Fine Blue Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 4) (27 page)

I took a deep breath and rubbed my own neck, which along with my tailbone would be inordinately sore in the morning. My heart, which beat in my chest as if I’d attempted to run a marathon, finally started to slow. Chester’s soft cry hovered at the edge of my hearing, and the encroaching mist, which earlier felt cold, now felt delectable on my sweat-soaked brow.

“Guys,” said Quinto in a soft voice. “Can we, uh…talk about what happened here? It might help me sleep better at night if we did.”

“Save it for the psychiatrist’s office,” I said. “Right now we have an unenviable mess to clean up. But…something tells me we should take care of Bellamy first.”

Believe it or not, nobody disagreed with me.

43

I leaned against a brick wall—the side of an apartment building in the process of being remodeled. The workers refinishing and cleaning it had long since gone home, likely with the light of day still at their backs, but now a new workforce swarmed around it. At least a dozen bluecoats, manning the torches and lanterns they’d set up, shooing errant spectators, guarding the back of the paddy wagon they’d brought with them from the precinct and keeping the horses that drew the thing calm. At least another dozen lent their intermittent presence to the mix as they shuffled back and forth between our current location and the Lowgate Cemetery three blocks to the north, bagging and tagging the bodies of the murdered vagrants—after wrapping them in tight coils of rope.

I took a sip of coffee to warm my gut. Someone had been smart enough to fill my thermos and bring it with them on route from the station. Of course, we’d need about a barrelful to sate the thirst of all the bluecoats who’d come to help, which was why I’d requisitioned the thermos for my own purposes.

Shay stood at my side, staring at the paddy wagon with her arms crossed. She looked cold.

I offered her the thermos. “Coffee?”

She gave me a distracted glance. “You know I don’t drink that.”

“It would warm you up,” I said. “I know it’s not tea, but once you get over the bitterness, it’s not that bad. Heck, it even grows on you after a while.”

“That’s called caffeine addiction, Daggers.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. So long as it’s cheap, readily available, and legal, I’m not sure what the problem is. Besides, the only adverse side effects from it are lack of sleep and increased cognitive ability, and the first one’s never been a problem for me.”

Shay gave me a subdued wave of her hand. “It’s ok. But thanks.”

I heard a crunch of gravel and looked up to find the Captain, clad in a heavy liver-colored trench coat, approaching. As usual, he looked happy enough to dance a jig and break into song.

“Daggers, what the world is this carnival?” he said.

“Not a carnival,” I said with a shake of my finger. “I like to think of it as a mobile command center, where I’m the ring master and all these bluecoats are my faithful employees.”

“You mean your carnies?” said the Captain.

I tipped back the last of my coffee and returned the thermos’s cap to its rightful throne. “Yeah, come to think of it, that was a carnival analogy, wasn’t it?”

“You know, Daggers,” barked the bulldog, “as much as I love large, unscheduled police expenditures that you call in without prior authorization thanks to your immeasurable ability to bluster people into submission, you still haven’t explained what the hell is going on or why we’re standing out in the cold in the middle of the night instead of warm in our beds, or in the worst case scenario, back at the precinct.”

“Well, to be honest, Captain,” I said, “I decided it wasn’t a good idea to bring our captive into close proximity of the station’s morgue.”

The old jarhead narrowed his eyes. “Say what?”

“Our murderer,” I said. “We caught him. He’s a necromancer. Although he doesn’t think of himself as such. He calls himself an ‘agent of divine rebirth.’ It’s…beyond creepy.”

The Captain shifted his granite-like gaze to Steele. “Did he get knocked in the head?”

“Possibly, sir,” said Steele. “It got hairy at times. But he’s not pulling your leg.”

“No,” I said. “Though that did happen to me. Literally. A zombie did it. Bruised my tailbone.” I pointed for emphasis.

“I’m telling you, that word isn’t accurate,” said Shay. “Husk or golem would be more appropriate.”

The Captain blinked and shook his head. “I think you two had better back up. Preferably to a point in the story that doesn’t include any shambling, mindless brain eaters.”

I lifted a finger. “Actually, they don’t eat brains—”

The Captain glared at me and ground his teeth.

“—but I understand what you’re getting at,” I finished. “The point is, we captured the man behind the homeless men’s murders. A pastor by the name of Julian Bellamy. And, unfortunately, the situation was far worse than we realized. It appears he murdered at least eight transients, including the two we found over the past thirty-six hours.”

“So the man’s a serial killer?” asked the Captain.

“No, sir,” said Steele. “Apparently most of the murders—and subsequent resurrections, if you can call them that—were for practice purposes. With the exception of the last couple. He had other plans for them.”

“I’m not feeling any more enlightened than I was thirty seconds ago, detectives,” said the Captain.

“Then bear with me as I give you a little backstory,” I said. “Once upon a time, our murderer, Julian Bellamy, was married to a woman by the name of Tabitha. She shared the same ideals as him, including her belief in their shared religion, that of the Divine Rebirth. It’s a complicated thing focused on reincarnation of souls and trees and whatnot. Don’t ask. But apparently a couple of Tabitha’s relatives died, one after another in close succession, and her faith weakened. What was the point of reincarnation if someone you cared for, or you yourself, came back as a tree or a sea snail? Did you retain any of the memories that made you the person you were? Or were those memories, those experiences, gone forever?

“These were the sorts of questions that eventually made her lose her faith in the Divine Rebirth entirely. She divorced Julian and promptly joined a new congregation, that of the Holy Oblivion, a religion that espouses the concepts of fatality and nothingness after death. There she met a deacon by the name of Cornelius Vo, whom she married.

“But her ex-husband Julian wouldn’t leave her alone. He followed her, harassing her at every opportunity—although he doesn’t see it that way. He was trying to convert her back to his religion, and in the process, he hoped to win back her love. But his efforts didn’t succeed. If anything, they deepened Tabitha’s depression, as did Vo’s own fierce rebuttals of Julian’s creed. She no longer knew what faith to believe in. So she decided to test the true path of the soul after death for herself. Following a violent argument between Bellamy and Vo, Tabitha killed herself by jumping out a window at the Church of the Holy Oblivion.”

“At first,” said Steele, “we thought Tabitha had been murdered, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Elmswood investigated her death a year ago and ruled it a suicide, and after revisiting what we’ve learned since, we haven’t found anything to contradict that. And Bellamy is adamant she committed suicide, for what it’s worth. Once he broke, he seemed perfectly willing to tell us the truth about everything. I don’t know why he’d lie about that.”

“You already interrogated him?” asked the Captain.

I nodded.

“And where is he?” asked the bulldog.

“In the paddy wagon,” said Steele. “Don’t worry. He’s bound and gagged. And he needs to be within a reasonable distance from his, err,
victims
should we say to be able to manipulate them. At least…we think so.”

“Very well,” said the Captain. “Now can we pick up the pace? Why did this man murder all those hobos?”

“I’m getting to that,” I said. “After Tabitha’s death, Julian couldn’t stop thinking about her religious quandary, but he remained as pious as ever. More so, in fact. See, he knew the Divine Rebirth was the one, true religion to be trusted in, mostly because of his unique
talent.
He’d never mentioned it to Tabitha, or even put much effort into it, but he’d seen the
divine rebirth
with his own eyes. Organisms—bugs, mostly—had come back into life in his presence—infused with new souls, or perhaps their original ones. He considered himself a conduit for his religion. He learned and experimented, first on rodents and small animals before moving on to people. So when Steele says his murders of the transients was practice, it was. Practice for the eventual resurrection of his wife—who he couldn’t wait to convince of the veracity of his religion.”

The Captain passed his hand through his thinning hair. “This is crazy. How did Bellamy not recognize his abilities for the black magic they are?”

“He’s pretty far gone in his delusions,” said Steele. “Not only did he plan to resurrect his wife’s year old corpse, but he thought she’d be fine. And I don’t just mean that she’d remember him and forgive him and reconvert to his religion. He thought she’d be, you know…in one piece.”

“As in not a rotten mass of bones and hair,” I added.

“Thanks for the visual imagery, Daggers.” The Captain eyed Steele. “And as our resident expert on all things magical, do you put your stamp of approval on this?”

Shay nodded. “Yes, sir. Bellamy admitted to as much, and necromancy is the only theory that explains the quirks regarding the scenario under which we found the dead homeless man this morning, not to mention how the body of our first victim escaped the morgue and made it to Cornelius Vo’s office—who, by the way, Bellamy also admitted to murdering, through Lanky. He blamed Tabitha’s death in large part on him and his fatalistic religion.”

“Wait a second,” said the Captain.
“We lost a body from the morgue?”

Steele eyed me sideways. “Daggers, didn’t you tell the Captain?”

“Uh…I was going to,” I said. “As soon as I figured out who’d stolen it. Turns out nobody did, unless you consider Bellamy dropping by and forcing it to walk out under its own power a theft. So…case closed.”

The old bulldog’s jaw clenched, and I could tell he wanted to chew me out, but at the same time we’d just solved a murder that had become far more complicated and disturbed than anyone could’ve ever predicted. Instead, he settled for a snort.

“Alright,” he said. “Good work, detectives. I’ll send out runners to alert the bigwigs about this one. We’ll get some serious magical backup to deal with Bellamy. In the mean time, I suggest you head home. It’s late, and you both deserve some sleep…assuming you’re capable of getting any after this fiasco.”

The Captain headed in the direction of the police wagon, and I turned to face Steele. She looked back at me with soulful eyes, her hands stuffed in her pockets for warmth, and I got the distinct impression she was waiting for me to say something, but what? The day had unfolded like a rollercoaster, with surges and dips, twists and turns. My body ached from the encounter with the undead, and my brain felt like jelly, drained by the day’s mystery and Shay’s outbursts and my far too early wakeup call. I wanted to please her. I wanted to say the right thing. So why couldn’t she give me a clue, rather than piercing me with those beautiful, azure doe eyes of hers?

I cleared my throat. “So…hell of a day, huh?”

Shay opened her mouth to respond, then paused before closing it with a slowly exhaled breath. “Um…yeah. See you tomorrow, Daggers.”

She turned and walked away, and all I could do was stare.

That wasn’t how the day was supposed to end, without so much as a ‘Would you mind walking me home, Daggers?’ or a ‘Goodnight, Daggers’ or even a less welcome but still optimistic ‘Why don’t we talk, Daggers?’ It was supposed to end with a laugh or a hug or a drink shared over a small table at a café. I’d even settle for an awkward high-five, but this? A simple ‘See you tomorrow?’ That was nothing. Purgatory. Indecision at the mouth of a stairwell that only went down.

But it didn’t
have
to end that way. I possessed free will, and conversations could be initiated by either member of a pair. All I needed was courage and an awareness of self.

I darted after her, past the mass of bluecoats and around the corner where I’d seen her vanish. There I spotted her, twenty paces ahead of me and disappearing into the fog.

“Shay! Wait!” I called.

She paused and turned, and I closed the gap between us.

“Yes?” she said.

I took a breath to still my nerves. “I’m sorry.”

44

Shay’s eyes narrowed.

“Yes, you heard that right,” I said. “I’m sorry. For being such an asshole.”

“Did Quinto put you up to this?” asked Shay.

“What?
No,” I said, my heart racing. “Look, I’m trying to open up to you here. I’m sorry for being such a curmudgeon sometimes, but it’s ingrained in me. It’s like a splinter that’s stuck underneath the surface of my skin and won’t come out. Sometimes it pokes through and it hurts and it makes me angry and then my flesh swallows it back up again. Yesterday was one of those days where the splinter jabs me, as was much of today. When I saw you and Agent Blue, a dark part of me came out, and it’s a part that’s hard to control. So I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have treated him the way I did. It was wrong and rude and childish, but I just…I don’t know. I felt threatened. I lashed out.”

Shay tilted her head, her brow slightly furrowed. “But Daggers, why would you feel threatened by him?”

“What do you mean, why?” I asked. “Because he’s smart and charming and has commendations plastered across the walls of his office. Because he wears a snappy uniform and his smile could blind birds and cause them to fly into windowpanes. Because he’s an elf and you’re a half-elf.”

“I’m also half human.”

“I know that,” I said. “Look, it’s not rational. I felt threatened because…because I like you, ok?
I like you.
And I don’t want to lose you. I mean, lose what we have. You know.”

Shay tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear and glanced at the ground furtively. “Daggers, I… Look, I like you, too. I told you as much earlier today. But we’re not even a couple.”