Page 52 of The Turning of the Tables

You always know how to reach me.

Thanks.

I let out a deep breath, trying to calm down and mostly failing. Quincy's sore throat—and subsequent positive test results—had ratcheted up everyone’s stress levels. I’d gotten texts from Maza, Tierney, half the lab staff, and even Schitikova. The lab staff wanted to know how I was feeling andwanted to coordinate a pool to send meal deliveries to Quincy at her house. I’d chipped in.

I sent a quick text to Noah letting him know I was clear, then another to Quincy, the latter of which I followed up with an offer to drop off a treat or something to keep herself entertained, like knitting or puzzles or something.

Puzzles actually sounds nice, she sent back.

Puzzles it is!I replied.

On my lunch break, I stopped off at One Eyed Jacques, the local game store, to buy some puzzles, then ran down the street to World of Mirth to look at stuffed animals, because that’s what Elliot had suggested. They had bears, bunnies, puppies, and kittens. All the normal things.

I saw a stuffed little fox, which was cute, but then I saw the possum. Quincy had spent the better part of a half hour cooing about the possum that lived behind her apartment in the alley once, and I’d teased her about her new pet for days. Even now, months later, whenever a cat or raccoon or squirrel bumped into something in an alley while we were working, I’d look at her and ask if she brought her pet possum.

Don’t ask me why, but she loves the ugly things.

So possum it was.

I stopped at the neighborhood Kroger and got her a carton of her favorite ice cream—rocky road—some Hershey’s Hugs and Kisses, and a six-pack of 7-Up bottles, because that’s what you were supposed to drink when you were sick. Or, at least, that’s what we’d always had growing up when we were too sick to go to school.

I left it all wrapped up in a brown grocery bag outside her door, then texted her to let her know it was there.

A few minutes later, a text came through.OMG thank you SO MUCH! Hes SO CUTE!!!

I smiled to myself. At least I’d made her happy.

I hoped she didn’t rip it apart.

Way to go me, ruining my own mood.

On top of that, I had the exciting bonus of now feeling deeply awkward about having emotionally unloaded on Elliot—who had been very kind and patient, but I really wasn’t his problem. We weren’t dating—because Rule Two and Rule Three—and we weren’t even really friends. I didn’t know much about him at all. Not even his birthday, which he had refused to tell me, although in a polite way by avoiding rather than refusing outright. And that said nothing about any of the other sorts of things you were supposed to know about your friends, like their favorite ice cream flavor, for instance.

The fact that I wanted tobeElliot’s friend in spite of his crystal-clear speech about ground rules that had established that we were only in it for the sex should tell you that I’m very bad at following directions. You wouldn’t think so, given my career choice, which, for the record, involves me doing a lot of very meticulous things in very specific orders, but here we are. People, including yours truly, are inherently contradictory creatures.

I slumped my way back into the lab, sinking down onto my stool and bringing up the spreadsheet of lab tasks that were on the docket.

Our lab manager, Joyelle Simpson, was the queen of spreadsheets. She had a single running one that we all shared, and it had more color-coded markers than anything I’d ever seen. You’d think it would be confusing, but, instead, it gave us a clear sense of what needed to be done for all the active cases running through the crime lab, if one specific person was assigned to them, and, if not, what equipment was needed so that someone who had free timecould do it. She even had them coded with priorities, so that the most important things got done first. She updated it, which meant that things went up in priority depending on how long they’d been with us—and nothing was supposed to take more than two weeks to get processed,ever.

I liked the spreadsheet.

I don’t like following directions, but I love spreadsheets—I’m an enigma.

I’d spentmost of my day on the Arcanavirus killer case for Maza—Joyelle had assigned me to those, specifically, although she’d emailed me to say that if I didn’t want to work the case for personal reasons, she’d understand. I told her that I’d argue with her if she tried to take it away from me.

Tox screens on Jessica Haverill, the victim who’d unwittingly given Quincy Arcana, had come back clean, unlike our Belle Isle victim. I frowned down at the report, not sure what to do with it. I didn’t really have to do anything except file it with the RPD, but I felt an obligation to this case and its victims. I wanted to behelpful, not just a source of seemingly unconnected facts.

Because this onewaspersonal.

I went through what I knew.

Miles Volkov had been drugged, taken up the hill on Belle, and brained with a rock. Jessica Haverill had been attacked at her own door, hit across the skull with something like a tire iron or crow bar. And Lisa Johnston, our first victim who’d tested positive for Arcana, had been beaten so savagely that her blood had ended up everywhere. If it hadn’t been for the Arcanavirus thread linking themtogether, we likely wouldn’t have thought they bore any relation to one another.

I wondered if that was on purpose. While I wasn’t an expert the way a detective or profiler might be, I did know a bit about serial killer patterns—most serial killers replicate their kills. The method and means are most of the point of killing, so the fact that this killer was deviating from a set pattern was unusual. Sure, blunt force trauma to the skull was what had killed all of them, but the weapon was different, the use of sedatives was different—only Volkov had been drugged—and the location was different. Two had died in their homes, one inside, one in the doorway. The third would have seemed to have been a murder of convenience—outside, with a rock—if not for the sedatives in his system.

The only thing they had in common was having active Arcana at the time of their deaths.

And maybe it was coincidence and Maza was wrong to connect them.