Page 1 of Veiled Justice
Prologue
Helga knew something was wrong soon after she took her first sip of champagne. Almost immediately her body started to react sluggishly and she struggled to put one foot in front of the other. Her ears were ringing; her eyes couldn’t focus.
A warm arm slipped around her waist; one she hadn’t asked for. The arm was strong and propelled her effortlessly out of the stuffy party and into the fresh night air of the ornate gardens. She was dimly aware of loud bangs followed by approving gasps of wonder, more bangs, more gasps. Fireworks, she thought, not gunfire. No one oohed and aahed at gunfire.
She staggered a little and the arm around her tightened to keep her upright. ‘Just hold on to me, baby,’ the voice said and confusion flooded her because she recognised it – didn’t she?
She shouldn’t have accepted the champagne flute because she was on duty; now her client was vulnerable and it was all her fault. A stupid mistake, a rookie error, one her parents would hold over her for years. She was too young to be on assignment, but she’d wanted so much to prove she could do it. She’d grabbed the off-the-books job eagerly, hoping it would lead to glory. Instead, this was going to set her back significantly.
This particular job had been a babysitting snoozefest from the start and it should have been a doddle, nothing more than a spoiled rich kid wanting to look tough. It had rapidly become clear that Helga was little more than an ogre accessory for a brat with too much money and not enough manners. She’d already stepped in when he’d got too handsy with one of the women. Her client hadn’t enjoyed that. She’d pointed out that she wasn’t here to facilitate rape but to keep the client safe: that included future reprisals for stupid horny actions.
She’d just wanted to do the job and leave, show her parents shecouldbe trusted, but instead she’d fallen at the first hurdle. The night had been so long and so utterly boring. It was nearly over, and a tiny sip of alcohol shouldn’t have affected her in the slightest – ogres metabolised alcohol faster than humans. Even so, she should have refused when she was offered the glass, but the temptation was there and her shift was so nearly over. Besides, she could handle her drink…
It wasn’t the alcohol she should have been wary of. Her drink had been spiked, no doubt with a potion of some kind. Some human men had ogre fetishes, and bigger, stronger women were a turn-on. The foulest of them called it bestiality.
She knew the company that she was keeping here. She’d seen the sneers, the looks of disdain, and in some eyes she’d seen a weird eagerness that she now understood.
Now she was drugged and she was probably about to be raped.
She felt oddly matter of fact about that. She should have been screaming, fighting, but everything was just so damnedoff. Hertongue was thick and leaden and, try as she might, no scream would come out.
She had weapons. She would draw one if only she could get her damned body to respond but it was all she could do to stumble and breathe, to claw onto consciousness so at least she’d be a witness to what happened to her.
And afterwards, when her limbs were working again, she’d kill her attacker for what he was about to do to her unwilling body. The thought made her smile inside.
The arm around her stopped guiding her and shoved her to the hard ground. She fell face first and her nose crunched. Pain exploded and blood poured from her nostrils. He turned her over and made a tutting sound, then wiped away the blood like it just wouldn’t do.
When he stood over her, she knew his face. He drew a dagger – and that was when real fear trickled through her, sluggish mind or not. Because that was when she realised it wasn’t rape on the cards but murder.
She hadn’t even drawn her weapons.
Her parents were going to be so disappointed in her.
Chapter 1
Champagne, caviar and a corpse – the glittering masquerade ball had descended into deadly scandal. I’d already donned gloves and cordoned off the area, so I set down my well-worn briefcase and knelt next to the body. I felt for a pulse. Rule one: always check the dead body reallyisdead. The magical occupants of the Other realm could recover from a veritable tonne of injuries; even with blood pouring from every orifice, death was never a certainty.
I shook my head. No pulse. There would be no miracle for this poor ogre.
The blonde female was barely into adulthood and was dressed in black combat trousers and a black tank top. Two large tusks protruded from her forehead and into her hairline, one in front of the other, but neither the tusks nor the metal mace by her side had any blood on them. For whatever reason, despite being heavily armed she hadn’t fought her killer.
I opened my briefcase, retrieved my camera and took a few snaps of the scene, both close-ups and wide-angle. The Scene of Crime Officers - SOCO - would document everything when they arrived, but a contemporaneous record was preferable before anything was disturbed.
When I’d finished, I turned my attention to the body and took more close-up shots, this time of the many stab wounds that decorated her slowly greying flesh. She was short for an ogre, only around six foot three, maybe six foot four at the most.
I set down the camera and searched the body. I found a phone, some ID and a plethora of weaponry. Besides the mace and the tusks, she had a gun on her left hip, a knife on her right hip and another knife strapped to her ankle. Most of her weapons were visible, which led me to believe she’d been here acting as a bodyguard. Dressed like that, she sure as hell hadn’t been a guest at this pompous affair.
The area was lit by oil tiki torches, which I’d been assured had been in situ when the dead body had been found; they had been staked around the body like points on a pentagram. The moon was full and vibrant and that, combined with the torches, provided a creepy but well-lit crime scene.
I checked the victim’s ID under the flickering orange light: Helga Jónson. When I looked at her date of birth and did some maths, my stomach clenched: she was only just eighteen. This had probably been one of her first bodyguarding jobs – and something had gone terribly wrong.
Helga lay in a pool of crimson blood; without turning her over, I could count at least fifteen places where she’d been stabbed. The wounds had stopped leaking but her body was still warm and supple. She hadn’t been dead for long.
Like most ogres, one of her limbs was particularly misshapen. Her right arm was overly large, and it was from that side that afinger had been severed. I grimaced: had it been taken by the killer as a trophy? The removal was recent, with blood coagulating on the stump.
I picked up the phone I’d found on her and tried facial recognition by holding it above Helga’s face. When that didn’t work, I tried her fingerprints, but that failed too; either she’d used her missing pinky, the phone wasn’t hers, or she hadn’t set up biometrics and preferred to tap in a PIN. Plenty of people did.
I sealed up Helga’s phone and ID in separate evidence bags, dated, signed and labelled them, then put them into the evidence box. Since the phone was password protected, I’d have to pass it on to my tech guy, Ji-ho Lee. People didn’t tend to write down their phone passwords in the same way that they did their computer ones, but perhaps her parents would know her password or code. It was unlikely but possible; if they didn’t, Lee would sort me out.
