Grave Memory: An Alex Craft Novel (16 page)

“Ms. Craft?” She looked at me, her pen hovering over her checkbook.

“I’d like to continue investigating this case.”

Her eyes narrowed. “My husband killed himself. I’m going to have to accept that.”

“It is possible.” Maybe even likely. “But there are still a lot of questions that don’t have answers. Like the memory lapse his shade experienced.”

She pushed away from the desk, crossing her arms over her chest. “Your magical failings are something you can look into on your own dime. I was a fool to go against my beliefs, but I was out of options, and I suppose, you did get me information.”

Gee, now isn’t that a compliment.

I worked hard to keep my smile in place. “Don’t you want to know where he was for the three days he was missing?”

The stern set of her crossed arms loosened, but didn’t drop. She looked away. “Of course. But you said the shade couldn’t tell you. Did he”—her voice caught—“could he even tell you why?”

“No. And despite the fact he was alone on that roof, there is still some possibility he didn’t intend to jump.”

She went still, then, as if in slow motion, her head turned. Tear-reddened eyes, a little too wide, locked on me. “You’re talking about magic.”

“I haven’t dismissed the possibility.”

Her hands locked into fists, and her lips quivered as if she were caught between screaming and crying. But she did neither. Instead, when she spoke again, it was in a hard, low voice, so quiet it was barely above a whisper. “That explains it. He didn’t leave me.” Her head snapped up. “Then he
was
murdered.”

I took a deep breath. Let it out. “Like I said, I haven’t dismissed the possibility. But, if there had been overt magical evidence, the police would already be investigating. Magic has limitations, and forcing someone to commit suicide is out of the scope of witchcraft.”

Her nostrils flared. “Then it must have been a fae.”

“I’m not drawing any conclusions until I have all the facts,” I said, working hard to keep my face empty. Right now, she’d grab on to any doubt she spotted. “Mrs. Kingly, do you have a photo of your husband. Something recent.”

The question threw her off balance, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. Her anger didn’t waver, but confusion tightened her features. Confusion and distrust. Her eyes narrowed and she searched my face as if she were studying a trap she knew would spring if she didn’t disarm it. “Why?”

“I have a theory,” I said, and when her expression didn’t change, I asked. “Was your husband ill?”

“Ill? Heavens no. James rarely even caught a cold.”

Which was what his ghost had said as well. “And how much would you say your husband weighed on the day he disappeared?”

Her glistening but stony eyes flew wide. “That is an inappropriate question.”

I waited, but when it became clear she wasn’t going to answer I said, “On the day he jumped from the Motel Styx he weighed only a little over a hundred pounds.”

“That…” Mrs. Kingly shook her head and dug her
phone out of her purse. “No, that can’t be. This is my James.” She opened a photo app on her phone before passing it across the table.

I picked up the phone and studied the picture. I knew what James Kingly looked like, of course, as his ghost had been in my office for the last hour, but ghosts were almost always idealized projections of a person’s self-image. The ghost James was neither fat nor thin, but an average, healthy looking balance. He also had a full head of hair. The James in the picture was beginning to bald, and while he wasn’t overweight exactly, he had plenty of padding—and not from muscle. Neither image fit the disease-wasted man who’d jumped from the top of the Motel Styx.

“When was this photo taken?” I asked, passing the phone back to her.

“I took it a week before he…” She stopped, her eyes misting, and she gazed down at the photo, a small, broken smile touching her lips. “We wanted to see the fall colors in the Botanical Garden. That’s where it was taken. It was a wonderful day.” She pulled more toilet paper from the rapidly dwindling roll.

One week.
He had to have lost the weight in the days he was missing.
And nothing natural could make a man drop seventy pounds in three days.

“Mrs. Kingly, I want to continue investigating your husband’s case. The police may have dismissed the case as suicide, but I think there are too many questions to be satisfied with that answer.”

“And why should I hire a witch instead of a reputable investigator?”

I ignored the implication that the two were mutually exclusive. “You should hire me because
if
magic is involved—and at this point, I’m inclined to believe it is—you’ll need someone not only familiar with magic, but able to detect spells. You won’t find another investigator in Nekros with as high a sensitivity to magic. Another PI might use charms to detect magic, but charms can be unreliable and they can’t determine what the magic does. I can.” I leaned forward,
clasping my hands on the table. “I am capable of following this case wherever it leads, magical or mundane.”

“How do I know you wouldn’t cover for a fellow witch?”

“Would you cover for a murderer simply because he
couldn’t
perform magic?” I asked, and she sniffed, but I wasn’t expecting an answer. “Can you e-mail me that photo, so I can show it to people as I track his movements over the missing days?” As an afterthought I added. “And a personal item, something he used a lot or carried with him, would be good.” I couldn’t do a thing with it, but Rianna might be able to concoct a spell that would help.

Mrs. Kingly’s lips flattened as the edges of her mouth tugged downward. “I’m not agreeing to anything yet, but answer me one question. And really answer this time.” Her eyes fixed on me, hard enough to pin me to the chair. “Do you think my husband was murdered?”

I thought of the photo of a healthy man with round, smiling cheeks, of the emaciated man who’d thrown himself from a roof, of the shade with absolutely no memory of the days prior to his death. Then I lifted my gaze to the ghost who looked as eager to hear my answer as his wife because he honestly didn’t know what happened.

“Yes, I do.”

Mrs. Kingly nodded. “Then get me a contract. You’re hired.”

Once the Kinglys left I considered my next step. I had two obvious starting points: head to Delaney’s, the bar where James’s last memory ended, or look into the suicide case he’d witnessed. I glanced over the notes I’d taken from the ghost’s account of the suicide. Besides the timing, and the fact both suicides had been public, one major detail struck me. James had described the man as being just skin and bones. Which was exactly what James looked like before he threw himself off a building to crash onto a populated street.

I chewed at the end of my pen, glancing over everything I’d written. It was still midmorning, so I doubted the bar
would be open. That left tracking down the crispy corpse. There had to be some connection between James’s vagrant and what had happened to James himself. I just didn’t know why. Or how. James was the last one in contact with the man before he killed himself. Had a spell spread to him like a virus? Stranger things had happened. I’d once contracted a soul sucking spell from contact with an infected shade.

I was still staring at my screen when Rianna walked into the room.

“So does Tongues for the Dead have our first case of real investigative work?”

I nodded. “Yeah, but it’s kind of ironic. I’m looking at where to start my investigation, and I’m leaning toward a conversation with a shade.”

“I thought you already raised the Kingly shade and didn’t get anything out of him.”

“And that’s what’s so significant.” Between last night’s fiasco at dinner and the fact the Kinglys had been waiting for me when I arrived this morning, I hadn’t had an opportunity to fill Rianna in on more than the most basic details of the case. It was past time to update her. After all, she was the mystery nut, and this puzzle was right up her alley.

“You’re right, the earlier suicide is definitely worth checking out,” she said after I’d brought her up to speed. She’d perched on the edge of my desk, and despite the fact we were talking about not one, but two horrific deaths, she was grinning, her eyes distant as if she were visualizing different scenarios. “And a spell spreading like a virus is an interesting idea, though it still circles back to one major problem.”

“How or if it forced the men to kill themselves,” I said, knowing exactly what she was thinking. It was the same stumbling block I’d been running into since I took the case.

No magic, witch or fae, could overcome self-preservation. Not directly at least. Falin had mentioned spells and abilities that amplified emotion. A spell couldn’t compel someone to jump off a building or douse themselves in gasoline, but maybe it could exaggerate situations until suicide appeared
the only way out? That would sidestep the willpower dilemma if the victim chose death, even if a spell was why they felt the need to die.

But then why doesn’t the shade remember?

The theory didn’t explain the missing memories, the weight loss, or the chunk sucked out of the ghost. Those had to be explained by a spell, didn’t they? And yet, it couldn’t be a spell. But if it was, the suicide James had witnessed had to be when he’d picked up the spell.

I pushed away from my desk, and Rianna jumped, startled by my sudden movement. That didn’t last long. Her gaze swept over my face, curiosity radiating around her.

“You thought of something?” she asked, sliding to her feet.

“More like made a decision,” I said. I needed to talk to that earlier suicide victim. To find out if his experience correlated to Kingly’s.

But first, I had to figure out Mr. Crispy’s name.

T
amara’s cell went straight to voice mail, so I called the ME’s office, but reached an intern who informed me that Tamara was in the middle of an autopsy. I didn’t want to get Tamara in trouble, so I left just my name and a message for her to call me ASAP.

While I waited, I pulled up the
Nekros Times
online archives. I hoped I’d luck out and find something about Kingly’s overcooked mystery man. I knew the date the event had occurred, so I queued the articles from the following day’s paper. The article described the event as “tragic” and “deeply saddening” but was only a couple paragraphs long. Kingly had told me more than the paper’s account of events. And worse yet, the man was listed only as “an as yet unidentified male.” That wouldn’t help me find his family or his gravesite. I searched for follow-up articles, but found none.

The
Times
having failed me, I pulled up a search engine. It took a good fifteen minutes of playing with keywords before I found an article on a news blog. It was much more detailed—and grislier—than the article in the
Nekros Times
, but it still didn’t list the man’s name. I checked out the comments, and was disturbed by how many people thought becoming a human torch would be an awesome way to go. More than once commenters asked if he was
testing a charm in an experiment that went terribly wrong. Answers went both ways, which tended to happen on the ’net where anyone could claim to be an expert. One commenter linked to a cell phone recording of the event.
Okay, my opinion of society just went down a notch.
At the same time, there could be something in the video that could help in my investigation.
If Kingly’s crispy horror is directly involved.

I bookmarked the location without watching it.

I’d found three more equally unhelpful news posts on the suicide by the time my phone rang. Tamara sounded tired when I answered, her voice rough and throaty.

“You okay?” I asked. “You sound sick.”

She huffed a laugh. “In a manner speaking, so if you’re calling to invite me to lunch, I’ll pass.”

Morning sickness.

Her chair squeaked and I imagined her leaning back and propping her legs up after hours of standing over an autopsy table.

“So what’s up, Alex?”

“I’m looking for the name of a suicide that probably passed through your cold room a little under two weeks ago.”

Tamara groaned. “Another suicide? What are you advertising these days?”

“Don’t worry. I just need a name this time.”

I described the manner in which the man had died. As I spoke, the other end of the line went eerily silent.

“Tam, you still there?”

“Who hired you to look into that case, Alex?” I could hear her frown through the phone. It wasn’t the response I’d expected.

“No one, directly. It came up in the course of the Kingly case. Why?”

“He’s a John Doe. Not that there was much left to identify him by. His hands were destroyed so no prints, and no one would ever be able to identify what was left of his face.”

Nearly two weeks as a John Doe?

“He’s been cremated already, hasn’t he?” A suicide
victim who had appeared homeless before lighting himself up? Yeah, the city wasn’t going to hold on to that corpse for long. And while I was damn good at grave magic, no one could pull a shade from cremated remains—the extreme heat obliterated everything.