Chapter 14
14
SETH MAYS
Did you get contact traced, when you got sick?
Sorry if that’s too personal.
ELLIOT CRANE
It’s not.
And no, I didn’t.
We never figured out how Dad and I got it.
Did your dad become a badger, too?
Yeah.
Why are you asking me this now?
Do you feel sick?
No.
I got contact traced. Work.
Again.
Does that happen a lot?
Not really.
I can’t talk about it.
Because of your brother?
No.
Ongoing case.
That has to do with arcana?
I can’t talk about it.
You live with your brother, right?
Yeah. Why?
So there’s someone there to watch you.
Take you in if you do get sick.
Because transformations run in families.
So I become a wolf if I get sick?
You might take after the other parent.
But the odds are higher you’ll become a shifter if there’s another shifter in the family.
Than if there isn’t, anyway.
Okay.
Text me when you know, okay?
Okay.
I was texting Elliot while I waited for my test results, trying to slow my pounding heart. A nurse came in, looked up over the top of her clipboard. “Mays,” she called out. “Clear.”
Relief flooded me, but I was still too worried and freaked out to be happy about it.
My hands were still shaking when I sat down in my Cruiser.
I’m negative.
But my friend has it.
I’m glad you’re not sick.
I’m sorry about your friend.
What do I do for her?
Let her know you’re thinking of her. A card. A stuffed animal.
Even if she does rip it apart by accident.
Did you murder a stuffed animal?
I might have. :)
Thanks for talking me through it.
I mean it.
You always know how to reach me.
Thanks.
I let out a deep breath, trying to calm down and mostly failing. Quincy's sore throat—and subsequent positive test results—had ratcheted up everyone’s stress levels. I’d gotten texts from Maza, Tierney, half the lab staff, and even Schitikova. The lab staff wanted to know how I was feeling and wanted to coordinate a pool to send meal deliveries to Quincy at her house. I’d chipped in.
I sent a quick text to Noah letting him know I was clear, then another to Quincy, the latter of which I followed up with an offer to drop off a treat or something to keep herself entertained, like knitting or puzzles or something.
Puzzles actually sounds nice , she sent back.
Puzzles it is! I replied.
On my lunch break, I stopped off at One Eyed Jacques, the local game store, to buy some puzzles, then ran down the street to World of Mirth to look at stuffed animals, because that’s what Elliot had suggested. They had bears, bunnies, puppies, and kittens. All the normal things.
I saw a stuffed little fox, which was cute, but then I saw the possum. Quincy had spent the better part of a half hour cooing about the possum that lived behind her apartment in the alley once, and I’d teased her about her new pet for days. Even now, months later, whenever a cat or raccoon or squirrel bumped into something in an alley while we were working, I’d look at her and ask if she brought her pet possum.
Don’t ask me why, but she loves the ugly things.
So possum it was.
I stopped at the neighborhood Kroger and got her a carton of her favorite ice cream—rocky road—some Hershey’s Hugs and Kisses, and a six-pack of 7-Up bottles, because that’s what you were supposed to drink when you were sick. Or, at least, that’s what we’d always had growing up when we were too sick to go to school.
I left it all wrapped up in a brown grocery bag outside her door, then texted her to let her know it was there.
A few minutes later, a text came through. OMG thank you SO MUCH! Hes SO CUTE!! !
I smiled to myself. At least I’d made her happy.
I hoped she didn’t rip it apart.
Way to go me, ruining my own mood.
On top of that, I had the exciting bonus of now feeling deeply awkward about having emotionally unloaded on Elliot—who had been very kind and patient, but I really wasn’t his problem. We weren’t dating—because Rule Two and Rule Three—and we weren’t even really friends. I didn’t know much about him at all. Not even his birthday, which he had refused to tell me, although in a polite way by avoiding rather than refusing outright. And that said nothing about any of the other sorts of things you were supposed to know about your friends, like their favorite ice cream flavor, for instance.
The fact that I wanted to be Elliot’s friend in spite of his crystal-clear speech about ground rules that had established that we were only in it for the sex should tell you that I’m very bad at following directions. You wouldn’t think so, given my career choice, which, for the record, involves me doing a lot of very meticulous things in very specific orders, but here we are. People, including yours truly, are inherently contradictory creatures.
I slumped my way back into the lab, sinking down onto my stool and bringing up the spreadsheet of lab tasks that were on the docket.
Our lab manager, Joyelle Simpson, was the queen of spreadsheets. She had a single running one that we all shared, and it had more color-coded markers than anything I’d ever seen. You’d think it would be confusing, but, instead, it gave us a clear sense of what needed to be done for all the active cases running through the crime lab, if one specific person was assigned to them, and, if not, what equipment was needed so that someone who had free time could do it. She even had them coded with priorities, so that the most important things got done first. She updated it, which meant that things went up in priority depending on how long they’d been with us—and nothing was supposed to take more than two weeks to get processed, ever .
I liked the spreadsheet.
I don’t like following directions, but I love spreadsheets—I’m an enigma.
I’d spent most of my day on the Arcanavirus killer case for Maza—Joyelle had assigned me to those, specifically, although she’d emailed me to say that if I didn’t want to work the case for personal reasons, she’d understand. I told her that I’d argue with her if she tried to take it away from me.
Tox screens on Jessica Haverill, the victim who’d unwittingly given Quincy Arcana, had come back clean, unlike our Belle Isle victim. I frowned down at the report, not sure what to do with it. I didn’t really have to do anything except file it with the RPD, but I felt an obligation to this case and its victims. I wanted to be helpful , not just a source of seemingly unconnected facts.
Because this one was personal.
I went through what I knew.
Miles Volkov had been drugged, taken up the hill on Belle, and brained with a rock. Jessica Haverill had been attacked at her own door, hit across the skull with something like a tire iron or crow bar. And Lisa Johnston, our first victim who’d tested positive for Arcana, had been beaten so savagely that her blood had ended up everywhere. If it hadn’t been for the Arcanavirus thread linking them together, we likely wouldn’t have thought they bore any relation to one another.
I wondered if that was on purpose. While I wasn’t an expert the way a detective or profiler might be, I did know a bit about serial killer patterns—most serial killers replicate their kills. The method and means are most of the point of killing, so the fact that this killer was deviating from a set pattern was unusual. Sure, blunt force trauma to the skull was what had killed all of them, but the weapon was different, the use of sedatives was different—only Volkov had been drugged—and the location was different. Two had died in their homes, one inside, one in the doorway. The third would have seemed to have been a murder of convenience—outside, with a rock—if not for the sedatives in his system.
The only thing they had in common was having active Arcana at the time of their deaths.
And maybe it was coincidence and Maza was wrong to connect them.
But I didn’t think so. I couldn’t really tell you why. It wasn’t like I had any special insight. As far as I knew, nobody had checked the DNA strains of the Arcana in the victims—not like one killer would have to somehow use the same strain, either. Maybe they did, though…
I sent off a quick email to Maza to ask him if he wanted me to run a DNA sequence on the virus from each of the three victims. A mismatch wouldn’t really tell us anything—but a match would essentially confirm that all three victims were infected from the same source. And if we had the source, at the very least it would mean that if we found the possible origin, we could test it against that sequence to confirm it.
It was a shot in the dark, but it was a shot. And sometimes that was better than nothing. At the very least, it would give me something to do that would help me to at least feel like I was doing something for Quincy. I couldn’t help her actually recover, but I could at least help figure out who had done it to her. And drop off puzzles and ice cream.
My email chimed.
Maza had cced Tierney’s office, letting them know I was coming over to pick up blood samples from all three victims. I took that as a yes to my idea, grabbed my office keys, and headed over to the other side of the complex. We—the crime lab—were on one side of the building, while the Office of the Medical Examiner was on the other.
It wasn’t a particularly interesting or eventful journey, so far as journeys went—slightly off-white-to-beige walls, grey tile hallways that opened into grey carpeted offices or other grey tile hallways and rooms, wooden doors, windows into offices from the halls with beige miniblinds, some open, some slitted, some closed.
Very late-twentieth-century-office-chic that had been touched up, but still reflected an aesthetic that was nearly half-a-century out of date. A lot of the little architectural niceties that people used to care about had gone out the window with the pandemic’s arrival—inflation, economic down-turn, and one hell of a boom in work for the ME’s office meant they didn’t have much opportunity to renovate.
Ditto for our side of the building. It wasn’t even a change in decor—just a slight alteration in layout.
Olivia Cartier, her black hair pulled up into a bun that was about three times more elegant than was called-for for a job handling evidence transfers, looked up at me through designer glasses than were a different color than I remembered her having last week.
“New glasses?” I asked her .
“Yeah! You like?”
“I do!” I assured her. They wouldn’t have worked on me in a million years, but on her fine-featured face, they did look good. “You always look great.”
The corners of her eyes turned up, her cheekbones lifting the top of her mask as she smiled at me. “Aw, thanks, Seth.”
I picked up evidence from the ME’s office often enough that Olivia and I were on a first-name basis, not that we knew anything else about each other. Well, okay, I knew she really loved Oreos, and I’d brought her a little package of them last year at Christmas. She’d given me some sugar cookies back that I’d foisted off on Quincy, because I hadn’t wanted to ask if she’d made them with butter. Sometimes a little butter was okay in things like cookies or breads, but I tend to be on the cautious side, so I usually just avoided anything that even might have the tiniest little bit of dairy in it.
“It’s only the truth,” I told her, winking.
She laughed, then turned in her chair to grab a little box that had six vials of blood sitting in its custom slots. “Here’s your present for the day,” she told me.
“That was quick,” I remarked. I’d expected to have to wait at least a couple minutes. Or like a half hour.
Olivia’s expression grew immediately serious. “Well, you know. We want our Quincy back.” Quincy might actually have spent more time over here than I did—not only was she doing the crime scene photography class, but she was also thinking about going back to school.
Olivia put the little box on the desk between us, then put a tablet beside it. I signed the screen, then took the box with its vials of Arcana-infected blood.
“Me, too,” I agreed, the pit in my stomach heavy as I turned around and began the short walk back to my side of the building. It had been two days, and I already missed having her on scenes. Of course, I’d gone for longer than that without having Quincy here—people go on vacations, for instance, or have to travel for other reasons. And sometimes one of us would have to be swapped out to a different crime scene because someone else was out or sick. But that was different. In those cases, you had a pretty good idea of when the other person would be back, or they were still around the building.
This was harder. Because it was possible—although I was hopeful that it wouldn’t be the case—that she wouldn’t come back at all. Death was the horrible shadow always lurking in the back of my mind, but she might survive and be seriously disabled. Or she might be psychologically scarred and incapable of returning to work. Or she might end up as a vampire or a ghoul, and they might not want her working crime scenes with active blood spatter.
There was one vampire homicide detective, Detective Rhodes, but he worked cold cases, not fresh ones. Since cold cases didn’t have crime scenes that needed processing, I hadn’t ever worked with him. I was pretty sure that the reason he worked cold cases was because he was a vampire—but it’s not like I’d ever had the opportunity to ask him, so maybe he liked cold cases. I kinda doubted it, though.
It took the rest of the afternoon to extract the viral DNA, working overtime—there were a handful of us still there at six, and me and Craig Hanson by eight when I finally put the three viral DNA samples into the PurePrep. That meant I had about an hour and a half before I’d be able to give Maza his answer.
My stomach growled, reminding me that I’d barely eaten lunch—a bagel with vegan butter—and that it was already past dinnertime, and it was only going to be later by the time the PurePrep finished doing its thing. I put in an order at Thai Studio, then got to work on some of the paperwork that would need to go Maza and the DA’s office along with the results of the viral DNA match. I’d leave out everything except the specific results—to be filled in when the PurePrep finished—and I might actually leave work before eleven.
At least Noah worked until three, so I didn’t need to text him. Despite the fact that we were both independent adults, Noah always insisted that he knew where I was—and, in his defense, he always told me where he was and until when. I was a little harder to put a clock on, since crime scenes didn’t exactly come with regular hours, but I did my best.
We’d been slowly processing other evidence—like the clay I was getting cross-checked against the Virginia soil typology databases to see if I could get any closer than General Piedmont Region—High Concentration Iron Oxide Clay . More sophisticated machinery could cross-check over two hundred different particulates against soil samples cataloged at the city and county levels. We also didn’t own those machines, so I was expecting to hear back from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation at some point in the next day or two.
What I was trying to do was create a coherent picture using all the evidence we had. Trying to figure out if there were other common threads—besides the Arcana itself—between the bodies and particulate evidence. Anything to provide connections or give some clue as to who might have been responsible. Tierney had sent over skin swabs, saliva swabs, blood for tox screens, stomach contents, clothing… and we’d tested pretty much everything.
So I got to work on a spreadsheet that would let me aggregate all the data we had.
My phone buzzed about twenty minutes in, letting me know my Thai food had arrived outside. I grabbed my keys, made sure my ID was still on me so I could get back into the building, and ran out to get my crispy tofu and chicken pad thai and gyoza from the driver.
The food was hot, greasy, and delicious—exactly what take-out Thai food should be, and the next hour or so of paperwork was considerably less mind-numbing, simply because I was slowly working my way through a giant container of pad thai while I typed in descriptions, dates, times, and other results.
And then I sat and stared at the rows and columns, looking for something that had been missed.
Don’t get me wrong—I was under absolutely no delusions that I was going to be the one to find something that would crack this case open. I’m a lab rat, not a detective. I get paid to push buttons and interpret little dots and numbers so that people who actually understand psychology and the criminal mind can do the work of figuring out the murderer’s identity and then determining how to build the evidence against them so that they could be stopped.
But I couldn’t help but want to actually look—just in case.
We had three different victims, two women, one man. Two of them white, one light-skinned Black. Three different age ranges, but all working-age adults. One dental office assistant, one barista, one homemaker .
One thing they did have in common was the fact that none of them had anyone else at home waiting—both Johnston and Haverill were divorced, Volkov was unmarried. I didn’t know if he had a significant other of any variety, or if the women did, either, for that matter. That information wasn’t the kind of thing they shared with CSIs. I only knew that Johnston and Haverill lived alone because their homes were the crime scenes. Quincy and I hadn’t been called out to Volkov’s apartment—not all teams specialized in homicide forensics, which meant that when there were bodies, we were one of a handful of teams that got called out. There were twice as many available for non-homicide crime scenes of various kinds—including technological, accounting, facial reconstruction, and several other branches.
Basically, Quincy and I were qualified to deal with the squishy stuff. So was Emil Favreau, our resident entomologist, but everybody had to share Emil. Lucky for all of us, he was gregarious and outgoing, and his wife made amazing vegan cookies. Not just for me—Hasan Kumar in the computer lab was an actual vegan.
I made myself refocus on the evidence we had.
All the victims had been hit by someone who was packing a significant amount of muscle—and if the shoe-prints were any indication, we were looking at an adult human male. There hadn’t been enough damage for an orc or a vamp or shifter with shoes that size—and the shoe impressions in the Johnston house were a probable match for the impressions in the grass at the Haverill residence. Any of the Nids with feet that size would have pulverized the victims’ skulls. They couldn’t get more dead, but the damage we’d seen was likely caused by a human male.
Probably around my height—give or take a few inches and a dozen or so pounds .
It raised the question of why a human would want to infect people with Arcana. The killer could be an Arc-human, certainly, but it seemed more likely to me—although it wasn’t like I was an expert—that it probably was a regular human.
I’d thought about it quite a bit, and the only possible reasons I could think of were two opposite extremes. One, the killer was an Arc-human trying to cause an outbreak to increase the numbers of Arcs and Nids in the population. Or two, which at the moment I was more inclined to think was the real reason, the killer was one of those crackpots who thought that Arcana was a divine purge and was trying to help get rid of all those who were unworthy, leaving behind a pure human stock.
I wanted to be an optimist. But the longer I was alive and working homicide, the less optimistic I tended to be.
I got up, grunting a little as I limped my way over to the trash can to throw out my empty food containers. The PurePrep chirped on my halting journey back, immediately sending my pulse through the roof.
I forced myself to walk over slowly, trying to prepare myself for a disappointing lack of clarity.
I looked at the screen.
All three were a match.