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Damn.
“Doc,” I began, the thought forming itself in my head as I spoke, “Julian fucking Vidal is a witch.”
He went very still. “Did Izar think he might have taken the pendant?” the orc asked.
I sighed, tugging on my braid. “What she said was that he wouldn’t, several times. She fingered her mother-in-law.”
“Is the mother-in-law a witch?” Ward asked.
“One would assume,” Doc answered.
“One fucking would,” I confirmed.
“So we bring this Izar woman back in to ask her… what, exactly?” Beck wanted to know.
I exchanged a look with Doc. “Well,” the orc replied, “we didn’t ask about specific ritual uses for the pendant. But if there’s a chance she really isourXipe Totec—” I’d explained what the pendant was of earlier “—then we probably want her to know that we know—to get her to tell useverything.”
I pulled up my email to send a message when my phone, sitting face-up on my desk—buzzed, the screen lighting up with a picture of Dan Maza grinning at me over the rim of a beer.
I picked it up. “Dan.”
“You at work?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Grab your boss and your other boss and get to the address I’m about to text you ASAP,” he answered, then hung up. My phone buzzed in my hand, and I pulled up the address.
“Dan needs us,” I reported to the three people and one ghost in my office.
“All of us?” Ward asked.
“He said my boss and my other boss.”
“Good,” Beck replied. “Because I’ve got a swanky thing at the Jefferson in an hour, and crime scenes takeforeverto process.” She tossed her black hair, the gold and navy crystal of her earrings sparkling. Then she grinned. “But you boys have fun.”
I’m pretty sure all three of us—four, if you counted Archie—rolled our eyes at that one.
* * *
Dan was hovering,shifting from foot to foot in the doorway of the apartment building—a walk-up not unlike mine, although over by Byrd Park, a handful of miles from where I lived in the Museum District. When I pulled up, Doc’s truck behind me, Dan ran down the stairs, handing us our consulting badges before we’d had a chance to even say hello.
“What’s going on?” I asked. His nervousness was making me anxious. He also looked like hell, not that even I was tactless enough to say so to his face. But it was pretty damn obvious he hadn’t been getting eight regular hours—or probably even six or seven—of sleep, either. I wasn’t going to judge. Pot, kettle, and all that.
“Victim seems to be one Vito Landa. No obvious bullet, but he appears to have been shot. I want to get you in there and get eyes on this before someone pulls it,” Dan replied, his voice stressed. His normally decently-kempt hair was too long and sticking out in little clumps, like he’d been tugging on it and maybe hadn’t managed a shower today. I also counted a handful of grey hairs in among the black to go with the dark under-eye bruising on his tan skin. Been there, doing that—my eyes were ringed with purple often enough, and the only reason I wouldn’t ever go grey is because my hair is already snow-white.
Feeling both guilty and sympathetic, I followed Dan up the stairs after Doc refused my help in moving Ward, not that there was anything I could do to help Dan that I wasn’t already doing. Or maybe there was, but I didn’t know that I had the mental capacity to help him when I could barely keep my own shit duct-taped together. It didn’t make me feel much better about it, but I felt like it was a better idea to know my own limits than to crash and burn and drag other people with me.
Once in the building proper, we went into one of the ground floor units, its door gaping open, to find Mays crouching down beside the victim, a perfect hole in the corpse’s forehead.
Fucking hell.
But at the same time…
This was a chance for us to get a jump on things before we got thrown off yet another Ordo case.
I turned around, my mouth open to ask Ward to summon our victim’s ghost and start by asking about connections to the Ordo or the Culhua or any of our previous victims—
“On it, Hart,” the medium told me, his eyes directed toward the corner of the room where I assumed the dead man was floating.
