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“Sure,” I replied, my tone resigned.
Thanks, universe.
He lifted the phone to his ear. “Standingbear here.” At once, his expression went almost too still, as if he was trying his best to keep me from guessing what might be passing through his mind. “Yes. Got it. I’ll be right there.”
Well, he had warned me he was always on call, although I wanted to groan at the timing of this one. If it had come through even a minute later….
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
Calvin nodded, expression stony. “I’m afraid so. That was Ned, one of my deputies. Athene Kappas was just killed in a car crash.”
13
The Hand of Fate
Lights flaredblue and red along the steep slopes that rose above Highway 60 as it wound its way out of town to the west. The ambulance was already here, although there was no point in taking poor Athene to the hospital. Her body lay on a gurney behind the ambulance, covered in a sheet, thank the Goddess. To one side stood Travis Cox, Globe’s on-and-off-again Uber/Lyft driver.
“I don’t know what happened, man,” he said. He was a gangly guy maybe ten years older than me, with sandy hair and a scrubby beard and the slightly unfocused gaze of someone who liked to smoke a lot of weed in his spare time. “It’s, like, something just grabbed hold of the car and rolled it.”
Cold trickled down my spine. I thought once again of my worries back at the apartment, that something supernatural was at work here, leaving a trail of death in its wake.
Calvin stood next to Chief Lewis, both men clearly not thrilled at the prospect of having to work together. Technically, this stretch of road was in Lewis’s jurisdiction, since it lay within Globe’s town limits, but because Athene had been part of the investigation into Lucien Dumond’s death, Calvin was also involved.
And that meant the two police departments had to work together.
Calvin had brought me along because I begged him. No, I’m not proud of that, but the instant I heard Athene was dead, I knew something hinky had to be going on. Luckily, he agreed that my witchy insights might be of some use, although he warned me to stay out of the way.
“I’m going to tell Lewis that you’re there because you’re a friend of the victim and her only advocate in town, but you still need to make sure you don’t interfere with anything,” he said.
I promised I’d behave myself, and that was why I stood off to the side and listened, trying my best to look as inoffensive as possible. Chief Lewis had shot me a gimlet glare as I got out of Calvin’s police SUV, but since he hadn’t said anything, I figured I’d been given the green light to stay.
“What do you mean, ‘something’ grabbed hold of the car?” Lewis asked, clearly displeased by Travis’s description of the accident.
“What I said, man.” Travis ran a hand through his stringy hair and then crossed his arms. He kept his gaze resolutely away from the still body on the gurney, or the crumpled wreckage of what used to be a Subaru Forester. “Like, I was driving down the highway — doing the speed limit — and then the back wheels started to skid. Next thing I knew, something jerked on the rear end of the car, and we flipped. Rolled two, three times. I can’t remember for sure.”
“Why wasn’t Ms. Kappas wearing her seatbelt?” Calvin asked next.
Because that was why Travis was still standing upright, no worse for wear except a few bumps on his forehead and the beginnings of a laceration from the seat belt visible against the side of his neck, and Athene was on her way to the morgue. When the car rolled, her neck was broken.
Just thinking about it made me slightly queasy.
“I think she dropped her phone,” Travis said. “I heard her swear, and I think I saw her bend down to get it but she couldn’t reach it. So she undid her seatbelt — and that was when the car started to act weird.”
I fought back a shiver. It sure sounded to me as though someone…or something…had put a hex on the car. However, I knew I’d better keep that theory to myself — at least until Calvin and I could talk in private. I didn’t even want to think how the hard-jawed Chief Lewis would react if I tried to tell him that Travis’s Subaru had been cursed.
Calvin nodded, as if satisfied with the explanation Travis had provided. Lewis, scowled, though, and said, “You been smoking, Travis?”
“No,” he replied at once in wounded tones. “Not that I don’t have the right,” he added, as if he wanted the police chief to understand that he hadn’t abstained because of fear of the law. Like California, Arizona had legalized recreational marijuana use, but that didn’t mean its residents had a license to drive while high. “But Ms. Kappas had contacted me though the app and let me know she wanted a pickup in a few hours, and so I made sure I was sharp and ready to go.”
I had my doubts about how “sharp” Travis was even when he wasn’t partaking, but I could tell he wasn’t lying. And apparently, Chief Lewis also seemed to accept his story, because he nodded and said, “All right. We’ll tow the vehicle in and inspect it, see what kind of mechanical problem caused it to fail like that.”
“Wasn’t no problem,” Travis protested. “I just had a full-on inspection only two months ago. Brakes, suspension, tires…everything was fine. There’s nothing wrong with my car.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then we won’t find anything,” Lewis replied. His gaze shifted to Calvin, and I saw his mouth go flat, even as bristles of red flared in his aura. Definitely no love lost there; I had a feeling he griped to his deputies about having to work with an “Injun,” even if he was savvy enough not to repeat that kind of thing in mixed company. “You need anything else, Standingbear?”
“I’ll take a quick look at the vehicle.” Calvin’s voice was brisk, no-nonsense, although he sounded friendly enough as he directed his next words to Travis. “You need a lift home, Travis?”
“If you could,” the other man said. From his obvious relief, I could tell he was much happier getting a lift from Calvin than from Chief Lewis.
