Obviously, this bitch is Detective Williams, the detective in charge, but she won’t be for long. “Where’s Roger?” I ask, still trying to solve the mystery of how I got here in the first place.
“Roger said you can handle this on your own. Was he wrong?”
She’s baiting me, but I’m not one to be baited. Roger called me in, but he’s not here. Any relief I feel at avoiding his all-knowing inspection fades quickly. “Where’s the body?”
“Down the hall in the master bedroom.”
I start to walk in that direction.
“You don’t want to know who she is?” Williams calls out.
“She’ll tell me herself,” I reply.
“You might want a barf bag,” she calls out, making herself all too easy to read. Detective Williams is a walking, talking power trip out to prove that she’s better than me. Which is why I don’t bother to reply, and why would I? She’s not important. The woman who lost her life tonight is another story. She matters. The person who took her life also matters, right up until the moment that we make them pay.
Cutting down a narrow hallway, the walls along my path are barren and the iron scent of blood now permeates the air with a vicious punch. I could work myself up about the buckets of blood that could be waiting on me, but that’s just not how I’m made. I need to be punched in the face with the crime scene. I need to take it all in, feel the shock and pain, and do it without any reserve. And so, I enter my Otherworld, my zone where nothing but the crime scene exists, where Kane Mendez and my shitty father don’t exist. Where assholes that fuck up crimes scenes don’t exist. There is just me, and the victim who needs me to speak for them. I step to the doorway of the bedroom and let the scene take over, clicking through what I find in what has become an almost mechanical process for me.
There is, of course, a dead body, a naked woman lying in the center of the room on her back. That’s expected. What’s not expected is the fact that she’s holding an open umbrella above her head. She’s been dead long enough that rigor mortis has set in, and her fingers are frozen around the handle. There is also blood, but not in buckets. It’s dispersed in splatter marks on the walls, the ceiling, all over the white, neatly placed bedspread, and virtually every other spot in the room.
There’s also an unexpected but familiar woman kneeling by the body, smartly wearing an orange jumpsuit. “Beth,” I say, drawing her attention.
Her gaze jerks to mine, going wide in surprise. “Lilah fucking Love,” she says, using her gloved hand to pull down her paper mask.
“Why is a Long Island coroner at a Manhattan crime scene?”
“I go where they send me,” she says. “But it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that we’re both here, now does it?”
Considering she just worked a case with me that directly linked to the Society, no, no it doesn’t, but she doesn’t need my agreement. Not to mention she looks unsettlingly like the victim. This entire crime scene is starting to feel like a puzzle, and we’re not the ones controlling the pieces. I need to change that and quickly. I cross the room and kneel beside the body, across from Beth, then look up at the ceiling fan that is holding a Tupperware container with holes in it.
“My understanding,” Beth says, “is that the fan was on when law enforcement arrived.”
A rather brilliant contraption that took time and some level of engineering to execute. I frown and look at her and then the body, my brow furrowing at the untarnished face and body, no cuts, no wounds. “I know what you’re thinking,” Beth says, “and you’re right.”
My gaze lifts sharply to hers. “The blood isn’t hers, is it?”
“No. The blood isn’t hers.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Just to be clear,” I say, motioning to the room. “I’m standing in a room that looks like a scene from a B-rated flick that’s one-part horror and one-part porno.” I hold up a hand. “Not that I watch either of those things—but I’ve heard, and you’re telling me that the added cherry on top is that, that blood doesn’t belong to the victim?”
“That’s the general gist of it all,” Beth confirms.
“If this isn’t her blood,” I say, “then whose blood is it?"
Beth lifts her gloved fingers. “Exactly.”
“Exactly? That’s not an accurate response to my question.”
“It was exactly the right answer because that's exactly the question. Whose blood is it? Or perhaps, the real question should be, where’s the other body? Because no one survived losing this much blood. There has to be another body.”
I grimace and say the most appropriate thing I can think to say in this moment, “Fuck.”
“Pardon my French,” Beth chimes in, “but yes, fuck.”
I give her a deadpan stare. “Did you just say ‘pardon my French?’ How fucking old are you?”
She visibly cringes. “I spent the weekend with my parents. Sometimes I'm terrified that I could become my mother.”
“You should be. I’m terrified for you.” I eye the woman on the floor and I’m instantly checked out of the conversation with Beth. This woman, whoever she is, will never see her parents, siblings, friends, or anyone ever again. “Who is she?”
“Mia Moore,” Beth says. “Twenty-eight. A retired, but successful model, who worked in fashion for a high-powered advertising agency.”
“Mia Moore,” I repeat, my gloved hand touching her hand where it’s been posed to hold the umbrella. This is about power, about domination. This was done by someone who never feels quite as good as everyone else. Someone who feels overlooked. “Cause of death?” I ask, eyeing Beth.
“To be determined.”
Considering Beth’s years of experience, that says all I need to know. The answer isn’t obvious, but I trust her to figure it out. “Was she raped?”
Her lips thin. “All I can tell you right now is that there are no bindings and no obvious struggle.”
Which could mean she knew the killer or that she was t
oo afraid to fight, which might mean a weapon was involved or threats to her family. “What do we know about her personal life?”
“I don’t ask those questions. I want to go into the initial screening as blind as possible. I prefer to not even know what I already know in this case.”
I give her a quick nod. “Understood.” I scan the room and visually confirm what she just told me: there was no struggle. Everything is in order, nothing appears out of place. “Did she die here?” I ask.
“Based on the lividity of the body, yes, but I’ll confirm once I do the official exam.”
“I’ll attend the autopsy.” I try to head off any questions she might have about why we’re both here, questions better discussed elsewhere. “That will be a good time for the two of us to talk.”
“Right,” she says, but for a smart person, she chooses to ignore my obvious avoidance. She lowers her voice. “Why are we both here, Lilah? It feels off. What is this?”
“A black fucking hole,” I say, “where we bleed out if we’re not careful.” Because it’s true. This, us here, together, is a warning, and I’ve made enough powerful enemies recently to take it seriously. “Which is why we’ll act normal and talk later.”
“Sometimes I really could do without your honesty,” Beth snaps, pulling her mask back into place. Whatever. She can be pissy as long as she keeps her mouth shut, so I can, in turn, keep her alive.
I stand up and start a deeper inspection of a room that’s really quite cold in its basic, sterile nature. Even the damn Kleenex box on the single nightstand sits in a perfect line. A white wooden dresser calls to me, and I pull out a drawer and then another. One after another, I scan and find perfectly stacked and folded items to such an extreme that I decide Mia had some level of OCD, which may or may not come from some kind of abuse in her youth. Abuse leads to an abuser. Some might think the blood means the killer doesn’t have OCD, but I don’t. The blood is part of a perfectly painted canvas. I just don’t understand its perfection.
Yet.