Sparks

by Laura Bickle

  “Pay it forward. Pledge to make your dreams come true, and we’ll pledge to help you on your journey. The Divine Intelligence will help your miracle come true for you, too. You just have to take that first step. Operators are standing by to take your call.

  “Blessings and good night.”

  To a standing ovation and thunderous applause, Hope waved and exited stage left. The screen filled with Miracles for the Masses’ phone number and address, then cut to a commercial.

  Anya sat back on her heels. “She’s got charisma. I’ll give her that. I suppose some people might find her to be appealing.”

  Brian snorted. “Sheeple. Sheeple might think they need to be led.”

  Anya lifted an eyebrow. “That’s kind of harsh, don’t you think? People want to believe in a better future. I mean, the fact that I’ve had my issues with the Catholic Church doesn’t mean I’d throw the baby out with the bathwater.” She had to admit, though, that it was hard to believe in a better future for Detroit. If she lay in bed, sleepless in the early hours of the morning, she swore she could almost hear the brittle city rusting.

  “Just because the rich lady talks a nice line and built a big building with other people’s money doesn’t give her moral authority. It’s a sociological fact: People get stupid in groups.”

  “Maybe. But good things can happen when people get together, you know?”

  Brian leaned over, sniffed her hair. He grasped the sleeve of her robe and tugged her down to sit on the floor beside him. “You smell like oranges.”

  Anya blushed. The change of subject wasn’t unwelcome. Her attention was distracted as his fingers brushed aside the curtain of dark hair covering her jaw. He nibbled below her ear, sending ripples of anticipation through Anya’s spine. She swung her legs into his lap, eager to touch and be touched by something real.

  “Hmm. Taste like oranges, too.”

  His arm wrapped easily around her waist, and his lips began trailing up her jaw line to her lips. Anya sank into the kiss, tasting mint and heat in his mouth. Her fingers wound in his shirt. She could feel the quickening of his heartbeat under her palms as one hand slid under the collar of her robe, pressed against the bare flesh at the back of her neck. She yearned to feel his bare hands on more skin.…

  Around her neck, she felt the salamander torque begin to yawn and stir.

  Go back to sleep, Sparky, she pleaded in the back of her mind. Not now…

  The phone rang. Reluctantly, Anya drew away. The universe was conspiring against her. She felt Sparky stretch and glide down her arm to the floor, where he watched Brian with half-lidded suspicious eyes.

  Brian reached for her. His eyes were shadowed in dark. “Can’t it wait?”

  “No one ever calls me at home… not unless it’s important.”

  She climbed up from the floor and plucked the receiver from the kitchen wall. The phone, an old-fashioned turquoise corded handset, had come with the house and was older than Anya. Thus far, like the 1972 Dodge Dart she drove, it had proven impervious to Sparky’s tinkering.

  “Hello.” From the corner of her eye, she watched Sparky’s tail lashing as he stalked around Brian. The salamander’s attention was suddenly arrested as he looked past the man to the glowing rectangle of shiny new circuitry on the floor. Sparky leaned forward to lick the HDTV. “Sparky,” she snapped, and he looked over his shoulder at her as innocently as a Rottweiler-sized fire elemental could look.

  “Kalinczyk?” the familiar voice on the other end of the line crackled with impatience.

  Anya pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. “Yeah.”

  “This is Marsh. There’s been an incident at the Jasper Bernard scene.”

  “What kind of incident?” Her brows knit together as her mind flashed through the possibilities. It couldn’t have caught fire again—the scene had been cool throughout.

  “The house has been ransacked. The press is already here. Better put on your Wonder Woman boots and come down here ready to kick some ass.”

  JASPER BERNARD’S HOUSE WAS a hive wrapped in yellow fire line tape, surrounded by the buzz of voices. Anya elbowed her way through the throng of neighbors gawking behind the line in their pajamas and robes. The shellacked news reporter she’d seen earlier at the site was standing in front of the fire line tape, the lights from his news van illuminating the face of the house, a pump truck, a burned-out sedan, and two police cars at the entrance.

  Anya flashed her badge and ducked below the line. The reporter reached over the line with his microphone: “Nick Sarvos from Channel 7 News. Is it true that a man was burned to death inside?”

  Anya grimaced. She hated dealing with the press. Her mind froze under questioning, and she was always afraid of saying something monumentally stupid. There was nothing the press could do for her, so she didn’t trade favors by leaking info. These things were best left to the Detroit Fire Department’s public relations people. She held up her hand as she walked away, telling him, “No comment.”

  The reporter shouted after her, “The neighbors are saying this is a case of spontaneous human combustion. Is there any truth to that rumor?”

  Anya walked briskly up the steps to Bernie’s porch, pretending she hadn’t heard him. Ignoring him would probably come back to bite her in the ass by looking damning on film, but she had nothing to give him. Hell, she didn’t even know which end was up yet.

  Cops milled around the porch, at the edge of the news van’s mast light glare. Their shadows cast long over the peeling paint, the uniforms moved aside to let her pass. Marsh stood in the doorway, scribbling on a clipboard. He did not look happy.

  “I thought the scene was secured.” Anya frowned up at him. DFD didn’t release a scene until the scene was deemed safe and all evidence of arson had been collected… and they were a long way from that point. Leaving at least one firefighter at the scene allowed DFD to come and go without a warrant. It was a handy facet of the law that allowed DFD a good deal of latitude in investigating… all in the name of public safety. “How in the hell did anybody get in?”

  “Yeah. It was supposed to be secured.” Marsh glowered. “I posted a guy on the curb. His car apparently caught fire. When he got it extinguished, he saw lights inside the house.”

  “Lights? What kind of lights?”

  “Not flashlights… the guy posted to guard the scene described it as a flickering orange glow. He thought the place had caught fire again, went in to investigate. Found the place tossed.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Yeah, well, DPD is taking a report, but can’t tell if anything is missing.”

  Anya pinched the bridge of her nose. “Let me guess.…”

  “Yup. Figuring out what’s gone is your job. You took pix of the scene before it was tampered with.”

  “It’s not as if I had time to do a thorough inventory.…”

  “Congrats. It’s your baby now.”

  Anya’s shoulders slumped. She trudged past Marsh through the kitchen door.

  It was not a pretty baby.

  The kitchen had been thoroughly ransacked. Boxes of cereal had been ripped from the cupboards, spewing rice puffs on the floor that crunched underfoot. The kitchen table had been overturned, a leg broken in the fall. Pots and pans littered the floor, mixed with newspapers and the contents of the refrigerator. The refrigerator door stood open, light on. Lids had been torn off dozens of plastic containers, leaving their contents cast aside. A bottle of ketchup leaked out onto the floor. Anya smelled the remains of Kung Pao chicken, the sickly sourness of melting ice cream. She tugged her jacket more tightly around her against the chill.

  How the hell had the firefighter posted outside not heard this shit going on and put a stop to it? she wondered. It had to have sounded like a frat party in here.

  Reluctantly, she shoved the door to the living room ajar. Unbelievably, Bernie’s living room was even more of a mess than before. The couch had been overturned, the stuffing slashed out of it. Bookcases had been ri
pped apart, their contents spilled among the black shards of broken vinyl LPs. Ashes from the fireplace were smeared along the carpet, almost obliterating the stain that had been Bernie.

  Anya’s eyes narrowed. This was no random burglary. Someone was looking for something specific.

  Her eye turned to the fireplace mantel. It had been stripped clean: no bottles, no sword, no talismans. She inhaled deeply. For all the chaos, one thing was clearly different here: She could smell no magick. None at all.

  She orbited the room, nostrils flaring. None of the objects she’d identified as magickal seemed to have been left behind. All she could detect was a dull, background smell of ozone she’d detected on her first visit here.

  Staring at the fireplace, Anya drummed her fingers on her lower lip. Someone had been digging around in the ashes. Perhaps someone who’d been after the fragments of the magick-stained geode bottle she’d found. At least that had been safely packed away in the evidence locker. She hoped Forensics might be able to lift some prints from it.

  She retraced her steps out of the room, careful not to touch anything. She’d get her camera and the rest of her gear, and would likely spend forever comparing these photos with her previous set. Cataloging the scene was shaping up to be a perfect nightmare.

  Anya sidled through the kitchen, through the knot of cops gossiping. She heard Marsh growling at the petrified fire cadet who was supposed to keep watch. His voice was too low for the press at the street to hear, but his tone had reduced the cadet to Jell-O:

  “…what the hell you were thinking. You’ve compromised the scene of an active investigation. I’ll have your badge on my desk by morning, understand?”

  The firefighter stood there, hands jammed in his pockets, staring at the floor. “Yes, sir. I don’t know what happened. My back was turned for just a few minutes.”

  “Were you sleeping on the job?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You been drinking?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Drugs?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your ass is going over to the ER for a drug test. Now.”

  Anya slipped past them, stopped. Her nose twitched, and she turned toward the hapless firefighter.

  He smelled like magick. The odor of ozone clung faintly to his coat. Anya sized him up. He was a regular guy—nothing outstanding about him: young man in his twenties with a buzz cut, shaking in his boots as Marsh chewed him out. Seemed earnest enough… not like a closet magick worker.

  “Hey,” she said, interrupting the ass-chewing. “Tell me what happened. What did you see?”

  The firefighter rubbed the back of his head. “I was watching the house, just like Captain Marsh told me to. I was listening to the radio, when I heard it get staticky. I tried to adjust it, but then I saw smoke rolling out from under the hood of the car. I popped the hood, thinking maybe it was steam from the radiator. But it was smoke.”

  “What color was it?”

  “White. I think. That’s why I thought it was steam. But I’m not sure.”

  Anya frowned. An engine fire fueled by motor oil would have emitted black or blue smoke. Maybe it had been an electrical fire, or an ignition of battery acid.

  The firefighter continued. “I got the fire extinguisher out of the trunk. By that time, the whole front of the car was in flames. I was afraid that the gas tank would ignite, and I called for backup.”

  “When did you notice there was movement in the house?”

  “I saw light in the house after the guys from the ladder company showed up to put the car out. Like I told Marsh, it wasn’t flashlights… it was golden orange. I ran up the steps, and when I opened the door, the lights went out.”

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “No. And I don’t get that.” The firefighter shook his head. “I don’t see how they could have gotten past me.”

  Anya’s eyes narrowed. “No one rushed past you?” There was only one door, the front one. Well, it was fairer to say that there was only one door that was accessible. The back door was blocked with crap; no one could’ve gotten out through there. And she’d seen no signs of forced entry yet.

  Anya’s eyes slid past him to the car he’d been sitting in by the curb. It was a charred hulk, the front end burned black and the hood gaping open like the mouth of a monster. The glass was still intact, suggesting that the fire hadn’t reached peak temperature. Car fires could get hot, over a thousand degrees, sometimes up to two. Perhaps opening the hood had dispersed some of that heat. Dodging through the police line and onlookers, she reached for the door handle…

  …and was almost knocked over by the stench of magick that rolled out of the car. It was as if someone had been in the car with the windows rolled up, smoking pages from a witch’s Book of Shadows for the last twelve hours.

  Anya coughed. Her eyes watered, and she felt the remnants of magick seep into her clothes and her skin. She felt the salamander collar move around her neck as she stumbled back. Sparky leapt lightly on the ground. He grasped her coat in his teeth and hauled her back, back into the fresh air.

  She breathed it deeply, forcing the heavy, still magick air out of her lungs. Sparky’s head swiveled toward the car, and he growled.

  Someone who knew how to use magick had started that fire to distract the firefighter. They’d broken into the house and lifted Bernie’s magickal inventory right under their noses.

  And she had no idea of what that all included. For all she knew, Bernie had the goddamn philosopher’s stone or fucking Excalibur buried under his stacks of newspapers.

  Shit.

  Anya’s office wasn’t much, but it was a pretty damn good sanctuary.

  Hidden in the labyrinthine bowels of Detroit Fire Department HQ, it tended to be forgotten. The basement office, with its old black-and-white tiled floor, broken transom window above the door, and beat-up 1960s office furniture, smelled like mildew and stale coffee. The overhead fluorescent light buzzed and flickered. But it was home away from home. And people rarely bothered her here. She appreciated not being in the upstairs cubicle farm; Anya didn’t care about seeing or being seen. She wanted space to think. Even if it smelled.

  Anya sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by stacks of eight-by-ten photographs. She’d spent all night logging the newly contaminated fire scene with her camera, and was comparing these shots to the ones she’d taken the previous day. The squeaky ink-jet printer on her desk grudgingly coughed them out, one at a time, before capriciously succumbing to paper jams. Anya perched over the photos with a red Magic Marker, circling things that should be there but weren’t. It was like playing a giant game of Where’s Fucking Waldo? and it made her head hurt.

  So far, Bernie’s place was missing six swords, twenty-six bottles of various descriptions, crystals and stones, a few statues, a carved wood skull, and a bag of marbles. And that was just what she could discern from an initial inventory and review of the photos. There was likely to be much, much more missing that she’d never know about. She’d tried tracking down Bernie’s relatives to see if they might be able to shed light on either his death or the missing items, but his only living relative was a nephew he hadn’t spoken to in twenty years. The nephew had the good sense to move out of Detroit. When Anya asked him what he wanted done with his uncle’s remaining things, the nephew told her, “Torch it. Can’t you use it for firefighter training or something?”

  Anya chewed the pen cap, staring at the pictures. This would take months to unravel. Years.

  The phone on the top of her desk rang, jolting her. She reached up and snagged the receiver. “Kalinczyk.”

  “What the hell is this thing you sent me? A goddamn foot?” the county medical examiner squawked on the other end of the line. The rustling of a plastic bag could be heard. “What, two feet?”

  “It’s a body, Gina.”

  “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “That is the rest of it.”

  “Explain this to me, please.”

/>   “It was found at a burn site. Scorch marks on the couch, floor, and the feet were found at the margin of the burn.”

  “You got photos?”

  “Yeah. I’ll send them over interoffice—”

  “Bring ’em to me if you want a report. Otherwise, these feet can stay in the fridge until Christmas.” Gina hung up.

  Anya sighed, plucked the photos off the floor that included shots of Bernie’s remains and jammed them into a manila file folder.

  She hated going to the morgue, but there was no defying the will of Gina the Ghoul.

  Folder tucked under her arm and muttering under her breath, Anya turned off her office lights and headed upstairs. Detroit Fire Department Headquarters had been built in 1929 in what was now known as the Washington Boulevard Historical District. The lobby and upper floors, which were open to the public, had been remodeled and refurbished several times, but the exterior still retained the original facade with high arches reaching over doorways.

  The spell the 1920s cast ended when she hit the street. Directly across from DFD HQ was the modern Cobo Center. Built in 1960, the modernist cubic structure sprawled over city blocks and even reached over the Lodge Freeway below. The disconnect between new and old still jarred her, no matter how often she stepped out of the cool shadow of HQ into the bright sun of the street.

  Anya dawdled getting the Dart out of parking. She took her time, pulling out and driving by the river district, intending to pick up I-75. She drove north to the morgue, hoping for traffic delays to postpone her visit there.

  The glossy columns of the GM Renaissance Center reached up to a clear blue sky, sharply contrasting with some of the older buildings in the downtown area. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Detroit had been known as the “Paris of the West” for its dazzling architecture. The Great Depression put an end to that building boom. Construction had sputtered in fits and starts since then, but seemed to have burned out completely.