“Jesus Christ,” he said, one hand petting the back of my head. “I heard bits of what she said over the phone.” He leaned back, briefly held my face in his hands, then looked me over, as if checking for battle wounds.
Calvin tugged at the sliced material of my shirt, prompting me to say, “I’m fine.”
“That’s right,” Quinn was saying into her phone. “East Seven Seven and Fifth. I need an ambulance right away.”
“She’s alive,” I informed the room. “But I hit her with—” I paused and double-checked the table before pointing at the setting with the missing goblet. “A wineglass.” Then I pointed toward the opposite end of the room. “She had a knife. I kicked it over there.”
Radcliff immediately turned to investigate. He crouched to peer underneath a side table before saying, “Got it.”
“Mrs. Manzi!” the housekeeper exclaimed from the doorway, after having followed the detectives upstairs. She dropped a bag that had wine bottles inside, and they smashed against the floor. A dark stain oozed across the carpet and wood. “Good lord in heaven!”
Radcliff left the knife where he’d found it and approached the housekeeper. His tone was professional yet warm as he gently drew her away from the scene and to a chair in the gallery to sit in.
Cynthia groaned against the floor but made no attempt to move.
Quinn bent down beside her, told Cynthia who she was, and informed her that she was under arrest for the murder of Sandra and Brad Habel, Marie Yang, and the attempted murder of me—Sebastian Snow.
Calvin’s grip tightened around me as Quinn spoke.
“You know something?” I said, once I heard the wail of an ambulance and at least one or two black-and-whites from the street below.
Calvin glanced down at me and asked warily, “What?”
“You took a bullet for me during Nevermore. You and Neil both saved my ass at the zero hour on the Curiosities case. I practically bit the big one during Moving Image, and webothended up in the hospital because of the Bones investigation.”
He was frowning. “What’s your point?”
I stepped free of Calvin’s embrace and held my arms out to show I was perfectly okay. “I did pretty well this time. Cynthia, however….” I motioned like I were holding a wineglass and whacking it against the side of my head. “It’s the histamines, isn’t it? Gives some wine-drinkers headaches.”
A tentative smile crossed Calvin’s face. He pulled me back into a hug and murmured, “So does this mean you’ve got… what, five lives left?”
“I think I still have all nine.”
“Let’s not test that theory and find out.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It turns out, everything Cynthia Manzi had been forthcoming with, right before she tried to slice and dice me, was the truth. Credit card statements going back a full three years indicated she hit up Readings by Madam Sandra a lot. And, sure, it was on Chris’s credit card, but he swore he had no idea. And I believed him. Because to be quite honest, he was not the sort of man who needed to worry, let alone check, his statements. But even so, if he had been aware that Cynthia frequented a psychic, he had no reason to care. Chris had known from the beginning of their relationship that Cynthia had an interest in the more spiritual and occult subjects. To each their own was his opinion on it. Everyone was entitled to their own beliefs. And had he known the psychic in question had been murdered—why the fuck would he assume it’d been his wife snapping after learning that she’d been part of a long con and that Sandra had been no different than the Fox sisters?
It’d be like Calvin believing Cynthia’s cock-and-bull story of me assaulting her. I mean, the difference being Cynthia reallydidcommit murder, andI’ma good person. But the point was, no one defaults to assuming their significant other would ever hurt someone.
And it was assumptions that had nearly allowed Cynthia to get away with offing three people. If I hadn’t been hired to consult on the artifacts found at the scenes, would the police have been able to track down the spiritoscope’s auction history? To be honest… probably not. Even I hadn’t done that without help from someone else in my own bizarre little community. They’d have never picked up on Chris Manzi’s name, and even if by some sheer force of luck they had, it sounded as if Cynthia had been more than willing to have him take the fall while she professed to be innocent of any and all wrongdoings.
But I don’t think it’d have ever gotten that far. Those three deaths would have sat unsolved—would have eaten away at Calvin, who’d have feared there was a serial killer on the streets, biding time until they felt the urge to strike again. And how fucked-up must that be for a detective’s psyche, never knowing if the killer went silent forever or might pop up again in a year, five, or fifteen, and in the meantime, the other murders remain unsolvable because there’s simplynot enough clues.
So I guess, even though it put me in a literal fight for my life, it was a good thing I’d gotten involved. Because the spiritoscope had been just odd enough, the Fox sisters’ mementos just off enough, and the Tiffany flatware just rare enough that we’d ended up with a trail of bread crumbs that were undeniable in the face of justice.
The heat wave had broken Sunday night. Like the rest of the population who was equally sick of being regulated to the indoors, lest they melt while walking on the surface of the sun, Calvin and I had ventured outside for fresh air that no longer tasted how I imagined sucking stagnant gutter runoff through a straw was like. Calvin had driven us to the West Side, parked in a garage, and we had dinner at the first interesting restaurant we’d come across in Hudson Yards, which happened to be a brunch-at-dinnertime establishment. Waffles and Irish coffee at seven o’clock in the evening? I had no complaints. And after the whole Cynthia Manzi, she-tried-to-kill-me fiasco, I’d had to postpone my boozy weekend with Aubrey, which turned out to be okay in the end, because now I knew to bring him to this place as his thank-you for inadvertently helping solve the Spirits case.
We got ice cream afterward and walked along the promenade at the Hudson River. It was mostly for tourists—those willing to venture all the way to Twelfth Avenue, that is—and featured some seafood restaurants and bars on the water, cruise tours around the island, and even theUSS Intrepid. For locals, it was a nice place to relax and watch the sunset—usually in one of the surrounding parks, but we took a seat at a bench overlooking the lapping water, and that was really just as nice.
Calvin leaned back and stretched an arm over my shoulders. His fingertips trailed up and down my bare arm, and maybe it was the ice cream or maybe it was the breeze coming off the river, but I got gooseflesh. “Hell of a week,” he murmured.
I dug my spoon into the cup of birthday cake ice cream and took a bite.
Calvin glanced at me, and wow, I never got tired of how sexy he looked in sunglasses and a T-shirt clinging to all those muscles. “Is that good?”
“Want to try?” I held the spoon out.
