Dirty Magic

by Jaye Wells

  “But if you do that,” I said, unable to help myself, “and Bane is guilty, we will lose any shot of nailing him on federal charges. Or he’ll retaliate by flooding the streets with the potion and even more lives will be lost.”

  He leaned back and crossed his arms, smiling like the cat that devoured the canary. “Then I suppose you better get to work.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  An hour later, Morales and I were back in his wheels headed to the morgue. Mez was still tied up going over the physical samples from the scene with Val, so we got the job of hitting up the ME for access to samples from the body.

  I wouldn’t say the ride over was awkward so much as tense and downright glacial. Morales made no effort at small talk, and I obliged his obvious desire for silence by ignoring him.

  When we’d pulled up to the morgue, he finally turned to me. “I’ll do the talking in here.”

  I considered arguing, but my instincts told me to keep quiet. I was pretty sure he was pissed about my not telling him about my past with Volos. After the meeting, he’d pulled Gardner aside for a heated discussion. I couldn’t make out their words, but the way he kept shooting me looks while he ranted, it didn’t take a cop to figure out the evidence pointed to his wanting me off the case. I supposed I couldn’t blame him for worrying. The meeting had left me feeling worried, too. Obviously Volos had some sort of reason for wanting me in that room, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything that would turn out well for me—or the case.

  But apparently Gardner disagreed because she shut him down and then told him to take me with him to the morgue.

  “Fine,” I said, finally, forcing an amiable smile. It wouldn’t hurt to try to get on his—well, not his good side, exactly. His less shitty side, maybe.

  The first sign of trouble was when Morales strutted into the morgue as if it were an Old West saloon. “I’m looking for Thomas Franklin.”

  If he’d had asked me, I might have warned him to take a cautious approach with the ME. But he didn’t ask, so I just hung back while he swung his dick around the man’s icebox.

  The tall, African American man in question had been leaning over a body when Morales entered. Franklin slowly levered his tall body upright, pulled down his mask, and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  Morales stilled like the guy had spit at his feet. I covered my mouth with my hand. This was going to be fun.

  “I’m Special Agent Drew Morales, MEA—”

  “In case you’re blind as well as rude, I’m in the middle of an autopsy. Get out!”

  “We called ahead.” Morales’s tone was cool, unruffled. “We’re here to see the body of—”

  Franklin made a rude noise with his lips. “This ain’t the motherfuckin’ Red Lobster, son. You can’t make a reservation. First come”—he pointed a goo-covered, gloved hand down at the body—“first served. Bye now.”

  I watched Morales closely, just waiting for him to lose it and threaten to shove that scalpel down Franklin’s piehole. Instead, the big guy relaxed his shoulders and lowered his tone. “The last thing we want is to inconvenience you. If you could simply point us to the proper drawer.”

  My eyes pinged back and forth between the two men.

  “You can’t view a body unattended.” Franklin sighed the sigh of the martyred. “You Feds are all alike. We got a backlog of bodies and you need me to take my assistant away from her work to babysit your bossy ass?”

  Morales stared down the taller man. “You got a problem, you can take it up with my field supervisor, but we’re going in there.” He moved toward the doors.

  Franklin started after him, “Hey!” But then he stopped because he finally noticed me lingering by the entrance. I waggled my fingers at him.

  “Kate Prospero! I almost didn’t recognize you with that black eye.”

  Morales stopped and turned slowly. His accusing glare burned my skin but I didn’t look at him. Instead, I smiled real wide at Franklin, ignoring the comment about my eye. “How’s it going, Franky baby?”

  “Ah, you know.” He shrugged. “Motherfuckers keep dying so at least I got some job security.”

  I laughed. “I hear ya.”

  “Wait, what you doing with this one, Kate? You working a case? And what’s with the shiner? Do I need to kick someone’s ass?”

  “We’re tracking the source of that new blood potion.” I placed a hand to the eye I’d forgotten was still bruised. “This was courtesy of one of the stiffs you’ve got in there.” I jerked a thumb toward the door. “Speaking of,” I said, “could you do us a solid and let us take a gander at Marvin Brown’s body? He just came in but we won’t disturb him too much.”

  Franklin pursed his lips and glanced at Morales, like he was weighing the other man’s character. Morales shifted on his feet.

  Just when I was convinced Franklin was going to start yelling again, he laughed instead. “Well, shiiit.” He dragged out the vowel like a match against a striker. “Why didn’t you just say so?” He pointed a dripping hand toward a set of swinging doors. “Body’s through there. Knock on Janet’s door on your way. She’ll help you.”

  The tension escaped the room. “That would be great, thanks.” Morales flashed a tight smile, like he didn’t really trust Franklin’s expected one-eighty to last long enough to get results.

  He turned and loomed toward the doors like a thunderhead. Franklin turned to me and winked. “Have fun with that.”

  “You’re a bad man, Franky.”

  He shrugged. “I spend my days collecting the human waste of this fucking city, Prospero. I gotta get my laughs where I can.” We both paused as the truth of those words sank in. Then, as if breaking a spell, he clapped his gloved hands together. “All right, get on with ya. I gotta remove a bullet from this poor asshole’s trachea.”

  I glanced at the body. The vic was a white male, probably early forties. His skin was blue and he’d been cut from sternum to pelvis. Franklin had closed the guy’s eyes, but the gaping mouth caught my attention. Fuck me if it didn’t look like he was silently screaming.

  * * *

  As if she’d been invoked magically, Janet was already waiting for us in the room. She had her trusty clipboard at the ready and quickly found the locker containing the mortal remains of one Marvin Brown. She opened the door, pulled out the drawer, and turned on her heel.

  “Humph.” She pushed her spectacles back up her overly large nose. No “Let me know if you need anything else” or even a good-bye. She just walked back into her office. A large window over her desk ensured she could see everything we did. However, the instant she sat down she began tackling the mountain of file folders covering the desk’s surface.

  “Charming,” Morales said. He paused a beat and then turned toward me. “Thanks for making me look like an asshole out there.”

  I bit my lip. “You didn’t need my help for that.” Okay, so maybe I wasn’t so hot at getting on people’s not-shitty sides.

  His eyes narrowed for a moment, but then he sighed. “Just grab a slide, will ya?” He pointed to the black duffel he’d carried in from the car.

  “What’s the hurry, Morales?” I said. “Feeling woozy?” I said this despite the fact that I always had nightmares about rotting slabs of pork for days after I visited the morgue.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I just have real police work to do. We’re not going to find jack shit on this body linking this murder to Volos.”

  The problem was, I totally agreed with him. Even if he’d killed the guy himself, Volos was too smart to leave evidence. “Then why are we here?”

  “Gardner.” He might as well have said God’s name.

  While I rummaged for the slides in the black bag, he started examining Brown. “What’s your story with Volos?”

  I paused and looked up. “The kind that’s none of your business.”

  He glanced at me. “Look, Cupcake, I get that a lady likes to have her secrets, but as long as we’re working together on a case involving your e
x, that history has a direct impact on my well-being. So spill it.”

  “There’s not much to tell.” I handed him the package of lab slides I found in the bag. As I did, I noticed those scars again. Curiosity itched the back of my brain, but he would never share his secrets until I spilled mine.

  He accepted the slides with his right hand. “We both know that’s bullshit. I saw you two today. There’s some shit between you that time hasn’t erased.”

  I sighed. “We didn’t end … easy.”

  He snorted. “What relationship does? Otherwise why end it?”

  “True enough.” I was stalling. “The short of it is, I wanted out of the coven. I finally convinced Uncle Abe to let me go—”

  “Why did you want out?”

  Now that topic was definitely off-limits. “Let’s just say I lost my taste for magic and leave it at that.” I could tell he wanted to press me, but he nodded. “Anyway, Abe was ready to let me go, but John—not so much.”

  “You dumped him?”

  I nodded. “And I said some things to make sure it stuck.”

  He whistled low. “Guy like that doesn’t seem like he’d take rejection well.”

  My stomach clenched at the memory of that night. I pushed it ruthlessly aside. “Anyway,” I said, “today was the first time we’d been in a room together in a decade.”

  Morales nodded but I could tell by his expression he was mulling it over. “Do you think he’s guilty?” He nodded toward the body bag to indicate Marvin’s murder.

  I blew a long breath out through my nose. “Do I think he’s capable of murder? Yeah. Do I think he’s responsible for this particular one?” I paused. “Not really. I mean, someone on Gray Wolf probably killed Marvin. And maybe Volos put that potion on the street. But did he send a hexhead hopped-up on his new junk after Marvin as retaliation for talking to us?” I shook my head. “Seems like a stretch.” Low-level guys like Marvin never knew enough about what happened at the top to be a threat.

  “Hmm,” Morales said.

  Clearly he wasn’t ready to tell me his own theories, which was fine. I was tired of speculation. We needed to find some hard evidence soon or our case was going to get torpedoed by the mayor and Volos’s lawyer before we could say “warrant.”

  “What about this Bane angle he threw out today?”

  I shook my head. “Also a stretch. Bane’s a lunatic, no doubt, but he’s a blood magic wizard. To pull off this kind of alchemy?” I sighed. “It’s not impossible, I guess, but he’d have to have help. And the only wizard I can think of who can pull off a spell like this is—”

  “Volos.”

  I nodded. “Round and round it goes. There’s got to be something we’re missing. Hopefully Marvin will help us.” I looked down at the body. On the way over, Val had sent a text confirming his identity from the print database. “Did he have any next of kin?” Morales had pulled Marvin’s file from ACD at the crime scene.

  He shook his head. “Never married, no kids. Mother died ten years ago.”

  A loud snap sounded. I looked up to see him pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. He leaned over the body and began to inspect it for Lord-knew-what. With nothing to do, I scanned the rows of drawers, wondering which one held Ferris Harkins’s body.

  “How’d you hook up with Harkins as a snitch?” I asked to distract myself.

  “He’d served a couple years in Crowley,” he said referring to the penitentiary for magic criminals on Philosopher’s Island. “His roommate was a CI of mine from a case I ran a few years back. I remembered him talking about his buddy who lived in the infamous Cauldron. Tracked him down through the shelters.”

  I raised my brows. “What was he hooked on—before the Gray Wolf, I mean?”

  Morales shrugged. “He worshipped at the altar of the Os for a time, but he claimed he’d been clean for a while.”

  As if Harkins hadn’t been unsavory enough, I thought with a memory of him grabbing his crotch and shuddered inwardly. It was hard not to picture the werewolf he’d become humping away at someone like there was no tomorrow.

  “And you believed him—about being clean, I mean?”

  “He didn’t show any signs of heavy use,” Morales said. “When I found him he was washing dishes in the kitchen at the Catholic mission on Salado Street.”

  I didn’t ask why Harkins had become a CI. If he’d been living at the mission, the income alone would have been enough of a motivator. Experienced CIs with excellent intel raked in decent paydays, but even a low-level guy could make a nice little nest egg—or potion bankroll. But now Harkins’s body would be donated to the state’s alchemy labs for experiments, and Marvin would probably end up in some remote potter’s field. Crime and snitching might pay, but, as they also say, you can’t take it with you.

  “So what exactly are we looking for here?” I asked.

  He looked up from scraping under the nails and carefully placing the results on the glass slides. I glanced to make sure Janet wasn’t looking. If Frank saw Morales taking evidence off a body, we’d be toast. “I’m hoping Marvin struggled with our perp. Maybe some DNA under the fingernails.”

  “Good luck with that. The state lab will take months to run that sample.”

  Morales snapped the lid on the test tube. “Don’t need the state’s lab—we’ve got ourselves a Mesmer.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  That night, I went to Pen’s to pick up Danny because he’d gone home with her after school, since Baba had her weekly smutty-book-club meeting that night. I had to make three passes before I found a spot halfway down the block from her building. I killed the engine and soaked in the silence, trying to collect myself before I headed in.

  But soon the silence was pushed aside by a jumble of worries that stumbled noisily into my head. To escape them, I grabbed my purse and hauled my tired ass out of the car. Pen’s apartment was on the first floor of a building that used to be a whorehouse. Back when the Mundane mob ruled Babylon—back before the magical criminals took over—they’d used this place to stash their ladybirds.

  Pen said she liked living there because of its scandalous history, but I couldn’t figure out how that was enough to make her overlook the tricky outlets, shitty plumbing, and lack of decent parking.

  When I entered the building, the air was saturated with the scent of hot grease and five-spice powder. My stomach grumbled and I realized I hadn’t eaten since that morning’s bagel.

  When Pen opened the door, her smile wasn’t as bright as usual. “Hey.”

  I glanced over her shoulder but couldn’t see more than the TV flickering in the corner of her shoe-box living room. “What’s up?” I asked with a frown.

  She shook her head. “Tough day.”

  Even though I’d had one of those myself, I pushed aside my own worries. I leaned on Pen way too much to put my problems ahead of hers. “What happened?”

  She waved me in. “That girl I told you about? With the diet potion?”

  I nodded and set my purse down. Danny was slouched at her dining-room table doing homework with his headphones on. “Hey, Danny.” When he didn’t respond, I bent over and waved a hand to get his attention.

  He glanced up from under his bangs and lifted his pencil in something approximating a wave but didn’t speak.

  Turning my attention back to Pen, I said, “What about her?”

  She pulled me into the galley kitchen. “She OD’d,” she whispered. She shot a worried glance to see if Danny heard, but the headphones prevented it.

  “God, is she okay?”

  Pen slowly shook her head. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. I pulled her in for a hug because what else could I do?

  Her shoulders shook and she held on as if I was the only thing keeping her upright. “I’d reported the case to child welfare,” she sobbed, “but they’re so backlogged they couldn’t make it in time.”

  “Shh,” I said and rocked her. “You did what you could.”

  Her head shook wetly agains
t my collarbone. “No, I didn’t. I should have called her mother myself. I should have gone over there—”

  I grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to look at me. “Stop. Don’t do that to yourself. You can’t save everybody.”

  Her tear-stained face morphed into a fierce scowl. “I have to try, Kate. I have to.”

  I swallowed the emotion that gathered in my own throat because I understood. I understood all too well why she needed to help those kids. I wasn’t the only one with a past that still haunted her.

  “I know,” I whispered. “And you did try.”

  She wiped her nose and eyes with a paper towel. “I filed a report at the BPD,” she said, standing straighter. “They’ve already picked up the mother.”

  “Who did you talk to?”

  “Detective named Duffy.”

  My eyebrows rose. I knew Pat Duffy’s name only by reputation. “I don’t know him personally,” I said, “but he’s an Adept. He managed to claw his way up to detective from patrol, which means he must be the real deal.”

  She licked her lips and nodded. “Good,” she whispered. “That’s good.”

  I hugged her one more time to reassure us both. “Anyway.” She sniffed and tried to swipe the mascara from under her eyes. “How was your day?”

  I bit my lip. After hearing the shit she was dealing with, I decided not to unload about my own problems. “Just another day at the office.”

  She leaned forward. “You do remember tomorrow’s his birthday, right?”

  I blew out a breath. Shit. I’d been so caught up in the case I’d lost track of the date. “Of course,” I lied. “I’m taking him to the Blue Plate tomorrow for lunch.”

  The Blue Plate was a diner that sat in the shadows of the Bessemer Bridge, on the Mundane side. Going there was a yearly tradition for Danny’s birthday. Just as it had been for my mother and me, before Danny was born.

  “You’re taking him out of school?” she said, sounding dubious.

  Crap, I hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, just for lunch, though.”