by Lyn Benedict
“Odalys Hargrove,” Alex said. “At least, that’s the name on the property-tax forms for Invocat. She has a condo in North Miami Beach, overlooking the ocean drive.”
“Expensive area,” Sylvie said. Wright took the towel from her, the Hands sticking out at weird angles as if they were attempting to peel back their winding cloths, and said, “Upstairs?”
“For now,” Sylvie said. “We’ll give Wales a call. He’ll have to do a house call and pick these up.”
Wright tucked them tighter into the towel and headed up the stairs. The bell’s chiming grew mournful, softer, as its rotation in the stone bowl slowed. Sylvie looked after him, her thoughts about Odalys temporarily derailed.
“He’s adapting fast,” Alex said.
“He’s had to,” Sylvie said. “Plus, Demalion’s coaching him now.”
“You don’t sound happy about that.”
The bell chimed twice while Sylvie thought. She wasn’t happy; she knew that much. But isolating why was as impossible a task as sifting through broken donax shells to match piece to piece.
Sylvie sighed. “It’s sort of like walking into a room where two people suddenly stop talking. I keep catching him looking at me, and I don’t always know which one it is. He’s switching back and forth pretty freely now.”
“Adapting,” Alex said. “Maybe they’ll share—”
“Some things don’t share,” Sylvie said. “Toothbrushes, underwear. Bodies. Did you get anything on Patrice Caudwell to link her with Odalys?”
Alex nodded, pulling the computer closer on the desk as if she wanted to hug it to her, proud as a mother with a talented child. “Oh yeah. You can thank family greed for it, too. Before she died, Patrice Caudwell, our dead toddler pusher, was worth about fourteen million dollars in actual money. After her death? One million. She made thirteen million dollars vanish in her last week alive, all without leaving her house, wired it to multiple other accounts. Beyond that? She’s tied up her entire estate. Her grandchildren can’t get hold of any of it.”
“She left it to Odalys?”
“That’d be too simple,” Alex said. “Honestly, I can’t even begin to follow all the ins and outs right now. It’s iffy enough just digging deeper through what’s a matter of public record. I get enough to know that there’s some really weird clause involved, turning the accounts into something like a scavenger hunt, something like waiting for lost royalty to show up and flash that crown birthmark. The good thing about that is since the majority of her money is tied up in this crazy-ass legacy, the family’s searching aggressively for the cash transfers.
“Interesting thing is,” Alex said, “Odalys got a big, and I mean big, infusion of cash in her accounts. No way of my telling where it came from, but it’s there. Five million dollars there.”
“Caudwell paid Odalys.”
“That’s my assumption,” Alex said.
“For what? Blackmail? Odalys had to have known she killed the toddler, or she wouldn’t have grabbed her hand for her spell . . . but.”
“But it doesn’t really make sense,” Alex said. “Caudwell was dying. And the death was ruled accidental.”
“So what was Caudwell paying Odalys for?” Sylvie frowned.
“She had household help, right?” Wright asked, clunking down the last few stairs with enough noise that Sylvie realized he had been deliberately stealthy for the first set. But then, she’d been discussing him and Demalion, reason enough for him to play eavesdropper, even if Demalion wasn’t a sneaky son of a bitch by nature.
“She did,” Alex said.
“So you show them Odalys’s picture? Ask ’em for a description of anybody that visited in the last week or so? Maybe they met Odalys, knew why she was there. And hey, Patrice Caudwell was older, became an adult in the fifties. She had money. But I bet you she didn’t know enough about computers to do the transfers herself. Bet she had a money manager. Did you talk to them?”
Alex slunk down into her seat. “No.”
“There’s something to be said for legwork,” Wright said. “Sometimes you gotta walk the beat.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “But sometimes your boss won’t let you.”
Wright turned a surprised glance at Sylvie, and she said, “Don’t give me that look. We’re dealing with black magic and murder. Alex stays behind the screen. Demalion can tell you what happens when she doesn’t.”
“You just don’t want to pay me danger fees,” Alex muttered. “The snake thing was once, Sylvie. Once.”
“Once is enough,” she said. “A god intervened to save your life. How often do you think that happens? Still, Wright’s got a point, and most of his questions can be asked and answered on the phone line. Try to track anything down.”
Alex nodded. “I did look into other deaths. I think I found yours.” She tabbed over on the screen, turned it about so Sylvie could have a better look. An obituary in the Herald, a smiling craggy face under a cloud of white hair. Sylvie pictured those thin lips squared and open around a gaping black hole of a mouth, her eyes glittering with malevolence, her bones made stark beneath ghostly skin. “That your crazy lady ghost?”
“Oh yeah,” Sylvie said.
“Who was she?” Wright asked.
“A helping hand,” Alex said. “A pillar of society. Margaret Strange, charity woman, and in her last year, senior volunteer at Baptist Hospital. She quit after one of her elderly charges died on her shift.”
“Alone with him when it happened?” Sylvie said. It wasn’t really a question. She recalled the smothering sensation of tightly stretched cotton pressed against her flesh, cold and clammy with ghostly intent.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Apparently, it really upset her.” She shot a glance at Wright that was half challenge, half apology. “I did talk to the hospital staff. I got to know some of them pretty well while I was in. Jenny, the volunteer coordinator, said she quit right after. She wasn’t really surprised. They lose a lot of volunteers after a death. Strange died not that long after in her own home. Suicide, I think.”
“By hanging?” Sylvie asked.
Alex cocked her head. “Don’t know. I was mostly reading between the lines. Does it make a difference? We know Caudwell died naturally.”
“Don’t know,” Sylvie repeated it back to her. “What about money. Strange have any?”
“She should have,” Alex said, “but she didn’t have any. It was embezzled, and recently.”
“So no payments to Odalys . . .” Wright stood, paced a tight circle.
“Hard to tell,” Alex said. “If some money went missing before the rest, I can’t tell. It’s under active investigation and my . . . sources can only do so much. But I did figure out the most likely place for Zoe to have gotten her filthy lucre.”
“Yeah?” Sylvie asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Alex looked a little too determinedly calm about it.
“Moneylender down near the dog track. His place was turned over and his safe emptied. No sign of who or how it was done. Pretty smart of her, really.”
Wright said, “Yeah, except now she’s got a heavy looking for his money.”
“No,” Alex said, then bit her lip. Oh, this was the part she didn’t want Sylvie to hear, the part she’d been hiding underneath her pragmatism.
“He’s dead?” Sylvie asked. “Died in his office, didn’t he. Unknown causes?”
Alex nodded. “She probably doesn’t even know. Didn’t mean to—”
“So manslaughter instead of murder?” Sylvie shook her head. “I guess that’s better. But not by much.” She slipped away from Alex’s outstretched hand, leaned up against the desk, pushing the fine traceries of sand across the floor with her sneaker toe, focusing on that small detail. She watched the grains move, listened to Wright interrogating Alex about homicides in hospitals and why they were harder to commit than she might have thought, listened to Alex shut him up by simply pointing out that Margaret Strange’s left hand had become a Hand of Glory, thus a murderer. If not
the man at the hospital, then who?
“Good question,” Sylvie said. “We need to remember, these women aren’t victims. In their last years, they each made a choice to kill someone. Why?”
“What about the Hands we collected today?” Wright said. “They murderers also?”
“Alex—” Sylvie said.
“I can pull up all recent deaths, comb through their pasts for hints of murder, but hell, this is Miami.”
“Rich people,” Sylvie said. “The two Hands we’ve identified are both rich, or should have been, and in the twilight of their lives. I’d start there.”
“And you’ll be—”
“Taking a look-see at Odalys’s condo, though I don’t expect it to pan out. Condos aren’t really necromancy-friendly. The neighbors tend to complain about the smell. Defective or not, these Hands have been cured.”
Wright’s lips curled up in distaste and understanding. “Once,” he said, “we rousted a guy who’d killed his girlfriend but couldn’t figure out where to stash the body. He bled her out in his bathtub and hung her up to dry. It was a cold winter, but . . . yeah, you can’t hide that smell.”
Alex made the “ew” face, so vivid on a girl with a tongue stud and bright lipstick. “Speaking of . . . take those Hands with you. The bell will drive me crazy otherwise.”
* * *
SYLVIE HUNG BACK WHEN THEY REACHED THE CONDO; WRIGHT AND Demalion had spent the ride double-teaming her, seamlessly working together, arguing about police procedure, about stealth, about catching flies with honey, until her head spun listening to the cadences of their voices flip back and forth, watching Wright’s wiry body lock up as if its nerves couldn’t keep up with the conflicting impulses the two minds sent it. Wright’s hand, resting on his thigh, twitched and trembled as if it were attached to a live wire.
All of that effort just for a discussion about which of them should approach the doorman.
“Stop talking about it and do it,” Sylvie snapped, reaching across and jerking the passenger’s-side door open. She brushed against him, recoiled at the fever heat roiling off his skin. He looked over at her, face immobilized by that same strange nervous-system lockdown; she wasn’t sure which of them was listening, if either. “Go, but first decide who’s doing the talking, or the doorman’s likely to call the cops. Maybe an ambulance. And Christ, give it a rest. I mean, I’m glad you’re making nice and all, glad you found some way to communicate, but Wright’s body looks about one step from a heart attack; and then where would you be?”
Wright’s body jerked, one of them wresting command enough to get out from under the spate of her aggravation. She was betting on Demalion; he’d been on the rough side of her tongue more often than he appreciated. She leaned out to shout something after him, but her phone rang, and she snatched it up without even looking at the number.
“Shadows, what the hell is going on?”
“Lio? Everything go all right with the evidence recovery?” Sylvie said.
“Forget that,” he gritted out. “Isabella Martinez just walked out of the hospital morgue. What’s going on!”
“She’s not dead?” Sylvie said. “But she was dead. You said so.”
“The goddamned doctors said so, too, but what do they know, because Bella went home this afternoon, walking on her own two feet.”
Sylvie’s brain blanked utterly. Suarez continued to harangue her, but she was made of sterner stuff than Demalion or just more wrapped up in her thoughts. Bella had been dead.
You didn’t see it, her voice suggested. Always best to verify the facts yourself.
But she had seen the girl clammy, desperately ill, corpse-pale, one step from death. Wales had said the Hands were defective, dangerous; the one, at least, had tried to devour Sylvie whole.
“Are you even listening? Tell me what’s going on, or I will bring you down to the station, and I will keep you there for as long as I can throw charges at you.” The fury in his voice was a thin thing, a veneer laid over fear, reminding her that he was new to this type of blatant magic.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I really don’t know what’s happening. I know what killed Bella, how Jaz and her boys were robbing the stores, and I know who started them on that path. But I don’t know about Bella’s death and resurrection. People just don’t come back from the dead.” This even while she watched Wright/Demalion speaking with the doorman in her peripheral vision, sweet-talking his way through.
Without wanting to, she remembered Wales’s comment that no good ever came of mingling life with death. While she wanted to be thrilled that Bella had recovered, it only raised sick dread in her stomach. “She taking visitors?”
“Ask her lawyers,” Suarez said. “She’s sure not talking to me. It seems to be a common thing these days. Me asking questions and getting shut out.”
“You can’t unknow things,” Sylvie said. “Sometimes aphorisms are right. Ignorance is bliss.”
“My son died. His killers have vanished. You tell me they transformed, which means nothing to me. And all the help I get from the bosses is a warning to drop it. I’ve got teenage cat burglars from high-class families waltzing through walls and alarms, dropping dead and coming back to life. Tell me, Shadows, how is this bliss?”
“Knowledge obligates you to do something about it,” she said. Across the parking lot, the doorman stepped back, allowing Wright entrance. “Gotta go, Lio.” She disconnected to his “Wait!” and hastened across the asphalt, nodding briefly to the doorman as she joined Wright.
The condominium apartments stretched tall and narrow, and the glass-sided elevator that they rode in gave them a wheeling, sunlit view of the bay. The doorman rode with them in wary silence until they reached nearly to the top floor. Odalys wasn’t a penthouse dweller, lived three floors below that lofty space, but Sylvie bet that she wanted to be. It was part of what made Odalys hard for her to figure.
Sylvie had dealt with voodoo kings who wanted power via infant sacrifice, succubi who wanted revenge, werewolves who were hungry for territory, and, of course, Lilith, who wanted to unseat her god. What she hadn’t dealt with was someone who was utterly money-oriented.
Magic-users often started out trying to gain wealth through magic—witness Zoe—but all too soon they traded that desire for more magic, ever more, until working it became as consuming as any addiction. Sylvie supposed it might be heady, finding that you had the ability to bend reality to your will, to push back the line between the probable, the possible, and the previously inconceivable. But humans weren’t innately magical, not like the natural denizens of the Magicus Mundi, and it always, always went wrong.
If Odalys was truly using magic only as a means for profit . . . Sylvie wasn’t sure if that was more dangerous or less.
From the moment the doorman opened the door into Odalys’s condo, Sylvie knew they were on the wrong track. The apartment smelled stale, the air flat and unstirred by human warmth. Their footfalls, even on the tiled entryway, were absorbed into the silence like water into a dry sponge. Not only was Odalys not at home, but she hadn’t been there for some time. It took at least a week to get that particular dead-air taste, and—Sylvie discreetly brushed her fingers along the top of the leather couch—a thin layer of dust was beginning to bloom, invisible, but slightly sandy against her skin.
“She hasn’t been here for days,” Sylvie said.
The doorman bobbed his head, gelled hair never shifting. “That’s right. I haven’t seen her at all.”
Wright asked about visitors, anyone that the doorman might recognize. Sylvie kept an ear out, listening through the name-dropping. No one really important, a few corporate businessmen, a banker—she noted that name to compare to Caudwell’s money manager. It’d be nice if they were the same man, or at least part of the same firm, another data point to seal the connection between Odalys and the dead women.
She opened the refrigerator—emptied. Cupboards revealed china dishes and silver-plated utensils, but no food. Eith
er Odalys ate out exclusively, or she’d cleaned herself out.
The bedroom was palatial, a wide expanse of space dominated by a luxurious bed overlooking the ocean. The room was color-muted, everything in tones of white and dust, and the drawers and closets, when she opened them, were emptied. Odalys had found somewhere else to live. And knowing her, she had traded up.
Sylvie gnawed her lip, wondering what Odalys considered more livable than an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo apartment with optional maid service and rooftop pool.
Something she doesn’t have to share, her little voice said, always more tuned into the dark side of humanity. Greed begets selfishness.
Someplace illicit also, Sylvie thought. If it was all on the up-and-up, Odalys would have broken her condo lease or sublet it rather than leave it open for dust bunnies to colonize; the same mind that made defective Hands of Glory and found a way to turn a profit on them wouldn’t let real estate lie fallow.
Sylvie shook herself. She was getting ahead of herself. The condo hadn’t been empty for months, a bare week maximum. That was hardly time enough to make assumptions about Odalys’s living situation. Hell, Sylvie had been gone longer from her own apartment, and she hadn’t even stopped the mail.
“She picking up her mail?” Wright said in the background, as if he had been following along with her thoughts.
“She is,” the doorman said. “Though I haven’t seen her do it. But I only work the day shift.”
“How about just giving us a call if she shows up?” Sylvie suggested. Her hand delved into her wallet, short-circuited the “I can’t do that” expression, which turned acquisitive within seconds.
“Really?” she asked. The bills in her hand drew a frown from Wright—jealousy, she diagnosed, from the cop who had to get results the hard way.
“Well, I’m not supposed to—”
“I just want to talk to Odalys.”
The doorman, his eyes on the slide of green, didn’t look like he cared about her reasons. She counted out the money toward him, watched his fingers twitch when she hit two hundred dollars, and held it out to him.
