Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel Page 12

  She pushed away from the desk, crossing her arms over her chest. “Your magical failings are something you can look into on your own dime. I was a fool to go against my beliefs, but I was out of options, and I suppose, you did get me information.”

  Gee, now isn’t that a compliment.

  I worked hard to keep my smile in place. “Don’t you want to know where he was for the three days he was missing?”

  The stern set of her crossed arms loosened, but didn’t drop. She looked away. “Of course. But you said the shade couldn’t tell you. Did he”—her voice caught—“could he even tell you why?”

  “No. And despite the fact he was alone on that roof, there is still some possibility he didn’t intend to jump.”

  She went still, then, as if in slow motion, her head turned. Tear-reddened eyes, a little too wide, locked on me. “You’re talking about magic.”

  “I haven’t dismissed the possibility.”

  Her hands locked into fists, and her lips quivered as if she were caught between screaming and crying. But she did neither. Instead, when she spoke again, it was in a hard, low voice, so quiet it was barely above a whisper. “That explains it. He didn’t leave me.” Her head snapped up. “Then he was murdered.”

  I took a deep breath. Let it out. “Like I said, I haven’t dismissed the possibility. But, if there had been overt magical evidence, the police would already be investigating. Magic has limitations, and forcing someone to commit suicide is out of the scope of witchcraft.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Then it must have been a fae.”

  “I’m not drawing any conclusions until I have all the facts,” I said, working hard to keep my face empty. Right now, she’d grab on to any doubt she spotted. “Mrs. Kingly, do you have a photo of your husband. Something recent.”

  The question threw her off balance, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. Her anger didn’t waver, but confusion tightened her features. Confusion and distrust. Her eyes narrowed and she searched my face as if she were studying a trap she knew would spring if she didn’t disarm it. “Why?”

  “I have a theory,” I said, and when her expression didn’t change, I asked. “Was your husband ill?”

  “Ill? Heavens no. James rarely even caught a cold.”

  Which was what his ghost had said as well. “And how much would you say your husband weighed on the day he disappeared?”

  Her glistening but stony eyes flew wide. “That is an inappropriate question.”

  I waited, but when it became clear she wasn’t going to answer I said, “On the day he jumped from the Motel Styx he weighed only a little over a hundred pounds.”

  “That…” Mrs. Kingly shook her head and dug her phone out of her purse. “No, that can’t be. This is my James.” She opened a photo app on her phone before passing it across the table.

  I picked up the phone and studied the picture. I knew what James Kingly looked like, of course, as his ghost had been in my office for the last hour, but ghosts were almost always idealized projections of a person’s self-image. The ghost James was neither fat nor thin, but an average, healthy looking balance. He also had a full head of hair. The James in the picture was beginning to bald, and while he wasn’t overweight exactly, he had plenty of padding—and not from muscle. Neither image fit the disease-wasted man who’d jumped from the top of the Motel Styx.

  “When was this photo taken?” I asked, passing the phone back to her.

  “I took it a week before he…” She stopped, her eyes misting, and she gazed down at the photo, a small, broken smile touching her lips. “We wanted to see the fall colors in the Botanical Garden. That’s where it was taken. It was a wonderful day.” She pulled more toilet paper from the rapidly dwindling roll.

  One week. He had to have lost the weight in the days he was missing. And nothing natural could make a man drop seventy pounds in three days.

  “Mrs. Kingly, I want to continue investigating your husband’s case. The police may have dismissed the case as suicide, but I think there are too many questions to be satisfied with that answer.”

  “And why should I hire a witch instead of a reputable investigator?”

  I ignored the implication that the two were mutually exclusive. “You should hire me because if magic is involved—and at this point, I’m inclined to believe it is—you’ll need someone not only familiar with magic, but able to detect spells. You won’t find another investigator in Nekros with as high a sensitivity to magic. Another PI might use charms to detect magic, but charms can be unreliable and they can’t determine what the magic does. I can.” I leaned forward, clasping my hands on the table. “I am capable of following this case wherever it leads, magical or mundane.”

  “How do I know you wouldn’t cover for a fellow witch?”

  “Would you cover for a murderer simply because he couldn’t perform magic?” I asked, and she sniffed, but I wasn’t expecting an answer. “Can you e-mail me that photo, so I can show it to people as I track his movements over the missing days?” As an afterthought I added. “And a personal item, something he used a lot or carried with him, would be good.” I couldn’t do a thing with it, but Rianna might be able to concoct a spell that would help.

  Mrs. Kingly’s lips flattened as the edges of her mouth tugged downward. “I’m not agreeing to anything yet, but answer me one question. And really answer this time.” Her eyes fixed on me, hard enough to pin me to the chair. “Do you think my husband was murdered?”

  I thought of the photo of a healthy man with round, smiling cheeks, of the emaciated man who’d thrown himself from a roof, of the shade with absolutely no memory of the days prior to his death. Then I lifted my gaze to the ghost who looked as eager to hear my answer as his wife because he honestly didn’t know what happened.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Mrs. Kingly nodded. “Then get me a contract. You’re hired.”

  Once the Kinglys left I considered my next step. I had two obvious starting points: head to Delaney’s, the bar where James’s last memory ended, or look into the suicide case he’d witnessed. I glanced over the notes I’d taken from the ghost’s account of the suicide. Besides the timing, and the fact both suicides had been public, one major detail struck me. James had described the man as being just skin and bones. Which was exactly what James looked like before he threw himself off a building to crash onto a populated street.

  I chewed at the end of my pen, glancing over everything I’d written. It was still midmorning, so I doubted the bar would be open. That left tracking down the crispy corpse. There had to be some connection between James’s vagrant and what had happened to James himself. I just didn’t know why. Or how. James was the last one in contact with the man before he killed himself. Had a spell spread to him like a virus? Stranger things had happened. I’d once contracted a soul sucking spell from contact with an infected shade.

  I was still staring at my screen when Rianna walked into the room.

  “So does Tongues for the Dead have our first case of real investigative work?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, but it’s kind of ironic. I’m looking at where to start my investigation, and I’m leaning toward a conversation with a shade.”

  “I thought you already raised the Kingly shade and didn’t get anything out of him.”

  “And that’s what’s so significant.” Between last night’s fiasco at dinner and the fact the Kinglys had been waiting for me when I arrived this morning, I hadn’t had an opportunity to fill Rianna in on more than the most basic details of the case. It was past time to update her. After all, she was the mystery nut, and this puzzle was right up her alley.

  “You’re right, the earlier suicide is definitely worth checking out,” she said after I’d brought her up to speed. She’d perched on the edge of my desk, and despite the fact we were talking about not one, but two horrific deaths, she was grinning, her eyes distant as if she were visualizing different scenarios. “And a spell spreading like a virus is an interesting idea, though
it still circles back to one major problem.”

  “How or if it forced the men to kill themselves,” I said, knowing exactly what she was thinking. It was the same stumbling block I’d been running into since I took the case.

  No magic, witch or fae, could overcome self-preservation. Not directly at least. Falin had mentioned spells and abilities that amplified emotion. A spell couldn’t compel someone to jump off a building or douse themselves in gasoline, but maybe it could exaggerate situations until suicide appeared the only way out? That would sidestep the willpower dilemma if the victim chose death, even if a spell was why they felt the need to die.

  But then why doesn’t the shade remember?

  The theory didn’t explain the missing memories, the weight loss, or the chunk sucked out of the ghost. Those had to be explained by a spell, didn’t they? And yet, it couldn’t be a spell. But if it was, the suicide James had witnessed had to be when he’d picked up the spell.

  I pushed away from my desk, and Rianna jumped, startled by my sudden movement. That didn’t last long. Her gaze swept over my face, curiosity radiating around her.

  “You thought of something?” she asked, sliding to her feet.

  “More like made a decision,” I said. I needed to talk to that earlier suicide victim. To find out if his experience correlated to Kingly’s.

  But first, I had to figure out Mr. Crispy’s name.

  Chapter 13

  Tamara’s cell went straight to voice mail, so I called the ME’s office, but reached an intern who informed me that Tamara was in the middle of an autopsy. I didn’t want to get Tamara in trouble, so I left just my name and a message for her to call me ASAP.

  While I waited, I pulled up the Nekros Times online archives. I hoped I’d luck out and find something about Kingly’s overcooked mystery man. I knew the date the event had occurred, so I queued the articles from the following day’s paper. The article described the event as “tragic” and “deeply saddening” but was only a couple paragraphs long. Kingly had told me more than the paper’s account of events. And worse yet, the man was listed only as “an as yet unidentified male.” That wouldn’t help me find his family or his gravesite. I searched for follow-up articles, but found none.

  The Times having failed me, I pulled up a search engine. It took a good fifteen minutes of playing with keywords before I found an article on a news blog. It was much more detailed—and grislier—than the article in the Nekros Times, but it still didn’t list the man’s name. I checked out the comments, and was disturbed by how many people thought becoming a human torch would be an awesome way to go. More than once commenters asked if he was testing a charm in an experiment that went terribly wrong. Answers went both ways, which tended to happen on the ’net where anyone could claim to be an expert. One commenter linked to a cell phone recording of the event. Okay, my opinion of society just went down a notch. At the same time, there could be something in the video that could help in my investigation. If Kingly’s crispy horror is directly involved.

  I bookmarked the location without watching it.

  I’d found three more equally unhelpful news posts on the suicide by the time my phone rang. Tamara sounded tired when I answered, her voice rough and throaty.

  “You okay?” I asked. “You sound sick.”

  She huffed a laugh. “In a manner speaking, so if you’re calling to invite me to lunch, I’ll pass.”

  Morning sickness.

  Her chair squeaked and I imagined her leaning back and propping her legs up after hours of standing over an autopsy table.

  “So what’s up, Alex?”

  “I’m looking for the name of a suicide that probably passed through your cold room a little under two weeks ago.”

  Tamara groaned. “Another suicide? What are you advertising these days?”

  “Don’t worry. I just need a name this time.”

  I described the manner in which the man had died. As I spoke, the other end of the line went eerily silent.

  “Tam, you still there?”

  “Who hired you to look into that case, Alex?” I could hear her frown through the phone. It wasn’t the response I’d expected.

  “No one, directly. It came up in the course of the Kingly case. Why?”

  “He’s a John Doe. Not that there was much left to identify him by. His hands were destroyed so no prints, and no one would ever be able to identify what was left of his face.”

  Nearly two weeks as a John Doe?

  “He’s been cremated already, hasn’t he?” A suicide victim who had appeared homeless before lighting himself up? Yeah, the city wasn’t going to hold on to that corpse for long. And while I was damn good at grave magic, no one could pull a shade from cremated remains—the extreme heat obliterated everything.

  Well, there goes that lead.

  “Actually, that case got to me. He’s still in my cold room.” Tamara’s chair squeaked again and she made a small “mmph” sound as she stood. “Since no family or friends have come forward, how would you like to officially identify our crispy friend?”

  And just like that, the red tape was cut and I had legal access to the shade. Now to hope he held the key to this mystery.

  “Here he is,” Tamara said, pushing the gurney out of the cold room.

  I could sense the preservative charm on the corpse, and the charms in the morgue that moderated the smell were functioning, but as the gurney approached, the scent of burnt flesh wafted over me.

  “This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” I asked as I drew my circle.

  “I’ve worked on worse, but yeah, he’s pretty bad.” She looked vaguely green, but I’d seen Tamara examine a corpse’s innards without so much as a crinkle of her nose. She looked at the body clinically, not seeing a person. I guessed that her current pallor and the fact her face was all tight lines had nothing to do with the man under the sheet.

  “Why haven’t you made a charm, yet?” I asked.

  Tamara frowned, cocking her head to the side and giving me a puzzled look.

  Right, I’d totally skipped the segue. “For the morning sickness, I mean. Why not make a charm to take care of it?”

  “Oh.” She looked away. “If I make a charm, anyone the least bit sensitive will pick up on it. Including my mom and sister who are flying in this weekend. Theoretically, Ethan and I were the only two who were supposed to know, but I suppose you’ve told Holly by now.”

  “That’s not my place.” After all, we were all keeping secrets these days.

  If I hadn’t been looking right at her, I’d have missed the fact her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. She really is worried about people knowing.

  “You ready for me to turn the recorder on?” she asked, changing the subject. “I want to know who our John Doe is.”

  “Yeah, go ahead.” I looked down at the shape under the sheet. “But first, why this one?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said this case got to you. Why?”

  She stepped over my still inert circle, and joined me beside the gurney. “You think you can look at him in the flesh?”

  I cringed back. “Can’t you just tell me?”

  “No, this is something you have to see.” She folded back the sheet exposing no more than a foot and a half of the body beneath.

  I knew it was a body only because my innate ability to sense the dead told me as much, but my eyes certainly didn’t agree. My brain rejected the blackened mess mixed with areas of dark red and thick, puss-colored blotches as ever having been a living person.

  “You’re not going to be sick are you?” Tamara asked. I swallowed the taste of bitter bile and shook my head. She nodded in approval. “Good, then come closer and look at this.”

  I stepped up to the side of the gurney again, staring at the thing she’d exposed. I’d expected a charred skeleton when I heard how he’d died, but there was still a lot of flesh left. I stared, not making sense of what I was seeing until I noticed the two translucent splotches almost evenly pl
aced in the front.

  His eyes. It was a head.

  I’d stopped breathing at some point, which I didn’t realize until my body forced me to gasp in air—air that tasted of char and dead flesh. My stomach twisted, and for a moment I thought I’d lied to Tamara and I would, in fact, be revisited by the half pot of coffee I’d called breakfast. I squeezed my eyes closed. You can do this, Alex. Calm down. Slow, shallow breaths.

  I could feel Tamara watching me, but thankfully, she said nothing about my reaction. I might need dead bodies, but I most definitely didn’t like them.

  Opening my eyes again, I made myself look at the thing on the gurney. The ear closest to me was gone, and I could only barely make out a blackened lump that had once been a nose between cheeks that had split open, exposing that yellowed, pustules substance.

  “What am I supposed to—” I lost the question as my gaze moved to where the lips had shriveled and drawn back, exposing a mouth full of pointed teeth. They looked like something that belonged in a shark’s mouth, not a man’s.

  “Damn,” I whispered the word, more to myself than anyone. Tamara nodded her agreement, but I couldn’t look away from those teeth. Nothing human had teeth like that. “Is he fae?”

  “No, I had an RMC test run. Not only is he a human; he was most likely a null.”

  The Relative Magic Compatibility test, or RMC, was still considered fringe science by most. The results weren’t admissible in any court, but they were fast, easy, and inexpensive. With a DNA sample, a tech created a slide and placed it in the RMC reader. The machine stored a minor charge of Aetheric energy, which it attempted to infuse into the sample. Then it measured the reaction to that energy on a cellular level and created a pretty little chart.

  Norms, as in the two-thirds of the population who were nonmagical humans, created low level readings that looked a lot like a rolling wave well below the first marker. Nulls, the humans who not only lacked any magical aptitude, but often had at least partial immunity to magic, registered on the chart as a flatline. Witches produced charts filled with large mountains and valleys. The more powerful the witch, the higher the spikes. But regardless of what the Humans First Party preached, norms, nulls, and witches were all human, the difference being that some could channel magic and some couldn’t. Fae, on the other hand, weren’t human. Placing a fae sample into the RMC reader produced no graph. Instead it spit out a single, vertical line in the center of the chart.