Mind Games (6 page)

“Wesley’s replacing Rick,” Sheriff Adams said, bringing me back to reality.

Repressing a groan, I took a fresh look at the newcomer to the office. The sheriff had this strange idea about pairing me with a non-believer, a sort of Mulder and Scully match. But, as I tried to explain to the sheriff, Scully wasn’t blind, she was analytical. Rick, on the other hand, wouldn’t believe David McClellan’s death might have had anything to do with werewolves when we found his half-eaten carcass the day after the night of a full moon. At least he’d quit soon after that, because he really would have hated my assertion that David’s death probably had something to do with the dangerous items he sold at his shop. I came to that conclusion after the medical examiner pronounced that David had not died from the animal attack, but had already been dead at the time. With the body in such bad shape, the M.E. hadn’t been able to tell us how he had died.

“Nice to meet you, Wesley,” I said, drawing my hand back. To the sheriff, I said, “Another Scully?”

Wesley blinked in confusion, but the sheriff just smiled. “Wesley isn’t from around here so it is possible that he’ll bring a fresh perspective.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“St. Louis. I was a cop there for five years.”

“Why did you come here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I thought the city was too violent. I wanted fewer murders and a slower pace of life.”

I almost laughed. “You might have come to the wrong place. Come on, I’ll show you around.” I paused at the door. “You giving him Rick’s old station?”

“Yep.”

That meant he’d be working right next to me. Not that it mattered, since I typically spent little time at the station. I’d been on my own since Rick quit, no one particularly eager to team up with me, and now I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful for the help or wary of the intrusion. A new partner meant new quirks. Given the types of cases I typically worked, I needed to know how he would react to the strange and unexpected. Bad backup could be worse than none at all, as Rick had proved during the diner robbery.

“What did you do in St. Louis?” I led him across the small open space where all the deputies had their desks. Mine was in the back corner, furthest from both the sheriff’s office and the reception counter. His was adjacent to mine, with only a few feet between. There weren’t even cubicle walls to give us the illusion of privacy.

“I started in traffic, but they moved me to homicide last year. I thought it would be interesting, and it was, but there was just too much of it. And too many cases we couldn’t solve.”

“We don’t always solve them here, either.” I thought about David McClellan, though I wondered if I was really putting my all into that case.

I didn’t get into David’s case with Wesley right away. Better to work our way up to that. Instead, I showed him the break room, coffee maker, file room, copy machine, and the small jail. We weren’t equipped to handle long-term inmates but there were always a few people there, awaiting trial or sleeping off a hard night of overindulgence.

I also introduced him to the other deputies. After Rick left none of them had rushed to fill the gap, but it wasn’t because they disliked me. We got along pretty well with one another, but everyone knew that if a crime involved anything out of the ordinary, I would be the one to get it.

Around mid-morning our dispatcher, Jane, came by to introduce herself to Wesley. She flung back her long red ponytail and sat on the edge of his desk, her manner typically flirtatious. I considered her a friend, but for some reason her mannerisms bothered me more than usual.

“So, Wesley,” Jane said. “Do you believe in magic?”

“Magic?” He furrowed his brows in obvious confusion. “Like stage magicians or something?”

“No, real magic,” Jane said.

He looked my way as if hoping I would help, but his answer interested me even more than it interested Jane. I’d been working my way up to the question more slowly, but now that Jane had forced the issue, I wanted to hear the answer.

“Do you mean like fortune tellers and ESP?” Wesley asked.

“Oh, you know… witches… vampires… magic.”

Wesley glanced at me. “Does this have anything to do with that Scully remark you made earlier?”

I gave him a careless shrug. “It helps to be open-minded.”

“I’m open-minded,” Wesley said, almost defensively. “But no, I don’t believe in magic. I’ll have to see it to believe it, and even then I’m going to want to rule out scientific explanations first.”

“You should check out our coffee maker,” Jane said, winking at me. The coffee maker had been a gift from my father. “Makes the best coffee you ever had in less than ten seconds flat.”

Wesley looked unimpressed. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I frowned, trying to place where I’d heard that before, but it escaped me.

“Arthur C. Clarke,” Wesley said helpfully.

“I see.” Since I didn’t normally read science fiction, I wasn’t sure why it had even sounded familiar to me. Maybe Evan had mentioned it before; it was the sort of thing he liked to read.

“Hey, Cassie!” Joe called from the reception counter.

I looked up, but before I even had a chance to ask what he needed, I saw the answer for myself. Cormack McClellan, David McClellan’s younger brother, drummed his fingers impatiently on the counter and stared straight at me.

“Speaking of unsolved cases,” I murmured as I rose to my feet and went to face down Cormack.

Cormack looked a lot like his brother around the face, especially the eyes, which gleamed with the same malevolent intensity. But Cormack stood at least half a head shorter than his brother, with a much wider girth. He had been by the sheriff’s department every few days since his brother’s murder, demanding answers when we had none to offer.

“Don’t tell me,” Cormack said before I even greeted him. “No new leads.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“It’s been a month,”

“I know how long it’s been.” I also knew that without any new information, we would never learn anything about David’s death.

He had been found in the woods past town where werewolves were known to run during the full moon. He probably had not been killed there, but rather dumped there by someone who knew about the wolves and had counted on them to help hide any physical evidence. It had worked, since we hadn’t been able to establish a cause of death or produce any useful DNA evidence.

“Maybe if you and your father would give me some more information about David’s enemies?” I suggested. We’d had this discussion before and I had little hope that it would go any further this time than it had before. Cormack knew things that might help lead me to the killer, but he refused to talk about them.

“You know we don’t reveal family secrets,” Cormack said.

“Then what, precisely, do you expect me to do?” I tried to keep my voice flat and emotionless, but I’m sure my irritation showed.

Cormack flung something onto the reception counter. It only took me a moment to recognize one of the pamphlets from Gateway Christian Church. On the cover, in big bold letters, were the words: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Exodus 22:18”

“I’ve seen these before.” The church had been giving out similar literature for as long as I could remember.

“Open it,” Cormack said.

Slowly, I opened the shiny red pamphlet, framed in fire, to the familiar text within. It warned against sorcery and encouraged people to fight the evil within our community. Since I’d read it before, none of that caught my attention. But thick, black, handwritten words immediately drew my gaze: “Repent by the next full moon or die.”

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“I found it in the store when I was cleaning out some personal papers.” Cormack pointed at the pamphlet. “David was killed at the full moon, just like it said.”

Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried to look at the new evidence in a logical, measured way. We didn’t know anything about the pamphlet except that Cormack had found it with David’s personal papers. For all I knew it had been there for years, in which case the timing of the attack at the full moon might have been a coincidence. A lot of magic culminated around the full moon – blood rites, werewolf transformations, and any number of spells.

But it was a lead, and if there was even the slightest possibility that it might mean something then I had an obligation to follow it. The church changed the format of the hated pamphlets from time to time, which might help me narrow down the timing of the threat.

“I need an evidence bag,” I called over my shoulder. A minute later someone thrust one into my hand and I carefully placed the pamphlet inside. After so many people had handled it there wasn’t much chance of finding fingerprint evidence, but a handwriting match wasn’t out of the question. Either way, I had every intention of doing this by the book to make sure the only lead in this case remained intact.

“I’ll follow up on this.”

“Good.” Cormack relaxed, slightly. “The pastor of that church has had it out for us for a long time.”

I frowned, remembering something from my initial investigation of the case. “Isn’t he your cousin?”

Cormack scowled. “He’s no relation of mine. If he killed my brother…” He let the implications hang.

“In the unlikely event that he did kill your brother, he’ll go to jail.”

“What if someone else in his church did it? Would he go free then?”

“Of course.”

“What’s the difference if it was him or one of the parishioners he goaded into it?” He walked away before I had a chance to respond.

W
HEN I WAS SIXTEEN, I VISITED
the Gateway Christian Church of Eagle Rock with Angie. I had always suspected that her friendship with me had been something of a teenage rebellion, but I accepted it. Sheer, morbid curiosity also made me accept her invitation to attend the Wednesday night youth service, led by her father.

I enjoyed the service. They played music for an hour, during which time the young people clapped and danced or, for the slower songs, held their hands in the air as if reaching out to God. The preacher then talked about resisting peer pressure and how to discover our own unique role within God’s greater plan. He made the message interesting and relevant, but then the preacher did something that made me distinctly uncomfortable. He asked that anyone who wanted to give their life to Jesus come forward to receive God’s healing grace. The invitation itself didn’t trouble me nearly as much as the people giving me meaningful looks after he issued it. One even nodded her head at the altar, telling me without words that she thought my soul was in danger and I needed to pray for salvation.

Even the most confident of people might have felt doubt under those circumstances, and I had never felt all that confident. I had an ill-defined role within my family and the greater magical community. I questioned my value and my ability to affect change in the world, but for all that, I had never considered myself a bad person. Besides, I’d always thought of religion as an inherently personal thing, something to affirm in the privacy of one’s own heart rather than in front of a hundred witnesses.

I didn’t go to the altar. But I felt the stares.

Afterward, a group of girls, most of whom I knew from school but with whom I had rarely spoken, closed in around me. They practically cut off my supply of oxygen.

“Are you saved?” one of them asked.

“Um…” I honestly had no idea what she meant at the time. “I don’t think I’m in danger.”

She gave me a half-exasperated smile. “I mean have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior?”

“Oh.” This conversation was getting a little too personal and I desperately wanted to find an escape. My family had never been to church, largely because they blatantly practiced sorcery, but we believed in God. It wasn’t a traditional belief and as far as I know, we’ve never followed any particular religious tradition; we just borrowed a bit from everyone and made it our own. We tended toward the natural, earth-centric beliefs. Pagan, some called it, though I never found the term to be at all descriptive. My parents had always encouraged me to discover my own personal truths, which was one of the reasons I had agreed to go with Angie. I was curious.

“Where do you go to church?” another girl asked. I didn’t know her, but later discovered her name was Riley, and she was home-schooled.

“I don’t.”

There was an exchange of meaningful glances, then another girl jumped in. “Her father is Edward Scot.”

Riley gasped. “Are you a witch?”

“Um…” I didn’t know how to answer since at the time, I liked to give the impression that I practiced witchcraft the same as the rest of my family. On days when I was being honest with myself, I knew I did this to keep people from knowing my shame and to cover up personal insecurities. To date I had never lied about it, though; I honestly couldn’t remember anyone asking so bluntly. Usually, my name inspired enough fear that people remained circumspect.

“She gave Jeff Conway painful boils,” another one said.

I could work with that. “He deserved it.”

There was a collective gasp, but it didn’t make me feel at all powerful. Somehow, this group managed to make me feel bad about my heart’s desire – to be able to practice real magic.