Devil Hath Come (an FBI/Romance Thriller ~book 7) (13 page)

Elizabeth winked at him. She could always count on Callen to pull off anything
that she requested.

“Thank you,” whispered Cyra Austin, as her partner wandered out of ear shot. “I really appreciate this.”

“I see that he found you again,” Elizabeth said, leading her towards the cops. “If it’s unbearable, send me a text and I’ll step in and reprimand him.”

“
Will you write me up if I kiss you?”

She laughed. It seemed like she
was always making out with one of her female staff on jobs. “That depends on where and how long you kiss me.”

Cyra laughed
and relaxed around her boss. “Where are we headed?”

Eliza
beth broke it down, “First on the scene was a local cop. He found the body and identified the victim. I just need to know how he wandered all the way up here, and then just happened to know our dead woman. That just seems off to me.”

“I have to agree
with you on that one.”

“You’re up. Show me what you’ve learned the last few months,” stated Elizabeth.

Cyra laughed at that. “Uh, not much. Everything in my arsenal is from my detective days. I don’t get to do much as an agent,” she stated, alluding to the Rickard issue. “So, keep that in mind when you’re grading my performance.”

Elizabeth nodded
and understood what she was saying.

“Gentlemen,” Cyra began
as she pointed at the two cops standing by the tree. “It’s been brought to my attention that one of you found the body?”

One man raised his hand.

“How about you?” she pointed at the other.

“No, I’m just here because my
boss told me to keep an eye on things and to follow up with her if need be, ma’am.”

“What’s your name?” Cyra questioned for future reference.

“I’m Officer Marsh.” He shook her hand enthusiastically. “Can I help with something?”

Cyra noticed Elizabeth had no intention of speaking at all. She wasn’t kidding when she wanted to see what Cyra could do. “Yeah,
you can see if the techs need help loading up the evidence.”

He hustled away
pretty fast, as if he wanted to be as far away from them as possible.

“What’s your name, O
fficer?” she asked the witness.

“I’m Larry Murphy,
ma’am.”

Elizabeth watched the man closely for any signs that he was scared, nervous
, or hiding anything. So far, he seemed personable, but then again they had yet to accuse him of having anything to do with all of this. Once that happened, it was anyone’s game.

“You found our vic
tim?” The cop was back, and Cyra ran with it. It was familiar and she fell back into the groove without it being awkward at all. It was great not dealing with her partner. Who knew that working beside Elizabeth would actually be easier?

“Yes, m
a’am. I was sitting at the coffee shop in town on break. When I came outside, there was a note on my car.”

Both Feds looked up
from their tablets.

“What?” Cyra asked, turning towards Elizabeth. “
Did you know that there was another note?” She’d studied the file on the way up and the only note that was mentioned was the one where the killer called out Elizabeth.

“No, I wasn’t.” For now, she’d remain calm. It was possible that it was sitting back in evidence unlogged. It was time to give the
Circle Rock cops the benefit of the doubt.

“Yeah, it was on my windshield. I opened it and it said
, ‘
I left something at the mining camp. Blessed be’.”

Cyra needed that note. “
Okay, where did you put it?”

The man had to think about it. “Well, I was parked next to a garbage can. I may have tossed it
in there. It wasn’t too full, so I doubt it blew away.”

Elizabeth was ready to explode.
THIS
was why she hated working with local law. It was the lackadaisical attitude that pissed her off every time.

Obviously, Cyra was just as irritated.

“So, you got a note to drive all the way up here into the woods and decided to toss it in the trash?” she restated incredulously.

The cop shrugged. “I didn't know there
would be a body.” He didn't get the Feds and why their undies were in a bunch.

“Did you go back to retrieve it?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t left here. I was told by my boss to remain on site and preserve the scene.”

Oh God, what Elizabeth would give to be able to run this
interview. She’d be chewing the man up and spitting him out. It was taking all she had to not say a single word.

“Wow, so again, you found a note,
and that led you to a body, but you tossed it in the trash and not once had you ever thought that it may be evidence?”

“Want me to go get it?”

Cyra stared at him. Was he for real? “Yeah, I want you to go find it, and on top of that, you’re going to get finger printed and offer a sample of your DNA too.”

“Why?”

If she slapped the man, she wondered what Elizabeth would do. “Uh, maybe because you handled evidence with your glazed donut fingers, and we need to compare it,” Cyra retorted sarcastically.

“I don’t like
the glazed ones. I’m more of a jelly filled kind of man. They are so much better than a plain donut.”

Elizabeth finally
lost her composure. How she managed to keep it that long was a small miracle. “Christina,” she called, motioning to the woman. “When this interview is over, our friend Larry here needs the full work up. Then, I need you to send a male tech with him down to the town for a garbage can. Bring the entire damn thing.”

“It was bolted to the ground,” the officer
warned.

“Bring a blow torch
,” she added.

“The mayor’s going to be pissed if you do that,” he stated unequivocally.

Elizabeth was ready to kill him. “I really don’t give two flying fu…”

Cyra
quickly jumped back to the interview, stopping Elizabeth from a full blown outburst. “You also knew the victim before we got here, how?”

Larry
shrugged and answered calmly, “She worked in a little shop in town. I would see her just about every day. One day, I gave her a ticket for jaywalking. She had one of those weird names, so it stayed in my mind. Who names their kid Scarlet Red? That’s color overkill.”

Well, at least he had a logical excuse on that one.
The name would have stuck for her too.

“I’ll get a tech to handle it,
boss.”

It was the man’s turn to snort. “So, you’re the
boss huh?” The sentence wasn’t exactly complimentary. “You’re too pretty to be an FBI boss. You sure you’re not a lingerie model?”

Elizabeth was ready to feed him his teeth, when Cyra
stepped in to handle it. “Hey Director Whitefox,” she called, getting his attention.

“Yeah?”
He quickly exited the dilapidated structure.

“Officer Murphy here just said something about the
boss lady and her unmentionables.”

Callen saw red as he crossed the opening
to get to her side. “I hope you’re not serious.”

Cyra turned back to the officer. “That’s her partner, and I don’t mean just in the field. If I were you, I’d go lock yourself in your squad car until we get a tech to go with you.
The big scary Native is pretty protective of his lingerie model.”

The man
hesitated at first, and then the look on the man’s face made him change his mind. He opted to take her advice and raced for his vehicle.

When Callen reached her side, he didn't look pleased. “What did that asshole do?” he stared at the man through his windshield
of his cruiser. He would put his hands right through it to strangle him.

Elizabeth started laughing
as Cyra told him. “You know, you rocked that interview, except I would have beaten the crap out of him personally, instead of calling for Callen. I’m deducting points for that one, due to lack of creativity.”

Cyra
found that entertaining. “Well, I just had a manicure, and I’d like to keep it more than two days. Besides, Callen’s on vacation. I can get fired for beating down a witness. With him, it’s kind of a technicality.”

“Good one,” retracted Elizabeth. “Way to think outside the box on that one.
I’m adding those points back on for that.” She offered the woman a fist bump.

Callen watched the lab tech knocking on the squad car window. The man looked nervous. When he pointed, the tech started laughing.

No one there doubted that it was a bad idea to provoke either man when it came to Elizabeth. 

“I’m not done with him,” Callen muttered. “I’ll get my back up and hunt him down
later.”

Elizabeth
patted his arm. “He only called me a lingerie model. He didn't ask to see me in it.”

Cyra
actually snorted, like that mattered.

“If he spoke it,
then he was thinking it. Ethan’s going to lose his mind, and I don’t blame him.”

Elizabeth ran her hand down his back reassuringly. “
You can calm down, Cal. While you’re here, let’s all go inspect the altar. The techs are done checking it for trace. I want to see it before they bag everything on it up.”

Cyra and Callen followed her to the
large stump.

Whitefox ran his
gloved hand across the cut. “It’s been like this a while, Lyzee,” he stated. “I’ve cut logs for Wyler to make his totems, and they get this patina when they’re out in the weather for so long. This tree wasn’t cut in the last year.”

Cyra picked up a little cauldron
to inspect the contents. Cautiously, she dumped it in her hand. “Looks like dirt mixed with blood.”

Elizabeth was out of her element here. “We need to bag it all up and take it in. We’ll start doing research on this one to figure out what all of this means.”

Cyra and Callen helped bag up each item. There was a shell with bloody water, various incense, and quite a few black candles that sat around where the body had been found. Oh, and almost all of it was covered in blood.

As they were moving the
crusted up cloth, Elizabeth stopped them. “There’s something beneath it.”

Carefully, they
folded it up to discover what was hidden.

“It’s another pentagram,” Callen offered, pulling out his phone to snap additional pictures of it. “It matches the one on the victim’s body.
”

Elizabeth stared at it
. She reached back into every case she had ever worked, until she found the information that she’d squirreled away. The last time she’d seen anything like this was back in Salem, when she met Ethan. “Yeah, this one is different,” she stated. “It’s inverted. We were wrong to think that we had witches.”

Callen didn't like the sound of that.

“An upside down pentagram means that we have a devil worshiper instead.”

“Oh hell,” Callen muttered.
It was definitely worse.

“Yeah, exactly.”

             
                  *   *   *

Monday Late afternoon

Ethan sat th
rough the entire autopsy. There had been so many in his life, that they stopped bothering him a long time ago. It was just another part of the job.

What made it uncomfortable was that the town ME was sitting not far away
and visibly unhappy with the situation. When he had returned from his side trip to clear their story with the police chief, he was in a very foul mood. Now, having to sit there and watch one of the best Forensic Medical Examiners in the states run the show was making him borderline irate.

Chris Leonard
was putting his previous autopsy to shame, as the victim was in far more capable hands. He had already started the Y-incision in the woman’s chest, after the tech team had re-swabbed every inch of the victim’s body. No one in the room could get past the fact that the man had dismissed doing a full autopsy before releasing the victim’s body.

Who did shit like that?

In the world of law enforcement, it just wasn’t done, and now Doctor Parrish was sitting three feet from Ethan with his arms crossed and very tense.

“All
of this was unnecessary,” he muttered to neither man in particular. “It was easy to find cause of death. The woman didn't have a drop of blood in her body, and then there was the little detail of her jugular being cut from ear to ear.”

Blackhawk was prepared to tell the man off, but his ME jumped into the conversation.