Precinct 13 (30 page)

Boyd all but dashed out.

He certainly was an odd one. “We should have asked him to say,” I said. “He’s the one who wrote the initial police report.”

“Are you sure?” Jones said. “I thought it was Peterson.”

I was beginning to wonder if Boyd had some kind of forget-me glamour, or if he was really that unremarkable. I dug my phone out of my pocket, and opened up my e-mail app. “See?” I showed Jones.

“Huh,” Jones said. “Well, you’ve got the report, at least. I’m sure we can reconstruct everything.”

I supposed he was right. “Did you get any more of a confession out of Brooklyn while we were looking for Stone?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Valentine said, from his spot against the wall. “Though Jones wouldn’t let me use my freeze breath on her.”

Everyone paled at the idea, except Devon, who attempted a little nervous laughter.

“So, what did she say?” I asked, choosing not to comment.

“It seems you were on the right track,” Jones said. “Their plan had been twofold. They wanted to trigger the Tinker Bell Theorem, and, if possible, get rid of me as chief investigator, as well.”

I blushed. I’d inadvertently helped them achieve one of their goals. I had to swallow the urge to apologize to Jones. Luckily, Jack raised his hand.

Once he had our attention, Jack lowered his hand and asked, “Has anyone told her that her brother is dead?”

We all looked awkward about that.

“No. I will,” Jones said. He shook his head. “It’ll be hard but she’s already grieving him. He’s been half-dead since the autopsy. She revived him as much as she could, but, well…”

I shivered at the memory of his badly stitched-up chest. “Did I kill him?”

“Which time? Twice, I think,” Devon said.

Valentine came up behind me, and put his hands lightly on my shoulders. “As good as he was at appearing dead he was a conversely poor judge of character.”

Right, he’d thought Jones would spirit his body away rather than put me in the crosshairs. I wondered what Internal Affairs would make of that.

A tense silence passed.

“Let me get this straight,” Jack said. “The necromancer, Steve, faked his death, which became partially accurate.” We all nodded along as he recounted the facts. “But, why, again? How does faking his death cause the Tinker Bell Theorem to be triggered?”

“It doesn’t,” I said. “That was part of a plan to discredit Jones.”

“How?” Jack asked.

“Uh,” I started.

In his usual half-interested pose, with his head resting in his hand, Devon casually said, “Spense and Brooklyn were hot and heavy for years.”

Years?

“Oh, you dark horse,” Jack said teasingly.

I’d say, though it explained Jones’s reticence to go after Brooklyn. In fact, given how close they must have been, I
actually was impressed with Jones’s behavior. As far as I knew, he’d never gone to her with the precinct’s plan or any of that. If it had been Valentine, who knows to what lengths I would have gone to protect him?

“I broke things off when we started to suspect Steve of grave robbing. Sometime after that they must have added discrediting me to their list of to-dos.”

Jack continued to ponder the case. He tapped a long-boned finger against his lip. “The zombie at the diner. That was for the Tinker Bell.”

“And, I think, the grave robbing,” I added. “I’ve been wondering: How did you guys hide those crimes from the public?”

“It’s taken all my efforts to keep it off the web,” Jack admitted.

“I’ve been tempted to just send a forget-me spell bomb to the local newspaper,” Jones admitted.

“It’s been extremely tough,” Jack continued. “The families always knew. They’ve been harassing the chief about the case almost continually. Why do you think he was so livid about the zombie?”

I hadn’t known. “So, it’s been working?”

“Sounds like it,” Valentine murmured. His hands had been unconsciously massaging my shoulders slightly.

“Are the cow mutilations related?” Jack asked. “The officers said it was really difficult to get people to forget they saw lights. And it made it into the paper.”

My gaze strayed to the whiteboard and the words
fairy ring
under the cow mutilation case. I thought back to the crazy visit to Jones’s mother. He’d said the whole house was some kind of fairy ring and that without the salt we could be lost in time.

“What do fairy rings do?” I asked.

“What?”

“When we visited your mom, we were in a completely different place, weren’t we? Can you use a fairy ring to travel in time as well as space?”

Jones, who had been stuffing the loose papers and notes into a case file, considered it. “I suppose. They connect places, but they could connect times, too, if there’s one in the future or the past to connect to. Time is pretty meaningless to fairy.”

“Could we use one to go back and see what killed the rancher’s cows?”

“Theoretically, but you’d need a fairy with a spare ring…” he started. He must have seen my idea glittering in my eyes, because he shook his head. “It’s not happening, Connor. I’m off the job.”

“You are
now
,” I said. “But you weren’t then.”

Jack smiled at my nerd logic, but Jones continued to shake his head. “I’m on leave.”

I tapped my finger on the remaining open case on the whiteboard. “Wouldn’t you rather go on leave with all the mysteries solved?”

I knew I’d gotten him with that. “Fine.”

Jones told us to meet at his place after dinner. He had a fairy ring in his backyard we could use.

In the meantime, Jack offered to give Valentine and me a ride back to Robert’s place. On the way, he told us that he was headed back to the cemetery to take his turn guarding Stone.

“How long until the rabbi comes?” I asked.

“One is driving in from Iowa right now,” he said. “He’ll be here sometime tomorrow morning.”

I tried not to be astonished that Iowa had a kabbalah-practicing rabbi. After all, I would never have guessed South Dakota had so many zombies. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“Solve the case,” he said. “I think Hannah would appreciate coming back to that.”

A little lump formed in my throat at the thought that if she didn’t it would make a fitting memorial. “Okay,” I managed to say.

Before getting out, I touched Jack’s sleeve. “What’s the deal with Boyd? Why can no one remember he was the police officer at the scene?”

“It’s the Dakotas, man”—Jack cut me off with a little laugh—“everyone around here has a name like Peterson, Olson, Hanson, Johnson. Hell, it’s tough for me sometimes.”

“Uh, Boyd sounds nothing like Hanson,” I noted.

“Oh,” he said, sobering suddenly. “I can keep an eye on him for you, if it’s important.”

“Very,” I said. “But be subtle, okay?”

He tried to look offended, but failed. “I’ll do my best.”

When I talked to him at dinner, Valentine was adamantly against coming with me through the fairy ring.

“You’ve proven yourself very capable.” Valentine yawned. He’d curled up in a spot of fading sunlight on edge of the bed. We’d had cheese and green pepper quesadillas, salsa, and the few crumbs of tortilla chips I found in the bag I pulled from the back of the top shelf in the pantry. Shortly after eating, Valentine had settled in like a satisfied cat.
“You don’t need me. Besides, fairy magic is smelly. It makes me sneeze.”

I was worried that we’d find something terrible on the other side of the ring, like a gryphon or hydra or other ancient monster. “I could bring Kleenex,” I said, trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. “Plus, I’d enjoy your company.”

He gave me a little smile for effort. “I’m sure you would,” he said. “But you can enjoy me even more when you come home.”

“You really don’t like Jones, do you?”

Valentine stretched his legs and propped himself up on his elbow. “You don’t either or you’d have learned to call him Spenser by now.”

That was probably true. “Are you sure I can’t convince you?”

“I don’t like being trapped in a fairy ring. They’re small and stinky. Not unlike prison, honestly.”

Oh.

“You can stay.”

It was weird to see Jones out of uniform. When he answered the door, my first impression was that he didn’t quite know how to pull off “civilian.” He looked vaguely uncomfortable in slacks and a polo shirt.

“Come in,” he said. Looking over my shoulder into the night, he asked, “No dragon?”

“He seems to think I can handle this on my own,” I said.

“He’s probably right.” He stepped aside to let me in. “Besides, the fairy ring will protect us.”

The décor of Jones’s house could have been plucked straight from
Field & Stream
or
Sports Illustrated
. It was a
man’s house, full of manly things. There was even a deer’s head on the wall.

If I didn’t know him better, I’d think he was trying too hard.

I didn’t get much chance to inspect the rest of the place, though, as I was only invited in long enough to walk straight through to the glass doors at the back. Outside, he had a wide wooden deck, complete with chunky woodsy patio furniture and an industrial-strength gas grill. A light on the garage illuminated a lone crab apple tree in an otherwise well-cared for lawn. A pile of snow melted in the drive in front of a beat-up truck.

He led me down the wooden stairs to where the deck shadowed the side of the house. There, just on this side of a gravel garden, delicately thin mushrooms grew in a perfect circle. I almost didn’t see them, their stalks were thread-thin and their brown caps so round and tiny. Though it was dark, I got the distinct impression of green in the center of the circle. I could smell summer: blooming clover and freshly cut grass.

Jones put out his hand to stop me from accidentally breaking the ring. I hadn’t even realized I was moving toward it.

“Careful,” he said, digging into the pocket of the Windbreaker he’d grabbed on the way out. Pulling out a familiar glass vial, he gave it to me.

I gripped it tightly.

“This is going to be trickier than the last time,” he warned. “Fairy magic is capricious and chaotic at best. We’re trying to go somewhere in place and time that’s very specific. We may have to spend time in-between until I can connect to the exact time that the fairy ring was created at
Olson’s ranch. You can’t break the line until we’ve found the connecting ring.”

I nodded, even though I had no idea what “in-between” was. The concern in Jones’s face made me ask, “You’ve done this before, right?”

“When I was younger,” he said. “And more foolish.”

That must have been a long time ago, because I couldn’t even imagine the Jones that would even consider anything foolhardy. Still, I was comforted to know he’d had experience with this and was still alive to tell about it. “Okay,” I said, taking in a deep, steadying breath. “Let’s do this.”

He offered me a hand. When I didn’t immediately take it, he said, “It’s very disorienting.”

“Right,” I said.

My snake tattoo protested a little when we clasped hands, but it must be getting used to my friends because the ache was tolerable.

“On three,” he said. “One…two…”

“Three,” I said with him, as we stepped together over the slender, unimpressive-looking line of mushrooms.

But my foot never touched the ground on the other side. Instead, I fell into a dark, endless pit. I let Jones’s hand go in my panicked tumble. Darkness swallowed me whole.

The sound of pounding hooves hammered through the inky darkness. Slowly, as if from a great distance, I made out the sound of voices. A man with a voice like my old psychologist’s said something about catatonic delusion.

Was I dreaming?

The voices returned, talking over me, about me, about diagnoses and treatments.

My stepmother’s voice, shrill, but firm, explained to the doctor, “She’s intentionally driving a wedge between us with her fairy stories.”

When I tried to deny it, the doctor reminded me that my denial and sense of entitlement were all part of the symptoms of the grandiose and persecutory types of my disorder.

It was happening all over again.

Or…had it never stopped?

Was Pierre all part of some hallucination?

I tried to scream but couldn’t. Terror crushed my stomach.

No.

I was not insane. I’d left that place, hadn’t I?

A snake hissed angrily. A horse whinnied, like a cackling laugh.

I tumbled downward until something solid gripped my wrist. A yank, and then, suddenly, I could make out dim shapes. Dots of dark against dusty white, coming closer, and then my body slammed into hard-packed dirt.

My eyes began to clear. Soft flakes of snow drifted lazily from the sky, melting on contact with my hot and flushed face. The sound of my breathing was harsh in my ear. My entire front stung from the impact with the ground. I held on to these real sensations and clutched at stalks of brittle hay with my trembling fingers.

“Is this real?” I whispered, tears of fear in my eyes.

A hand rested, heavily, solidly, against my shoulder. I looked over to see Jones kneeling beside me. “Yes. Sadly,” he said, inspecting the remains of a spattered cow pie on the elbow of his Windbreaker.

“But…I heard…”

“Lies,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. He offered me a hand up. “Lies so awful they seem real, but you also heard the Night Mare’s hooves.” To my horrified expression, he added, “Tell me about it. I fucking hate fairy.”

With his help, I pulled myself into a sitting position. I revelled in each ache and pain and future bruise because they grounded me. The snow melted into wet on the butt of my jeans, a very annoying physical sensation.

I still felt unsettled, though.

It didn’t help that all around us lights danced, like fireflies,
flickering on and off, but always staying within the confines of the circle. The ground began to warm as shoots of green hay unfurled and began to grow.

“Please tell me you didn’t drop the salt,” Jones said, once I’d made it all the way to my feet.

“Crap,” I muttered. It wasn’t in my hand or my pockets. I glanced around, beginning to get nervous, but, miraculously, found the vial on the ground inside the circle.