Anton Strout - Dead Waters

“Oh,” Jane said, crossing her arms. “How sexist of you. And here I thought you might actually need me for my technomancy.” She made no effort to move.

Davidson looked over at me. “Are all ex-cultists this stubborn?”

Jane’s eyes flared with anger, so I spoke up quickly.

“Pretty much,” I said. “Be lucky she’s an ex -cultist. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want to be standing that close to her if I were you.”

Jane gave him an evil grin. “A girl can learn a lot from cultists. Like how to fillet a man using a kukri . . .”

Davidson smiled back at her, not missing a beat. “Maybe we can save that as our second option. . . you know, after asking questions of the nice people who live here.”

Jane looked over to me. Her eyes smoldered. I nodded. “Go,” I said. “There’s nothing to be done in here yet. Talk to the neighbors. Then check their security system records.”

“Security systems don’t ever want to cooperate with my technomancy,” she said, “locks or otherwise. It’s like they’ve purposely been trained to not talk to me.”

“Still, there’s nothing for you to do in here. I think this crime scene is technically going to get classified as Other Division anyway, so that means Connor and I will get stuck with all the paperwork on this one.”

“I’ll go talk to all the neighbors, then,” Jane said, still somewhat cheesed off, “but if anything Arcana related comes up, call me.”

Connor let out a single laugh. “You mean other than Professor Redfield drowning from the inside without any signs of struggle, forced entry, or water spilled?”

Jane shivered and her face lost its look of anger. “Yeah, other than that.”

She turned around, shaking off the darkness that had crossed her face, and headed back to the front door of the apartment.

“All right,” Connor said. “Let’s see what we can see.”

I set to work once again trying to run the psychometric histories in the room, but whether they were devoid of them or I was simply thrown by Jane’s comment about drawer space earlier and afraid to use them since the incident with the tattooist and its weird aftereffects, I wasn’t sure.

All I knew was that my emotions were still stuck on high and it was hard enough to fight off that woman’s urges without having them mess around with my own emotions. My mind kept superimposing Jane meeting a sexy stranger while knocking on doors for the investigation.

I tried to focus on the crime scene but it was little use. The tattooist’s jealous rage kept me haunted by thoughts of gouging my own eyes out, but without the needle of a tattoo gun at my disposal, the best I could hope for was getting a black eye from trying to use my bat instead. I fought the urge, but only barely.

Without a lingering spirit to be found, Connor was more than willing to call it a night fairly early, which meant that the two of us headed back to the Lovecraft Café. Following up on the case could wait until we broke a lead on it, but given the budget cuts, the preliminary paperwork could not.

We headed back through the coffeehouse and behind the dark curtain that led into the theater hidden behind it. The eighties version of Clash of the Titans played on the movie screen. Laurence Olivier was chewing up the scenery as Zeus as we made our way down the right-hand aisle past the crowd of thirty or so watchers. At the back corner of the theater, I swiped a plastic keycard against a metal plate next to a door marked H.P. The door swung into the open bull pen of the Department of Extraordinary Affairs with its carved in runes ringing the tops of the walls. We headed back past the cubicle farms and doors heading off in every direction until we hit the long red curtains that sectioned off Other Division from the rest. Connor and I settled in at our partners desk, which sat in a space that was larger than the cubicles and partially walled higher. Each of us worked in silence drafting our own accounts of what we both found and didn’t find. I was almost falling asleep in one of my case folders when Connor spoke up.

“What was that crack Jane made earlier?” Connor asked. “The one about Professor Redfield having a lot of drawer space. . . Seemed to rile you.”

“It was nothing,” I said, feeling the tattooist’s residual anger rising up once again at the mention of it. “Let it go.” I fell back into work and silence for a few more minutes, forcing the emotions down again, but when I looked up at Connor for a second, he was watching me.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Any wedding bells in the future?”

“Whoa,” I said, throwing my pen at him. I tried to hide the unbidden anger as it rose again, tried to play it off. “Are you proposing?”

“Funny,” Connor said. “You know who I mean. You and Jane.”

“Slow down,” I said, sharp. “Right now we’re just fine as is, thanks.” I fished another pen out of the D.E.A. mug on my desk and went back to my file.

“Really?” Connor asked, skepticism thick in the single word.

“Really,” I assured him, hoping to end the discussion.

“Well, maybe you could try not sounding so pissed off when you say it, then,” he said.

I looked up from my desk, sighing. I pushed the anger down. “I thought I was doing a fairly good job at hiding it. I’m that transparent, am I?”

“Not to most people,” Connor said. “No. Probably not. But to your partner in slime? Yeah, it’s pretty obvious.”

I swore under my breath. “Remind me to sign up for No, You Can’t Read My Poker Face when they offer it up next time.”

Connor settled back into his chair. “Will do,” he said. “Am I detecting trouble in young hipster paradise?”

“Something like that,” I said, attempting to dodge the question by delving back into my paperwork.

Connor shifted a stack of case files from his in-box to right in front of him. “I’m all ears, at least for the next few hours,” he said, then looked at the rest of the stack still sitting there. “Maybe even a few more than that.”

“Fine,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I put down my pen. “I had a little psychometric episode earlier unlike any I’ve ever had before. The two of us were helping your brother with that ghost problem they’ve been having over at the Gibson-Case Center.”

“The tattooist?” Connor asked. I nodded. “Aidan told me about her before. Seems like he was a bit frustrated to be dealing with something he couldn’t punch, kick, or bite.”

“Yeah, that’s about right,” I said. “Anyway, I psychometried my way into the woman’s past and. . . I don’t know. It felt different. She was all Fatal Attraction over this guy who was cheating on her and I just got caught up in her whirlwind of emotions. She was passionate, angry, outraged, all at once. . . and when I pulled out of it, I couldn’t shake her severe emotional state. I still can’t. It flared up at Professor Redfield’s apartment when Jane teased me about the drawer space.”

“And this hasn’t happened before?” Connor asked. “The emotion of someone’s past lingering like that?”

I shook my head. “I’ve always had trouble with using my powers,” I said. “You know that, but nothing quite like this, not since before I joined the Department and started working with you on controlling them. The emotion was so. . . raw that I couldn’t ignore it. When I first came out of the vision, I was so caught up in it still I ended up snapping at Jane.”

“About. . . ?”

“Something stupid,” I said, avoiding looking over at him. “A piece of furniture.”

“All great fights are over stupid things when it comes to building a relationship,” he said.

“Thanks, Master Yoda, but I don’t think a chest of drawers is something to get all worked up about.”