“I wanted to question the ghost that popped out of Remy’s body, but she moved on before I could.”
“She?”
I nodded. “Like the museum thief yesterday, today’s souls didn’t match the already-dead bodies they were wearing.”
Briar stalked toward the table, dropping her invisibility spell as she moved. It probably would have been damn impressive and shocking if I hadn’t known she was there, but I’d been expecting her to jump in at any moment, so I simply turned, focusing on her for the first time.
“Here’s the thing, Craft,” she said, sliding the laptop away from John. “That wasn’t the only weird moment.”
She used the trackpad to back up the video. John’s lips compressed, and Jenson scowled, but neither interrupted her. When it came to magical crimes, she outranked them.
“Here, you jump for no reason, and then nod,” she said, hitting play. She couldn’t see Roy in the video, but the clip was the moment he’d let me know he’d unlocked the door. “And here, before ‘someone caught the older woman’s attention’ as you put it, you focus right on the spot that is about to be the center of the robbers’ attention. And again, you nod.” She enlarged one panel on the screen, playing a closeup of me when the collectors first appeared. “And then, of course, there is this, right before everyone drops dead.” She cued up one more selection, and no big surprise, it was the moment I’d thrown open my shields.
I grimaced. In the black-and-white images, you couldn’t see that my eyes were glowing eerie green, but the change in light spilling onto my cheeks and the way my hair lifted in a sudden violent wind were dead giveaways to anyone who’d ever seen me raise a shade that I’d been using my magic. On the screen, it happened so fast. The guard lifted his gun, the maelstrom started around me, and then all three robbers fell, simultaneously. At least I finally knew that the guard shot after they were already falling, though he couldn’t have realized it at the time.
I looked back up at Briar. She hadn’t asked a question. Yet. I redirected before she could.
“What did the ME determine was the time of death?”
She frowned. “The field determination was inconclusive.”
“Because two of the bodies were already in full rigor mortis when the medical examiner arrived, and the other appeared to be coming out of it,” John said. Then he sighed and rubbed one large hand over his expanding bald spot. “Alex, help us out here—help yourself out—we have four bodies downstairs who were walking and talking before they met you. The footage from the museum yesterday is horrible quality, but the bank clearly shows you using your magic when three people suddenly drop dead.”
“Technically, they were already dead,” I said, which earned me a scowl from all three. “Remy Hollens’s girlfriend exchanged several text messages with him at five o’clock yesterday, but we don’t know at what point he actually went missing between five and eleven that night, when he missed picking her up from work. That’s a window of fourteen to twenty hours between his abduction and the robbery. Rigor releases what? Twenty-four to eighty-four hours after death? I’m guessing Remy must have been one of the bodies in full rigor. Have you identified the other two—”
John slammed his palms down flat on the metal table, and I flinched.
“I know you can accelerate decay,” he said, so softly that I doubted Jenson, only a few feet away from John, could hear him. “I’ve been on crime scenes where you have done it.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. I didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t wrong. It was the root of the issues that had come between us. Until earlier this year, John and I had been good friends. He’d been the one who’d hooked me up with my retainer job with the police years ago, I used to have dinner at his house with him, his wife, and several other cops from the station nearly every Tuesday, and I’d considered him a father figure. We’d drifted apart in recent months. There were just too many things I hadn’t told him about my changing magic, my newfound heritage, and my tenuous relationship with the Faerie courts. The fact that a combination of those things had landed me in the middle of some very weird crime scenes, most of which wound up classified above his pay grade, had chipped away at the trust and friendship until a giant gulf had opened between us. I had no idea how to span it, and it looked like I was about to tumble down into it and probably get buried in a landslide.
“I . . .” I started, but then floundered. I was fae, so I couldn’t lie. I couldn’t claim that my magic had no part in the bodies aging, because my magic had forced the souls out, and from what I could guess from the little I’d seen of these walking corpses, the souls were what prevented the bodies from decaying. Once the souls were out, it all caught up to them. So, in an indirect way, my magic had done this, but not the way he meant.
“Back up the video,” I said, and nodded at the laptop.
Briar dragged the bar back to the exact moment I appeared to startle on the screen.
“That was when the ghost who haunts my business informed me he’d unlocked the door. You’ll notice later in the video that the first person who rushes by me doesn’t stop, just pushes the door open.” I nodded for Briar to forward it to the next questionable spot. “Our friendly neighborhood grim reapers appeared here. Most people can’t see them, but the robbers were already dead, so apparently they could.”
John frowned, and Jenson raised a skeptical eyebrow, but Briar nodded. Almost nothing was known about soul collectors, and many didn’t believe they existed. On forums frequented by grave witches, there were threads reporting sightings occasionally, and there were often entire chat rooms devoted to speculation about collectors, but as far as I was aware, I knew more than any other living person. I was also bound with oaths of secrecy about much of it. Briar did know a little, though, as the case we’d met during had resulted in her meeting Death before a creature from the land of the dead had temporarily taken over his body.
“And here?” she asked, forwarding it to the moment before the three robbers collapsed.
“These bodies were better . . . preserved . . . than the thief at the museum. With the museum thief, I felt the grave essence rolling off him from the sidewalk. These three I didn’t realize were dead until after the collectors showed up. Here I’ve opened my shields so I could see into the land of the dead and get an idea of what we were dealing with.” Which was true, just not the whole truth. “They were piloted by ghosts. Once the souls were out of the bodies, they stopped mimicking life and collapsed. But all of these people were murdered before they ever walked into that bank.”
Briar glanced from me to something in her palm. She scowled at it. Then she set a small glass charm on the table. A lie-detecting charm. It glowed a cheery green, indicating it hadn’t caught any lies being spoken.
With a sigh, Briar stepped around John and sank down into the empty chair beside him. Maybe Jenson had left it open for her the whole time. Nah. Jenson wasn’t that polite. Or maybe it was just me he didn’t like.
“Initial reports indicate no active spells on any of the bodies,” Briar said. “How were these corpses, as you call them, walking around?”
And wasn’t that the question of the hour. I’d been asking myself that since yesterday. I still didn’t know.
“I didn’t sense any spells before they stopped moving either, though I admittedly wasn’t looking. I am technically still on retainer for the NCPD. The shades might—”
“You’re still a suspect,” Jenson said, his eyes widening as if he couldn’t believe I’d had the audacity to mention the shades. “You’re not going anywhere near those bodies.”
John frowned, the motion dragging down his gray and red mustache. “Unfortunately, he’s right. And that’s coming from the top, Alex.”
“So now what?” I asked.
Jenson just scowled at me, but John looked to Briar, who shrugged.
“You remain a person of interest in this case,” Briar said, then held up her hand to stop my protest when my mouth opened. “But there are enough questionable circumstances that you are not currently under arrest. Geez, Craft, I leave you alone for a few hours and you take a case that should have concluded with a bad breakup and end up with three bodies at your feet.” She shook her head, whether in amazement or disgust wasn’t clear. “Go home. And, of course, don’t leave town.”