Precinct 13 (2 page)

My psychologist told me I would, but that it was a crutch. He was bad for me. He enabled my sickness.

I took a deep breath and tried to do what my therapist always said I should. Focus on the present. Focus on what was
real
.

I checked my watch. Where was everyone? I was supposed to have an assistant, though I had yet to really meet
her. We’d pressed palms briefly at my orientation/welcome party. I had a vague memory of a fortyish brunette in a black dress with a sloshing glass of wine in one hand. She’d been the one to perform all the autopsies for my politician predecessor, and I’d hoped she’d walk me through this one.

Her loyalties had been pretty obvious at the party, the way she stage-whispered drunkenly that I looked “awfully young and inexperienced,” and, given my weird haircut, probably a lesbian.

I guess it wasn’t a really big surprise she was AWOL this morning.

Luckily, I’d enjoyed doing autopsies in med school. Most of my colleagues freaked out about touching dead people, but I found them to be like Mrs. Finnegan—uncomplaining and patient. Besides, there were worse things than being dead.

I wasn’t supposed to think about those options anymore, though, was I?

Outside the door, I heard the squeak of wheels. I pushed open the double swinging doors to look down the hall. The walls that formed the entry to my cave were unadorned plaster. Bare bulbs surrounded by safety cages ran down the center of the ceiling. The wires were exposed. It was ugly, but it was honest.

Two cops wheeled the sheet-covered cart down the hall. The pair seemed like the classic odd couple. He was shorter and lither, and probably in his mid-forties. She was taller, but built more like a rectangle, and looked younger, though I couldn’t say why. In fact, if it wasn’t for the messy ponytail, I might have mistaken her for a man. I couldn’t distinguish their words in the echo chamber, but the guy seemed to be telling some wild tale, punctuated by a lot of chuckles.

Typical cops, in other words.

Frankly, I preferred corpses.

I steeled myself for the inevitable interaction as they came within range.

“Where’s the coroner?” the guy cop asked, looking around me as if hoping for someone more impressive.

No one expected a petite, twenty-six-year-old to be in charge of anything, much less the county’s morgue. This was heightened by the fact that I was in the process of growing out a very punk hairstyle, and still had spikes and a streak or two of blue. I also tended to dress in clothes that could get dirty, so I had on blue jeans and a cotton T-shirt. Knowing I was going to have company, however, I’d tossed a white lab coat on for that extra air of authority. I pointed to myself and tried to sound confident as I said, “That would be me, Alex Connor.”

“Oh, Alex, as in short for Alexandra or something,” he said, squinting at my shaggy hair. “I thought you’d be a dude.”

And, yet, somehow I knew you’d be an asshole
, I managed not to say. Instead, I murmured, “Uh-huh.” I looked down at the outline of the figure underneath the white sheet. There was a manila folder on his chest. “Anything you want to tell me that’s not in this?” I picked up the file to show them.

When he didn’t answer right away, I set the folder back down and glanced up. The guy cop had his arms crossed in front of his chest, an almost defensive posture, and was looking to his partner. So, I glanced over at her as well.

She was the flintiest woman I’d ever seen. I suspected a smile might actually crack that stern face of hers. Generally, she was built like a block. Everything about her was very squared away, too. Well, except her hair. Wild, dark curls
sprung out in every direction underneath her cap, defying the ponytail, and completely covering her forehead and ears. She just stared at me with an unreadable face.

Even her name was solid. The embroidered name under the badge said, simply:
STONE.

“You guys
have
some information, right?” I prompted when neither of them said anything. “I know my predecessor was a crook, but, you know, we’re on the same team here.”

“Are we?” the guy cop asked. I noticed his name was Jones, and he didn’t look at me when he asked the question, so I wondered if he was really quizzing his partner about her loyalty for some reason.

“We should tell her,” Stone said in a voice very much like the rest of her: solid and deliberate.

“Yeah, you really should,” I agreed.

“You tell her,” Jones said gruffly.

To my surprise, he turned and walked away. His boots clomped in the corridor. The door at the far end of the hall squeaked when he pulled it open, and slammed shut hollowly, as he left.

Okay, this was getting very strange, very quickly.

I scanned the remaining cop’s face for some clue. What the hell was going on with the corpse that this Jones guy just recused himself from discussing it?

When the silence had stretched to an almost unbearable length, Stone finally asked me in a serious voice, “Do you believe in magic?”

Oh, shit.
Of all things to ask…when I’d just been thinking about Valentine, too.

Breath caught in my throat so suddenly I nearly choked. All the blood drained from my face to collect in my hammering heart.

“I’ve had a…complicated relationship with magic.”

I’m not sure why I even admitted that much, but it seemed to be the answer she was looking for. The corners of her lips turned up slightly, and her eyes softened a tiny amount. “Good. Then I must tell you to be careful with this body,” she said, matter-of-factly. “There’s magic in it. Do you understand?”

“No,” I admitted, my voice little more than a hoarse rasp. I was having trouble remembering to breathe. “Not in the least.”

“We suspect this man was a necromancer. A bad magician.” She spoke slowly, carefully, very coplike, as if explaining the situation to a frightened child. I had to admit that wasn’t too far from the truth, given how small I felt and how much my body was shaking. “Someone who uses the dead for rituals.”

I nodded, despite myself. I did know what a necromancer was, even if I wasn’t ready to talk about it.

She continued, “There may be a booby trap, a spell inside him that might—”

At the word
spell
, I held up my hand. “Stop.”

She waited while I tried to compose myself. It wasn’t easy. My entire body quivered with each heartbeat.

Finally, I was able to muster enough righteous indignation to sputter, “Spell, huh? Now I know what’s going on.”

“I don’t under—”

I grabbed the gurney from her with a violent jerk. “I know what you’re doing,” I said more firmly than I felt. “This is some sort of cruel joke and I’m not falling for it. I don’t know how you found out about my problems, but it’s not cool to poke at…sick people, okay?”

“I’m not—”

“Shut up,” I snapped, which surprised even me. I wasn’t usually in the habit of disrespecting the uniform, but she’d really pushed my buttons. “You are making fun of my illness, and I would appreciate it if you and your partner, Jones, or whatever his name was, would knock it off. I’m sure it’s all over the department by now, but you can just let everyone know that I am perfectly fine these days and haven’t seen a fairy in months.”

“Actually, you just—”

“I don’t want to know,” I cut her off quickly, and put my hand up again. I wheeled the stretcher around and turned my back on her.

“Just don’t crack the rib cage,” Stone shouted.

Oh, like I could perform an autopsy any other way.
“I’ll take that under advisement,” I said over my shoulder as the doors slammed behind me.

Once I could no longer hear the sound of footfalls in the hall, I leaned on the cart, breathing hard.

What I couldn’t understand was how anyone had found out such specific details of my delusions. What the hell happened to doctor-patient confidentiality?

Oh, crap, the court case. Of course the police would have access to all my insane ramblings from Valentine’s trial, when I tried to convince the world that his aggravated assault on my stepmother was justifiable because she was an evil demon who’d cast spells on me.

Not one of my finer moments.

With my luck, they probably had the court transcripts super-sized and posted on the bulletin board in the staff lounge for everyone’s edification and amusement.

Fuck.

So much for starting over fresh.

I hugged myself and wished it was Valentine’s arms around me. Which I supposed was a foolish thought, given that he was part of the problem. Or so all the doctors told me.

Why did I still miss him so much, I wondered.

Letting myself go, I blew out a steadying breath. Well, what did all those group therapy sessions teach me? One thing at a time.

I had a body to deal with. That was the first order of business. I took what comfort I could in the cold metal and simple, rough furnishings of the morgue. I moved one of the adjustable floor lamps off to the side and wheeled the body next to the mortician’s table.

I stared at the sheet-covered corpse. The police file on his chest had his mug shot paper clipped to the outside, so I checked it out.

What had Stone said? He was supposed to be some kind of a necromancer? That was clearly a joke. The guy looked like a hippy Jesus. Hell, he’d even smiled pleasantly for the camera—not in a serial-killer creepy off-kilter way, either, just nicely, as if happy to oblige. Blond and Vikingesque, this necromancer of Stone’s looked like half the guys I went to college with at the University of Minnesota.

Thumbing through the file also revealed that he was just under six foot and a hundred and ninety-odd pounds.

There was no way in hell I’d be able to move the body off the stretcher without help.

I looked around the empty space again.

Where
was
my assistant? I shook my head in frustration. I was going to fire her if she ever showed up for work.

Returning my attention to the dead man, I asked, “So, what’s your story? Your
real
story?”

I thumbed through his file. There were a lot of reports of domestic squabbles. A woman with the same last name had briefly had some sort of restraining order against him. It wasn’t just his wife or whoever that he liked to threaten, though: He seemed to love a good brawl. If there was a bar fight on any given night, it seemed my friend here had been pulled out of it and set to cool his heels in the city jail.

On paper, he seemed like a pretty bad guy: violent, destructive, and dangerous.

But I knew all about labels, and how they could stick to you, even when you didn’t deserve them. Somewhere in a precinct in Chicago there was a file like this on Valentine. It only told half the story.

So what was the rest of this guy’s?

My iPhone beeped. I fished it out of my pocket to see a text from someone named Boyd with a Pierre Police Department address informing me a preliminary report was ready for me to look at. I left the body where it was for a moment, and went over to my little office space to fire up my laptop. I opened the e-mail. This was what I needed.

Most cops are terrible writers, I’ve discovered. Grammar isn’t always their strong suit. But this one had done a pretty good job of describing the scene. The officers had responded to a neighbor’s complaint of weird noises—moaning and groaning. When the police arrived at the apartment building the sounds were still going strong. They knocked, but no one answered. The noise got stranger and louder, until the police fetched the super to open the door. They found the guy hunched over some kind of altar. The cop stopped
short of using the words
black magic
, but he did describe an awful lot of disturbing figurines, candles, silver skulls, etc. Anyway, despite all the racket the guy had been making seconds ago, he was dead. A cup was found near his hand, the contents of which smelled of rat poison. The paramedic was called. The paramedic had declared it a suicide by poison.

All I had to do was confirm it.

I swiveled my chair around and gave the body an appraising look.
Rat poison, eh?
I could
do
this.

With my shoulders back in determination, I walked over to the gurney and pulled the cloth away from his face.

Yeah, he looked dead to me.

I wondered if I should presume the paramedic did all the classic tests? No breath, check; no pulse, got it. His eyes were glassy and empty. His skin was already taking on that grayish hue favored by corpses, though it hadn’t yet settled into the “clammy” temperature range.

No doubt that was because he hadn’t been dead very long.

I could tell right away that my job was going to be a lot harder than I was hoping. Rat poison’s main ingredient is warfarin, which, among other horrible things, acts like a blood thinner. People who have accidentally ingested rat poison bruise easily and get bloody noses. I could see no trace of blood in the hairs of my corpse’s mustache, but he might not have had time to develop one.

I pulled the sheet the rest of the way off, ready to look for more confirmation for the poison theory. It was almost impossible to tell if he had bruises because his body looked like someone’s doodle pad. Very little of the ink made any sense, either. I thought I recognized Hebrew characters in a
band around his left wrist, and the squiggles around his thigh might have been Arabic. Or Sanskrit. Or Greek, for all I knew.

There were a few pictures interspersed among the nonsense or foreign words—a nude female demon with bat wings over his heart, a human skull on his bicep, and, over his stomach, a devil doing rude things to a woman with his tail.

Okay, I was getting why Stone thought she could pull my leg with the whole black arts/necromancer thing. There were all the creepy artifacts found at the scene, and, while he might have Jesus’ face, dude had Satan’s tats.

Of course, he also seemed to be wearing Tweety Bird jammie bottoms, but that just added to the scary.

I was sure that the CSI team at the scene had taken pictures of his body, but I wanted my own documentation. Using my key, I unlocked the desk and found the giant analog camera used for documenting autopsies. After determining there was plenty of film still in it, I brought it over to the body. I adjusted the floor lamps to illuminate the body, and so I was surprised when the flash went off. “Dang it,” I cursed under my breath.