Page 3 of A Subtle Scar
When I’d first met her—on the same case I’d met the Devil and his boyfriend—she’d struck me as an unusually good detective. Her department’s clearing rate supported this. One of her strengths was that she was good at delegating and trusting the people she worked with knew what they were doing. Also, she completely lacked the prejudices held against magic users I’d seen in other departments in the course of my consultant work.
“If you want, sir, you can go right on through to her.”
Which was what I had wanted, so I nodded, killed the engine, got out, and passed under the tape.
Brunswick could get cold. It was the proximity to the ocean, and today, a biting breeze was making me shiver and do a double take to get my jacket from my car.
I turned up my collar and walked over to Detective Rice. She spotted me a few paces away, and her eyebrows went up in surprise.
“Agent Chandler. You? Here? Not that I’m holding it against you.”
“Detective,” I said and shook hands with her. “Just a social visit, but I bumped into your…crime scene? On the way in.”
“Yeah, it’s a crime,” she said and gestured toward the telltale white tent that made me think something entirely unsavory was in there. “Hawkes’s birthday party, right? Might only get to show there for an hour or so myself with this mess. Fucking Mondays.”
I cocked my head. “A mess I can help you with at all? Since I’m in town already, you know. And I don’t mind Mondays.”
She sighed and pulled out her tablet. “A driver reported the body about two hours ago. They saw it being tossed out of a van, and because that happened suddenly on a busy street, the following vehicle ran it over.” She pointed to the ambulance where they were treating someone to a nice shock blanket and something hot to drink. “Driver’s in a bit of a state after that, understandably. Deacon is working on the corpse, and the coroner is already in there as well. You can go and have a look, I’m not stopping you. The vic has symbols carved into her skin, which Deacon says aren’t the real deal but similar, like someone wants to distract us.”
I nodded. Brunswick PD would have to follow up with anything that might give even the hint of an indication that a magic user was committing crimes, especially with the recent cases that had magic user involvement. Following that logic, it wouldn’t hurt if I threw my opinion in the ring as well because the FIS would help make Rice’s conclusions just that much more airtight for the courts.
“I’ll take a look around,” I said. “You can put that in your report, and I’ll file a quick one with my office as well. Can’t hurt, right?”
She nodded. “It sure can’t. Thanks a lot for having great timing. Well, great timing from my point of view.”
I gave her a bright smile. “I’ve been on vacation since this morning, so this is, uh, I want to say nice, but murder. It’s good to be useful is what I mean.”
She snorted. “You keep that up, you might need to get yourself a Devil who makes you take a sabbatical as well. As the department shrink likes to say, burnout is a real thing.”
“Detective, I do what I do in a measured pace without haste or hurry. I practice mindfulness. That has to give me some counterbalance to the whole burnout thing, right?”
She gave me a look. “You’ll have to take that up with my shrink. Who knows, knowing Lucy, he invited him to Hawkes’s party too.”
And I could totally see the Devil do that.
Deacon was Rice’s second necromancer. It felt unfair to think of the man as a backup necromancer, but essentially, he was that.
Nowhere near as powerful as Lionel, who could raise a corpse with a thought, he was a broad-shouldered blond guy with a beard and a smile that came easy to his face. He’d come to necromancy late in life, something that happened a lot when early testing at kindergarten age wasn’t a requirement where you grew up.
Deacon was still in the process of setting up his talismans when I pulled the tent flap back and Rice and I walked in. The forensic guys barely acknowledged us as they photographed and sampled, but the scene was only going to yield so much, what with it being a busy road.
Broken bones, some of which had gone through the skin of the woman’s naked body. Dull brown hair, not very memorable at all. The way her body had been used as a notepad for some deranged pseudo-arcane scribbles made my trained eye look her over, searching the meaning of the spell or wards.
What I saw made no sense: geometry that felt random, a half circle near her elbow, a square on her thigh. The Pleiades symbol on her hip and the three-pointed star on her left breast. I also spotted the Horus eye and another, vaguely Egyptian-looking bird symbol, both on her legs.
“Oh, Agent Chandler,” Deacon said. “You’re joining us again?”
I shook my head. “Just passing through and decided to stop to find out what the roadblock was about. Also? Not an agent.”
I walked closer to where he was working, across the road and past the tire tracks that must’ve been left from when the second driver had tried to hit the brakes in time. This scene was a mess.
“Right, sorry,” Deacon said.
Rice activated her tablet. “Anything that jumps out at you?”
I walked around the body, took note of a few other symbols. “No. I have to agree with Deacon here,” I said. “This is some wanna-be evil warlock type shit. Almost like stuff you’d pick up from one of those old black-and-white movies. Half of these aren’t even arcane symbols, and the ones that are normally show up in bindings, but in connection with others. They’re like…if magic is a language, think of them as conjunctions. This is gibberish, magically speaking.” I stepped around the body again to get a closer look at her abdomen. “I don’t know at all what to make of the hieroglyphics, other than the Horus eye.”
“Agreed,” Deacon said. “We’ll have to find an expert at the university.”
