Death Magic

TEN

LILY parked three blocks from 14321 Camber Lane. One block away and she started shoving. As she got closer, the elbow duel got vicious. The press was in feeding frenzy.

They didn’t seem to know much yet, judging by the questions hurled at her. Well, neither did she. Croft hadn’t told her much. He wanted Drummond to brief her.

Bixton’s body had been found in his living room by the only person in the house at the time—the maid. His wife was visiting family in North Carolina. The maid’s 9-1-1 call was logged at 12:01. Time of death not established, though Lily assumed they had reason to think it was between 8:30 and 12:30. The probable murder weapon was known. The killer had thoughtfully left the dagger in Bixton’s body. No other visible wounds or trauma.

Left in his shoulder, that is. Not his chest, not near any vital organs. That’s why Lily was here.

She saw three possibilities: one, the dagger had not caused Bixton’s death, or had caused it indirectly, triggering a heart attack or other event. Two, the dagger had been dipped in a contact poison. Three, magic was involved.

Croft was betting on Door Number Three. So was Lily.

She accepted that she couldn’t be lead on this one. The reason made her stomach churn, but she understood, just as she knew why Croft had had to ask where she’d been when someone slid that knife into Bixton. Rule wasn’t the only enemy Bixton had made in his political career. He wasn’t the only lupus in the city, either. But the press would sure be looking at him . . . and whoever handled the case would have to, as well.

She hadn’t called Rule. Croft had said the case was “need to know” at the moment. She wasn’t to discuss it with anyone not part of the team Drummond was leading, so she hadn’t called. But she’d been creative as hell in how she followed orders.

She’d been close to Mika’s lair, after all. If she “shouted” at him that she wasn’t allowed to tell him anything, well, he might have decided to snoop around in her head and find out what she wasn’t telling him. He might even decide to tell someone else.

He might not, too. She hadn’t heard from him, so she didn’t know.

With luck, Rule would be alibied by the great man’s top flunky. Lacking luck . . . don’t jump that creek yet, she told herself. And don’t assume the Great Bitch was behind this just because it looked so much like the frame she had arranged for Rule eleven months ago. A frame Lily had taken apart.

Less obvious was why the lead investigator was regular FBI. Murder by magical means was a crime for the Unit.

Magical means was not confirmed, she reminded herself, pushing a mic out of her face as she at last reached the barricade. They’d closed the street for a block around the senator’s house. Things weren’t quite as chaotic on the other side of the barrier. Close, but not quite.

“Special Agent Yu,” she said to the uniform manning the barrier, holding out her badge.

He looked it over, checked his BlackBerry, and shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’ am. You’re not on my list.”

“Then there’s a problem with your list. Get someone here who can—Crawford! Hey!”

A pale man with busy eyes and a bald head turned, frowning. Terry Crawford had thirty years with the Secret Service and a memory for faces no software could touch. She’d worked with him when she was briefly on loan to the Secret Service last winter. “Agent Yu. I wasn’t told to admit you.”

Her eyebrows lifted. The Secret Service was handling the perimeter? “You in charge of the scene?”

“I’m making sure we aren’t flooded with help. If you’re not officially assigned—”

“I’m officially assigned to Special Agent Drummond. Your list’s wrong.” A cameraman jostled her. She spared him a scowl.

Crawford’s mouth thinned. “I’ll need to confirm.” He touched his headset.

Lily waited impatiently. She’d gotten spoiled, she supposed. Used to being in charge. Ever since the Turning, Unit agents had been spread too thin to team up, so she’d been lead on pretty much every investigation she’d been involved with. Plus Unit agents were pretty much top of the food chain, and she’d gotten used to that, too.

But it wasn’t as if she didn’t know how to be a subordinate. She was just out of practice. She’d be patient if it . . .

Crawford nodded at the patrol officer. “She’s cleared.”

Lily ducked under the barricade.

“Sorry about the delay,” Crawford said under his breath when she reached him. “It’s a goddamn circus. Every goddamn agency in town wants in. I turned away two agents from ATF, another from the DEA—” He broke off, shook his head. “I can see why they need you, though. Drummond’s inside.”

“Thanks. Where’s the sign-in?”

“One of my people’s handling it at the door.”

The senator’s Washington digs weren’t all that different from hers, Lily thought as she approached the house. His place was bigger, sure, and stone rather than brick, plus the location was better—facing a small park rather than an identical row of conjoined homes. But from the outside it didn’t look that much nicer than Nokolai’s pied-à-terre in the capital.

Lily signed in at the bottom of the steps leading to the front porch, which held a couple of planters topped with profusely blooming yellow mums. The front door was open. She stepped inside.

Things took a turn for the grand on this side of the door. The foyer was large and floored with marble; the painting over the narrow console table looked old and expensive. The Bixton family had made their money from logging, if she remembered right, though they’d long since diversified. Rule had told her that the senator’s personal wealth was held in a blind trust to avoid any possible conflict of interest. Bixton’s a bigot, he’d added, but an honest one.

Facing the door was a short wall with a gleaming console table. It held a floral arrangement, a pair of silver candlesticks, and a cardboard box full of disposable booties. To her right, an arched entry led to the living room, where voices suggested the official presence was gathered. She couldn’t see much of the room from here. To her left was a single closed door and a wide, sweeping staircase any forties movie star would have been delighted to descend on camera.

Lily bent and took off her Nikes and her socks. They went in the tote she’d retrieved from the trunk of her car.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” someone asked in a deep, raspy voice.

Lily straightened. The man standing in the arched entry on her right was average height and on the thin side. He wore a navy blue off-the-rack suit and combed his thinning black hair straight back from a high, flat forehead. Plain gold wedding ring on his left hand, just like the ghost’s. Disposable booties covered his scuffed black shoes. His eyes were dark and keen and pissed.

“It’s the quickest way for me to check for traces of magic on the floor. I’m Special Agent Lily Yu.” She held out her hand. “You are—?”

He scowled. “Al Drummond, but you can call me ‘sir.’ The floor didn’t kill Bixton. A goddamn knife did. Put your damn shoes back on, grab some booties, and get in here.” He turned and tramped back in the living room.

Lily obeyed one of those orders. She followed him into the living room . . . after digging out her baby wipes and giving her bare feet a thorough wipe-down. Her shoes stayed in her tote.

It was a long, narrow room, ending in French doors to the backyard. Everything was capital-G gracious. The walls were pale gold, the silk drapes dark gold, the furnishings a mix of ivory and gold with splashes of red. Lily’s mother would have loved it. There was a large oil painting over the mantle, a landscape in the pastoral style that had been big a hundred and fifty years ago. Ornate frame. More fresh flowers—in a vase on the mantle, floating in a bowl on the coffee table. No clutter. Everything was spotless . . . except for that messy body on the ivory carpet at the other end of the room.

Lily knew the small mob swarming the room by type, if not by name. One man was snapping still photos while another aimed a camcorder and an older woman took notes. Lily did know the woman. Hannah Kuruc was a topnotch Crime Scene Officer; the other two would be part of her crew. At the far end, a man in a dark suit stood in the open French doors with his back to the room, talking to someone Lily couldn’t see. He turned his head briefly and Lily caught his profile.

The ME was on-scene himself. No flunkies for Senator Bixton.

Drummond was at this end of the room, talking to a short, sandy-haired man with a pug nose. He glanced at her. “This is . . . son of a bitch. What the hell did I tell you? You ever heard of contaminating a scene? Put the goddamn booties—”

“There are traces of death magic on the floor in the entry.”

The sandy-haired man’s eyebrows shot up. Everyone at the other end of the room looked their way except Hannah. Drummond’s scowl didn’t budge. “You’re sure.”

“Positive. Death magic has an unmistakable texture.” Like ground glass and swamp goo. “It’s faint, but it’s there. I haven’t picked up any traces on the carpet yet. I need to walk around.”

“Hell, no. Your method doesn’t get us anything admissible, and I don’t want my scene contaminated.”

“Such faint traces as I picked up are going to fade quickly, and I cleaned my feet thoroughly in the foyer.”

“Climb down, Al,” Hannah said, frowning at the carpet near the body. “It’s my scene until I say you can have it. You said the maid vacuumed in here this morning?”

Drummond’s mouth was tight. “That’s what she said.”

“Huh.” Now she looked up. “Lily, you can come do your thing, but for God’s sake—”

“Don’t touch anything,” Lily finished for her.

Hannah’s mouth crooked up. “Right.” She gestured at the man with the video cam. “Get her movements on record.”

Drummond scowled at Lily. “You’re here to check the knife. That’s priority.”

Lily held out her hand again. “You might as well shake hands. It’ll save us both the embarrassment of me having to find some excuse to touch you.”

He rolled his eyes, shoved his hand out, and took hers.

Firm grip, wide palm, long fingers, no magic. Lily nodded, dropped his hand, and walked slowly forward.

The quickest path to the other end was straight down the middle. She wandered from side to side . . . yes. “I’m finding something. A trail. Faint and spotty, but . . .” She dug in her tote, pulled out a pack of Popsicle sticks, and laid one on the carpet where she stood. Another went a foot back where she’d first picked up the trail. “I’ll mark where I find death magic residue.”

“Knife first, dammit. Do you in any way grasp the concept of taking orders?”

“It’ll come back to me.” She moved slowly, pausing now and then to place another Popsicle stick. About five feet from the body she stopped and put three sticks down. “Stronger here.” Another step. Another, and another Popsicle stick. A couple more and she set down her tote and crouched, studying what was left of Bixton.

The senator had dressed for the day in a crisp white shirt and what looked like the same slacks he’d worn to question Lily, but without the vest and suit jacket. His tie was red again, but this one had little gold dots as well.

He lay on his back near an overstuffed hassock looking mildly offended. One hand rested at his side, palm up, fingers curled in. The other arm was flung out, the fingertips brushing the hassock’s skirt. No visible defensive wounds. His eyes were glazed, his mouth open, his body slack with the peculiar stillness of death. That always struck Lily, how motionless the dead were. Dead people don’t look like they’re sleeping or unconscious. They look dead.

They often smell bad, too. All the muscles relax at death. Bixton had died with a full bladder, but without much in his bowels, judging by the smell.

The knife protruded from the fleshy place between the armpit and the top of the rib cage, just under the collarbone. Not much blood. The knife itself looked old, with a carved handle that might be bone or ivory or something like that. She could see about two inches of the blade.

Didn’t get it all the way in, did you? No bone there to stop the blade. Either you aren’t very strong or you didn’t care how deep it went, didn’t need the steel to kill him. It was just the means of delivery. Lily reached out a hand.

“Careful,” Drummond snapped. “Don’t get fingerprints on it.”

Lily pressed the back of her hand to Bixton’s palm. “Special Agent Drummond, sir, you aren’t Unit.” She checked Bixton’s throat next, paused there briefly, then pressed the back of her hand to his face. “You haven’t worked with a sensitive before. But you might try pretending you think I’m a professional.”

“Are you going to professionally check the damn knife anytime soon?”

Anger prickled over her skin almost as tangibly as magic. She clamped down on it. Truly she was out of practice at the subordinate thing . . . oh, yes, she’d grown unaccustomed to a*sholes giving her orders. “If Bixton was killed by magic, some residue may still be in his body. Where the magic lingers and how much is present makes a difference in determining the type of spell used.”

“Does it matter what kind of spell it was? Killed by magical means is a capital crime. Doesn’t matter what kind of chanting went into it.”

“If he’d been shot, would you want to find the bullet? Maybe—I don’t know—run some ballistics tests?”

He grunted. “So what did you find?”

“Nothing in his hand or face. A very small trace on his throat. I’ll need to loosen his clothing to check elsewhere, but I’ll do the knife first.” Now she pressed the back of her hand to the knife’s hilt. And grimaced. Ugly. “Death magic and lots of it. This won’t fade anytime soon. You’ll be able to get confirmation from the coven.” The only magically produced evidence that was admissible in court was that obtained by a certified Wiccan coven. The coven couldn’t do what Lily did—Gifts were stronger and more accurate than spells—but with that pretty dagger loaded with so much death magic, coven spells would do the job just fine. “Have you contacted Ms. O’Shaunessy, or shall I?”

“Your man Croft’s supposed to be handling that. Go ahead and check for lingering magic elsewhere.”

Maybe the a*shole was capable of learning. Lily glanced at Hannah.

Her mouth tipped down unhappily. “Okay, but I’ll unbutton him. You got more of those baby wipes?”

While Lily cleaned her hand, Hannah knelt on the other side of the body and bent low, studying the starched landscape of Bixton’s shirt. After a moment she grunted, motioned to one of the other techs, and got tweezers and an evidence bag from him. “Looks like one of Bixton’s,” she said, depositing a single short, white hair in the Baggie, “but you never know.”

After that, Hannah undid four buttons—enough for Lily to slide her hand in between cloth and cool, clammy flesh. Bixton turned out to have a hairy chest. That surprised her, somehow.

“One spot where the death magic is concentrated,” she said after a careful grope. “Over the heart. It thins out evenly as I move my hand away from the center of the chest. I didn’t touch the wound, but did touch about two inches from it.” She withdrew her hand and twisted to grab her tote.

“What does that tell you?” Drummond demanded. “Where the magic is and isn’t. What does that mean?”

Lily scrubbed her hands with another wipe as she stood. It wasn’t touching a DB that made her feel unclean. It was the death magic. “First, that he wasn’t killed by death magic directly. It was used to power the spell that killed him, not as a sort of blunt force trauma all on its own.”

“You can do that?” His eyebrows lifted in surprise and for a brief moment he didn’t sound pissed. “Just blast someone with death magic and it kills them?”

“I can’t,” she said dryly, and started back toward him, avoiding the trail she’d marked with Popsicle sticks. “And I’m really damn glad to find out this perp can’t, either.” The only time she’d run up against that kind of killing, it had been done by a madwoman using an ancient staff created by the Great Bitch. The woman was dead, the staff destroyed, but presumably she could make another one if she wanted. “That the magic was heaviest over his heart suggests the spell targeted his heart specifically.”

Drummond rubbed his jaw, eyebrows down. “Brooks’s heart attack was caused by a potion, not a spell. Never heard that death magic was involved, either.”

“As far as I know it wasn’t, but I’m not part of that investigation. The heart is a popular target for killing spells. I had a perp a couple months ago who used a heart-stopping spell delivered by a blade.” She frowned, slid her foot a few feet to one side. She wasn’t finding a second trail of death magic. Shouldn’t the perp have leaked it coming and going?

Not necessarily, she realized. Once the spell was discharged, there probably hadn’t been anything to leak. The odd thing was that it had leaked in the first place. Could be the perp had charged himself or herself with death magic rather than charging the blade, sending the power through the dagger when he or she struck.

Was that likely? She needed to call Cullen.

“Huh. Guess that’s why you’re here. You’ve dealt with this crap before.” He looked past her. “Hannah, it’s all yours. I’ve got people to talk to. Let me know what you find. Doug, Agent Yu, with me.”

He led her and the sandy-haired man into the foyer and from there through the door on the left. Turned out that wasn’t the coat closet, like she’d thought, but a small study. Lots of books, a single small window. Desk with the usual computer stuff and tidy stacks of files and papers.

He stopped, turned, faced her. “I do not like having my direct orders ignored.”

“Yeah? I don’t like being treated like an idiot.”

“The difference here is that I’m in charge. You aren’t. This is Doug Mullins. He’s second-up as far as I’m concerned. You’ll take orders from him, too.”

Mullins was a squat little man with pale skin, pale eyes, and a wide mouth that probably altered his face a lot when he smiled. If he ever smiled. Or spoke. So far she hadn’t heard one word from him. “Fine,” she said, and held out her hand. “Good to meet you, Agent Mullins.”

He studied her outstretched hand about the way he’d examine a wad of gum stuck to his shoe.

Drummond snorted. “Don’t be a p-ssy, Doug. Shake the nice agent’s hand so she knows you aren’t a big, bad witch.”

Reluctantly he did. Damp palm, short fingers, no magic. Wedding ring on the left hand, plain gold. Lily looked at Drummond. “Do you ignore the expertise of everyone on your team? Or is it just the women you discount? Or the ones with a Gift?”

Drummond rubbed his jaw again. After a moment he nodded. “Point. I should’ve asked what the hell you were doing before I told you to stop doing it. But from here on in, if I say hop on one foot, you start hopping and keep one damn foot off the damn floor. Or I’ll get someone else from the woo-woo side to handle that part of the investigation.”

Lily didn’t buy the threat. Croft had assigned her to the case. Drummond couldn’t unassign her . . . but he could make it hard to do her job. “I’ll follow orders. Sir. But I’m not good at hopping for no damn reason.”

“Tough. Tell me about death magic. Tell it like I don’t know a damn thing. You won’t be far off.”

“It’s magic sourced through ritual killing.” He had to know that much. Every cop in the country knew that much. “The practitioners use the power of the transition—”

“What do you mean, practitioners?”

“It takes more than one person to perform the ritual. The only known exception is a wraith, which both creates and subsists on death magic, no ritual needed.”

“Any chance we’ve got a wraith on our hands?”

“How much detail do you want?”

“Put the detail in your report. Give me a yes or no now.”

“There’s a chance, but it’s extremely slim.” First because wraiths were really, really hard to make. Second because a wraith wouldn’t have left so much tasty death magic behind on that dagger. Wraiths ate the stuff.

“We’ve got a human perp, then.”

“Perps. Five is considered the minimum necessary for a death magic ritual. One for each of the four compass points, and one to direct the ritual and do the actual killing. In all of the known rituals, the killer uses a blade, usually to cut the victim’s throat. The ritual allows the person in charge to absorb or contain the power released when a soul transitions from life to whatever comes next.”

Turned out Mullins did have a voice—a gravelly baritone at odds with his size. “Soul?” He loaded plenty of scorn into the word. “You believe in souls?”

“You don’t like the word, pick another one. Something persists after the body dies. We don’t know how long it persists or what happens to it, not in any definitive way, but souls are fact, not belief.”

Mullins’s chin jutted pugnaciously. “You can’t prove that.”

“Death magic itself proves something other than the purely physical exists.”

“All that crap about transitions! You sound like a TV psychic. Obviously death magic uses the life energy of the victims, not some holy-baloney transition.”

“What’s life energy?”

“The energy it takes to keep a body alive.”

She snorted. “Talk about an undefinable term! If you stick to the purely physical, a subsistence diet consists of twelve hundred calories. That’s the equivalent of about five Btus. If all a death magic practitioner could access was the purely physical, he’d do a hell of a lot better figuring out how to eat the energy from a blow-dryer.”

Drummond broke in impatiently. “Enough metaphysics. To make death magic, someone’s got to kill someone else. That’s where we start.”

“It’s still death magic when the sacrifice is an animal,” Lily said, “but people give the bigger bang. I suspect our perps needed a human death, but . . .” She drummed her fingers on her thigh. “I need to consult an expert.”

“You’re supposed to be the damn expert.”

“You wouldn’t ask a blood splatter specialist to analyze fiber. I’m a touch sensitive. I can’t work magic, so I’ve never learned spellcasting. I need to talk to someone who knows it all—casting, theory, history.”

“You got someone in mind? One of your Unit people?”

“No, he’s a consultant.” Cullen Seabourne, lupus and sorcerer. Sorcerers were rare enough that some people didn’t think they existed. A lupus sorcerer was supposed to be impossible.

Cullen did like to break the rules. “He’s got clearance,” Lily added. “The Unit uses him often. I’ll need you to approve his fee.”

He grunted. “I need your request in writing—name, contact information, fee scale. Did Croft tell you—” His phone buzzed. He took the call, said he’d be right there, and told Mullins, “You brief her. I need to talk to Armistead.”

“All of it?”

“Hell, yeah. She has to know why she can’t shoot her mouth off.” He left, closing the door behind him.

Mullins looked at her. “I hear you’ve got homicide experience.”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.” He pulled a small pad from an inside pocket on his jacket and looked over his notes. “Bixton was a man of regular habits. Up at seven every weekday, according to the maid. Name’s Sheila Navarette—unmarried, thirty-two, lives in. She has his breakfast ready at seven thirty every weekday, and that’s when he arrived to eat it today. Eggs and toast, coffee, apple juice. While he ate, she ran the vacuum downstairs—she does that every damn day—then went to wash up the breakfast things. Passed him on her way to the kitchen about eight fifteen. She thinks he went to his office then because that was his routine, but she didn’t actually see.

“So she cleaned up the kitchen and went upstairs, where she made the bed, tidied up, and collected the laundry. She took that down to the basement. That’s where she was at between nine thirty and ten when the doorbell rang. The doorbell rings on all three floors—basement, first floor, and second floor. She answered the door and showed the visitor in to the senator here in the living room. After determining that they didn’t want coffee or tea, she returned to the basement, where she remained, ironing the senator’s shirts, until she went upstairs to fix lunch around noon and discovered the body.”

He looked up from his notes. There was an odd, mocking gleam in his eyes. “That’s the only visitor the senator had this morning.”

“Are you saying we already have a suspect? Or at least a witness. You have a description? A name?”

“Both.” He consulted his notes again ostentatiously. “Thin, average height, wore a dark gray suit with a white shirt. Pale blue tie. He was not carrying a briefcase or laptop or other object. She estimates his age as between forty and fifty. Dark hair and eyes, large nose, glasses. She hadn’t seen him there before and he didn’t have an appointment, but the senator saw him anyway.”

“And the name?”

Mullins smiled thinly. “Ruben Brooks.”