A Kind of Magic (2 page)

Emily decided to pay a visit the next morning to the enchantress sisters she used to work for. They might have some insight. Until then, she had another show to do that evening, and it was going to take everything she had to keep up with Olivia.

Bethesda Terrace, Central Park

Thursday, 6:30 a.m.

“You know, it’s really rude for someone to die and drag us out in these conditions,” Marisol Lopez griped as she and Michael Murray went down the stairs to the crime scene by the lake.

“I’m sure it’s even more inconvenient for her,” Michael remarked to his partner.

“Yeah, but she’s not feeling the cold. I’m Puerto Rican. My blood isn’t thick enough for me to be out in this.”

“Your grandfather was born in this city. Your blood should have thickened by now.”

“It’s still November. I haven’t yet acclimated.”

“And just think, it’s only going to get worse from here. There may even be snow before long.”

“Shut up, Rev. And wasn’t this precinct supposed to be a cushy assignment while you recovered? This is way more bodies than they advertised in the brochure.”

“Maybe, but did you think working the park would mean being indoors?”

“I guess I should have looked at the calendar before agreeing to come with you. It was nice in September and October. Maybe you’re ready to go back to the full grind?” They reached the crime scene tape and Mari said, “Whattaya got?” to the uniformed officer holding it up for them to duck under.

“White female, probably in her twenties, found in the lake. An early-morning jogger spotted the body.”

“How’d she get in the lake?”

“You’re the detective. I’m just here to guard the scene for you.”

Before Mari could retort, Michael said, “It’s not exactly the kind of weather for swimming or boating.” There was a thin skin of ice on the water next to the shore.

“She’s wearing running clothes. Maybe she was out jogging in the dark and fell?” the officer suggested tentatively.

“How do you miss a lake?” Mari asked, then added to Michael, “See, I knew it. Jogging is hazardous to your health.”

“I wonder if she died of hypothermia or if she drowned,” Michael mused.

“That’s a question for the ME,” Mari said, tucking her hands up under her arms and stomping her feet. “If you ask me, jogging in this weather means she was suicidal.”

“Any signs of wounds?” Michael asked.

“We haven’t really touched the body, other than getting it out of the water,” the officer said. “You’re thinking maybe someone disposed of the body after a mugging escalated?”

“We have to keep all the options open right now.” Michael headed over to where the ME knelt by the body. The victim’s face looked peaceful, almost joyous, even with the pallor of death. It was hard to imagine that her end had been violent. He was about to ask the medical examiner about wounds when he saw motion out of the corner of his eye.

Turning quickly, he thought he caught a glimpse of a white horse on the lake’s far shore, but it was gone before he could call anyone else’s attention to it. There hadn’t been horses in the park, other than the controversial carriage horses, in ages. Had one of them escaped? And did that have anything to do with the case at hand?

After his recent experiences with the world of the fae, he hesitated to ask if anyone else had seen the horse. There were now far too many things he saw that others wouldn’t, and he didn’t want to find himself ordered to meet with a police shrink. He figured that a horse wandering through the park would be obvious enough that it would eventually get someone’s attention if it were real and returned his focus to the case at hand.

“I’m not finding any obvious wounds,” the ME was saying, “so we’ll have to wait on an autopsy to figure out the cause of death.”

“Any ID?” Mari asked. The ME handed over a driver’s license. “I guess we get to notify the family. Yay,” Mari said without enthusiasm. “You do the talking, Rev. You’re better at it than I am.”

Before Michael could respond, he caught that sense of motion again and turned to see the filmy outline of a white horse running across the water. It was almost like the way you could sometimes see shapes in whitecaps on the ocean, but the lake was smooth as glass. At any rate, he was now certain no one else could see it, and he had a sick feeling that it had something to do with this case, which would make solving it impossible. Well, actually he was sure he could solve it, but not in a way he could write up in a report that wouldn’t get him committed. If he recalled his research correctly, this could be a kelpie, a magical fae horse that enticed unsuspecting people into riding it and then ran straight into the water, drowning them. The explanation perfectly fit the situation.

Or maybe it was all in his head. He was bound to imagine things after what he’d been through. But he was trying very hard to put all that behind him. He was done with magic, fairies, and the like. He rationalized that if the others weren’t seeing it, then it was very unlikely that the victim would have seen it. And the victim couldn’t possibly have ridden a horse she couldn’t see into the lake.

“Rev, you see something?” Mari prodded.

“No, just mentally composing my sermon of condolence. Any witnesses?” he asked the officer.

“The jogger who found her is over there, but he didn’t see anything other than the body.”

“I’ll go talk to him,” Mari offered, heading to the witness. Michael tried to focus on what the ME was doing and saying, but his mind kept straying to the horse. No, he told himself, barely stopping himself from shaking his head, there was no horse. There was a rational explanation for this.

Deliberately turning away from the lake so he wouldn’t be distracted by the eerie white horse that wasn’t there, he noticed a stout figure pushing a shopping cart on the street above the terrace. He couldn’t see her face from here in this light, but he could feel her staring at him. He turned back toward the lake, horse or no horse. If Mrs. Smith, the park’s resident wise woman, was here, something odd probably was going on, and he didn’t want to go there until he’d absolutely ruled everything else out.

Fortunately, either no one else noticed the bag lady or no one considered her a viable potential witness, because no one suggested interviewing her. He could feel her eyes boring into his back, but she didn’t draw attention to herself. She’d gotten it into her head that because he’d been touched by the fae, thanks to his experiences in trying to rescue his erstwhile wife from the fairy realm, that made him something like she was, a person who could mediate between the worlds of fae and human. He’d prefer to be just a cop, even if he happened to be one who could see weird things that were usually hidden from human eyes. Like the ghostly horse that wasn’t there.

He noticed that Mari, through with her interview, was staring up at a few faint snowflakes swirling around the angel fountain. “Hey, look, it’s snowing!” she said.

“I thought you hated winter.”

“I hate cold. I like snow—while it’s falling, before it gets nasty on the ground. This”—she gestured toward the faint flakes dancing around the angel’s wings—“is almost enough to make you believe in magic.”

“I had no idea you were so imaginative. Let’s give the area a look before we go find the family. That is, if you’re through greeting the first snowfall.”

The Upper West Side

8:00 a.m.

Mari pushed the buzzer at the victim’s building with an air of authority before glancing up at Michael. “You’re talking to them, right?”

Sometimes he was tempted to make her deliver bad news, but he really was better at it than she was, and he thought the needs of the victims’ families were greater than any need to push Mari out of her comfort zone. “We don’t know if there’s any ‘them’ to talk to yet,” he said.

Of course, at that moment a female voice came through the intercom. “Hello?”

“This is Detective Murray with Detective Lopez of the NYPD. Is this Valerie Johnson’s residence?”

“Um, yeah. I’m her roommate. But she’s not home. I think she’s out for a run.”

“We need to talk to you about her.”

“Okay, I guess. Come on up, but you’ll have to wait a sec.”

The door buzzed open, and they found the apartment. Michael figured it was the kind of place that wasn’t posh, but that wouldn’t be too scary—normal for a twentysomething woman. A roommate was to be expected if she wasn’t living with family. He’d been hoping for family, since a roommate meant more people to break the news to.

A few minutes later, the door opened, still on the chain. “I don’t want to be rude, but I should probably ask for some ID,” the voice on the other side said. Both Michael and Mari had their IDs out and ready to show. Michael wanted to commend the young woman for her caution. It was amazing how many people were willing to open their doors and let someone in, just because they said they were cops. After a moment, the door shut enough for the chain to come off before opening again to reveal a tall, lanky woman in her mid-twenties. She wore jeans and a sweater and her dark hair was pulled into a low ponytail, but she wore no makeup and was barefoot. Michael got the impression she’d thrown on clothes after they’d buzzed her. “Okay, come on in,” she said.

She gestured them toward a futon in the tiny living room, and she perched on a barstool by the countertop that also seemed to serve as a dining table. Mari flipped open her notepad, and the young woman said, “So, what’s this all about, anyway?”

“Can I get your name, please?” Michael asked.

“Melanie Jacobs.”

“And you’re Valerie’s roommate?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know where she is right now?”

“Like I said, she went out for a run. Actually, I’d have thought she’d be back by now. She usually is. She works downtown, so she needs to get home in time to get dressed and get to work.” Her eyes went wide, and she gasped. “Oh God, that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Something happened to her?”

Her reaction seemed genuine enough, and she really looked like she hadn’t been awake long, so Michael didn’t see any need to drag out the suspense. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid her body was found in the park this morning.”

Melanie pressed her hands against her mouth and whimpered. Her eyes blinked rapidly, fighting off tears. “Oh God! I was always so worried about her going out running in the dark like that. I knew something bad would happen to her. What did happen?”

“We don’t know yet. We’ve only just begun our investigation. Now, do you know what time she left to go running?”

“No, by now I’ve learned to sleep through her getting up and ready, and she’s really quiet about it. She’s training for a marathon, so she does it all the time. I think it’s something like five-thirty or so. I always thought that was ridiculous.” Her last word broke into a sob, and Michael gave her a moment to collect herself, even though he could sense Mari’s impatience. She wanted out of there right away.

“Do you know if she ran with anyone—a training team, a running buddy?”

“I don’t think so. She didn’t say anything.”

“Does her family live nearby?”

“They’re upstate.”

“Is she in a relationship?”

“No.”

He caught Mari’s start at her vehemence, so he said, “You seem pretty sure about that.”

“Well, unless she’s got a secret boyfriend at work and only goes on lunch dates, I don’t know when she’d see him. We spend just about all our evenings together. We watch a lot of chick flicks and Disney movies and complain about not finding Prince Charming. Or we did.” Her voice broke again, and Michael reached for the small packet of tissues he kept handy for these situations. She mouthed a “thank you” as she pulled a tissue from the packet he offered her and wiped her eyes before blowing her nose.

“Would you mind if we took a look at her room?”

“Our room. But sure. Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting company.” She slid off the barstool and led them to a set of pocket doors that slid back to reveal what looked like a girls’ dorm room. He knew Mari would describe it as looking “like Disney threw up all over the damn place.” He wondered if her thoughts being so clear he could read them required her to put a dollar in the penalty jar for cursing. “That’s her side,” Melanie said, pointing to the side decorated in blue. The other side was pink.

A bulletin board over the twin bed held a number of race bibs, alongside pictures of various kinds of fairies, from the Disney variety to the wispy flower fairies of Victorian illustrations and sexier fairies straight off fantasy novel covers. There were also unicorns and castles, and a lot of other fantasy art. His five-year-old niece would have gotten along very well with Valerie Johnson.

In short, Valerie had been a dreamer, and that shattered his rationalization that she couldn’t possibly have seen a kelpie to be carried away by one. Even if she didn’t actually believe in fae creatures—though from the looks of her room, she’d be right there clapping to save Tinkerbell—she might have wanted to believe strongly enough to see the fae, and probably didn’t know enough to recognize the danger.

“Do you know if she left her phone and if she has a computer?” Michael asked.

“It’s all there on her desk.” Melanie waved in the direction of a small desk that doubled as a nightstand. Mari took charge of collecting those. They’d probably send a team out to look at the place more thoroughly, but they needed to collect things like this before there was a chance anything could be tampered with. Michael got the contact information for Valerie’s parents and dreaded having to make that call almost as much as he dreaded figuring out a way to deal with what looked increasingly like a case that would be impossible to explain in a way that would satisfy anyone.

Central Park

9:43 a.m.

The cold took Sophie’s breath away as she stepped through the gateway from the Realm into the park. She wasted no time in putting on her coat. Back home in Louisiana, she hadn’t even put the heat on yet. She was so focused on her destination that she’d left the park and crossed a couple of busy streets before she noticed the headlines on the newspapers being prominently displayed at a kiosk. “CRADLE ROBBED!” the tabloid blared. Probably some rich, old executive marrying a young starlet, she told herself. It couldn’t possibly be about anything else, like a missing child.