The Devil's Eye

by J. R. Rain

  After a moment, Rick shrugs and glances at me. “Must be humid out. Your hair is filling the entire right half of the car.”

  “Ha. Ha.” He’s exaggerating, but I grumble and try to gather it down a bit. Try, being the operative word here.

  Rick starts the engine. “You really don’t feel any temptation to trim it, eh?”

  “Nope.” I raise my nose with an air of fake aloofness. “It’s the source of my power. And you’re right. It is humid today.”

  “Does your magic hair see through ski masks, too? Because we’re going to need more than you having odd cravings to tie the pizza guy to this.”

  I scrunch up my nose. “We could get Alan’s picture and overlay a ski mask on it, see if Victoria could ID his eyes. Maybe that’s going out on a limb.”

  “Yeah. Any decent lawyer will get that tossed.”

  “Hmm. Well, we have the phone records showing Walter contacting both of them regularly. Not exactly barking up the wrong tree.”

  Rick taps his foot on the brake pedal. “It’s something, but weak.”

  “Well, let’s get pictures of the stolen jewelry circulating, and request a bunch of uniforms branch out to all the pawn shops in the city. Also, time to rattle some trees in the lab and see if they got anything from Walter’s trash.”

  “Are you doing that on purpose?” asks Rick.

  “Doing what on purpose?”

  He stares at me for a few seconds, the whole time I feel confused. “I guess not then.”

  “Doing what, dammit?”

  “Well, you keep adding tree metaphors or idioms or whatever to everything you’re saying.”

  “Tree metaphors?” I raise an eyebrow.

  “Going out on a limb, branching out to pawn shops, barking up and rattling some trees.”

  “Huh. I didn’t mean to do that.” My eyes narrow. “Or that’s another message.” I snap my head to the left to face him, and my hair clip flies onto the dashboard with an explosion of curls that completely covers my face and drapes over my chest. “Back to the forest! I have to have missed something.”

  Rick chuckles. “Would you hit me if I called you adorable?”

  “Yeah.” I wait ten seconds, then thump him on the leg.

  “Ow. What was that for?”

  “Not calling me adorable.” I part the hair off my face enough to stick my tongue out at him again.

  “Wait, so you would’ve hit me for calling you adorable, and you did hit me because I didn’t?”

  “Yep.” I grab the hair clip and wrangle the mane back into a semblance of order.

  “Women… I do not understand.”

  I smile. “That’s okay. You’re not supposed to.”

  ***

  Hopefully, there’s still a little residual clairvoyant boosting in me from the mugwort tea.

  Rick drives us back to Ken Lake and parks on the side of Lakemoor Drive again, near the same house we visited when first checking the crime scene. From the road, there’s little sign that a murder scene sits a short ways west into the woods.

  We get a radio call within seconds of Rick shutting the engine off.

  “Yeah. Go ahead,” says Rick into the mic.

  “Hey, thought you might find this interesting since Wims is into that weird stuff,” says Dispatch.

  I grab the mic in Rick’s hand and squeeze his finger into the button. “It’s not weird; it’s pronounced Wicca. What happened?”

  Rick grins at me.

  “One of your suspects was just involved in a motor vehicle incident. Patrol sent over an FYI. A guy you accessed records for was hit while walking across the street with a couple pizzas.”

  My stare locks with Rick’s. Without looking at the mic, I ask, “Alan Chan? Is he okay?”

  “I don’t have that info, Detective. It just says here he got clipped by a Prius. Let me check and get back to you.”

  “Copy. Thanks.” I hang up the mic. “Well, we know who’s got the Devil’s Eye.”

  “Alan.”

  “The one and only,” I say.

  “And he’s looking likely as a suspect for Walter’s death.” Rick wags his eyebrows. “We better move fast before that curse hits him with something heavier than a Prius.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps it really was an accident.” I shrug. “That’s the annoying part about curses. It takes a string of unfortunate things to happen before it’s possible to separate a curse from bad luck.”

  Rick starts to laugh, but it melts off to a worried expression. “Okay, this is getting a little scary now.”

  “Well, don’t worry too much. If you wind up touching the gem, just keep saying, ‘I don’t want to keep it’ over and over in your head. Maybe Khufu will believe you.”

  “Not funny.”

  I push my door open. “Not trying to be.”

  “Sheesh, Wims,” says Rick after getting out. “You look like a prehistoric fern.”

  “It’s humid,” I deadpan, then sigh. “Volume triples in moist conditions.”

  Rick adjusts his belt. “I can sympathize, but more like quadruples or quintuples.”

  “Hah.”

  I lead the way up the hill and plow into the woods. About twenty minutes later, a few scraps of crime scene yellow tape lead me to the ritual circle. Amazingly, nothing looks disturbed from the last time I was here. Arms out, fingers splayed like spiritual metal detectors, I walk in an expanding circle, waiting for intuition to lead me somewhere.

  Rick checks out the altar and circle again, picking at the head-sized, bloodstained stones at each star point and looking under them. Fifteen-ish minutes later, he sighs. “I don’t think we missed anything.”

  Not having felt any tugs, I stop walking and rub my pentacle amulet. Since my boots block me off from nature, I crouch and thrust the fingers of my left hand into the soil and moss, reveling in the energy that creeps up my arm.

  “Earthen circle stained with death,

  “Lines of power, lines of magic.

  “Witness here a man’s last breath,

  “Bear no taint from fate most tragic.

  “Goddess guide my instinct true,

  “Show me that which I must do.”

  Rick hovers a short distance away, keeping quiet. He folds his arms, one eyebrow up. “If that works, donuts on me next time. Hell, the next five times.”

  A ripple of energy seems to peel away from me and race off into the woods. The feeling is subtle, but enough to get me moving. I walk as if a thread pulls me forward. Within minutes of leaving the clearing behind, I spot a handprint in the dirt at the base of a tree.

  “Someone fell here,” I say, but keep going, unable to resist the urge.

  “Drag mark,” says Rick behind me. “Holy shit, Wims. Fuck. Are you serious? Tell me you’re not actually following the path those guys dragged Manning along.”

  His feet crunch and splinter twigs; mine are silent.

  “Another drag mark here,” he reports. “Forensics didn’t search wide enough.”

  “Neither did we,” I mutter.

  The pull leads me down a much shallower incline and out of the forest in a dirt lot behind a house a good ways west of the development around Ken Lake. The property is isolated on all sides by trees, except for a spur that connects to a little westbound road. I come to a halt by a set of tire ruts and a half-buried can of Diet Coke.

  Rick walks up behind me, looking around.

  I point at the tire tracks, and other marks that look an awful lot like a man’s knee imprints. “This is where they brought him in from.” The can lines up with the tire tracks about where the passenger side door would open, assuming they didn’t back in. “Bet one of them kicked that soda can from the car when they got out and didn’t notice.”

  “You thinking what I am?” asks Rick.

  “Another call to Forensics?”

  He nods. “Yeah. Couple of shoe prints along that trail too.”

  After offering silent thanks to the Goddess for her help, I look over at
Rick. “I’ll go get the car and drive around here. Gotta work off that donut.” I pat him twice on the belly, and head back into the woods.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Dangerous Magic

  A large black cloud hovers over me Saturday morning. Metaphorically speaking. Conjuring actual clouds only happens in video games.

  Yes, I knew what I was getting in for when I signed up for this job―heck, patrol officers have a relationship with weekends like an angry ex-spouse after a brutal divorce. Still, going into detective work was an improvement schedule wise… except in mid-case when the suspects could disappear at any time.

  So, here I am at the desk, fist mushed into one side of my face, staring at a report. The tread from the tire marks matches the type of radial sold stock on Chevrolet Impalas from 2010 through 2014. Alan Chan owns a silver 2012 Impala. Score one for the good guys. Speaking of Alan, he had an unexpected close-up meeting with a Prius driven by a young woman who admitted to glancing down for a second because her cell phone chirped. Her windshield suffered more damage than Alan, since she hadn’t been going that fast. Perhaps the biggest tragedy (as Rick put it) was the loss of two pizzas that flew out of the cozy bag and landed in the street, cheese-side down.

  Who says there are no universal laws?

  Drop a pizza, it goes cheese-to-pavement.

  And, yeah, how the pies landed was in the report. In other news, no local pawn shops have gotten any suspicious merchandise of the jewel persuasion. However, the tire print matching Alan’s car on top of phone records might be enough to seduce a judge into issuing a warrant to search his place.

  With nothing else to do but wait for any of my feelers/inquiries to come back, I find myself thinking about Elise. It’s a little bit of an abuse of my access, but I justify it to myself by promising the Goddess I will only do good with anything I learn, and not betray my coven sister. First, I run her name, Elise Taylor, in the system. It comes back with a missing person report from four years ago, when she’d been sixteen. The file has an FBI link via NCMEC. Looks like she vanished from Colby, Kansas, reported missing by foster parents. Based on what I know from talking to Abigail and Elise herself, this report was issued about a month before she turned up at Abigail’s doorstep.

  It’s cross-linked to four police reports involving the foster parents’ biological son, Derrick. The boy, a year older than Elise, attacked the father once, Elise once, and two random strangers. No one pressed charges, and the boy was sent for psychiatric evaluation. His record has nothing in it after Elise ran away.

  Hmm. Elise has been consistently terrified of ‘dark energies’ following her. Whatever had been after her probably affected Derrick, and left when she did. Nothing remotely sinister has happened around her at Abigail’s, but our High Priestess’ mansion is perhaps the spiritually safest location within a hundred miles. Maybe it can’t get to her… whatever it is. Or maybe it’s her and she can’t control it? I want to look more into what happened to her biological parents, but that’s not in any system I can link to. Nope, that’s going to take an actual phone call to a police department in Colby.

  I glance at my computer. Nothing yet. Hmm.

  Minutes later, I’m being transferred to a detective in Kansas.

  “Keef,” says a milquetoast-sounding man.

  “Hello, Detective Keef… I’m Detective Wimsey in Olympia, Washington. I have a person here who may be in danger, and I’m trying to piece together as much as I can of her background from about four years ago when something happened.”

  “All right, but you’re kinda taking a stab in the dark. This is a pretty quiet town,” says Keef. “Whatcha got?”

  “Her name is Elise Taylor. She would’ve been sixteen at the time, four years ago. Can you tell me if she was the victim of any violent crimes?”

  “Hang on.” Computer keys tap for a few minutes. “Hmm. Okay. Yeah, I got something here. Two reports of her being involved in assaults at school. Mind you, she attacked two other students.”

  “Oh, my. How bad? Any weapons involved? Gang activity?”

  “Nah. Looks like a pair of girls having a catfight.” Keef chuckles. “Poor kid. There’s something here about her mother passing away soon before the outbursts started. Another note says she was real quiet beforehand, well-behaved, good grades. They cut her a break, but a month later, her old man goes on a rampage.”

  A cold, sick feeling grows in my gut. “Rampage?”

  “Drove around town, trying to run people over… did a bunch of property damage, broke a leg or three. He tried to run over a few officers, too, and they shot him. He didn’t make it.”

  “Sorry.” That explains foster care. “Thank you, Detective Keef. You’ve been a big help.”

  “No problem.”

  I hang up and sink back in my chair, staring at the wall. Her mother died somehow. Since Keef didn’t elaborate, I’ll assume nothing criminal happened there. Elise is gifted, like the rest of us at the coven. We know what we’re doing, and our magic is real, not some fun toy to mess around with. Shit. I rub the bridge of my nose. Did she try and use a spell to make her mother come back, or talk to her, or something of the sort… and a dark entity heard her calling? Dammit. This feels right. Scary, but right.

  My system beeps with an incoming email. Oh, goody! Perfect timing. Then again, I’m the impatient girl who can’t sit still for ten minutes. I file what I learned about Elise in the back of my brain for later and open the results of the fingerprint analysis on the Diet Coke can. The mugshot staring at me is Alan Chan, but that’s not the name on the file. Mr. Nelson Wang is evidently wanted by police in Delaware for the theft of $200,000 from his former employer. I skim the document enough to understand that he inserted some kind of virus into their system to obtain passwords from higher-level people, then forged authorization to purchase nonexistent copiers, computers, and such. He controlled the account the electronic funds transfer went to, under the guise of a falsified office supply company.

  Hmm. This guy must’ve been the one who found out about the Devil’s Eye, or at least where it would be going. Maybe he hacked the armored car service or got into the system of whoever Mr. Shah purchased the gem from.

  “Murder in thirty minutes or it’s free,” says Rick over my shoulder. He’s eyeing the picture of Alan Chan on my left monitor.

  “Something like that.” I chuckle. “Alan isn’t Alan. His prints match this guy.”

  Rick reads the Delaware warrant. “Well, if they want him, they can wait for the murder trial to end.”

  “Hey, Wimsey,” says Linda in a raised voice. “You’re on television.”

  “Huh, what?” I sigh mentally. Well, at least Rick and I aren’t the only ones here on a weekend. I get up and follow the sound of her voice to the little kitchenette off the squad room. The smell of crappy coffee and vending machine cheeseburger (somewhere between melting plastic and bread) keep me from getting too far in.

  She points at the screen on the wall.

  It’s news, and the text in the blue strip on the bottom reads, “Local pastor warns of witchcraft,” below a square-faced older guy with wispy gray hair and perhaps the frumpiest beige blazer I’ve ever seen. Red tinges his face and spit globules fly from his lip every few seconds as he gesticulates wildly at the reporter next to him.

  “Oh, shit,” I mutter.

  Andrew turns the volume up a little.

  “…and no one is doing anything!” shouts the pastor. “There is an entire coven of Satan-loving witches right here in Olympia, and people should be concerned. What is it going to take before people heed God’s word? Infant sacrifice? Murdered children?”

  I scowl. “They need to fit that guy for a padded cell.”

  “Have you seen any evidence,” asks the reporter, “that these supposed witches―”

  Bang!

  With a brilliant flash, a shaft of lightning nails the steeple of the small church-shaped building in the background. The upper third of the spire explodes in a sh
ower of splinters with a racing crack that continues down into the front wall. Fire breaks out near the topmost point. The pastor clutches his chest and falls to one knee, gasping, while the reporter screams and throws her microphone over her head, ducking for cover.

  The balls-of-steel camera person doesn’t even twitch, and zooms in on the burning steeple. When he pans back out to show the reporter, she’s recovered her composure.

  “Pastor Waters, I don’t think God agrees with you.”

  He glares at her. “They did that. This was no act of God.”

  “How can you know that?” asks the reporter. “Lightning strikes have traditionally been associated with divine retribution.”

  I tune out as the pastor launches into another tirade.

  “So, what do you think?” Linda leans on the table and slurps horrible coffee. “Act of God, or did one of your friends learn how to throw lightning?”

  I think Tamika is throwing out bad energy… and needs to be careful. But I say, in a lightly exasperated tone: “We don’t throw lightning from our fingertips. That’s Hollywood. We don’t even do destruction. Our credo is basically, ‘do whatever you want as long as it harms no one.’”

  “What about harming churches?” asks Linda.

  “That isn’t a church. It’s a building with a pointy part used to vacuum money away from the gullible.” I walk back to my desk. “There’s no spirituality there. At least, not at his church. Many churches, yes. Not this one. Truly, all that guy wants is power and control over what others think.”

  Linda trails after me. “Do you always have to pick on Christians?”

  “Christians, I have no problem with. Con artists on the other hand… He’s not religious. He’s using religion to enrich himself. There’s a difference.”

  I get a blank stare from her for a second or two before she returns to her desk.

  “Why do you look guilty?” asks Rick when he sits at his desk.