Page 53 of The Turning of the Tables

But I didn’t think so. I couldn’t really tell you why. It wasn’t like I had any special insight. As far as I knew, nobody had checked the DNA strains of the Arcana in the victims—not like one killer would have to somehow use the same strain, either. Maybe they did, though…

I sent off a quick email to Maza to ask him if he wanted me to run a DNA sequence on the virus from each of the three victims. A mismatch wouldn’t really tell us anything—but a match would essentially confirm that all three victims were infected from the same source. And if we had the source, at the very least it would mean that if we found the possible origin, we could test it against that sequence to confirm it.

It was a shot in the dark, but it was a shot. Andsometimes that was better than nothing. At the very least, it would give me something to do that would help me to at least feel like I was doing something for Quincy. I couldn’t help her actually recover, but I could at least help figure out who had done it to her. And drop off puzzles and ice cream.

My email chimed.

Maza had cced Tierney’s office, letting them know I was coming over to pick up blood samples from all three victims. I took that as a yes to my idea, grabbed my office keys, and headed over to the other side of the complex. We—the crime lab—were on one side of the building, while the Office of the Medical Examiner was on the other.

It wasn’t a particularly interesting or eventful journey, so far as journeys went—slightly off-white-to-beige walls, grey tile hallways that opened into grey carpeted offices or other grey tile hallways and rooms, wooden doors, windows into offices from the halls with beige miniblinds, some open, some slitted, some closed.

Very late-twentieth-century-office-chic that had been touched up, but still reflected an aesthetic that was nearly half-a-century out of date. A lot of the little architectural niceties that people used to care about had gone out the window with the pandemic’s arrival—inflation, economic down-turn, and one hell of a boom in work for the ME’s office meant they didn’t have much opportunity to renovate.

Ditto for our side of the building. It wasn’t even a change in decor—just a slight alteration in layout.

Olivia Cartier, her black hair pulled up into a bun that was about three times more elegant than was called-for for a job handling evidence transfers, looked up at me through designer glasses than were a different color than I remembered her having last week.

“New glasses?” I asked her.

“Yeah! You like?”

“I do!” I assured her. They wouldn’t have worked on me in a million years, but on her fine-featured face, they did look good. “You always look great.”

The corners of her eyes turned up, her cheekbones lifting the top of her mask as she smiled at me. “Aw, thanks, Seth.”

I picked up evidence from the ME’s office often enough that Olivia and I were on a first-name basis, not that we knew anything else about each other. Well, okay, I knew she really loved Oreos, and I’d brought her a little package of them last year at Christmas. She’d given me some sugar cookies back that I’d foisted off on Quincy, because I hadn’t wanted to ask if she’d made them with butter. Sometimes a little butter was okay in things like cookies or breads, but I tend to be on the cautious side, so I usually just avoided anything that even might have the tiniest little bit of dairy in it.

“It’s only the truth,” I told her, winking.

She laughed, then turned in her chair to grab a little box that had six vials of blood sitting in its custom slots. “Here’s your present for the day,” she told me.

“That was quick,” I remarked. I’d expected to have to wait at least a couple minutes. Or like a half hour.

Olivia’s expression grew immediately serious. “Well, you know. We want our Quincy back.” Quincy might actually have spent more time over here than I did—not only was she doing the crime scene photography class, but she was also thinking about going back to school.

Olivia put the little box on the desk between us, then put a tablet beside it. I signed the screen, then took the box with its vials of Arcana-infected blood.

“Me, too,” I agreed, the pit in my stomach heavy as Iturned around and began the short walk back to my side of the building. It had been two days, and I already missed having her on scenes. Of course, I’d gone for longer than that without having Quincy here—people go on vacations, for instance, or have to travel for other reasons. And sometimes one of us would have to be swapped out to a different crime scene because someone else was out or sick. But that was different. In those cases, you had a pretty good idea of when the other person would be back, or they were still around the building.

This was harder. Because it was possible—although I was hopeful that it wouldn’t be the case—that she wouldn’t come back at all. Death was the horrible shadow always lurking in the back of my mind, but she might survive and be seriously disabled. Or she might be psychologically scarred and incapable of returning to work. Or she might end up as a vampire or a ghoul, and they might not want her working crime scenes with active blood spatter.

There was one vampire homicide detective, Detective Rhodes, but he worked cold cases, not fresh ones. Since cold cases didn’t have crime scenes that needed processing, I hadn’t ever worked with him. I was pretty sure that the reason he worked cold cases was because he was a vampire—but it’s not like I’d ever had the opportunity to ask him, so maybe he liked cold cases. I kinda doubted it, though.

It tookthe rest of the afternoon to extract the viral DNA, working overtime—there were a handful of us still there at six, and me and Craig Hanson by eight when I finally put the three viral DNA samples into the PurePrep. That meantI had about an hour and a half before I’d be able to give Maza his answer.

My stomach growled, reminding me that I’d barely eaten lunch—a bagel with vegan butter—and that it was already past dinnertime, and it was only going to be later by the time the PurePrep finished doing its thing. I put in an order at Thai Studio, then got to work on some of the paperwork that would need to go Maza and the DA’s office along with the results of the viral DNA match. I’d leave out everything except the specific results—to be filled in when the PurePrep finished—and I might actually leave work before eleven.

At least Noah worked until three, so I didn’t need to text him. Despite the fact that we were both independent adults, Noah always insisted that he knew where I was—and, in his defense, he always told me where he was and until when. I was a little harder to put a clock on, since crime scenes didn’t exactly come with regular hours, but I did my best.

We’d been slowly processing other evidence—like the clay I was getting cross-checked against the Virginia soil typology databases to see if I could get any closer thanGeneral Piedmont Region—High Concentration Iron Oxide Clay. More sophisticated machinery could cross-check over two hundred different particulates against soil samples cataloged at the city and county levels. We also didn’t own those machines, so I was expecting to hear back from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation at some point in the next day or two.

What I was trying to do was create a coherent picture using all the evidence we had. Trying to figure out if there were other common threads—besides the Arcana itself—between the bodies and particulate evidence. Anything to provide connections or give some clue as to who might havebeen responsible. Tierney had sent over skin swabs, saliva swabs, blood for tox screens, stomach contents, clothing… and we’d tested pretty much everything.

So I got to work on a spreadsheet that would let me aggregate all the data we had.

My phone buzzed about twenty minutes in, letting me know my Thai food had arrived outside. I grabbed my keys, made sure my ID was still on me so I could get back into the building, and ran out to get my crispy tofu and chicken pad thai and gyoza from the driver.

The food was hot, greasy, and delicious—exactly what take-out Thai food should be, and the next hour or so of paperwork was considerably less mind-numbing, simply because I was slowly working my way through a giant container of pad thai while I typed in descriptions, dates, times, and other results.