Chapter 13
13
SETH MAYS
Did you know that the average human body has enough fat to make seven bars of soap?
ELLIOT CRANE
I did not.
To what do I owe this sudden burst of trivia?
It’s also yellow when exposed.
I’m killing time at work.
Are you at a crime scene?
Yep.
Are you texting me over a murder victim?
I’m nowhere near her.
Or him.
Or them.
I know nothing.
While not literally over the body, why ARE you texting me at a crime scene?
Because there’s a fight over who gets the body.
So I can’t do anything until they settle it.
Is this a fight you want to win or lose?
Definitely win.
I could use the hourly overtime.
Fingers crossed you get to keep this body, then.
It was another twenty minutes before Maza came over and told us we could get back to work. Apparently we had won the jurisdictional fight, although us lowly CSIs weren’t generally privy to the details about why. It didn’t really matter, to be honest.
“What do you think that was about?” Quincy asked me, leaning close.
I shrugged. “We’re close to the county line,” I pointed out. Maza was Richmond City, and while he did sometimes get pulled to cases in other jurisdictions when they had ritual or magical connections—as had Hart before him—if it was a plain old homicide, we still had to play by jurisdictional limitations.
But even though we were on the line, we were definitely on the Richmond side—even if the officer who had called it in wasn’t. He was Henrico County, and we were at a residence about three blocks on the Richmond side of the line—otherwise known as Chippenham Parkway—but because a Henrico officer had been closer, they’d been the first on scene. And that meant that they wanted to claim it as theirs—because everybody wanted the overtime.
The victim was lying on her back in the front doorway—the door was wide open. A neighbor had come over to meet her, found the body, and placed the call. The neighbor in question—a middle-aged white woman with brown hair pulled back into a ponytail who was dressed as though she’d been out for a run or walk—was sitting on the curb, her forehead resting on arms folded over legging-clad legs. Maza was talking to her, also sitting on the curb, and he’d already offered up a handkerchief.
Given the similarity in age between the victim and the neighbor—and their matching windbreaker jackets—it was clear they not only knew each other, but were likely friends. Or at least friendly.
Crime scenes were extra rough when the person who found the victim was a friend or family member. Usually, these were the natural causes deaths—an elderly parent or grandparent, someone who suffered a sudden stroke or heart attack, an accident such as falling down the stairs. Murders, however, tended to be found by strangers—not always, of course. It depended on whether the body was dumped or killed in the home.
This was clearly one of the latter.
Quincy was crouched next to the body, and I was doing the lawn walk, looking for shoe prints that didn’t match the running shoes worn by the woman talking to Maza—anything larger, most likely, given the fact that the victim appeared to have been felled by a single blow to the head with some yet-to-be determined object.
The victim’s friend had clearly seen something wrong and run across the lawn to get to the front door, leaving impressions in the grass and wet shoe-prints on the cement stoop and the last few squares of the path. Her feet were small—I’d guess around a size five—so it was easy enough to eliminate her… assuming of course that she had actually discovered the body and not made it, of course. Realistically, I’d have been shocked if she were our killer—usually a dent like that in someone’s skull requires more force than a short, thin woman is capable of making, assuming she wasn’t a shifter. A small shifter can still pack quite a lot of punch—Noah’s one, after all, and while I’d never actually tried physically fighting my brother, I was pretty sure based on other life experiences that he could absolutely clean the floor with me. Taavi was even shorter, and I wouldn’t want to mess with him, either.
So if our friendly neighbor was a shifter, then she could be a suspect, but she didn’t seem to be acting like one to me. Too confident in her own presence. Too immediately trusting. Shifters tend to be cautious around strangers—especially strangers in positions of authority, like cops. I couldn’t say that I blamed them.
Not my job, of course, but if I’d thought she was going to be a legitimate suspect, I’d have paid more attention to her shoe-prints beyond pointing them out to the photographer to document.
Instead, I was looking for something that didn’t belong—dirt that was red or sandy instead of the dark brown of the soil that I could see in the patchy yard across the street; a rock or pebble; a smudge of grass on the sidewalk or a drip of oil on the road where a car would have been parked.
It seemed pretty evident to me that whoever had killed the victim had either knocked on the door or rung the doorbell—and that it was someone for whom she would plausibly have opened the door. Someone she recognized and trusted enough to open the door to very early in the morning. Or someone who seemed to be trustworthy, like a cop or a utility worker or someone else who would have a legitimate reason to be knocking on doors before eight a.m.
But that wasn’t my job. My job was to find the evidence that would help Maza to figure out who did it and why.
Behind me, Quincy sneezed.
“Bless you!” I said, turning around to look down at her.
“Ugh,” came the response. “Gross.”
“See if I bless you again,” I teased.
“Not you,” she muttered, pulling her disposable mask off. “I hate when I sneeze into these things and then just have snot all squished up against my face.” She sniffed hard, then dug around in one pocket before she pulled another mask out, unwrapping it and putting it back over her face. “Stupid spring allergies.”
I might have chronic Lyme and alpha-gal, but at least my face didn’t explode every spring like Quincy’s did. Yeah, she’d had a mask on, but it takes like twenty minutes for her sinuses to clear out when she puts them on in the spring. We’d had them off while waiting so we could drink our coffee before it got totally cold waiting for us in the cab of the CSI van, and we’d only been back at it for about ten minutes, so she was still sniffly.
“You poor thing,” I said to her, both teasing and sympathetic.
“Go tent some damn spatter,” she grumbled back.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I hate you, Mays,” she said, also teasing.
My eyes scanned over the grass, searching, assessing.
There . A depression at the corner of the lawn where the walk leading up to the door intersected with the public sidewalk. I crouched down beside it, wincing behind my disposable mask—we used disposable everything in CSI to make sure there was exactly zero chance of our equipment introducing foreign particulates—as my knee protested at being forced into a deep squat.
Amid the pressed-down grass was just a hint of red clay—which most definitely was not from around here. There was clay further west, but here we were too close to the James, and our soils tended to be sandy loam where people hadn’t brought in their own dark topsoil, which was common in suburban neighborhoods like this one.
I’d run the sample against the USDA’s soil typology database to get a list of actual potential matches, but it was definitely something. Continued searching found another smudge of clay on the sidewalk, although not enough to actually get a sense of the size or type of shoe or boot in question. But it was still a little wet, which told me that it was recent—not from a day or two ago, but this morning. I’d also check the neighbor’s shoes, but because her track was clear and didn’t intersect with this one, I very much doubted she’d have the same clay on her shoes.
I kept looking, my eyes sweeping grass and sidewalks and streets, slowly pacing my way back and forth so I didn’t miss anything.
That little bit of clay was, unfortunately, it—at least in terms of evidence that would help Maza to find the killer. From there, I moved on to the tiny spatters of blood on the doorframe, the stoop, and the door itself.
As usual, when Tierney was done, I helped him load the body, lifting the bag onto the gurney, then pushing it down the sidewalk to load the body into the van.
Another day, another death.
“Mays, my throat hurts.”
I rubbed sleep from my eyes, then fumbled for my glasses so that I could look blearily at the clock on the nightstand. Five-oh-three a.m. I was about to ask Quincy why the hell she felt like she had to report that to me—but then my brain dragged itself out of sleep enough for me to remember the fact that we’d all been sent home mid-afternoon yesterday because our newest victim, Jennifer Moynihan, had tested positive for active Arcana.
“Shit,” is what I said out loud, my heart pounding in my throat. I forced myself to stop being selfish. “Quincy, are you okay?”
“No,” she warbled.
“Is—” I was going to ask her about Aaron, her boyfriend, but she cut me off.
“I’m locked in the bedroom,” she said softly, her voice still shaking. “Because I made him keep me isolated after we got sent home.”
“Have you told him your throat hurts?” I asked her softly.
“N-not yet.”
“You should wake him up.” Not because I begrudged her this phone call, but so that he could take care of her—and be prepared to call an ambulance if one was needed.
“I—what if he doesn’t?—”
“He loves you, Quince,” I reminded her gently, trying to get my own heart to stop racing and the air to come more completely into my lungs. Because even while I was talking to Quincy, trying to keep her calm, my whole being was tense with fear. Because I’d been around her for the three-ish hours between when we’d gotten back from the scene and when we’d gotten the trace from Tierney.
Sure, we’d been in and out of each other’s workspaces, so it wasn’t like we’d been constantly breathing the same air. But still.
It was a quarter to six by the time I convinced her to wake up Aaron, that he wasn’t going to leave her—although I didn’t know that—and that she’d be okay—although I didn’t know that, either. I was scared for her, and scared for myself. For Tierney, who was old enough to retire, which made him more vulnerable to infection. For Maza. For the cops and the other techs at the lab…
I started down at my phone, quashing the impulse to text Elliot. He was an hour earlier and not a morning person. And it wasn’t like he could do anything about it, anyway.
So I texted my brother, who was sleeping at Lulu’s.
Nono—I got contact traced again. I feel fine but Quincy’s sick.
He would read it when he woke up. And, other than being terrified, I did feel fine. Not sick, at any rate.
I forced myself to take a deep breath and got up to take a shower, because God knew I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep anytime soon.
I had twenty-eight hours before the mandatory test. Twenty-eight hours during which I was going to second guess every tickle in my throat, every sniffle, every borborygmic gurgle of my stomach. Anything that could be a sign of illness.
Twenty-eight hours of anxiety and stress—and worry about Quincy, although that was going to last longer than twenty-eight hours. Hopefully not too much longer, but…
Eight percent of people who caught Arcana died. Two out of every twenty-five. Just under one out of ten. If you know thirteen people, statistically, one of them will die from Arcanavirus .
And thirteen percent ended up Arc-human or Arcanid. More than one in ten.
That was one in five lives irreparably changed. Some clearly for the worse—since being dead is definitely worse than being alive. Others—well, it depended on your perspective, I guess. With all the anti-Nid bigotry, I guess you could say becoming a Nid was worse than not. Certainly there were things about it that would get harder.
I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to become either an Arc or a Nid, either. I knew what that meant—I knew the constant passive aggression faced by Nids, especially those who no longer looked human—orcs, fauns, vampires, ghouls. Shifters might be able to pass as human—sometimes—but now shifters had to register, and their status was all but public. Maybe you could go to the grocery store without dealing with bullshit, but holding down a good job or having human rights... And if you became an Arc, there was the constant anxiety, either because you didn’t want to be outed, or because your life was now filled with the dead, with visions or flashes of emotion that weren’t yours…
I didn’t want any of that, either. Because I’d seen it.
I knew what my brother went through every day, and he had a job working with other shifters, a job where people cared about his well-being and the people around him accepted him for who and what he was. And he still went through hell.
I’d watched Ward speak to dozens, maybe hundreds of dead people over the years. I’d seen what it took out of him, and I understood that he was one of the most powerful mediums in the whole damn state of Virginia. Maybe the mid-Atlantic region. Maybe farther, I don’t know. The point was, his Arcane ability exhausted him—mentally and emotionally. Maybe physically, too .
I had enough days that were a struggle, enough days where fatigue made my limbs heavy and my brain slow, where my joints ached and swelled, where someone put a little butter or milk into something and forgot, leaving my intestines in shreds and my airways constricted—if I was lucky. If I wasn’t, it meant a trip to the hospital and enough adrenaline to leave me jumpy for the next twelve hours before I crashed for the twenty-four after that.
I had no desire to add Arc abilities or being a Nid on top of that. And I definitely didn’t want to be dead.
If I got sick, would I be the four out of five? The odds were in my favor, except…
Odds were rarely in my favor.