Chapter 13

Tamara’s cell went straight to voice mail, so I called the ME’s office, but reached an intern who informed me that Tamara was in the middle of an autopsy. I didn’t want to get Tamara in trouble, so I left just my name and a message for her to call me ASAP.

While I waited, I pulled up the Nekros Times online archives. I hoped I’d luck out and find something about Kingly’s overcooked mystery man. I knew the date the event had occurred, so I queued the articles from the following day’s paper. The article described the event as “tragic” and “deeply saddening” but was only a couple paragraphs long. Kingly had told me more than the paper’s account of events. And worse yet, the man was listed only as “an as yet unidentified male.” That wouldn’t help me find his family or his gravesite. I searched for follow-up articles, but found none.

The Times having failed me, I pulled up a search engine. It took a good fifteen minutes of playing with keywords before I found an article on a news blog. It was much more detailed—and grislier—than the article in the Nekros Times, but it still didn’t list the man’s name. I checked out the comments, and was disturbed by how many people thought becoming a human torch would be an awesome way to go. More than once commenters asked if he was testing a charm in an experiment that went terribly wrong. Answers went both ways, which tended to happen on the ’net where anyone could claim to be an expert. One commenter linked to a cell phone recording of the event. Okay, my opinion of society just went down a notch. At the same time, there could be something in the video that could help in my investigation. If Kingly’s crispy horror is directly involved.

I bookmarked the location without watching it.

I’d found three more equally unhelpful news posts on the suicide by the time my phone rang. Tamara sounded tired when I answered, her voice rough and throaty.

“You okay?” I asked. “You sound sick.”

She huffed a laugh. “In a manner speaking, so if you’re calling to invite me to lunch, I’ll pass.”

Morning sickness.

Her chair squeaked and I imagined her leaning back and propping her legs up after hours of standing over an autopsy table.

“So what’s up, Alex?”

“I’m looking for the name of a suicide that probably passed through your cold room a little under two weeks ago.”

Tamara groaned. “Another suicide? What are you advertising these days?”

“Don’t worry. I just need a name this time.”

I described the manner in which the man had died. As I spoke, the other end of the line went eerily silent.

“Tam, you still there?”

“Who hired you to look into that case, Alex?” I could hear her frown through the phone. It wasn’t the response I’d expected.

“No one, directly. It came up in the course of the Kingly case. Why?”

“He’s a John Doe. Not that there was much left to identify him by. His hands were destroyed so no prints, and no one would ever be able to identify what was left of his face.”

Nearly two weeks as a John Doe?

“He’s been cremated already, hasn’t he?” A suicide victim who had appeared homeless before lighting himself up? Yeah, the city wasn’t going to hold on to that corpse for long. And while I was damn good at grave magic, no one could pull a shade from cremated remains—the extreme heat obliterated everything.

Well, there goes that lead.

“Actually, that case got to me. He’s still in my cold room.” Tamara’s chair squeaked again and she made a small “mmph” sound as she stood. “Since no family or friends have come forward, how would you like to officially identify our crispy friend?”

And just like that, the red tape was cut and I had legal access to the shade. Now to hope he held the key to this mystery.

“Here he is,” Tamara said, pushing the gurney out of the cold room.

I could sense the preservative charm on the corpse, and the charms in the morgue that moderated the smell were functioning, but as the gurney approached, the scent of burnt flesh wafted over me.

“This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” I asked as I drew my circle.

“I’ve worked on worse, but yeah, he’s pretty bad.” She looked vaguely green, but I’d seen Tamara examine a corpse’s innards without so much as a crinkle of her nose. She looked at the body clinically, not seeing a person. I guessed that her current pallor and the fact her face was all tight lines had nothing to do with the man under the sheet.

“Why haven’t you made a charm, yet?” I asked.

Tamara frowned, cocking her head to the side and giving me a puzzled look.

Right, I’d totally skipped the segue. “For the morning sickness, I mean. Why not make a charm to take care of it?”

“Oh.” She looked away. “If I make a charm, anyone the least bit sensitive will pick up on it. Including my mom and sister who are flying in this weekend. Theoretically, Ethan and I were the only two who were supposed to know, but I suppose you’ve told Holly by now.”

“That’s not my place.” After all, we were all keeping secrets these days.

If I hadn’t been looking right at her, I’d have missed the fact her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. She really is worried about people knowing.

“You ready for me to turn the recorder on?” she asked, changing the subject. “I want to know who our John Doe is.”

“Yeah, go ahead.” I looked down at the shape under the sheet. “But first, why this one?”

“Huh?”

“You said this case got to you. Why?”

She stepped over my still inert circle, and joined me beside the gurney. “You think you can look at him in the flesh?”

I cringed back. “Can’t you just tell me?”

“No, this is something you have to see.” She folded back the sheet exposing no more than a foot and a half of the body beneath.

I knew it was a body only because my innate ability to sense the dead told me as much, but my eyes certainly didn’t agree. My brain rejected the blackened mess mixed with areas of dark red and thick, puss-colored blotches as ever having been a living person.

“You’re not going to be sick are you?” Tamara asked. I swallowed the taste of bitter bile and shook my head. She nodded in approval. “Good, then come closer and look at this.”

I stepped up to the side of the gurney again, staring at the thing she’d exposed. I’d expected a charred skeleton when I heard how he’d died, but there was still a lot of flesh left. I stared, not making sense of what I was seeing until I noticed the two translucent splotches almost evenly placed in the front.

His eyes. It was a head.

I’d stopped breathing at some point, which I didn’t realize until my body forced me to gasp in air—air that tasted of char and dead flesh. My stomach twisted, and for a moment I thought I’d lied to Tamara and I would, in fact, be revisited by the half pot of coffee I’d called breakfast. I squeezed my eyes closed. You can do this, Alex. Calm down. Slow, shallow breaths.

I could feel Tamara watching me, but thankfully, she said nothing about my reaction. I might need dead bodies, but I most definitely didn’t like them.

Opening my eyes again, I made myself look at the thing on the gurney. The ear closest to me was gone, and I could only barely make out a blackened lump that had once been a nose between cheeks that had split open, exposing that yellowed, pustules substance.

“What am I supposed to—” I lost the question as my gaze moved to where the lips had shriveled and drawn back, exposing a mouth full of pointed teeth. They looked like something that belonged in a shark’s mouth, not a man’s.

“Damn,” I whispered the word, more to myself than anyone. Tamara nodded her agreement, but I couldn’t look away from those teeth. Nothing human had teeth like that. “Is he fae?”

“No, I had an RMC test run. Not only is he a human; he was most likely a null.”

The Relative Magic Compatibility test, or RMC, was still considered fringe science by most. The results weren’t admissible in any court, but they were fast, easy, and inexpensive. With a DNA sample, a tech created a slide and placed it in the RMC reader. The machine stored a minor charge of Aetheric energy, which it attempted to infuse into the sample. Then it measured the reaction to that energy on a cellular level and created a pretty little chart.

Norms, as in the two-thirds of the population who were nonmagical humans, created low level readings that looked a lot like a rolling wave well below the first marker. Nulls, the humans who not only lacked any magical aptitude, but often had at least partial immunity to magic, registered on the chart as a flatline. Witches produced charts filled with large mountains and valleys. The more powerful the witch, the higher the spikes. But regardless of what the Humans First Party preached, norms, nulls, and witches were all human, the difference being that some could channel magic and some couldn’t. Fae, on the other hand, weren’t human. Placing a fae sample into the RMC reader produced no graph. Instead it spit out a single, vertical line in the center of the chart.

I stared at the razor sharp teeth filling the man’s mouth. “You’re sure the machine was calibrated correctly?”

“Trust me, I double-checked.”

“So it’s what, cosmetic? On a homeless man?”

She tugged the sheet back over the man’s head, which was a relief—I’d seen as much of John Crispy as I cared to.

“I’m not convinced about the homeless part either,” Tamara said as she stepped away from the gurney. “That is, unless soup kitchens are now serving caviar and champagne.”

Yeah, no. I didn’t see that happening, and from Kingly’s description of the man, it didn’t sound like he could have sauntered into a place serving such items without drawing attention.

“And then there is this.” She crossed back over my inert circle and picked up a file from a nearby equipment tray. I reached out my hand for it, but she shook her head. “Not until after the ritual. I want to hear him say his name first.” When I just glanced from her to the folder she said, “Suffice to say that several witnesses to the event sat down with sketch artists. The resulting images immediately pinged a missing persons report. But the dental records didn’t match.”

Go figure. This guy must have had a hell of a smile. I was shocked Kingly hadn’t mentioned the teeth. Neither of the Kinglys were extremely open-minded, but James spent several minutes with the man. Surely he would have noticed the jagged, razorlike teeth—a smile like that would be hard to miss—but all Kingly had said was that the guy was “so polite.”

Odd.

“We should start,” I said and began my ritual as soon as Tamara turned on the recorder.

The shade that sat up from the body was almost worse than the body itself. The body had continued to burn after death, making its features hard to determine. The soul had left the body a little earlier so that even without distinct color, its burnt body looked raw. For the second time in as many days I found myself looking anywhere but at the shade I’d raised.

“What is your name?”

“Richard Kirkwood,” the shade said, not the least bit hindered by his burnt lips or sharklike teeth.

From outside my circle Tamara made a triumphant whoop. “I knew it. Ask him when he got his teeth changed.”

This was supposed to be my interview, but Tamara was the one who’d arranged it, so I complied.

“I never altered my teeth,” the shade said. “I did have a root canal two years ago.”

Tamara grumbled something disparaging about shades. I ignored her.

“Do you remember having all your teeth sharpened to points?” And lengthened by the look of them.

“No.”

“Have you ever had the desire to do so?”

“No.”

This interview was eerily familiar.

“Mr. Kirkwood, do you remember how you died?”

“Fire. I was on fire. I could hear people screaming and then…” Then the collector came for him.

“Do you remember how you caught fire?”

“No.”

“Do you remember asking a man to fill a milk jug with gasoline?”

“No.”

I glanced at Tamara. She stood perfectly still, watching the shade with a loose jaw, her lips slightly parted. But while her mouth might indicate shock, there was dread in her eyes.

“What was the last thing you remember before the fire, Mr. Kirkwood?”

“Going to bed early. Kelly was working a double at the hospital, but I didn’t feel well.”

“And what day was that?”

“Friday night.”

I looked at Tamara and she flipped through the missing person report. With a nod she said, “Kelly Kirkwood filed the report. She was worried when she returned from her double and her husband wasn’t home. When he hadn’t returned the next morning, and didn’t answer his cell phone, she reported him missing.”

He didn’t pull his combusting trick until the following Tuesday, so like Kingly, he was missing three days.

“Is there a picture?” I asked Tamara, and she turned the file to show me a printed photo. Between the decay from the land of the dead and the blue haze of my circle, to say nothing of the random swirl of Aetheric energy, the picture was completely obscured. I shook my head. “How about weight, did she list it in the report?”

Tamara nodded. “She has approximately a hundred and sixty pounds listed. She must have been guessing. Very poorly too. I’d estimate he weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds at time of death.”

Which fit the description of a scrawny man in clothes that hung off his bones that Kingly had given me. And if I was right, though I half hoped I wasn’t, Richard’s wife hadn’t been as bad a guesser as Tamara assumed. Not if Kirkwood suffered the same transformation as Kingly. I turned back toward the shade. Then regretted it and moved my gaze slightly to his right.

“When was the last time you weighed yourself, and how much did you weigh at that time?”

“Wednesday. Kelly and I always weigh in on Wednesdays since we joined a gym. My last weigh-in was one hundred and sixty-three pounds.”

“That’s impossible,” Tamara said. “A person can’t lose sixty pounds in six days.”

But he had, and so had Kingly. “Three days,” I muttered.

“What?” Tamara asked leaning close to the edge of my circle.

“He lost it in three days. The same three days he was missing.” Whatever spell had infected Kingly and Kirkwood, it wasted them before, well, wasting them. To the shade I asked, “Do you remember anything odd happening on Friday?”

It was a dicey question because it required the shade to evaluate the subjective notion of what could be considered odd. Shades could recite the events in their lives—often in horrific detail—but opinions left with the soul along with emotions. I wasn’t surprised the shade sat mute.

I tried again. “Did you meet anyone new on Friday? Did anyone ask you for a favor?”

“No.”

Damn. If Kirkwood had spread whatever made him waste away to Kingly, how did Kirkwood catch it?

“Did your routine change in any way on Friday, besides that you went to bed early.”

“Yes. I normally go home at lunch and walk Missy in the park. We didn’t make it to the park because a man threw himself in front of a bus.”

My mouth went dry. Another suicide?

“Did you see this happen?”

“Yes. Missy and I were walking down the sidewalk and the man was standing on the curb. He watched the bus approaching and then jumped into its path. He hit the front first, before disappearing under the bus and getting drawn into the wheel well.” He said all of this with a level voice.

I didn’t feel half as calm. A queasy uneasiness reverberated through every cell in my body. Three bodies couldn’t be a coincidence. Nekros had a serial killer. Weapon of choice: suicide.