Spell Blind (6 page)

CHAPTER 5

I had calmed down by the time I got back to Chandler, though I remained watchful as I made my way up to my office. Emerging from the brick stairway, I saw a woman standing by my door, and before I knew it, I was reaching for my Glock again.

“Mister Fearsson,” she said.

I let my hand fall to my side and walked toward her, my steps deliberate. I even went so far as to take off my sunglasses. Still, it took me several seconds to recognize her.

“You’re the blogger,” I said, stopping in front of her

She smiled. “That’s right. Billie Castle.”

“Miss Castle, of course. Forgive me for not recognizing you right away.”

“It’s all right. I hope I didn’t alarm you.”

“No, I . . .” I held up my hands. “Never mind.” I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“I found you in the phone book after we met at the Deegans. It’s a nice picture.”

I chuckled. “Uh-huh.”

“You’re a private detective.”

“I am. And you’re avoiding my question.”

“Can I buy you lunch?” she asked.

I glanced at my watch and cocked an eyebrow.

“Fine,” she said. “An early dinner?”

It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and that I was starving. But I didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to spend too much time with Miss Castle. I’m sure Howard Wriker would have agreed.

“I think I’ll pass. Thanks, though.”

A thin smile flitted across her face. “Wriker warned you away from me, didn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“How would you put it?”

I felt like she was holding a microphone in front of my face.

“Look, Miss Castle—”

“What did you do to your leg?” she asked, staring at my bloodied knee.

“I fell down, running . . .” I clammed up, reminding myself again that I was talking to a reporter.

“Running?” she repeated.

“Yeah. Running. It’s not important. But I was going to say, Miss Castle, that—”

“Billie.”

“I think I’ll stick with Miss Castle. I don’t care much for politics or politicians, and I’m not interested in being famous. I’m trying to pay some bills and help out a friend.”

“Are you a friend of Senator Deegan?”

I turned away from her, pulled out my key, and unlocked the door to my office.

“I’m writing a story, Mister Fearsson. A series of them, probably. And my readers are going to want to know why a private eye is involved with an ongoing murder investigation. They’ll want to know why that private eye was forced to resign from the homicide division of the Phoenix Police Department nineteen months ago in the middle of the Blind Angel Killer case. Now I can leave it to others to answer those questions—Kona Shaw, Howard Wriker, Cole Hibbard . . .”

I couldn’t help it. At the mention of Hibbard’s name I bristled and shot a glare her way. She stared back at me with this innocent expression on her face.

“Or,” she went on, “you can answer my questions yourself and make certain that I get your story right.”

Just as I’d thought: smart as hell. Pretty, too. I probably should have ducked into my office, bolted the door behind me, and hidden in the shadows until she gave up and left. Instead, I sighed, locked the door once more, and turned to face her.

“An early dinner, eh?”

She nodded.

“You buying?

She grinned. “Sure.”

There was a pizza place on the ground level of the complex, below my office. I took her there, and we ordered a small pie: mushrooms, green peppers, and sausage. I don’t know if she was being agreeable so that I’d answer her questions, but we settled on the toppings in no time at all.

We both ordered Cokes as well, and carried them to a booth in the back corner of the restaurant.

“All right,” I said. “What is it you want to know?”

She pulled a digital recorder out of her purse and set it on the table between us. Switching it on, she said, “Interview with Justis Fearsson, Private Detective.” She glanced at her watch. “Five-twenty p.m., Monday, May fourteenth. What kind of name is Justis, anyway?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “Old English, I think. Probably my dad’s idea. He wouldn’t have settled for something normal. What about Billie?”

She smiled, though there was something forced about it. “My dad. He wanted a boy.” She sat up straighter. “What were you doing at the Deegans’ today?”

So much for the casual chit-chat.

“I was picking up a friend who was there to speak with the senator and his family.”

“Kona Shaw, right? Your partner when you were on the force?”

She’d done her homework. I suppose I should have been impressed. Instead, I found myself growing annoyed. Who was this woman to investigate my life?

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. We had business downtown, and she didn’t have her car with her. So she asked me to meet her there.”

“What business did you have downtown? Was this police business?”

I shook my head. “I’m not—”

“Was this in connection with the Blind Angel killings? Did it have anything to do with the murder of Claudia Deegan?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

Her smile was smug. “By not answering, you tell me that it was.”

I said nothing.

“You worked on the Blind Angel case when you were on the force, didn’t you?”

I thought about this and realized in about half a second that my name was in articles about the murders published at the time. “Yes, that’s right. Kona and I worked the case from the start.”

“You investigated the very first murder?”

“Gracia Rosado. Twenty-one. Five feet, two inches; 127 pounds. Born in Hermosillo, came to the States with her parents when she was seven, lived in Mesa at the time she died.”

Billie opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“To you this might be a great story, but I lived it for a year and a half. Longer, really. I’m not sure I’ve ever stopped living it.”

“Can you do that with all the victims?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“Probably. Do I really need to?”

“No.”

Before she could say more, a waitress arrived with our pizza. She eyed the recorder, put the pizza on the table next to it, and gave us both odd looks.

When she was gone, Billie sipped her Coke and leaned forward. “Why do you think he blinds them?”

Because he’s a weremyste, like me. Because he’s drawing power out of them in some way—through their eyes—and using that power to make his magic stronger.

A part of me wanted to say it, just to see the expression on her face. For all I knew, it could have been the biggest story her blog had ever seen. Because while most people knew that magic was real, few understood anything about the workings of spells, and fewer still could say that they knew a weremyste.

We were around, of course, in more places than most people would have guessed. We were cops and school teachers, doctors and lawyers. Hell, there were weremystes in the military. At one time, if the claims that flew around the magical community could be believed, back in the early ’70s, and again in the early ’90s, the Pentagon tried to create a special unit of magical Green Berets. It makes sense: combine that level of military training with spell-casting ability, and they’d have a force that was all but unstoppable. But as with all efforts to integrate weremystes and their magic more fully into American society, the effort foundered on the phasings and their effects on our minds. Special Ops guys went through vigorous psychological screenings. They lived violent dangerous lives, and they needed to be available at a moment’s notice, 24/7. Throwing a three-day phasing into that equation created problems, both immediate and potential. As far as I know, the Magic Special Ops program never got off the ground. As far as I know.

And its failure pointed to the larger problem that weremystes faced. The stigma that surrounded mental illness in this country was a heavy burden, for those who were ill as well as for their families, in large part because mental illness was still so poorly understood. Well, so was magic. And as a result that stigma was far worse for those whose mental problems came from being weremystes.

This was why most of my kind used blockers to hide their abilities, and to spare themselves the effects of the phasings. Blockers were a family of drugs, the first of which came into use centuries ago. Many of them were legal; a few, like Spark, were not. But all of them, including Spark, affected weremystes the same way. Rather than getting us high, they guarded us from the psychosis of the phasings and suppressed our magic. If a weremyste was willing to give up magic, he could use blockers to avoid the phasings and the insanity that inevitably came with them. Seems like an easy choice, right? How many people could afford to lose their minds for three nights out of each month? How many people wouldn’t do everything possible to avoid an otherwise inevitable descent into insanity?

But for a few of us, the choice wasn’t quite so clear. Blockers were an all-or-nothing deal. I couldn’t take them for the three days around the full moon and cast spells the rest of the month. That would have been great if it were possible, but as I had learned a thousand times, the world didn’t usually make things that convenient for anyone, runecrafters included. In order for blockers to work, they had to be in our systems at a certain level for an extended period. If I wanted to escape the phasings, I would have had to give up magic entirely, and like my father, I wasn’t willing to do that. So I didn’t use blockers at all. I suffered through the phasings; I accepted as fate the eventual loss of my sanity. And I wielded my magic.

The truth was, even as I argued with Namid about mastering runecrafting, I liked being able to conjure. When I was a cop it gave me an edge over the creeps I was trying to put away, and now that I was a PI, it still came in handy. Maybe more to the point, it’s who I am. I can’t give up being a weremyste any more than I can give up being a Fearsson.

But I wasn’t ready to share all of this with Billie Castle and her readers, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t ready to hear it.

“Mister Fearsson?” she said, eyeing me with what might have been concern.

“I think he blinds them because he’s nuts,” I told her. “I think he blinds them for the same reason another serial killer might rape his victims or dismember them or do something else that horrifies the rest of us. It gives him a sense of power, of control. It makes him feel like a god in his twisted little universe.”

“And why do you think the police have had so much trouble tracking him down?”

Again, an honest answer would have come back to magic. We couldn’t catch the guy because despite all appearances, he
wasn’t
a typical serial killer. He wasn’t crazy, and didn’t secretly want to be caught, like some of those nut jobs you read about in the papers. He killed with purpose, he was sane and calculating and intelligent, and he had managed to leave no clues of value at any of the thirty-plus crime scenes we’d found. But I couldn’t tell her all of that, either. So I tried to punt.

“I’m not on the force, Miss Castle. I haven’t been for some time. Questions about the PPD’s investigation should go to the PPD.”

“You were with the force for the first year and a half of this case. I would think that you’d have some ideas.”

I shrugged. “I think he’s been clever,” I said. “And I think he’s been lucky. But I also think that his luck will run out sooner or later. It always does in these cases. The PPD will get him.”

“Do you think they would have already if you’d remained on the job?”

I laughed, short and harsh, and reached for a piece of pizza. Taking a bite, I shook my head and said, “I’m not going to second-guess the detectives working this case.”

“I’m not asking you to,” she said, taking a piece of her own. “But I would think that you’d have spent the last nineteen months second-guessing the department’s decision to fire you.”

I stopped chewing and glared at her. Her gaze didn’t flinch at all. Pretty, smart, and tough. At that moment, I wasn’t sure which I wanted to do more: get up and walk out, or ask her out on a date.

I looked away before she did. “I’m not talking about this.”

“Why were you fired, Mister Fearsson? Did it have something to do with the Blind Angel killings?”

“No.” I said it automatically, my gaze snapping back to hers. As soon as I thought about it, though, I wondered if this was true. I was fired because of the phasings, because my erratic behavior and my inability to function for three nights every fourth week became too much for my superiors to tolerate, and too much for Kona to cover up. I was fired because I’m a weremyste. And wasn’t that the same reason the Blind Angel Killer had evaded us for so long?

Billie must have seen the doubt in my eyes. “Did they blame you for the fact that they couldn’t catch him? Is that what happened?”

I shook my head, resisting the urge to say,
You’re getting colder
. “No. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“Then what?”

I bit into my slice of pizza and chewed.

Billie frowned and took a bite, staring right back at me, like we were kids daring each other to be the first to blink.

“Do you like prying into other people’s lives?” I asked after some time, breaking a lengthy silence and reaching for a second slice of pizza.

“That’s not what I do. I give people information. I tell stories about real-life situations. And occasionally I uncover truths that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.”

“That’s what you think you’re doing now, isn’t it?”

She hesitated. “Yes, I guess it is.”

“I think you’re going for the cheap thrill. I think what you’re doing here with me is no different from what the tabloids do, or what you see on those cheesy news shows that come on TV after the real news.”

From the way she responded you would have thought that I’d slapped her. Her mouth was open in a little ‘o’ and her eyes were so wide I thought she might cry. But that look only lasted for the span of a heartbeat or two. Then she pressed her lips into a thin hard line and the muscles in her jaw tightened. It’s funny, but I didn’t notice until that instant that her eyes were vivid green and as hard as emeralds.