Something Wicked (2 page)

“The good news is, we found the murder weapon,” he admitted. “The bad news is, Ben Fisher’s fingerprints don’t match.”

“But…that can’t be right. It was him.”

“And he’s got an alibi.”

“No.”

“I can’t tell you anything else,” he insisted, pained. “Just…wait and see.”

So again, I got to stand in that cold, dark room, waiting for the lineup. The same lawyers from the day before were there, plus a new one whose suit probably cost more than my car. The suspects filed into the room, and this time, Ben Fisher was number one. His hair seemed to get curlier the longer he was in lockup. Shadows smudged his dark eyes, and his mouth was set.

“It’s still him,” I insisted. Aunt Maria was right. We shouldn’t have to do this….

Then I saw who filed in as number five, and a chill of recognition raised goose bumps.

What the hell…?

It was the same man.
But this version didn’t have shadows under his eyes. This version had a neater haircut, and he was still clean-shaven. He looked impatient, but he also had an edge of deliberate charm about him that number one did not.

Other than that, they were identical.

“Two of them,” I whispered, feeling sick. “Twins.”

“Ms. Trillo,” said the captain, “we realize that this is difficult, but is there any way you can point out the man who attacked you on Friday night?”

My gaze darted from one man to the other, ignoring the rest. Identical freaking twins.

“Katie?” prompted Ray.

I swallowed unsteadily. “Have them…have them smile,” I whispered. Just in case.

The captain gave the command over the intercom, and the six suspects each attempted a smile. Number one’s eyebrows angled in momentary shock before he reluctantly bared his teeth, clearly repulsed by the very idea. And number 5—

Number five smiled earnestly enough to reveal dimples, right through the glass. Right at me.

I spun away from the window and threw up, right on the floor.

Ray caught my shoulders with his hands. One of the lawyers gave me a handkerchief and the captain sent someone out of the room for water. Eyes watering, I looked back at the lineup, where the forgotten suspects had let their compulsory smiles fade into confusion. All except one.

He was still smiling, like a proud host at a frat party.

“It’s him.” I pointed. “Number five.”

“You can’t be sure,” insisted the most expensive suit. I guess I knew who was whose lawyer. “They’re identical.”

He wasn’t referring to the other four guys in the lineup, either.

“No, they’re not.” I accepted the paper cone of water that someone handed to me. “I remember that snooty haircut. Unless that first guy has brand-new extensions….”

The lawyer made a note, maybe to check suspect number one for hair extensions. “But yesterday you said it was—”

“Are you trying to talk a witness out of her identification?” demanded the suit who’d been there last time; three guesses whose lawyer
he
was. And the fight was on.

“We’re finished, right?” demanded Ray over the bickering, and the captain nodded. We were finished.

“You did good.” Ray put a supportive arm around my shoulders. “He doesn’t have an alibi, his fingerprints match and now you picked him out of a lineup against his own freakin’ twin brother. We’ve got this bastard dead to rights.”

But it wasn’t time to roll the end credits, not just yet. What you’d think would be good news was barely a consolation prize, for one thing. Diana was still dead, no matter what happened to her killer. And for another…

That part stood out for me, more than anything else in those first few days.

“Which one’s which?” I demanded, setting my feet against Ray’s attempt to lead me out to Aunt Maria. Beyond the window, the suspects began to file away.

“The one you ID’d yesterday? That was the real Ben Fisher,” Ray explained tightly. “Turns out the killer is his brother,
Victor
Fisher.”

His words sounded far away as I watched number one—the solemn, haunted Ben Fisher—search the mirrored window one last, tired time before he left the room. He’d been falsely arrested for murder. That, at least, could be reversed. But more than that…

I’d cursed the wrong guy.

N
obody could see Victor Fisher pacing except for Leon, his cellmate. Leon sprawled back on his metal-grill bed, his beefy arms folded and his feet extended. He had nothing else to stare at. Nothing except the peeling paint, the bars, the steel sink and toilet…and the cockroaches.

Fisher and Leon wore the same outfit, Cook County standard, but Fisher’s white D.O.C. T-shirt was pristine, as opposed to the food and bloodstains on Leon’s, and Fisher’s khaki pants were still creased. And clearly he was thinking, his dark gaze constantly skimming the room, constantly searching. Sometimes he muttered snatches of words—“dropped the damned hammer” and “Hekate.” He only stopped when he stumbled from exhaustion. He dragged his hands down his face, only to look around again, spread his arms and scream,
“Fuck!”

The word bounced off the cement walls. Laughter from other cells seemed to echo forever. Other inmates mimicked him, some with cruder versions. They were bored, too.

Leon just rolled his eyes. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Fisher’s dark gaze cut to him, shocked, angry. For a minute, it looked like he wouldn’t deign to answer. Then, maybe recognizing that Leon was his only option, he shook his head—and smiled, as if at a joke. “Do you believe in curses?”

“I
know,
” I admitted, at Diana’s solemn look. I’d always hated her solemn look. “We’re not supposed to curse people. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.”
She widened her eyes to mock my obvious disbelief.
“Victor Fisher would have killed you if you hadn’t stopped him. Hello? I should know.”

My eyes began to heat with more tears. Mere days, and I was already exhausted from crying. “Then why didn’t you stop him? You’re the real witch.”

“Okay, one? He hit me from behind; that’s why I didn’t stop him. And two? You’ve always been better at magic than me. If you hadn’t scared yourself off of it when you were a kid—”

What?
“I was never that into magic.”

She dismissed that with a wave of her hand.
“Whatever. My point is, you did what you had to do. Now it’s all just…damage control.”

“Because curses go in both directions.”

She went solemn.
“It’s more complicated than that, Sis. You called on Hekate. It’s not like you can say, ‘Oops, never mind,’ and take it back.”

“
I never said I’d take it back.” And yeah, I knew that I was embracing the darkness. But Fisher—
Victor
Fisher—had
murdered her.
If anybody deserved cursing…

Diana paused, cocking her head at the distant sound of a man’s voice.
“Ooh. You should catch this.”

I opened my eyes, still swollen from crying, and tried to reorient myself. It’s not like these dreams of my dead sister were making the week easier. They only reminded me of what I’d lost.

Where was I this time? I’d been staying with Aunt Maria’s family since the murder, but this place was new.

For some reason, my mother’s simple chant whispered from my lips. “One, two, three, protected be.”

After years of practicing no more magic than the occasional knock-on-wood, I’d now done two spells in under a week.

It was anyone’s guess if this one actually worked. Still, when I pictured a circle of blue light around me, some of the worry that had chewed at my gut for the last week eased…And that’s what counted, right?

Then I remembered. I was in the spare bedroom of my and Diana’s neighbor, Mrs. Hillcrest. She’d offered to let me and Aunt Maria hang out while the crime-scene cleanup professionals did their magic next door. You have to have a responsible party there to let them in, and for consulting and stuff.

As soon as she saw how exhausted I looked, Mrs. Hillcrest had led me to the back bedroom and commanded me to nap. I hadn’t thought I could and lay down just to be polite. But to judge from the fading winter light filtering through her Swiss-dot curtains, I’d slept through the afternoon.

It was the kind of sunlight you get at the edge of darkness.

Outside, dogs barked. From deeper in the house came the strangely familiar voice Diana had heard, in my dream….

I mean, the voice
I
had heard. I guess.

“…partners for a long time now,” the man’s voice continued. It was a good voice, earnest, with just a rasp of city bluntness. “But I’ve got to draw the line somewhere, Al. ‘No comment.’”

“But surely you want to set things right,” protested…Al? This voice
was
affected, deep and clearly playing to a microphone.

Some kind of radio interview, then. I sat up in bed, pushed back the crocheted afghan someone had draped over me, and took a deep, painful breath.
Set things right….

I was sore in too many ways, my face bruised purple, my hand still cast in plaster, my heart permanently broken. And Diana’s absence felt a lot more obvious than my missing molar.

“A woman was murdered. There’s no setting that right,” agreed the voice I’d liked.

Just as I stood up, Al said, “But you were falsely accused. Arrested. As if that’s not everybody’s nightmare, Ben, the murder victim wrote your name
in blood
at the murder scene!”

I stopped dead still, my heart kicking back into overdrive. No wonder the voice had sounded familiar…but
likeable?

“Nightmare?” challenged Ben Fisher, with a sharp laugh. “Look, Al, if you want to do the Conspiracy Catch-up, like we do every Friday, I’m happy to do that. But as for recent current events?
No comment.
”

“Then let’s look at this event as a conspiracy. You were arrested for murder, picked out of a lineup. Yes, you passed a lie-detector test, but so did your brother and frankly, he has a better reputation than a conspiracy guru like you.”

“Thanks a lot, Al. And shut up.”

“If you didn’t have an alibi, not to mention different fingerprints from your twin brother—and who would have guessed
that
could happen—you could be facing death row right now.”

Instead of pointing out that the case had only made it past the bail hearing, Ben simply said, “Bye, Al,” followed by the shuffle of someone pushing back from the console.

“Okay, okay, you win.” Al’s voice might be deeper, but he’d sure blinked first. “We’ll do our Conspiracy Catch-up. For those listeners just tuning in, our guest tonight is a Friday regular. He’s my partner in crime—wow, that sounds worse today than usual….”

“Al,” warned Ben’s voice, not as near the microphone.

“My partner, and sometimes on-air guest, Benjamin Fisher. But from the way our phone lines have lit up, I’m guessing you folks already know that. I’m Al Barker, and this is the
Superrational Show
on WP—”

Mrs. Hillcrest screamed.

She’d come around the doorway from the hall, nearly ran into me and leaped back with a startled screech.

What’s even more surprising is—
I didn’t.

I didn’t jump. I didn’t flinch. I just stood there, looked at her and felt…strong.

But not necessarily in a good way.

“Good heavens, Katie,” my neighbor gasped, a hand going to her chest. “What are you doing, standing here in the dark? I was just coming to check on you….”

I continued to stare at her for a long, weird moment. Then I asked, “Where’s Aunt Maria?”

I felt fairly sure from the radio’s volume, not to mention its channel, that my aunt wasn’t still in the house.

“The, er…the
workers
are finished. They needed someone to do a walk-through and to double-check their inventory list.”

“
I
need to do that. It’s our house.”

The sympathy in her gaze when I said “our” instead of “my” felt like cold water on my face. The last, lingering weirdness from the dream evaporated. For now.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, veering around her. “I really have to be there.”

I broke into a run, grabbing my coat as I went, leaving Mrs. Hillcrest and her knickknacks and the loud radio commercials behind me with the slap of a screen door.

The houses in our neighborhood were the squat, brick style called Chicago bungalows. Working-class homes from the early twentieth century, they weren’t overloaded with yard space. Only an alley with a walkway separated each home, so narrow that the kids used to dare each other to jump from one house to the next—and do it. Not in the winter, of course, even with the winds blowing the roofs clean. But still…

Anyway, it didn’t make for a long walk from Mrs. Hillcrest’s. I barely had time to see that the big white truck was still parked in front but that the workers—the “crime-scene cleanup specialists”—were already stripping out of their masks and biohazard suits to reveal jeans and sweaty T-shirts despite the February cold. They were pulling blankets over their shoulders, swigging water and joking with each other. They stopped when they saw me, not all at once but bit by bit, only hitting full awkward silence as I wrenched open my own screen door.

I only noticed the reporters, farther down the block past a single cop car, because of the glitter of camera flashes as I wiped muddy snow from my feet and strode inside.

For the first time since Diana’s death.

This was my home—but it wasn’t. It smelled of powerful cleaning agents instead of the mix of candle wax, incense and Mediterranean cooking that had always filled it before. A large square of carpet had been cut away to reveal old wood floors I’d never seen. Diana’s “magic cabinet,” as we’d always called the big oaken armoire in the front room where she and Mom had kept their altar, stood open, which it usually never did. But its shelves looked strangely bare.

And of course, Diana was gone. Forever.

I took a deep, trembling breath to resist crying again.

“—complete list of the items we’ve taken,” a man was saying in the kitchen, just down the hall from the entryway. “Some of it—for example paper products like books and, uh, playing cards—had to be disposed of. That’s for health reasons, you understand. Anything nonporous that could be cleaned, we cleaned. We’ve sorted the loose or broken items by—”

When he saw me, he abruptly cut off.

“Katie!” greeted Aunt Maria. “You’re awake.”

“You should’ve gotten me up.” I noticed how rude I sounded even as I said it, as if Diana herself had tugged the edges of her mouth down with two fingers and lisped,
Look at Miss Pouty Pants!

Diana could be a real wise-ass, sometimes.

Still, I didn’t apologize. Neither Aunt Maria nor Mr. Page—the crime-scene cleanup specialist—seemed to take offense. It’s amazing what you can get away with on the excuse of grief.

“You’re right,” said Maria simply. “I should have.”

“As I was telling your aunt,” said Mr. Page, “we’ll dispose of everything that couldn’t be cleaned, as a biological hazard. But everything else has been disinfected and itemized. We kept an inventory of what we took and what we’ve left. Any loose or broken items are in those bins on the table.”

He continued talking, but I began looking in the bins.

Assorted screws and nails. Pink-handled tools from the toolbox although not, of course, the hammer. CDs, though some of the jewel cases no longer had their liner notes. And items from the magic cabinet. I found pieces of jars that had held healing herbs or oils, now neatly scrubbed. I found a black-handled knife, called an athame, which had belonged to Mom before it was Diana’s.

It all smelled like disinfectant instead of magic.

As if from a distance, Mr. Page said, “If you’ll sign this, agreeing that I’ve gone over the lists with you and that you’re aware of your options should anything prove to be missing…”

There’s something I need to find first.
I wasn’t sure where the urge came from, but I felt it as surely as I felt my sister’s absence.
Something important.

“Perhaps I should sign,” suggested my aunt, as I reached awkwardly over the edge of another bin and shifted its contents with my good hand, frowning.
Something vital.

“No, wait.” I found the terra-cotta disk, carved with leaves and grapes, now broken into three roughly pie-shaped pieces. That was Diana’s pentacle, to honor the element Earth. I found her willow wand. But not…

After taking and glancing at the papers Mr. Page offered, I felt increasingly sure.

“The chalice,” I said, and turned to Mr. Page. “The Hekate Chalice is gone. Couldn’t you clean it?”

Give the man credit; he wasn’t easily fazed. Then again, look at what he did for a living. “The
what
what?”

“It would have been with this other stuff, the witchy stuff.” I put down the inventory to tip the bin and spill out a mix of crystals and jar fragments. Aunt Maria laughed a little nervously; she’d married into the family and, even though she knew of our traditions, she didn’t practice. But hell—Mr. Page had just spent hours cleaning up not only blood, but tarot cards, candles, incense and pages torn from the family Book of Shadows. He wasn’t in the dark, here. In his line of business, he’d probably seen worse.

Besides, even the newspapers had gotten hold of the fact that Diana had considered herself a witch. It made for gripping copy, you know?

“I’m talking about a cup,” I insisted. “A sand-colored goblet with three woman’s faces carved into the sides of it. Hekate…” The strange word came to me as if someone had whispered it in my ear. “Hekate Triformus?”

Mr. Page shook his head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Not even pieces of it?” So many of the other magical items had been broken, after all. And this was important.

Vital.
Even if I wasn’t sure why.

“Perhaps the police took it as evidence?” he asked.

But the police had given me an inventory list, too. Everybody’s watching out for lawsuits.

I turned and went back to the living room, with its chemical smell and its missing carpet, and I narrowed my eyes to concentrate.

The scene played out in front of me, in slow motion.