Chapter 3
3
ELLIOT CRANE
Thanks for a fun night. Hope you’re not too sore tomorrow. :)
SETH MAYS
It was fun. Thank YOU.
I decided against anything else, since that was cringey enough. Given that Elliot hadn’t responded, he probably agreed, although to be fair, it was only about six in the morning the fourth time I checked my messages to see if he’d replied yet.
I was absolutely breaking Rule Two left and right. Not that I was expecting that he would want to be a couple or anything, because he’d made it absolutely clear that he was not interested. But because I was already falling hard, and I knew it.
It also didn’t help that I’d awakened at exactly 4:17 a.m. when my phone rang. I’d looked down at it and cursed under my breath at seeing Detective Maza’s name on the caller ID .
By six, I’d been awake for nearly two hours, was desperately under-caffeinated, having only managed to chug a quick half-cup before leaving my apartment, and I was hungry. To top it all off, I was bunny-suited and masked up and had spent most of the last hour marking tiny little blood spatters, which meant that my bad knee was killing me, to say nothing of my back.
As to the content of Elliot’s text—I was also sore, but doing my damnedest to not let anybody else guess that, because the last thing I needed from the Richmond PD or my coworkers was any sort of shit about gay sex. In fact, I was pretty sure none of them besides Quincy even knew I was gay. Not that it was any of their business—and I kind of preferred to keep it that way.
I’m not closeted, not really. I like to think of it as being a practical survivalist. I wouldn’t be worried if Hart knew, or Ward or Mason. I obviously trusted Quincy, although that had come about because I’d run into her at a gay bar when she’d been out with some friends at a double bachelorette party for the two brides. She also knew about Devin and the disaster that was the end of our relationship because we’d gotten called out the morning after, and I must have looked like the absolute shit I’d felt like.
I guess that made us friends—but the casual kind who didn’t really know much beyond the basics. She knew I was gay and single, and I knew she had a boyfriend she thought might be the one, but they’d only been together a year, so she wasn’t in a hurry to rush into anything. We shared the occasional lunch break at work, and gossiped over coffee when we had godawful early calls—like today—but I wasn’t going to be the person she called after a breakup, and she wasn’t going to be the person I told about the impossible torch I had already started carrying for Elliot Crane .
“I got you a present,” Quincy said, her voice slightly muffled by her mask, and I looked up from my painful crouch. She was holding out another bag of little yellow tags, because I was almost out.
“Gee, thanks,” I grumbled, but reached up and took the bag from her.
Despite what various TV shows might tell you, being a CSI tech is not glamorous. It’s almost always either freezing or disgustingly hot—bunny suits are not comfortable, as they provide no insulation in the winter and essentially turn into body-shaped steam bags in the summer. You wear a mask not simply because of the risk of contracting Arcanavirus while working in close quarters with the PD or the other techs, but because you have to get close to things you don’t really want to be breathing in—bodily fluids, sometimes chemicals or dust or even just the very particular and pungent stench of death. Or because you might accidentally drool or sneeze—or, let’s be honest, vomit—on the evidence, which then makes your job even more difficult. You have to wear booties that make walking awkward and often slippery, around things that you don’t want to fall in or on, and not just because they’re disgusting. Falling on a corpse might well be disgusting, but falling on it will also contaminate the crime scene and mess up the evidence like nobody’s business.
And that’s just the gear.
That, and the job itself can be almost unbearably tedious, such as now, as I set out one hundred and seventy-two little yellow plastic tents to mark every instance of blood spatter we’d found. I didn’t know that at the start, of course, and the little tents came in packs of a hundred. When Quincy came and brought me bag number two, I was on ninety-six. Dusting for fingerprints is equally mind-numbing. As is cataloging every damn object in a room where the crime took place, just in case it becomes relevant later. And going through the house or office or immediate area—depending on the crime, although in this case it was a small, one-story house—to determine whether or not other rooms were relevant to the crime, then getting confirmation from the detective on site, then getting the photographers to document it, then marking and dusting everything.
The crime scene itself wasn’t what interested me most about the job. I liked the lab work. The biochemistry of it—finding and identifying particulates, ID-ing the chemical signatures of drugs or poisons, figuring out the likely size and shape of a suspect based on a shoe print. The actual science part of forensic science. It’s why I had a small storage shed with old equipment I’d gotten from labs that were replacing it—it gave me a place to play with finding new methods or techniques, as well as test theories that my bosses at the crime lab weren’t willing to gamble on. I usually didn’t blame them for not wanting to take the risks. Usually.
Our budget was a lot tighter than it should have been, so a lot of the calls that got made were the result of not having enough funds for what we really wanted to do. But sometimes it was because somebody at the RPD shut a case despite the evidence. Or because I wanted to try to do something experimental that was just too risky because it might not be acceptable to a court of law. I got it, because part of our job really was providing evidence for the district attorney’s office, but it was still frustrating.
I also did lab work for Beyond the Veil sometimes. They didn’t usually need much—it’s a lot more straightforward to solve crimes when the dead person can tell you who killed them—but when they did, Ward would come to me. Hart had started doing it, but now he had a fancy FBI lab, so he didn’t ask me anymore, unless he was asking for Ward.
Every now and then, when it was something the feds wouldn’t touch, but Ward or Mason or Beck wanted it looked into. Those were my favorite cases—I liked it when I could actually be useful, and BTV never minded if I did things a little less conventionally.
I hadn’t told Quincy about that part of my life. Probably because she’d tell me I would get into deep trouble if the powers that be ever found out about it. Which I probably would. But it’s not like Hart or Ward is going to tell anybody, though.
This particular crime scene was one of the ones that was less interesting and more depressing. Even though it was one of Maza’s cases, it wasn’t a magical case, at least as far as any of us could tell. We hadn’t seen any indication of sigils or magical artifacts anywhere in the house, although we all knew that us normies wouldn’t notice if something had been hidden.
Cause of death wasn’t a mystery, either. The yet-unidentified woman had been bludgeoned to death with a crowbar, also found on scene. This was clear from the one hundred and seventy-two discrete areas of blood spatter—several of them containing multiple spatter points that I’d carefully outlined in chalk on the kitchen tile. And the counter. And the cupboards. You get the idea.
She was unidentified for the same reason that I was marking blood spatter everywhere in the kitchen and in the part of the hallway within a straight line of the body. We were assuming she was probably Ms. Lisa Johnston, since that’s whose purse was inside the front door and the height and skin tone matched the woman on the driver’s license inside. But you couldn’t tell by looking at what was left of her face.
Quincy and I had rock-paper-scissored over who was going to go through the rest of the house and who got blood spatter duty, and I lost. She’d been working on a set of footprints in the front hall when I’d called to her for more tents. “Anything interesting on the shoes?” I asked her.
“A couple sets,” she replied. “One seems to match a pair of sneakers on the shoe tray by the door that would fit our vic. The others look bigger, so I’m guessing that’s either our perp or the probable man in her life… or both.”
“You assume he’s in her life?”
A shrug. “Most likely outcome, statistically speaking.”
She wasn’t wrong. At least 65% of murdered women are killed by someone they know—and that’s not counting the 20% that are unsolved, some proportion of which were probably also committed by someone they knew. “We’re not supposed to assume,” I reminded her. “In fact, we’re not supposed to actually do the solving at all, remember?”
Naturally the CSIs had betting pools for all of the murder cases we worked. We weren’t dumb enough to post them anywhere, or to play for money, but let’s just say that there was always a reason when someone brought in donuts for the rest of us.
Quincy, who hadn’t bought the donuts in at least six months, snorted. She was the only person who’d made it longer than me without having to buy the donuts—I was working on five months and one week, myself. I’d been seriously pissed when she was right about the brother having been the killer on the case that had made me responsible for the last round of staff donuts. I and nearly everyone else had placed our donut-dollars on the husband, because that’s what the odds said. But in that case—nope. The brother had framed the husband, then killed his own sister and thought to defraud both the husband and his own niece and nephews out of the life insurance money.
Quincy snorted. “No sign of B and E,” she said. Breaking and entering. “Means she let him in.”
I nodded. “Selling boy scout cookies?” I suggested, knowing full well, of course, that boy scouts weren’t that big and didn’t sell cookies. Not the kind that went door-to-door, anyway. I’d been to a club once that had boy scouts selling cookies. While I’d been curious, I’d been warned away from the cookies if I wanted to pass the piss test at work anytime soon.
I’m not really into mind-altering substances, other than caffeine and alcohol and the occasional use of marijuana to cut the pain when it got too bad, so I’d appreciated the warning.
“Ha,” was Quincy’s response. “Adult boy scouts show up to your door selling cookies, you probably shouldn’t let them in, Mays.”
I shared her chuckle. “Noted,” I replied.
“My turn to buy the Bux on the way back to the office,” she said. “You in?”
“God, yes.” I grinned up at her, even though she couldn’t see my lips—she could see the crinkling around my eyes. “You’re an angel, Quincy.”
She snorted. “Hardly. More like a… troll bearing coffee and scones.”
“Troll?” I laughed. Quincy is definitely nothing like a troll, unlike, perhaps, yours truly. I’m a big guy—not particularly ugly or stupid, I don’t think (the stupid part, I know I’m not ugly, but if I were stupid, I don’t think I’d know it, so I’ll allow for the possibility)—but I’m definitely more troll-sized and -shaped than Quincy, who’s like five-five and definitely shaped like a human woman. Not my thing, but I’ve seen enough people check her out while she’s wearing a bunny-suit that it’s clear she’s pretty far away from ‘troll’ on the fantasy-creatures spectrum. “Coffee-and-scones pixie, maybe,” I countered.
“Fair enough,” she replied, good-naturedly. “Just as soon as we finish this. So I should get back to my mud.”
“And I have at least another two or three or four dozen of these things to go, so we’ll see who gets done first.”
The answer was Quincy.
I woke the next morning to a text from Maza: Vic tested positive for active Arcana. We’re in lockdown for the next 24 hours.
“Fuck.” We would know forty-eight hours after exposure whether or not any of us had contracted it. Usually, homicide victims didn’t have the active virus—or, if they did, we would know in advance because they’d been reported sick by someone in their lives, they looked sick, or because that was actually what had killed them, despite the violence they might also have suffered. I’d attended more than one scene that had started as a wellness check because the person had been missing for a few days—and they’d died of Arcana. Sometimes they were stuck mid-transformation. Those were the worst.
This one hadn’t had any of the usual flags that went with an active Arcana case. For one thing, she’d been beaten to death. Most positive Arcana cases we encountered died from the virus. And in most of those cases, it was either immediately evident—because of evidence of sickness or transformation—or no longer active, the virus having died at having been in a corpse for more than 48 hours. Point is, we usually had plenty of evidence that we were dealing with an Arcana case.
Not this time.
I was more cautious than most people about contracting Arcanavirus. I mask in every public situation, including when outside. And at the crime scene in question. But the kind of masks we wore, while helpful, were imperfect, and we’d spent a lot of time in the room with the body. Handling it. Helping the ME, Doc Tierney, load it into the bag and then the van. Taking swabs of blood and other bodily fluids. Testing those fluids in the lab, where most of us—including me—didn’t mask if we were alone in the room. Or with an Arcanid—like Hart.
Nids can’t contract or carry Arcana. They’re the only ones. Even Arc-humans can re-contract and carry it, although they’re unable to gain any new arcane abilities or undergo transformation. They can still die, though. I was more cautious than most because I’d witnessed Noah’s transformation. It had been horrible and painful and had changed his life forever.
It wasn’t that I loved my twin any less post-transformation—of course not. And I didn’t think Noah deserved any fewer rights or privileges than the rest of us. But that looked like it hurt . A lot. And the world wasn’t as kind and accepting as it should have been. It was harder for him to get a job, access health care, and move throughout the world. And now he had to register with the state of Virginia.
I didn’t want to get horribly sick, I definitely didn’t want to die, and I also didn’t want to make my life any harder than it had to be.
Was it likely that everyone at that scene now had Arcana? Realistically, our risk was pretty low. But protocol was that we had to quarantine for forty-eight hours from first contact, then test before we could go back to work. Arcanavirus is very, very contagious. Regardless of how you felt about catching it, if even one of us showed up to work carrying it, we could take out the whole department—and the idea of losing the crime lab, URPD’s Precinct One day shift, and a chunk of the ME’s office for two weeks minimum was unacceptable to the city government.
So every uniform cop, every tech, Maza, Doc Tierney… This one victim meant that all of us were off the job for the next twenty-four hours, at least. Which meant that if you were going to commit a murder in Richmond, today would have been the day to do it. Sure, there were still cops and coroners and lab techs, just… about a quarter fewer of them. More, if transmission got out of control.
So I guessed I got to sleep in.
Then I thought about Noah and the fact that he might not be alone in his room…
I dragged myself out of bed with a groan as my knee and back protested, grabbed my glasses off the thrifted nightstand, and then walk-limped over to the door to my room—what had been Noah’s art studio before he’d let me move in with him. I put a hand on the knob. “Noah?” I called.
Noah’s an artist—paint and sculpture, mostly, although he ranged pretty broadly within those media. He’d even done one of the massive murals that graced walls all over the city—it was gorgeous, a mermaid holding her hands up as though the bricks were a glass wall behind which she was being held—or through which she was watching this air-filled world with its people walking to and fro. There was a small smile on her lips, an expression of curiosity on features surrounding eyes that were solid black. She was eerie and beautiful and strange, a threat and a promise all at once.
I loved her.
She got mixed reviews from other people—although everyone agreed that she was technically exquisite, some people didn’t like the implied threat in her bottomless eyes, or maybe they just objected the curves of her breasts that were barely concealed by drifting strands of kelp.
I had a poster-size print of a photograph of that wall framed in my room. Noah had laughed and told me he’d give me the concept drawing. But it wasn’t the same. I still took it—I had that, too, also framed.
“Noah?” I was louder this time.
I heard movement. “What, Seth?” came his irritated reply. I didn’t blame him. Noah did not keep normal-people hours. Artists rarely did. He’d worked the five to one a.m. shift last night at Hands and Paws Shelter—that’s how he knew Taavi Camal, Hart’s boyfriend, who also worked there, although Taavi worked much more normal people hours—and part-time. Noah was a chronic night-owl. I’m the opposite. It means we rarely cross over each other—Noah’s in bed when I get up, I’m in bed by the time he gets home. Sometimes we have the same days off, though. That’s nice.
“Is Lulu here?” I asked him through the door. Lulu is Noah’s significant other. We’d fought about Lulu when they’d first started dating because I didn’t think Lulu was good enough for Noah. I still didn’t, but I didn’t really think anyone was good enough for Noah. I’d mostly gotten over it, although Lulu and I were really only civil to each other.
“No, why?” Noah was definitely grumpy with me.
I opened the door. “I just got contact traced,” I told him. “I wasn’t going to open the door if Lulu was here.” Lulu was human, and if I had Arcana, Lulu could have gotten it from me. I might not be Lulu’s best friend, but I wasn’t about to give them Arcanavirus if I could help it.
Noah blinked blearily up at me, wrapped in a too-long silk robe that had to have been Lulu’s. Lulu was a couple inches taller than Noah, and tended to wear heels that made them even taller than that. Including heeled slippers that I did not understand in the slightest, since I was under the impression that slippers were supposed to be comfort shoes. But whatever—not my feet.
We might be twins, but Noah is slight, much shorter than I am and built more thin and willowy, where I’m basically a human tank. We’re both blond, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and prone to freckles, I just look like I was destined for an offensive line, and Noah comes in somewhere around ‘figure skater’ rather than ‘football player.’
Fortunately, Noah isn’t susceptible to Arcana anymore—he already had it when we were fifteen, and that’s how he ended up at Hands and Paws, although back then he’d needed the shelter it provided to homeless shifters. I’d somehow not contracted it back then, even though we’d been nearly inseparable. But because Noah was a wolf shifter, he was perfectly safe around me, even if I had gotten infected.
“Work?” he asked, the words coming less thickly now as he woke up, a worried furrow on his brow showing that he was taking this seriously.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“How do you feel?” he asked, stepping forward and standing on his toes to put one long-fingered hand against my forehead.
“Fine, Nono.”
“Did you have a mask on?”
“Yeah, of course.” And here was why I had dreaded—a little bit—telling Noah. Because he would go full mother hen on me.
“What happened?”
“The victim had it,” I replied. “And it was still active when the autopsy was done, so everybody at the scene got traced.”
“From yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you go other than work?”
“Just work. You know me—I have no life.” I was not going to mention the evening of amazing sex I’d had the day before the case. Because I was not going to talk about my means-nothing sex life with my brother.
Noah gave me a look that said he didn’t believe me.
“What?”
“You didn’t go out again?” he asked.
“Again?” I tried to play dumb. I should know better.
“You were out late the night before,” my incredibly nosy brother said bluntly.
My neck started feeling itchy. “That wasn’t anything. I was just… helping a friend.”
“What friend?” Noah wanted to know. Because Noah lives for gossip, and I am sadly lacking in gossip at least ninety percent of the time.
“A friend of Hart’s actually,” I answered him. “He’s in town to do some work for Ward and Mason.”
Noah’s eyebrows rose. Goddamn it, but I can’t hide anything from him. “A friend of Hart’s,” he repeated.
“Yes. The same guy I picked up from the airport last week, nosy.” I knew my neck was heating up, which was totally going to give away to Noah that there was more that I wasn’t telling him .
“Why did a friend of Hart’s need a ride to the hardware store?” Noah asked.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” I replied, “but because Hart is working the senator’s wife’s murder.”
“Oh.”
That effectively shut Noah up. The story had been in the news since the evening we’d been called in to the scene—I knew the FBI were trying to keep the details under wraps, but they were only going to be able to keep the press preoccupied with backstory without juicy details for so long.
Noah might like gossip, but he hated the news—especially when it involved shifter murders. I couldn’t say that I blamed him for that. I wasn’t much of a fan of the news these days, either. Protests, violence, hatred and bigotry, laws being passed across most of the South and parts of the Midwest that placed limitations or traces—like the new Virginia SID Registry—on shifters and other Arcanids. I might be human, but people I cared about were Nids. Noah, especially. But also Hart and Mason.
I paid attention because I felt like I had to know—I had to know how to protect my brother. It was instinctive. Even though Noah’s an adult—and is technically an hour older—because I was the bigger one, I’d always felt protective of him. So it was my job to know what was going to come after him.
Nevermind that if it came down to it, Noah could more than handle himself. Shifters are strong—very strong. To say nothing of his massive teeth.
“So Hart was busy,” I finished lamely. “And Elliot seems like a nice guy.”
Noah’s blue eyes sharpened. “A nice guy, huh?”
“One who lives in Wisconsin,” I said, as much for my own benefit as Noah’s. I needed the reminder that nothing was going to come of our one-night stand. Or two- or however-many-nights it ended up being.
“Ah,” was Noah’s response. I could tell he knew that I liked Elliot, but that he also knew that I was trying not to.
Twins are like that.
“So you’re home today?” Noah politely changed the subject.
“Apparently,” I replied. “You?”
Noah nodded. “Chinese food and movies?”
“I’m in,” I agreed. “Although can we start with coffee and donuts? Six is a little early for egg rolls and General Tso’s Chicken.”
Noah laughed. “Gimme an hour, and I’ll get us some Sugar Shack.”
There’s a reason I love my brother.
I was up at five the next morning—a full forty-nine hours after my initial exposure—to head over to the clinic to get tested. City employees, including those of us in the crime lab, the RPD, the fire department, emergency services, and everybody in the courts and city buildings, had their own clinic that was open twenty-four hours so that the city could maximize employee productivity. In other words, to make sure that we didn’t take an hour longer off work than was legally mandated.
At least a day off yesterday meant that my knee and my wrist hurt a little less then usual.
All of us had appointments between six and seven a.m., so I was about to get to go hang out with everyone else from the Johnston homicide. And yes, DNA had confirmed that Ms. Johnston was our battered victim. Unfortunately, none of the other swabs had picked up any other DNA, which meant we still had no idea who our killer was. Not even a blood type or a general profile other than ‘probable male’ between five-foot-eight and six-foot-two. So… about half the adult population.
If we had a footprint in the mud, we could have told more—weight, probable height, gait. But a dirty shoe-print on the carpet only gave us shoe size, and that was only enough to very loosely guess height based on average shoe-size-to-height ratios. Which was only marginally better than having jack squat.
Maza and Quincy were sitting in the waiting area when I got there, both wearing the heavier respirator-style masks you were supposed to wear if you had or had been exposed to Arcana. Maza waved as I settled in the chair next to Quincy’s.
“How you feeling?” I asked her, nudging her shoulder with mine.
She rolled her light blue eyes over the top of her mask. “Fine,” she replied. “You?”
“Just peachy,” I reported. “Got a day off, though. That was kinda nice.”
Quincy snorted. “Not if you have to spend it cleaning.”
“True,” I agreed. “But at least you got paid?” The government’s solution to keeping people from coming to work sick was that they made it illegal to knowingly work if you had or had been exposed to Arcana, which meant that if you had an official trace or showed possible Arcana symptoms, your work had to pay you. Most places of employment also mandated that if you’d been traced but weren’t symptomatic, you had to work remotely. It was really hard to do CSI and police work remotely, though, so we got away with days off. Office workers, not so much .
Sure, there was sometimes a little paperwork at the crime lab, and I’d actually spent an hour filing a few things, but most of what I had to do required lab equipment or would have taken me to a scene, and that I couldn’t do from the isolation of Noah’s apartment. So we’d marathoned Indiana Jones, because why not?
The door to the testing room opened, revealing Doc Tierney with a bright pink bandaid on his arm from where they’d drawn blood for the test. The nurse behind him, looking bored, called out “Maza” without even looking up. Maza waggled his eyebrows as he traded places with Tierney, walking into the office.
It was a rapid test—they’d have the results within fifteen minutes—so once you had your blood drawn, they sent you to a separate waiting room from which they could either admit you into the hospital or send you back to your life, Arcana-free.
Quincy and I chatted until she was called in, talking about the fact that she wanted to start fostering senior cats. Apparently she just couldn’t stand the fact that old cats got left at shelters—which, okay, that was really sad, but I also knew that if I got a cat that was going to die in a few years, I’d just be heartbroken over and over again. But I told Quincy that was really awesome and asked if I could come play with her old cats if she did it.
She’d grinned at me, her eyes turning up. “Hell, yeah!”
I grinned back, and then the nurse released Maza and called Quincy.
A couple uniforms—Mattheson and Lombardi—had shown up by the time they got what they needed from Quincy, and the nurse called me.
“Mays.” She sounded bored.
I got up and walked into the tiny room .
And then we did the fun and exciting rundown of my medical history. Name. Date of birth. Previous surgeries. Allergies. Then the full explanation of Lyme and Alpha-gal.
And after all that we got to why I was here.
“Any symptoms since yesterday? Congestion? Upset stomach?”
“Nope.”
“Which arm?”
I held out my left, and she swabbed the inside of my elbow, then deftly slid the needle into one of the prominent veins on my arm, drawing a vial of blood.
Then I was band-aided—mine was purple—and sent on my way to await the results after fifteen minutes.
Tierney was putting on his coat as I walked in.
“Clear?” I asked him.
“Indeed,” he replied. “I’m sure I’ll see all of you soon.”
Maza was cleared next, then Quincy. Mattheson and Lombardi were both waiting with me when the med tech came back with mine.
“Mays?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re clear. Have a good one.”
I’d essentially known I would be. Not really , but the likelihood had been extremely low. Coupled with the lack of any symptoms, and I’d been ninety-five percent sure I was good. I still felt a surge of relief when she said You’re clear . Funny, that.
“Thanks,” I said to her departing back. “See you guys at the next scene,” I said to Mattheson, Lombardi, and now Schitikova, who had just come through from getting his blood drawn.
Back to the lab.