I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (21 page)

Dayna Chrissie, the leading Crime Scene
Analyst for the LAPD, enjoys nothing more than finding the one clue
that can solve a crime.

The day she finds a golden medallion on a
body that’s been dumped at a downtown construction site, she
doesn’t think much about it. Until that medallion transports her to
the magical kingdom of Andeluvia. Dayna discovers that she’s been
summoned to solve the murder of the realm’s king, before war breaks
out between Andeluvia and the Centaur Kingdoms.

When the trail of evidence leads from
Andeluvia, back to LA, Dayna must bring all of her forensic skill
to bear in order to solve the case. The price of failure? A war
that will kill millions and devastate both lands.

Hope she works best under pressure.

Just my rotten luck.

In the movies, when crime scene analysts
arrive at the site of a murder, it’s usually deep in some dark,
woody glen. Or, if the murder takes place in an urban area, cops
from film-land know enough to hang around on the edges, quiet and
respectful like mourners at a funeral. Call it in, set up the
yellow tape, and get-the-heck-outta-the-way so my work space stays
pristine as fresh-fallen snow.

That no-touchee mojo wasn’t working for me
today.

I couldn’t get something as simple as a body
lying up by the Hollywood reservoir, or down one of Topanga’s blind
slot canyons. The crime scene I’d been called in to work had enough
cops snooping around to put on a St. Patrick’s Day parade.

I parked the van at the curb and squinted
through the grimy windshield and the glare of the noonday sun,
trying to make sense of the site. The body of an adult white male
had been discovered lying atop a heap of rubble, smack in the
middle of a newly demolished city block.

The rectangular piece of property was an
ankle-turning warren of shattered concrete blocks, tangled steel
rebar, and patches of common mallow. The weed’s flowers filled the
air with a dusty, nose-tickling scent like ragweed pollen.

California low-rise buildings bordered three
sides of the block. Two were clinker-brick apartment buildings that
sported rickety metal cage balconies jammed to bursting with
curious onlookers. The third was a decrepit office building that
some thoughtful ethnic Angeleno had decorated with a multicolored
spray-paint mural of the Aztec God, Quetzalcoatl.

Quetzo appeared to be giving everyone at the
crime scene the finger, but then I’ve never been good at
interpreting urban art.

I got out of the van, went around back, and
threw open the rear doors to finish suiting up. I slipped a
disposable jumpsuit-style jacket and pants over my civilian
clothes, and then sat on the rear bumper. A dull summery warmth
radiated from the metal. I hoped that the plastic pants wouldn’t
melt in the heat.

I tucked my long black locks into a dingy
gray hair net for that oh-so-attractive cafeteria lady look and
then jammed the lot under a dark blue Dodgers baseball cap.
Finally, I kicked off my flats and slipped into a pair of zip tack
shoes that I’d nicknamed my ‘stompy gothic boots of doom’. They
wouldn’t win any awards on the fashion runway, but they’d keep
corpse juice out of my socks.

The shoes also gave me almost three more
inches in height. I’m already pretty tall, at least for a woman,
but when you’re dealing with cops, men who each think they’re as
tough as Clint Eastwood and hung like Mr. Ed, every extra inch
counts. Don’t ask me why. I think it’s a dominance thing. We really
are still primates at heart.

I grabbed a heavy aluminum case by its
textured plastic handle, heaved it up to my side, and slammed the
van doors shut. I stepped over the worn side of the curb and picked
my way through the mallow flowers and gravel.

Broken glass and dry twigs snapped under my
feet. The cops milling about the scene looked up and watched me
approach. They looked unsure as to whether I was there to help
clear things up.

Or just muddy the waters a little more.

This wasn’t like a bunch of construction
workers ogling a tight-bloused secretary on her way to work.
Believe me,
nobody
looks sexy in crime scene gear. But show
me a beat cop, and I’ll show you a frustrated wanna-be detective.
If there’s less than three cops at a murder scene, they’ll sidle up
to you to offer their pet theory on how it all happened. Three or
more, and they’ll hang around, hoping to overhear something they
can gossip about to their buddies back at the station.

The debris formed a gentle slope of loose
material that’d have been hell to walk through in my flats—let
alone high heels—but my stompy boots handled it just fine. One of
the guys separated himself from the mass of the LAPD’s finest and
waved as he came towards me. Hazel eyes, close-cropped hair, and a
friendly face that shone through a perpetual haze of beard
stubble.

I recognized Alanzo Esteban from working a
couple of these joyful little scenes. One of the few detectives in
Homicide who I actually liked. Judging by the bashful way he snuck
glances at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, the feeling was
more than mutual.

“Why, señora del acero,” he said with a
smile. He wasn’t a good looking man, but his warm Latino accent
sent a thrill down my spine. “So good of you to join us,
Dayna.”

“Yeah, but I’m sure no lady of steel, no
matter what you say,” I replied. I fought to keep a grin off my
face and lost. “Fill me in. What the hell’s going on here,
Alanzo?”

Esteban had worked with me enough to know
that I wasn’t asking about the crime scene, at least not yet. I
wanted to know why so many cops were wandering over the site,
making my job harder and more miserable by the minute.

“What’s going on is that some
pendejo
dumped our dead guy in the middle of this demolition zone,” he
said. “Construction’s due to start here on one of the mayor’s pet
projects. So you have politicos falling all over themselves to jump
into everyone’s soup. And when the Chief heard…”

I held up a hand. “He sent McClatchy out,
didn’t he?”

He nodded. I let out a groan.

“Esteban, I’m not done with you yet!” came a
harsh voice. We traded a glance that spoke volumes.

“Speak of the devil,” I said.

I followed Esteban across the tumbled surface
of concrete and rebar. The sun beat down on the exposed city block
and I pulled my cap brim down as far as it could go. Perspiration
already stained the inside of my jumpsuit. No wonder I was always
able to keep the flab off my hips and the cottage cheese off the
thighs. I carried my personal one-size-fits-all sauna around with
me. I licked a stray bead of sweat from my lips and came away with
the gamy taste of body salt.

We came up to a barrel-chested, red faced man
busy shouting orders at the officers towards the far end of the
field. His salt and pepper hair was balding, his jowls were
threatening to sag, and he clenched a red and black-tipped
toothpick between his teeth. A snazzy gray pinstripe suit tented
over his wide frame. Office wear for field work always marks you as
one of two things: a rank amateur, or a politically appointed desk
jockey.

Deputy Chief Bob McClatchy fell into both
categories.

“Esteban, see what you can do,” McClatchy
said, with a wave of one hand. “You know, tell these scene techies
to hurry up. We’ve got real work to do.”

“As it happens, you can pass the message on
directly,” Esteban said, indicating me with a nod. McClatchy
squinted at me like Esteban had brought him a new kind of bug to
look at.

“Dayna Chrissie, Office of the Medical
Examiner,” I said. I put my hand out. McClatchy stared
uncomprehendingly at my open palm for a moment, as if I were
offering him a dead fish. Then the automatic courtesy I was
counting on kicked in, and he gingerly shook my hand. “We’ve met
before, in passing. Phone booth shooting in Northridge.”

“I remember,” he said. “Not you. The case.
Took your people eight days to go over a crime scene the size of a
shower stall. Real pain in the ass, if you’ll pardon my
French.”

“I pardon and parlez French,” I said wryly.
“But crime scene processing is always a pain in the ass if you do
it right. You don’t just run in, scoop up a handful of DNA, and
boom, you’re finished. And you’re going to make it harder for me to
do my work if you keep using beat cops to comb the area for
evidence.”

He scowled at me. From the pattern of
wrinkles on his face, I could tell that the scowl was one of his
favorite expressions. Maybe he practiced in front of a mirror every
morning before he went to work.

“Fine, anything to speed this mess up.” He
spoke to one of the nearby officers and sent the man off to round
up the boys in blue. He shifted the red and black toothpick in his
mouth and then jabbed a finger at me. “You’re going to perform your
initial report with me present, got that, Chrissie?”

Esteban coughed. McClatchy stared at him.

I pointed at the Dodgers insignia on my
baseball cap. “I’m not LAPD, McClatchy. I’m a non-com private
contractor, like most of your Crime Scene Analysts.”

“A lot of the M.E. offices are moving that
way,” Esteban added. “Gives people like Dayna here more flexibility
while it saves the city money.”

“Well,” McClatchy huffed, “I still want to be
there—”

“Then come along,” I said brusquely.

I turned away and started hiking towards the
yellow and black scene tape markers. I heard the two men follow in
my wake, but I didn’t turn to talk with either of them. My meager
store of patience had run bone dry. When you come down to it, I
think that’s why I got into this line of work in the first place.
Compared to the living, dead people are so much more agreeable, in
no small part because they don’t try to pull rank—they just smell
it.

Esteban stepped quickly to keep up at my
side. He said, “You got lucky. Hector Reyes got here ten minutes
before you did. Before the rest of the local police division
arrived.”

“Really? That
is
good news.” Hector
was the best crime scene photographer in the department. If he got
here before too many extra footprints were set down, we’d have more
to work with than a smeary blur of shoe marks.

“Somebody called the body in around eleven
this morning,” Esteban added, as we each slipped under the yellow
tape perimeter. “No eyewitnesses to the killing, or, if the body
was dumped here, any reports of suspicious people, suspicious
vehicles.”

We crested a small rise where the mess of
concrete blocks and rusted iron gave way to a pitted gravel
surface. I didn’t see the body at first, but my eye followed a
little trail of red droplets that dotted the ground. Several little
trails, actually, that led back to a patch of mallow that’d been
half-crushed by a pair of feet, clad in a pair of worn leather
boots.

The stench of the body hit me then. The
corpse hadn’t been lying out too long. Insects were just beginning
to gather, and even in the burning heat of the Southern California
summer, it smelled only of newly decomposing flesh. On the Chrissie
Scale of Stinkiness (patent pending), our guy still only rated a
five out of ten. But it still made Detective Esteban pause and His
Highness McClatchy reel back as if someone had punched him in the
gut.

I stepped up and took my first look at the
body. Let my reptile brain sift through the images to pick out any
curious, out of place details later. The corpse belonged to a man
in his late thirties to early forties. Caucasian with sandy blonde
hair. Well built. Looked like he’d been in good health and pounding
the weights at Gold’s Gym.

And that’s when I saw something that really
got my attention, got my pulse pumping like I’d gone down to
Starbucks and mainlined a Venti espresso.

The skin on the man’s arms was covered in
little white scales like a snake.