The Deer Prince's Murder: Book Two of 'Fantasy & Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 2) (12 page)

“Okay, Destry. I’ve got to put this chat with you on ice, or they’ll send me off to have my head shrunk.”

“But of course,” the pooka agreed, and I heard the smile in his voice.

I pushed through the doors and into the room. Deputy Chief McClatchy looked up from where he had been in intense conversation with a trio of people. The trio sat behind one long table set catty-corner to the room, while McClatchy, a barrel-chested, red-faced man wearing his trademark one-size-too-small pinstripes, sat at another.

The three probation officers gave me a frosty look. They all wore no-nonsense clothes in near-identical shades of beige. One was a sallow-faced man, while the two others were women with the sour expressions of nuns forced to attend a death metal concert.

“Good morning,” I greeted them, with the most sincere smile I could muster. “I’m Dayna Chrissie, and I–”

One of the beige-clad women cut me off as she intoned, “Let the record show that Ms. Dayna Chrissie was late to this hearing.”

My new-found confidence took that verbal torpedo and promptly sank without a trace.

Just my rotten luck.

Chapter Fifteen

“Please take a seat.”

The sallow-faced man indicated an empty chair with a jab of his red ballpoint pen. He paused to take a long sip of his coffee as I followed his order.

Like a pair of drinking bird toys, the women next to him followed suit with twin
slurps
.

The chair was one of those hard plastic ones that could make your butt fall asleep. Worse, someone had positioned it smack in between the two tables. So not only did you feel as if you were on trial in front of the probation board, but Bob McClatchy as well. Depending on who was talking, I would have to swivel my head if I wanted to look at them head-on.

The muffled
clop-clop
of hooves on carpet echoed in my ear, and I had to remind myself not to turn and look. From the corner of my eye, I saw Destry approach and stand off to my left like a big block of ebony granite.

Sallow-face swallowed his coffee and went on. “Ms. Chrissie, your absence has, as my colleague points out, been duly noted. Deputy Chief McClatchy was of the opinion that you might not show up at all.”

That made me grit my teeth. My confidence stopped its free-fall and was replaced by a spark of irritation.

“I don’t see why he would feel that way,” I replied. “Because I do show up when I’m asked, to the best of my ability. If you will review my employment history, you should see no record of unexplained sick time or vacations–”

“That’s nice,” he cut in, “but I’m not clear on how that relates to McClatchy’s complaint against you.” The woman sitting next to the beige-suited man raised an eyebrow at that, but remained silent.

Suddenly, the pooka’s voice whispered urgently in my ear. “That woman, she has an image in her mind. A piece of paper that says ‘Off-Shift Time Sheets’.”

I cleared my throat and decided to go with Destry’s hint. “I believe it does relate, in that it shows I don’t have a history of leaving the job without notice. In fact, I’ve spent great deal of time responding to LAPD requests to visit crime scenes outside of my normal work hours. Since I’m an independent contractor, this costs the City of Los Angeles extra. So I’ve had to record each instance on my time sheets.”

“I agree,” said the beige-accented woman in the middle. “We have accounted for this in our review. Indeed, Ms. Chrissie, your paperwork is impeccable when it comes to off-hours tabulation.”

McClatchy let out a snort that put any of Destry’s to shame. “As far as I’m concerned, her past performance does not excuse the incident in question. What about the overtime billed to my office? What about the time spent by my officers to locate little Miss Chrissie when she was placed under police protection?”

Destry
tsked
. “This chieftain of yours? He is quite cross, and only just able to control himself. And see the woman on the end there? She is
pas content
over that last comment.”

Indeed, the second woman, the one with a bouffant hairdo at least thirty years out of style, narrowed her eyes as she looked across the room at McClatchy. It was only a quick flash before she hid her expression, but Destry had called it. Maybe I could play that angle up, get Bob to make a few more errors.

“I sincerely appreciated the protection,” I pointed out, “but I think this was a simple miscommunication; no one had told me how long I was supposed to have an escort. I left the M.E.’s office without anyone telling me I was supposed to check in with your men. You may not be aware of this, but even though I’m a woman, I do know how to take care of myself.”

“You only think you do!” Bob shot back. “Like most women, you have no idea how to take care of yourself!”

“Oh, my,” Destry chuckled, as the woman with the bouffant shot daggers at McClatchy with her eyes. “Now she is quite angry with your friend, quite angry indeed.”

I shook my head. “You and I will have to disagree on that point. Like I said, I didn’t know when and how to interact with your patrolmen. How can you hold me accountable for that? If this was so important, why was I not given explicit guidelines?”

“If it was so important?” McClatchy growled. “How would you know what ‘important’ means? This probation meeting was certainly important. And you showed up late.”

“The man on the panel,” Destry put in, “he is thinking about the crashed cars he spied upon the road this morning. The sign by the road, it showed a number ‘10’.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” I said dismissively. “There was a pileup on the Pomona freeway. I got stuck in the traffic jam just like everyone else.”

“Not your fault?” McClatchy’s voice went up a notch. “That’s ridiculous! You don’t use the Pomona freeway to get here from your house!”

“You are making him boil,” Destry said. “I would push him on this.”

I cocked my head at McClatchy. “Who said I was coming from my house?”

“Then where the hell were you?” McClatchy demanded.

“I do have a social life, you know. I had a date that turned into something more suited for private conversation. Or did you want me to recite the play-by-play?”

“Don’t be insolent! If I want the play-by-play from you, then you’d damn well tell me every last detail of your pillow talk!”

A
bang
as the bouffant-haired woman slammed her notebook shut. She stood, red-faced, and leaned forward on the table.

“That is quite enough, Deputy Chief McClatchy!” she stated firmly. “You are asking questions that could fall afoul of our policies on sexual harassment!”

“I concur,” the other woman chimed in. “And the rest of this hearing has been a waste of time. All of the accusations I’ve heard today fall under the category of ‘personal squabbles’. They’re certainly not about violating the LAPD’s professional standards.”

The sallow-faced man let out a gasp of protest. “But…there is still the issue of unresolved overtime incurred by two of McClatchy’s officers.”

“Even so, it does appear to have been caused by a simple case of miscommunication. Three weeks of probation and a note on the contractor’s employment record seems appropriate punishment to me. And since Ms. Chrissie has spent three weeks on probation already, I believe she’s ‘served her time’. Given our chronic shortage of personnel in the forensics department, I recommend that she be reinstated to full privileges in the M.E.’s office immediately.”

After a moment, the man said, “I guess I’ll second that.”

“Furthermore, I recommend that Deputy Chief McClatchy re-take our department’s training program on Sexual Harassment Prevention.”

“I will certainly second
that
,” the bouffant-haired woman huffed, and the man echoed his agreement.

Having made their pronouncement, the three beige-clothed panelists frostily thanked both me and McClatchy for attending. A not-so-subtle way of dismissing us as they wrote up their final report, but all I wanted was to get out of that meeting room before anything else happened.

McClatchy paused when we’d shut the door to the meeting room. “I don’t know what just happened in there,” he said sulkily, “but I’ll be watching you like a hawk from now on.”

“You’re all sunshine, Bob,” I replied.

“Again with being a smart-ass. Do you know any other tricks?”

“It’s not my fault that you give me so much material to work with.”

He gave me a venomous look. “Just remember, Chrissie: Any screw-up, and I’ll be on you like fleas on a dog.”

He grunted and stormed off.

Normally, I felt pretty darned good about beating McClatchy at his game. But this time, I got a bad feeling. And it didn’t go away when Destry appeared by my side.

“There is something
très mauvais
with that man,” he remarked. “He truly believes that the world is out to get him. To hold him back from whatever he believes he is destined for.”

I shuddered a little at that, but there was nothing I could do to remedy the situation.

“Come on,” I said, “I’ve got work to do, and I can’t think of a better time than now to do it.”

Destry followed along in my wake down a series of slate-gray corridors until I got to the Chem Lab. While the facility’s older Ballistics Lab reminded me of a cross between a badly run machine shop and a sleazy cafeteria, this room at least was a tiny step up. Aqua blue tiles and bright orange plastic chairs gave this lab the cheesy, halfway cheery look of a down-at-the-heels fast food restaurant.

I greeted a couple of the technicians I sort of knew in passing, as I worked my way over to the far corner of the room. A bank of examination equipment and a length of counter space lay open for the taking, and I immediately put it to use. Destry watched, fascinated, as I put on a set of pale green gloves, face mask, and scrubs. I slid a protective visor over my eyes and then pulled out the cloth bag. I poured out a sample of the dust Galen had collected into a clear Lucite sample tray, and slipped it into the correct machine. Next, I followed the same procedures with the hair, tissue, and blood sample I’d stored in the plastic bag.

“
Intéressant
,” Destry remarked. “The dust, she has a certain…scent to it. Magic has been done on it, no doubt. But the rest of what you are doing, I simply do not comprehend.”

“The machines of my world can’t detect magic,” I explained. “But they might be able to tell me other things. For example, I placed the dust inside a mass spectrometer. It should tell me what that dust is made of, whether there is any organic matter inside. The blood, hair, and tissue went into various kinds of gas analyzers, to determine which poison tipped the darts that killed Vazura.”

“Poison? Are you sure? That is a vile way to kill someone.”

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure. Whatever killed Vazura, it did so almost instantly. The darts aren’t anywhere nearly long enough to have ended his life any other way.” I looked over to where the equipment hummed along, and then made sure that no one else on the other side of the room was watching my conversation with my pooka companion. “This shouldn’t take too much longer. In the meantime, I want to take a look at our murder weapons.”

I pulled out the wooden box and used a pair of forceps to place each dart into its own Lucite tray. Destry moved closer to the table, his muzzle almost touching one of the little missiles. He sniffed at one dart, then the other.

I took the trays from him and began to go over each dart with the microscope at low power. Vazura’s blood hung in a bruise-colored dab at the end of a hellishly sharp point. I moved the scope’s viewer along the weapon’s shaft, confirming that it had been made by a set of five individual pine needles, wrapped and braided around each other to form a strong, pliable surface.

“Anything, Dayna?” Destry asked, as I leaned back from the scope.

“Nothing we don’t already know,” I grumbled. “We’re going to have to wait to see what the other machines tell us.”

“It is truly amazing, what you can do here. Even though I am of this world, I know nothing of these things except from what I have seen in dreams.”

“Really? What kind of dreams?”

“I have seen bad dreams about waking up on a coroner’s table, as you might guess. Rather, I mean that Reveé has shown them to me. I could not view these things on my own.”

That got my attention. I gave Destry a look.

“You couldn’t see these things…of course, this must relate to the problem I’m supposed to solve for you.” I sighed. “I’m sorry I haven’t tried to help you yet, there’s a lot on my mind right now. Reveé said that you couldn’t perform your function. Which I assume has to do with delivering bad dreams.”

A nicker. “That is a fine assumption,
chérie
. It is a defining characteristic of the
pouquelaye.
”

“Complete inability to deliver nightmares…it must really bother Reveé, if she’s brought you to me.”

“I
can
deliver the terrors of the night,” Destry added. “But not
at
night, which is really when they should take place, yes?”

“So you can do…daymares?”

“Unpleasant daydreams, really. But most daydreams are cute, or hopeful. At most, they are filled with vague unease. This makes my sire and dam
furieux
, as you might guess.”