Chapter 16
16
SETH MAYS
Hi hi hi hi.
Whatre you doing?
ELLIOT CRANE
Are you drunk?
Defubutekt,
Definitely.
Good drunk, or bad drunk?
Yes
What happened?
Dont wanna talk abotu it
What do you want to talk about?
What youre doing.
I was reading.
I suppose I am still reading, but not my book anymore.
What book
Hidden in Snow.
Whats it about
It’s a murder mystery set in Iceland.
Is there sex in it
No…
Too bad
Whatre you wearing?
Are you trying to sext me?
Will it work?
You’re really drunk, aren’t you?
maybe
I was, in fact, very drunk and feeling very sorry for myself. Work was absolute shit. Noah was pissed at me because I’d missed dinner with him because work was absolute shit, and I’d forgotten to text him and tell him, so he’d waited for me for almost an hour. I had no personal life and no interest in the dates Noah kept offering to set me up on because all I could think about was a stupid badger shifter half a country away.
Who I’d proceeded to text while completely shitfaced to ask what he was doing and then try to sext with him.
Because I’m a sappy, pathetic drunk.
I stared down at the phone screen, feeling sorry for myself and guilty about dragging Elliot Crane back into my life because I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
He hadn’t replied to my last text, and there weren’t any little dots suggesting he was working on it.
I tried to take another swig of beer, but discovered the bottle was empty.
I didn’t have the energy to bother getting another one.
I’d already drunk the nip bottles of vodka and whiskey I’d collected from various stupid holiday parties and whatever.
I hadn’t even gotten this drunk after I’d left Devin.
Pretty close, though, on margaritas with Noah because that’s what twins do for you when your boyfriend cheats on you and you decide to move out of his apartment at two in the morning.
In my defense this time, I felt like working a crime scene with the bodies of three mutilated kids was a justifiable excuse for drunkenness.
Still no reply.
Then my screen lit up.
It took me far too long to realize that Elliot was calling me.
Calling me .
I dropped the phone, but still managed to answer it before it stopped ringing. “Hey.” It sounded pathetic, even to my drunken self.
“What happened, Seth?” His voice was familiar and rough, but strangely gentle. It was enough to melt my already thawing heart.
“Work sucked,” I muttered, embarrassed by my own neediness.
“Bad case?” Of course he’d figure that out. He was best friends with an ex-cop-turned-fed, for Christ’s sake .
“Yeah.”
“But you don’t want to talk about it.”
“No.”
There was a pause. Then he sighed. “Gym shorts and a t-shirt.”
It took me way too long to realize that he was answering my earlier texted question.
“That’s not exciting,” I told him, feeling extra stupid.
“Not particularly, no,” came the response. “Unless varnish stains are exciting.”
I couldn’t help the laugh that came out of me. “Never thought about them that way,” I admitted. “But on you, maybe they could be.”
He snorted into the phone. “You’re definitely drunk.”
“Yes,” I agreed, nodding emphatically, even though he couldn’t see me.
“And you can’t talk to anyone else, because…?”
“Noah’s mad at me.”
“Should he be?”
“Probably.”
“Anyone else?”
“I don’t have anyone else.” That was a gut-punch to admit out loud.
“What about Val—Hart?”
“Hart isn’t exactly your friendly neighborhood elf.”
He laughed. “I’ll tell you a secret.”
“What?”
“He absolutely does have emotions.”
“No way. Not possible.”
“Yep. But only to me. And Taavi.”
“Hart doesn’t really people.”
“True. ”
“You aren’t people. Well. Human people.” I winced. That sounded bad.
But Elliot laughed again. “No, I suppose not. Taavi does emotions much better.”
I hummed. “Yeah, but… I don’t know him. Noah does. They used to work together. He seems nice, but…” I trailed off.
“So I’m it?”
When he put it that way, it sounded even worse. And absolutely violated Rule Two. “Sorry.” I hung up and let myself fall sideways on the bed—because I was drinking sitting in bed, like the absolute loser I am—staring off into space.
My phone lit up again.
I stared at it, confused.
It went dark.
Then lit up again.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” I told him.
“I know.”
But he didn’t hang up. This time, neither did I.
“They were kids,” I blurted.
“The bodies?” he guessed.
“Yeah.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.” I chewed my lip, tears filling my eyes. “Throats and stomachs cut open. Naked. Bruising… everywhere.”
“Seth…”
“I try not to look at them. When they’re that bad. You know? But it’s my job. Document evidence. Mark it. Tag it. Fingerprints. Shoe prints. Everything.”
He waited, silent, although I could hear him breathing.
“They were buried only a few feet down. Some guy’s dog found the first. They were close enough together…” I broke of f. There had been two of them. One girl, one boy. Neither one older than about ten. Officially, we had to wait for the postmortem, but you get to recognizing the signs of that kind of physical abuse. I knew what I’d seen.
“You okay?” Elliot asked after a while.
“No.”
“What can I do?”
My fingers tightened in the blankets. “I don’t want to be alone,” I whispered.
“Okay.”
A minute went by. “Tell me something?”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Anything.”
Another half-minute or so, then, “Back before the coming of the white man, in the days before the animals ceased to talk, there were four brothers. Manabush was the oldest of them and loved the humans most of all his brothers…”
Shit. I had fallen asleep while Elliot was talking, telling me what I’m pretty sure was a legend from his people. And I was so shitface-drunk that I’d clearly been unaccountably rude and fallen asleep, and my cheek against the phone had probably hung up on him. Or maybe I’d started snoring, and he’d hung up on me, which I totally deserved and wasn’t even a little bit offended by.
Or my phone had died.
I definitely had a dead phone. So I had no idea if I’d hung up on him when it went or if that had happened after one of us had hung up on the other.
I really needed to never, ever drink that much again .
Or text Elliot, given the fact that I’d just shit all over Rule Two and then I’d been unaccountably rude by falling asleep during what was probably a very personal legend and possibly hanging up on him. After I’d drunkenly texted him for some sexting while shitfaced because I’m clearly a sad, pathetic loser.
I rolled over on my back and stared up at my ceiling, trying to decide if the humiliation or the headache was worse. My eyes felt vaguely gummy—that, combined with the fact that I could clearly make out the details of the popcorn paint on the ceiling, told me I’d fallen asleep with my contact lenses in. Ugh. I hate that feeling.
I hated even more the fact that I really needed to go to work again, so I couldn’t give my eyes the break they now desperately needed by wearing glasses because you can’t do decent lab work if your glasses keep fogging up because of your mask.
That and the horror of your glasses sliding down your nose while you’re working a crime scene was the primary reason I wore contacts. Because you can’t just shove your glasses back up your nose when your hands are covered in blood and who knew what else. I don’t mind my contacts—most of the time. But the morning after falling asleep shitface-drunk I minded them. I just didn’t have much of a choice.
It was my own damn fault.
With a groan, I pushed myself up, plugged my dead phone in, and limped to the bathroom to brush the dead-animal taste out of my mouth. At the very least, I needed to do that before dragging my sorry ass in to work—assuming it wasn’t so late that I didn’t have a job to go back to.
Teeth brushed, I determined that I had about forty minutes before I needed to be at the CSI lab, so I swallowed a bunch of Pepto, took a speed shower, and threw on clothes, then grabbed my phone and keys and headed out, hoping the Pepto would kick in so that I wouldn’t throw up the coffee I desperately needed.
My head and knee were competing over which wanted to throb more, shame and self-recrimination making my stomach just as sour as the aftermath of the alcohol.
I still had to go to work to a lab that my friend wasn’t in because she was sick—and getting sicker—thanks to a serial killer we hadn’t managed to catch. A killer we hadn’t caught yet, even though I’d made so much progress two days ago.
And then last night’s case had just completely derailed me.
That was the thing about working homicide. You didn’t just get the one case and then ignore everything else. The detectives pulled cases—we got pulled to whatever crime scene needed us. I was glad this one had been Clements, though. She was easier to work with than a lot of people, and she didn’t put up with bullshit at her scenes. I already didn’t do well with dead kids, and if I’d had to deal with some of the horribly off-color jokes that some of the uniforms threw around in addition to not having Quincy, things would have been even worse.
I’d gotten completely shitfaced as it was. And humiliated myself by drunk texting the man I had a crush on who had no interest in me and lived half a country away and then falling asleep in the middle of a moment that could have been meaningful. That maybe could have changed his mind about Rule Two.
I felt like absolute shit. About Elliot. About being hung over. And, most of all, about the case that I was going to have to go in and run DNA, tox screens, and particulate analysis for. Because now I was going to have to spend a lot of time thinking about everything that had been done to those poor kids. In painstaking genetic detail.
I stopped to get iced coffee, both because it was a warm spring day and because the copious amounts of almond milk and sugar would help to settle my stomach by absorbing the acid of both the coffee and my anxiety.
It didn’t really help. The caffeine did, but my stomach was not really improved. Not worse, either, which I suppose I was going to take as a win, because I really needed to grab onto absolutely anything positive.
“Morning, Seth!” one of the other techs called as I walked into the building. Sam Lodovic. She was in a bunny suit, hood off, front half-way unzipped.
I raised my coffee in her direction, and a small furrow marked the light brown skin of her forehead.
“What’s—oh, did you work that homicide last night? The… kids?”
Apparently my attempt to not groan, grunt, growl, or vomit by not speaking only served to indicate to other people that I was in a terrible mood. Which… Okay, I get it. Because I usually go out of my way to be cheerful, since it’s sometimes really hard to find the positive side of things in this job. Today I was not doing a very good job of that, although I felt pretty justified in being a bit of a Debbie Downer.
I sighed. “Yeah,” I admitted.
“Ouch,” was Sam’s response. “That sucks.”
I nodded. “What did you just get done with?” The only time you saw us in bunny suits was when we got back from a scene or from one of the large evidence lockers—the places where they keep cars and heavy equipment that doesn’t fit in a normal locker. You still had to do evidence collection on vehicles, so we’d go to evidence impound and do the workups there in full gear.
“Vehicular from two days ago,” she replied. “The poor guy died this morning, so the case got pushed up the food chain.” Vehicular homicides—unlike hit-and-runs—mean having to go over broken windscreens, grills, and other car parts, which explained the dark streaks—grease, probably—on Sam’s white suit. An accident where the victim survived generally got investigated more slowly, but if the victim died, that elevated the whole case to homicide and meant that we had to go over the car much more thoroughly.
“Sucks,” was what I said.
“Not as bad as yours,” she replied.
I didn’t disagree. “I’d better get back to it,” I said, toasting her again with my coffee and trying very hard not to limp as I headed back to the lab cluster I normally shared with Quincy. Right now, it was just me—probably for the best, given my current mental state, but it really just reminded me that she wasn’t there because some asshole had given her Arcana. Deliberately.
Okay, not her deliberately, but they clearly wanted to spread it deliberately.
That was the case I wanted to work—I wanted to run more evidence, to move that case forward. Not that I didn’t think these poor kids didn’t deserve justice, because they absolutely did, probably even more so than many of the cases that came through my lab. But I didn’t know them. I knew Quincy. It was personal .
Which was probably exactly why I probably shouldn’t be working that case, but there wasn’t really any way for it not to be personal for somebody, since we all knew each other. Everyone was a potential target for this asshole, because any of us could be called to the scene of an Arcana-positive homicide. I wanted to stop this guy before he hurt anyone else I knew.
And, if I’m being honest, I didn’t want to have to confront the gruesome reality of what had been done to those kids. I didn’t want to think about the fact that there were people in the world who did that kind of shit to kids . It was bad enough when adults did it to other adults. It was ten times worse when they did it to fucking kids .
I stood in the main lab, staring at the half-size glass-front fridge that held the biological samples—blood, saliva, semen, and so on—that needed testing. I’d dropped off my stuff in my little office, but I had to pick up samples and claim time slots on the PurePrep and the MultiSTAT. And then I had particulates and insect parts to stare at in my own microscope, so I could hide away in my office and drink my coffee and try not to make it too obvious that I was losing my shit.
I hate kid cases.