Chapter 3 #2
“Any chance you’ll let me call Mays?” Hart asked Raj.
“No,” came Raj’s response. “You can’t call in an RPD tech.”
Hart sighed. “You know he’s better than any of ours.”
“And yet the Federal government pays their salaries, not his,” came the response. “So you have to deal with the fact that they are incrementally less skilled than your favorite CSI.”
“Fine.” Hart sounded a little annoyed. “Can we call in some other fucker who knows about blood spatter, then?”
Raj let out a low huff. “Will I do?” he asked, and even I could detect the sarcasm in the question.
Hart’s eyebrow arched. “You know blood spatter? Why the fuck didn’t I know that?”
“You never asked,” came the response. He paced over to the spot in question, then turned to look at me.
“Okay, Rayn. This particular pattern”—He pointed at the spattery streak on the wall.
—“Would have been caused by a backswing.” He swung a pretend weapon of some sort in a kind of lazy arc.
“Blood on the weapon from the victim would have been thrown backwards—probably more than once, given the thickness of the spatter.”
I walked over to where he was standing, and he took a step away, letting me stand where he’d been.
I looked around me, at the end of the couch, at a small side table with a round clean spot in the middle that suggested there had been something there, like a vase or jug.
I looked for anywhere the killer might have touched on the way over, anywhere they might have gone from this spot, what they could see…
There was a smudge on one of the curtains at about hip height. “What about that?” I asked Raj.
He walked over to it, studying it. “Hard to say,” he replied. “But it looks like a smear, not spatter. Like something that was bloody brushed up against the curtain.”
“Would the killer have had blood on his sleeve?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
I swallowed, then walked over to the curtain. Raj stepped back again, but only one step. I could still feel him standing there.
I reached out and gently brushed my fingers over the fabric, not on the stain, but just above it. Where, if the killer had been wearing gloves, a little bit of skin might have been revealed if his sleeves had come up during the murder.
The stupid bitch had clawed him, torn his shirt, raised welts on his skin. At least there’d been no blood. Given how badly everything else had gone, at least there was that.
It was supposed to have been a clean kill.
She was supposed to have been unconscious, unable to fight back.
But either Garraway had lied to him about the stupid necklace, or she’d not worn it enough.
Garraway had said she’d be out after he triggered the spell, but when he’d let himself in, although she’d been on the floor, she’d been awake, crawling toward the couch and her purse.
Stubborn bitch.
It had made noise—killing her. And that meant that he needed to grab the money and get the hell out of here.
I gasped, swayed, then steadied as warm, strong hands gripped my arms by the elbows. I looked up, confused, and nearly lost all sense of space or thought in twin pools of golden brown with black centers.
Maybe it was the aftereffects of the vision—or of having two in rapid succession—but it felt like I forgot everything as I stared into Raj’s eyes.
“Rayn, focus,” he said softly, his low voice soothing and soft. “Deep breaths.”
“You okay, kid?” Hart’s voice came from behind me, and I blinked quickly, refocusing away from Raj’s hypnotic gaze and toward Hart’s amethyst one.
I nodded. “Y-yeah.” I took a deep breath. “The name of the guy who enchanted the necklace, I think, is Garraway.”
“Oh, fuck, yeah,” Hart said, his face lighting up.
“You’re sure?” There was an edge of excitement to Raj’s voice.
I told them both what I’d felt.
“Seems pretty likely,” Hart said, speaking to Raj.
The darker-skinned man nodded, his hands on his hips, having let go of my arms. “Agreed, although it’s not a guarantee.”
Hart rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Tony. What the fuck else could that mean?”
“Maybe he’s the one who gave it to her, but he wasn’t the one who put the spell on it,” Raj replied. “Or maybe he’s just a go-between, someone who relayed information, but wasn’t involved in the casting.”
Hart looked skeptical. “You really think either of those things is at all likely?”
“It doesn’t matter if I think they’re likely or not,” came the response. “It’s whether or not they’re possible. We can’t act without definitive evidence.”
Hart made a face.
“You’re a Fed now, Keebler. We have standards.”
“Obviously not, if you’re in charge of anything,” Hart quipped.
Raj flipped him off again.
I wobbled a little, and one of those big hands took my elbow. “You need to sit down,” Raj said gently. “At least for a few minutes.”
I swallowed, focusing on the hand on my elbow, the warmth of it through my sleeve. “I—I don’t want to sit in here,” I whispered.
“No,” Raj agreed. “We’ll find somewhere else.”
I liked Cassandra Rheinhertz. Although a little over the average height for a woman, she was several inches shorter than me, with thick auburn waves and a dark sense of humor.
We were sitting in a small conference room on the ground floor of the hotel that we’d requisitioned after Raj agreed that I could sit somewhere that wasn’t the crime scene.
Cass, once she arrived, had concurred that trying to block out the crime scene wasn’t going to do either of us any favors in terms of concentration as we worked on pushing my psychic abilities.
I had no idea what Hart and Raj were doing while we were in the conference room.
“Okay,” she said, her voice pitched low and even. “When I have a vision, I try to think about slowing things down, really paying attention to as many details as I can. Almost like playing a video at half speed.” She shrugged. “I kind of imagine a little dial in my head, trying to slow things down.”
I frowned. “But you see them. Your visions?”
She nodded. “Yeah. You don’t?”
“No. It’s more like… thoughts. Inner monologue, kind of. But abstract. Almost like there’s a voice in my head narrating.”
She looked thoughtful, tapping one long finger against her lips. “Huh. Can you… go deeper? I think about zooming in, although if you’re experiencing your visions in language, that’s probably not the right way to think about it, exactly. But a way to get at more detail? More nuance?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve never tried.”
“Well,” she said, brightly. “No time like the present.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out a smooth stone. “I brought this for practice.” She held it out.
I hesitated.
“It’s mine,” she said. “I’ve had it for years. A worry stone. That way you can ask me if things are accurate—and I’ll know if you’re actually getting anywhere with your attempt to target specifics.”
I stared at the stone. It was white and pearlescent, quartz or something similar, probably. There was a smooth depression in the center of it, as though her thumb had rubbed over it again and again.
I swallowed, steeling myself, and held out my hand.
She put the stone in it.
She worried at the stone every time she felt anxious—her mom had called it a ‘worry stone,’ after all.
That’s what it was for. She’d kept it in a pocket for years, rubbing at it when she approached Sharon Wright to ask her on a date, and kept rubbing at it when Sharon had turned her down with an ‘ew.’ And kept rubbing at it for the next four months every time she had to pass Sharon and her friends in the hall and they all burst into fits of giggles, making her cheeks heat.
She worried at it while lying in a hospital bed, trying to breathe through the thick congestion in her chest, wondering whether or not she was going to come out of the disease with fangs or horns or some other drastic change.
She worried at it after her visions took over her mind and body, leaving her bruised from the falls she kept experiencing when the visions took over her consciousness.
She worried at it while studying her criminal justice textbooks, an absent motion that helped to keep her body distracted so that her mind could focus.
She worried at it while waiting her turn to get her firearm certification. And recertifications.
She worried at it while interviewing for her first job with the FBI, and on her first day, when she’d walked up to a faun named John Kurtzweil and asked him where she was supposed to go to be part of A-Branch.
She’d stopped worrying at it regularly after that, although she carried it around whenever she knew she was going to have a particularly stressful day. Just in case.
I gasped as I came out of the memories, then put the stone on the conference table in front of me, resting my head in my hands as my vision swam a bit.
I’d never tried to use my psychic abilities this many times in one day, and I was starting to understand what Ward meant when he said he’d overextended himself talking to the dead.
“You okay?” Cass asked.
“I—I think I’ve just done this too much today,” I admitted. “I feel dizzy.”
“What have you eaten today?” she asked.