Last Grave (9781101593172) (13 page)

Jill walked into the kitchen, humming lightly to herself. Samantha eyed her warily. “How are you this morning?”

Jill shrugged. “Still a little weirded out and a lot curious. We have a lot more to talk about.”

“Oh, joy. Listen, Lance is coming up here. Remember that we need to keep this between us.”

“I know.”

There was a knock on the door, and before Samantha could stand up, Jill had bounded over to open it.

Lance stepped inside, closed the door, and then swept Jill up in his arms and kissed her while she squealed in delight.

Samantha just sat, staring, in shock.

“Did you miss me?” Lance asked.

“Every minute,” Jill said breathlessly.

“What the hell is going on?” Samantha asked. “I thought you two couldn't stand each other.”

“Shut up,” Lance growled.

Jill just laughed. “I know. It's going to take a bit to get used to.”

Samantha felt like she'd missed something. Jill and Lance barely knew each other. And even though he'd driven her home the day before, the reaction was far too intense even if they had made some sort of connection in those few minutes.

“It's not anywhere near April Fools' Day,” she said.

Jill looked at her like she was crazy. “What on earth are you talking about? You know that Lance and I have been dating for the last couple of months.”

Samantha didn't know any such thing. What was happening to her? The hair color, the car, those could be explained away if she tried hard enough. But this? Impossible. Either someone was messing with her, or she was truly losing it.

“Samantha, what's wrong?” Jill asked.

“I think I've got a headache,” Samantha said. She stood and took her bowl to the sink. She downed some aspirin and prayed that her head would clear soon. She had a sneaking suspicion it was going to be a long day, though. Thanks to the scheduled meeting with Trina, it was going to be an even longer night.

She grabbed her badge and gun from the bedroom. When she returned, she tried to ignore the lovesick look that Jill and Lance were sharing.

“Let's get out of here,” she said.

A minute later, when they were in the car, Lance punched her in the shoulder.

“What was that for?”

“Not cool back there,” he said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“You know I don't like reminding Jill that I didn't like her at first. It's embarrassing, and she gives me crap about it. Don't do that to me.”

“Who are you and what have you done with my partner?” she asked.

“Very funny.”

But Samantha wasn't joking. For the rest of the drive, she stared at Lance out of the corner of her eye. He and Jill had never told her they were together. Lance had pretended to barely know her the other day. What was happening? Lance even seemed different, nicer somehow.

Because he's a man in love,
she realized.
When did that happen?
Has the whole world gone mad?

They parked at the university. As they got out of the car, Samantha looked around. “Who are we here to see?”

“Marcus Rogers. Head librarian and on-again off-again boyfriend to our deceased.”

Once inside the library, an assistant led them to Marcus's office. He was a thin man with graying hair and thick glasses perched on top of his nose. As she shook his hand, Samantha pushed her way into his mind and in one glance saw what she wanted to know. He had no idea what Winona had been mixed up with that got her killed.

Unfortunately, there was no way she could tell Lance that. She needed to find some other way to make use of this trip.

“Did Winona have an office here?” she asked after the introductions were made.

“Ah, no. She did a lot of lecturing here, but was not an employee of the university. She did, however, like to use conference room two here in the library a lot. She'd spend hours on end working in there.”

“Thank you.” She turned and looked at Lance. “I'm going to go take a look around. You got this?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Great.”

She exited the office and quickly found the conference room in question. Fortunately, it was empty. She walked in and closed the door. She stood in the room for a moment, quietly, trying to pick up on any sensations that were overwhelming.

Unfortunately, she couldn't sense the presence of any witches, which meant none had been there—at least, not recently. She ran her hands over the table and sat in every chair. There was nothing she could pick up on, though.

Finally, she left the room and walked out into the stacks. She found a section on local history. Drake had said Winona had found something that verified a story her grandfather had told her. It was possible one of these books held a clue to what Winona was working on. But there were hundreds of books, and it would take dozens of cops days and days to go through them all. And given that she couldn't tell them what to look for or even why she knew they held something important, it would be a useless effort.

I have to know what she found out.
She could feel the desperation that had been building in her since they had found Winona's body. She felt that time was running out somehow. She felt guilty for how she had pushed her way into the librarian's mind a few minutes before, but really, what choice did she have? It wasn't like she could ask everyone they interrogated if they knew why witches would want Winona dead.

She dropped her hands to her side. “I summon the book that can help me,” she whispered. She felt her fingertips begin to tingle with energy. She lifted her arms so that her hands were touching the bookshelves that faced each other. She walked down the aisle, trailing her fingers along the spines of the books in the fourth row. She reached the end of the row and had found nothing. She turned and repeated it, one row higher.

There were better ways to do this, but she didn't have access to any of her tools at the moment. Plus, the last thing she needed was for a book to actually fly into her hand as someone walked by. This way she only risked looking strange.

On her third pass, the fingers on her left hand received a shock of electricity as she touched one of the books. She stopped and grabbed the book.
Santa Cruz Then and Now
. It was old, and when she opened it she realized it was written in the 1940s.

She tucked the book under her arm and headed back toward the office, where Lance would probably be finishing up with Marcus.

She popped in just as Lance was standing to go. He handed Marcus a card, and as she did the same, she remembered that she had to get a replacement cell phone for the one lost to the water. She was about to tell him that she needed to borrow the book, but stopped. If it really held useful information, the fewer people who knew she had it, the better.

She managed to get it out of the building without anyone seeing and without setting off the alarm.

“Any luck in there?” she asked as she slid it underneath her seat in Lance's car.

“No. You?”

“Didn't find anything or anyone interesting,” she fibbed. “But I do need to get a new cell phone.”

“What happened to yours?”

“I lost it.”

“You lost it?”

“Yeah. And if you bring it up again, I'll have a good long talk with Jill tonight about you.”

He swore under his breath, and she turned toward the window so he wouldn't see her smile.

After she got a replacement phone, they followed up on a couple more leads, both of them dead ends as well. They went to grab lunch, and at the diner Samantha excused herself. She called George Wakefield and set up a three o'clock meeting with him.

She had just sat back down at the table when the whole building jolted hard. It lasted less time than it took for her to think about standing up.

“I hate those,” she said between clenched teeth when the aftershock was over. “How much longer are they going to happen?”

Lance shrugged. “Can't be many more left.”

The waiter brought their food, and they ate in silence. Lance refrained from making any jokes or saying something snarky to the waiter, which she counted as a miracle. When the guy brought around slices of fresh apple pie, Lance began to talk.

“Most murders are committed by someone the victim knows.”

“Yes, that's true,” Samantha said, digging into her own piece of pie.

“Family, boyfriend, colleagues, everyone seemed to like the woman.”

“Someone didn't.”

“Yeah, but who? I don't buy that this is random. It's not like she was mugged on the streets or dragged down a dark alley. Whoever killed her had to have followed her into the museum. She still had all her valuables, and there were no signs of sexual assault. That rules out random.”

“But it doesn't necessarily point at family and friends.”

“Unless we've got a serial killer on our hands, I think it does. And I don't know about you, but I haven't seen any other petrified bodies showing up. And I still hate that Jada can't give us a clue what could have caused that.”

“Maybe it was spontaneous.”

He gave her a sideways glance. “Like human combustion? I don't think so. No, someone killed her. We find out who and I'm sure we'll figure out how. Personally, I think it sounds like some kind of science experiment gone wrong.”

“Maybe she owed somebody money,” Samantha said.

“Her financials came back clean. I can't see a motive or a suspect from where I'm sitting. Can you?”

Samantha shook her head. It felt terrible deceiving him, but what else could she do? It had been bad enough telling Jill her secret. She had no intention of adding Lance to that special little club.

“I'm telling you, there's something we're missing.”

She glanced at her phone. She needed to get ready for her meeting with George, but she didn't necessarily want to share that with Lance.

“Well, I know I'll be missing a dentist appointment if I'm not careful. Can you drop me home after this?”

“Seriously, can't you reschedule?” he asked, looking at her incredulously.

“Sure. You look into a magic ball and tell me what day we're not going to be working a case, and I'll reschedule.”

“Fine.”

They finished, and a short while later, he dropped her off.

Samantha walked upstairs and into the apartment.

“How's it going?” she heard Jill ask.

“Okay.”

Samantha stopped in her tracks as Jill walked into the room.

“What are you staring at?” Jill asked.

“Your hair. It's got purple streaks in it.”

“And?” Jill asked. “Your point being?”

“When did you dye it?”

“This morning.”

Samantha sagged against the door in relief. She wasn't going crazy.

“I was starting to get sick of the green streaks, so I figured today to change them to purple. You like?”

And just like that, everything came crashing back around her. Jill was staring at her, waiting for an answer.

“It's better than green,” Samantha forced herself to whisper.

“I'll take the W.”

“W?”

“Yeah, as in Win. Are you okay?”

“Just tired.”

Samantha headed for the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. What happened when people with powers went crazy? Was this what it was like? Did they start seeing things, misremembering things? Had the strain gotten to be too much?

Get a grip. Someone is just messing with you. That's all that's happening here.
But deep down she wasn't so sure that was what was happening. She thought of all the corridors in her mind, all the repressed memories she'd been letting out these last few months. Could the fact that she was regaining lost memories be screwing up other parts of her brain? Was it all too much too fast? She really wished her parents weren't on a cruise. She didn't like the idea of trying to explain this all to her adoptive father, but as a psychologist, he might have some insight.

And just the right set of papers to have me committed if I am cracking up.

She changed her blouse and then headed back out to her car. She tried to shake off the sensations that were assailing her. She felt like she was going crazy, and it was starting to spook her a bit.

Before she realized what she was doing, she found herself dialing Anthony. He was quick to answer, and the warmth in his voice made her blush.

“How can I help you?” he asked after a minute.

“I just need to talk, I guess. I feel like I'm going insane.”

“What's wrong?”

She explained to him in detail how things seemed to keep changing, like Jill's hair color and relationship status.

“It's possible you're just overly stressed, focused on other things,” he suggested.

“Or I'm cracking up.”

He paused. “You know, I knew a Wiccan once who was very sensitive to things around him. He didn't have powers like you, but he once told me that there were times he could swear he was shifting into other realities.”

“Other realities?” Samantha asked, fighting to keep the skepticism from her voice.

“Yeah. It's like for every choice we make, there's a universe where we made the opposite choice.”

“Multiverse theory? I heard about it once.”

“Exactly. Well, this guy I knew swore that from time to time it was almost like something happened and he felt like somehow he'd shifted into one of those other universes. It was as though time had changed on him, and something he remembered clearly had no longer happened in our reality.”

“I've never heard of magic doing anything like that,” Samantha said, still dubious. It seemed more likely that someone had put some kind of curse on her to make her forget or misremember things.

“And just how much do you actually remember about the magic you learned as a kid?” he asked, failing to hide a note of sarcasm.