Chapter 3 #2
“My boss is watching, and trust me, no one wants a cop’s husband to go down for something he didn’t do.
The optics won’t look good to the press or the union.
I’m sure it’s fine. Here.” Murtola jerked his head, and Nick followed him into a large conference room, the wall covered in crime scene photos and some head shots.
Nick didn’t recognize anyone, but he did recognize the name Cayo Durkavic.
The man was definitely attractive enough to have caught a woman in a honey trap.
With wind-tousled blond hair, a slender nose, and sharp cheekbones, he wouldn’t have been out of place as a principal dancer for a ballet company.
“Right now, all we know about the murder is the blood pool on the floor used to be Durkavic. The only thing we need is for your husband to tell us what he knows about Durkavic’s associates, anyone he saw interacting with him.
” Murtola gestured to the board. “You might see more of this in Paranormal Crimes, but up here, our dead bodies tend to not be goo by the time we get them. I’m sure he told you something. All we need is a direction to go in.”
“I wish I could help,” Nick said easily. He knew better. This was a fishing expedition. They wanted him to give up something on Parker because they didn’t have anything.
He was relieved all over again that he’d called in Keating. She was the best in the county, and he knew even if Parker didn’t listen to her, she wasn’t going to let him walk into becoming their primary suspect, at least not any more than he already was.
“Sure, sure.” Murtola sipped his coffee. “I mean, he’s a paranormal, too, right? Your husband? That’s what everyone says.”
Nick went tense. “He’s a practicing witch.”
“Registered?” Murtola asked.
“That’s not required for his job,” Nick said.
“So no,” Murtola said. “You know, my sister is a witch. Can’t do more than lift a pencil on her own, but she loves her coven. I think it’s just an excuse for her to get together with her girlfriends and drink wine and gossip about their husbands.”
Nick nodded, reminding himself that he was the good cop to Parker’s loose cannon. Murtola was chatting him up, but he could do the same.
Since the battle for San Amaro and, by extension, the world, the SAPD had been divided up into those who’d fought and then stayed with the department, those who’d left as soon as the dust cleared, and newcomers who were either a little bit supernatural themselves or very eager to show the new supernatural citizens what American justice looked like.
It had created factions in the SAPD, and Nick knew from Murtola’s questions that he hadn’t been in San Amaro for the battle. No one who’d seen Parker in action would take the witch cover story with anything more than an eye roll.
“Yeah? You close to your sister?” Nick walked to the board, squinting at the crime scene photos.
Murtola started a story about the last family gathering and a potato salad with the wrong mustard in it. He relaxed into the telling, but Nick felt his eyes heavy on Nick’s back.
In the crime scene photos, the white bones left behind were the most incongruous part.
Durkavic had been completely liquefied except for a few rib bones and a femur.
Everything else was in shards, cracked and splintered.
The complete bones looked strangely out of place.
Why these specific ones? Why weren’t they as destroyed as the rest?
Nick’s eye caught on a swirl of blood. “Murtola, you have any close-ups on the bones?”
A second after he said it, Nick realized how sharp his question had been, but Murtola didn’t seem to mind. His eyes were dark, suspicion heavy when he said, “Sure.”
He pulled out a file folder and offered it over. Nick took it, flipping through until he saw the bone again.
“This is a circle,” he said.
“Is this like seeing Jesus in a burned piece of toast? It just looks like blood spatter,” Murtola said, coming up beside Nick.
“You think this cracking on the bone is the same pressure that destroyed the rest of the bones, right?” Nick wet his lips.
He was past being the good cop. Parker was their number one suspect, and Nick couldn’t let them get any more suspicious of his husband, even if it meant solving the crime himself.
“Yeah, that’s what CSI said.” Murtola took the photo from him, squinting at it.
“This is an alchemy circle,” Nick said. “Here, you can see the blood looks a little darker where it’s in the grooves.”
“What does the circle do?” Murtola asked.
“I don’t know. I need to find out if CSI took any other good photos of the bones. Maybe from the other side or a different angle.” Nick raised both eyebrows, frustrated when Murtola looked at him blankly.
“Oh,” Murtola said finally, and Nick wanted to shove the man into a three-day basic procedures review class. “Let me call and find out.”
He picked up the phone from the center of the conference table and dialed the extension for the Crime Scene Lab. As he talked to the receptionist, Nick found more evidence of circles on the other whole bones, but none of the pictures showed the bones in their entirety.
“They said the lead crime scene tech—Buford—is in the building right now,” Murtola said. He jerked his thumb toward the door. “Want to go talk to him?”
“Sure.” Nick straightened his jacket and followed Murtola to the elevator.
“So… what’s it like being an alchemist married to a witch?” Murtola asked.
“Complicated,” Nick said, watching the elevator numbers. At the ground floor, he let Murtola out first. It wasn’t Nick’s case, and he had to be careful not to contaminate evidence.
The last thing he needed was the real culprit getting away because Nick had made a mistake. Nick could practically hear Parker’s voice telling him that his career had been built because Nick was good at his job and a good person, that his being careful was only part of that.
The front desk said that the lead CSI tech was in the break room, and as they headed there, Murtola asked for more details.
“How much do you know about alchemy?” Nick asked.
“Not much,” Murtola admitted.
“All circles have specific elements. Anchor points are the most well-known. If it was just a crack, it might have been random coincidence, but I saw an anchor point.” Nick waited, hoping Murtola was smart enough to catch on.
“You saw anchor points, meaning the CSIs should have noticed it wasn’t a random crack in the bone.” Murtola frowned. “They’re trained to look for evidence of alchemy or witchcraft.”
“Which makes me wonder how they missed it,” Nick said.
“Right. And we wouldn’t have even seen it if you hadn’t looked at the pictures.” Murtola was frowning, and Nick winced internally. There was just enough suspicion there that Murtola might be wondering how Nick knew to look for circles on the bones in the first place.
Nick could hear Parker mocking him. What happened to “I want my attorney and I invoke my right to be silent”?
They turned into the break room, where the investigator Nick recognized from the crime scene was chatting with a records clerk. Murtola called him over.
“What’s this about?” the investigator said crankily as the clerk took her chance to escape. “You can tell your boss no, I haven’t magically finished the report in less than twenty-four hours. They don’t even do that on TV.”
“Yeah, this is actually about some of the photos. This is Detective King from Paranormal Crimes. He noticed that the bones had some alchemy circles on them.” Murtola gestured, and Nick smiled.
Friendly, he reminded himself. “That’s right. I was wondering if you had any—”
He broke off because the investigator looked like he was choking. His eyes bulged, and Nick and Murtola both leapt forward, ready to do something, but it was too late.
The man’s body expanded and contracted, pulsing once.
It was enough warning for Nick to pull up a circle.
He’d been practicing creating the shield spell without writing out the circle, and it paid off.
The second his circle covered him and Murtola, the CSI exploded, covering the room and the shield with blood.