“You want some coffee?” I asked, nodding at a small coffee shop down the street.
“There’s coffee inside the station.”
“Central Precinct? I’ve had it before. Trust me, it’s not coffee.”
She frowned at me but glanced between the doors of the station and the coffee shop down the street. Finally she shrugged.
“Coffee. Sure, why not?”
We trudged down the sidewalk in silence. At the coffee shop, I ordered my coffee black; she had hers with hazelnut and cream. When I stepped toward one of the round tables at the front of the shop, she shook her head and led me to the very last table in the corner. She took the chair against the far wall, which gave her the best vantage point to watch both the door and the rest of the patrons in the coffee shop. It also put my back to both, which I wasn’t completely comfortable with. I turned my chair so my back was to the side wall. Briar gave me an amused smile as I sat sideways at the table, but she didn’t comment.
We sat in silence as we sipped our coffee. The coffee shop clientele had been trickling in slowly when we entered, but the morning rush hit soon after we took our seats. The tables around us filled quickly, and disappointed patrons searching for empty seats wandered through the shop, some hovering around people they thought might abandon their table soon. None hovered around us. In fact, everyone seemed to avoid our table. Not in an I’m trying but failing to not stare at the heavily armed, leather-clad woman in the corner way, but like their gazes just naturally slid away from Briar and her surrounding area.
“Do you keep those charms active all the time?” I asked, turning to face Briar. I could feel that her look-away charm was active, but I was apparently inside the covered radius, because I had no issue focusing on her.
Briar shrugged. “When I’m in public, typically.”
“Don’t you ever want to get noticed? To stand out?”
“If I want someone’s attention, I put a really big weapon in their face.” Briar set down her coffee. “What are we doing, Craft? I’m not interested in girly chitchat or becoming best friends forever.”
“I don’t think there is any danger of that,” I said, taking another sip of my coffee.
She stared at me a moment, and then a smile cracked across her face. “I like you, Craft. Not that I’m about to gossip about shoes or purses or whatever girlfriends talk about.”
“I often discuss dead bodies with my best girlfriends.”
Briar looked like she might choke on her coffee. I shrugged.
“My best girlfriends include a medical examiner, a prosecutor, and a grave witch.” And my best guy friends were a soul collector and an assassin. We sure sounded like a morbid bunch, huh?
Briar laughed and held her coffee cup up in a faux salute. “I knew there was a reason I liked you. Now back to the case. Derrick’s making headway in getting you access to the bodies. This is so wrapped up in red tape it might as well be a present, but we need to talk to those shades.”
Derrick, the mysterious partner. He apparently did the paperwork while she did the ass kicking.
I watched two women dressed too casually to be part of the morning business crowd scan for a table, their brightly patterned purses hiked up high on their shoulders and the heels they wore with their jeans clicking on the tile floor with their annoyance.
“Have the police found any commonalities between Annabelle McNabb and Remy Hollens?” I asked.
Briar lifted an eyebrow. “You figured out who another of the robbers was. You didn’t know that during our interview yesterday.”
“Yesterday I also didn’t know the bank robbery was part of a spree. One of my housemates mentioned it last night, and I looked up what little I could find online.” I set down my now-empty cup of coffee and considered whether it would be worth it to buy a refill. The line was now out the door, so probably not. “Yes or no on any common points of interest between Annabelle and Remy? Or should I spend today digging up whatever background I can find on those two, which you and the police likely have already begun?”
“A soccer mom and a college freshman? No, last I heard there was nothing to connect them, besides the obvious of both being dead after robbing a bank together. They didn’t live, work, or shop anywhere near each other. It’s possible they had a strangers-on-the-train kind of relationship, but we can’t pin down where they would have crossed paths.”
Which was exactly what I was afraid of.
Briar nodded toward my wrist, where I still wore the tracking charm. “When it did have a second trail, did you narrow down what area of the city it wanted you to head toward?”
“Not in the city at all. It was tugging toward the wilds to the northeast of Nekros.” And since Nekros was completely inside a folded space, the wilds had never been fully charted.
“You’re sure it wasn’t pulling toward someplace outside the folded space?”
I shrugged. “It didn’t seem to lead toward the road out.” And as far as anyone knew, there was no consistent way out of the folded space through the wilds besides the two interstates that acted as doors.
Briar started to ask another question, but then her phone buzzed. She dug it out, glancing at the screen, and a smile spread across her lips. She stood and tossed her empty cup a good fifteen feet across the room at the trash can. It passed through the narrow opening without even touching the sides.
“Grab your stuff, Craft,” she said, marching toward the door.
“Where are we going?” I called after her as I hurried to the trash can—no way could I make the shot she had, and I didn’t want to apologize for beaning someone in the head with an empty cup.
“Looks like the red tape wasn’t as bad as I thought. You’ll have babysitters, but you’re cleared to raise some shades. Let’s go talk to dead people.”
Chapter 11
Briar had warned me I’d have babysitters at the morgue, but we now had enough people in the room to throw a party. Aside from Briar and me, we had been joined by John and Jenson, as they were the detectives in charge of the case; Tamara, since she had direct custody of the bodies, as well as one of her assistants; and two uniformed officers who stood by the morgue door looking very uncomfortable. It had been decided to pull out all of the bodies so that I wouldn’t have to lower my circle or start a new ritual to confirm stories between victims, if we needed to do so. The morgue wasn’t small, but it also wasn’t built to have four bodies on gurneys with eight living people gathered around them. We’d had to do a little rearranging, and I was still going to have to be very careful when I drew my circle to make sure all the corpses fit without trapping any of the living people in the circle with me.
The most uncomfortable part of the whole situation was how very quiet the entire group was. I dragged my waxy-chalk on the ground with seven gazes locked on me, the room silent except for the buzz of the lights and the whirl of the air purifiers. I tried to ignore them, but I could all but feel their eyes on my flesh. Tamara was the only one who looked friendly out of the bunch. Not that everyone else was strictly unfriendly. Briar looked impatient. The two uniformed officers looked a little freaked out and maybe a little queasy. I wasn’t sure if that was because I was about to raise shades or because the bodies were rather ripe. Jenson, well, he was definitely unfriendly as he scowled at me around a handkerchief he had pressed over his mouth and nose.
John stood off by himself beside one of the two video cameras trained on me for this ritual. He held his case notebook in his hand, pen gripped tight by his side in the other hand. I couldn’t see his mouth under a mustache that definitely needed a trim, but I could tell by the way his cheeks were drawn down that he was frowning.
When I finished my circle, I nodded first to Briar and then I turned to John.
“I’m ready. Who should I start with?”
“You’ll likely end up raising all,” he said, which was a nonanswer.
I chose to believe it was permission to use my best judgment and turned to Remy first. Four shades were a lot for one ritual. I could do it, but it would drain me. He was the one I was most invested in, and he was the one I wanted the most answers from. I wasn’t planning to charge Taylor for any more of my time—after all, this ritual was now bought and paid for by Briar—but if I could find more information for her, something to give her closure, I would.