Shade Chaser (City of Crows 2)
Page 29
Lovely.
Schultz marches over to the fridge bank and slides her hand across the numbered stickers near the top of each square door. She stops at the chamber labeled 15. Reaching down, she grabs the handle, twists it until the latch clicks, and pulls open the door with an echoing screech of old hinges, revealing the tray inside.
The empty tray. Where a body should be.
The medical examiner stares at the tray, perplexed. “Okay,” she says after a long, uncomfortable silence, “you two want to tell me what’s going on?” She glances over her shoulder, expression mired with palpable fear. “How did you know he wouldn’t be here? In fact, how the hell is he not here? He was here eight hours ago. And yesterday. And the day before that. And every day since I picked him up at Jameson’s the morning after he was murdered.”
Lassiter scratches his chin. “You’re a hundred percent sure about that?”
“Yes!” Schultz cries out, slamming the chamber door shut. “I’ve seen him myself, two dozen times since he was brought in. He was definitely here. Until now.”
“And,” I say, shifting back and forth on my crutches, “the only thing wrong with his body was his slit throat, right? That was the injury that killed him?”
“Ah, yes.” She curls in on herself, suddenly unsure. “Like the report said. Time of death was between two and three AM the day he was discovered at Jameson’s. Single, deep laceration to the throat, caused by a sharp, curved blade. Severed his carotid artery. He bled out. Simple as that.” Her attention flicks from Lassiter to me. “Or was it not? What do you two know that you aren’t telling me?”
Lassiter holds up his finger, asking her to wait a moment. “This doesn’t make sense,” he says to me. “The body in the woods was definitely Slate, right? But that body was far too old to be the one found at Jameson’s, even if it was left outside for a period of time. It’s been too cold lately for outdoor exposure to have accelerated decomp that much. So…what the hell? What’s going on here?”
“That’s what I would like to know too,” Schultz mutters. “What body in the woods?”
My mind reels with the jumble of clues, trying to straighten the details out into a logical series of events. I close my eyes and concentrate, recalling every piece of evidence my team uncovered, and cross-referencing that evidence with every unanswered question.
If Slate’s body was indeed in the morgue until today, then the body we just found in the woods can’t be Slate, even though Slate’s own ghost led us to it. On the other hand, if the body in the morgue wasn’t Slate’s body…
“Holy shit.”
The answer slams into me like a fucking train, and I’ve never felt so stupid in my life.
(But then again, hindsight is a powerful force.)
“What?” Schultz and Lassiter ask in unison.
“We got played,” I reply, a dark laugh crawling up my throat.
Lassiter rolls his shoulders, uneasy. “What do you mean? How? By who?”
I lean against the door, muttering stupid, stupid, stupid to myself until I finally regain enough composure to provide a response that doesn’t make me sound batshit insane. “We got played by the guy who was pretending to be Slate. The guy who you”—I point to Schultz—“hauled here in a body bag and did a preliminary exam on. You never got around to the full autopsy, did you, Doctor?”
“Um…no? We’ve had a big influx of bodies over the past two weeks. Slate’s cause of death was obvious, so I pushed his autopsy back to work on more complicated cases.” She bites her lip. “What guy are you talking about, Kinsey?”
I smack my head against the metal door and laugh even harder. “See, that was the trick. He made it look like he had an obvious cause of death, so you would work on him last, giving his plot more time to unfold before he played his hand.”
Lassiter grasps my shoulder. “Kinsey, are you okay? You’re making it sound like this ‘guy pretending to be Slate’ is still alive.”
I smile bitterly at the detective. “Because he is. He was never dead. Slate died weeks ago, long before the Jameson murders. He was killed, and then had his ghost sealed away in one of his own clocks, to make sure he couldn’t interfere. He was then replaced by this lookalike, who attended the meeting at Jameson’s, killed Halliburton and Martinez, and faked an injury that made it appear like Slate had gotten murdered too.”
I snap my fingers, over and over, louder and louder. And I know I’m scaring my acquaintances, but I can’t help it. My resentment for this abysmal failure is too damn strong. “You see,” I continue, “that’s why Slate’s Lexus was still parked in front of his house. Because he never drove it to Jameson’s that night. He never went to Jameson’s that night. The imposter drove his own vehicle to a parking spot near the bar and grill—and since we had no clue there was an imposter, we didn’t bother looking for his car.”
Sheer terror strips the pride from Schultz’s face. “Are you saying the corpse with the slashed neck I examined several times was actually a living guy?”
“Yes, Doctor. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
She shudders. “I was going to do his autopsy today…”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s why he left when he did. He overheard you talking about it. Otherwise, he would have slipped out after closing time.”
“B-But he was dead.” She sounds lost, confused, uncertain of her own skills. “No pulse. No heartbeat. Cold and stiff and…Was it somehow all a trick?”
“Indeed.” I toss my crutches away, and they clatter to the floor, startling Schultz and Lassiter. “One big fucking trick. That’s all it was. In a case bursting with people armed with the ability to transform themselves into other things, into wolves, into owls, I never once thought about the obvious solution to the murder mystery.” Strength drains from my limbs, and I sink to the floor, suddenly encased in a heavy blanket of fatigue. “My god, it was right there the whole time.” I gesture to chamber 15. “He was right there the whole time.”
Lassiter shrinks back from the fridge bank and half whispers, “Who was there? Who was this imposter, Kinsey?”
One last dry chuckle passes my lips, and I reply, “A shapeshifter. The vampires hired a shapeshifter assassin to infiltrate the summoning alliance and murder the apparent leaders, Martinez and Halliburton. The real leaders, McKinney and Marcus, escaped the vampires’ notice only because they were smart enough to hide their identities behind clueless proxies. Not that it saved them in the end…
“After the successful attack at Jameson’s, the shapeshifter must have stuck around, pretending to be Arthur Slate’s body, so that DSI would discover Slate’s connections to the summoning plot and ultimately blow the lid on the whole operation, leading to discord in both the practitioner and werewolf communities. And once he was sure the seeds of disorder had been thoroughly sown, he climbed out of his body bag, changed his face, probably to mimic one of the morgue employees, and walked right out the fucking door.”
Lassiter and Schultz stare at me in abject horror.
And unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do to comfort them. Or myself.
Because the truth of the matter is evident, and it’s a truth that will haunt me for years:
“The killer got away. He won. We lost. And since we have no idea what he looks like now…
“…we will never find him.”
To Be Continued
IN WRAITH HUNTER
Coming Spring 2017
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