The Company of Shadows (The Company #1)

by Olsen, Lisa

  Not exactly the Ritz, but someone had put forth an effort to make the place a home.

  As he stepped over the threshold, Nick spotted his team standing by an interior door, speaking in hushed tones. Detectives Brady and Park were seasoned enough to know what to look for without him having to babysit them, while young enough to keep that eager edge despite all the drudgery they had to slog through. Better them than him, he’d already put in his time running down dead end leads in his day, Nick was content to let the younger pups have at it.

  Michelle Park, primly dressed in a navy blue, conservative woman’s suit, stood with perfect posture, black hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. Of Asian descent, Nick found her attractive in an understated way, but completely lacking in any flirtatious or playful manner, despite his best efforts to engage her. She looked more like an investment banker or an assistant principal than a detective, but Gibson had come to appreciate her dry wit and sharp observation skills.

  Her counterpart Kip Brady waited to her left, impeccably dressed in a dapper charcoal gray suit that Nick guessed was worth at least a week’s paycheck, his shoes buffed to a high shine. With close cropped dark hair and blue eyes, he easily fit the bill of everyone’s buddy, a trait that served him well in his years on the force. A little short in stature, Brady had none of the ‘short man’s complex’ that plagued so many of his height. Witty and affable, Nick could always count on him for a clever quip. The pair of them tried Park’s patience to no end sometimes, of that he was sure, but overall they made a good team.

  Brady looked up with a reverse nod and waved him over. Gibson gave a little mock salute to a couple of EMT’s lounging by the kitchen entrance and slid past them. The doorway led to a small bedroom, the epicenter of the fire with its blackened walls and waterlogged carpet. “Hey guys, did you bring the marshmallows? I’m fresh out.”

  “That’s probably for the best, I think you’re probably gonna lose that sugar jones as soon as you take a look.” Detective Brady gave him an amused smirk and Park stepped aside so he could stick his head into the bedroom, swiftly taking in the extent of the damage. Even with the charring, it was easy to see the room hadn’t been filled with expensive furnishings. There were puddles of wax on every surface indicating an overabundance of candles once resided there, along with an interesting array of candle holders made of glass, resin and stone. A hanging contraption made of brass hung suspended from the ceiling, about the size of a small apple, riddled with little holes. Maybe some kind of incense holder? He hadn’t seen anything like it since his days as an altar boy.

  It wasn’t long before his eyes were drawn to the badly burnt corpse lying on what was left of the bed. “Eewh, crispy…” he muttered, ducking back out. “So… are we thinking arson?” His brow furrowed, it wasn’t often he was called to a fire; in fact, he could count them on one hand over the span of his ten year career in law enforcement.

  “No sir, the initial report from the Fire Marshall indicates it was started by untended candles,” Park supplied politely and Nick gave a long suffering sigh. No matter how many times he’d asked her, Park hadn’t lost the need to call him sir yet, but he was still working on softening her up.

  “So, tell me again why we’re here?” His phone chirped cheerfully, and he automatically withdrew it to check the screen, his face breaking into a wide smile when he saw the display. “Hold that thought,” he raised a finger before reading the text: It was supposed to be your turn to make breakfast!

  Brady leaned over to surreptitiously read the message from around his shoulder. “Bimbo du jour?”

  “Bite your tongue, you know there's only one girl in my life,” Nick scoffed, swatting Kip away before placing the call. A smile was exchanged between the younger detectives as they listened to the one sided conversation. “Hi Muffin…No, I know, but I'll make it up to you…Well…how about pancakes for dinner? ...Okay, Belgian waffles then…Did you finish your English project? …Okay, okay, it's my job to ask, you know…I will keep that in mind…I’ve gotta go chase bad guys, I’ll see you tonight. Make good choices! …Bye sweetie, I love you.” Nick tucked his phone away with a smile, rubbing his hands together expectantly. “Now then, where were we?”

  “We were about to regale you with the tale of why we’re here before you stopped to play Father Knows Best,” Brady supplied helpfully.

  “Regale away.” Nick nodded benevolently, ignoring the jibe. There weren’t many that took a back seat to his work, but he did his best to make time for his teenaged daughter, Veronica. “But start with the part as to what makes this a homicide investigation.” In his experience, fires were a messy way to kill someone; most people didn’t get that fancy.

  “I think I can help with that.” A gloved finger tapped on his shoulder and he turned to make room for the petite brunette with a paper mask attached to her forehead. “Had to hit the ladies room, too much coffee.” Her nose wrinkled as she stepped into the bedroom and she rapidly replaced the mask, her hazel eyes skimming over the room to find the clipboard where she’d left it on the top of the dresser.

  “My favorite M.E. Nice to see you, Libby, well… part of you,” Nick grinned, stepping into the ruined bedroom with her.

  “Always a pleasure, Sergeant Gibson,” she nodded amiably, flipping open her metal clipboard and clicking on her pen.

  “Not yet, but I’m hopeful,” he dropped a playful wink, drawing a roll of the eyes, prompting Nick to clear his throat. “So, you were saying? This wasn’t an ordinary fiery death then?”

  “Not by a long shot, in fact this one should be right up your alley.”

  “Yeah?” He studied the body a little more closely. “Cause of death?”

  “Not the fire. In fact, there’s no sign of smoke inhalation at all.”

  “Huh, I wonder how he managed that?” He certainly looked crispy on the outside, why not the insides?

  “I’m thinking it was probably a little hard for her to breathe with an eight inch knife plunged into her heart,” Libby deadpanned.

  “You don’t say…” Nick brightened at the news. It was turning into an interesting fire after all.

  “I do say. Entered here under the breast bone.” She lightly touched the body with her gloved hand. “Right up under the rib cage and straight to the heart. Either the killer really knew what he was doing, or it was an incredibly lucky shot. She would have died almost instantly.”

  “That would complicate things,” he allowed. “Any way to tell time of death?”

  “It’s a little more difficult with the state of the body, but on first examination I’d say sometime between eleven PM and two AM,” Libby replied, scribbling onto the clipboard. “I’ll have a more thorough report after I get her down to the morgue.”

  “The fire department was called at one forty-two AM by the next door neighbor,” Park supplied, referring to the notepad on her cell phone.

  “Okey doke.” Nick backed out of the bedroom, leading them away from the doorway so Libby could get back to work. He might enjoy teasing her, but he knew she hated to have someone looking over her shoulder. “So, what have we got on our vic?”

  Brady flipped open his notebook and began to recite the facts. “Her name was Caroline Mackenzie, but she legally changed it to ‘Skye’ when she became an Oregon resident. Age twenty-two, moved here from Texas three years ago. No priors, except for one arrest for disorderly conduct last year, during a peaceful demonstration that turned a little ugly, but the charges were later dropped. Worked as a massage therapist, according to her business cards. Not a bad looker if you like the hippie type.” He picked up a framed photo depicting a smiling blonde sitting on a field of grass, a crown of daisies atop her head. She flashed a peace sign for the camera, blue eyes crinkling with mirth.

  “Massage therapist, huh? Maybe someone got ticked off when she wouldn’t give them a happy ending?” Nick chuckled at his own joke, drawing a smirk from Brady in kind before he cleared his throat with a look at Park.

  Ignori
ng the childish jokes as par for the course, Park took up where Brady left off as though there hadn’t been an interruption. “Her parents are still living in El Paso, Texas and she has two sisters that live in Texas also. That’s about the extent of what came up on record so far.”

  Ducking his head into the kitchen, his gaze was drawn to a series of green plants tied into bundles and hanging face down from the ceiling. “Drugs?”

  “No sir, those are various herbs. Some for cooking I assume, I can identify rosemary, sage, parsley, dill, oregano, basil, thyme… some of these… are a little more obscure, but nothing illegal.”

  “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, huh? I’ll take your word for it.” He stepped back out into the living room, pausing at the desk. “We’ll want to check out her client list, friends from her email account, the usual.”

  There was a small stack of business cards on the desk, all for the same shop. He picked one up, examining the stylized silver flame printed on glossy, deep blue cardstock. “Argent Flame, metaphysical and ritual supplies,” he read aloud. “I wonder why she had a stack of these? Looks like it’s over in the Hawthorne district… I wonder if she was running massages out of that place?”

  Brady traded an amused look with Park. “Yeah, about that…”

  “About what?”

  “Come on, you’ll want to see this for yourself,” Brady smirked, already backing towards the archway that led to the small room in the back of the little house. The room was untouched by the fire, presumably as the owner had left it. Once intended as a sun room, the windows were all covered with brightly colored bedspreads in a series of celestial designs. One of the sun, another with a constellation of stars, one with the three phases of the moon and one with a large, five pointed star within a circle.

  Candles surrounded the room as well, tall slender tapers, fat pillar candles and many unusual shapes and sizes. A small table pressed into the corner was covered with trinkets, small boxes and bottles, and some objects that resisted identification. Another five pointed star within a circle was drawn on the threadbare carpet with what looked like dirt, a darker stain in the center.

  “Oh, this case keeps getting better and better…” Nick breathed, wandering through the room with interest before he turned on his team with exasperation. “You knew this room was here the whole time and you didn’t lead off with this?”

  “We saved the best for last?” Brady defended weakly with a helpless shrug. “We were letting the mood build.”

  “We didn’t want to prejudice your examination of the rest of the crime scene,” Park offered with a straight face.

  “Sneaky… I like that.” Nick pointed at each of them in turn. “So… what am I looking at here, exactly?”

  “It appears our golden haired girl was also a card carrying witch.”

  “Get outta town, a witch?” Gibson’s brows climbed. “Like pointy hat and broomsticks and the whole shebang? She sure hid her warts well.” He thought back to the picture of the pretty girl, she looked like any wholesome college co-ed. Not the sort of gothy, tattooed, black dyed-hair type that he associated with the occult.

  “The politically correct term is Wiccan, sir. But that does seem to be the case based on her library. She had a very strong interest in paganism if she wasn’t one herself,” Park added, sounding fairly knowledgeable on the subject. Nick resolved to ask her more about that later, but the star symbol on the rug caught his attention. Kneeling beside it, he looked up at her.

  “CSU’s already processed this room?”

  “Yes sir, everything has been catalogued.”

  Picking up some of the dark powder and letting it fall through his gloved fingers, Nick studied the symbol. “Any idea what this stuff is?”

  “First word is it’s dirt, nothing beyond that as of yet, they took a sample down to the lab,” Brady replied. “See that darker stain in the center? That’s blood, same type as our vic. We’re betting she was stabbed in here, then moved to the bedroom to make it look like the fire did her in.”

  “There’s not too much of it then,” Gibson frowned, rising to his feet again. Ordinarily he would have expected quite a bit more blood, especially if the body was moved to a completely different room. He studied the books on a short bookshelf. Lots of witchy subjects; everything from candle magic to herb craft, whatever that was.

  Returning to the living room, he paused at one of the tall bookcases. Withdrawing a scrapbook, Nick studied the pictures within. There were photos of the victim at several gatherings, always smiling and laughing, hugging, generally joyful. His expression thoughtful, he flipped through the pages of her life, wondering, who would have killed such a happy go lucky kind of girl? But then again, he’d learned time and again, things were rarely as they seemed.

  “Okay, let’s step through this… our killer slips in here when she’s home all alone and vulnerable, maybe she’s in her witchy room, working on some kind of spell.” Nick walked back into the ritual room. “Maybe she’s even in a trance or something, because he’s able to get the jump on her and stab her through the heart without her making so much as a squawk.”

  “Maybe he held his hand over her mouth? Muffled her before he stabbed her? She wasn’t more than a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, she would have been easy to overpower,” Brady suggested and Nick nodded his approval.

  “True, it could have gone down like that. Either way, our guy decides the best way to hide any evidence of the crime is to burn the body, make it look like a simple accident. After all there are enough candles in the house to open up her own shop. So he scoops up the body, carries her into the bedroom.” He stepped out of the rear room and headed back to the living room, stopping short of entering the bedroom, not wanting to interrupt Libby in her examination. “He sets her down and starts lighting candles. All he has to do is knock one over and it’s domino city… soon the room is ablaze and he beats feet out of here, through the back door if he’s smart.”

  “There’s a large back yard out there, shared with the unit next door, fenced all the way around,” Park supplied. “He could have hopped the fence, or even left through the front door. It was late, he could have gambled that no one would be up and around to see him, and the flames wouldn’t have attracted any attention until they got really out of control.”

  “We’ve got a whole lotta nothin’,” Nick sighed in disgust. At that stage of the game it was as though someone had taken a box of puzzle pieces and tossed them into the wind. Not only were they scattered about without any trace of a pattern, he wasn’t even sure if all of the pieces were in one place yet.

  Libby stepped into the bedroom doorway and crooked her fingers at the waiting EMT’s who disappeared into the bedroom, wheeling the gurney between them.

  Somewhat subdued, Gibson turned to his team. “Okay, now the fun stuff,” he said briskly, all business now. “Park, you take the family, make the call, you know what to do.” Never one to enjoy making that call, he delegated it to Park, who had a gentle touch with victim’s families. “See if you can find out about her friends, if she had a boyfriend, the usual. Brady, start running down the contacts from her phone and computer, I want a list of her clients ASAP. Find out if she’s affiliated with a massage therapy place in town or if she was working freelance on her own. Let’s get her bank records too, see if there’s anything suspicious there. Keep in touch, you know the drill.”

  “You got it boss-man,” Brady nodded, scribbling into his notebook, and Park echoed her assent, fingers flying across the screen of her smart phone.

  “I’m gonna swing by and check out this occult store, see what I can turn up. See if she was really a tree-hugger type or if she was into any of the dark stuff.” He waved one of the business cards from the desk.

  The EMT’s emerged from the bedroom, wheeling the body bag with practiced indifference. “Okay, let’s move like we got a purpose people.” Nick waved them on grimly. All kidding aside, it tore at him to see someone full of youth struck down so sens
elessly, and he was determined to bring the killer to justice.