Page 11 of The Turning of the Tables

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ELLIOT CRANE

Thanks for a fun night. Hope you’re not too sore tomorrow. :)

SETH MAYS

It was fun. Thank YOU.

I decided against anything else,since that was cringey enough. Given that Elliot hadn’t responded, he probably agreed, although to be fair, it was only about six in the morning the fourth time I checked my messages to see if he’d replied yet.

I was absolutely breaking Rule Two left and right. Not that I was expecting that he would want to be a couple or anything, because he’d made it absolutely clear that he wasnotinterested. But because I was already falling hard, and I knew it.

It also didn’t help that I’d awakened at exactly 4:17 a.m. when my phone rang. I’d looked down at it and cursed under my breath at seeing Detective Maza’s name on the caller ID.

By six, I’d been awake for nearly two hours, was desperately under-caffeinated, having only managed to chug a quick half-cup before leaving my apartment, and I was hungry. To top it all off, I was bunny-suited and masked up and had spent most of the last hour marking tiny little blood spatters, which meant that my bad knee waskillingme, to say nothing of my back.

As to the content of Elliot’s text—I was also sore, but doing my damnedest to not let anybody else guess that, because the last thing I needed from the Richmond PD or my coworkers was any sort of shit about gay sex. In fact, I was pretty sure none of them besides Quincy even knew I was gay. Not that it was any of their business—and I kind of preferred to keep it that way.

I’m not closeted, not really. I like to think of it as being a practical survivalist. I wouldn’t be worried if Hart knew, or Ward or Mason. I obviously trusted Quincy, although that had come about because I’d run into her at a gay bar when she’d been out with some friends at a double bachelorette party for the two brides. She also knew about Devin and the disaster that was the end of our relationship because we’d gotten called out the morning after, and I must have looked like the absolute shit I’d felt like.

I guess that made us friends—but the casual kind who didn’t really know much beyond the basics. She knew I was gay and single, and I knew she had a boyfriend she thought might be the one, but they’d only been together a year, so she wasn’t in a hurry to rush into anything. We shared the occasional lunch break at work, and gossiped over coffee when we had godawful early calls—like today—but I wasn’t going to be the person she called after a breakup, and she wasn’t going to be the person I told about the impossible torch I had already started carrying for Elliot Crane.

“I got you a present,” Quincy said, her voice slightly muffled by her mask, and I looked up from my painful crouch. She was holding out another bag of little yellow tags, because I was almost out.

“Gee, thanks,” I grumbled, but reached up and took the bag from her.

Despite what various TV shows might tell you, being a CSI tech is not glamorous. It’s almost always either freezing or disgustingly hot—bunny suits arenotcomfortable, as they provide no insulation in the winter and essentially turn into body-shaped steam bags in the summer. You wear a mask not simply because of the risk of contracting Arcanavirus while working in close quarters with the PD or the other techs, but because you have to get close to things you don’t really want to be breathing in—bodily fluids, sometimes chemicals or dust or even just the very particular and pungent stench of death. Or because you might accidentally drool or sneeze—or, let’s be honest, vomit—on the evidence, which then makes your job even more difficult. You have to wear booties that make walking awkward and often slippery, around things that you don’t want to fall in or on, and not just because they’re disgusting. Falling on a corpse might wellbedisgusting, but falling on it will also contaminate the crime scene and mess up the evidence like nobody’s business.

And that’s just the gear.

That, and the job itself can be almost unbearably tedious, such as now, as I set out one hundred and seventy-two little yellow plastic tents to mark every instance of blood spatter we’d found. I didn’t know that at the start, of course, and the little tents came in packs of a hundred. When Quincy came and brought me bag number two, I was on ninety-six. Dusting for fingerprints is equally mind-numbing.As is cataloging every damn object in a room where the crime took place, just in case it becomes relevant later. And going through the house or office or immediate area—depending on the crime, although in this case it was a small, one-story house—to determine whether or not other rooms were relevant to the crime, then getting confirmation from the detective on site, then getting the photographers to document it,thenmarking and dusting everything.

The crime scene itself wasn’t what interested me most about the job. I liked the lab work. The biochemistry of it—finding and identifying particulates, ID-ing the chemical signatures of drugs or poisons, figuring out the likely size and shape of a suspect based on a shoe print. The actual science part of forensic science. It’s why I had a small storage shed with old equipment I’d gotten from labs that were replacing it—it gave me a place to play with finding new methods or techniques, as well as test theories that my bosses at the crime lab weren’t willing to gamble on. I usually didn’t blame them for not wanting to take the risks. Usually.

Our budget was a lot tighter than it should have been, so a lot of the calls that got made were the result of not having enough funds for what we really wanted to do. But sometimes it was because somebody at the RPD shut a case despite the evidence. Or because I wanted to try to do something experimental that was just too risky because it might not be acceptable to a court of law. I got it, because part of our job really was providing evidence for the district attorney’s office, but it was still frustrating.

I also did lab work for Beyond the Veil sometimes. They didn’t usually need much—it’s a lot more straightforward to solve crimes when the dead person can tell you who killed them—but when they did, Ward would come to me.Hart had started doing it, but now he had a fancy FBI lab, so he didn’t ask me anymore, unless he was asking for Ward.

Every now and then, when it was something the feds wouldn’t touch, but Ward or Mason or Beck wanted it looked into. Those were my favorite cases—I liked it when I could actually be useful, and BTV never minded if I did things a little less conventionally.

I hadn’t told Quincy about that part of my life. Probably because she’d tell me I would get into deep trouble if the powers that be ever found out about it. Which I probably would. But it’s not like Hart or Ward is going to tell anybody, though.

This particular crime scene was one of the ones that was less interesting and more depressing. Even though it was one of Maza’s cases, it wasn’t a magical case, at least as far as any of us could tell. We hadn’t seen any indication of sigils or magical artifacts anywhere in the house, although we all knew that us normies wouldn’t notice if something had been hidden.

Cause of death wasn’t a mystery, either. The yet-unidentified woman had been bludgeoned to death with a crowbar, also found on scene. This was clear from the one hundred and seventy-two discrete areas of blood spatter—several of them containing multiple spatter points that I’d carefully outlined in chalk on the kitchen tile. And the counter. And the cupboards. You get the idea.

She was unidentified for the same reason that I was marking blood spatter everywhere in the kitchen and in the part of the hallway within a straight line of the body. We were assuming she was probably Ms. Lisa Johnston, since that’s whose purse was inside the front door and the height and skin tone matched the woman on the driver’s licenseinside. But you couldn’t tell by looking at what was left of her face.

Quincy and I had rock-paper-scissored over who was going to go through the rest of the house and who got blood spatter duty, and I lost. She’d been working on a set of footprints in the front hall when I’d called to her for more tents. “Anything interesting on the shoes?” I asked her.

“A couple sets,” she replied. “One seems to match a pair of sneakers on the shoe tray by the door that would fit our vic. The others look bigger, so I’m guessing that’s either our perp or the probable man in her life… or both.”

“You assume he’s in her life?”

A shrug. “Most likely outcome, statistically speaking.”

She wasn’t wrong. At least 65% of murdered women are killed by someone they know—and that’s not counting the 20% that are unsolved, some proportion of which were probably also committed by someone they knew. “We’re not supposed to assume,” I reminded her. “In fact, we’re not supposed to actually do the solving at all, remember?”