by J. L. Ray
All three of them paused at that, since witches’ reproductive methods were well-known and the butt of many Super comedians’ stand up jokes. Tony almost felt sorry for witches, in that sense, right up to the point where she had to bring in a witch for, well, any reason. The sheer nuisance involved in questioning a witch tended to end any empathy for them or their genetic plight although the more she considered that, the more she realized it ought to work the other way around and make her more empathic.
“Did they get a location? Should I head up there?”
“They went to check in with the McKneeleys, who are tailing Serena. If she doesn’t leave the offices of Monster-Mate soon, then they plan to meet with you here. Lieutenant Azeem left explicit instructions that you were to wait for him and Cal before you do anything,” and here Tony got another look from over the top of the glasses. “So you go wait for them. Am I clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Phil echoed her automatically, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Not you!” The Sergeant held out a hand in a stopping motion. “You are free to go.”
“What if I wish to stay?” Phil asked her pleasantly.
“What if I wish for a million dollars?” she replied as pleasantly. “Oh dear. I don’t think that is going to happen, either.” Much less pleasantly she added, “Now beat it, demon.”
Tony frowned. “No, Sergeant, Mr. Akkadian has been instrumental in this case, and I need to take his statement.”
“His statement?”
“Uhm, yeah.”
Hubbard leaned back in her chair and folded her hands over her comfortably broad belly. “You want to take his...statement?”
Tony narrowed her eyes. “Yes.”
“Uh huh.” She paused for a good minute, watching them sweat, and then waved them on. “Go ahead.”
Tony walked through the door into the work room, red-faced and really annoyed. Phil followed her, mystified at her insistence that he come back. He had assumed she be thrilled finally to rid herself of his presence.
“I hope that won’t cause you any trouble later,” he murmured as they approached her desk. “I should have left.”
“Yeah,” Tony nodded her head. “Yeah, it’ll cause me trouble and yeah, you should have left, but what did you think I was going to do? Ditch you?” She turned to him, brow furrowed. “We are so close to solving these murders, but we’re closer to the deadline, too.” She slumped a bit. “If we have even a hope of getting this finished in time, then I think we need your help.”
As they got to her desk, he touched her arm and she turned to him as he told her, “You do know I would do anything I could to help you?”
She looked into his eyes for a moment, wondering how three days could turn her life upside down like this. She didn’t want him to leave because she was afraid that time might run out and suddenly, he’d just be gone, snuffed out by the Geas. How the hell had seeing his face become so crucial to her general well-being in so short a time? She didn’t want to feel this way, but there didn’t seem to be a thing she could do about it. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, pursed her lips, and nodded, opening them. “Yeah, I know you would. C’mon.” She sat at her desk and took out her f-light. “I want to see if there’s anything we’ve missed. I need to review the case file. Why don’t you record your impressions of Adonis from the interrogation while I do that? Maybe something will occur to you while you write. Happens to me all the time.”
“I could leave and give the old dragon up front a chance to yell at me again,” he told her.
She snorted. “I don’t think Nick, Nancy, or Shep would be as rude as the Sergeant is at times. Just stay. She’s working my last nerve with the whole mothering thing. I know the Supers appreciate it, but I have a perfectly good mother, thanks. Besides, I think the Lieutenant will wants to ask you some questions about Heraphina before we head up to bring her in. Grab a chair and sit.”
Phil reached over for Cal’s chair before she could tell him to take any chair but that one. She couldn’t blame him for going for it. It was large, mainly because it had to be to accommodate an ogre, and it was lined with fur, or grew fur, depending on who talked about the chair, Berthell or Cal. It was an attractive chair, no doubt. But most importantly, it was Cal’s chair, and that chair knew it was Cal’s.
As Phil put his hand on the armrest to pull it over, Tony cried, “Not that one!” just a minute too late.
Phil jumped and then looked at the bleeding scratch on his hand. “Is that a Mage-e-boy Furr 2000?”
“Yup. And it’s Cal’s.”
“I should have assumed that. Even the furniture at your Bureau is trying to get rid of me,” he muttered.
“That’s just Cal’s chair. Berthell won’t let him keep it at home because it won’t let her clean it. And it does that to anybody who touches it but Cal. Even the Lieutenant got a slap once.”
Phil quirked a lip. “Ah. I shall not take it personally, then.” He looked at Tony and gestured to the chair at a different, unoccupied desk. She nodded and he pulled that one over.
They worked in silence for a short while, Tony making notes in the glow of her f-light, Phil simply writing across a small portion of the desk, but without pen or paper. Anything he put down would appear in his records, and he could transfer it to f-light later for Tony to put in the official file. As they worked, occasionally Tony would make a noise of some kind and gesture at the open file on her viewer, paging backwards.
She looked over at Phil after doing one of those back and forth motions a few times. She put out a hand to stop him writing. He looked at her and smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and she caught her breath. Then she glanced at her view screen, which currently showed pictures of the crime scenes of Lilith and Signa Engstrom, side by side, and she refocused on the job at hand.
“I just remembered something that got Cal’s attention that first night, with Lilith,” she told him. “Look at her feet.” She made a pulling gesture at the screen with both hands over the picture of Lilith’s body. That image enlarged and the cuts and abrasions on the feet became very clear. “Now, look at Engstrom’s feet.” She pulled over that image as well, and the viewer suddenly showed both sets of feet with fairly similar damage on them.
“What are those?” Phil murmured, leaning in closer to get inspect them. “And where are their shoes?”
A loud voice rumbled over their heads, “Y’know, I said the exact same thing myself, am I right, Tony?”
They both jumped and turned to find that while they had been absorbed in the viewer, Cal and the Lieutenant had walked in. Cal gave Phil a look that managed a balance between innocence and malevolence, and Phil acknowledged it. The Lieutenant had gone on to his office to check in with the Captain about jurisdictional privileges and permission to follow one of their major suspects up near Skyline Drive.
When Cal had walked in and seen the two heads together over Tony’s desk, her brown hair gleaming with red in the light next to Phil’s blue-black hair, for a moment he felt a pang of jealously. He and Tony worked cases like no other partners in D.C., and there she was, his partner, treating Snarkfest the Ancient like her best bud. But he had talked to Berthell about the whole situation, and she seemed to believe that old Mephistopheles might be just what the doctor ordered for their girl, and that Cal’s job, should he choose to quit being, as his Sweet Love put it, a complete centaur’s ass, was to make totally certain of that idea before Tony did anything hasty and stupid, like sleep with the guy.
Cal wasn’t certain about the last bit, but he had a feeling that even Mephistopheles couldn’t make that kind of time with his partner in just three days. She was way too picky about dating. That particular thought cheered him up so much, he sauntered over to break up the little party in front of him.
“Hey,” Cal rumbled, looking at the photos again, “Those are both of the vics, right?”
Tony turned in her chair and looked up at him. “Cal, sit down. My neck is cracking trying to talk to you from do
wn here.” He rumbled, this time with laughter, and pulled his chair over, patting it as he did so to calm it down. “Hey, did someone upset Fluffy? She’s acting a little odd.”
Phil stared at him. “It has a gender?”
Cal stuck his nose in the air. “She’s a very delicate creature. Don’t insult her.”
Phil put up his hands, “Of course not, of course not.” He cleared his throat. “I’m afraid that I’m the culprit. I didn’t realize what kind of chair...she is, and I tried to sit on her.”
Cal grinned an evil, ogre grin. “I guess that’s a mistake you won’t make again.” Then he turned to the viewer and the pictures. “Okay. So,” he pointed to the left image, “that is the view of Lilith’s feet that I asked you to take.” Then he pointed to the image from the Engstrom murder. “That image doesn’t have as clear a view of the feet.”
Tony agreed. “You were at the hospital, and Phil and I got back from Fairie after the scene was processed. I think the techs with the Lieutenant viewed our pics and tried to take similar images, but this is the closest.”
“They have similar cuts on their feet,” Cal said.
“Yes, and just like Lilith, Engstrom had on a really nice outfit, but she had no shoes and didn’t look as if she had run from the scene,” Tony told him, as she brought up the report the Lieutenant had written for the Engstrom crime scene.
“What woulda made those marks on their feet?” Cal mused. He got out his own f-light and pulled up the same set of images, then pulled them larger and larger until one foot from each victim sat in front of them, each one the size of a stove-top.
The three stared at the marks. Tony looked at each cut separately, then at the pattern on each foot.
“Hey Tony,” Cal put out a finger to one of the images, “look at this mark on the insole of Lilith’s foot.” Then he moved it to point at other image. “Then look at Engstrom’s insole.”
“Similar marks. Were they crossing through something?” Tony asked.
“I think we gotta see Dr. Caligari. He working today?”
“Why Dr. C., Cal?”
“I gotta theory, gorgeous. Let’s go talk to the Doc.”
Phil coughed into his hand, and they both looked up. “Shall I stay here?”
“You gotta stay here. You can’t come into an area with the physical evidence and compromise it,” Cal told him as Tony winced, thinking about that word, compromise, and all that might entail on this case.
“He’s right. You’ll have to wait here. We’ll be back. Finish your statement about Adonis.”
Phil nodded and the other two headed down to the pathology lab.
“So,” Cal began cautiously as they waited for the elevator.
“So,” Tony replied tightly, just knowing she was about to get another talk from Cal about the dangers of Mephistopheles. Because she figured Cal was probably right about this one, she steeled herself for an I-told-you-so.
“How was the interview with Adonis?”
Since that was so not the question she expected at that moment from her partner, she stood for a moment, stunned. The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Cal stepped in and turned to her. “You comin’ or you gonna walk the stairs?”
She shook it off and stepped into the elevator. “Let’s go.” She turned to him, “The interview was pretty awful, Cal. Adonis is essentially bat-shit crazy.”
“That bad, huh?”
She shook her head. “I felt like I needed a shower after that one. I mean, Sammeal was a piece of work, but really, he was just a garden variety pig compared to Adonis.”
“So,” Cal began again, then stopped.
“Cal, just say it, whatever it is.”
The elevator dinged their arrival, and they stepped into the deserted hallway.
He turned to her and stood there for a moment.
“What?” she almost yelled.
“Hang on, hang on. I don’t do this often.”
“Give me unsolicited advice? Seriously? ‘Cause you do that all the time, dude.” “No, I mean--apologize!” He threw his arms out for emphasis.
Tony snapped her mouth shut.
“So,” he began again, more calmly. “I’m sorry that you had to do those interviews without me. I feel like I let you down.”
“What?” she looked at him and realized that he was totally serious. She reached up and punched his arm. “You didn’t let me down, Cal. You had a baby! Geez, Cal, you’re my best friend. How could you let me down when you’re doing something that important?”
Cal cleared his throat, “Well, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help lighten the mood.”
She snorted, “Seriously, buddy, a bus-load of clowns couldn’t have lightened that mood. Comedy Central couldn’t have lightened that mood!”
He shivered, “You had to mention the C-word.”
“Oopsy. Sorry. I know Comedy Central gives you the heebies.”
“All those desperate comedians trying to make someone laugh! I get so tense!”
“Sorry, buddy! Anyway, what I’m saying is, I appreciate it, but I was okay.”
“I’m glad,” he stumbled over the word, mumbling it enough that she almost thought she heard a very different word, “that Mephistopheles went with you.”
She stared at him. “Who are you, and where is my partner?”
“I’m just sayin’. Y’know. If anything had gone down, he coulda taken care of it and kept you safe.” He hung his large head and shuffled his 22s a bit. “When I checked in on Newman and the gang, Berthell almost chewed my ear off when I complained about hearin’ you had him with you on your road trip.” He looked up and grinned, “Luckily, I was f-lightin’ that conversation, not home on a break, so she had to settle for a metaphorical ear chew!”
“Now I’ve got it,” Tony gave him as smug grin as she turned to walk down the hallway. “The motivation for all this uncharacteristic action is knowing that you might get out of a literal chewing out if you can tell Beautiful B. that you apologized.”
“But I mean it!”
“Uh huh.”
“I do!”
“Sure.”
Nothing.
“You’re irked,” she told him.
“Naw.”
“You’re irked.” “Now I’m irked,” he admitted.
“I knew it!”
“I gotta work with you don’t I?”
She gave him a grin and a shoulder punch as high as she could go, and then they went through the doors to the autopsy room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The two found Caligari working on a body unrelated to their case. When he saw them, he came over quickly.
“My two favorite detectives,” he said, smiling without showing teeth in his most polite fashion. “How goes the vampire hunt?” Tony shrugged, “Not so well, Doc. We have yet to figure out who is controlling it, who it was, and where it is, though we have a lead.” “Oh dear,” he said, pushing back his thick glasses. “Tell me what I can do to help you. I am yours to command,” and he bowed in as courtly as gesture as she had seen since, well, Lock Up, the Medieval Version.
“Doc, we got questions,” Cal rumbled.
“My large friend, let us see if I can provide answers,” he replied, rubbing his hands together in his familiar comfort gesture. “Tell me what you need.”
Tony walked over to the viewer port on Caligari’s desk and pointed her f-light, then brought up the pictures of each victim’s foot. “Can you tell us about these?” “Ah, yes, the glass cuts on the feet.”
“Glass?” Tony asked him, puzzled.
“Yes,” Caligari told her, “I found shards in each foot, though very small ones indeed.”
“Both women had small shards of glass embedded in their feet?”
“Very small, though some of the cuts were made by larger pieces. When I did the original autopsy, I assumed that those came from attempts to flee their attackers. It is in the report.”
Cal headsmacked himself. “I fo
rgot to update my f-light to the Bureau’s system.” Caligari grinned, and then trotted over to a cabinet and opened it, leaning in and telling them, his voice briefly muffled, “I believe that I heard you were otherwise engaged in the midst of this investigation!” He turned back around holding the butt-ugliest stuffed animal that Tony had ever seen in her life. It had too many eyes, too many teeth, and its fur was a color between baby-shit green and fluorescent yellow. Cal slapped his huge hands together and started tearing up at the sight.
“Doc! A Bed Monster! I haven’t seen one of those since mine fell apart when I was just a little ogre!” Dr. Caligari handed it to Cal who forgot himself enough to hug it for a minute until he noticed his partner staring at him, open-mouthed. He tucked it up under his arm. “Little Newman is going to love this. Berthell will, too. She had one herself as a kid.”
Tony looked over at the doll. If she was a little kid, it would have given her nightmares. She looked back at Cal and smiled because she hadn’t seen him this genuinely happy, except in the delivery room, during the past three days. Caligari noticed her reaction and actually snickered.
“Detective Tony, the Bed Monster is the ogre equivalent of a Teddy Bear. The ersatz depiction of them as fuzzy and huggable is like that of your Teddy Bear. Just as an actual bear might attack and harm you, the Bed Monster is a real creature in Fairie that, at times, attacks other creatures. By making it a toy, we lessen its ability to frighten. Declaw it, so to speak.”
“I have got to get Melly in to interview you, Dr. C.”
“Ah, yes, the sister studying the cultures of the Realms,” he said. “I shall be very happy to give her the ‘inside scoop’ to some of the more esoteric Fairie customs.”
“Cool!” She looked at the f-light port and frowned. “Cal?”
He looked at the f-light port and then at her. “What?”
“Both murders happened in the city.”
“Yeah.”
“With Lilith, we could assume the glass came from the alley where she was found. But we check that alley and found--”
“No glass!” Cal finished in his excitement.
