Death Magic (16 page)

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Authors: Eileen Wilks

BOOK: Death Magic
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“Your man Croft’s supposed to be handling that. Go ahead and check for lingering magic elsewhere.”
Maybe the asshole was capable of learning. Lily glanced at Hannah.
Her mouth tipped down unhappily. “Okay, but I’ll unbutton him. You got more of those baby wipes?”
While Lily cleaned her hand, Hannah knelt on the other side of the body and bent low, studying the starched landscape of Bixton’s shirt. After a moment she grunted, motioned to one of the other techs, and got tweezers and an evidence bag from him. “Looks like one of Bixton’s,” she said, depositing a single short, white hair in the Baggie, “but you never know.”
After that, Hannah undid four buttons—enough for Lily to slide her hand in between cloth and cool, clammy flesh. Bixton turned out to have a hairy chest. That surprised her, somehow.
“One spot where the death magic is concentrated,” she said after a careful grope. “Over the heart. It thins out evenly as I move my hand away from the center of the chest. I didn’t touch the wound, but did touch about two inches from it.” She withdrew her hand and twisted to grab her tote.
“What does that tell you?” Drummond demanded. “Where the magic is and isn’t. What does that mean?”
Lily scrubbed her hands with another wipe as she stood. It wasn’t touching a DB that made her feel unclean. It was the death magic. “First, that he wasn’t killed by death magic directly. It was used to power the spell that killed him, not as a sort of blunt force trauma all on its own.”
“You can do that?” His eyebrows lifted in surprise and for a brief moment he didn’t sound pissed. “Just blast someone with death magic and it kills them?”
“I can’t,” she said dryly, and started back toward him, avoiding the trail she’d marked with Popsicle sticks. “And I’m really damn glad to find out this perp can’t, either.” The only time she’d run up against that kind of killing, it had been done by a madwoman using an ancient staff created by the Great Bitch. The woman was dead, the staff destroyed, but presumably
she
could make another one if she wanted. “That the magic was heaviest over his heart suggests the spell targeted his heart specifically.”
Drummond rubbed his jaw, eyebrows down. “Brooks’s heart attack was caused by a potion, not a spell. Never heard that death magic was involved, either.”
“As far as I know it wasn’t, but I’m not part of that investigation. The heart is a popular target for killing spells. I had a perp a couple months ago who used a heart-stopping spell delivered by a blade.” She frowned, slid her foot a few feet to one side. She wasn’t finding a second trail of death magic. Shouldn’t the perp have leaked it coming and going?
Not necessarily, she realized. Once the spell was discharged, there probably hadn’t been anything to leak. The odd thing was that it had leaked in the first place. Could be the perp had charged himself or herself with death magic rather than charging the blade, sending the power through the dagger when he or she struck.
Was that likely? She needed to call Cullen.
“Huh. Guess that’s why you’re here. You’ve dealt with this crap before.” He looked past her. “Hannah, it’s all yours. I’ve got people to talk to. Let me know what you find. Doug, Agent Yu, with me.”
He led her and the sandy-haired man into the foyer and from there through the door on the left. Turned out that wasn’t the coat closet, like she’d thought, but a small study. Lots of books, a single small window. Desk with the usual computer stuff and tidy stacks of files and papers.
He stopped, turned, faced her. “I do not like having my direct orders ignored.”
“Yeah? I don’t like being treated like an idiot.”
“The difference here is that I’m in charge. You aren’t. This is Doug Mullins. He’s second-up as far as I’m concerned. You’ll take orders from him, too.”
Mullins was a squat little man with pale skin, pale eyes, and a wide mouth that probably altered his face a lot when he smiled. If he ever smiled. Or spoke. So far she hadn’t heard one word from him. “Fine,” she said, and held out her hand. “Good to meet you, Agent Mullins.”
He studied her outstretched hand about the way he’d examine a wad of gum stuck to his shoe.
Drummond snorted. “Don’t be a pussy, Doug. Shake the nice agent’s hand so she knows you aren’t a big, bad witch.”
Reluctantly he did. Damp palm, short fingers, no magic. Wedding ring on the left hand, plain gold. Lily looked at Drummond. “Do you ignore the expertise of everyone on your team? Or is it just the women you discount? Or the ones with a Gift?”
Drummond rubbed his jaw again. After a moment he nodded. “Point. I should’ve asked what the hell you were doing before I told you to stop doing it. But from here on in, if I say hop on one foot, you start hopping and keep one damn foot off the damn floor. Or I’ll get someone else from the woo-woo side to handle that part of the investigation.”
Lily didn’t buy the threat. Croft had assigned her to the case. Drummond couldn’t unassign her . . . but he could make it hard to do her job. “I’ll follow orders. Sir. But I’m not good at hopping for no damn reason.”
“Tough. Tell me about death magic. Tell it like I don’t know a damn thing. You won’t be far off.”
“It’s magic sourced through ritual killing.” He had to know that much. Every cop in the country knew that much. “The practitioners use the power of the transition—”
“What do you mean, practitioners?”
“It takes more than one person to perform the ritual. The only known exception is a wraith, which both creates and subsists on death magic, no ritual needed.”
“Any chance we’ve got a wraith on our hands?”
“How much detail do you want?”
“Put the detail in your report. Give me a yes or no now.”
“There’s a chance, but it’s extremely slim.” First because wraiths were really, really hard to make. Second because a wraith wouldn’t have left so much tasty death magic behind on that dagger. Wraiths ate the stuff.
“We’ve got a human perp, then.”
“Perps. Five is considered the minimum necessary for a death magic ritual. One for each of the four compass points, and one to direct the ritual and do the actual killing. In all of the known rituals, the killer uses a blade, usually to cut the victim’s throat. The ritual allows the person in charge to absorb or contain the power released when a soul transitions from life to whatever comes next.”
Turned out Mullins did have a voice—a gravelly baritone at odds with his size. “Soul?” He loaded plenty of scorn into the word. “You believe in souls?”
“You don’t like the word, pick another one. Something persists after the body dies. We don’t know how long it persists or what happens to it, not in any definitive way, but souls are fact, not belief.”
Mullins’s chin jutted pugnaciously. “You can’t prove that.”
“Death magic itself proves something other than the purely physical exists.”
“All that crap about transitions! You sound like a TV psychic. Obviously death magic uses the life energy of the victims, not some holy-baloney transition.”
“What’s life energy?”
“The energy it takes to keep a body alive.”
She snorted. “Talk about an undefinable term! If you stick to the purely physical, a subsistence diet consists of twelve hundred calories. That’s the equivalent of about five Btus. If all a death magic practitioner could access was the purely physical, he’d do a hell of a lot better figuring out how to eat the energy from a blow-dryer.”
Drummond broke in impatiently. “Enough metaphysics. To make death magic, someone’s got to kill someone else. That’s where we start.”
“It’s still death magic when the sacrifice is an animal,” Lily said, “but people give the bigger bang. I suspect our perps needed a human death, but . . .” She drummed her fingers on her thigh. “I need to consult an expert.”
“You’re supposed to be the damn expert.”
“You wouldn’t ask a blood splatter specialist to analyze fiber. I’m a touch sensitive. I can’t work magic, so I’ve never learned spellcasting. I need to talk to someone who knows it all—casting, theory, history.”
“You got someone in mind? One of your Unit people?”
“No, he’s a consultant.” Cullen Seabourne, lupus and sorcerer. Sorcerers were rare enough that some people didn’t think they existed. A lupus sorcerer was supposed to be impossible.
Cullen did like to break the rules. “He’s got clearance,” Lily added. “The Unit uses him often. I’ll need you to approve his fee.”
He grunted. “I need your request in writing—name, contact information, fee scale. Did Croft tell you—” His phone buzzed. He took the call, said he’d be right there, and told Mullins, “You brief her. I need to talk to Armistead.”
“All of it?”
“Hell, yeah. She has to know why she can’t shoot her mouth off.” He left, closing the door behind him.
Mullins looked at her. “I hear you’ve got homicide experience.”
“That’s right.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.” He pulled a small pad from an inside pocket on his jacket and looked over his notes. “Bixton was a man of regular habits. Up at seven every weekday, according to the maid. Name’s Sheila Navarette—unmarried, thirty-two, lives in. She has his breakfast ready at seven thirty every weekday, and that’s when he arrived to eat it today. Eggs and toast, coffee, apple juice. While he ate, she ran the vacuum downstairs—she does that every damn day—then went to wash up the breakfast things. Passed him on her way to the kitchen about eight fifteen. She thinks he went to his office then because that was his routine, but she didn’t actually see.
“So she cleaned up the kitchen and went upstairs, where she made the bed, tidied up, and collected the laundry. She took that down to the basement. That’s where she was at between nine thirty and ten when the doorbell rang. The doorbell rings on all three floors—basement, first floor, and second floor. She answered the door and showed the visitor in to the senator here in the living room. After determining that they didn’t want coffee or tea, she returned to the basement, where she remained, ironing the senator’s shirts, until she went upstairs to fix lunch around noon and discovered the body.”
He looked up from his notes. There was an odd, mocking gleam in his eyes. “That’s the only visitor the senator had this morning.”
“Are you saying we already have a suspect? Or at least a witness. You have a description? A name?”
“Both.” He consulted his notes again ostentatiously. “Thin, average height, wore a dark gray suit with a white shirt. Pale blue tie. He was not carrying a briefcase or laptop or other object. She estimates his age as between forty and fifty. Dark hair and eyes, large nose, glasses. She hadn’t seen him there before and he didn’t have an appointment, but the senator saw him anyway.”
“And the name?”
Mullins smiled thinly. “Ruben Brooks.”
ELEVEN
 
 
AT
eight twenty that night Rule heard a car in the alley, followed by the sound of the garage door opening out back. He was in the kitchen, his laptop on the table, his ass in one chair, his feet in another, wearing his headset. “Okay, Andor, thanks. I appreciate your not asking us to wait for the All-Clan.”
“Chad is unemployed at the moment. It is no difficulty for him to fly to D.C.”
“He’ll stay here, of course, and Wythe will pay his airfare.” The Rho of Szøs clan snorted. “You speak for Wythe now as well as Leidolf and Nokolai?”
“My father speaks for Nokolai,” Rule said mildly. He listened to the car pull into the garage, glad that Lily hadn’t worked too late. She’d texted him a couple hours ago not to wait supper on her, which could have meant she’d be home at eight or at midnight. Or later. “No one speaks for Wythe at the moment, but my
nadia
and the Wythe Council agree that the clan will reimburse others for expenses incurred in this search. Let Walt know how much and who the check should go to—you or your young man—and he’ll send it immediately. You have Walt’s number?”
“Szøs will pay Chad’s expenses,” Andor said gruffly. “It is not good for a clan to be without a Rho. This would be true at any time, but in time of war, we do not bicker over a few dollars.” Andor paused. “Of course, if Chad does turn out to be capable of holding the Wythe mantle, he will no longer be Szøs. Wythe will owe us reparation for the loss of a clan member.”

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