Djinn and Tonic (2 page)

There’s no way to ask her about it without sounding absolutely drunkenly idiotic so I keep quiet, but I can’t stop staring at her, can’t stop watching the gentle, subtle fluttering of her hair in the stillness and silence of the dimly lit bar.
 

I finish my drink and hand my credit card to Leila, who processes the bill. I sign the slip with a sloppy signature, adding a generous tip. Then I accept one last drink. My fourth? Fifth? I don’t even know; I’ve lost count, and I don’t really give a shit.
 

“Okay, so it’s like this,” I say. “A DPD patrol officer responds to a call from the MGM, they found a dead body in the parking garage. The responding officer shows up on the scene, takes one look, and calls for a detective. So I roll up, thinking it’ll be just another dead body with few or no leads. Easy enough, either you find evidence and make the collar, or you don’t, and it goes cold. Get a lot of both. Only, what I find when I get on scene is like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. It’s not a dead body, it’s…just bones. Charred bones, like very literally burnt to a goddamned crisp. Blackened almost to ashes. No weapon on the scene, and no cameras in that part of the garage. Nothing to go on. No way to even identify the body, I thought at first. But it turns out the vic was ex-military, and the teeth were intact enough to get an ID based on dental records. Poor dead fucker was a guy named Ben. So we have an ID on the vic, but that’s it. Because there’s no other evidence of any kind, except a pool of blood a few feet away, and four shell casings from a nine-millimeter pistol. Not much to go on. No eyewitnesses, no other calls that could be connected.”

“So what did you do?”

The room is wobbling a little as Leila shuts off the lights in the kitchen, locks the register drawer in the office, and sits down next to me with a plastic cup of Coke. She’s sitting pretty close to me, her shoulder brushing mine, her thigh nudging mine as she absently bounces her knee. I can smell rum in the Coke and on her breath. I’m aware of every point of contact between us. Her presence grounds me in some undefinable way, keeping my spinning world centered.

“I investigated the victim, Ben. Ex-Marine, nothing big on his military record, no commendations but no demerits either. Just an average guy. But then I find out that he’s got a girlfriend, a girl named Miriam. And she’s nowhere to be found. Further conversations with those who knew Ben revealed that he had a mean streak, liked to knock Miriam around a good bit, and that Miriam in turn had a history with dating abusive assholes. That gives me motive for Miriam as the killer, but shit, I still got nothing whatsoever on cause of death.”

“I thought you said the body was burned?” Leila asks, then sips at her rum and Coke.

“Yeah, but
how
was the body burned? House fire? Car fire? Set on fire intentionally? None of those fit the evidence, not even setting the guy on fire with accelerant. Because there is no evidence. No physical clues of any kind. No weapon, no sign of struggle, no sign of fire anywhere else, no reports of someone on fire anywhere within, shit, hundreds of miles. Nothing. The garage itself is clean, too. No scorch marks on the ceiling or walls or the floor or any of the surrounding cars. Nothing.
 

“But wait, it gets weirder. The ME tells me that in order to burn a human body to the point this one was, so there’s nothing left but bones, and even those were toasted to ash—to burn a human body, flesh, muscles, skeleton, hair, clothes, personal effects, you need the kind of heat used to cremate a body. That’s fourteen, fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Insane
heat. Flame throwers don’t give off that kind of heat. And even if it could have been a flame thrower—which isn’t something you can just go out and buy, even on the black market—or an accelerant like charcoal grill starter fluid or gasoline, a dude gets set on fire, he freaks out. It’s a slow, horrible way to die. I know, I’ve seen it. They run around screaming, roll on the ground, bump into cars, jump out of the fucking window, anything. But forensics told me the body died where it fell, the way the bones were arranged. It looked, according to the evidence, that the vic was somehow exposed to unnaturally extreme temperatures and was dead within seconds. But…that’s not possible. There is no weapon, no technology, nothing in nature short of the fucking sun that can produce that kind of heat. It’s just not possible.”

Leila doesn’t answer right away, and there’s a tight, sour expression on her face, like she doesn’t like what she’s hearing. “So then what?”
   

“So then I keep digging. Look for Miriam. She’s the only suspect I could find. No one else had any reason to want Ben dead. No gambling debts, no gang affiliations, no enemies, not even a bar fight. Just his battered, abused girlfriend. And there’s a lot on her, motive-wise. A nurse at Mercy Hospital tells me Miriam was brought in a few days before Ben’s body was discovered. Someone drove by an alley, saw her on the ground. Thought she was dead, she was so badly beaten. The nurse was emphatic that Miriam should have died. Ribs broken, lungs punctured, fractured cheekbone, fractured skull, severely concussed, bleeding from everywhere. She was brutalized, Leila. So there’s the second impossibility: she got up and walked out that same day,
with
the guy who put her in the hospital in the first place. Shouldn’t have been conscious at all, should have had months of surgeries, healing, recovery, physical therapy. But she walks out on her own two feet hours later.”

Leila isn’t looking at me now, running a thumbnail in the Styrofoam of her cup, making abstract patterns. “That is weird.”

She knows more than she’s letting on
, that’s my impression. I shake it off, and keep explaining, because I’ve already gone this far, so why not?

“Then there’s the lady who saw a weird glow out her living room window late one night. She went to the window, peeked out the blinds of her second story apartment. She claims—she
swears
—she saw a girl walking down Eleven Mile Road, glowing. She wasn’t senile, wasn’t suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s or even boredom. No medications that might cause hallucinations. So she must have seen something, right? I have no reason to disbelieve her. So then I have to believe her, right? But…a glowing person? Glowing like she had the sun inside her, the witness insisted. Then a motorcycle shows up, swerves, crashes, and the glowing girl goes to the rider of the motorcycle, a guy I find out later is named Jack, who was also at the hospital, begging Miriam to go home with
him
, not Ben.
 

“So go back to more weirdness: She has a guy who clearly cares about her, who knows she’s got this asshole hanging around who likes to hit her, but she doesn’t leave with him, she leaves with asshole? What the fuck? That’s what I’m thinking. But the motorcycle crash, the glowing girl, who I’m assuming is Miriam, based on purely my own intuition, she glows even brighter, so bright the old woman who saw all this said she had to look away because the glow was so blinding.
 

“And then, of course there’s more. A fancy sports car shows up, a big guy gets out, looks angry, and this is Ben I think. Miriam faces him, they argue, and Miriam—again, according to the eighty-six-year-old eyewitness—catches on fire. But doesn’t burn. Like she
was
fire, the lady claimed. Not like she was
on fire
, like someone tossed her a match—and get this, it was raining buckets at this point anyway—but like she was made of fire.”
 

I lift a hand palm-up, shrug, and shake my head. “Okay, so the fancy sports car. Legally registered to Ben, but…no proof of sale. It was a Maserati, a car worth a quarter million dollars. And this was a guy who worked at a bar and lived off his USMC savings. No way he’d ever afford a Maserati. No way. Yet it was registered to him. No title in his apartment or in the car, no transfer of funds to show he’d purchased it, no importer or high-end dealer in the surrounding four states with a record of that car’s VIN in their inventory. Also highly bizarre, but not really material to the murder. It was found in the casino’s parking garage, several levels up from where the body was found. So it wasn’t stolen or stripped for parts, despite its value.”

Leila glances at me, then back to her cup. “I’m starting to see why you’re having a hard time with this case. Nothing adds up.”

“No,” I agree. “Nothing adds up. Until Miriam herself shows up at the precinct one day and tells me the whole story. An abusive ex-boyfriend, how Ben saved her, they dated, and then he joined the Corps and went to Afghanistan, came back a different man. Meeting Jack, ending up in the hospital, leaving with Ben, getting kidnapped by Ben after she finally had enough of him—did I mention Ben had another girlfriend who Miriam hadn’t known about? Yeah, he did. Nice guy, right?
 

“And then she gets to the confrontation in the parking garage. Ben kidnapped her, brought her to the casino, was going to rape her. She escaped, ran, he caught up to her in the garage. Jack showed up about the same time, but he wouldn’t say
how
he’d found them…. So there was a big showdown. Ben had a gun, Jack fought him for it, Jack got shot, Miriam got shot…but neither of them died, or needed medical attention. And Miriam killed Ben. She said as much, in so many words. It was self-defense, she claimed.”

Leila’s voice is low and even. “How did she kill him? And how did they both survive being shot? Did she explain that?”

I nod. “She sure did. She healed Jack, because she has magical powers. And then she killed Ben because she’s—what was the word she used? A djinni. She claimed she was sort of a mythical or mystical being called a djinni, and that fire was a integral part of her essence. Now, aside from the fact that her explanation fit all the evidence, it sounded like delusional horse shit. Right? Magical powers? The ability to heal gunshot wounds, to heal herself of brutal injuries, and oh yeah, she also claimed the Maserati was her doing too, because a djinni is where we get the myths about genies, right?”
 

I glance at Leila, and see that she’s gone stock-still, expression blank. I watch her as I finish my explanation. “So of course I’m openly and obviously skeptical. But then she closed her eyes, and when she opened them…I don’t know how to explain this part. Her eyes were flame. As if the sun lived inside her soul. As if…like the old lady said, and as Miriam herself claimed, as if she was made of fire on an elemental level. I
saw
it, Leila. With my own eyes. And then…and then this little flame, the size of a candle flame, it comes out of her fucking fingertips, dances across my desk, onto my palm. It was fire, and it was…
alive.
On my hand. I felt it. It burned, it hurt, but it didn’t consume me. It was just there. And it
looked
at me. I swear it did. But…that’s impossible, right? Yet I saw it, and I can’t forget it. I’ll never forget what I saw, but I can’t explain it. Not to anyone. You probably think I’m crazy.”
 

I look at her, and instead of laughing at me or telling me how nuts I am, she snags a packet of matches from a glass on the bar, folds the lid over to reveal the striking surface, lights a match, and watches it burn down toward her fingertips. Before it touches her skin it suddenly extinguishes, as if puffed out by a gust of wind.

She glances at me sideways to see if I notice, and I wonder if she’s hoping I did notice, or hoping I didn’t?
 

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” is all she says. A long moment of silence, during which I should ask her why she doesn’t think I’m crazy. I don’t ask her this, and she sighs. “So what are you going to do? Is the case still open?”
 

“Yeah, it is still open,” I say, avoiding the question of my sanity. “Technically,
legally
, what Miriam did was manslaughter. She should’ve reported Ben to the authorities and let them deal with him. But, speaking as
one
of those authorities, by the time she did, and we had investigated, he would have vanished. He would’ve disappeared before we could have caught him and, honestly, there are just so many other more pressing cases to investigate that a domestic abuse complaint is a lower priority. I’m not saying this is right or okay in any way—abuse in any form is despicable. I don’t mean it that way at all. I just mean that with all the drug cases and murders and shit like that, her case would just get…lost in the shuffle. And although I’m not supposed to say this, all the evidence points to Ben being an asshole who deserved
exactly
what he got.” I drain the last of my drink and chew on an ice cube. “I know what I
should
do, what I’m supposed to do, according to the most correct definition of my job, but I just don’t think I can. I became a cop to get justice for people. There were other reasons, but that was the biggest one. In the case of Miriam, she did the only thing she could in those circumstances, and I just can’t make myself arrest her for it. It’s like...ethics versus morals, you know?”

Leila nods, bumping her shoulder against mine, and I pretend like the quick, innocent touch doesn’t send a bolt of lightning through me. “Hey, all you can do is what you think is right, you know?
 

Leila has a ring on her right hand that she twists absently. I remember the first time I met her, the way she’d pause before answering a question, and how she often fiddled with that ring, how I thought she was a woman with a story to tell. I have that feeling about her now more than ever. She didn’t balk at my story in the slightest, despite how crazy it sounded even as I told it. In fact, she looked like she was finding it all too believable, and disturbing for that very reason.
 

She twists the ring again, then glances at me. “So you’re gonna close the case?”
 

“Yeah, I think I am,” I say. “I’ll tell the captain there’s not enough to go on. And, honestly, there isn’t. There’s no physical evidence tying Miriam to Ben’s death, and even if there might be plenty of motive to pin on her, there’s no way to make a charge stick. It would waste everyone’s time and money, and just cause more trouble for Miriam. And she’s had enough of that, if you ask me.”