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Zhou let out a long breath, his expression thoughtful and crimson eyes sharp. “I will do what I can,” he replied. “Although the equipment I have here may not be sensitive enough to catch all of the possibilities. We should be able to rule out most major kidney diseases, for instance, as a potential cause.”
I rubbed my hands together. “Great.”
Anubis made a weird grumbling sound.
I looked down at him. “Sorry, bud. But you’re gonna have to get poked a bit.”
The dog let out a huffing sigh.
* * *
Zhou promisedto call once he had results back, although he’d warned me it could be a couple days, since most veterinary labs weren’t in a huge hurry—unless I wanted to drop about a grand on a rush order. I’d hesitated, and Anubis had growled his response to that. So we had a day or two to wait for what would hopefully be some answers.
In the meantime, I was at a complete dead end on this case, so I was trying to jostle something niggling in the back of my brain loose by going through old open case files.
I pulled out the bottom drawer of my desk, a long file drawer that held my unsolved cases. The outside of it had a laminated card that read ICE CREAM DRAWER in blocky, black Sharpie with a little ice cream cone drawn next to it. That label had come with me from Milwaukee, written by Elliot when he’d once asked me about the files. I’d told him that was the cold case drawer, and he’d cracked a joke about that being where you put the ice cream.
Hence, the ice cream drawer.
Anubis had noticed the label when I’d reached for the handle and whined at me, cocking his head to the side to fix me with his brown eye. I’d explained the whole story to the dog in a low voice, and he’d responded to it with a soft snort, which I thought meant he found it amusing. Or he thought I was a dumbass. Either was equally plausible.
I flipped through the cases, past Anderson, Mary, a homeless woman found dead with track marks in her arm under the bridge down by the river; and Dunning, Jeremy, who’d been stabbed repeatedly and left to bleed to death behind an old, empty bus station; to hover over Harding, James, which I pulled out.
James Harding, an orc artist who had been killed by the Antiquus Ordo Arcanum, was an open case not because we didn’t know who’d killed him, but because he’d been abducted and given to the Ordo by a cop who was still active on the force. Raj Parikh was, in theory, working on it.
In the meantime, though, that cop was still working, much to my annoyance and Ward’s, since Ward had been the one who had summoned the dead Mr. Harding. The problem, according to Raj, was that we didn’t have any evidence besides a drawing created by a dead man to identify the cop in question, one Darren Shelby.
I tapped my fingers on the surface of my desk as my eyes skimmed over the altered statement Ward and I had gotten Harding to write. A statement that skipped over the whole part about Shelby’s involvement. The real one, the one with all the gory details, had been turned over to Raj. But because everyone knew I was a rat who would turn in his own kind, and I was fully aware that the assholes I worked with probably had no compunctions about breaking into my desk and going through my files, I kept this censored version in my desk.
I was the elf brought in as a diversity hire, which meant that as far as most of my asshole colleagues were concerned, my better-than-average clearance rate meant jack-shit because I was the pointy-eared sonofabitch who was somehow cheating to make myself look better. But, let me tell you, it was me they came crying to the fucking second a case showed the least sign of magic.
And I closed more of them than I left open. Never enough of them, mind you. Not for them—because even if I closed all of them it wouldn’t be enough—and not for me. Because even one ice cream case was one too many.
I picked up my phone and called Raj.
“What do you want, Hart?”
“Harding,” I said.
I heard him sigh. “I’m trying, Hart. Ranks of steel over there.” What he meant was that all of Shelby’s coworkers were closing ranks and not giving up a damn thing.
“So you’re letting it freeze?”
“Not yet,” Raj replied. “I’m building a pattern.”
“What kind?”
“I’ve got two other possibles, both cold. One missing shifter where the victim’s mother was on the phone when the victim said he was getting pulled over, although I don’t have a specific tie to Shelby. Another missing Nid with a witness report that stated an orc matching her description was seen by a motorist outside her car with a cop on Route 1.”
I thought for a second. My stomach churned at the thought of calling Ward again, although I knew it was because of my own unresolved guilt issues that had nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with me. I sucked it up. “I can put Ward on it if you give me victim names,” I said. Because I really am trying to be less of a total dick.
Raj let out a soft rumbling sound, thinking. “Might be a problem if it comes from the same medium,” he said.
“Ward didn’t ID Shelby. He’s never fuckingmetShelby.”
“He got the picture.”
“Drawn by adead man.”
