Okay, so there wouldn’t be any footage of Scarlett and him entering the shop to worry about, but there could still be eyewitnesses who remembered the incident from the other day. He hated this. When had Jesse become the kind of person who sneaks around hiding from official police investigations? The second he’d picked up the garbage bag, he realized, and felt a flare of anger.
“Uh, Jesse?”
“What?” he barked, harsher than he’d meant to.
“Um, am I just dropping you off here? I mean, there’s no way I’m gonna be allowed at the crime scene, right?”
He tried to focus. “No, I want you to come. You might see something I wouldn’t, something related to Ronnie being a werewolf.”
“But how am I gonna get that close to him?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Do you know anything about photography?”
My first dead body was a witch case.
It wasn’t as gruesome as what I would eventually see, and certainly didn’t compare to La Brea Park. I had been working and living with Olivia for about three months, and our days had settled into a routine: each morning we woke up late, ran for three miles, then drank a protein shake and made ourselves brunch. This was the one area where I’d actually shone. Olivia could barely boil eggs, and my mother had loved cooking, especially breakfast. She’d taught me how to do soufflés and perfect omelets. After brunch, we would talk about equipment—mostly what cleaning supplies worked best for what situations, but also what to keep in your vehicle that wouldn’t look too suspicious (like the bolt cutters), what to do with dead bodies, that kind of thing. I was already making a little Old World money as an apprentice, but Olivia helped me put a down payment on my van and paid for the custom freezer section to be installed. During dinner, she usually told stories that were funny and sometimes scary, but always instructive, and at night, if we didn’t have a job, I was free to do whatever I wanted, as long as I had a cell phone with a full battery and didn’t drink. We both stayed up late—most of our work was done at night, after all. I never went out much, though. I had no friends in the city, and I preferred to stay close to Olivia. I was like a scared little girl then,
still adjusting to the sudden wrong turn that my life had taken, and Olivia was the only light left in my world.
She spent a lot of evenings trying to teach me about clothes—my mother hadn’t been a bad dresser, exactly, but LA and Esperanza standards are very different—and taking me shopping for the kind of clothes she wore: casual tailored dresses with high heels and earrings that matched the necklace. She dressed me up in the brands she liked best: Armani, Burberry, Christian Louboutin. Soon I was her perfect little clone—no, not like a clone. A daughter.
Olivia had inherited money from her husband, a banking consultant who’d died a decade earlier, though she never talked about him. I asked her once why she worked for the Old World if she didn’t need the money, and she just shrugged and said she enjoyed the challenge. That never seemed quite enough to me, but I wasn’t going to push. I never pushed Olivia, actually. If we got too close to certain subjects—her dead husband, her childhood, her education—she would get this hardness to her, a flashing steeliness that had me backing off quickly. It didn’t take very long for me to learn to keep my mouth shut.
That night, I had been planning to read for a while in my room, but Olivia took a call right after supper. She listened to Kirsten for a few seconds, nodded, and hung up, telling me to change and get in the van immediately. I ran to my room and pulled on the coveralls Olivia had given me—just like hers—and was delighted to find that I’d beaten her into the van by a few seconds. She gave me a weird little frown at that but got behind the wheel, driving us to a suburban area in Culver City where a bunch of sensible sedans and SUVs were parked in front of a little split-level house. It just looked like any other party. We backed the van into the driveway and strode through the door near the garage, Olivia in the lead like she owned the place.
There were five witches, plus Kirsten, waiting for us in a small kitchen. I had expected the women inside to look the
part of the suburban mommies, but most of them were fairly young, mid-twenties, with a professional look. Like big-business interns who had the night off. There were six of them crowded around the modest kitchen table, which was piled with wads of used tissues. They had all been crying, except for Kirsten, who was leaning against the counter looking furious. Kirsten isn’t really pretty, exactly, but with her clear Swedish skin and tranquil blue eyes, you’d never really notice. She has what my high school drama teacher used to call
presence
. In the Old World, though, we just call it
power
.
“Death magics,” Kirsten said tersely, her calm eyes flashing now. She had on jeans and a black leather jacket over what appeared to be a pajama top. “They were playing with death magics.” She pushed herself off the counter and jerked her head so Olivia and I would follow. Kirsten stalked down the hall to a back bedroom, which looked like the morning after a Wicca-themed slumber party—lights on, used candles and spell books and chalk scattered around next to empty wine cooler bottles and an honest-to-goodness Ouija board. It could have all been fairly innocent, except for the corpse in the middle of the room—a man, stark naked, with no visible injuries, unless you counted the look of terror on his face. He wasn’t rotting, didn’t even smell yet, but no one would mistake him for alive. I looked away. I wasn’t a virgin, but I’d never actually seen a penis in full light before, much less a dead penis. My eyes fell on Olivia, as I waited for her to tell me what to do. She was already opening her black old-fashioned doctor’s bag, pulling out some surgical gloves and an extra-strength Hefty bag.
“Put these on,” she said, tossing me a pair of gloves. I fumbled the catch and had to pick them up, my hands shaking. The worst thing I’d seen up until then was a severed werewolf ear, but the wolf had grown it back quickly, and the detached ear looked more like a movie prop than anything else. But I wanted so desperately to impress Olivia with my cool.
She unfolded the garbage bag, clearing a space on the floor to spread it next to the body. “You should always know what happened,” she told me as she worked. “It might make a difference to the cleanup. Usually the witch who did it—or Kirsten, if it’s a bad one like this—will fill you in, but I’ve seen this before, so she didn’t bother.” She motioned me to go crouch by the guy’s feet. “Death magic usually involves trying to contact the dead. This guy probably knew one of the witches and asked for help to talk to someone.” She leaned back for a second, showing me the importance of what she was saying. “A lot of things happen in the Old World, Scarlett, and some witches have a lot of power to manipulate the magic. But magic doesn’t like it when someone tries to cross the line between the living and the dead. It takes a very, very powerful coven to control death magic spells. Those witches couldn’t do it, and the magic went right back through them and zapped him. Like a lightning strike, but with no marks, which is why we have to take care of the body. No coroner is going to be able to determine cause of death.”
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Kirsten said, leaning in the doorframe. “Your magic—or lack thereof—costs you nothing.” Her eyes were sad. “For the witches, there’s always a cost. Some of us can’t afford to pay it.”
Listening to the two of them talk as if we weren’t gathered around a corpse was starting to calm me down. But then Olivia smiled at me, reached down, and wrapped her gloved hands crudely around the guy’s head, nodding for me to take his feet and help lift him onto the bag. I had no choice but to look. The guy’s feet were on the smallish side, and he’d had a pedicure recently (thank you, LA). I put my hands gingerly around his ankles, sticking my elbows out so his toes wouldn’t brush my forearms, and Olivia counted to three. When we lifted him, he felt awful—just
dead
, a dead sack of meat. His sad little penis lolled around with the movement, and the second he hit the bag, I was moving, darting out
of the room. Kirsten had already backed into the hallway, pointing at one of the doors with a look of sympathy. I ran by and got the toilet lid up just in time to puke up all of that night’s dinner. I lost control of my body, which kept heaving and heaving, ignoring my attempts to calm it down, until at last it allowed me to collapse back against the tub. I stretched out one leg and kicked the handle on the toilet.
“Thanks,” I said to Kirsten, who was standing in the doorway.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. She gave me a sympathetic smile. “First one, right? It gets easier.”
But I don’t want it to get easier
, I thought.
I’m not supposed to be moving dead bodies; I’m supposed to be a regular person
.
“Scarlett, get back in here,” Olivia barked. She sounded furious. “I can’t use you if you’re going to go to pieces at every little thing.”
I froze. I’d never displeased her before. Kirsten frowned, checking my face, but I managed to give her a shaky smile and a shrug. Then I got up and hurried back to Olivia.
We arrived at the comic book store just before 4:00 a.m., and Cruz came around the van to open my door for me, which I thought was incredibly cheesy. We circled around to the back of the building, where a bunch of that yellow crime scene tape segregated the section of the parking lot between the dumpster and the store. Even from thirty feet away, I could see the rust-colored blood still oozing sluggishly down the sides of the dumpster. We weaved through the parked police vehicles and approached the scene.
Before I could worry too much about his plan, Cruz took my hand in his warm brown one and led me straight over to a squat, nerdy-looking guy in his late twenties who was painstakingly cleaning the lens of an enormous camera.
“Hey, Dale? Have you got a second?”
The heavyset guy looked up, wrinkling his nose in a squint at us. “Hey, Jesse. What’s up?”
“Dale, this is my girlfriend, Scarlett.”
I smiled winningly. Or tried to.
“She’s studying photography at the U. I was hoping maybe you could show her around the scene a little, say she’s your apprentice.”
Dale looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know, Jesse. They’re pretty careful about who gets across the tape these days.”
“Aw, come on, man. Don’t make me look bad.” He leaned in, and I heard him murmur to Dale, “You know that new Kate Beckinsale movie? How’d you like to go to the premiere?”
Dale’s eyes bugged out. “Really? You can do that?”
“My dad’s working on the set, man. He can do anything. You think you can help me out?”
“Sure, yeah.” Dale nodded his head enthusiastically.
“Thanks, Dale.” Cruz squeezed my hand and turned toward me. “You go on home when you’re done, baby. I’ll have somebody drop me off at my car when I get done. It might be late.” He gave me a mischievous grin, then reached over and patted my ass. “Go get ‘em.”
I glared at him behind Dale’s back, but he just smiled sweetly.
He trotted off to join the other cops who were milling around the tape line, and Dale looked me over with interest, taking an extra-close look at Molly’s leather pants.
Never borrowing these again
, I thought.
“Wow, you’re pretty. Okay, so how far are you in your classes? Have you taken two forty-five with Crawford yet?”
We started walking toward the yellow tape ourselves.
“Um, no. I just declared my major,” I said lamely. Undercover is not exactly my thing. I had explained to Cruz that my only understanding of cameras was how to push the big green—sometimes red—button, but he’d just shrugged and told me to fake it. Thanks, Jesse. Very helpful.
“Okay, well, we’ll just go over the basics, then. Police photography is straightforward, not much for artistry or technique.”
He frowned disapprovingly at the justice system’s obvious artistic ignorance, but continued. “The cops drop a numbered marker near anything they think is important, and you take three shots of each marker—close-up, mid-shot, and wide shot.” He flashed an ID at the cop guarding the scene and briefly introduced me as his new assistant. The cop nodded, and we ducked under the tape, just like that. Dale kept on talking, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I was too busy looking at the dead werewolf.
Ronnie had been tied up with glittery silver chains, bound at the hands and feet. He was tipped over on his side, shoulders against the dumpster, and his mouth and eyes were wide open in a scream. Little white things were scattered across his torn clothing. I resisted the urge to walk over, squat down, and look closer. This was supposed to be my first scene, so I tried to look squeamish.
“Scarlett? Are you hearing me? Oh,” Dale said, looking from me to the body. “Yeah, sorry, I probably should have warned you. You have to have a strong stomach for this sort of thing.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly. “Just give it a second. I’ll grab a few shots.”
I followed Dale blindly around to different markers, never taking my eyes off the body. I noticed two things: first, that there were welts under those chains, and second, that all the teeth had been taken out of his mouth. I took one step toward the body. The little white things were teeth, but not human teeth. They were way too long.
I’d cleaned up werewolf teeth after fights, and I knew what I was looking at. It didn’t make any sense, though. Why had Ronnie made the change? Why let his teeth get ripped out and then change back?
There was, of course, only one possible answer.
When there was nothing more for me to learn, I made a weak excuse to Dale—“Oh, I’m so nauseous. I’m really not cut out for this at all. I better go,”—and left for the van. As quickly as
I could, I pulled away from the crowd of cops and turned the car back toward home, feeling as if I’d just gotten away with something naughty. One hand on the wheel, I pulled out my phone and speed-dialed Will. I told him what I’d found at the comic book shop.
“Ronnie? Why would anyone kill Ronnie?” He sounded dazed.
“I have no idea. I know this sounds stupid, but did Ronnie have any enemies?”