Chapter 8
8
ELLIOT CRANE
Thanks for the help yesterday.
Did you want to see it come together?
SETH MAYS
I’d love to—kind of busy at the moment, though.
Work.
Sorry.
No problem.
I’ll send pictures.
I’d like that!
He did send several, the first of the chalked outline on the table, then later ones as he carved out the channels along those lines, and then more as he pressed in the inlay. Not right away, of course, but over the next several days. The last one he sent—the inlay finished, although unvarnished—was quite possibly the most beautiful piece of furniture I’d ever seen. Not that I’ve seen a lot of beautiful furniture, but holy shit that table was gorgeous. And it wasn’t quite done.
I wanted to go over to see it in person—to see Elliot—but I was kept busy by a combination of work and helping Noah scrub the everloving shit out of the apartment because of spring cleaning.
Or something.
It’s Noah’s apartment, so I go along with it.
It was also probably better that I didn’t see Elliot again—because regardless of the fact that I’d agreed to not develop feelings for him, I had, and I needed to break off whatever it was we had before things got any worse.
But on that particular day, I’d started off getting dragged to a crime scene a little after seven in the morning—earlier than I usually went to work, but not so early that I felt like a scrap the cat had dragged in. I was, however, a little annoyed that I kept getting called to crime scenes the morning after Elliot had done his best to make sure I couldn’t walk a straight line.
I mean, okay, I could . It just took concentration.
The bigger problem was the fact that the strain from managing to stay standing meant that my knee was throbbing and my back and wrist ached even more than usual. Add to that the fact that I’d already been having a shit pain day and had thrown a table around for several hours, and I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.
This would have been much less of an issue if I’d been in the lab where things like stools could alleviate pressure from both knee and back. Instead, I was currently—stupidly—crouched outside next to yet another body trying to keep my expression from showing just how much pain I was in. Nobody likes a whiner. Not like there was anything anybody could have done about it, anyway.
The dead don’t care about the pain of the living.
The victim—blunt force trauma to the skull, it looked like—had been found on Belle Isle just off one of the trails on the hilltop. Normally, this would have led to a quick discovery, but it had absolutely poured a handful of nights ago and a small mudslide had washed out the trail on one side, so the park people had just closed the whole thing.
Tierney was betting that it had rained shortly after the victim had either been killed or dumped, which meant that our killer thought the victim would be discovered more quickly than it had been. Or the killer had panicked and just run, leaving the body where it fell.
With the rain and mud and the intervention of wildlife like crows, vultures, and rodents, the body was a bit hard to identify—and the evidence was absolute shit.
It looked like a rock—probably—had been used as the murder weapon, and it could have been one of several appropriately-sized specimens nearby, which Quincy was currently putting into boxes, since the evidence baggies were neither large nor sturdy enough to be used to collect softball-plus-sized rocks. Rain had washed away any obvious traces of blood, although we’d be spending a lot of quality time with Q-tips going over every tiny crevice until we either ran out of rocks or identified the murder weapon.
I’d rather be hunched over a lab table swabbing rocks than squatting in the mud with a knee that pulsed pain in time with my heartbeat and a back that felt vaguely like it was trying to set my nerves on fire.
I had other discomforts much worse than the one in my ass to be worrying about .
A squelching sound followed by a “Fuck!” had both Quincy and I looking up to see one of the uniforms having ass-planted right in the middle of the scene.
I met her blue eyes over her mask. We shared a look that conveyed volumes about rookie cops and messing up our crime scenes.
When I looked back at the uniform—a guy I didn’t know—he was staring morosely at hands that definitely now had blood on them.
The next look Quincy shot me clearly said I had to be the one to go get his DNA so we could eliminate it from the evidence collection.
I sighed, wincing as I pushed myself to standing off my own thighs, then half-limped over to where the guy sat in the mud. I already had a handful of DNA swab kits in one of the bunny-suit’s many pockets. It was really more of a utility-bunny-suit, with pockets on the hips, both thighs, and the chest. It meant we could keep baggies, gloves, a mask or two, collection vials, and other small necessities on us, instead of having to constantly run back to the truck or even across the scene to where our kits sat. The less traffic across crime scenes, the better. And the lower the risk that you were going to slip and fall on your ass, like my about-to-be-new-acquaintance.
“Hi!” I said to him, trying not to sound like a grumpy asshole.
He looked up at me, clearly embarrassed. “What?”
“I’m going to need your DNA, officer,” I told him, trying to sound pleasant. I didn’t want to have to swab him, and he wasn’t going to like it. But we all have jobs to do, and the fact that he’d just gotten blood on my crime scene meant that mine was now more complicated.
“What? Why? ”
I gestured at his bleeding hands. “Because now it’s on my crime scene,” I replied. “So I’ll need a sample to eliminate your DNA from the suspect pool.”
He gaped at me. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Sadly, yes,” I replied, trying not to get annoyed at him. Well. More annoyed.
“I’m not giving you my DNA,” he snapped.
“Yes, you are, Trullheimer,” Dan Maza called out from behind me. “You barf on a scene, you give us DNA. You drool on it, DNA. You bleed on it, you sure as hell give us DNA. So get off your ass and give Mays here whatever he needs. Comprende ?”
Trullheimer muttered something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, but I was pretty sure was rude—either to me or to Detective Maza. Or possibly both of us. I waited for him to get himself out of the mud on his own—one, I was wearing gloves and didn’t want to contaminate them, and, two, he was being a dick.
Once he got on his feet, I waved a swab at him. “Do you want me to use your hands or swab your cheek?”
“What? Fuck. I?—”
“Cheek, then,” I decided for him. I’d been pretty sure he wasn’t going to tell me to use his hands—they were scraped up pretty badly, and he probably didn’t want me digging around in them. I didn’t want to do that, anyway, with all the mud and grime ground into the wounds. A cheek swab would be cleaner.
He wasn’t wearing a mask—the uniforms rarely did, although Maza had on a police-issue navy blue one—probably because we were outside and the transmission risk was much lower. I hadn’t always seen Maza wear one to scenes, either—crowded ones, yes, but he’d started to wear them to all of them after our little contact-trace fiasco .
“Open up, please,” I said, far more pleasantly than I really wanted to.
Trullheimer made a face, but did as I asked. I stuck the swab in and rubbed it against his cheek, then took it back out and stuck it in the little tube.
“Thank you,” I told him as I copied down his last name on the tiny label. Under that, I wrote ‘elimination.’
Then I made my way back to the body, which was still undergoing examination by Doc Tierney. I’d help him bag the body, then find someone to help me carry it down the muddy and rocky hillside and out to the gravel area where the ME’s van could actually park. Preferably someone other than Trullheimer, who had already demonstrated his lack of coordination and who now didn’t like me.
A different uniform named Ramirez came to the rescue, taking the victim’s feet and walking gamely backwards, carefully looking over her shoulder as we slowly made our way down the hill.
“Why can’t people body dump on flat ground?” she complained after navigating a particularly unpleasantly rocky curve. Her tone made it clear that she was trying to commiserate—shared pain as a friendly overture.
“It really would be much more helpful if they did,” I replied cheerfully in spite of the throbbing in my knee and back and the twinges going through my wrist. “Or at least push them off the cliff.”
She snorted a laugh, although the going was tough enough that neither one of us was particularly inclined to conversation. Tierney led the way, calling out cautions about particularly tricky rocks and roots as we went, and he opened the van doors when we got there, both Ramirez and I significantly sweatier than when we’d started.
My knee was completely fucked, throbbing and pulsing and weak. I was frankly surprised the damn thing had actually managed to make it all the way to the van. I resisted the urge to bend down and rub it—I’d get mud all over the bunny suit, for one thing, and then I’d have to field questions about what was wrong with me, for another.
I hate talking about my knee. Or my back or wrist. And sometimes my hip, my jaw, and my hands, especially when they get cold. Because people ask what happened, and then they get this panicked little look when you tell them that you were bitten by a tick eighteen years ago and now have chronic pain due to Lyme arthritis for life. Inevitably that leads to questions like Can’t they cure that now? to which I have to explain that you can only do that if you treat it early, and mine was not treated early because my parents were religious fruitcakes who thought they could pray it better. So now it’s a permanent part of my life.
People are perfectly happy to express sympathy about illness and injuries when they think they’re going to get better. They don’t like it when you tell them that you’re just always in pain—sometimes less, sometimes more, but it’s always there. Because then they have nothing to say , no well-wishes or hopes that it will clear up soon. Because it won’t.
I don’t know—maybe it forces people to confront the fragility of their own bodies.
Like when Ward’s spine got damaged. People were super weird around the poor guy when he started working cases again—and not just because he was putting tire tracks on our scenes. Hart yelled at more than a dozen people the first several cases, which, honestly, made me like him about a million times more. I hadn’t known him all that well at first, and I’d been tricked by his gruff asshole exterior. But then I heard him chewing out one of the other CSIs for whining about Ward’s chair and asking whether we couldn’t get a normal medium, and I immediately knew that he was the detective I wanted to work with.
The guy might have the mouth of a sailor on a grog bender, but underneath it, he’s actually a genuinely empathetic person. You think he asked to be in that fucking chair, Hollings? You think he woke up and went, ‘you know what? Today I’m going to fuck up a crime scene with some wheels?’ and just got in a chair? No, dumbfuck, he did not. So how about you shut the fuck up and be helpful about where he can go instead of bitching like an entitled teenager whose daddy won’t let her use the Mercedes?
I missed Hart.
And yeah, sure, I got to see him from time to time, but it wasn’t the same. And yeah, Maza’s a good guy and a good detective, but he’s not Hart. Nobody’s Hart but Hart.
I finished putting the DNA swab into the appropriate part of the evidence collection bin and logging its entry on the case clipboard, doing all of them with deliberate slowness so that I could stall having to climb back up that damn hill until my knee had settled back to a dull pounding instead of an acid-soaked ice pick.
Then I realized Ramirez was being nice and waiting, so I smothered my sigh and followed her back up the hill.
The next day, my phone rang, and I put down my peanut-butter and jelly sandwich—I know, living the high life—to answer it, wiping my fingers on the square of paper towel I’d taken from the bathroom to serve as a napkin. “Hi Detective, what can I do for you?” I asked Maza.
“You’re not going to believe this one, Mays. ”
“Believe what?” I asked him, feeling a frown furrowing my brow.
“The victim from Belle? Positive for Arcana.”
I felt a punch to the gut. “Are you shitting me?”
That was two bodies in close succession, both positive for Arcanavirus. “Sadly, I am not. Fortunately,” he continued before I could swear again, which really wasn’t like me—sure, I swear plenty, but I try not to do it in professional situations. “By the time we found him, the virus had gone inert. But it was active when he died.”
I felt my brain turning it over. “But he was dumped on Belle, right on the pathway,” I said.
“He was,” Maza agreed.
“Doesn’t that—” I cut myself off. I wasn’t the detective here.
“Imply that our killer is deliberately trying to infect people with their victims?”
“Something like that, yeah.” I hadn’t worked out in my head whether I thought the point was to infect just anyone or us, specifically. Us being the medical examiner or the police.
“It does, doesn’t it?” came Maza’s response. “You mask at all the scenes, but I’m going to ask the chief to instate a mandate for all homicide or possible homicide cases from here on out, at least until we can figure out if the Arcana is part of the victim profile or a deliberate attempt to infect the homicide team. Or we catch the bastard.”
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” came Maza’s response. “We’re gonna need his help.”
It took me several minutes after Maza had hung up to fully comprehend just how much of a mess this was going to be. It wasn’t so much the potential for a policy change that was going to piss off a lot of the uniforms, or even the fact that we might be looking at a serial killer, although that was definitely bad.
The problem was that if this killer was trying to cause an outbreak, that meant that they hadn’t actually succeeded, and they were going to keep killing people with Arcana until they did manage to spread the disease to their real targets.
The question was why.
Targeting people with Arcana seemed like the sort of thing the Magic Free Movement might do—to stop people from becoming Arcanids or Arc-humans. But none of the victims we’d seen with it had shown signs of transformation. An Arc-human’s DNA wasn’t distinct from a human’s, although Arcanids absolutely had genetic markers of difference. But killing anyone with Arcana would potentially be killing a normal human. Statistically, it was actually more likely than eliminating either an Arc-human or an Arcanid.
Now if Maza was right, and the killer was attempting to spread Arcana to the cops… I had no idea what could possibly be the motivation. Revenge, maybe? Maybe a Nid or Arc who had been arrested, or someone who had a loved one who was a Nid or Arc who had been arrested or even killed? Or whose murder had been dismissed or gone unsolved?
And what about someone who was just trying to cause a widespread outbreak? Why? Technically, it was an act of bioterrorism—germ warfare.
The Magic Free Movement might have been the focus of the news for the last several months, but they weren’t the only organization out there making headlines. Sure, there were reasonable organizations like the AARC, the Arcanid-Arc-human Rights League, or Hands and Paws, but there were also the UberArcs, an organization that was as equally fucked-up as the MFM, just in the other direction.
The UberArcs claimed Arcanid supremacy, arguing that Nids were the next level in human evolution and that humans were inferior to both Arcs and Nids. Whether they claimed Nid superiority to Arcs or not seemed to depend on the specific chapter. The fact that they had chapters was a little depressing, because it meant that there were enough of them that they could actually have differences of ideology across groups of people.
I’m sure there were other, more local groups. The Tusks, for instance, were an orc-only gang based out of DC with reach as far as Richmond and Baltimore. And they weren’t the only one.
And even outside of organizations, there were always what the media referred to as ‘lone actors’—individuals who had some sort of vendetta, whether real or imagined, who threatened or attacked people for reasons that only made sense to them.
It wasn’t my job to figure out the answers. It was my job to provide the puzzle pieces so that Maza could put them together. And I would do my best to do that.
But it’s human to speculate. And to fear.
I didn’t want Arcanavirus. I didn’t want to be part of the eight percent of the population who died from Arcana infections. I also didn’t want to get cripplingly ill.
And, if I were being honest, I didn’t want to become either an Arcanid or an Arc-human. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being either—I love Noah. I like Ward and Mason and Hart and Taavi. I don’t think any of them are less worthy of rights or respect or affection than I am.
But I like who I am, for the most part. Despite the chronic pain and alpha-gal, I like the body I live in and the way I interact with the world. Sure, I’d ditch the Lyme and alpha-gal if I could, but I really didn’t want to add any new complications to my existence if I could help it.
I knew full well that becoming an Arc or a Nid would completely upend my life. And that I didn’t want.