Or to take more pills, which luckily might not be necessary since her stomach was just beginning to warm with the ones she’d taken at the file cabinet.
The file didn’t mention where— Okay. Lucy McShane’s aunt had died. Her cousin, Chelsea Mueller, had left Triumph City entirely about ten years before.
Chelsea Mueller.
Lucy McShane’s cousin. Lucy’s cousin who’d owned a book on ghost summoning and who’d missed Church training by less than a point.
Lucy McShane’s cousin whose copy of that ghost-summoning book had been tainted with energy, and that energy had been what Chess felt the night before. She’d thought it was Lucy’s—well, some of it had been—but of course, they were related, their energy might very well have been similar.
Chelsea Mueller had been summoning her cousin’s ghost.
Well, wasn’t that interesting. Damn! So where was Chelsea? Was she in Downside? Well, yeah, duh, of course she was in Downside—but where? Her side of town, Lex’s side of town? Did she live by the pipe room, or the school, or …?
Both victims had been from Lex’s side of town, at least to some degree. Even—even Terrible had said Eddie lived on the border streets. And Jia … Well, Jia had had Chelsea’s book. Jia must have somehow known Chelsea, had some contact with her.
She could just ask Beulah. Beulah was right there. But no. This was rather important information, confidential information, which meant it should be sought with care, when the time was right. Especially since if Jia had somehow come in contact with Chelsea at the school, asking Beulah outright might tip her off that it mattered, and she might mention it to who knew who else.
So she made a note—not that she’d forget—and went back to the file. Lucy’s suicide, yes, a few very unpleasant black-and-white photographs that Chess flipped image-down the second she realized what they were. Looking at them made her think of the catwalk, and the talk she’d had with Terrible. Back when he’d been glad she was alive, when he’d known without having to be told that she’d thought of suicide every day of her life and accepted that knowledge the way he accepted everything about her.
Or the way she’d thought he had, anyway.
Before the thoughts could dig too deep, she forced them away. Work, this was work, and it needed to be done. She jotted down the drawer number of Lucy’s grave supplies. Those would have to wait until morning. A summoned ghost required special Banishing, yeah, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle. She could at least do that right.
She flipped through more pages. An autopsy had been done on Lucy, and she had indeed been pregnant. They’d done a DNA analysis on the— Hmm. Okay, that she could ask about.
“Beulah?”
“Yeah?” Movement in one of the aisles; Beulah appeared at the end, holding a thick white book. “What?”
“Didn’t you tell me—or Monica, or somebody told me—that Lucy McShane got pregnant by her drama teacher?”
“Um … I think so. I don’t know the story very well, but I think that’s what she said, yeah. Why?”
Chess glanced at the file again. “They— No reason.”
“Oh, come on. I know you have to be all confidential and everything but you know, maybe I could actually help you, since I know the school and the neighborhood and you don’t. I’ve lived there my whole life.”
“Do you remember when this happened?”
“Kind of, yeah. I was only little, of course, but I kind of remember them talking about it. It was a big deal, you know?”
“Yeah, I guess it would be.” She looked at the file again. “This says they tested the teacher’s DNA, and Lucy McShane’s baby wasn’t his.”
“Really?”
Beulah rounded the tables, her slim form weaving through the patches of light cast by the windows along the outside wall until she reached Chess’s side. Chess glanced down at the file, scanned it to see if that sheet contained anything Beulah shouldn’t see—but oh, hell, who the fuck cared? It didn’t matter. Lucy McShane’s death was Fact and Truth, and it wasn’t being investigated anyway. This was just background. Chelsea’s name was on it, sure, but not in any way that connected her to anything.
So she just pointed at the pertinent line. “See?”
That spicy smell again, that almost-Lex smell, as Beulah leaned over. Her slim hand rested on Chess’s shoulder.
“Where does— Oh. Okay. Is that important?”
Chess shrugged, which had the added benefit of getting Beulah to move her hand. When was the last time anyone other than Terrible or Lex had touched her? Kind of odd, really. How often did people touch each other? Was that normal, to just touch someone like that?
Didn’t matter. “It’s not important, really. I mean, it doesn’t make a difference to me, as far as the case goes. It’s just odd, that she supposedly killed herself because she was pregnant by this teacher but she wasn’t.”
“So she was sleeping with somebody else, too.”
“Maybe.” Duh. “I mean, yeah, obviously.”
“Maybe she just thought it was the teacher’s? Maybe Monica just heard it wrong.”
And Mrs. Li had said Lucy didn’t know who the baby’s father was, that Lucy was a “slut.” Interesting. She’d have to try to get another chat with Mrs. Li.
She flipped the page. “Oh well. Like I said, I don’t care why she did it or who was involved or anything. I just need to get her grave supplies so I can Banish her, really.”
“So it’s a definite haunting.”
Shit. She hadn’t—well, what the fuck ever. Wasn’t like Beulah wouldn’t find out anyway. “Yeah. I saw her last night.”
“Lucy McShane’s ghost.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t Banish her or send her away or whatever it is you do.”
Chess sighed. “No, I didn’t. She kind of caught me off guard.”
She waited, tense, for some sort of snide comment about how exactly Chess had been distracted; thankfully it didn’t come. Instead Beulah grabbed the other file. “What’s this? The school’s file?”
Chess grabbed it back. “Yes. And it’s none of your business.”
“You are really fucking touchy, aren’t you? Again. My side of town. Maybe I can help.”
“Funnily enough, I’ve managed to solve lots of cases in parts of town where I don’t live without help from random local residents. So thanks, but no.”
Beulah didn’t answer. Chess glanced at her and found her staring at the open page of the McShane file. “What?”
Okay, that could not be a good smile. That smile, the one spreading across Beulah’s face, could only be described as smug. “Oh, really?”
Shit. “What.”
A slim finger rose into the air, planted itself right down on the page in front of Chess. “Look at the address.”
Chess did. “What? What’s the— Oh.” Little wheels in her head spun; double-time, in fact, because the speed was starting to kick in. “That’s the building, right? The one Aros rented an apartment in?”
“Oh,” Beulah said, widening her eyes, batting her lashes like Chess was a Victorian suitor, “I’m sure you would have figured that out on your own, though, right?”
Being wrong sucked.
Well, not wrong, exactly. She would have put two and two together when she got to the building—of course, Beulah wouldn’t have known that, but still. She had to admit it was nice to have it pointed out to her, and especially nice to know she already had an arrangement to visit the place, thanks to Beulah.
She also had to admit that checking the place out after dark, as she was doing at that moment, was better than having to come back during daylight, because Beulah hadn’t been lying when she said Chess wasn’t exactly popular in that part of Downside.
Standing on Twenty-first with Lex on one side, his arm around her, and Beulah on the other, she could almost ignore the stares of the small group of people on the opposite side of the street. They didn’t glare at her, not outright, but they watched her,
very carefully, and their anger blew in sharp gusts across the empty pavement. She didn’t need either Lex or Beulah to tell her that only their presence kept her from getting attacked, and thankfully neither of them did.
She wasn’t scared. But she didn’t want to stand on the street, either.
And she didn’t have to, or at least she wouldn’t have to once the owner of the building showed up. Hopefully that would be any minute.
Lex lit up a smoke, leaned against the wall. “Ain’t feelin like spending my whole night here, aye? Gots places I could be, me.”
“I’m sure Lena’s going to be free later,” Beulah said.
Chess blinked, turned her head in time to intercept the glare Lex shot Beulah’s way. “Lena?”
He shrugged. “Ain’t like you still around, aye?”
“Ain’t like you weren’t seeing other people even when I was.” Somewhere deep inside her something twinged, a rather uncomfortable little pinch she didn’t like one bit.
That was a feeling, and those were what she absolutely, positively did not want. She dug in her bag for her pillbox, ready to open it the second she got inside; what had she taken? Three or four Cepts, three Nips to wake up? It had been an hour and a half or so, she could take more. And if she couldn’t she didn’t really give a fuck. What was going to happen, she’d pass out? Oh, yeah, that would suck. Unconsciousness was just so undesirable right about then.
Lex looked as if he wanted to say something else, but he was stopped by the arrival of what could only be the building’s owner, a female sack of bones with pure white helmet hair and fingernails so long and shiny that Chess thought for a second the woman was some sort of clawed mutant.
She raised one of those taloned hands; from the index finger dangled two keys on a tarnished ring. She didn’t say a word.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pai.” Beulah plucked the ring off the woman’s finger and inserted one of the keys in the lock to open the front door.
Mrs. Pai didn’t reply. Instead she glared at Chess, cloudy white eyes like crystal balls set deep in her wrinkled face. Chess forced herself to meet the stare; when she did, Mrs. Pai started to giggle. The charm necklace she wore—tiny bones and gold lightning bolts—glittered with the movement.
Chess’s hand tightened on her knife. This woman looked like she’d left sanity behind her a good ten or fifteen years before, and Chess could see those shiny sharp nails impaling her with scary ease.
Either Lex thought the same or he was just in a hurry to rush off to see that Lena person, because he practically shoved Chess through the building’s doorway and into the dim hall.
The stereotypical naked lightbulb fizzed at them from the center of the ceiling; a warped door to the left leaked the scent of boiling cabbage. Beneath it was another scent, an unpleasant one. The hairs on the back of Chess’s neck rose. That was not good news, that smell. She glanced at Beulah and Lex; their expressions told her they noticed it, too—their expressions, and the way Lex’s hand moved under his jean jacket.
The staircase creaked beneath their feet. Halfway up, the bare bulb’s glow became so weak as to be useless, and Chess switched on her flashlight instead. The scent didn’t grow stronger. Hopefully it was a memory of death, and not evidence of it.
“It’s number three.” Beulah fiddled with the key ring. “That one, I guess.”
Lex snorted. “Aye, with the three on it? Ain’t let em say you ain’t sharp, Blue.”
Beulah opened her mouth, but Chess stopped her with an upraised hand. “Hold on.”
If her flashlight had had new batteries, she might have missed it, but as it was the light was just oblique enough for Chess to catch the scratches in the door, almost camouflaged by the general ruin of the wood and paint.
“Witchy shit, aye?” Lex leaned in. “Kinda like on you door, Tulip.”
“Yeah. Kind of.” Except it wasn’t, not really. Chess had general protective wards on her door, a few special ones she’d developed thanks to her Church education.
The wards Aros—it had to be Aros, she couldn’t imagine who else might have done it—had carved into his door were much, much darker than the ones Chess used. The Bindrune the light picked up was kesrah, and it was violent and bloody. Illegal.
She waved the light. “Get back, okay?”
Violent, bloody, and illegal. But not active. Or at least not energized. When her fingers brushed against it a jolt of yuck ran up her arm, like touching a wire live with evil.
But just the evil of the rune itself; highly unpleasant, but if it had ever been powered by a witch, that energy was gone. It was … anonymous, was the best way to put it, really.
She ran her hand over the door from the top to the bottom. If Aros—or whoever—had booby-trapped the apartment with illegal wards, setting them off would be a bad idea. Almost as bad an idea as falling in love had been.
The rest of the door felt clean. Well, not clean, but not smeared with evil like the kesrah rune. Just the typical yuck of any Downside building; misery and hate, greed and lust, attempts at theft spells and death spells and any other magical vice the human mind could come up with, and the human mind was in general a pretty sick fucking place, as she well knew.
“Okay.” She held her hand out for the key. Beulah placed it in her palm. It slipped into the lock, didn’t stick on opening.
Something told her this was not going to be good.
She was right. The door creaked open. That smell, that foul stench of death festering in private, belched from the open doorway in a moldering cloud to cover her, to cover Lex and Beulah, and sent them all staggering back to the wall.
“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Beulah gasped. The sickness in her voice twisted Chess’s stomach even more.
“It is,” she managed in reply. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Something was dead in that apartment—something or someone—and she had to walk in and take a good look at it.
And she didn’t have a handkerchief or cloth or anything. She pressed her sleeve-covered hand over her mouth and nose, waiting for the nausea to subside. Oh, fuck, that was so awful. So awful and just teeming with bacteria and sickness and germs waiting to invade her body, to marry the sickness already inside her so deep it would never leave.
Bleach might clean the apartment she was about to enter, but they didn’t make bleach for people’s insides. She was stuck with her own filth. She didn’t need to add more.
Beulah tied a cloth around her face; Lex improvised with a sleeve, like Chess; and they stepped forward to see what new horror waited for them.
Horror indeed. Chess barely saw the apartment around her, bare walls scribbled with words in black and the dried brownish-red of blood. Nonsense words; the man had seriously gone bug-fuck crazy, hadn’t he? At least if someone considered scribbling “tutu,” “minerals,” and “dancing” in blood on walls to be bug-fuck crazy, which Chess did.
Her flashlight picked up a sofa with stuffing erupting like mushrooms from holes in the rough fabric, a pockmarked table flecked with paint, scraps of thin carpet grayish in the light’s beam. On the left, a stove crusted with filth; on the right, an open doorway emitting stench like a blast furnace giving heat. The bedroom.
Lex’s gun caught a ray of thin moonlight that fought its way through the grimy windows. Beulah pulled a silver dagger from somewhere; Chess followed suit and flicked the blade on her knife. Her new knife. Terrible had given it to her two weeks before. She wished she’d thought of that and brought her old one.
And it wasn’t necessary anyway. As soon as they’d walked far enough to see into the room, she knew it wasn’t. The only person in the room capable of injuring them was as disarmed as it was possible to be, quite literally.
Aros’s naked body lay on the bed, barely recognizable. He had to have been dead at least three or four days, in that tiny apartment with the heat turned up.
At least she thought it was Aros; she’d only seen him once or twice, quick glances around the Church building. She’d been d
istracted, to say the least, the kind of distraction where every man looked the same save for one, their faces blurring into a haze in her mind. But she remembered darkish, longish hair such as covered the head of the corpse on the bed, and thought she remembered … well, she didn’t remember anything else. But the apartment was in his name, and it was definitely a man’s body; enough remained of it for her to be certain of that.
And she could be certain the death hadn’t been pleasant. The face was … obliterated, was the best term she could think of for it.
Well. So much for the loose—more than loose—idea she’d had that maybe Aros was the man behind the murders, that maybe he was Slobag’s new witch. She hadn’t fully realized until that moment that the idea had even been there; she’d been mentally classifying Aros with Riley, really, as someone who just couldn’t handle the job. But as she looked at what was left on the bed, she realized that yeah, she’d wondered. Hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself—and had been too high the night before, too busy since Beulah showed up at her place—but she’d wondered. And she’d been wrong.
Aros must have found Chelsea. Must have discovered something that drove him crazy, that led to his murder.
“Ain’t know why I let you get me into this shit, Tulip,” Lex muttered. “Could be doin all sorts else, ‘stead of here.”
“Oh, come on,” she managed. “What could possibly be better than this?”
He acknowledged the joke, lame as it was, with a thin smile and jerked his chin at the remains. “Gotta call you Church this one, aye?”
She nodded. At least there was that. At least this wasn’t a death she needed to hide; she could report this one, and the Church could take care of it, and maybe she’d get a tidy report at the end if they thought she could use the information provided.
Seeing the body, the apartment, though, reminded her that she hadn’t gone into Aros’s cottage on the Church grounds, hadn’t even asked yet. She supposed that could be excused, or at least understood; she hadn’t planned to spend her day passed out in her hallway. But it certainly made that task more urgent, didn’t it, that Aros was apparently dead. In a very grisly fashion. He hadn’t done that to himself, had he?