A Murder of Mages (25 page)

Minox was too late. He knew this before he even reached the chapterhouse. Half a block away, a horrified scream pierced the air. His gut churning, Minox broke into a run, hoping that Inspector Rainey would follow his example.

He ran around the corner to see Jaelia Tomar dead. Dead in a grotesque and perverse spectacle, killed in the same manner as her husband. Stripped naked, spikes through her hands, heart removed. The only difference was her body was splayed out on the front steps of the Light and Stone chapterhouse, obscured only by a slight haze around the steps.

Pushing the bile back down his throat, he raced over to the gawking and screaming crowd that had already formed. Rainey was at his elbow, shoving people aside to form a path. They blew their whistles and forced their way through to the steps.

Inspector Rainey tore off her coat and covered the body. Minox turned to the ugly crowd, screaming over their shouts and cries. “Who saw what happened? How did she get here? Anyone? Anyone?”

Screams and jeers were the only reply. Inspector Rainey came back up to him, standing close to whisper in his ear. “Public street, all but broad daylight? Impossible!”

“From what you could see, was she killed here?” Minox asked. His eyes stayed on the crowd, scanning it for a face he could connect to the earlier murder.

“Almost no blood here,” she said. “We need to clear this mob before things get out of hand.”

The crowd was shouting incoherently, Minox able to pick out only a few choice words about dead mages and serves them all right. “We might have some good witnesses in here. If not the killer.”

“Not much good if we have a riot,” Rainey said. “Earlier you said something about a show of color?”

Minox nodded, understanding her meaning. He pulled out his whistle and gave five hard, short trills as loud as he could manage. Inspector Rainey took out her own and did the same. The Riot Call. Not only would every footpatrol Constabulary in earshot come running, they would repeat the signal. Most people on the street knew what the call meant as well.

Minox drew out his handstick, noting that Inspector Rainey already had hers out. Now that they’d made the Riot Call, they had wide latitude in how they handled the crowd. People knew the call meant get clear or get beaten down and arrested. That didn’t seem to intimidate them: they still shouted and pressed forward.

“Stand down and step away!” Rainey boomed out. He was impressed she had that much power with her voice. “You have to the count of ten!”

“Burn out the mages!” someone shouted.

Inspector Rainey did not count. Instead she drove into the crowd at the direction of that voice. Minox blew the signal again, and he could hear other whistles repeating the call in the distance.

Inspector Rainey knocked three or four men in the crowd—not too hard, but enough to get them out of her path and think twice about causing more trouble. She grabbed one man by the front of his coat and pulled him out of the crowd to the steps. He struggled with her, but she knocked him with her handstick across the head.

“Did you yell that?” she asked the man.

Her approach was direct; Minox respected that.

“No, I—”

“You did!” Inspector Rainey snapped at him. She threw the man onto the steps next to the covered body. He scrambled away from the dead woman. “Look at that! You want more of that?”

“No . . . no . . .” the man gibbered in panic.

Rainey turned out to the crowd. “Anyone else?”

The crowd all moved back. Whistles sounded from all directions. Constabulary descended on Downing Street.

“Round up and question!” Minox yelled out to the approaching patrolmen. “I want to know every witness account!”

The patrolmen looked confused, and more than a little apprehensive. Minox deduced that they were not sure exactly how to follow his orders. Inspector Rainey, however, had no trouble.

“You three,” she pointed to a group of patrolmen coming from Dockview. “Set up a perimeter around the square and that teahouse. The rest of you, corral the witnesses into the teahouse. Get names, addresses, and witness accounts. Anyone who doesn’t cooperate gets the lockwagon!”

The patrolmen got to work herding people into the teahouse. Inspector Rainey released a slow breath and turned to the body. She lifted her coat up off it just enough to look under. “The spikes weren’t driven into the steps,” she said.

Minox stayed a respectful distance away from Missus
Tomar’s body. “But they are completely through her hands?”

Rainey nodded. She reached under the hands. “Bits of powdered stone. So the killer did his whole ritual somewhere else and then brought her body here.”

“Why here?” Minox asked, not that he expected an answer from Inspector Rainey beyond supposition. Dead body left here on the steps? How could it be done? There was the haze in the air, the slight sulfurous odor. He glanced at the steps around the body. Fine white powder. Minox dabbed a bit on his finger and tasted it. Sweet, just as he suspected.

A window opened up on the second floor of the Light and Stone chapterhouse, and an older woman stuck her head out. “Will you please remove that filth from our step!”

Rainey took the lead in responding, stepping out to the walkway. “What do these vests mean, ma’am?”

“What?”

“The vests that we are wearing? What do they mean?”

“You’re city Constabulary!”

“Right,” Rainey said. “Not sanitation. We’re here to investigate a murder, not clean up a mess for you.”

“Get rid of it, like you did the crowd!”

Minox stepped over so he could address the woman as well. “Ma’am, I don’t think you quite understand the gravity of the situation here.”

“I understand there’s a corpse on our front step!”

“And I need to figure out who killed her,” Minox said, straining to keep his voice even and calm. The muscles in his neck were tightening, and his stomach turned in knots. This woman was strangely infuriating, but he could not let that cloud his judgment or impede the investigation. He knew that the fact that he was at his second Mage Circle chapterhouse in as many days was additionally affecting his emotional control.

“That’s not my problem!”

“No?” Minox couldn’t believe the woman would have the audacity to say that. “Let me clarify my line of thought for you, then. There is a dead body here, on your
steps.” He stepped up to the stairs and lifted up the coat so the woman could see. “The body of a naked woman with her heart cut out. Not exactly something a person can carry around town and escape notice. So the question is, what’s the easiest place one could do that from?”

The woman looked nauseous, placing a hand over her mouth. Minox noted, however, that she did not pull back through the window despite her obvious discomfort. She was a captive audience now.

Minox held up two fingers. “Two places, ma’am. One is right out that front door!”

“You’re disgusting!”

“Most likely place,” Inspector Rainey said. “We’ll need to question everyone in there.”

“You can’t do that!” the woman shouted. “This is a private place!”

“We’ve made the Riot Call, ma’am,” Inspector Rainey said. “That gives us quite a bit of freedom of action, especially when there’s a dead body involved. We will come in there.”

Minox knew that Inspector Rainey’s interpretation of the rule of law with regard to privacy and the Riot Call was, to say the least, imaginative, if not wholly inaccurate, but he wasn’t going to ruin the moment by interrupting her. They did need to investigate this Circle and its members.

The woman stared quietly for a moment. “What’s the second?” she finally asked.

“The second what?” Inspector Rainey asked.

“The second place the body could come from?”

Minox pointed up. “Your roof.”

Chapter 16

S
ATRINE COULDN’T STOP BEING ANGRY. She had attempted to curb this by hitting random bystanders when the Riot Call was made, but it wasn’t helping. Her first assignment as an inspector had spiraled into a dismal failure. The murderer not only was still on the loose, the murder unsolved, but now another person was dead. A woman who might have been home and safe in her chapterhouse had it not been for Satrine.

The moments when she had spoken with Jaelia Tomar yesterday kept running through her mind. She could have done something different, said something smarter, and kept the whole situation from falling apart and ending in Jaelia’s arrest.

Welling was still thinking clearly, in his own way. Satrine had been trying to figure out how the blazes someone could put Jaelia’s body on the building steps, and the only thing she had thought of was some fast work with a wagon. The roof hadn’t even crossed her mind. Not thinking straight.

Not thinking like an inspector. Because she wasn’t one. She was a fraud.

“Inspector Rainey,” Welling said. “I think it best that you inspect the body further, while I question the Light and Stone members.”

“That’s what you’d prefer?” she asked. She was surprised that he’d volunteer to talk to the mages.

“I’d honestly prefer to do neither one,” he said. “But given the circumstances that would be the height of irresponsibility. We also need to . . . ah, look.” He pointed down the street, noting Inspectors Kellman and Mirrell approaching.

“The blazes is happening?” Kellman asked. “Which one of you made the Riot Call?”

“We both made it,” Satrine said quickly, before Welling could do anything to gainsay her.

“Where’s the riot, then?”

“Quelled before it started,” Welling said. “And it was starting, gentlemen.”

“Really?” Mirrell asked. “Why was that?”

Satrine stepped forward, noting that Mirrell flinched slightly away on her approach. “We’ve got a dead body—a dead naked woman—on the steps of the chapterhouse of a Mage Circle. People surrounded it gawking and screaming. The whole situation was a hay barn on a dry day.”

“Funny,” Kellman said.

“Where’s your crowd?” Mirrell asked.

“Rounded into that teashop,” Satrine said. “Footpatrol are taking statements, but they may need some inspectorial guidance. Why don’t you go give it to them?”

“You trying to give us orders, Tricky?”

The nickname was sticking. Terrific.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Satrine said. “I thought you two were inspectors interested in helping keep the blasted peace. If you just want to sit around and chat, go back to the stationhouse.”

“Hey, hey,” Kellman said. “The blazes is your problem?”

“Problem is a dead body, gentlemen,” Welling said.

“There’s twenty of those problems a day, Jinx,” Kellman said.

Mirrell had walked over to the body and lifted up the coat. He yelped and skittered away. “That’s—that’s our mage from yesterday!”

“That’s right,” Welling said. “The one we let get grabbed. Our fault, Mirrell.”

Mirrell frowned, biting his lip. “Come on, Darreck. Let’s go ask some questions.” He stalked off into the teashop.

“I would suppose that the teashop owners will be displeased with our commandeering their business,” Welling said once the two of them had walked out of earshot.

Satrine shrugged. “Or they’ll be pleased by how much tea they’re selling today.”

Welling gave the barest hint of a smile at that, and turned up the stairs, pointing to the body quickly, and then up to the roof, before going up to the door and knocking on it. Two Light and Stone members opened the door just enough to admit him entrance.

Satrine called for a page on her whistle. The body was going to have to be investigated, but not here on the street. The air was moist, it was going to rain soon. Plus, this was too in the open, too exposed. That was the least she could do for failing Jaelia, preserve some degree of dignity for the woman—a woman whose only crime was not holding herself together when she found out her husband was dead.

Blazes, Satrine was barely holding herself together all this time.

She didn’t wreck city blocks when she lost control, though, she smirked to herself. No, she just cracked the skulls of street trash. Not exactly the healthiest way of confronting her problems.

She looked back up at the door of the Light and Stone chapterhouse. The door had a frosted glass panel, so she could make out the silhouettes of Welling and the mages. She really wondered what it was like for Welling and other mages. Were they constantly holding themselves in check?

Was it at all like the gnawing anger in the pit of her stomach over what happened to Loren, threatening to burst out at the slightest provocation?

Satrine glanced up to the roof, three stories up. Like most of the houses in this neighborhood, the roof was
flat-topped. Getting up on the roof with an unwilling victim might be challenging, but certainly possible, and once up there the killer could easily perform his death ritual, and then throw the body down to the stairs below.

Satrine crouched down and looked under the coat. The steps were solid stone. Would the impact of a woman dropping three stories do much to them? Satrine had no idea. Leppin would know. Where was the page she called for?

She looked back up to the roof, and the heavy clouds beyond it. It would be a perfect place not only to kill someone without being disturbed, but to watch the chaos unfold on the street.