Page 3 of The Turning of the Tables

As I pulled out of the airport loop and headed back to the city, I reached into the cupholder and passed Elliot a set of keys. “Hart gave me these this morning so you can get into his apartment if you want. There’s a cat named Pet, and there may or may not be a Taavi. You know Taavi?”

He took the keys from me, although he looked a little bewildered. “Yeah. They both came back for… my father’s funeral.”

Oh. I’d known that Hart had gone back home a few months ago forafuneral, but I hadn’t realized it was forElliot’s dad. Even though I’d helped on the case, I’d somehow not put two-and-two together. Let’s just say there’s probably a reason I’m a CSI tech and not a detective. In addition to my generally pacifist outlook, which doesn’t tend to go well with police training.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling awkward.

“Thanks.” Elliot didn’t seem offended. “He called you about the evidence, I think.”

The snot I had talked Hart through collecting off a window had been the DNA evidence that led to the arrest of one of the men responsible for killing this man’s father. “Yeah, he did,” I confirmed, feeling a little embarrassed.

“Thanks for helping.”

“I was… I’m glad I could help,” I replied honestly. “I’m a bit of a science nerd.”

“You usually explain evidence collection over the phone?” he asked.

“That would be the one and only time,” I replied with an awkward little laugh. “It’s not really SOP. Sorry. Standard Operating Procedure.”

“You remember who my best friend is, right? I’m familiar with cop lingo.”

I shot him a look, trying to figure out if I’d offended him, but there was a slight upturn to one corner of his lips, so I didn’t think so.

I’m not super great at small talk, so I let the conversation drop.

Elliot didn’t say anything, either, but every time I glanced over at him, he was looking around at the city as we drove through the neighborhoods leading back toward downtown. It wasn’t a terribly pretty drive, but there had been a crash on 64 in the westbound lanes when I’d driven out to the airport, and I had no desire to get us stuck in thaton the way back, so through the city it was. Kind of like a mini tour—except with a tour guide who didn’t tell you anything.

But Elliot didn’t seem to mind, his eyes glinting in the beams of the oncoming headlights as he glanced at the houses, shops, and trees we passed driving through the city.

“Will we go by Beyond the Veil?” he asked as I rounded the curve at the top of Church Hill.

“I can,” I replied. I’d been planning on taking a different street to the hotel, but it was easy enough to detour. “It’s maybe an extra minute or two.”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

Beyond the Veil, co-owned by Ward Campion and Mason Manning, occupied the ground floor of a commercial space that might once have been a residential building, and which had converted the top floor—which haddefinitelybeen residential at some point—into the offices for the Lost Lineage Foundation, their partner company owned by the exceedingly rich woman they worked with.

Ward, the founder of Beyond the Veil and a powerful medium, often showed up to my homicide scenes—particularly the weird and messy ones. He’d more than once pulled some really spectacularly terrible cases. My least favorite so far had been the creepy-as-hell basement cult room that had almost killed Piper Emory, one of my fellow techs who had promptly quit as soon as she had the breath to do so.

I didn’t blame her. I’d been upstairs, organizing the collection of evidence from the rest of the house, including blood-stained clothing and tools, when that whole thing had gone down. And then, because all of a sudden the team down there hadallbecome victims, I’d had to take charge of evidence collection in the aftermath.

I still have nightmares about the blackenedthingthat had DNA-matched as human that we’d brought out in a cooler because it was too gooey to be contained by a body bag.

Don’t get me wrong—I like Ward. I like his husband, Mason, too, although Ward was a lot more useful at murder scenes. Some of the other techs get annoyed when Ward shows up, either because they’re just generally creeped out about the idea of a medium talking to ghosts or because he puts tire tracks all over everything—or both—but he knows his way around a crime scene and will do his best not to roll over anything particularly important. But they haven’t figured out a way to put booties on a wheelchair yet, so we just have to deal with it.

He's also good enough at his job that nobody argues when Dan Maza, the current lead detective on all Arcane cases since Hart quit, calls him.

Elliot was in Richmond because he was making Ward a table—some sort of ritual thing that I knew next to nothing about, but that apparently required someone particularly skilled at… carving? Or something? I don’t know much about either woodworking or summoning ghosts. I’m a decent hand at helping with basic projects, like a fence or building a dog house or something like that, but nobody would ever mistake me for a real carpenter.

“It’s right there,” I said, pointing across Elliot’s lap toward the darkened front glass windows of the office. “There’s parking in the back for the staff, and they’ve got a little kitchen and stuff. And a coffee-maker.”

I didn’t work with the company itself often, but every now and then I’d drop something off for Rayn Alverno—the company’s touch-psychic—to handle, or, more rarely, I’d have to bring in a piece of bone for Ward to identify if wecouldn’t get a match with DNA or dental records. He’s not a fan of that, but he was definitely happier about it when it was clean or old bone than when it was a fresh corpse.

I didn’t blame him for that, either.

“It’s… cute,” was what Elliot said.