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When Mays had texted me this morning about meeting for lunch and bringing ‘presents,’ I showed up with bells on. Well, not bells, literally, but barbeque had to count for something.
“Thanks for this,” Mays said, gesturing with his sandwich.
“Least I could do,” I replied, skimming over Bazan’s autopsy report. “Does Dan know?”
Mays shrugged. “Not explicitly, but he basically had steam coming out of his ears when I ran up a lab report.” He took another bite. “So, no, he didn’taskme to, and I didn’tsayI was going to pass these on, but let’s just say I’m not the only one who wants these cases actually solved.”
That was fair. I nodded, my mouth full of burrito. “What else can you tell me about the Whitehead scene?” I asked, once I’d swallowed.
“Not a lot,” Mays admitted. “Face down in the front hall, bullet hole, no bullet, no exit wound.”
I frowned. “Was he shot in the back of the head?”
“Nope, forehead. Just like Faith Oldham.”
I stared at him for a moment. “Then why the fuck was he found face-down?”
“The fifty-million-dollar question.”
“Who found him?” I asked.
“Dog walker. Called immediately. Didn’t touch anything—which we confirmed by taking her fingerprints. They were on the exterior door handle and the light switch—that’s it.”
I nodded again, putting down my burrito to take notes on my phone. “Anything obvious missing?”
“Nope. Cash and cards still in the wallet in his pocket.”
“Any offices that got trashed?” I asked, thinking of the Oldham house. Bazan’s home office had been a mess—but it looked like a messy office, not a trashed one. Mays’s team had gone through it anyway.
“Andthisis why you were paid the big detective bucks.”
“Big is perhaps a relative term,” I remarked wryly. Especially since Ward and Doc actually paid me more, which was honestly a little sad. “Tell me about the office.”
Mays shrugged. “We didn’t really find anything to speak of,” he replied. “And it was hard to tell if anything was missing—nothing obvious, anyway.”
“But if I hadn’t noticed the magical cabinet in the Oldham house, we wouldn’t have noticed that, either, I’d bet.” I took another bite of my burrito. “I don’t suppose Dan called in Bowman or let Doc look at it?”
Mays shook his head. “Nope. And I don’t think I can break you into the Whitehead house to search that office, either.”
I sighed. “Definitely not legally.” One of the benefits of having been a Nid as the lead detective for magical cases was that I knew when there was active magic involved because it made my skin tingle. Dan was a good detective, but he was a regular old human with the magical sensitivity of a rock. If there had been a magical hidden compartment in Whitehead’s office, he’d never have known. Not without me or Doc or Bowman doing a once-over on it.
“I don’t suppose anybody said anything about getting a warrant for Bazan’s office at the firm?” I asked. I wasn’t really expecting Mays to know. Usually CSIs showed up when somebody needed a scene processed—they didn’t serve or secure warrants.
Mays snorted. “Above my paygrade,” he said.
I nodded again.
“But,” Mays cut in, a grin spreading over his features. “There was also a boot-print outside Whitehead’s house in a planter with a perfect sight-line…ifWhitehead had been on his back.”
This was exciting. “You sure?”
“Through one of those fancy-pants stained glass side windows next to the door.”
“Nice. Mays, you are the fucking best. Now—likely gender? weight?”
He laughed. “Men’s size twelve, probably about six feet, likely a little over two hundred pounds, but not by much.”
I wrote all this down. Annoyingly, it was more or less a description of the average adult American male. On the up side, we’d eliminated about half the population—people under that size—along with fauns, elves, and orcs. Fauns didn’t wear boots, elves of that shoe size and height would weigh less, and orcs would weigh more. Our shootercould, in theory, have been a vampire or a ghoul, although I very much doubted that either one would be working with the Ordo. People have done stupider shit, though.
