SkinThief

by Sonnet O'Dell

  “I take it you put something in the report about magic being involved.”

  “Only as a by-line. I think my exact words were ‘probable magic involvement, angle being investigated.’ She just made her own conclusions and has stuck to them.”

  “For Rourke, conclusions just seem to be the place she got tired of thinking.”

  Hamilton led me around the feet of the body and sat me on the arm of the sofa while I took deep breaths. I gripped the solidness of it and used it to ground me. I could feel that I was giving off a vibe of power; I hadn’t even realized I was amping up.

  “Sorry. Rourke just has a tendency to rub me the wrong way.”

  “Now there’s a visual,” Hamilton said with a grin. I gave him a weak smile and pretended to try and kick him. He stepped back out of the way. “Just try to ignore her—we all live by our own set of rules.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said with a smile, “and what are yours?”

  “Always treat a lady like a lady, never make promises you don’t intend to keep, and never do anything you wouldn’t want to explain to paramedics.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it—there wasn’t much I couldn’t imagine Hamilton trying if there was a pretty girl involved. I stood slowly and I felt much calmer.

  “Think you can handle looking at this body?”

  “Yeah, it probably won’t be any worse than the last one.”

  I turned and looked at the body in question. Another overturned coffee table, and the victim was duct-taped to it again. He’d been tortured with the tiny slices to his chest just as the other had been, and the death blow looked to be the heart. Blood stained the carpet; it had overflowed from the underside of the table because this guy was built slightly bigger than the last. He looked like he could have been muscle. In the body of a woman, how could Petrovich have overpowered this man? The victim could have underestimated her because she looked so small, or maybe he knew Chloe Dietrich. If he knew her, then he might not have perceived that she meant to hurt him.

  “Any money says that’s the same roll of tape from the Dietrich home?”

  “More than likely,” Cameron said where he was on his knees next to the body, measuring the depth of the wounds. “Is this like the one from last night? I haven’t had a chance to look over Ro’s report.”

  “Yeah, looks like,” I said, moving around the head. There was a matted patch of his black hair. “Cameron, is this what I think it is?”

  He moved around the blood pool carefully and lifted the back of the victim’s head to examine it.

  “Subdural hematoma. Blunt force trauma to you. He was hit with something hard to the back of the skull—might have been enough to take him down for a few minutes.” I nodded and looked at Hamilton.

  “That would explain how someone small like Chloe Dietrich would have been able to take him down. She’s out there, and I get the feeling it’s still a woman in the driving seat and this guy’s wife, girlfriend whatever is gone.”

  I nodded, agreeing with Hamilton. “I found a reference to the amulet in question. It’s potent, with an inscription on the back—read it while touching someone and you switch bodies. Sad to say even a human can use it. Outside of the amulet, our perp has no power, but he’s quick and clean and smart.”

  “His history says he was a big man in Russia before he came here; he knows the world and work. He keeps working over these poor bastards, trying to get to someone. If that person’s heard about the deaths, how soon before he or she vanishes, goes deep under the radar?”

  “Not long if he works out he’s being targeted directly, but even we can’t seem to work out who he’s going after next. We don’t even know if this guy told him anything.”

  Hamilton took out his notepad and flicked through it.

  “From what I could get from the woman before she clammed up, the guy’s name is Charles Banks, he works as a bodyguard, he’s had many gigs. She thinks he’s been working for the same guy for the last five or so years but can’t be sure—he doesn’t discuss his work or clients.” Hamilton was squinting at his own notes. I’d thought before it was possible Hamilton might need glasses to read but didn’t wear them because they would ruin his profile. I shook my head. Vanity was such a stupid thing.

  I looked down at the guy, and something on his shoulder caught my eye.

  “Cameron, do you have an extra pair of those gloves?”

  Cameron turned back to his kit and dug out a box of surgical gloves. He passed it over, letting me pull out a couple. I blew air into them, making it easier for me to slip them onto my hands. Once I’d been clumsy putting on this sort of latex gloves, but now I had practice. I could see the image of what was on his shoulder clear in my mind before I even lifted the shoulder. It was like seeing what I was going to do, but only a couple of seconds ahead. It had been happening a lot recently, and I added it to the list of things I’d have to bring up with Virginia at some point.

  “He’s got a jailhouse tattoo, mean’s he’s done a stretch somewhere. You should be able to find more about this one.”

  Hamilton raised an eyebrow at me as Cameron came around to confirm what I was looking at.

  “How can you tell it’s jailhouse?”

  “I went there, remember? I saw them on some of the guys there. This is very similar—lack of colors, poorly done. Real tattoo artists would never admit to this shoddy thing being their work.”

  “I can just imagine what your walking through a prison would do to the inmates,” he said with a dim chuckle. I glared at him; I was repressing what some of the inmates had called at me as I walked along behind Pert-Smith. Some of them I wasn’t even sure were physically possible. I felt my cheeks start to redden. I wondered if women in prison felt or acted that way when they saw even a slightly attractive man enter their confines. I couldn’t ever imagine.

  I stood, turning my back to Hamilton, and started examining things on the shelves and things on the floor. There was a mock fireplace with an electric fire in it and on the mantle were several picture frames. I could tell a woman definitely lived there, because blokes didn’t tend to put photos on display in quite the same way. I picked up the frame and looked at the couple in it. Charles stood with his arm around a buxom redhead; her hair curled wildly down over her shoulders and over her chest. She was quite pretty, with deep green eyes and freckles sprinkled across her nose. She looked really young compared to Charles. She had a ring on her wedding finger. There was no matching ring on Charles’s finger, but somehow, I didn’t think that they were having an affair. I turned back to Hamilton with the picture in my hand.

  “Can you think of a reason why he wouldn’t wear his wedding ring?”

  “Sure, weight gain or to keep people from knowing he was married, protecting her in case someone tried to come at him through someone he cared about. I know a few professionals who don’t wear theirs on the job.” That made sense, but if the wife wasn’t there, that meant he had failed to protect her. Ivan Petrovich was running around the city inside her skin right now.

  A uniformed officer came rushing into the living room. It was the same guy I had seen outside talking to the neighbors. He was young, but he was still out of breath from just a little run. Hamilton looked at him displeased, by the interruption at first, but then he appeared concerned.

  “What’s the matter, Carlson?”

  “It’s D.I. Rourke, sir. She’s trying to arrest the woman in the back of the ambulance. I tried to tell her she was a witness, but with the blood and the confusion of her testimony... I can’t stop her, sir.”

  “Damn it,” Hamilton snarled, swinging around the young officer into the corridor. His coat billowed out behind him a bit like a cape; Hamilton to the rescue of the damsel in distress. I giggled a little to myself because that made Rourke the dragon, a role that suited her perfectly. I decided to follow him out, still c
lutching the picture in my hand. Hamilton had broken between the struggling woman and Rourke and was pushing Rourke’s extended, handcuff-holding arm away.

  “You don’t understand what’s going on here, Rourke. For Christ’s sake, the poor thing is traumatized and you want to make it worse. Put those away.”

  “He’s dead, and she’s covered in his blood. I think that warrants more questions down at the station—don’t you?”

  “She tried to save him, she ran to the neighbor to call the police; why would she do all that if she was guilty of killing him?”

  “She’s pretending to be someone else. Either she’s lying or she’s crazy; the way I see it, she’s suspicious,” Rourke said, trying to shove Hamilton aside. The woman behind him cowered. I stepped in then, just as Hamilton got himself back between her and Rourke. I got the woman to sit down on the back of the ambulance and calmed her down, watching from the corner of my eye as Rourke and Hamilton tried to stare each other down. I left her side for a second, leaving the picture next to her.

  “Thank you, Rourke. While we are all challenged by your unique point of view, I’m afraid that if you keep talking, you might actually say something intelligent.” Rourke’s eyes came down on me, full of scorn.

  “Why, you little...” she started but didn’t finish. I turned back to look at the woman inside Chloe Dietrich who had picked up the photo and was looking at it; tears started to roll down her cheeks.

  “She can’t even pay attention to me long enough to back up her insults. I swear it’s like she has ADD or something.”

  “I don’t have ADD, Rourke—I’m just not listening to you. You don’t know the case or what you’re talking about.” I moved closer to Chloe’s body slowly, so as not to spook her the way Rourke had, and gingerly sat down next to her. She gave me a watery eyed glance.

  “He was a good man, you know. He didn’t always work for good people, but deep down, he...” She trailed off for a minute to sniffle. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a tissue and handed it to her. She blew her nose and thanked me.

  “He always, always treated me decent, he never ever hit me when he got angry, he would always make it up to me if we fought. He brought me flowers at least once a month; he was a sweet, caring man.”

  I tapped the picture of the woman next to him lightly with my fingernail.

  “And this is you?”

  “Yes, it was taken in the park by a friend of Charlie’s; it was such a nice day.” She started to sniffle again, losing her grip on the picture; I snapped it up before it fell to the ground and turned it around to show the woman to Rourke. Rourke looked at her, and her confusion grew—I could tell by the look on her face. I took out my compact mirror, opened it and placed it in the hands of the woman. She raised it up to check her face and let out a scream. Rourke took a step back while Benjamin’s hand fluttered over his gun. Even Hamilton looked vaguely shocked as he turned around to face her.

  “That’s not me,” she babbled. “That’s her, that’s the woman who came to our house, but...” She used the mirror to check herself more closely. “What’s happened to me? Why I am I like this? Where is my body?”

  Rourke agreed to take her into the station, but as a material witness and not as a suspect, after about five minutes of both Hamilton and I going on at her. I promised both the woman inside Chloe and Rourke an explanation about what was going on. I took the picture back inside to find that Cameron and a helper were putting Charles into a body bag to go off to the coroner’s office.

  “You all done?” I asked. I was putting the picture on the mantel back the way I had found it when something caught my eyes from just behind an armchair.

  “Yes, all that’s left is autopsy, but we’ll do that when we get him back to my office. Tell Hamilton I’ll have my official report to him before I go off duty.”

  “Okay.” I watched as he and his helper carried the body between them carefully to the gurney that waited in the hall. I still had the gloves on, so once they were out of sight I bent down to retrieve the object I’d noticed. It was a little black address book; it was splattered by a spot of what had to be the victim’s blood and was open to a specific page. I grabbed a little baggy from Cameron’s kit that he had left behind and slipped the address book into it. There were three names on the page, and it might be our biggest clue as to who Petrovich was going after next.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Hamilton turned the small break room in Homicide into a briefing room, and he set up a whiteboard at the far end with pens and tape to stick pictures up. Then he turned to me.

  “You ready?”

  “Am I ready for what?” I looked down and he was handing me a pen. I shook a little as I took it from him. “You want me to do this?”

  “Well, you know the beginning of this case and I know the middle, but we don’t know the end and I don’t know the magical part. You’ll have to explain that.”

  “Did I ever tell you about this problem I have speaking in front of large groups of people?” My fingers curled nervously around the pen and I shook a little, trying to take it.

  “What large group? It’s just gonna be me, some of my guys and some of PCU’s guys, since we’ve decided to work together again.”

  “I call that a large group,” I said, and I felt my knees knock together. I sat down on a chair next to the board and sucked in deep breaths, trying to calm my nerves. I hated presentations, especially ones at school with all your peers looking down at you, looking bored and waiting for you to say something that might even slightly interest them. I felt nauseous. I was not going to put my head between my knees, I did not need to do that, I could handle this. I was not going to throw up or pass out.

  Rourke was the first one through the door. She looked at me, with the pen in my hand, and turned to Hamilton.

  “Don’t tell me you have the outsider doing this briefing.”

  My head snapped up. If there was one thing guaranteed to get me to do something, it was anger at someone claiming I couldn’t or shouldn’t be doing it. I felt my spine stiffen and I stood tall, brushing my plait back over my shoulder. I held the pen firmly and pointed at her.

  “Cancel my subscription; I do not need your issues. Sit down and listen or get the hell out, but one way or another, I’m doing this.” Rourke recoiled like I had slapped her; I turned to the board and slapped a picture of Ivan Petrovich on the left-hand side. Rourke took a seat up front, while Benjamin sat just behind her with Michael LeBron. I smiled at him, and he gave me a secretive little wave. He was the one person in PCU whom I thought of as having a brain and the ability to make up his own mind about things and people. He was fair and honorable, which was rare these days. A few more uniformed officers filed in behind, squishing into the room, while Hamilton wiggled his way back to the front.

  “Listen up, pay attention, because we are not going to repeat ourselves. Questions at the end.” He yielded the floor to me, and I took a deep breath, writing a name under the picture. All their eyes were on me; I could feel it even with my back turned, and Hamilton started sticking up the other photos we had in an order we had agreed on.

  “Right,” I said, tapping the end of the pen on the photo of Ivan. “This is Ivan Petrovich. He’s in Birmingham Medium Security prison for manslaughter, currently in the infirmary in critical condition. Except it’s not him in there.”

  “Then who is it?” someone asked at the back to a background of chuckles. Hamilton stared every one of his officers down, and there was silence. I pulled out the photo of the pendant and stuck it to the board under his picture.

  “This pendant is called the amulet of Taish. It was bought by his lawyer, we’re assuming, and sent to his client in jail. The amulet is extremely potent magic, meaning that even a non-practitioner like Ivan can employ the spell which switches the spirits of the two people involved.” There was an awed silence
. I drew an arrow to a picture of Merrick Stone.

  “He used the amulet to transfer himself into a guard, Merrick Stone, and Merrick into his body, which he then beat to within an inch of its life so he couldn’t reveal the switch, therefore ensuring his escape from prison and allowing him to go after this man.”

  I pointed to the picture of Tony Dietrich to find that Hamilton had gotten ahead of me by writing names under the pictures.

  “He assaulted Dietrich in his home, restrained him using duct tape and then switched bodies with Dietrich’s wife before torturing him with a knife for an hour, then dealing a death blow to the heart.” I yielded to Hamilton for a minute while he put up the picture from the death of Nikki Lewis.

  “The murder of Dietrich was a mock copy of the death of Nikki Lewis, who turns out to be born Nikki Petrovich, the suspect’s daughter and his granddaughter is missing. The murder and disappearance is also a case of ours, but it started to go cold because we had no suspects and no evidence.”

  Hamilton yielded back to me and smiled. I took another deep breath.

  “What we know about Nikki is that she was dating someone big when she died—her friends described him as moneyed but not exactly above board. Following this theory, I believe Petrovich thinks this man either killed or had her killed and he knows what has happened to his granddaughter.” I smacked the picture of the crime scene we had just come from, and a few people jumped.

  “He hit again this afternoon. Charles Banks, muscle for hire. His wife claims he’s been working for one person for the last few years, but we don’t know who. What we do know is that Petrovich took the opportunity to switch from Chloe Dietrich to Gwynne Banks, so we have to be on the lookout for her while also trying to find where he’ll head next.” I went back to where my things were and pulled out the evidence I’d found at the last crime scene, the address book. I held it up.