by SM Reine
“Good question.” He summoned another agent with a gesture. Agent Bryce appeared at his side. Her round face was half-hidden by glasses that made her eyes look like they were bulging from her face, though I bet she would have been a classically pretty woman without them. “What’s up there?”
“We don’t know, sir.” She seemed a little breathless in the director’s presence. Most people didn’t have the friendly rapport I did with Fritz, and he had a reputation for being kind of a badass. A well-deserved reputation, to be fair. “It looks like it’s meant to lead to an attic, and there are grooves where we expect a door, but we can’t open it.”
I looked up at the ceiling again. There really was a faint square at the top of the ladder, but I never would have noticed if Agent Bryce hadn’t pointed it out to me.
After what I’d found waiting for me under the trap door leading to the basement, I was relieved that this one wouldn’t open.
“Have someone drill through the floor and send up a scout,” Fritz said. He meant a magical scout, a little firefly that could go up and peek around for us.
“Already on it, sir.”
He patted her on the shoulder. “Excellent.”
Agent Bryce’s cheeks flushed crimson.
The square indicating what might be an attic was strangely mesmerizing now that I’d noticed it. Tilt my head one way, and I couldn’t see it at all. Tilt my head back, and it looked like a door waiting to be opened.
An agent was bringing a cordless drill up the stairs. I felt sick just seeing him approach. I didn’t want that attic opened.
“This way,” Janet said, drawing us away from the ladder and whatever waited at the top.
The bedroom doors all stood open, giving easy access to the forensics team. I peered through as we passed them.
Paradise Mile’s living quarters were about what I’d expected. Twin beds, dusty old carpets, antique armoires, warped glass on the windows. The doorframes and ceilings were low, obviously designed for people a lot shorter than me.
Oh, and the windows were painted in blood. The sunlight filtered through them and tinted everything crimson.
The smears on the glass were the only visible spots of blood. Otherwise, things seemed pretty homey. There were a few personal touches in each room: knickknacks on one old lady’s shelves, family photos in this other guy’s room, decorative plates in another.
Every one of the beds was occupied by a dead body. I only recognized one of them—the balding woman with the hairy mole—but I figured they all had to be the residents that had been eyeballing Suzy and me on the stoop the day before.
The victims looked like they’d been tucked in. Pillows under their heads, sheets up to their chests.
The blood hadn’t come from these bodies. They hadn’t been bled out like Herbert. They were peacefully dead, sallow-fleshed and silent.
So where had the blood on the windows come from?
Fritz took off his sunglasses as he stepped inside the room on the end. “What killed her?” he asked, gesturing toward the body in the bed with his glasses.
“The current theory is carbon monoxide poisoning,” Janet said. “Old houses like this, there are lots of things to leak CO. The furnace, the wood stoves, whatever. Easy way to kill everyone in their sleep, just as easy to clear out afterward so that there’s no immediate sign of it within the house.”
“Herbert didn’t die in his sleep.” It felt insane that I had to even point that out.
“Maybe his murderer hadn’t planned on killing anyone with a knife.” Fritz drummed his fingers thoughtfully on his chin. “Maybe our killer planned to kill everyone in their sleep via asphyxiation, and Herbert was an accident.”
I held up both hands to stop Fritz and Janet from continuing. “Wait. Do we remember the demon worship in the basement? How did we go from demon worship to an impromptu stabbing and group CO poisoning?”
“The theories aren’t mutually exclusive,” Fritz said. “Even demons can be practical murderers.”
“Then why the blood on the windows?”
Janet looked annoyed at me. “We don’t have any perfect theories yet.”
No fucking kidding.
We were on our way back down the hallway when I noticed a glint of metal under the floor runner. The sun rising over Mojave cast light through the warped bedroom windows, and the slight shift reflected off of something metallic. It barely peeked through the tassels.
I flicked back the corner of the rug.
There was our butcher’s knife.
It was an antique, totally unlike the new hardware down in the kitchen. Janet had been right about the blade—it was roughly seven inches long and brutally geometric.
The blade had been wiped off, but there were still blood smears near the hilt. They were drying brown.
I didn’t touch it.
“Good eye,” Fritz said as Janet moved in to examine the knife.
“I’ll make lifting prints a priority, but we might not get anything good off of this if someone took the time to clean it,” she said. “If they wiped off the blade, you can bet they did the handle, too.”
“How long will it take to run them through the database?”
“Not long,” Janet said. “If we can get a good signal, maybe ten minutes.”
Fritz nodded, then gestured to me. “Show me where this demonic evocation ritual was cast, Agent Hawke.” He called over his shoulder to Janet, “We’ll be downstairs when you get results.”
I followed him reluctantly. I’d been doing good with all the bodies—my self-control had reached a very special new level of ironclad. I wasn’t sure that could hold up against going back into that musty little basement, though.
On the way downstairs, my mind replayed the death of the orderly. The way his expression went blank when the hole appeared in his forehead, the sound of the gunshot following a second later, like time had gone distorted.
It was getting hot in the retirement home.
There was a photographer in the drawing room, but since nobody had died in that part of the house, forensics didn’t seem to be doing much searching in the area. There were no tags on the covered furniture. No sign that there’d been an investigation at all aside from a lot more footprints in the dust.
The trap door in the servant’s hallway stood open.
“Down there,” I said.
Fritz arched an eyebrow at me. “Problem, Agent Hawke?”
“Nope. No problem.” He’d know I was lying, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try to preserve some shriveled scrap of my pride.
He took the lead down the stairs.
Before I could follow him, my gaze was caught by the door to the servant’s quarters. I can’t tell you why I thought I needed to do it, but I stepped around the trap door, dropped to one knee, and peered through the keyhole again.
The room that had looked completely red the day before wasn’t crimson now. It was dark, but I could make out a few details. The shape of a bed, an armoire like those upstairs.
“Huh,” I said.
What could have made it look like the whole room was red before? Maybe my eyes were all fucked up from too much time staring at my desktop monitors.
Or maybe it was something a lot creepier.
Fritz called up to me from the basement. “Coming?”
I headed down.
As soon as I cleared the floor with the top of my head, I saw why Fritz had sounded so annoyed. He wasn’t pissed at me for taking ten seconds too long to join him.
He was pissed because the basement was completely empty.
Where the circle had been drawn the day before, the floor was blank. Parts of the circle had been carved in, but even those furrows were gone.
There was no sign of the altar, either. Nothing but shelves of Christmas decorations, cobwebby rafters, and a light bulb that had probably been installed around the time that electricity had been invented.
All thoughts of the mysteriously red servant's room fled f
rom my mind.
Stepping out onto the bare floor, I shuffled around in search of magical residue. You know, the urge to sneeze.
That was gone, too.
“It was here, it was all here,” I said.
“I know. I saw the photos Suzy took before you left.” Fritz fished his Blackberry out of his pocket and pulled up the email. “See, here they are.” He lifted it to show me the pictures attached.
Before I could see anything, the screen blanked out.
His brow furrowed. “Hmm.” He tried to turn it on again, but the phone didn’t respond. “I thought my battery was nearly full.”
“I don’t need to see the photos again anyway.” I could get them from Suzy, give them a review later. “Did the cleaners already come through?” We had a department that swept scenes, removed preternatural artifacts, and made it look like nothing had ever happened there.
“I told them to wait until we dismantled the altar. I’m pretty sure they weren’t scheduled to arrive until this afternoon.” Fritz’s fist clenched on the Blackberry. “I can’t check my calendar. Damn it!”
He stormed up the stairs, and I pitied whoever was about to be on the receiving end of his temper.
Until Janet met us at the top, anyway.
“Got results,” she said, holding up a printout. She faltered at the sight of Fritz’s expression. “What’s wrong?”
Fritz thrust a finger toward the trap door. “I need to know exactly who has been down there today. Who ruined my crime scene?”
She scoffed. “Ruined…? No way. Don’t be ridiculous. It wasn’t me, and nobody on my team would ever contaminate a crime scene.”
“Destroyed, Janet, not contaminated. Who did it?”
“I don’t know. Give me a few minutes and I’ll find out. I can tell you now that it wasn’t anyone under my watch, though.” She sounded offended that we would even consider it, but her hand with the paper wavered, betraying her anxiety. “Did you still want this?”
He snatched it from her grip and skimmed it. “Are you sure this is correct?”
“Absolutely.”
I angled myself over his shoulder to check the page. It hadn’t been printed out of our database because Janet hadn’t needed to run the fingerprints that she found through the database; she had simply matched the prints on the handle of the knife to the prints on one of the bodies. Herbert’s, to be precise.
“He killed himself?” I asked.
“He’s the only one who touched the knife,” Janet said. “The blood on the windows also belongs to him. All of it.”
I was feeling sick all over, sore and hot and a little bit dizzy, just like I’d caught the flu.
How could it be possible?
Trying to visualize the timeline—There is no timeline, Janet had said—didn’t make me feel better because it didn’t make any sense.
Everyone had gone to bed early, maybe with Herbert’s help since the orderly was dead. Then he had gone downstairs to blow out the pilot light on the furnace, jacked up the gas, waited for the house to fill. Maybe he grabbed the knife out of the kitchen and did the cutting there…but no, because he would have had to paint the glass upstairs with his blood first.
He’d died in the kitchen. He couldn’t have cut himself in the kitchen, sprayed the blood around, decorated the second floor, and then dumped his own body back in front of the oven.
“There was someone else here,” I said. “Someone killed these people. A demon evoked by the ritual I saw.”
Janet gave me the kind of look that said she would have chewed me out for being stupid if the department director hadn’t been standing right next to us. “There are no other prints, no other DNA. This Herbert guy is our killer.”
“The entire property has been searched?” Fritz asked.
“Three times that I’ve seen.”
Through the windows of the drawing room, I could see the teams searching again. They were positioned all over the retirement village. No way could anyone have gotten past them to escape.
“Herbert didn’t have a motive,” I said.
Fritz glanced at his Blackberry again. There was a vein bulging on in his forehead. He was on the brink of stroking out without his smart phone. “This murder seems more mundane than we expected. We’re going back to the office, Agent Hawke.”
When there was still something so obviously wrong?
“But—” I began to say.
“Now, Agent Hawke,” Fritz said.
There was no arguing with him when he sounded like that, so I didn’t.
We left Paradise Mile Retirement Village in the rearview mirror. I watched the house until the road twisting through the valley made it vanish from view, feeling frustrated and angry and sick all over.
I was relieved to get out of that place. Relieved I didn’t have to go back and see Herbert’s body again. Even kind of relieved that the orderly’s ritual space had been cleared out.
But frustrated by the lack of answers. Deeply frustrated.
This case wasn’t closed.
Fritz’s Blackberry blinked back to life as soon as we were on the highway.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE INVITATION WAS WAITING for me when I checked my mail that night.
It had been printed on a yellow card with flowers on the front. The inside said, “You are invited to a memorial in honor of the residents of Paradise Mile Retirement Village. Please join us to pay your respects on Sunday the 26th of October. There will be a viewing prior to group burial at the Paradise Mile Cemetery.”
“Refreshments will be served” was at the bottom in tiny text.
Twelve dead bodies and a veggie tray? Oh boy. Sign me up.
Flipping the envelope around to look at the front again, I saw that they had the right name and address. Whoever sent it to me had definitely intended to reach Cèsar Hawke in apartment 17B.
Someone had given my personal address to the owner of the retirement village where there had just been a mass murder. A mass murder that was possibly my fault—or if not a direct consequence of my actions, then definitely something I’d failed to prevent.
If the leak had come from one of my coworkers, I’d have been willing to bet it was Aniruddha. That guy was a dick.
“Did you get one of these?” I asked as I headed through my apartment’s front door.
“One of what?”
“These.” I flapped the card at Suzy.
Then I actually looked up at her.
She was bent over my coffee table, head hanging over one edge, her butt sticking up facing the door.
And what a butt it was.
It was always a little bit of a shock to see Suzy without the monkey suit. Doubly so when she wore pajama shorts that cupped the cheeks of her ass like two juicy apples. The hems of the leg holes had lifted so that I could see the curve of skin where rump roast met thigh meat.
Someone had been doing her squats.
Any chance I might have had at formulating a coherent sentence was gone instantly.
Suzy flipped upright with a triumphant noise, hair sticking up in a wild mane, cheeks flushed pink. “Gotcha, motherfucker.” She pinched a metal disc between her forefinger and thumb.
With her butt safely underneath her, I could actually figure out what she was holding. It was about the size of a watch battery with wires sticking out of it. I’d messed with so many of those in the last couple of months that I could have disassembled and reassembled it in my sleep.
“Another bug?” I asked. “Isn’t that the third one you’ve found since you got here?”
“Fourth.” Suzy set it on the coffee table. “You need to get better at searching for these things if you want any privacy, ever. I don’t even want to imagine what the OPA has seen you doing.”
They hadn’t seen anything worth writing home about. I’d been working long hours. The spy cameras would have seen me coming home, flopping on my couch, snoring for a few hours, and then leaving. Rinse and repeat every day for weeks.
I laughed and agreed with Suzy, though. Better than confessing the pathetic truth. “Yeah. Wow. Don’t want to know what the surveillance might think about all the, you know, wild parties.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, all those wild, crazy parties.”
“I’ve had guests,” I protested weakly. “Guests” had mostly involved neighbors coming over to complain about the volume of my music—even though I don’t listen to music at home—and Suzy’s visits to pick up more sleeping potions.
The current batch was simmering in a stockpot on my stove. Sticky smoke had painted the backsplash in rainbow colors commemorating the many potions I’d brewed in that dinky kitchen: coppery gold for healing, red for juicing up on strength, green for mental acuity. This smoke was tinted the same shade of blue as the veins cording my arms. Liquid sleep.
I’d offered Suzy samples of my other mixes, but all she wanted was the sleep. She thought the rest was cheating. Pretty rich coming from a woman who had enchanted her townhouse so that it was bigger on the inside than on the outside.
Bang. Suzy hammered the spine of a book down on my coffee table, pulverizing the OPA’s bug.
“Think that’s it?” I tossed the metal fragments into a Banker’s Box with the rest of the dead bugs. I hadn’t thought of a way to recycle them yet. The OPA wouldn’t be happy if I threw proprietary technology out with the rest of the trash.
“Yeah, I think that’s the last of them,” Suzy said. “What’s that?”
I was still holding the invitation to the memorial. I’d completely forgotten about it once I’d been distracted by the happy valley between my partner’s legs.
“See for yourself.” I shoved it at her and then occupied myself with stirring my potion. Just a couple of smooth, slow turns to keep it from sticking to the side of the pot.
She read it, then crumpled the invitation in her fist. “Fuck them.” She hurled it at the trash and missed. “They’re fucking with you. That’s all it could mean.”
“Or they want money.” They’d have to get it somewhere else. My government salary was barely enough to keep my shitty apartment stocked with all these books I had no time to read, much less pay off grieving families. “Did you get one?”
