Precinct 13 (10 page)

Boyd, meanwhile, looked disappointed.

More and more curious. Was there a contingent in the magical community that wanted to be more out in the open?

When no one else had a comment, I continued my tale. This time I stopped myself. “Why would he take his liver? I had all sorts of bits of him scattered all over the room, ready to be sent to the lab for more analysis. He left all that.”

“What’s the liver’s function in the human body?” Stone wanted to know.

“It does a lot, actually. It makes bile, which is used to help digest food. It processes cholesterol and does a number of detoxification functions—”

“Detox? So maybe he took it to hide the evidence of something,” Jack suggested.

“I was looking for poison,” I said. “The police report”—my eyes went to Boyd: Was that where I’d heard his name before?—“said they suspected suicide by rat poisoning.”

“What?” Jones asked, sounding deeply surprised by this.

I looked at Boyd, but he kept his eyes studiously fixed on something on his laptop screen.

Maybe I was mistaken about the name on the report? “Uh, yeah,” I continued. I looked at Jones next. “Weren’t you there? I mean, you brought the body in.”

“Not really,” Jones said. “The place had too-powerful anti-natural wards. We intercepted the body after our guy inside—” He paused as if searching for a name. I gave Boyd a hard look, but he refused to make eye contact. Instead, Jones looked to Stone. “Is it Peterson?”

Next to me Stone shrugged. “One of those guys.”

O-kay.

“So, anyway,” I continued. “I took a biopsy to send to the lab. If there’s something out of the ordinary in their workup, we’ll see it.” For a second, I forgot just who I was talking to. All the faces around the table were highly skeptical. “Okay, so the report will only show the sorts of chemicals they typically look for. I don’t know how to ask them to test for the elixir of resurrection.”

“I doubt he has
that
,” Devon said. He was slouched back in his chair, doodling on a yellow legal pad. “I’m pretty sure it’s a myth, anyway.”

“What’s a myth?” Jones asked.

Devon set his pen down and seemed a bit surprised to find all of us watching him expectantly. His jaw set and his eyes narrowed. He crossed his arms in front of his chest.

“Don’t get like that,” Jones said. “Just tell us what you know.”

“It has nothing to do with this case, I’m sure of it,” he said.

“I’d like all the facts,” Jones insisted.

I couldn’t be sure of it, but I felt something pass between them as they stared each other down. Eventually, Devon flinched almost imperceptibly and broke eye contact. “It’s stupid,” he said, sullenly. “There’s just this rumor in my community about someone who used alchemy to transform. I don’t think it’s possible.”

I happened to catch Boyd’s eye across the table. “Transform?” I mouthed.

“Into a vampire,” he whispered behind his cupped hand.

Devon gave us a sharp look.

“ ‘Bile’
is
a term used in alchemy, now that I think of it,” Jack noted. “There’s all that ‘black bile’ and ‘yellow bile’ stuff, isn’t there?”

Officer Jones, who had been scribbling notes like crazy, turned to the table. “You’re suggesting that all this”—he gestured at the grave-robbing images—“was to get the ingredients for the philosopher’s stone?”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “People have done pretty insane things to get eternal life.”

Boyd coughed like he’d swallowed something suddenly.

Devon looked insulted. “It’s not possible to get the dark gift through better fucking chemistry,” he said. “This is a dead end.”

I hated to be the one to point it out. “He did walk out of my morgue.”

Sarah Jane crowed her pleasure as the others joined in poking Devon with “She’s got you there,” and congratulating me with, “Excellent point.”

“Perhaps, if he is a vampire, he’s gone somewhere to regenerate,” Officer Jones said once the room had calmed down a little. I tried to imagine how long it would take to recover from a nearly completed autopsy. There was a lot
that needed to be regrown. Jones continued. “What we need to focus on next is finding this man. Let’s break into our usual teams and see what we can find out.”

That seemed to be “meeting adjourned.” I took my phone and tucked it back into my pocket, wondering what I should do with myself.

I was just about to take a donut from the box and think about heading back to the morgue when Stone stood over me.

“You’re with us,” Officer Jones said, coming up beside her. “It would be good for you to see the usual suspects.”

It was my first time in a police car without handcuffs. I still felt a bit like a criminal since Devon slouched in the seat beside me, looking particularly sullen and trapped.

Our first stop, thankfully, was to drive through the Starbucks.

I tend to judge people by the coffee they drink. Stone got the house blend, black. Plain coffee for a plain Jane: That suited what I’d seen of her personality so far. Devon got a double-shot energy drink, which grossed me out, but didn’t seem out of character in the least. Jones, on the other hand, got a skinny, white-chocolate peppermint mocha, surprising me utterly. Admittedly, I considered Starbucks fairly awful as chain coffee went, and, in my opinion, the only way to drink it was with tons of added sugar and milk. Still, peppermint—that was pretty fluffy for a dude. I decided there was more to Jones than met the eye.

I got a regular latte, which probably made me seem a little mundane. It was a feint. The truth is that, given the right circumstances, I could be downright pretentious about my coffee. In Chicago, Valentine and I preferred our local,
independently owned coffee shop, which was the sort of place where the baristas routinely won the Midwest Regional Championship. I didn’t want these guys to know that about me yet, however. Besides, it was hard to be a coffee snob in Pierre, where my choices were so limited.

Stone had to get out and open our door to pass us our drinks. Once she strapped herself back in, we headed down the street. Jones seemed to be in cruise mode. He drove slowly with one hand on the wheel and the other taking sips of his froufrou drink. Occasionally a pedestrian would give that small-town nod, and he’d reply with the fingers-off-the-wheel salute.

Next to me, Devon chugged his disgusting energy drink.

“Late night?” I asked, and then instantly felt stupid. The guy was supposed to be some kind of vampire after all.

He grimaced as he sucked the last drop from the bottle. “It’s my time of the month.”

“Yeah, Devon gets really sensitive about a week before the full moon,” Jones said in a very ha-ha tone from the front seat. Stone hit him on the arm. He nearly spilled his peppermint mocha. “What was that for?”

“Fifty-one percent of the human race gets a little sensitive once a month, often in tune with the phases of the moon. It’s not a joke.”

“I guess not.” Jones spared his partner a meaningful look, but then returned his attention to the road. He seemed just on the verge of muttering something about females under his breath, but he clamped his mouth shut.

Devon tucked the empty bottle under the seat casually. When he caught me watching him, he put a finger to his lips and mouthed, “Payback.”

I wasn’t sure if Jones was such a neat freak that finding
litter in his squad car would piss him off sufficiently, or if Devon hoped some criminal would find the container and use it to bludgeon Jones. Considering the empty was about three inches high and plastic, I didn’t think it would do much harm. I said nothing.

We continued our slow meander around Pierre’s downtown. Just when I wondered whether we were going to spend the rest of the day aimlessly driving, Jones turned the wheel sharply. “There she is,” he said.

Devon slid into me as we rounded the corner and pulled up to the curb. With some luck, I managed not to dump my latte on his head. I heard the front door slam as Jones jumped out of the car. I could see him setting a brisk pace, as if hurrying to catch up to someone.

Stone rescued Devon and me from the locked backseat. After the warm stuffiness of the cramped squad car, the crisp air felt good on my cheeks. My breath misted as I arched my back in a stretch.

We were in an industrial part of town. Unadorned business incubators sat in long rows, surrounded by parking lots. A railroad track split the block. Just beyond the intersection, a train car, spattered with bright graffiti, sat abandoned and desolate.

Near a large Dumpster, I saw Jones talking to a woman in a dirty parka with wild gray hair. I thought I recognized her as the homeless woman on the park bench near the capitol from earlier this morning. She had the same duct tape–patched parka and frizzy, matted hair at any rate. “Who’s that?” I asked Stone.

“Nana Spider,” Stone said. “She’s a
civitas veneficus
.”

“What’s a
civitas veneficus
?” I asked.

“Anyone who uses city magic,” she said. “Most
civitas
veneficum
are soothsayers. They use various methods to foresee the future or read the signs. They also tend to be hermits, choosing to live in the urban wild.”

“In other words, homeless,” Devon piped up from where he leaned against the hood of the car.

“By choice,” Stone insisted, quietly.

He arched his eyebrow as if he begged to differ, but he continued, “It’s also the only use of power that’s been officially designated neutral—neither natural nor unnatural.”

Officially? I wondered who decided that sort of thing, the “Ministry of Magic”? I felt far too silly to ask that, however. I looked around at the concrete. There wasn’t a tree in sight. A piece of litter, a torn plastic shopping bag, got caught in an updraft and spiraled lazily into the air.

“You see,” Devon said, his eyes following the bag’s strange, slow-motion dance. “The bag is plastic, the essence of something unnatural, fake. But it’s the wind that moves it, plays with it.”

The bag dropped suddenly to the ground when the breeze shifted. There was something eerie about it, that was certain. But was it magic? Jack had told me that I’d been seeing magic my whole life, but had been told not to talk about it. In effect, I’d been trained not to see, not to believe.

The bag skittered along the ground. Like some kind of strange, urban animal, it scooted behind the corner of the building, out of sight.

I decided there was definitely something creepy and weird about all this. I would keep an open mind.

The three of us had been hanging back, giving Jones and Nana room to talk. All at once, Jones turned in our direction and beckoned us closer. “Nana’s going to read the entrails.”

We gathered around the Dumpster expectantly. Nana cut a striking figure in her puffy down coat. Her skinny legs stuck out beneath the filthy gray ball like the stick on cotton candy. She wore clingy, black leggings that accented her knobby knees, and disappeared into mismatched boots: one cowboy-style, the other a fake fur–covered Ugg.

I held the lid of my latte close to my nose to ward off the rather ripe combination of the garbage and Nana. We stood in a loose circle, with the two uniformed cops on either side of the old woman.

Devon, who stood between Stone and me, shoved his hands in his pants pockets. It was the first time I noticed that he was the only one of us without a coat. He only had on his college sweatshirt. I shivered on his behalf and took a warming sip of my drink.

Nana seemed to have commandeered Jones’s peppermint mocha, as she was taking large gulps of it as she crouched over her army pack. She was digging through it, looking for something. All the while she was muttering to herself. I only caught the odd word: “maleficium,” “water lily,” and “highway patrol.”

Finally, she pulled out a single tennis shoe. After downing the last of the coffee, she handed the cup back to Jones. He looked at it for a second, as though disappointed to have sacrificed all of it, and then tossed it over his shoulder into the Dumpster.

Nana smoothed a matted lock away from her face and held the shoe out before us with great reverence. It was a large, white running shoe, looked like it might be a man’s by the size of it. It looked huge in her thin, bony fingers. It was a Nike; I recognized the black swoosh.

Nana’s body started to sway, though somehow she kept
the shoe held out in front of her, perfectly still. The movement was mesmerizing, and I found myself moving unconsciously to the same rhythm. She began to speak. Instead of a spooky, echoing voice, she croaked: “Okay, Great Powers, so where’d the guy go, huh?”

I, for one, was disappointed at the lack of rhyming.

She threw the shoe into the middle of our circle. It hit the asphalt with an unceremonious
thunk.
Everyone’s eyes were wide, even Devon’s, as we waited for something to happen.

The shoe lay there.

No one said anything for the longest time. The wind hissed around the edges of the building and through the empty parking lot. I started to wonder if I’d missed something. I glanced around the circle. Everyone waited.

Then, apparently responding to some silent cue, Nana shuffled over to look down at the shoe. She circled this way, then that. She bent closely and seemed to study the laces, in particular.

From the squat, she squinted up at Jones and scratched her chin with long, ragged fingernails. “The signs aren’t clear,” she said. “All I see is that he was close to me this morning.”

I accidentally inhaled some latte in my surprise. “It’s true,” I said excitedly, around hacking the coffee. “I found the toe tag near the capitol. Nana was there on a bench, only I didn’t know it was her. I almost went to ask her if she’d seen anyone, but I thought she didn’t want to be disturbed.”

Nana’s pale green-tinged eyes turned to inspect me. They were deep set, but sharp. “Yes, this morning,” she agreed. “I was communing with the ghosts.” She frowned to herself and dug in her ear. “But to have missed the presence of not one, but two magicals? I must be losing my touch.”

Jones cleared his throat. “What about the shoe?”

“I need more than it can give me. Time for the big guns.” Nana pulled a fast-food ketchup packet from her coat pocket. She threw it on the ground. In a flash, she lifted her foot and stomped on it. Ketchup spattered explosively.