Majowski glanced at Ardeth, then back at him. “No problem. I guess I forget sometimes, cop humor doesn’t always translate.”
“I thought it was funny,” Ardeth said.
“You would.” Speare shot her a look; she smiled back at him, one of those smiles so innocent it had to be hiding something.
He’d analyze that later, too. They had work to do. “So where’s the body?”
“Over here.” Majowski turned, motioning for them to follow him. Which they did, though as soon as they passed Majowski’s car the body was visible, a crumpled heap of what had once been humanity, discarded on the ground like a shed snakeskin.
Except snakeskins were supposed to be limbless. Human bodies weren’t. That made it even more disturbing that the corpse at their feet was devoid of both legs and his left arm. Speare thought at first that he’d been cut in half, but when they reached the corpse he saw that the legs had been carefully removed at the hip joints, leaving hideous cavities.
Ardeth gave a sharp gasp. Instinctively he reached for her but caught himself before his arm circled her to draw her close. She wouldn’t appreciate that, at least he didn’t think she would. Not with Majowski there watching. Maybe not even without him there watching. He turned the gesture into something less, into a gentle rub and squeeze of her shoulder. When she glanced at him her eyes glistened with tears; her obvious determination not to shed them made something inside him twist.
He quickly looked away. It was less uncomfortable to look at the dead body at his feet, to feel its emptiness instead of the odd resounding pang of his own, and to try to figure out who it was—who it had been—instead of trying to figure out what the hell was going on with himself.
“Who is it?” he asked, ready to focus on something.
“Frank Mercer,” Ardeth said, in a small, shaky voice. “Jesus.”
Speare’s surprise was probably plain on his face, just as Majowski’s was. Majowski spoke first, though. “You know him?”
She nodded. “We’ve met. We know a lot of the same people. He’s a friend of Nielsen’s—he was a friend of Nielsen’s.” Her eyes stayed fixed on the body as she spoke.
So the dead man was friends with the guy who might have been involved in the theft or sale—or both—of a demon-sword. Had Frank known about it? Had he been involved, too?
He’d ask Ardeth about that when they got back in the car. Majowski didn’t need to know everything, especially not when that “everything” might put the cop in even more danger than he was already.
Well, best to get it over with. He knelt beside the body and pulled out his phone to snap a few photos. “So how did you know he was here? Did somebody call it in, or—”
“Excuse me.” Ardeth’s small, tight voice cut him off; before he could look up—almost before she’d even finished saying the words—she’d turned away and started walking. Both men watched her stride away, with her arms wrapped around her chest and her chin down so her hair fell forward. Speare noticed the rigidity of her back, the stiffness of her steps, and that irritating little twinge in his chest returned. Had he eaten something bad, or something? Was this some new game the beast was playing—and it could have been, since the thing was so obviously thrilled at getting to look at a corpse. Its glee blurred his vision; its delight made his stomach roil.
“You should go see if she’s okay,” Majowski said, still watching Ardeth’s back, her trembles visible even at a distance.
He was probably right. Yes, she’d walked away—she’d chosen to go stand by herself—but that was probably fear more than anything else. Fear that the men would think less of her, that they would make fun of her or dismiss her as some typically overemotional woman. Having one of them show her that wasn’t the case might matter to her.
But to do it himself…that wasn’t as easy as it seemed. They both seemed to have agreed to something of a truce, but he didn’t want her thinking he was taking advantage of that and hitting on her, or something. More awkwardness was the last thing they needed.
And, of course, there was the beast. It had been known to enjoy the misery of others. The thought of it feasting on hers, and making him share its twisted pleasure at her expense, made him feel even worse than the sight of Mercer’s mutilated corpse did. “You should go. I’ll get some pictures of him, see what I can figure out.”
“I can take pictures,” Majowski said. “Unless you’re afraid of me digging around in your phone.”
It didn’t warrant a full smile, but his lips curved a little anyway. “No, I’m not.”
“So you’re afraid of her?”
“What—where the hell did that come from? I’m not afraid of anything. You’re the one who said we don’t have a lot of time, so I’m trying to get this done fast.”
“She’s pretty,” Majowski said, in a just-making-conversation kind of tone.
Speare leaned in to get a close-up of the gaping wound where Mercer’s left shoulder had once been. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Then you’re stranger than I thought. And a liar.”
“For fuck’s sake.” He shoved his phone back into his pocket and gave Majowski a look that he knew showed every bit of his irritation. “Maybe you don’t have anything important to do right now, but I do. So why don’t you go over there and ask her out, or whatever the hell it is you want to do, and let me get on with solving a murder?”
“She’s not my type,” Majowski said.
Speare stared at him. Was he trying to act like a creepy idiot, or was he just an actual creepy idiot? “You just talked about how pretty she is.”
“And she is. Doesn’t mean I want to go to bed with her.”
“If you don’t want to go to bed with her, your tastes must be really fucking weird,” Speare said without thinking, and then immediately regretted it. Why not just hang a sign around his neck that read I WANT HER?
Even though he didn’t.
Majowski caught that, too. His eyes gleamed for a second—gotcha!—but he took mercy, for whatever reason, and shrugged. “Is it really fucking weird to prefer dick?”
Shit. “Oh. Sorry, man.” Shit shit shit. “I didn’t mean—”
Majowski laughed. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it. Really.”
Maybe he should go see if Ardeth was okay. At least that way he wouldn’t be kneeling there feeling like an asshole.
But just as he was about to stand up, footsteps sounded behind him. She was back, her face a tad paler than it had been and her eyes a little swollen and watery, but back, and businesslike again. “So, what do we know so far? Did you find a mark, Speare?”
He didn’t even detect any huskiness in her voice. That took effort, he knew. Control. Where had she learned it?
But then, someone in her line of work would need that skill. “I haven’t looked yet.”
“What have you guys been doing here, then?”
He couldn’t tell if it was annoyance or amusement in her voice, so he’d pretend it was the latter. Either it would lighten the mood further or it would fuck with her, and both of those sounded pretty good. “Talking about you. Right?”
Majowski nodded. “And about dicks.”
“Oh, right. And about dicks.” Rigor mortis had definitely set in; when Speare lifted Mercer’s shoulder, his entire body rose off the ground—what was left of his body rose off the ground, anyway. “You have a light or something?”
He didn’t need it. The second his hand touched Mercer’s body he felt the mark on him, the lingering darkness that meant his soul had been invaded by an object of evil. Or, rather, the beast felt it the second his hand touched Mercer’s body. But he couldn’t exactly tell Ardeth and Majowski that, so he held Mercer’s corpse up, cringing inwardly as the swirling black energy of brutal murder vibrated up his arm and through his torso, down his legs.
That wasn’t the only thing swirling around and making the beast shiver with pleasure. Beneath the smell of death lurked another scent, a musky, scratchy sort of smell. Incense. Patc
houli and…lobelia. He was pretty sure he detected devil’s shoestring in there, too. Powerful herbs, dangerous ones. “Majowski, can you smell that?”
Majowski looked like he’d been asked to lick a maggot, but he leaned in close anyway and sniffed. “Theodore’s clothes. That’s the same smell, yeah.”
“What does that mean?” Ardeth leaned in, too, holding her hair back so it didn’t touch Mercer’s body, exposing the graceful curve of her neck and the hollow where it met her collarbone. Her ears were pierced, he noticed, but she wasn’t wearing earrings.
He also noticed that she looked away when she got close to it, her gaze focused off in the distance to her left, so she didn’t have to see the pale dead skin and open wounds in close-up. “Ugh, is that patchouli?”
“Among other things.” He listed them. “Nobody uses those herbs to do love charms.”
“No.” Ardeth stepped back. “Those are for summonings, demon rituals, that kind of thing. Control rituals, you know? Bindings.”
He nodded. “Makes sense. Here, turn that light on, okay? I’d like to put him down.”
“Oh, sorry.” She switched on her mini-flashlight. It took only a minute or so for the round beam to find the spot where the demon-sword had penetrated. Her voice broke through the beast’s growls and mutters in his head. “That’s it, right?”
“Yeah.” He dropped Mercer. “That’s it. He was killed by a demon-sword, just like Theodore.”
Majowski sighed. “So the cause of death won’t be clear to an ME?”
“Right. Well, sort of.” The edges of the incisions where limbs had been removed looked like the ones he’d seen earlier in the photographs. Well, of course they did—it was the same killer. Had to be. The idea that two limb thieves with demon-swords were wandering around Vegas burning the same ritual incense stretched reality too far. “It’ll look like a heart attack, maybe a stroke. That’s how they work. Concentrated evil is powerful. Powerful enough to stop hearts or pop veins. Or both.”
“It’s like the perfect murder weapon,” Majowski said.
“Sure,” Speare said, “as long as you don’t go cutting up the bodies to make it really obvious they were murdered.”
Ardeth shook her head. Her eyes stayed focused on Speare and Majowski, resolutely refusing to look at the body by their feet. “Whoever’s doing this, I don’t think they care about making it obvious. Maybe they even want to do that? Like, sending a message.”
“Hell of a message,” Speare said. “Literally.”
“Serial killers don’t usually worry about having their victims found.” Majowski paused for a moment, thinking. “You know, this could just be a random killer with a specific ritual—a specific pattern—that happens to involve occult items and limb removal. I’ll check some of the databases and see if I can find any similar unsolveds. Maybe we’re overthinking this.”
He didn’t look like he believed it, though, and Speare definitely didn’t. “That’s kind of stretching, isn’t it?”
“Well, yeah, I guess so,” Majowski said. “But we might as well have a look.”
“I’d rather have a look at a drink,” Ardeth said. “Somewhere else.”
Funny, Speare had been thinking the exact same thing. There might be a lot more to learn from examining the body—there undoubtedly was more to learn from examining the body—but he couldn’t do any examining without potentially screwing things up for the police and the ME. They probably wouldn’t be the ones solving the case, no, but he didn’t want them coming to talk to him because he’d left a hair or a fingerprint or some DNA where it shouldn’t have been. Dealing with the cops was not his favorite thing.
But then, none of what he’d done so far would come close to being on a list of his favorite things, and he was still stuck doing them, so what was one more not-favorite activity?
Majowski checked his watch. “You guys probably should go somewhere else, actually. I really need to get this called in and get the crime-scene guys out here.”
Time for yet another not-favorite thing, Speare thought as they said goodbye: analyzing the possible motives of someone who liked to play with body parts and demons.
Chapter 4
Ardeth’s silence was especially deep in the car, the kind of silence that made it seem like the silent person was on another planet in their minds. Whether it was because she’d just been looking at a dead body—a dead and mutilated body—in general, or if it was because it was the dead and mutilated body of someone she knew, he wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to ask. That would be weird. And he didn’t care.
Much. He didn’t care much. Not too much, certainly. Why should he? He wasn’t supposed to care about her—he couldn’t care about her. That would only lead to problems, and he didn’t need more of those.
Besides, it wasn’t like she cared about him. She thought he was a sleazeball, and she barely tolerated him.
Well, she’d bandaged his arm, and hadn’t been judgmental or nasty about the stolen Coke, and had shared some interesting thoughts about the murder they’d just learned about, but aside from that she barely tolerated him. And she’d only done those nice things because she wasn’t a horrible person, and she stole for a living so why would she judge him for that?
Those nice things had still been nice, though. And that body they’d just seen had upset her. “Hey, are you o—?”
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t, though. He knew it. The beast knew it. One thing that bastard could do was sniff out misery; it was like an unhappiness radar, constantly pinging in the background, slavering at the thought that someone was in pain. Including him. Which meant it was always slavering.
He ignored it. “It’s not easy seeing somebody like that, when you knew them alive.”
“I didn’t know him. I just met him a few times. It’s not a big deal, okay? He wasn’t my friend, and he’s not the first dead body I’ve ever seen, and I’m not some delicate little flower, so you can put away your big-strong-tough-guy bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit.” Had he touched on something sensitive? She didn’t seem the type, but then he remembered her comments earlier at the bar, about having no one to back her up and having to look after herself.
She probably wouldn’t appreciate him bringing that up, though, and he didn’t want to get into a big conversation about it, either. It wasn’t like they were forming some kind of relationship or something. They were working together—sort of—on this one case, and that was that.
So he’d go in another direction. “I really am that big and tough.”
He’d hoped she would laugh. He didn’t anticipate how hearing that laugh would make him feel like he’d done something special, or how some of the tension in his shoulders and back would disappear.
“So I hear,” she said, and her voice sounded easier, happier, too. “Maybe later you’ll tell me about the Gallo thing.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“Not according to Felix.”
He shifted in his seat. Damn Felix. “It wasn’t a big deal. He was a husband I was tailing, and he and his wife got in a fight and she told him all about it. He showed up at my place with a gun and demanded I give him everything I had on him—which was a lot—and I refused. That’s all it was.”
“You broke his arm, his collarbone, and his leg,” she said, “and made him shoot himself in the foot.”
And he’d be breaking Felix’s gossiping mouth next, or he would if he wasn’t one of the few real friends he had. Although it was hard to remember what a good friend Felix was when he could feel Ardeth’s eyes focused on him, watching his reaction, waiting for a response he couldn’t think of.
Damn it, why was she putting him so off-balance? It wasn’t the strangeness of the circumstances, of the night, or of anything else. He just felt like…like there was something he wanted to say to her, like there was a conversation they should have been having that they weren’t having. He’d spent plenty of time with plenty of women, but he couldn’t
remember ever feeling so unsure of himself.
Maybe it was better to change the subject back to something he felt comfortable with. “So why Mercer, do you think? What do you know about him?”
She paused long enough to let him know she was well aware that he was changing the subject, and why, but she allowed it. “He’s—he was—a great dipper—a pickpocket. I don’t think he’d ever been caught, at least not once he got out of his teens. A great lockpick, too. Trained by a magician—Enzo Lario. Ever heard of him?”
“Yeah,” he said, surprised in spite of himself. “My mom used to pal around with him, before I was born. I met him once or twice, but I guess he wasn’t too into dating a woman with a kid.”
“I didn’t know that.” It was her turn to sound surprised. “I mean, I know your mom spent a few weeks guesting at the old Crown when he was there, but I didn’t know they were friends.”
“Everybody was my mother’s friend. If you can call it that.”
“Hey, she did what she had to do,” Ardeth said. Something in her voice sounded different. Sad? No, wistful, he thought. Wistful. “It can’t have been easy.”
His mother was another subject he definitely didn’t want to discuss. “What did yours do?”
“Died,” Ardeth said. “When I was three.”
And now he felt like an asshole again. “Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t really remember her. And my dad took care of me. Taught me everything I know.”
“I’ve heard of your dad,” he said. “Mickey, right? Mickey Coyle.”
“That was him.” Pride touched her voice.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” Her recent loss, now that he thought of it; Mickey Coyle had died just a couple of months before.
“Thank you.” She shook her head slightly, her smile soft and sad in the darkness. “He used to take me to work with him, when I was little. I was an experienced decoy by the time I was five. When I was six he started teaching me basic lifting—you know, finger tricks, card tricks, sleight-of-hand stuff. He was the best.”