Chapter Nineteen #2
“What?” Kimmie asked, trying to look like she was paying attention to something other than the chicks.
“Something in here was a big draw,” he explained, as the prints drifted over and solidified, waiting for their turn to tuck themselves into the evidence case.
Most were fresh, but some had the half-decayed look of ones left days ago.
Somebody had been here for a while and met with others, yet the prints were the only sign, with not even the blurred outline of a body that habitual presence should have created.
Caleb noticed and glanced at me, and I shook my head.
I didn’t know, either. The only other time I’d seen something like that had been a drug seller who’d appeared as a column of solid, glowing white, perched on a chair in an alley at the Jersey Shore, while the people who bought from him had been barely whisps on the air.
But the sea breeze had been responsible for that, clearing out the evidence as fast as the buyers shed it, as well as the brevity of their visits.
Leaving only the dealer’s hours-long presence as truly discernible.
Yet there was no breeze in here, and even the perp, who must have been bent over his victim for a while, judging by the state of the corpse, wasn’t so much as a smudge.
“The ceiling collapse?” Caleb guessed because that must have happened after the crime, as the debris partly covered the body, and could have scattered some of the evidence. But all of it?
“Or a scouring spell,” I said. “With the ceiling used to cover it up.”
“Yeah, but why use a scouring spell to clean up the crime scene and leave the body, the biggest piece of evidence of all?”
“Point.”
“You know, the idea of teaching usually involves telling the rest of us what’s going on,” Dimas said sourly.
“There aren’t as many traces here as we’d expected to find,” Caleb explained, and didn’t elaborate.
But I decided that Dimas had a point, and cast Absconditus, both to give us more to work with and to provide a lesson for the kids.
I knew from my own training that crime scenes tended to focus the mind, at least until you became somewhat numb to them, and the instruction I most vividly remembered had taken place standing over a body.
Use what you have, I thought, and went into lecture mode.
“Human police used to tell their recruits that there are only three ways to catch a perp.
He takes something from a crime scene that can later be used to identify him; he leaves something behind with the same result; or someone witnesses him committing the crime and talks.
That definition has had to be expanded somewhat with the rise of cybercrime and increased surveillance, but it often still holds.
A digital footprint is still a footprint, and facial recognition is still recognition.
“For magical crimes, though, there are additional options. One of them is the reveal spell you just saw, which we discussed the other day. It’s usually employed first on a scene because it paints a sketch of recent activity: how many people were there, where the locus of action was—”
“I think we know where the locus of action was,” Aki said dryly, pointing at the body.
“You’re assuming,” I chided. “Never assume. The spell can detect activity in a corner or under some stairs where it shouldn’t be, indicating trap doors, hidden rooms, or even warded spaces, as it sees through most wards.
But some enchantments see even more and are cast second, like peeling back the layers of an onion to reveal the whole story.
One of the most powerful of those secondary spells is Absconditus, which shows any magic used on the premises recently. ”
I’d expected to end on a flourish, with the spell, which took a moment to do its thing, lighting up the room even more brilliantly.
But my visual aid fizzled. No ghostly spells streaked the gloom, no burnt-out charms blazed briefly back to life, and no wards lit up areas in faint but discernible ways.
With one small, scattered exception.
“This is powerful?” Aki said, confused, but was ignored because I was busy shielding my hand and pawing through the fallen ceiling material to retrieve something shining softly through the mess.
There were ten or fifteen somethings in all, but even when I pulled them free, I had no idea what they were.
Small, round, wrinkled, brownish things, hard to the touch, and dusty.
I rubbed my finger over one, which cleaned it off, but didn’t help much with identification.
Could be some kind of wood; the guys in the lab would have to help on this one.
Caleb didn’t look impressed when I put them in an evidence bag. “Weak-ass bought magic,” he sneered. “Probably off some kind of protection amulet. Everybody’s wearing them these days.”
“But no sign of anything else,” I frowned.
“Not even the magic we exhale with every breath,” he agreed. “If I had to guess, I’d say there weren’t any magic users on the premises, at least not lately.”
“You think a norm did this?”
“Or somebody very, very careful.”
As strange as it sounded, I voted for the former because this perp hadn’t been careful. He’d had his victim almost get away and had to bury a hatchet in the poor bastard’s skull to prevent it. And then…
Well, I didn’t know what then, because the body wasn’t much of a body anymore.
It was more of a stump, with only the torso and head still present.
The limbs were missing, having been chopped off after death, leaving behind something that looked less like a man than a particularly gruesome Halloween decoration.
Damn.
“Let’s get this over with,” Caleb said, because we had to move the body to examine it any further.
The amount of dirt, dust, and debris covering it made identification impossible until it was cleared away.
The guys who had been in earlier had moved enough to make sure what it was, but hadn’t done more in order to leave a fairly undisturbed scene for us.
Have to remember to thank them, I thought dryly.
“Get back a few feet,” Caleb told the kids, right before his summoning spell jerked the corpse out from under, sending a cloud of dust billowing and making me glad for the mask. Until it cleared enough for me to see—
Well, shit. Because, along with all the other indignities this guy had suffered, he was missing most of the skin on the backside of his body, with only raw, red flesh remaining. I crouched down to pull a tuft of fur out of a smear of half-coagulated blood and felt my lips draw back from my teeth.
“Got something?” Caleb asked.
“Yeah.” The reason I had been assigned this particular job.
Sebastian, who was sick of leaving “justice” to the Clan Council, had recently agreed to a revolutionary joint Were/mage task force to investigate shifter crimes.
That took some of the workload off the Corps and put new operatives in the field with a different skill set.
On paper, it was a dream team, but in practice…
Well, we were still figuring that out.
But I imagined that the boys from this morning had been more than happy to find some bit of fur, allowing them to dump this monstrosity on us. It looked like our little task force had our first big assignment. Because sure, I absolutely had time for this right now!
“Lia?” Caleb prodded.
“Hunter,” I said, with the wolf in my voice, and heard him curse.
He wasn’t half as furious as I was. Hunters were the scourge of the Were world, taking us for our pelts, which could allow norms to Change with the right application of spells.
The stolen hides normally went for huge sums, and now that the world was at war, the price had increased by a factor of ten.
But Hunters were mages and used spells to strip off the hides from their dangerous prey, yet there were no traces of magic here.
So what the hell?
And why dismemberment? Hunters were normally after hides, not trophies. And if this was a trophy hunter, why leave the head of the victim intact, which was the part that the sick bastards who hunted Weres for sport most valued, and which would give us the best chance of identifying the victim?
My wolf didn’t like this puzzle any better than the rest of me, having woken up and started prowling around my skull. I didn’t know why, as a body shouldn’t trouble a wolf, even a savaged one. But she wasn’t happy.
That made two of us, but I still had students to instruct.
“Another important secondary spell is Sanguigen,” I said roughly, “which reconstructs a picture of a person from the DNA in their blood. It is often far more detailed than a simple reveal spell, and surprisingly accurate, showing not only the most likely hair and eye color but also approximate age, body composition, the presence of identifying factors such as freckles or baldness, and general health. It’s not as good as a photograph, but it’s better than relying solely on eyewitness testimony, and is invaluable in cases like this, where no witnesses were present. ”
I stood up and backed off before casting it, to avoid the clots of blood suddenly flying up from the floor, goopy and half-solidified, like a gory fist. They shimmered and flashed in the air for a moment, going from shit-brown to a brilliant gold, before whipping about in a mad cyclone and coalescing…
Into something that was not a man. Or a Were, or anything else I’d expected in my wildest dreams. But that had my vague feeling of unease ramping up into nightmare fuel.
No.
No!
“Augghhh!” Kimmie gave a little shriek and stumbled back.
“Holy fuck!” Caleb swore.
“What the hell?” Dimas said roughly and looked at me, with the light of the spell gleaming on his face shield and making him look like an astronaut. A very pissed-off one. “What is that thing doing here?”
Good question, I thought, feeling the room tilt dangerously around me as I stared into the face of a Relic, the prehistoric version of a Were that haunted my dreams.
Good goddamned question.