Athena Force 8: Contact (2 page)

“Yes,” she said. “She did.”

He swore under his breath and stood. “Well, ma’am, this is one for the cops, the coroner and the crime scene unit.”

Two down.
But Faith wasn’t worried about EMTs, either.

Again she found herself alone with the body. She looked into Krystal’s staring eyes, not quite able to reconcile the corpse with the tall, vivacious young woman who’d offered to style Faith’s hair before they’d headed out that night.
Krystal.

It had always been one of Faith’s favorite daydreams, to live with a bunch of other women. Roommates, sisters, dorm-mates at some kind of boarding school—no matter the details, she’d always imagined it would be like an endless slumber party. Like…belonging. This new apartment—rather, her newly rented half room in a very
old
apartment—was her first real effort toward that.

But slumber parties usually didn’t include murder.

Now she wished she’d accepted Krystal’s offer, despite her dislike of being touched and Krystal’s overreliance on hair spray. Krystal had been teaching her breathing and relaxation techniques to control her oversensitivity. They’d been friends, though maybe not as close as normal people got. Faith wasn’t sure she knew how to get close to other people. Now she’d lost any chance to get closer to this one.

She hadn’t expected losing someone to hurt like this.

Still, the worst part about standing here in the bathroom, alone with Krystal, wasn’t that guilt. It wasn’t the eerie stillness, a now blatant absence of jazz music, laughter and shouted conversations that made the simple gurgle of water running down the drain become deafening. It wasn’t even being this close to a dead person.

The worst part was the lingering…
smell
was what Faith could best call it, but that wasn’t wholly correct. A perverted sexuality hung in the air, part musk, part heat. It had been left by the killer and this horrible, irrevocable thing he’d done. It smelled like power. Dominance.

Evil.

More than the corpse’s presence, that atmosphere of evil twisted deep in her stomach.

“So,” drawled someone loudly. Though the man in the unbuttoned coat didn’t throw the door open hard enough to bounce it off the wall, he might as well have, the way Faith jumped at his arrival. “What do we know?”

Damn. Not only had the detectives arrived, they included Roy Chopin.

Faith had been around Chopin only a handful of times. He was a rangy man with a rolling walk, blunt and expressive. He wore his brown hair styled back from his long face, to keep it out of his tired eyes. His mouth alternated between threatening and mocking, and his jaw looked like a dare. His sheer physicality made her uncomfortable, even without touching. He didn’t
have
to touch. A cop in every sense of that word, Chopin seemed to expect the whole world to get out of his way. To judge by his cocky attitude, the world usually did.

Tonight, though, his presence felt welcome as it washed over the crime scene like a rainstorm clearing out the gutters of Bourbon Street. Imagining all this ugliness through his detached gray eyes demoted Krystal’s death from a scene of horror to a mere shame and, more to the point, a puzzle to be solved.

Faith grasped gratefully at that air of detachment. She would return to the horror soon enough, after all. And she would need all her wits. Where Chopin went…

Well, when his partner arrived, she’d be three down. The detectives were the ones who had worried her all along.

For good reason.

In the meantime, Chopin was already looking impatient.

“This is Krystal Tanner,” she reported. “I found her like this at about ten-fifteen. Someone was climbing out through the ceiling. I went after him, but he had a pretty good head start, and—What?”

Chopin had shaken his head, his tired eyes widening.

“You
went after him?
” he demanded.

“Yes.”

He looked her up and down. She sensed the way he saw her as surely as she could read his perusal of the scene. She was a blond-haired, ponytailed coed with full lips, unusual green-gold eyes and tanned arms and legs, bared by the miniskirt and crop top. The outfit had seemed a better choice before her crawl through the filthy roof space.

“Alone?”

Her chin came up under the challenge of his gaze. “Yeah.”

Chopin leaned closer, faux conspiratorial. “And why would you do an idiotic thing like that?”

Well, duh. “Because the alternative would have been
not
to go after him?”

He grinned as he straightened, fishing a notebook out of his shirt pocket. “Krystal Tanner,” he muttered, making a note. “Ten-fifteen. You’re not on the force, so how is it I know you?”

She was surprised he’d remember her, even vaguely. Then again, powers of observation went back to his cop-ness. “I’m an assistant evidence technician for the city. Faith Corbett.”

She fisted her right hand, hoping he wouldn’t want to shake. The man was intense enough without risking direct contact.

“Yeah, that’s it.” He nodded and, to her relief, kept his own hand busy taking notes. “You’re one of Boulanger’s day shift, working the desk, right? Sometimes you make pickups and drop-offs at the station. So Corbett, how is it you know the deceased?”

Poor Krystal. One minute she’d been dancing, drinking, celebrating life. Then she’d headed for the ladies’ room and…God.
The deceased.

“She’s my roommate.”

Chopin stopped writing and angled his wide gaze back to her, brows furrowed. “Oh. I’m…uh…”

Why was it some men had trouble expressing even the most conventional courtesy, lest it betray some emotion? Faith saved him the effort. “Thanks.”

“So, Bernie, you went charging after this killer and…?”

Had he just called her Bernie? Unwilling to be distracted, Faith repeated the story as quickly as she could without looking too suspicious, increasingly aware of him studying her as he listened and took notes. She felt as if he could see every hair on her arms, every piece of grit embedded in her tummy, every scrape on her knees. It wasn’t sexual—there was a corpse at their feet, after all. Well…not any more sexual than any man staring at a woman’s bare tummy, anyway. But such intense scrutiny made her uncomfortable.

Like he could maybe
see
just how weird she was.

“You didn’t get a good look at him?” Chopin demanded, when she finished. At least he hadn’t interrupted her.

“Just the bottom of his feet.”

“And you didn’t ask anybody if they saw him leave the storeroom?” His mouth had gone back to threatening. His questions were starting to feel like little shoves of energy.

“No, everyone was distracted by finding Krystal.”

“And how was your relationship with the vic?”

Faith’s mouth fell open. “Why are you questioning me as if…oh.” But she knew the answer to that, too. “The first person on the scene’s always the first suspect, right?”

“Yeah.” Chopin didn’t even bother to apologize for his suspicions. But he did include her in another mocking grin.

“Nothing personal, hon. It’s one of those hard truths, like ‘everybody lies.’ Statistics would put the odds on either you or her boyfriend-slash-husband.”

“She didn’t have a boyfriend or a husband.”

“Could I see your hands, please?”
Shove.

Faith spread her bare palms for him. Only when she felt his interest spike—a minute change of his temperature, a sharp inhale through his teeth—did she notice the pink lines where she’d pulled herself up through the ceiling, the bleeding cut from that exposed nail. “Oh…” she whispered.

For a moment she felt dizzy with the very real possibility that she might be charged with this crime. So much for keeping a low profile!

“Don’t sweat it. If you’d done the deed, you’d have lines on the sides of your hands, too. Here—” to her relief, he indicated where he meant with his pen, not his finger “—and here. Besides, she’s fashion-model tall—pushing six feet? I’m no M.E., but I’m betting the ligature marks on her neck would be a lot lower if you did her. Unless you somehow made her kneel first, which, how could you without imminent threat, and I don’t see anyplace you could’ve hidden a gun. Or much of a knife. Nice shirt, there.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” said Faith, fully aware it was her own way of shoving back.

“’Cause of my fashion sense, or ’cause I’m not hauling you down to the station yet?” Detective Chopin looked less exhausted as he eyed her. “Usually I’m the brawn of the outfit. Right, Butch?”

Strike three.

“Now, Roy,” demanded Chopin’s partner from the doorway. Here stood the sweet, trustworthy man whose arrival Faith had feared even beyond the slap-in-the-face energy of the younger Roy. “What are you doing harassing this here helpful citizen? Sugar over vinegar, son. Sugar over vinegar. How do you do, Miss? I am Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson. I am most terribly sorry to have to meet you under such clearly distressing circumstances, and I apologize for my partner’s appalling lack of manners.”

“He’s the Good Cop,” muttered Chopin amiably, still taking notes. Which made him what?

Butch, who had more than twenty years on his thirty-ish partner, extended both a genuine smile, which made his dark eyes crinkle at the corners, and his worn brown hand. There was no way Faith could refuse to take the latter. Not without rousing suspicion and requiring more conversation, which—around Butch Jefferson, anyway—she wanted even less than touching.

With a determined smile, she allowed Butch to envelop her hand in his.

It wasn’t anywhere near as unsettling as touching his partner would have been. Butch’s personal energy was slow and easy, like the Mississippi in the summertime. The flashes of possible information that accompanied his touch—
widowed, volunteered with Big Brothers, loved beer and boiled crawfish
—he released it all so freely, it didn’t carry the unsettling jolt of so many other people.

“Faith Corbett,” she said—the first time she’d ever given this particular cop her real name.
Please don’t recognize me.

“From evidence,” added Bad Cop, who proceeded to take over most of the talking.

The older detective didn’t seem to realize he and Faith had spoken before, much less that it had had nothing to do with her job with the crime-scene unit.

Then again, she’d chosen Butch Jefferson last year specifically because he didn’t have a terribly suspicious nature—not for a homicide detective, anyway. She’d always used a fake accent, the dozen-or-so times she’d telephoned him. And she’d given him a fake name, Madame Cassandra. But the information she’d passed on as Detective Jefferson’s anonymous contact with the psychic community had always been real.

As long as the information stayed anonymous, Faith could remain useful. But if he recognized her voice, or learned the tips came from her…

Well, either he’d see her like Chopin had—young and blond and thus somehow unreliable—or he’d see her like the few other people who had learned her secret.

Freak.

Worse, they would want to know how she did it. And that, not even Faith could tell them.

She honestly didn’t know what she was.

But whatever she was, keeping quiet about it was one of the few things her nervous mother had gotten right.
Look what happened to Krystal.

The thought caught Faith by surprise. How could Krystal’s murder have anything to do with the tarot reader’s special abilities?

She stiffened, increasingly aware of the gurgling drain beneath Roy Chopin’s surprisingly accurate narrative of her night. It would keep running until the night shift for the crime-scene unit arrived.

Running water?

She might only do glorified clerical work for the crime-scene unit, so far. She might only be an assistant crime-scene technician. But she knew the water had to mean something.

What?

Amidst the Bourbon Street crowd that lingered into the night, attracted by flashing lights and yellow police tape, He closed His eyes to savor His…His
amplification.

Strength. Meaning. Confidence. Yes!

That last time hadn’t been a fluke, after all.

He stood for what may have been hours, too powerful to tire of it, relishing how helpless the so-called authorities looked. Patrolmen had come and gone, as had an ambulance. Now the photographers and the crime-scene investigators, the night shift, had arrived. But He waited.

He wanted to see the detectives leave as ignorant as when they’d arrived. Stupid, arrogant suits. He wanted to gloat.

When finally they emerged, a younger man with an old black partner, they didn’t seem as helpless as He’d hoped. The younger one looked dusty enough to have been clambering around the crawlspace over the ceiling.

But they didn’t look satisfied, either. Or done.

Both seemed distracted by the blond bitch who’d chased Him from His kill before he was done. The one with the green tank top and the miniskirt. He didn’t like that one at all.

“Let me or Roy get you a cab now, Miss Faith,” He heard the black man say. “Gang activity’s gotten worse, not far north of here. No need for you to take chances.”

“No,” said the girl, all but backing away. “Really. My roommates will walk with me. We’ll be safe together.”

The trio who shuffled nearer, red-eyed and lost, looked as if they needed more protection than they would provide. Even the man among them had the posture of a girl.

Those three looked familiar—from Jackson Square.

More psychics?

Even as He thought that, as His breath fell shallow and His heartbeat sped and his groin tightened, the one called Miss Faith suddenly turned her head. Her unnerving green gaze raked across the remaining onlookers as if she knew what she was looking for.

He leaned back just enough to hide behind the shoulders of some good ol’boy. When He dared look again, she’d gone. She seemed to deliberately ignore the detectives staring after her. She was too busy dividing her attention between her friends and the street around them, like a little blond bodyguard.