Wicked Tempest: A Kate Waters Mystery (Kate Waters Mysteries Book 2) (12 page)

“First of all, I don’t need saving,” Kate said, standing up. “You were the one that needed saving.”

A curious expression crossed Nick’s face, and he stood with her. He was about to say something to her when Aaron opened the door for them. Kate took the opportunity to flee an awkward and seemingly intimate discussion and stepped inside the building. Nick followed her, and Aaron shut the door behind them. It slammed with the velocity of the wind.

“You’re both more than lucky,” Bruce said. “That was a tornado.”

“Sure was,” Nick said, eyeing Kate. His inquisitive expression lingered on her, and Kate felt suddenly self-conscious. She smoothed her shirt down and walked over to the water cooler, still stunned and shaky on her feet.

“Didn’t you guys hear the national storm advisory on the radio?” Stewart asked them.

“I heard,” Kate replied, “but I was already in my car.”

Nick joined Kate at the coffee counter. She looked down at his arm where blood dripped. “You’re bleeding.”

He reached for a napkin and wiped at it. “I’m all right.”

“Wow, look at that,” Aaron said, peering out the window at the lot. Bruce and Stewart joined him, leaving Nick and Kate to a moment of privacy.

“Are you okay?” Nick said to her. He took the cup of water she handed him. “I mean, between sharks and tornadoes, you live life on the edge.” A glimmer of light flashed in his eyes.

Kate frowned at him, sensing his attraction to her thickening. It was both pleasing and uncomfortable. “Trust me, it’s not my intention.”

He smiled, and the warmth in his face stirred something inside her, something she worked to push back.

“Do you have plans tonight?”

A cough snuck up on her then, and she turned her head away to clear her throat. “Given the way life seems determined to take me out of it, I should probably stay home.”

He shifted closer to her, subtly, but enough that Kate caught the musky scent of him.

“Come have a drink with me.”

“I can’t.”

“Boyfriend?”

She nodded, wishing she had put the necklace David had given to her back on. “Yes. His name is David.”

A smile shrugged into his shoulders. “Well, if you would like to meet purely as work acquaintances or would like to invite him, I’ll be at McKell’s down on 4th and Clay tonight.”

Kate smiled. “Thanks for helping me…again.”

A slice of light from the front door pierced between her and Nick as Stewart, Bruce, and Aaron stepped outside the building. The funnel cloud had blown over, and only a light breeze stirred through the trees.

“No need to thank me. I’d do it again.” Nick started to follow the team out the door, but paused halfway and turned to her. “Given your history though, that’ll be sooner than later.”

Kate felt her smile grow, and she headed to her desk in the back room. As much as she wanted to disagree with Nick’s comment, it seemed he was right. The woman had come for her twice now. Whoever, whatever, she was. Coincidences didn’t repeat themselves, and neither did hallucinations. Repetition was a pattern, and pattern was intent. How many more times could she escape death? Had Brooke thought the same thing?

Kate hadn’t realized it, but she was standing in front of the mirror in the backroom. The butterfly bandage on her cheek oozed blood, and her neck ached. She shivered, though not because she was cold. She missed David then more than ever, and a lump in her throat swelled unexpectedly. Kate swallowed back tears that threatened to break free. She had to be strong. If Rán was real, then she wasn’t out of the storm yet.

The Criminal Investigations Division hustled with blue uniforms. A scurry of attitude, determination, and a lot of bureaucratic bullshit, Keith thought, as he walked out of his office. The continuous buzz of phones, faxes, and alarms added to the rigorous pace of the atmosphere. Keith found it the perfect opportunity to pry into the forensic database for Jim’s autopsy results. Even though Jim had died from drowning, Keith wanted to be certain there wasn’t anything else mentioned in the report, such as the discovery of an expensive, rare statue in his possession or other valuables he might have found but had not yet been announced.

A short woman in a flowered skirt walked up to him. “Keith, are you coming to Ted’s going-away party?” Alice asked him. “We’re having a cupcake decorating contest.”

Alice was like the grandmother of the office. As annoying as she often was, she looked after every one of them as if they were her own children, but a fucking cupcake-decorating contest? How in the hell were they ever going to catch the bad guys by spending their time decorating cakes? Keith thought to keep this to himself. “Alice, I couldn’t compete with your talents, but if I finish my report in time, I’ll swing down.”  

“Don’t wait too long,” she said, nearly singing it. “They’ll go fast.” She gave an “it’s-your-loss” shrug and continued down the hall.

Keith resumed his mission and went into an office around the corner. It was no one’s office in particular and worked as a spillover room when the department hired new officers before assigning them a desk or when other computers were going through maintenance. There was a sign-in sheet on the door for whoever used it and for what purposes, with a space for case numbers. Keith skipped it altogether, not wanting anyone to know that he was going to use the spare computer, but also because a part of him wondered how many people really gave a shit anymore.

He pulled up the database and typed in Jim’s name, waiting for the loop on the screen to change to green, tapping a beat to the Stone’s song, “Miss You.” He couldn’t help but think about that little brunette down at Wild Cats with the cinnamon-colored nipples and big brown eyes that drifted his way whenever he went in. Now that was a cupcake he wouldn’t mind sinking his teeth into.

The document blinked on the screen with all the reports and records on Jim’s death. Keith checked the door before he continued reading. Cause of death: drowning; lightning strike occurring postmortem. Keith read the physical details, separating himself from the emotional aspect of it. He hadn’t known Jim more than five years, but he had liked his stamina and his reserved demeanor. He would think of him on occasion, but never so far as to mourn his death. As far as he was concerned, they were all going to die, and it might as well be doing what you loved, which in his case would be sex, he thought, smiling.

He scrolled down to pictures taken of Jim on the beach. It shook something beneath his skin to see the white-and-blue bloated complexion of him twisted over the sand. The coastal birds had torn apart his face, neck, and arms, but the fog in his eyes held a certain mystery. The silence of a discovery?

After quieting his thoughts for a moment, Keith worked to invoke his intuition, that inner voice that knew all. He believed in that kind of stuff. It was damn creepy when one got good at it, how future events could unfold in the form of an inaudible whisper or strong gut instinct. The extraction of sacred knowledge was out there for all, but only a few were capable of achieving it. Keith knew he was one of them, and looking at Jim in death, even from a photograph, he was certain he had found the statue. It was there in his eyes, like a distant star.

Keith went through all eleven pictures of Jim. One was a close-up of his neck, where a spiral-like mark had been burned into his skin. Something about that mark scraped at his thoughts. The autopsy described it as Lichtenberg’s Flowers, the entrance of a voltage shock.

A man passed by and paused in the doorway. It was Boyd Fergus.

“Hey, Keith. What are you up to?” His bug-eyed face peered in at him.

Keith hit alt-tab, switching windows on the screen to an Excel spreadsheet. “They’re upgrading software on my computer. Thought I’d check the status of one of my reports.”

Boyd glanced at the sheet on the door. “You didn’t sign in.”

Boyd kissed only one type of ass in the department, and it certainly wasn’t anyone without their shield. His bald head on a 6-foot steroid frame often gave him a false sense of superiority over others. Keith enjoyed testing it.

“There’s a cupcake contest in the faculty room, Boyd. You might actually win at something this time.”

“Fuck you, Davidson.” Boyd tightened his fist in front of him and then walked off, though not without a glance down the hall in the direction of the faculty room. Keith shook his head. Idiot.

He looked back at the database login registry, noting the officers who had logged into Jim’s case file. Two of them were from his investigative division. They were the ones who had delivered Jim to the morgue, but there was one officer he wasn’t familiar with, Detective Orwin Wells. Keith checked the date and time that Detective Wells had been viewing Jim’s file—last night, at 11:37. Seemed an unusual time to be digging through a case file that didn’t belong to him.

He sorted the active records under homicide and found the case Wells was currently investigating, the death of a young girl by the name of Brooke Jennings. Keith punched in Brooke’s name into the deceased database and found her autopsy results. Cause of death: electrocution by lightning. He thought it a strange coincidence. Alone though, that didn’t explain why Wells was looking into Jim’s file—their only link being the lightning. There had to be something else, he thought, scrolling through the documents.

He switched screens and opened up the photos taken of Brooke’s autopsy. Too bad, he thought. She was pretty. He passed over a photograph of her neck. She had the exact same mark as Jim, a red spiral-looking wheel. Now that could explain why Wells had been looking through Jim’s file. Both autopsy results concluded that the mark wasn’t caused by human intervention, which seemed unlikely to him. What were the chances that two people, seemingly unrelated, would have the same mark, Keith thought. Apparently, Wells must have wondered the same thing.

Keith sat back and stretched his arms behind his head when it hit him like a thunderbolt. The mark. He had seen it before. Rán. The statue. Keith sat up, toggled to the Internet, and found the website of the statue. His back stiffened as he studied the painting of Rán, the symbol on her breastplate just above the coiled body of a snake and a spiral wheel. It looked exactly like Jim’s and Brooke’s.

Below, he found folklore regarding its curse. He remembered Jim telling him about the curse and how he had laughed at him, telling him he was crazy, but Jim was dead now, and this girl, Brooke, was dead, both having suffered lightning strikes. Somehow, they were connected to the statue. Could she have found the statue on Jim? In the autopsy pictures he had seen, Jim’s hand curled in a way that looked to have held something in it. If Brooke did find the statue on him, where was it now that she was dead? Still in her house or with someone else?

Keith closed out the database and switched off the monitor. “Follow the trail of bodies. The path will lead to Rán.”

***

The statue had become the pink elephant in the room, a nemesis to be dealt with. Kate knew she would have to do something with it sooner than later. In the meantime, she knew it was important to send Andre Singer a message. Try as he might with the dead snakes on her doorstep, if it were him, she needed to show him that she wasn’t afraid of him. Truth was, she was terrified of him, but she had been a victim once before and swore it would never happen again.

After a good hour researching Andre Singer on Google after work, she located what she believed was his house. She got in her jeep and drove over. From the street view, it was a small, gray bungalow in the northeast end of town, lightly manicured with Rhododendrons, yews, and decorative grasses. Wind chimes hung at the doorway. Flowers encircled the red mailbox post. A barrel of candytuft sat on the steps. It didn’t seem like the yard of someone who marched into another person’s house unannounced, uninvited, and to threaten them. Andre must have a girlfriend, she thought, and if he had a girlfriend, maybe she knew about the statue too.

The wind chimes clanked in the breeze when she stepped from her car. She walked cautiously up the steps, and at the door, knocked three times. Someone pulled the curtain aside in the window next to it. Kate stood tall, trying her best to look stern, unafraid, and determined to deliver Andre the same message of warning: stay off my property and stop threatening me. She had little doubt he was the one who had placed the dead snake on her doorstep.

The door handle twisted and a thin arm came into view. A woman with long dark hair appeared from behind the door. It appeared that Andre had a girlfriend after all.

“Yes?” she said.

“Hello,” Kate said. “I’m looking for Andre Singer?”

Eyes in a gaunt, pale face narrowed on her. “He’s not here. Who are you?”

“I’m Kate Waters.”

Kate wanted to speak with Andre directly, but decided by the woman’s grim attitude that having Andre’s girlfriend deliver her message might beat her doing it herself. She stood her ground. “Tell Andre if he puts another dead snake on my doorstep, I’m going to report him to the police.”

The woman’s eyes grew wide. “You found a dead snake on your doorstep?”

“Yes, rotting and mutilated, and I’m almost certain Andre put it there.”

She opened the door wider. “I think you should come inside.”

It was not what Kate expected, and it forced her to pause, but her curiosity won over, and she stepped into the house. The woman shut and locked the door, as if she were afraid of someone seeing her. She was thin and frail. Even through the woman’s sweater, Kate could see her shoulder bones, and the skinny jeans she wore gave her skeleton legs. “Who are you?” Kate asked.

“My name is Suzanne. I am Andre’s girlfriend.”

Kate glanced around, smelled the salty aroma of cooked meat. Paintings of buildings and city bridges hung on the walls and a very large flat screen rested on a bookshelf loaded with other electronics.

“Come, this way,” Suzanne said, leading Kate toward the back of the house. “I know someone else who had a dead snake left on her doorstep.” She stopped at a sliding-glass door that led to the backyard and turned to Kate. “And now she’s dead.”

“Brooke Jennings,” Kate said.

“You knew her?”

“No, but I was the one who found her in her house. Me and Thea.”

As if a dark memory had stung her, Suzanne looked away. A thunder of thoughts seemed to be rolling around in her head. “Why don’t we talk in the backyard,” she said. “Do you want something to drink?”

“No, thanks.”

Suzanne slid open the sliding-glass door that led into a covered patio and a spacious backyard filled with deciduous trees, flowering foliage. Purple clematis climbed the poles of a white gazebo.

“Nice yard.”

“Thanks. Andre gets the inside, and I get the outside, which is fine by me.” She pointed to a wooden chair with a red cushion. “Have a seat.”

Kate preferred to stand and instead, walked over to a flowerbox at the windowsill. Suzanne sat down in a chair facing her.

“So Brooke had a dead snake on her doorstep too?” Kate asked, though already knowing about it from Thea. “When?”

“The night before she died.”

A twinge of worry shuddered through Kate. If a timeline was important, and the curse real, that would mean her death could occur tonight.  

Suzanne took a drink of lemon water already sitting out on the table next to a pitcher. “Brooke called me just before it happened. She told me she was afraid.”

“Afraid of who?” Kate asked.

“Not who, but what,” Suzanne replied.

“I’m not following you,” but in her gut, she knew. The woman. Rán.

“Brooke told me she had a strange mark on her neck. She thought it was…” Suzanne stopped, took a drink of her water, and then continued. “She thought it was an omen. Other things had happened besides the snake.”

Kate sat down in a chair at the end of the table, feeling weakness in her knees. “What kinds of things?”

“Close calls with death. A tree almost landed on her, and she barely escaped a landslide on the Burnside Street curves.”

The sensation of cold water surged over Kate, icy dark water. She realized she had been holding her breath and let it out with a slight sigh.

Suzanne sensed her panic. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” But it was something, and all the pretty plants in Suzanne’s backyard couldn’t alleviate her growing anxiety.

“Kate, why were you and Thea at Brooke’s house?”

Kate looked over at Suzanne. “Thea wanted to check up on her. She thought she was in danger too.”

Something dark crossed into Suzanne’s eyes. “Thea believes in a curse.”

“I’m vaguely aware of it.”

“How well do you know Thea?”

Kate felt a smile slip over her face. “Probably about as well as anybody else, which may not be much.”

Suzanne smiled too. “Then you do know her, and probably not to trust her either. Thea does what she wants, and sometimes that goes against the Wiccan law of
harm none
.”