by T. K. Thorne
Firmly, I twist the knob and pull the door open, only to find two more of those consequences standing on Alice’s front porch.
One of them is a child—the same boy kidnapped by Theophalus Blackwell, the same boy who suffered severe burns in the wake of my mixing magics. His hand is patched with grafted pink-white skin that matches the swath on his face. With it, he grasps his mother’s pant leg. The other hand is rolled into a fist and stuffed into his mouth in a familiar gesture.
For a moment I can’t breathe.
“Can we come in?” the woman asks.
Flummoxed, I have no answer and just step back, allowing them inside.
From over my shoulder, Alice says, “Well, hello, Daniel. Hello, Mrs. Pate.”
Replying around the hand still in his mouth, the child says, “Lo,”—a shortened form of “hello,” I assume. Then his gaze darts to the cartoons. Releasing his mother’s leg, he heads for the TV—or telly, as Alice calls it—plopping onto the floor beside Becca.
I’m rooted in shock.
“Cup of tea?” Alice asks.
Chapter Two
Iwalk into the Burglary Unit office thinking my life can’t get more complicated. I’m wrong, of course. My lieutenant is not happy. That is evident, even from my position at the doorway.
On my last day of training in Patrol, I shot a man in the back. That was also the day magic awoke in me. I kept my mouth shut about that part. The homicide was ruled justifiable, or, in cop terms, a “good” shooting—I did it to protect my partner, but the nuances of that were lost on the public. The chief decided to hustle me out of sight by reassigning me to the Detective Bureau, a move that didn’t go over very well with my fellows. An assignment as a detective—working day hours in plain clothes—is considered an earned perk, not a position normally given to a rookie, unless the administration really wants to keep that rookie out of trouble and out of the public eye.
“What the crap are they thinking?” the Burglary lieutenant rails at no one in particular.
The two detectives in the office busy themselves in paperwork with far more concentration than is called for.
Only the lieutenant has an office, more a cubicle. The rest of the space is open with desks and computers. Lieutenant Jake Fisher—“Fish” behind his back—has thick black eyebrows, now scrunched close to his eyes, a jutting jaw and belly, and a grumpy attitude. He stands in the doorway to his office, glowering, and spots me before I can melt into the chair at my desk.
“Detective Brighton, glad you could make it to work.”
His sarcastic emphasis on my title is meant to draw attention to the fact that I have no business being in the Detective Bureau, despite the fact that I have been assigned here for several months. Granted, the last four I was not actually working. Some of my time off from work was to heal from my injuries and some of it was on administrative leave while the incident—the Ordeal, which involved a couple of bodies—was all being investigated.
Fish does not have to verbalize that he is not happy that one of his detectives got herself held hostage by a deranged man who “somehow” spontaneously combusted. It was all over the news, including the fact that I was the same officer who only a few months before had shot a man in the back. All this did not sit well with the Department’s plan to keep me out of sight and let things quiet down.
“Do you think you can just sashay in here any old time you feel like it?” Fish demands.
I know it’s a rhetorical question, but I want to say—Sorry, sir, but as I was about to leave for the office, a woman and her child showed up on my front porch, and I couldn’t leave because I was responsible for the magical fire that burned the boy’s face, hand, and back, and nearly killed him. Okay? Instead, I tighten my lips and find my desk, wishing Tracey Lohan was here to fill me in on what’s bugging Fish. The lieutenant was obviously worked up before I showed my face in the doorway. Tracey, however, has been whisked away to Homicide to fill the vacancy left by another of my victims.
My life is really complicated.
As quietly as I can, I slip into my chair. A stack of paperwork halfway to my shoulder sits there. Apparently, no one decided to help with my caseload while I was recovering, at least with the routine stuff. Somewhere outside, a car backfires and I flinch. For a second, I’m paralyzed with fear. My pulse beats a fitful rhythm in my throat. Looking down, I realize my fingers are clutching the edges of my desk. Thankfully, I don’t dive under it. With luck, no one saw my reaction to the pop of the backfire. Dark curls hide the sweat beads on my forehead, and I manage to wipe them surreptitiously as I pluck a report from the stack.
“In my office, Brighton!” Fish says before I can read it.
No one looks up or gives me a clue what is going on. He has already chewed me out for being late. How could I possibly be in more trouble already? I’ve been back at work less than five minutes.
Scowling, Fish plops into his chair, which barely contains him. I stand at the doorway to the cubicle, because there is only room for his desk and one empty chair that he has not invited me to sit in.
“I don’t like this one bit,” Fish says.
“What, sir?”
“Do they think they’re the only ones having to work with no people? Do they think they have the only crimes going on in this city?”
I have no idea who “they” are and decide the best response is to wait until he elects to tell me.
With a yank, he snatches open the top drawer to his desk and pulls out a round can, spitting a wad of brown tobacco into the trash basket.
My nose wrinkles in distaste.
“Homicide is short-handed and wants one of my people.” He glares up at me as if it’s my idea.
“Why?”
“They don’t teach you what short-handed means in college?”
I bite my tongue. No point in rising to the bait.
When I don’t answer, he says, “They got too many dead bodies lying around and not enough living bodies to count the corpses.” He leans back in his chair, which creaks at his weight and looks like it might tip over if he goes an inch further.
“They say the gang problem is responsible for a slew of homicides, and all their experienced detectives are working cases. They say they need somebody to work the routine homicides and the other stuff. That’s what they say.”
I remain silent.
“What I say,” he mutters, his face flushing red, “is that they are using the gang stuff as an excuse to grab one of my people.”
All the departments play this manpower game. All claiming to be short-handed. Actually, all of them are short-handed, and they each have to make a case as to why they need people. Patrol wants the Detective Bureau to give up bodies; Robbery cries they need people from Vice/Narcotics; and Vice/Narcotics plucks people out of Patrol. The Burglary Unit probably has the hardest time keeping people, as it is on the lowest rung in the Detective Bureau in terms of priorities and internal status.
“If they think I’m sending my best detective, they are smoking grass, because they already got him.”
“Lohan?”
He grunts. “Damn straight.”
I have no idea why Fish is telling me this. There is no way he is going to send me to the elite Homicide Unit.
“I’m sending you to Homicide,” he says, cramming a wad of fresh tobacco into the other side of his mouth.
My mouth opens.
“Don’t just stand there gawking. They’ll throw you back soon enough. Report to Homicide. It’s right down the hall.”
Chapter Three
The Homicide office is down the hall from the Burglary Unit in the Administration Building. The only person I know there is Tracey Lohan. A few months ago, I would have said I had no friends and didn’t want any. Now I have two, and Tracey is one of them. If he knew that Becca was in the shape she was in because of me, he might not
want that status.
Enough with the guilt trip.
When I walk into the Homicide office, I feel the attention of everyone. I’m used to that in a roomful of men. Becca once told me, “Honestly, Rose, you’d think you don’t like being gorgeous.”
“I don’t,” I said.
She’d squinted her eyes at me the way she did when I told her I didn’t like to shop. When she finally believed me, she declared me genetically defective. Maybe I am. I pushed boys away as a teenager and even in college, only going on a few dates. It wasn’t hard there because there was no lack of beautiful girls on the University of Alabama campus, and I refused to do the sorority thing. I dressed down and let my overly curly hair live in its natural, wild state. Even so, I’m used to drawing men’s gazes, but this is different. Hostility clots the air. My mouth flattens in a grim line, and I tilt up my chin. Screw them.
“Rose!” Tracey Lohan’s voice is a haven. He is difficult to miss, especially when he stands. Brown hair and a square jaw remind me of Paul, my deceased former partner. That’s the only resemblance. Paul had been short and square, intense, while Tracey is a big-boned, clumsy bear with an open smile.
I step closer and ask quietly, “Who’s the lieutenant here?”
“Faraday.” He points at the glass cubicle similar to Fish’s.
I give him a quick nod of thanks and report to the lieutenant.
Lieutenant Faraday is a block of a woman with coffee skin, a strong nose, and a haughty bearing that makes me think of African nobility. She wears her dark hair cut short in natural tight curls. Dark-framed glasses magnify her piercing eyes. I stand in her doorway a good minute before she looks up over the glasses.
“Brighton?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She sighs. “How long have you been in Burglary?”
“Um, almost seven months, but I’ve been on leave the last four of them.”
“Well, I guess I asked for a warm body.”
I don’t know what to say.
“Are you sure you’re together enough to do this? A lot of dead people to look at, and they’re not pretty.”
“I saw dead people in Patrol.”
“I don’t guess I need to warn you that your reception won’t be overly warm by some of my detectives.”
My back stiffens. “I didn’t ask to be assigned here.” Any more than you asked to have me.
“I’m putting you with Detective Lohan for a while and we’ll see.”
Her attention drops back to the report she was reading, and I take that as a dismissal. Returning to Tracey, I sit in the empty desk next to him.
“Looks like you are the lucky guy assigned to babysit me.”
His gray eyes scan my face. “You okay?”
Tracey came to see me while I was in the hospital, but I made it clear I didn’t want any visitors after that. That was rude on my part, especially given the fact that he saved my life by finding me in a cave under Red Mountain and getting me to the hospital.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re one tough cookie.”
I sniff. “I could use a cookie. Are you packing?”
He grins and opens the drawer to his desk, pulling out a pack of cookies and offering one to me. Even though I don’t cry, I want to because they are chocolate chip, my favorite, and because it makes me remember Paul with a milk mustache and a purloined cookie standing in the hallway of my house. That was the night my now dead partner became my lover, at least for a while.
“Welcome to Homicide,” Tracey says.
My first homicide case awaits us the next day. Tracey and I ride together to a red brick administrative office in the sprawling UAB campus and medical complex. Two uniformed officers, one from Birmingham and one from the UAB Police Department, await us. We step under the crime scene tape to get to the room beyond.
A body sprawls face up on the floor behind a rich mahogany desk. My response to Lieutenant Faraday that I have seen dead men before was not a lie. In Patrol, where I worked for four months, that was the first informal test my peers imposed—how would I react to a gruesome death? I did okay and managed not to do anything “girly” like faint or vomit. But seeing dead bodies is not the same as “working” the homicide—finding out what happened and who was responsible. Other than a class at the police academy, my total preparation for this is that last night I read the first three chapters of a homicide investigation book I borrowed from Tracey yesterday.
Fortunately, there is nothing particularly gruesome here, other than the stark pallor of the man on the floor and his glazed eyes staring at nothing. Above him, rich oil paintings hang on the walls. Thick, crimson carpeting swallows our footsteps. Framed certificates cover the entire opposite wall. A credenza holds a few glass and acrylic awards, a silver-framed photo of a woman with luxurious red hair, and a small mini refrigerator.
According to the name on his door, the victim is Benjamin M. Crompton, head of the School of Public Health.
So far, no signs of foul play. Patrol called it in as an apparent natural death, most likely a heart attack. Hence, the two Homicide rookies—Tracey and I—were assigned the case. Normally, detectives work by themselves with a “team” to call on when needed, but I’m not ready to go solo for a while, as Lieutenant Faraday quickly let me know.
No evidence tech has been called yet, although the first patrol officers to arrive sealed off and guarded the room as soon as the paramedics declared a DOS—dead on the scene. Those officers will remain stationed in the hall, protecting the scene until we make a determination that all the evidence has been collected.
It’s obvious from the size and decor of the office that the victim was a “somebody” at the medical center. Tracey kneels beside the body and his sudden stillness catches my attention. His face is almost the pallor of the corpse’s.
“What is it, Lohan?”
For a moment, he doesn’t respond. Slowly, his gaze shifts to me, as if he’s forgotten I’m there. He shakes his head.
“What?” I demand.
“I know him.”
That stops me. “How well do you know him?”
His mouth twitches.
“We should get someone else here,” I say. “You can’t work a case on someone you know.”
With another small shake of his head, he says, “No, I can do it. He was a . . . professor in one of my classes here. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
I study the man on the floor again. He doesn’t look like he should have had a heart attack, but people in their fifties and sixties die from one every day. I stand back, near the mini fridge that rests on a counter, my gaze traveling around the room. Maybe he had a stressful job. Maybe he had a lot of drama in his home life.
Without warning, the witch part of myself engages. Unbidden, a sudden golden warmth of energy flushes over me from my toes to my head, suspending me in the color-leached, unfocused world of a time flow. This is my particular “gift,” to see the past or the future related to a place. I can’t control when or what I see, even though I can draw energy at will from the living-green. That is the term House of Rose witches use for the source of their magic—underground deposits of coal. Although it is no longer “living,” coal contains the essence and energy of plant life condensed eons ago by the weight of earth and stone.
On the floor in the office, black and gray shadow-figures of paramedics huddle around Crompton’s body and move backward, indicating that I’m seeing the recent past, a vision I know only I am privy to. The scene ripples, as if I were looking through a bad reception. They lift him from the floor to the chair, where they leave him with his upper half sprawled on the desk. Then the paramedics back out of the door. Crompton’s body animates, lifting off the desk into a sitting position in a slow-motion reversal. I’m stuck in time and can only watch as he sits at his desk, picks up an empty syringe on the desk,
moves it into a fold of pinched skin on his stomach, withdraws liquid from his injection into a syringe, releases the skin of his stomach, pulls his shirt together, and gives a full syringe to a petite young woman. The woman with the syringe backs up across the room and turns to face a drawer next to the mini fridge, which is an arm’s length from me. I imagine if I were in her path, she would just go through me.
She opens the drawer, then pulls an empty vial from her pocket and places the syringe needle into the vial, pushing on the plunger and forcing liquid from the syringe into the vial. After she pulls the needle out, a cap and plastic wrapper float through the air from a nearby trashcan into her hand, and she places them onto the needle, putting the full vial into her pocket. Then she opens and closes the refrigerator with one hand, the other holding the wrapped needle, which she puts into the drawer and closes.
The world snaps back to full color and reality. My head aches as if it’s been forced apart, then crammed with something larger than the space available inside.
Tracey is still kneeling by the body, which is now back on the floor in the present, but I scan the desk for the syringe I saw in the shadow world. Nothing on the desk.
When he passed out, Crompton fell forward on the desk on top of the syringe. The paramedics would have been in a hurry to get him into a position where they could try to resuscitate him. In the process of moving him, several papers apparently were dragged off the desk onto the floor. Kneeling, I gingerly move them aside with a pen to keep from contaminating anything with my fingerprints. Beneath one, I find what I’m looking for—an empty syringe.
“Got something here,” I say.
Tracey looks up. His eyes are shiny, and I suspect tears are a blink away, despite his claim at detachment. He clears his throat and stands.
“What?” he asks.
“An empty syringe.”
With a frown, he joins me. Our hips touch in the close quarters.
He stares at the needle as if it’s a poisonous snake. Returning to Crompton’s body, he rolls up the corpse’s shirtsleeves.
