Chapter 80
Someone’s Fallen Off Their Broomstick
Darcy arrived with an excited grin about an hour later, which grew a few megawatts when he saw the phones and a laptop he’d get to hack into. Karson walked in behind him with a black backpack, throwing it on a chair.
“Did you get what you needed?” Ethan asked.
Karson nodded.
“Someone’s fallen off their broomstick,” Darcy stated, glancing at me as he moved toward the table. I laughed.
Ethan placed some blue police gloves on the dining table, which was covered in clear plastic. “Put these on, Darcy.”
Darcy pulled them on and settled himself in one of the chairs. He fit the part well. He could pull off being a forensic scientist in any laboratory.
Karson placed the laptop and five mobile phones on the table.
Darcy picked up the laptop first, he opened it and while he waited for it to whirr to life he collected a phone.
He pressed the screen a few times and frowned.
He looked up at Ethan. “The laptop is probably password protected, I can get into it easily enough but the phone opens via fingerprint, I’m not going to be able to open it without wiping it. ”
Karson opened the backpack and pulled something out. He tossed a plastic bag full of white, rubber-looking things on the table.
It hit me all at once. Shock and disgust seized my stomach. Startled, I staggered back.
“Oh,” I rasped, “is that a . . . thumb?”
It wasn’t just one thumb, but a jumble of them. Raw flesh hung in jagged formations from their ends. Shards of snapped bone coffined by dark red, chunky flesh. The phalanges were mannequin pale. In contrast, the fingernails housed grime, like train tracks across a desert.
Darcy opened the bag. “Interesting.”
The stench of stale sweat and rotting meat wafted out. I threw my hands up to my nose and took another step back.
Darcy pulled one thumb from the bag and studied it with all the focus of an avid stamp collector. “This one was not cut off, it’s a little too rough around the edges and the rips in the meat run up, not sideways—it was torn off in an upwards motion.”
Disgust laced with acid hit the back of my throat. With detachment Darcy pressed the thumb on the screen, it didn’t open. He grabbed the next phone, that one didn’t open either. The third phone lit up.
“Lucky they didn’t use eyeball recognition,” he chuckled.
Ethan glanced at me with an uncomfortable look, as if he were offering an apology for what I’d seen. “You might want to turn away now, Amy.”
Too late. Horror, revulsion, and mortification found a home in the base of my spine.
The apology was not for what I had seen, but for what Karson pulled out of the black bag next.
It was a snap lock sandwich bag that looked like a slug had spent the night wandering around in it, a shiny smear clung to the clear plastic sides.
Squashed in the corner, sat a white ball, about the size of a crow’s egg.
Pink wrinkled flesh hung like a mini deflated rubber hose from its end.
As Karson move the bag it rolled and bobbled across, the pupil a cloudy brown, an iris painted by death seemed to stare at me like an accusing, silent victim.
I gasped and spun away. Vomit gurgled in my stomach.
I fought to hold it down. I bolted to the kitchen and clutched the sink like it was a buoy thrown out to save me.
My chest heaved, my head throbbed, saliva flooded my mouth.
I swallowed it back down and stared out the window, trying to distract my mind.
A crow landed on the limb of a large oak tree and bounced along its branches.
The crow grew bored and, with a couple of long, drawn-out caws, it flew off.
I grabbed a glass of water and sculled it down. Taking a few heaping breaths I went back into the living room.
Karson gave me a condescending ‘I told you so’ look.
I muttered under my breath, “Careful, your face is calling my palm.”
He chuckled. Arrogant prick. I sat on the couch. I figured I didn’t need to see anything else, hearing it would suffice.
Darcy was speaking fast. Everything he said flew like a kite on a windy day and went completely over my head.
To say I was not tech savvy was an understatement.
I got up and poked at the fire, the flames leap and roared to life.
I sat back down, listening to the soothing, crackling sound, watching the orange flames lick at the wood like a ravenous child consumes an ice cream.
“Okay, I’m in,” Darcy said. There was a short silence and then he read, “They were hired by Cole for security detail initially, re-hired again by Cole—it’s all coded but essentially the package they talk about would be Amy. They were meant to bring her unharmed to a point just out of town.”
“Hired by Cole. Are you sure, Darcy? It was a woman who answered the phone,” I said, twisting toward him, trying not to look at the thumbs seated like fallen, roughly sawn tree stumps and the one blind eyeball perfectly spaced apart in order of size on the table.
To Darcy, arranging people’s missing phalanges was as important as spacing his, red, black, and blue pens.
He popped his head up at an angle, as if considering, his blue eyes glassy from staring at the screen. “The email is from Cole, but it might have been hacked to make it look like it was from him. If someone knew he’d used them before, and didn’t want any link to themselves, it’s easily done.”
Ethan scowled. “Or it could be him, Amy. He wasn’t exactly happy with us in the diner.”
He had a point. We’d pretty much accused him of murdering Katrina and Robert.
But why leave it so long? Wouldn’t he want to stamp out the threat immediately?
And why target just me, and not Ethan as well?
He couldn’t know what Ethan was, surely?
But the message did state to make sure I wasn’t around Karson or Ethan, so maybe he did . . . or someone did.
A chill rose on the back of my neck.
“Can you cancel the order from Cole the same way?” Ethan asked Darcy.
Darcy nodded. “Yeah, easy, but if they find out you killed their mates, they won’t need an order from Cole to come looking for you.”
Karson said, “There won’t be any of that gang left to come looking after tonight.”
Darcy grinned with all the excitement of a five-year-old. “How exciting, can I come?”
“No.” Ethan touched his shoulder briefly. “You are a big help, doing what you’re doing. We need you to keep an eye on the emails, make sure no more harm is directed to Amy, no one else can do that.”
Darcy nodded, happy with Ethan’s response.
He spent the next hour or so reading through emails, we never got much more information other than they were paid ten grand in cash. The money was left in a bag outside their premises so they never saw who was paying them.
We were no closer to knowing who the woman on the phone was.
I was sure from the anger in her voice she knew Karson.
She wasn’t witch, nor a vampire, or she would have done it herself.
There was no way a vampire would allow a mere human to do their work.
A vampire could have me dead before I even opened my mouth to scream.
She was most likely just a human. A pissed-off human.
I asked the question that had stirred in the back of my mind since last night. “Is there an ex-girlfriend, or someone you’ve hurt who might want revenge, maybe thought we were still together?”
His face showed darkness and perplexity. “No, I do not have girlfriends, Amelia. Any relations I have are purely non-committal, mutually-beneficial understandings.”
I couldn’t help the bitterness that flew from my mouth or the heat that soared. My hand flew off to the side like a goose flaps its wing in warning.
“That’s good to know, Karson. Did you stop to consider that maybe not all your mutually-beneficial understandings get that memo?”
Out of the corner of my eye I caught the blur of movement before I could process what it was, the sounds of glass shattering stung the air, tiny opaque fragments splintered all over the floor.
Startled, I stared at it for a moment, before realising that I was the cause.
One of Ethan’s favourite whisky glasses lay in ruins.
I bit my lip, and shot a quick glance at Ethan.
He didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to, his angst was written all over his face.
I mumbled, “Sorry.”
“I don’t know much about women, Karson,” Darcy said, “but I’m confident enough to proclaim Amy didn’t get that memo, and she’s not particularly impressed with the declaration.” He went back to reading through the phone.
Ethan grimaced.
Karson scowled at the top of Darcy’s head, his mouth pulled into a thin line, but he remained quiet.
I went to the kitchen and grabbed the dustpan and broom. I came back to the room.
“Leave it.” Karson snatched the duster from my hands. “I’ll do it.”
I strode up the stairs, slammed the door, hard, and sat down on the bed. I googled whiskey glasses from Italy, found some, five hundred and fifty dollars for the set of four, thanks for coming. I ordered them and a decanter for good measure.