Circle of Blood (22 page)

“Witch-dar,” he said smugly.

Samantha turned to stare out the window, annoyed that she’d walked into it. She fingered her cross and tried not to think about how her need to touch it to make herself feel better was not much different from ceremonial magic.

“Sorry,” he said, growing serious. “What do you think about the dead girl and the pentagram on her forehead?”

Samantha shrugged. “I think it’s a red herring. Wiccans take an oath to do no harm. Human sacrifice isn’t their thing.”

And the types of people who do believe in human sacrifice don’t use that symbol
.

“Still, it’s freaky.”

“Do we know what the cause of death was?” Samantha asked. She hadn’t been able to see any trauma to the body—no gun or knife wounds, no strangulation marks either.

“Coroner’s gotta run some tests. It could be poison or something like that.”

“Or she could have had a medical condition. Neither of which points to the supernatural.”

“No witches, then? So, all that and it’s just going to be a standard investigation,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Remember last month it was that fake vampire murder and six months before was that woman who swore the ghost of her dead husband was the one who killed her boyfriend instead of her?”

“Your point?” she asked.

“Mark my words—one of these days there’s going to be something supernatural actually going on.”

“You really believe that, Ed?” she asked, carefully keeping her tone neutral.

“Where there’s smoke there’s usually fire. Plus, Vanessa saw a ghost when she was a kid and I believe her.”

“It’s always a good policy, believing your wife.”

“And you don’t believe her?” Ed asked.

“Of course I do. She’s one of the most grounded, practical people I know. If she says it happened, I take it as gospel.”

“So, off to chase down an ordinary killer. Let’s go see the boyfriend.”

“Frat Brat Brad,” Samantha said. “What more did you get on him besides a nickname?”

“Brad Jensen. His name was in Camille’s cell. According to Goth girl, he belongs to an honors fraternity. Apparently that’s how he and Camille met.”

Ed pulled up outside the fraternity house. They walked up to the front door, knocked, and the door was opened by a tired-looking guy with three-day-old stubble and coffee breath.

“We’re looking for Brad Jensen,” Ed said.

“Come in. He’s in the kitchen,” the other guy said before yawning.

They walked into the kitchen just as someone picked up a backpack and began to head out.

“Brad?” Samantha asked.

“May I help you?” he asked, open curiosity on his face. “If this is about pledging, maybe Harry can help. I’m just on my way to class. Sorry.”

Samantha looked him over. He was tall and slender with a gentle smile and innocent eyes partially obscured by glasses. He was wearing slacks, a long-sleeved shirt, and a tie and seemed comfortable in them. He didn’t look like someone who was into drawing bloody pentagrams on girls after he killed them. Samantha flashed Ed a sideways glance and could tell he was thinking the same thing.

Brad left the kitchen and they followed him into the common room.

“Brad Jensen?” she specified.

“Yes. Why?” he said, turning to look at her. There it was in his eyes, the sudden dawning that something might be wrong. She had seen that look dozens of times. Most people could sense when they were about to get bad news.

“We’re Detectives Ryan and Hofferman,” she said, flashing her badge. “We need to talk to you about Camille.”

“Is she okay?” he asked, going completely white.

“I’m afraid not,” Ed said, his voice softening. “She’s dead.”

“Dead?” Brad asked as he sank down into a green velvet armchair that had seen better days.

Ed nodded. “We understand the two of you were dating.”

Brad’s eyes had glazed over and he didn’t respond. Samantha knelt in front of him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Brad?”

“What? Sorry. Yeah. We had just met, but she was special, you know. We had so much in common.” His voice caught in his throat and he looked away.

He doesn’t want to cry in front of us.

“I told her to be careful when driving around here, that people were crazy. She wasn’t used to all the traffic, and it scared her.”

“She didn’t die in a car accident,” Samantha began.

“She was murdered,” Ed finished.

And she watched Brad’s eyes as the news shattered him. Grief, pain, and disbelief flashed across his face in quick succession. Rage would come soon enough. It was a critical moment, the one when you realized the world wasn’t safe and that those you loved could be ripped from you by evil. It would likely be a defining point of his life. She wondered, as she always did, what it was like to be innocent and then to lose it. Her own innocence had been destroyed when she was too young to even remember it.

“Was she religious?” Samantha asked.

Brad nodded. “Very. She’s Mormon. I am too. That was one of the things that was so great. You don’t meet as many Mormons out here as you do back home.”

“Was she interested in Wicca or anything like that?”

“You mean witchcraft?” Brad asked, looking somewhat shocked.

Samantha sighed. Wicca and witchcraft were two different things, especially in the way he obviously thought.

“Yeah,” Ed said, pressing on.

Brad shook his head. “No. I mean, I know her roommate was into some weird stuff, but not Camille. She was only staying there until she could find a better place to live. The fraternity is coed. She applied for a spot in the girls’ building. I was really praying she’d get it so she could get out of there.”

“When was the last time you heard from her?” Samantha asked.

“Three nights ago. We went out to dinner. We were supposed to go to the movies tonight . . .”

The tears he had been trying to stop started to flow.

“Did anyone ever threaten her in any way?” Samantha asked.

“Who would do that? It was Camille. She was so . . . nice.”

The guy who had answered the door and two others had gathered at the far side of the room. Samantha stood and nodded, and one of them moved over and sat down next to Brad, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“If there’s anything we can do to help you find her killer, let us know,” he said, looking Samantha straight in the eye.

Brad had begun sobbing uncontrollably. Samantha and Ed took the names and phone numbers of the others in the room and then left.

“That got us nowhere,” Ed complained when they were finally back in the car.

Samantha wished she could disagree, but Brad didn’t know anything. She was sure of it.

“Someone wanted her dead. There had to be a reason, right?” Ed continued.

“Well, we’ll just have to keep looking until we find it.”

Samantha’s phone rang.

“Look at that—it does have an button.”

Samantha grimaced as she went to answer it.

“Let’s hope that’s the coroner with some good news for us,” Ed said.

“And that would be what? ‘Oops, our bad—she’s still alive’?” Samantha snapped.

Ed looked at her, clearly startled, and she turned away to answer the phone. She could tell by the caller ID that it was George at the coroner’s office.

“Do you know the cause of death?” she asked with no greeting.

“Hello to you too,” an older male voice said. “No. There’s no easily discernible cause. I’ll be running a tox screen.”

“If you don’t have anything, why are you calling?”

“Wanted to let you know that the pentagram was drawn in nail polish.”

“Not blood?”

“Nope. Looks like it was applied several hours
after
she was dead.”

“Thanks, George,” she said, and hung up.

“What is it?” Ed asked.

“Pentagram was drawn in nail polish, not blood.”

“I think we need to go back to the apartment and do some color checks to see if it might have belonged to her or Katie,” Ed said, steering into the right-hand lane and preparing to turn.

“Agreed.”

•   •   •

It felt morbid, going through a dead girl’s bathroom, looking for her makeup. Three flavored lip glosses, a pale pink blush, and a bottle of clear nail polish turned up in the third drawer Samantha checked. That was it. No eye shadow, no mascara, no liners, not even any powder. The nail polish bottle was nearly full. The blush looked like it had been used only a couple of times.

Samantha searched the other drawers, but she knew she wouldn’t find anything else. It fit with the picture of Camille that she had been forming.

Camille’s bathroom was the one shared with guests. Katie had the master bedroom with her own bathroom, which Ed was searching. Samantha exited Camille’s bathroom and headed for Katie’s room.

Katie was sitting on the couch in the living room, arms folded across her chest, clearly upset that as soon as forensics finished their job she was going to be locked out of her apartment for the next couple of days to preserve the scene.

A couple of days on a friend’s couch won’t hurt her, but a couple of days in prison might,
Samantha thought.

Samantha walked into Katie’s bathroom just as Ed was whistling and bending over the trash can.

“Look what we have here,” he said.

“Red nail polish.” Samantha confirmed it as he used tongs to pull the bottle out of the trash can and deposit it in an evidence bag. They returned to the living room and Ed held the bag high.

“Care to explain?” he asked.

“Duh. It’s nail polish,” Katie said.

“Why did you throw it away?”

“What? I didn’t throw it away.”

“Then why was it in your trash?” Samantha asked.

“It . . . I don’t know,” Katie said.

“Did you put it in there, or drop it accidentally, after painting the pentagram on Camille’s forehead?” Ed asked.

“What? That was blood, and I didn’t do it!”

“It was nail polish, not blood, and you need to start talking to us before this gets any worse for you,” Samantha said.

“Worse for me?” Katie squeaked, her eyes widening in fear. “But—but I didn’t do anything.”

“So who are you covering up for?” Ed demanded.

“I . . . uh—no one. No one!”

“Who are you protecting?”

“I’m not protecting anyone!” Katie said, beginning to sob.

But she was. The question was, who would someone like Katie protect? She seemed more the kind to be loyal to herself first. What would someone have to do to gain her loyalty? What would someone have to be?

Samantha stared hard at Katie. The girl was scared and she was hiding something. “Tell us about your boyfriend,” Samantha said suddenly.

“Kyle?” Katie asked, blinking at her in confusion. “Why do you want to know about Kyle?”

“Is he the kind of guy that likes pentagrams a little too much?” Ed asked, gesturing first to Katie’s necklace and then mimicking drawing a pentagram on his forehead.

“What? No. He’s, like, a normal guy. Anyways, he’s not even my boyfriend. We broke up, like, six months ago.”

And yet on some level she still thinks of him as her boyfriend,
Samantha thought.

“I mean, he and Camille never even met.”

“Are you sure about that?” Ed asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you have any enemies?” Samantha asked.

Katie went pale. “I hope not,” she whispered. There was fear in her eyes, a fear that was much deeper, much more primal than her fear of the detectives.

Ed’s cell phone rang. After a few seconds he moved several feet away. Samantha turned her attention back to Katie. She wanted to know what the girl was hiding from her, what she was afraid of.

You could make her tell you. It would be easy,
a voice whispered in her head
.

She set her jaw and tried to ignore the promptings, the urges. A spell of revelation perhaps . . . Samantha shook her head fiercely. She didn’t do that anymore, not for years. She took a deep breath, struggling to control herself. It had to be because of the nightmare. Every time she had a nightmare she had to remind herself that she wasn’t that person anymore. No spells. But convincing Katie to trust her would be so very easy.

Samantha squatted down slowly, bringing herself to eye level with the girl. She tilted her head slightly and waited for Katie to meet her eyes.

“Look at me, Katie,” she said, dropping her voice into its lowest range. “You’re going to trust me. You’re going to tell me—”

A hand descended on her shoulder and Samantha gasped and nearly fell backward onto her rump. She caught herself with a hand on the floor and took several quick breaths. Guilt rose up in her at what she had been about to do.

She glanced up and saw Ed looking at her with raised eyebrows.

“What?” she snapped, more forcefully than she meant to.

“We need to go. Now.”

She stood up.

“Don’t leave town,” Ed said to Katie. She nodded, eyes wide, still looking at Samantha.

“Joe,” Ed said, turning to one of the officers still on the scene, “make sure you drive her to her friend’s house, see that she gets settled, and get all the contact info for her and her friend.”

Joe nodded his understanding. Ed turned and headed out of the apartment, Samantha trailing behind him. As soon as they were in his car, he turned to her. “What was that? Trying to hypnotize her? Watching too much television again?”

“Yes, that was it exactly,” she said, letting sarcasm drip from her voice. “I was just trying to calm her down and get a better look at her eyes when I asked her questions.”

“Did it work?”

“I didn’t have long enough,” she said.
Thank God,
she added silently. “Where are we going?”

“Across town. St. Vincent’s Cathedral.”

“Can’t they put someone else on it?”

“No, we’re the go-to guys for this one.”

“Let me guess,” she said with a sigh. “Local color?”

“Worse. There’s a dead nun with a pentagram on her forehead.”