Page 93 of Booked for Murder

“Maybe because I would pass out every time they tried to even show me a picture of the senator? I just got told I wasn’t cleared from being a suspect and to be accessible for questioning—and possibly for trial.”

I feared the investigation would give me a migraine to go with my throbbing foot. “Mom?”

“Ah, yes. I recognize that plaintive whine. You’re tired, you’re cranky, and you don’t want to deal with what you need to deal with, so you would like me to feed you.”

Damn. My mother was out for my blood right along with my pride and dignity. As protesting would only encourage her, I replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Just don’t crawl under the table to have a nap on your pillows. I caught you thinking about it. If you need somewhere to start, profile the murdered senators and figure out what they all have in common outside of that bill, if anything. And then do the same about the ones who haven’t been killed yet. I’ll feed you, but if you don’t do something productive, you’ll guilt eat on top of anxiety eat, and I think we’ve had enough guilt and anxiety in this household for one day.” My mother rose from her seat, circled the table, and kissed my forehead. “Try to behave for the two hours it’ll take me to feed you.”

“I’ll try,” I promised.

Twenty

I don’t want to think about insurance right now.

Everything about the deaths of the senators bugged me. Exsanguinators couldn’t punch a hole in a skull, and after sending Mickey into the kitchen to help my mother, Mr. Tawnlen laid out every picture of the bodies he’d been able to get a hold of. Bradley had a few photographs of Senator Godrin, too, taken on the sly with his cell phone. The hole in Godrin’s head reminded me of a bullet hole, although larger and more jagged around the edges. The other photos, mostly of Senator Tomalin’s body, had similar markings.

“It’s like a gunshot wound but not quite,” I muttered, shaking my head over the inconsistencies between the injuries and what I expected from a bullet tearing through somebody’s skull.

Mr. Tawnlen tapped on the photograph of Senator Tomalin’s head, which had been cleaned to better show the injury. “Right. It very much looks like an exit wound from a distance of no more than fifty yards with a 9mm if you were to restore the jagged sections. From everything I’ve been able to get on the other victims, this is consistent. Something else added extra damage, but it’s possible the damage was done to mask the exit hole.”

“And the entry wound,” Bradley said, grabbing one of the photographs of Senator Tomalin, who had been in his sixties at his time of death. “But what could possibly hide the entry damage from a shooting?”

“An adept using the same type of reconstruction magic used to work on Janette’s foot,” my boss replied. “If you don’t care about how much trauma you inflict on the victim, it is possible to restore flesh, bone, muscle, and brain matter with magical abilities. An adept can do so quickly. Add in an illusionist, and you have a situation where a bullet wound could be masked. It’s something taught in forensic sciences because of a serial killer over twenty years ago, who masked the cause of death in this fashion. But that serial killer was actually three people, including an illusionist, a bone mender, and a shooter. The illusionist shrouded the victim, the shooter took the shot, and the bone mender, Lauley Rivers, was immune to the illusionist’s ability, and he repaired most of the damage to make it harder to solve the crime. They made mistakes, however.”

“What mistakes?” I asked, making a mental note to read into the serial killer—and to determine if our killer was a copycat. “What happened to those killers?”

“The shooter was killed during a standoff with police, the bone mender escaped custody, and the illusionist was killed during an incident in prison.”

“Then it’s possible this mender is partially responsible for the killing?” Meridian asked, wrinkling her nose. “I’m not sure I want to be tangoing with a serial killer who likes scrambling somebody’s brains after killing them.”

“It’s possible,” my boss confirmed, but after a moment, he shrugged. “It’s unlikely, though. He was seventy-two by the time the police identified the group behind the killings, so he’d be in his nineties now. He has—or had—cancer, and he couldn’t treat himself. That is a known limitation to his magic. While all three of them worked together to pick victims, he tended to pick those in the medical industry.”

“Because of his cancer?” I asked.

“In a way. He liked to target those who hampered research that might lead to a cure for his specific type of cancer.” Mr. Tawnlen searched through a stack of papers. “Ah, here it is. Rivers had juxtacortical osteosarcoma, which means the cancer developed on the outer portion of the bone. It metastasized, spreading from his bones to his digestive system, lungs, and stomach. The notation here states it began in his left knee. In good news for him, the cancer spread rate was at a relatively slow pace, but it would eventually kill him without treatment. Chemotherapy and other treatments used at that period of time proved ineffective. While there are some magic-based treatments effective on cancer, the notes I have state he didn’t have the right type of cancer for it to be effective.”

“So, chances are he’s probably dead?” Beatrice asked.

“By now? He is very probably dead unless there was an advancement in cancer treatments I’m not aware of. Even then, he’s probably dead from old age. Outside of checking corpses if cancer was the cause of death, it’s not something I’m well versed in. Truth be told, most cancer patients I autopsied didn’t technically die from their cancer. They died from complications associated with their cancer. Flesh-eating bacteria is a very common cause of death among cancer patients, for example. When I worked in the morgue checking into suspicious deaths, I did try to denote that the cause of death was related to cancer, however. I couldn’t, not always. But I did try.”

Something about my boss’s tone bothered me. “Why is that important?”

“Insurance purposes,” he spat.

Well, shit. That made a disturbing amount of sense, and I regarded my foot with a scowl. “I don’t want to think about insurance right now.”

Bradley, his mother, and his father snorted.

“What? It’s true. I don’t want to think about it.” I pointed at my foot. “This thing creates hundreds of pages of paperwork a year.”

“That thing is your foot, and it will heal,” Bradley’s mother replied. “I don’t doubt the amount of paperwork it has created for you, however. We’ve recently gotten a taste of the paperwork. Some of us dislike it more than others. The insurance angle is an important one, however. Insurance companies will do anything to get out of paying out in case of death. If they can find a loophole to escape making a payment, they will. Many cancer patients, at least in our area, have special policies that pay out a certain amount depending on the cause of death. Some have tried to get out of paying end-of-life benefits to benefactors founded solely on the cause of death being something other than directly cancer.”

My boss nodded. “In the morgue, we would make certain to note if the preliminary cause of death was a complication from cancer. That usually closes those loopholes. It’s pretty easy to tell when the cancer is the underlying cause. Normal, healthy people typically do not die from flesh-eating bacteria. It’s a common issue with cancer patients.”

“If I acquire cancer, please kill me before I get to the flesh-eating bacteria phase,” I muttered.

“It’s an unpleasant way to go,” my boss agreed. “In the case of Rivers, I can think of ten different ways the cancer might have gotten him long before old age took him out—or takes him out. It is, technically, possible he’s still alive. Unlikely, but possible.”