Mortal Sins

SIX

FBI agents tended to see themselves as the top of the law enforcement food chain, an attitude that did not endear them to local law enforcement. Lily knew how annoying that attitude could be, having been one of those locals until last November. She also knew a number of ways the locals could make life difficult for the big, bad feds if they wanted to, so she made a point of getting along with locals whenever possible.

But cops, of whatever stripe, were more territorial than the average lupus, so some clashes were unavoidable. She didn’t see any way she could have ducked the one with Deacon, but she wasn’t sure what to do now. She still had to work with the man.

Maybe that was why she headed for those golden arches before her meet with the DA: to remind herself of her law enforcement roots.

She could have stayed at the house and eaten a much better meal. Rule cooked, and he was good at it. But sometimes a woman wanted junk. Junk was familiar. She’d eaten a lot of fast food in her cop car.

Of course, her cop car hadn’t been a Mercedes. She pulled into the parking area and got in the drive-through line for the familiar foodlike products.

The car’s interior was spotless. Rule was nowhere nearly as tidy as she was, but he kept his cars clean, even a rental like this one. He was so damned perfect—wealthy, sophisticated, sexy enough to wake a woman from a coma. It was reassuring to know that, under it all, he was still very much a guy. Never mind making the bed, but for God’s sake don’t get crumbs on the leather seats.

He was fussy about his appearance, too. Lily smiled as she inched forward another car length. A touch of vanity there. Maybe he saw a car as something he wore, the twenty-first-century equivalent of a knight’s armor.

She’d eat carefully. Got to keep that armor shiny.

Three more cars ahead of her. Lily propped her laptop against the steering wheel and was filling out an online form when her phone buzzed like an electric razor—the ring tone she used for calls forwarded from her official number.

Turned out to be Deacon calling. He’d heard from the DA, who wanted to change their meet to eight thirty at the jail so she could be present when Lily interviewed Meacham. Lily told him it was no problem, though her interview was getting pretty damned crowded. Meacham’s attorney from the public defender’s office would be there, too.

She supposed she ought to be glad Halo’s police chief wasn’t attending. Meacham had lived—and killed—outside the city limits, so the case belonged to the sheriff’s department.

Cities and states divvied up authority differently. Most FBI agents were attached to a local or regional office; they needed to know the chains of command for the various state, county, and city agencies in their areas. They didn’t have to know how things were done in all fifty states.

Lily did. As a special agent attached to the Unit, she could be sent anywhere in the nation. Her boss had assured her he would assign her cases as near San Diego as possible whenever he could, because where she went, Rule had to go, too. That was the downside of the mate bond. It was currently allowing them a couple hundred miles of separation, but it was a capricious son of a bitch. She could wake up tomorrow and find she had to remain within fifty miles of him, maybe. Or ten. Or one.

Admittedly, one mile was unlikely. Rule said the bond was that rigid only when it first formed. But neither of them knew the rules, dammit. No one seemed to know the rules, or even if there were any. They didn’t know when, why, or if the bond might suddenly constrict, so they generally stayed pretty close.

Rule shrugged it off. She didn’t understand that—he wasn’t exactly a laissez-faire kind of guy—but the mate bond’s variable proximity clause didn’t bug him the way it did her. “Why worry about it?” he’d said recently. “I don’t get upset when gravity keeps me from floating off whenever I feel like it.”

“But gravity’s a constant! It doesn’t suddenly drag me down twice as hard. I know what to expect with gravity.”

“Maybe the mate bond is constant, too, and it’s our experience of it that varies.”

Since it was her unpredictable experience of the bond that drove her crazy, that didn’t help much. At the moment, though, that aspect of the mate bond wasn’t giving her trouble. It was another variable that fretted at her.

Memory.

It’s normal to forget a name now and then, she assured herself as she accepted the sack and a lidded cup from the kid at the drive-up window. People forgot names all the time.

But to forget the name of the alleged perp? She’d never done that. “Meacham,” she muttered as she pulled out of the parking area. “Roy Don Meacham. Now quit being paranoid.”

She was downing coffee when her purse buzzed. She set her cup in the cup holder, dug her phone out of her purse, checked caller ID and the time, and flipped the phone open. “Hey, there. I didn’t expect to hear from you for another hour or two, given the time difference.”

Abel Karonski grunted. “Explain that to Ida. The woman doesn’t sleep herself, so she’s fuzzy on the concept.”

Ida Rheinhart was Ruben’s secretary and the terror of every agent in the Unit. Lily grinned and looked for a spot to pull over. “Cynna swears that Ida lairs up beneath her desk at night.”

“Lairs, yes. Sleeps, no. How else could she be at her desk calling me at five o’clock in the damned morning?”

“It’s seven here. Hang on a sec—I need to park this thing, or my eggs will get cold while I juggle the phone.”

“Eggs. You’ve got eggs.”

“Well, the yellow stuff inside the muffin was purportedly once inside a chicken.” She’d reached the sleepy peace of an elementary school set in a long sprawl of grass punctuated by swings and a slide. All empty, of course, this early on a summer morning. Parking spots were slanted along its length. She pulled into one and wondered if the dead children had gone to this school. “I’ve got coffee, too.”

“I’ve got coffee. Hotels put coffeepots in the rooms these days, thank God. It’s food I lack. Are you chewing? Do I hear chewing?”

Lily swallowed and grinned. She could picture Karonski sitting in a generic hotel room in his rumpled suit . . . No, he wouldn’t be dressed yet. He probably slept in his shorts, but no way was she going to picture Karonski in his underwear, so she mentally provided him with brown Sansabelt slacks and a wrinkled shirt. Karonski’s shirts were always wrinkled. “Who, me? That would be rude, even though I am in a hurry. I’ve got a meet in twenty minutes.”

“Then you’d better tell me about these bodies you found.”

Another image replaced the one of a wrinkled Karonski. This one had her putting the uneaten portion of her egg sandwich back in the bag it had come from. “Actually, Rule found them.” She folded the bag down so no crumbs could escape, giving the task more attention than it warranted.

“A woman and two kids.”

“Yeah. The locals locked up the father for it even though they didn’t have the bodies, but they had cause. He showed up at the sheriff’s office with the bloody baseball bat. There’s supposed to be a witness, too, a postal worker who tried to help and got whacked.”

“But you detected death magic on the bodies.”

“Yes, and I don’t understand it. Here’s how it looks to me. Either the victims were killed by death magic, or they were killed creating it—as part of a ritual empowering the practitioner. The first one seems unlikely. Physical evidence on the bat marks it as the murder weapon, and there’s a witness. It’s barely possible the perp pounded the bodies afterward in an effort to hide their true manner of death, but that doesn’t fit with his subsequent actions.”

“Disposing of the bodies, then driving back into town so he could hand the sheriff the bat with all that great physical evidence.”

“Yeah. The guy’s nuts, but insanity usually has its own weird logic. I can’t make that fit any kind of logic, no matter how twisted. As for the other scenario . . . evidence at the victims’ home suggested that the kids were killed in their beds, but the mother was chased down. Death magic—the extraction of power through killing—has to be performed ritually, right? That doesn’t sound like the kind of controlled situation a ritual requires.”

“Could be the first kid was killed ritually and the others were taken out because they’d witnessed it.”

“What kind of idiot sets up a ritual killing with others in the house?”

“He’d have to be loony tunes,” Karonski agreed. “Probably a lousy practitioner, too. Maybe he thought he’d spelled the others asleep and got it wrong.”

Lily tapped one finger against the steering wheel, frowning. It didn’t feel right. “They all had it on them. I confirmed that on the scene. Death magic was smeared on all three of them. Would that be true if only one of them was killed ritually?”

Karonski had a deep, windy sigh like a weary hound. “No, you’re right. I obviously need more coffee. Nothing I know makes that possible. Of course, there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about death magic. What I keep having trouble with, though, is the bat. Blunt force trauma is not symbolically correct.”

“Expand on that.”

“Death magic involving human victims is extremely rare, but animal killings aren’t, so we know a little about what’s required. Every ritual I’ve heard of uses a knife or blade. The Aztecs didn’t bash their sacrifices’ heads in. Another thing . . . most Wiccans believe death magic operates the same as blood magic, that they’re related. Blood magic requires a blade and control. You have to control what happens with the blood to use it. Hard to do that if you’re smashing people with a baseball bat.”

Lily shook her head. “I don’t know. Blood magic doesn’t feel the same to me. I know Wiccans believe it’s tainted—”

“We’re not the only ones.”

“No, and you may be right, though the Catholics disagree. But that’s not my point. The thing is, I don’t personally know that blood magic is tainted. I don’t pick up that sort of thing when I touch magic.”

“Unless it’s death magic.”

“Yeah.” Evil. That’s what she touched when she touched death magic, and she did not understand. Power was power, and magic no more held a moral component than did electricity—or so she’d believed until the first time she’d touched a body slain by death magic. “I’m right about those bodies. I’m sure.”

“Hey, I’m not doubting you. Just having a hard time coming up with an explanation. We may not know much about death magic, but what’s happened there violates the little we do know. Have you talked to your pet sorcerer?”

“Not yet. It’s still short of five a.m. in California. I texted him, but I texted Cynna, too, just to make sure.”

Cynna was Lily’s friend. She was also an FBI agent, Rule’s former lover, and the only woman in the world married to a lupus—Cullen Seabourne, whom she was living with at Nokolai Clanhome while they awaited the birth of their child. Cullen was Rule’s friend, a former lone wolf, a stripper . . . and a sorcerer. Sorcerers were supposed to have died out in the Purge; lone wolves were supposed to go crazy cut off from their clans; lupi were never Gifted—and they never, ever got married.

Cullen didn’t so much break rules as explode them.

“How’s she doing?’ Karonski asked. “Is she getting fat yet?”

“You do know better than to use the word ‘fat’ around a pregnant woman, don’t you? Especially Cynna. She’s armed.”

Karonski chuckled. “Good point. You figure she’ll make sure Seabourne calls you back?”

“Yeah.” Among Cullen’s bad habits was ignoring phone calls if they weren’t immediately interesting. Lily thought the mention of death magic would get his attention, but you never knew with Cullen, especially when he was hip-deep in some complicated arcane research. Which was usually. “Listen, I’ve got one hypothesis that might fit. I’d like to run it by you.”

“Shoot.”

“What if the whole family was involved? Maybe Meacham got them to participate, told them it was some other sort of ritual they were performing. Some spells require multiple practitioners, right? If they’d all been part of it, then when the boy was killed, they’d all be smeared by it.”

He was silent a moment. “Theoretically possible, but you’d have a hell of a time proving it.”

“I’m going to have a hell of a time proving anything. Especially if the Wiccan coven Ruben’s sending can’t confirm that death magic was involved.” A limited number of Wiccan spells were the only form of magically acquired evidence admissible in court, but the coven might not pick up the traces Lily had. Cullen said that trying to get a spell to do what an innate Gift did was like programming a robot to walk. You could do it, but a toddler would outperform the robot.

In other words, there was a good chance the coven wouldn’t be able to find anything.

“Is he having Sherry’s bunch do the test?”

“Probably, and I know they’re good, but it’s been four days. The traces I felt were pretty faint. I . . .”

“What?”

She’d seen something move, or thought she had—at the edge of her vision, a flickering sort of movement. But when she looked in that direction, all she saw was a single swing swaying gently. The other swings weren’t moving.

A pale bird—a dove, maybe—took off from the other end of the swing set and she shook her head, feeling foolish. Must have glimpsed another bird taking off from the swing, making it move. “Nothing. I’m distractable today.” Maybe because she didn’t like the next question she needed to ask. “Karonski . . . exactly what does a death magic ritual take from its victim?”

“You’re asking about the soul.”

She hadn’t expected him to go there so fast. “I guess I am.”

“Different systems, different faiths, have different takes on that. Most Christian churches teach that the soul is indestructible, but a few of the evangelical ones disagree. Of course, they’re the ones who think a demon can steal your soul, so I don’t put a lot of credence in their opinion. Still, many Wiccans believe that death magic can damage a soul, while Islam—”

“I’m not asking about religion. What do we know?”

“You asked about souls. Can’t go there without talking religion, because we don’t know a damned thing.” He paused. “You said Turner was knocked out while he was guarding the bodies. He had death magic on him.”

“It’s gone now.”

“Right, but how do you fit that in?”

“With a crowbar and a whole lot of maybes.” She raked a hand through her hair. “If Meacham is the killer, then someone else wandering in the woods last night used death magic on Rule. That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. We don’t know how many people were involved in the ritual. Maybe Meacham had one or more confederates. But it doesn’t explain why ...”

“Why he or she didn’t kill Turner.”

Lily swallowed. “Yeah. I’m thinking maybe he or she couldn’t do it. Rule’s not easy to kill, and our second perp might not have had enough juice to do the job. If the death magic was shared between a bunch of ritualists, maybe . . .” She broke off, sighed. “That’s a lot of maybes.” She needed to talk to Cullen, dammit, about what was or wasn’t possible, but . . . she glanced at her watch. “Shit. I’m late.”

“You go, then, and I can go get me some eggs.”

Lily thanked him for the consult, put her phone away, tidied the take-out trash, and backed out of her spot in front of the school.

Religion. She hated the way it kept intruding on her cases. Not that she was opposed to religion, per se . . . Oh, be honest, she told herself. She had issues. Her father was Buddhist. Her mother was Christian. There’d been a discreet little war throughout her childhood on the subject. As a result, she was . . . well, not exactly prejudiced. Religion was fine for other people. She simply preferred not to think about it.

Lily pulled into the parking lot in back of the sheriff’s office. Karonski was probably right about most of what he’d said, but they did know one thing about souls. At least, Lily did. Souls existed. That was more than she’d known for the first twenty-eight years of her life, so she counted it as an important datum.

Especially since she’d had to die to obtain it. Lily climbed out of the plush car, shut and locked the door. And did her best not to remember.