Page 54 of The Turning of the Tables

And then I sat and stared at the rows and columns, looking for something that had been missed.

Don’t get me wrong—I was under absolutely no delusions that I was going to be the one to find something that would crack this case open. I’m a lab rat, not a detective. I get paid to push buttons and interpret little dots and numbers so that people who actually understand psychology and the criminal mind can do the work of figuring out the murderer’s identity and then determining how to build the evidence against them so that they could be stopped.

But I couldn’t help but want to actually look—just in case.

We had three different victims, two women, one man. Two of them white, one light-skinned Black. Three different age ranges, but all working-age adults. One dental office assistant, one barista, one homemaker.

One thing they did have in common was the fact that none of them had anyone else at home waiting—both Johnston and Haverill were divorced, Volkov was unmarried. I didn’t know if he had a significant other of any variety, or if the women did, either, for that matter. That information wasn’t the kind of thing they shared with CSIs. I only knew that Johnston and Haverill lived alone because their homes were the crime scenes. Quincy and I hadn’t been called out to Volkov’s apartment—not all teams specialized in homicide forensics, which meant that when there were bodies, we were one of a handful of teams that got called out. There were twice as many available for non-homicide crime scenes of various kinds—including technological, accounting, facial reconstruction, and several other branches.

Basically, Quincy and I were qualified to deal with the squishy stuff. So was Emil Favreau, our resident entomologist, but everybody had to share Emil. Lucky for all of us, he was gregarious and outgoing, and his wife made amazing vegan cookies. Not just for me—Hasan Kumar in the computer lab was an actual vegan.

I made myself refocus on the evidence we had.

All the victims had been hit by someone who was packing a significant amount of muscle—and if the shoe-prints were any indication, we were looking at an adult human male. There hadn’t been enough damage for an orc or a vamp or shifter with shoes that size—and the shoe impressions in the Johnston house were a probable match for the impressions in the grass at the Haverill residence. Any of the Nids with feet that size would have pulverized the victims’ skulls. They couldn’t get more dead, but the damage we’d seen was likely caused by a human male.

Probably around my height—give or take a few inches and a dozen or so pounds.

It raised the question of why ahumanwould want to infect people with Arcana. The killer could be an Arc-human, certainly, but it seemed more likely to me—although it wasn’t like I was an expert—that it probably was a regular human.

I’d thought about it quite a bit, and the only possible reasons I could think of were two opposite extremes. One, the killer was an Arc-human trying to cause an outbreak to increase the numbers of Arcs and Nids in the population. Or two, which at the moment I was more inclined to think was the real reason, the killer was one of those crackpots who thought that Arcana was a divine purge and was trying to help get rid of all those who were unworthy, leaving behind a pure human stock.

I wanted to be an optimist. But the longer I was alive and working homicide, the less optimistic I tended to be.

I got up, grunting a little as I limped my way over to the trash can to throw out my empty food containers. The PurePrep chirped on my halting journey back, immediately sending my pulse through the roof.

I forced myself to walk over slowly, trying to prepare myself for a disappointing lack of clarity.

I looked at the screen.

All three were a match.

15

SETH MAYS

Thank you—the chair leg is perfect.

ELLIOT CRANE

Of course it is.

:)

I laughedand shook my head. I’d have thought that Elliot was being egotistical, but I’d seen his craftsmanship. He really was that good—to my inexperienced eye, anyway. But he’d managed to somehow exactly match the chair’s color and tone, even scuffing it a little bit so that it looked as though it belonged with the other three.

It had been in a little box waiting for me on the kitchen counter when I’d gotten home—a little early today, to make up for my late night last night. I’d also spent half of today talking to Maza, who had actually come to me for once. So of course I’d also showed him my spreadsheet, even though I’d been nervous that he’d get irritated with me for doing his job. I liked him, and I didn’t particularly want him to be angry with me.

I also just really don’t like it when people yell at me. Or talk to me in a way that isn’t technically yelling, but is also clearly yelling. I’m an extremely non-confrontational person. I prefer to keep my head down and smooth things over whenever I can. It’s easier that way. And less stressful.

But Maza had reacted like I’d just given him tickets to Disney World, which was definitely a pleasant surprise. He’d asked me to send it all to him, and I’d happily done so. It was about the most accomplished—the mostuseful—I’d felt in a long time. I’d done something that would help us to catch whoever had done this to Quincy. To stop them, hopefully.

So I was feeling good when I got home. Better when I opened the long box containing a single, perfectly matching chair leg.

And then my phone rang.

For a moment, I wondered if it might be Elliot. If my evening was going to be spent in a long, illicit phone call that would culminate with an orgasm almost as good as if he were physically in the room with me.

But it was Detective Clements.