Eileen Wilks - Mortal Sins

So far, Lily’s cell had worked fine here in Halo, North Carolina.

Deacon was staring at her as if she’d sprouted a second head. She sighed. “I don’t know what you’ve heard. My involvement wasn’t in the news.”

“My cousin’s with the Washington PD. He said you summoned the dragons.”

Good grief. Lily wondered what other crazy stories were flying around, but for once left a question unasked. No point in it. As Grandmother said, rumors were like politics—inevitable whenever more than two people were around. “No one summons a dragon.”

“What did you do, then?”

“It’s complicated, large parts of the story are classified, and none of it relates to our problem tonight.” She turned and started walking again, skirting a large fallen branch.

They’d left the mob of teenage trees behind. Here the trunks were thick and widely spaced, with little underbrush. Nothing looked like a path.

She aimed her light up into the trees. There. A scrap of white. When Rule was taking her back to the highway, he’d shredded a tissue from her purse, fixing the bits on branches here and there to mark a detour she needed to take around some low, wet ground. Lily hitched her purse more securely on her shoulder and followed the tiny white flags.

Deacon moved up beside her. “Nothing you learned by touch is admissible in court.”

“Not as evidence, no. But it gives me reasonable grounds to believe magic was involved in the commission of a felony. According to the recent amendment to the Domestic Security and Magical Crimes Act—”

“Fuck that gobbledygook. Why are you here, huntin’ up crimes? Don’t you have anything better to do? Seems like I’m always hearing about how stretched you MCD folks are since the Turning, yet here you are, complicatin’ a simple case.”

MCD stood for Magical Crimes Division, the FBI division that, on paper, contained the unit Lily belonged to. And yes, they were stretched. Badly. “Sheer lust for power.”

He didn’t laugh.

Lily didn’t roll her eyes. But she wanted to. “Joke, Sheriff. That was a joke. I’m not eager to complicate your life or mine. I’m supposed to be on vacation.”

“Yeah? I don’t see Disneyworld nearby.”

“Personal leave, actually. Family stuff.” And that’s all she planned to say about it. Rule had given up a lot to protect his son from his own notoriety, and though the secret couldn’t be kept much longer—not with Toby moving to San Diego to live with them—Lily wouldn’t be the one to reveal it.

And she could not, of course, refer to the other reason they were in North Carolina. Rule’s new tie to Leidolf was secret. “I understand the perp you’ve locked up—Meacham, right?—hasn’t admitted anything.”

“Claims he doesn’t remember. Shit, half the time he refuses to believe his family’s dead, says we’re lying’ to him. The DA thinks Roy Don’s hopin’ to cop an insanity plea.”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, Roy Don’s nuts, all right. I don’t know if he matches up with the legal definition, but he’s crazy as hell.”

He sounded deeply sad, as if Meacham’s insanity robbed him of something important. “Did you know him? Or the victims?”

“I met Roy Don a few times. Went to high school with his wife, Becky. Rebecca Nordstrom, back then. Didn’t know her well—around here, kids mostly hang with their own in high school. Some of it’s prejudice, but a lot is just social hang-ups. You know how, at a middle school dance, the boys bunch up together along one wall, the girls across from them? No one’s sure what to say to the folks on the other side. That’s how it is. Loosens up some if you go on to college, but Becky didn’t—married Roy Don right out of high school.” He was silent a moment. “Their youngest daughter was friends with my little girl. Pretty thing. Real sweet.”

And now decaying under a tree. Lily thought she understood why he’d been such an ass about holding on to his case. “I used to work Homicide. It’s hard when the victims are kids. And it’s hell if you knew them.”

“I don’t let it interfere.”

“I’m sure you don’t.” Lily didn’t believe that, but he needed to. She knew how it was when the professional and the personal trampled all over each other. Most of the time, you could hold professionalism up like a shield to keep the horror at bay. Not entirely, maybe, but enough to do the job. When an investigation turned personal, you worked harder than ever at the shield. Knowing it wasn’t enough.

She helped by turning the subject back to the job. “The killings happened quite recently, I understand.”

“Four days. Four days,” he repeated, his voice heavy with skepticism. “You can be sure after so long that there was magic involved?”

“I’m sure. The traces are faint, but unmistakable.” She didn’t blame him for asking. Suspicion was a natural attitude for a cop—doubt edged sword-sharp by the knowledge that people lied. For big reasons, for small ones, for convenience, for the hell of it—people lied to cops all the time.

But, dammit, she was a cop, too. He might try to remember that. “I heard Meacham turned himself in, then denied he’d done it.”

“Not exactly.” He was silent a moment. “It was noon on Monday. I was fixing to head out for a bite to eat when Roy Don pulled up in his truck. Parked in a handicapped spot, which folks around here don’t do, not right in front of my office, so I waited. Figured either he was drunk or somethin’ was bad wrong. He got out.” Another pause. “I never saw so much blood on a living person before.”

“Did he have the bat?”

“No. No, he climbed out and just stood there, not talking, not moving, not seeing anything at all, from the look in his eyes. His eyes . . . I asked him, was he hurt. Where was he hurt. That’s when he turned and got the bat from his front seat. He handed it to me. Didn’t say a word, just handed it to me. It was another two hours before he spoke. He seemed to wake up all of a sudden. He was in a hospital gown—that’s where we took him, to the hospital—but he still had blood on him. He saw that blood and thought he’d been in a wreck or somethin’. Didn’t remember anything since breakfast.”

“Did you go to the hospital with him?”

“No. No, I went out to his place to see if that’s where the blood had come from, and found poor Bill Watkins out cold. Bingham—that’s one of my deputies—took Roy Don to the hospital.”

She nodded. “So you didn’t actually see him when he, ah, came to.”

“No, but Bingham told me about it. He’s a good man. Pays attention.”

“He’s not an empath. Even with your Gift slicked over by that spell, you probably pick up more than an unGifted could. Your hunches about people would be good.” Which gave her an idea. “May not work with me, though. Maybe my Gift locks yours out.” Maybe that’s why he didn’t like or trust her.

“I’m not used to talking about this stuff.”

Tell me about it. Until her career change to the FBI, Lily never spoke of being a sensitive. Too often in the past, sensitives had been used to out the Gifted or those of the Blood, and she’d wanted no part of that. Being open about her ability had taken some getting used to. She figured she knew something of how a gay person felt, coming out of the closet. “Times are changing.”

“I guess. Are you askin’ me what I felt about Roy Don when he stepped out of the truck? When he handed me the bat?”

“What did you feel?”

“Nothin’. Like there was no one home.”

“You get that feeling with me?”

“No, you’re there. Like a closed door, but you’re there. I’ve never had that feelin’ with a person before. Not with a person. Bethany White’s girl, now, she’s mentally handicapped. Pretty severe—she wears diapers, can’t feed herself, but she’s there. Roy Don wasn’t. He drove his truck into town, came to me, handed me that bat. And he wasn’t there at all.”