indeed in the morgue until today, then the body we just found in the woods can’t be Slate, even though Slate’s own ghost led us to it. On the other hand, if the body in the morgue wasn’t Slate’s body…

  “Holy shit.”

  The answer slams into me like a fucking train, and I’ve never felt so stupid in my life.

  (But then again, hindsight is a powerful force.)

  “What?” Schultz and Lassiter ask in unison.

  “We got played,” I reply, a dark laugh crawling up my throat.

  Lassiter rolls his shoulders, uneasy. “What do you mean? How? By who?”

  I lean against the door, muttering stupid, stupid, stupid to myself until I finally regain enough composure to provide a response that doesn’t make me sound batshit insane. “We got played by the guy who was pretending to be Slate. The guy who you”—I point to Schultz—“hauled here in a body bag and did a preliminary exam on. You never got around to the full autopsy, did you, Doctor?”

  “Um…no? We’ve had a big influx of bodies over the past two weeks. Slate’s cause of death was obvious, so I pushed his autopsy back to work on more complicated cases.” She bites her lip. “What guy are you talking about, Kinsey?”

  I smack my head against the metal door and laugh even harder. “See, that was the trick. He made it look like he had an obvious cause of death, so you would work on him last, giving his plot more time to unfold before he played his hand.”

  Lassiter grasps my shoulder. “Kinsey, are you okay? You’re making it sound like this ‘guy pretending to be Slate’ is still a
live.”

  I smile bitterly at the detective. “Because he is. He was never dead. Slate died weeks ago, long before the Jameson murders. He was killed, and then had his ghost sealed away in one of his own clocks, to make sure he couldn’t interfere. He was then replaced by this lookalike, who attended the meeting at Jameson’s, killed Halliburton and Martinez, and faked an injury that made it appear like Slate had gotten murdered too.”

  I snap my fingers, over and over, louder and louder. And I know I’m scaring my acquaintances, but I can’t help it. My resentment for this abysmal failure is too damn strong. “You see,” I continue, “that’s why Slate’s Lexus was still parked in front of his house. Because he never drove it to Jameson’s that night. He never went to Jameson’s that night. The imposter drove his own vehicle to a parking spot near the bar and grill—and since we had no clue there was an imposter, we didn’t bother looking for his car.”

  Sheer terror strips the pride from Schultz’s face. “Are you saying the corpse with the slashed neck I examined several times was actually a living guy?”

  “Yes, Doctor. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  She shudders. “I was going to do his autopsy today…”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s why he left when he did. He overheard you talking about it. Otherwise, he would have slipped out after closing time.”

  “B-But he was dead.” She sounds lost, confused, uncertain of her own skills. “No pulse. No heartbeat. Cold and stiff and…Was it somehow all a trick?”

  “Indeed.” I toss my crutches away, and they clatter to the floor, startling Schultz and Lassiter. “One big fucking trick. That’s all it was. In a case bursting with people armed with the ability to transform themselves into other things, into wolves, into owls, I never once thought about the obvious solution to the murder mystery.” Strength drains from my limbs, and I sink to the floor, suddenly encased in a heavy blanket of fatigue. “My god, it was right there the whole time.” I gesture to chamber 15. “He was right there the whole time.”