Mortal Sins wotl-5

by Eileen Wilks

  “I want to save him!” Alicia cried. “You used to agree with me. You didn’t trust them any more than I do.”

  “I used to fear what I didn’t understand.” Louise paused to give Rule a quick, apologetic glance. “Maybe I still do, a little. But at least I want to understand. You don’t. You just want to make that part of Toby go away.”

  At this critical moment, Lily’s pocket rang out with “The Star-Spangled Banner” again. She grimaced and gave Rule a look of apology. He squeezed her hand, telling her it was okay. She hurried to the hall.

  This time Ruben’s news had nothing to do with the drama being played out in the living room. After she disconnected, she had to make a couple of calls. She was speaking to Sheriff Deacon when James and Alicia left.

  Lily stepped back, giving them as much privacy as possible. It didn’t matter. Neither of them saw her. Alicia was crying quietly. James had his arm around her, his expression bewildered. He’d meant everything for the best, hadn’t he? How could everything have gone so wrong?

  Lily had put away more than one perp who’d meant everything for the best. Sometimes she’d felt sorry for them. Not this time.

  In the living room, Rule was comforting a woman she did feel sorry for. Lily slipped her phone in her pocket, took a breath, and went back in.

  “No.” Louise shook her head. Rule had an arm around her shoulders. “No, don’t call. I don’t need Connie or my son right now. I’d have to talk to them, and—” She drew a shaky breath. “I’m pretty much talked out for now.”

  She looked so tired. Lily had seen her looking her age before—when her leg was broken, and yesterday, after the shooting. This was different. “Mrs. Asteglio, I’m so sorry. If you—”

  “Louise,” the woman corrected her tartly. “It’s Louise still, and don’t you go thinking any of this was your fault, or that I hold any blame for you in it. You handled it as well as it could be handled. As well as she’d let you handle it,” she added with some bitterness. “I imagine you’ll search back over your conscience later, no matter what I say, because you’re the type to worry that way. So am I. I’ll spend time wondering how I could have blinded myself to just how far sunk Alicia was in her—her hatred for Toby’s heritage, and what I should have done differently with her over the years. But not tonight.”

  She pulled back, away from Rule—and patted his cheek. “That’s about as much hugging as I can manage. I’m not as comfortable with it as you are, and never will be, but I appreciate your caring. I’m going to bed now. It’s early, but I . . . the dishes.” She cast a glance at her kitchen, obviously second-guessing her decision. “Well, it won’t take that long.”

  “We’ll clean up the kitchen,” Lily assured her. “I think I know where things go.”

  “Thank you. And that,” she said with a faint smile, “is quite a compliment, if you don’t know it. There aren’t many I’d trust in my kitchen, but I know you’ll clean it properly. Good night.”

  At the doorway, she paused and looked back at Rule. “You’re wrong about one thing, you know. She does love Toby. It’s a wrongheaded love that can’t wrap itself around the whole of what he is, just the human part, and it’s a selfish love in some ways, but it’s there. So’s the fear, but it isn’t only fear of what he’ll become. All his life she’s been too afraid of losing him to let herself stay with him much. Toby knows that, in his heart if not his head. You need to know it, too, or you’ll step wrong with him.”

  “Well,” Lily said when she was gone. “How did a woman like Louise end up with a daughter like Alicia?”

  “We’ve all got fault lines that our parents aren’t responsible for.” With a gust of a sigh he slid both arms around her, holding her as if that was all he needed in the world. Then stood utterly still, as if movement and words were both beyond him for the moment. His breath stirred her hair.

  After a moment he spoke quietly, in a voice husky with emotion. “Toby’s mine now.”

  Lily blinked suddenly damp eyes, but felt obliged to say, “Alicia could change her mind again.”

  “She won’t.” He stroked her hair. “Not this time. Not when it would mean James’s arrest on drug charges.” He straightened, and now, amazingly, he was grinning. “Was that a bluff, that you’d put pressure on the DEA to make the arrest?”

  “The DEA doesn’t much care which cases I want them to prosecute,” she said dryly. “But we could certainly bring some of it up in court and, uh, leak it to the press. The publicity might force them to act.” She hesitated. “You feel sorry for James, don’t you?”

  “You gave me the luxury of pity,” he said, and dropped another kiss, this one on her forehead. “You stopped them.”

  “Ruben did it, really.”

  “Ah, yes. His hunch. How did he happen to have a hunch about a man he’d never heard of?”

  “I told you I was going to do a run on James? Well, I asked Ida to do it—just a basic run, you understand, nothing fancy. She said she was ready to e-mail me the results when Ruben came out of his office, looking puzzled. He asked her why she’d run a Level Three search for me. She said she hadn’t, of course. I don’t have the authority for a Level Three—it involves so many agencies outside the Bureau. So Ruben said to her, ‘Ah, I see. But it’s supposed to be Level Three. Let Lily know I authorized it, will you? And find out if she knows why.’ Then he went back into his office.”

  “He didn’t know why he authorized it.” Rule shook his head in a marveling way.

  “Neither of us did until we saw the report from the agency that tracks sales of gadolinium.” She sighed. “I was hoping it was the wrong James French. That happens sometimes, though the social security number was a match. But I should have told you. There was so much going on, and we were late, but . . . I should have told you.” He’d have kept an eye on Cullen if he’d had more warning. As it was . . . “Would Cullen have killed French if you hadn’t stopped him?”

  “He loves Toby, and he had an unpleasant experience with gado many years ago.”

  Which did not answer her question . . . or maybe it did.

  He hugged her closer for a moment. “About those dishes. You had another phone call from Ruben. I can handle the cleanup, if you need to go.”

  She shook her head, a leaden feeling in her stomach. “I’m not needed. I already notified Deacon and the hospital. Ruben’s sending a Medevac chopper to pick up Hodges. He needs more expert care than he can get here.”

  “Why?”

  “Roy Don Meacham died a couple hours ago. Progressive neurological damage, they said. Just like the dogs.”

  DARKNESS and light are the same to one without eyes, yet it remembered night. It remembered so much more than it had before—not what it needed most to remember, but other things. Things like night, street, boy . . . when the boy left with the other warmth, it had almost followed. It had been excited because it remembered boy and had wanted to see what a boy did. There had been something about the other warmth, too . . . something familiar.

  That was it, yes. It hadn’t remembered, but for a moment it had seemed there was something to remember. But it wasn’t drawn to that warmth the way it was to the man. The one who knew it.

  It had formed a plan. It would stay near the house until the man came out. Somehow it would speak to the man. If it could hang on to words long enough to speak to the man, maybe it would know what to ask.

  So it stayed outside the house. It knew walls once more, but that wasn’t why it didn’t enter, for it also remembered sliding through walls. This puzzled it—why did it remember walls as a barrier? But this house would not admit it, not through walls or doors or windows. It didn’t know why.

  Perhaps the man had forbidden it to enter.

  It cringed back upon itself. Yes, that might be. It didn’t remember a forbidding, but it forgot so much, so much. Still, it remembered attacking the man. While in the old man’s warmth, it had tried to kill the man. The horror of that moment made its pieces clatter together, a harsh
and painful dissonance.

  In its misery, it had allowed The Voice to call it back. But The Voice fed it poorly, with such small lives—sparks only, little sparks that flared for a second, then were gone, swallowed by the cold.

  It had left The Voice, searching until it found the house once more, the house where the man was.

  The man had nearly killed it. It shuddered, remembering that as well. It had bared its throat—the warmth’s throat—and tried to hold itself still for that terrible judgment, which was the man’s right.

  It had failed, and fled.

  Coward.

  That word it didn’t want to remember, but it did. Yes, the man had probably forbidden it entry to the house, and it had to obey the man. It deserved no better. But it was cold, so cold again . . . always cold, unless it was in a warmth. Even feeding well didn’t warm it for long. But the right warmths were so hard to find . . .

  Hunger and cold and a longing so keen it drowned the rest drew it closer to the house whose walls wouldn’t allow it in. It could feel the warmths inside, several large warmths other than the man. They didn’t interest it until one warmth shifted, moving its thoughts or its self in a strange way. Opening . . . For a second it saw a way in.

  Then it was gone. A door had opened in that warmth, then shut. It hung there, astonished, as still as it could be with its crashing, disintegrating pieces.

  The door didn’t open again.

  Disappointment crushed it. It needed to feed. It needed to feed and be warm—oh, how it needed that, before it began losing night and street and boy and all that it had remembered.

  It was afraid to enter the small warmths the way it had before. They lacked words. Maybe that was why it had lost words for so long: it spent too much time in the small warmths. But it couldn’t hold itself together much longer. It needed . . . needed . . .

  The Voice was calling. It heard, and all its pieces vibrated with hate. Not yet. It wasn’t going back yet to the thin meals and commands and—and something it couldn’t remember, but that it hated above all the rest. It had a plan. It hadn’t followed the boy because . . . because . . .

  Why hadn’t it followed the boy? It couldn’t remember. It had had a plan, but it couldn’t remember.

  Screaming in silent rage and despair, it lost its hold on where it was and began drifting. The Voice was calling, tugging at it. It gave up and allowed this. The Voice would feed it.

  Maybe this time it would find a way to make The Voice feed it properly. Maybe if it fed enough, it could kill The Voice. That felt right. Important. Kill The Voice, and it would regain . . . something. Something it needed so much.

  The comfort of this new plan eased the pain of losing the other one. Something involving the boy . . . It did remember the boy.

  Maybe, once it fed, it would remember what it needed from the boy.

  THIRTY

  THE next morning was Saturday. In July, the sun sticks his head over the horizon around six twenty. Rule dragged Lily out for a run at six.

  Since he’d woken her even earlier for another sort of exercise, she didn’t complain as much as she might have—especially when he was right. She needed a good run to clear her head.

  It was almost cool at that hour. The air was thick, the ozone warning high, but the mercury had dipped below seventy by at least a degree. Maybe even two.

  She didn’t push herself until the last mile, so was able to fill Rule in on where the investigation was headed. Laying it out for him cleared her head, too. By the time she was in the shower, washing off the sweat, she’d figured out what the next step needed to be.

  They’d soon have a list of graves to be salted. Headquarters was working on it. That was one great thing about turning fed—she could get information a helluva lot faster, even when she needed data from several jurisdictions.

  The hundred-mile radius around Halo included multiple North Carolina counties as well as parts of South Carolina and Virginia. That was the problem, Lily thought, with these dinky little eastern states. A hundred miles this way or that, and you ran right out of state. Plus they needed to sort by sex—the ghosts were consistent about calling the wraith “he”—and time of death. The major power wind of the Turning had hit at 2:53 EST, so they were excluding deaths after four p.m. that day.

  They’d received the first list well before Lily left for dinner: eighty-two deaths that might have produced the wraith. Unfortunately, it turned out to be incomplete. After a great deal of thinking, pacing—and the occasional sketching of arcane symbols in the air, which worried the cops in the room no end—Cullen had declared that the spell casting could have taken place up to two days after the death. Blood retained a magical connection to the deceased for that long. He thought it likely the spell had been cast very soon after death, but they had to look at deaths over a period of two and a half days.

  Lily had had to call headquarters and get them to start over. With luck, though, the expanded list would be waiting for her when she booted up.

  Narrowing that list was going to be a lot harder. “Get the name,” Cynna had said. She was trying.

  They had no criteria for eliminating any of the male decedents over that three-day period, so they had to go after the human end, the practitioner who’d created the wraith. That practitioner, according to this Baron spirit, was a medium. A woman.

  Next step, then, was hunting a medium among all the people who’d had contact with one of the deceased at or near the time of death. That was going to take a while. Lily could tell by touch if someone was a medium. Cullen could see a person’s magic, but couldn’t always tell what their Gift was. Sometimes, yes, but not always. This morning on her run, she’d figured out how to use him anyway.

  And the press would help.

  She got to her temporary field office at 7:10, booted up her laptop, and got to work. The list was there—and hallelujah, it was sortable. It made sense to start with the deaths on the day of the Turning and those in or very near Halo.

  When Brown—the older, grumpier Brown—arrived at seven thirty with Jacobs—white, male, ten years with the Bureau, seldom spoke—she had a lot of white thumbtacks stuck into the map they’d pinned to the wall. That map already had red and green pins in it, showing where dead animals had been found.

  The dead animals were noticeably clustered on the west side of town.

  “Whatcha got?” Brown asked, sipping from an oversize foam cup of coffee.

  “The list of deaths. We’ve got more animal deaths on the west side of town.” She gestured at the map. “We’ll focus on deaths on that side first.”

  “Hospital’s on the west side.”

  Which meant it included the majority of deaths. “We’ll need to check hospital personnel anyway. Here’s the plan. You know we’re looking for a medium, which means we’re looking for a woman.”

  Brown grunted. Jacobs actually spoke. “Problem is, you’re the only one can tell.”

  “That’s right. And I can’t testify about what I learn, but we’ll jump that hurdle later. For now we just need to find her.”

  “You’re buying all that voodoo stuff?” Brown said.

  “I trust the agent who collected the information, so—yes. We’ll assume for now it’s accurate, so we’re looking for a woman who had access to the body. She needed blood for the spell. Brown, you’ll divvy up the list of decedents and make the assignments. I want to know everyone who had access to these people just before, after, or when they died.”

  “Male and female both?”

  “Yeah, get both. We’ll look at females first, but we might need the others as witsnesses. I’ll be visiting funeral homes and the hospital.”

  Brown nodded glumly. “Better look at paramedics, too. Ambulance drivers. Cops.”

  He caught on quick. Emergency personnel, like hospital workers and morticians, had plenty of access to the dying and the dead. “Good point.” She grinned. “Careful, Brown. I might start liking you.”

  He managed to control his enthus
iasm.

  “When you’re divvying up the deaths to investigate, leave yourself out. I’m going to give a press conference.”

  “Shit. You’re not asking me to—”

  “No, I’ll talk to the reporters. Locals only, emphasis on TV and radio. I’ll ask that anyone who knows someone who died on the day of the Turning come to the sheriff’s office and speak with us. You’ll interview those who turn up. You and Seabourne.”

  Now he looked horrified. “You’re pairing me with that—that—”

  “I am. You’ll take names and addresses, relationship to the deceased, and ask who else was around at the pertinent period. He’ll spot any who have Gifts. He may be able to tell if one is a medium.”

  “Somehow I don’t think our perp will trot herself down here to chat.”

  “If she doesn’t, we’ll still have more information than we do now. We’ll be able to cross off some of those connected to the deaths on our list because they lack Gifts.”

  He sighed heavily. “Putting her on notice, are you?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I am. Might shake her up a bit.” She grinned at him, her blood fizzing. She had a line on the human perp now, and a way of hauling in that line. It was just a matter of time.

  THE next two and a half days were as frustrating as any Lily could remember. The high point hit Saturday afternoon when she found a medium who worked for one of the mortuaries. Sandy Kaufman dressed the hair of the dead and she was very, very blond—in every sense of the word. Her lights were several bulbs short of a string, in Lily’s opinion—but she was a fairly strong medium.

  Unfortunately, she hadn’t dressed the hair of any of the dead from the Turning. She’d been in Hawaii, basking on the beach with her boyfriend, her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her mother’s boyfriend’s mother.

  Lily heard from Dr. Alderson on Sunday. The rats they’d fed the contaminated meat to were doing fine. No detectable brain damage.