AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I pulled a police-issue, navy blue filtered mask over my face to counteract the acrid burn of the tear gas that the responders had unleashed on the crowd to clear the area around the body.
Judging from the blood on the pavement, my dead man wasn’t the only victim, and I could only hope that whoever the rest of the blood belonged to didn’t also end up on my docket. Off to the side, inside the ring formed by police in riot gear, Dan Maza—who’d come out with me—was speaking with some crying witnesses, dark sunglasses concealing his eyes. I crouched beside the body, my ears ringing from the yells and screams of the crowd and the occasional blare of a bullhorn as somebody tried to keep people clear of the scene.
I’d had to squeeze through the line of uniforms in riot gear, and they hadn’t been too gentle about letting me through, either. Normally the glares of cops don’t bother me, but here, now, they sent chills running down my spine. I got the distinct impression that not a few of the people ostensibly there to keep the crowd from rushing me so I could do my job wouldn’t have cried very many tears if I ended up joining the victim on the blacktop.
I took some photos with my phone, knowing that it would likely be a while before CSI was able to get here to document anything, although I really would have appreciated Mays’s friendly face right about now.
The victim had several stab wounds and a few that looked more like slashing rather than stabbing injuries, although the ME would have to confirm that for certain. The vic was youngish, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, his skin that waxy shade of bluish grey that happens when you bleed to death.
I took a couple more photos, documenting the position of the body, then pulled on a pair of gloves and went looking for a wallet and ID. I found it in his front right pocket, smeared with blood that had soaked down from his perforated torso. Grimacing, I opened the wallet.
The driver’s license photo was pretty obviously the victim. Paul Schmidt, age thirty-one. Opposite his license in the wallet was his medium certification.
Fuck. Given the fact that this was an MFM rally, I couldn’t help but assume that somebody had known—or found out—that he was an Arc and targeted him deliberately. Well, maybe nothim, but some Arc. For some MFM assholes, any Arc or Nid was a target.
I stood and, pulling my gloves off inside out, crossed the pavement to join Dan Maza with the witnesses. He turned to me when I walked up. “Detective Hart, this is Liz Carpenter and Theresa Morris.”
The first woman was short and curvy with close-cut red hair and thick glasses over bloodshot blue eyes. Her pale cheeks were flushed with a combination of emotion and sun exposure. The second was taller and thinner, her skin a light mocha and her hair a mass of thick dark curls. She had on sunglasses, and her arms were crossed protectively over her chest.
“Ms. Carpenter, Ms. Morris.” I can be polite when the circumstances require it. This was one of those instances. “Did you know Mr. Schmidt?” I inquired.
Liz Carpenter burst into tears.
Theresa Morris nodded. “We—we came down to counter-protest,” she rasped, her voice hoarse, whether from emotion or yelling back at the surging crowd, I couldn’t tell. It didn’t really matter. “We—” Her eyes skimmed nervously over the line of riot cops holding back the mob.
“Mr. Schmidt was a medium,” I said smoothly. “Should I assume you’re both also Arc-human?” I could tell at least one of them wassomething, but they were standing close enough together that I couldn’t tell if it was one or both. Whatever they were wasn’t particularly powerful.
Morris shook her head. “I’m not,” she said. “But Liz is—” Her eyes darted over to the crying woman. “Liz is a shifter.”
I nodded once. “Please be careful, Ms. Carpenter. Now is… not a great time to be a shifter in this city.” It was about the best I could do as a warning, although it felt pathetically inadequate given the circumstances.
She nodded anyway.
“What can you tell me about what happened?”
Morris looked at Dan, her brow furrowed.
“I’m sure you just told Detective Maza here what you know, but it would help me if you would go over it again for me,” I explained. Standard procedure, both to check the details of the witness’s statement and to make sure we had multiple people who heard them.
Between the two of them, they gave me the story—they’d decided to come down to counter-protest, Morris wanting to support her friends, who were angry about the MFM’s recent push for anti-Arcanid and anti-Arc policies. Schmidt worked as an accountant and had contracted Arcana only a couple years ago—he hadn’t really been into politics or Nid-Arc rights until it became a very real part of his reality.
As irritating as I found self-serving activism, it was a common enough mode of entry into social causes for a lot of people. Everything seemed reasonable or fine until you got to experience bigotry for yourself. I hated to say it, but it was extra true if the person in question—like Paul Schmidt—was a white cisman. Trust me, been there. Because there, but for the grace of Elliot Crane, who spent most of our childhoods calling me out on my cis white dude bullshit, went I.
Morris had been involved in the AARL, the Arcanid-Arc-human Rights League, for years, despite being the only human in the trio. Carpenter had recently moved to the city and joined the local AARL branch, which is how she’d met Schmidt and Morris.
Once they’d gotten to the protest, Carpenter had asked to leave, made nervous by the rage she was seeing on the other side of the barriers put up between the protestors and the counter-protestors. Morris and Schmidt had wanted to stay—wanted to do good.
For Schmidt, that had meant confronting the protestors directly.
Adrenaline will make people do some seriously stupid shit. Like get in the face of someone screaming about how magic was a sign of corruption or sin or genetic defect or some other form of inferiority. I’ve heard a veritable laundry list about why, precisely, I’d ended up with pointy ears and lavender eyes.
And that’s what Schmidt had done—he’d gotten confrontational with a group of MFM supporters who had pushed through the barrier designed to contain them. Yelling had happened, and then screaming, and then Schmidt had fallen to the ground gasping and bleeding.
And of course neither Morris nor Carpenter had been able to identify the person or persons who’d stabbed him. That would be far too helpful, and the universe clearly hated my guts, so I wasn’t going to be that lucky. Maybe—just maybe—somebody had been recording on their phone and we’d find a story posted on social media. But I wasn’t going to hold my breath.
It took another twenty minutes before the CSI team managed to get their van in through the crowds and barricades, and I saw Mays, his brow creased in a frown, crossing the pavement toward me. He stopped and looked down.
“We’re not going to get this one, are we?”
