Chapter 5
5
ELLIOT CRANE
Why are there so many loud, drunken people outside my window?
SETH MAYS
It’s St. Patrick’s Day.
It’s Wednesday. Does this city think it’s Dublin?
RVA will take any excuse to drink overpriced craft beer.
This city’s a bunch of lightweights.
I wouldn’t tell them that.
I can take them.
I snorted and tucked the phone inside my bunny suit, then pulled on a pair of gloves. I didn’t know if Elliot had any intention of actually going out drinking for St. Patrick’s day at eleven at night on a Wednesday, although he was probably right that he could take out most of the hipsters that I was sure currently populated the streets around Scott’s Addition by Elliot’s hotel.
I spared only a moment to wonder what Taavi and Hart were doing—if Hart was working, as I and almost the entire RPD were, just like every other damn St. Patrick’s Day since I started processing crime scenes.
Even though it was a Wednesday, we’d had to get some uniforms to come in and keep away the gawkers who wanted to know what was going on by the police tape and flashing lights. The drunker they were, the less likely they were to process that it might be a problem if they tried to scoot either under or over the police tape. And because most of the uniforms were distributed elsewhere dealing with St. Patrick’s Day, we were a little shorthanded on crowd-control.
And that meant that Quincy and I had to keep removing people, then changing gloves so we could go back to evidence collection.
I’d gone through six pairs so far. Quincy was only on three—because I’m a big guy, so I can intimidate drunken people more easily than she can. Also because I told her just to deploy me after the second time, since she kept getting hit on by drunken frat-boy types.
Funny how they don’t hit on me. Not that I want to get hit on at work in any capacity, but somehow I just don’t give off the same vibes as Quincy.
I was trying to keep half an eye on the perimeter while also looking for any trace evidence that wasn’t in the immediate vicinity of the body, which Quincy was documenting. She’d started taking a course in crime scene photography, which was a good thing for us tonight, since our usual photographer was otherwise occupied, and nobody particularly wanted to wait for her to get here from wherever they had her working. Quincy was a decent photographer in general, and I had no reason to think she wouldn’t be just as good at this.
Detective Fairfield was standing behind Quincy as she took close-ups of the body, staring down at the victim.
That was his ‘thing.’ All detectives have a ‘thing.’ A way they process a crime scene. Hart always gave the body a once-over, then walked the room, looking like he was about to touch everything, although he never did. I assume he still does the same thing, although I no longer have the privilege of doing it with him. Maza looks at pretty much everything except the body—I mean, he does look at it eventually, but he likes to look at the rest of the scene first. Detective Clements talks to herself, softly, under her breath, reasoning through things. Detective Maginot always crouches down next to bodies and inhales, deeply. Maginot is weird. Nice enough, but weird.
Somehow, despite the lack of light and extremely high level of distraction, I still caught the slightly darker smudge on the brick wall, and I pulled my little flashlight out of my pocket to look at it. The stain was dark red, shading toward brown, with that particular not-quite-sheen that drying blood has. I’m not supposed to speculate, but it looked to me like someone had reached out and steadied themselves on the wall before—I looked back the direction I’d come—staggering toward where they fell down dead.
I slipped under the loose crime scene tape, risking moving away from the scene in order to figure out if we needed to expand it.
Another wall smudge.
And then the site of what had clearly been a scuffle on a patch of pavement that looked a little worse for wear. There were a couple loose cobbles—you get those around Richmond, especially the older parts—and the sand from underneath them had been scuffed around in a vaguely circular kind of pattern. I crouched down next to one of the bricks, its surface slightly darker on the top than the bottom. Or, more accurately, what had been its bottom (and was now the top) darker than the sun-exposed and dried top side (on which it was currently lying). That and the sand suggested that someone’s shoe had probably snagged it.
There was another brick, this one broken, smeared with blood. And there were scattered blood drops around the area.
I went back to find a uniform to expand the taped-off area.
I found Schitikova, who had also worked the Johnston scene with me. “We need to expand the scene,” I told him, then explained what I’d found.
He sighed. “Right. Okay.”
Schitikova wasn’t the fastest at getting stuff done, but he was reliable, so I went back to tell Quincy what I’d found and to collect what I’d need to swab the blood and mark all the points of evidence.
Quincy looked up from the corpse when I walked over to her. “Tierney thinks he was hit with a brick,” she reported.
Given that even from my full height I could see reddish dust mingled with the blood at the edge of a nasty head wound, I could have told her that. Quincy probably also could have told herself that, but when you work CSI, you get in the habit of keeping your crime-related speculations to yourself. Detectives really hate it if a CSI tech starts positing theories of cause of death or murder weapon or anything else. Especially when we’re right .
“And I probably found that brick,” I replied, then explained where I’d wandered off to and what Schitikova was currently doing.
“Don’t tell Fairfield you think you found it,” Quincy warned me.
“Never even crossed my mind,” I replied blandly.
Some detectives—including Fairfield—believed that any such guesswork on our part was worse than meaningless, so Quincy and I kept our mouths shut around him. He otherwise wasn’t bad—you just didn’t want him to think you were trying to solve the case. Because that was his job. I guess if we were too accurate that might threaten his feeling of self worth or something? I don’t know.
Hart never cared. In fact, I had almost been thinking he might even appreciate my opinions, but then he quit. Maza hadn’t said anything about it either way, but after getting my ear chewed off by a now-retired former RPD homicide detective who apparently had nothing better to do than yell at CSIs, I keep my thoughts to myself unless someone is about to violate the integrity of my evidence. Then I speak up.
I get yelled at for that, too, sometimes. But I care more about doing my job right than I do making friends with some of the assholes in the RPD. The detectives who are decent people don’t yell at you for making suggestions that might be helpful—whether or not it infringes on their territory.
You learn who the bad ones are pretty quick. The good ones take longer to find—you might have to look past the world’s biggest potty-mouth, for instance. Not that I’m bothered by swearing, but Hart would put even the most stereotypical sailor to shame. It took me more than a few cases to realize that was just his personality—and that if he cursed around you, he wasn’t cussing at you. And Maginot is weird, but he’s good at his job and polite to everyone, uniforms, CSIs, media, even the bodies. Maza always looks like he’s about to keel over from exhaustion and seems frazzled, but that’s just Maza. I think if I ran into him in a spa getting a massage he’d look that way. And once you got over the fact that Clements narrates her entire process, you realize that she’s eminently competent.
Fairfield is only okay. He’s not a major asshole, and he’s not stupid, but he’s not the stellar detective he thinks he is, either. But at least he wasn’t an openly raging bigot or complete monster to work with, which is more than I could say for some people who I tried to work with as infrequently as possible… not that I always got a choice.
Quincy and I were a team—and sometimes we came with a whole crew. Not tonight, of course. Because it was St. Patrick’s Day. Half the CSI staff had asked off, and the other half was spread out on cases of their own. So it was Quincy and me, and she was also doubling as our photographer.
She finished taking the pictures of the body, then stood with a grunt. “I should probably go document your smudges,” she grumbled, although I didn’t take it personally. We were all grumbly and whiny tonight.
“Probably,” I agreed, trying to at least sound pleasant, even if I wasn’t feeling it.
Quincy shuffled off in her bunny suit and booties, and I stayed by the body, waiting for Tierney to come back and give the all clear to bag up the victim and get him into the van for transport back to the morgue. As Quincy had said, it looked fairly clear that the deceased—a white, mid-twenties male with dark hair—had been hit in the head with a brick. Whether that had been the fatal injury or not was Tierney’s job to determine, but it looked pretty likely to me .
Not that our victim maybe didn’t have other potentially fatal injuries, since other parts of his face were battered and there was blood on his arms and hands, dirt and grime as well as blood on his clothes, and one shoe was missing.
I’m no detective—as Fairfield would likely remind me if I shared my thoughts—but it seemed to me like the victim had probably been beaten by at least two or three other adults, maybe more. Statistical odds—and our location in Shockoe Bottom, land of seedy nightclubs and a couple strip joints—said that a bar fight was not out of the question as a possible origin. What remained to be seen was who and why—and that was most definitely not my job.
“Ah, Mays. Excellent.” Tierney had returned, bringing with him a black bag. “Our victim is a bit on the larger side, so your muscles will be useful.”
Quincy can roll a corpse with the best of them, but since our victim looked to be over 200 pounds, I probably would have an easier time helping our near-retirement medical examiner heft the corpse’s dead weight. Just don’t tell Quincy I said so.
But since she was down a dark alley taking pictures of blood smears and scuffed cobblestones, Tierney and I did the rolling, zipping, and hefting, with me taking most of the load because Doc Tierney, while a tough guy in good shape, is over sixty-five and stubbornly clinging to his career.
Since he’s very good at his job, they haven’t tried pushing him out of it yet. I like Tierney—and since I do pretty well at hauling corpses, I wasn’t going to object to having to take a little more weight to keep him around and working.
When it came right down to it, I was actually pretty lucky in terms of my job… dead people aside. But not only did I like the puzzle of fitting evidence together, of figuring out where this bit of dirt or that pollen came from, of fi nding the matching shoe to go with a print, I liked that I got to do puzzles that let me help find justice for the victims. I got to make a difference.
And more of my colleagues in the crime lab and the ME’s office and even the detectives at the RPD were good people than weren’t. And I felt like that was increasingly difficult to find in the world at large.
Or maybe it was just the fact that the news couldn’t stop reporting on anti-Arcanid crimes, on the Magic-Free Movement’s protests and increasing presence in local governments and state-level legislatures. More and more states and municipalities were attempting to pass laws against Nids—especially shifters, orcs, vampires, and ghouls—blocking them from the medical professions, from working with kids, and even from public service jobs like fire or police.
On some level, I kinda got why people made arguments against vampires and ghouls in a surgical OR—but if you actually understood how bloodlust worked, then you’d realize that unless you’d recently starved or almost killed said vampire or ghoul, they were no more dangerous than your average waiter serving food they like to eat. And yeah, sure, you needed a lot more education to cut someone open than you did to serve up a steak, but that’s also part of the point. If you can get through med school without eating anybody—or even trying to—then it wasn’t like you were suddenly going to take up snacking on your patients if you’re feeling a little peckish.
But what the hell do I know? Other than science and facts.
I was still bitter about the fact that Noah’d had to register as a shifter with the state for… reasons. They said it was so that if they had to identify a shifted body, they would have a record of everyone’s species. That it was in case of accident or illness while shifted.
It wasn’t so that people could keep from hiring shifters.
My ass, it wasn’t.
In the same way that identifying Jewish people in 1930s Germany was about supporting religious diversity and not at all about antisemitism.