Last Breath (9 page)

J
ANICE MET ME
a few blocks down from the coffee shop at a smoothie shop. The protein and energy-enriched drink wasn’t exactly my idea of a liquid breakfast, but since the reporter was paying, I wasn’t complaining.

“So the dead guy in the park is involved with a group of occultists who are killing people as part of their magical rituals?”

I’d told her everything, from the angel-on-the-loose right down to the unidentified bone in the sage pot. In typical reporter style, Janice had seized on the one thing she could run a headline with.

“In a nutshell, yes. The police haven’t released anything. It was pretty gruesome.”

Janice nodded. “Normally I’d run with it, but I’m thinking of waiting a few days. I’ve been tracking down some missing persons’ reports and I think it might be connected to this.”

And this is why I risked angering Detective Tremelay and Baltimore’s finest to spill the beans to Janice. Raven had said the Baltimore group were regular practitioners of death magic. There was a good chance that this dead woman at Old Mall hadn’t been their only human victim, and if Janice had a lead on others, I wanted to know.

“People go missing all the time—homeless, junkies, runaway teens.” The reporter tapped a pen to her paper. “These aren’t those kind of people. Four of the missing had loose ties to the occult—a psychic, a woman who wrote about local ghosts and seemed to believe what she wrote, and two Pagans. The religious Pagans, not the motorcycle gang Pagans. All of them went missing within the last two months.”

That did seem like an odd pattern.

“Two accountants. A waiter. Three home improvement contractors,” Janice continued. I shook my head, not understanding the connection.

“Let’s just say the word about town is that there’s a gang you don’t want to piss off. No threats. No extortion. No violence-as-a-warning. You just disappear.”

A gang of mages. It seemed kind of risky behavior, though. They had to have some big egos to go nabbing accountants and the like without the fear of getting caught. Could that be part of the magic they were spinning? Something that shielded them from detection? Ten people in two months was a lot to go missing.

And it was a lot of murder to power their magic. Could a protection and containment spell need
that
much energy, or were they doing something else, too? I also wondered if the quality of the victim mattered, or would the death of any human do? Would it matter in other, non-human sacrifice? Was a purebred attack-trained Doberman a better victim than a trusting mutt from the pound? If they needed upstanding citizens to get the biggest bang for their magic, then it made sense to take out those who had angered or hindered them in the process, killing two birds with one stone.

I thanked Janice for the smoothie and headed to work, mulling the whole thing over in my head. The lunch rush was just tapering off when I saw Detective Tremelay come through the door. The man appeared to have the same pants on as last night, although his shirt was clean and looked as though it had been neatly pressed at one time in the last century or so.

I’d been running late this morning and hadn’t been able to call him as promised. I’d planned to grab a few moments on my break to connect, but it seemed he was too eager to wait. Either that or he wanted a coffee this lovely Sunday afternoon.

Actually I was surprised he’d bothered. I’d thought that in the cold light of day he’d write me off as a crazy girl whose talk of magic seemed even more improbable than it had in the dark of Old Town Mall. I really didn’t expect him to walk into my coffee shop. And I certainly didn’t expect him to order an iced, caramel mocha, soy latte.

“We’ve got coconut milk.” It was good to have a second non-dairy option for the scores of lactose intolerant.

“Nah. Soy. I hate coconut.”

I wrote the order on a cup and Brandi sidled up to me, posture-perfect as she smiled at the detective.

“Hi,” she purred. I got the hint.

“Brandi, this is Detective Justin Tremelay.” I handed her the cup.

She eyed the order. “Extra shot of caramel? My way of thanking the city P.D.”

My eyes nearly rolled out of my head. I loved Brandi, but this guy was twice her age and couldn’t manage to iron his pants. Although, now that I thought about it, he
was
her type.

And that bothered me. It shouldn’t. Sheesh, was I now collecting guys? They’re mine. They’re all mine. Yeah, the detective was cute in a slovenly public servant kind of way, but he’d not shown a lick of interest in me. Vampire, geeky LARP guy, and now a middle-aged detective. What was next, the garbage man and the landlord?

I smiled. “Have a seat. Brandi can bring your coffee out to you.”

He shot a quick glance at the blond, looking surprisingly like a cornered rabbit. “Actually I need to speak with you. Can you spare a few moments?”

I cast Brandi an apologetic look. She shrugged. “Okay,” I told the detective. “Only a few, though. I’ve got another hour on my shift.”

That would be my excuse if questions got too uncomfortable. Although with the lack of customers right now, I’d need to claim an urgent task in the stock room to get away.

Tremelay sat on one of the sofas, throwing one arm across the back and scanning the various mugs and accessories on the sale shelves. I tried not to stare at him as Brandi mixed up his iced latte. I’m sure he wanted to discuss the case but I didn’t have much to tell him. In a fit of paranoia I checked my phone, wishing that the bone dudes would hurry it up and get back to me. It’s not like this was a griffon, and I doubted they were flooded with bone identification requests.

Brandi still gave him an extra shot of caramel. I’ll give the girl props for her optimism. Tremelay took the cup, raising his eyebrows as he sipped.

“Please tell that girl that I have a daughter her age.”

I snorted. Not that Brandi would care. Girl had her type.

“Got a daughter my age, too?” Seriously?
That
came out of my mouth? Oh for crying out loud, I needed to get a boyfriend—one that wasn’t a vampire or a middle-aged man. Zac. I should have ask Zac to spend the night last night. Maybe then I wouldn’t be hitting on every guy I saw.

“I wasn’t
quite
that precocious. Any kids claiming to be mine would need to be under thirty.”

Did I need to rethink my moisturizer routine, or what? This was the second person in two weeks who had assumed I was older than my actual age. I
was
twenty-six.

Let it go. I took a deep breath. “There is some information that I’m still waiting on. What I do know is that the death at the Mall and the park are related. The death magic ritual was used to power a protective and containment spell. Protect and contain what or whom, I don’t know.” I thought about my conversation with Janice and decided to throw in the extra info. “I doubt that woman last night was their only victim. Protection and containment spells wear off, and if they needed the energy of a sacrifice to protect them, then it’s something dangerous enough to warrant repeated spells.”

Which also got me to thinking that I needed to figure out what exactly they were trying to protect themselves from. If it was the angel that had killed Ronald, then why not just use the sigil? There had to be a reason they were using that odd symbol.

“I’m sure if there were more of what happened last night, we would have heard about it. There aren’t many places in Baltimore you can leave a dead woman in a bathtub with occult symbols everywhere and not eventually have it discovered.”

True. But if they needed to kill off ten or so people in the last two months, they would have been more careful about it. “Maybe we found the one last night before they had a chance to clean up and dispose of the body. Maybe they had an emergency or were interrupted before they could cover it all up. I’m thinking you need to look at other missing persons’ reports and consider other victims.”

He pursed his lips and nodded before taking another sip of the coffee. “Point taken. I’ll dig around the reports and see what I can find.”

Good. And there was one more thing I needed to tell him. “The sigil under the park death is for Araziel.”

Tremelay waved a hand. “Can you elaborate? Who is this Araziel, and can I bring him, or her, in for questioning?”

Now that would be something I’d like to see. “Araziel is an angel—the one who separates the soul from the physical body at the time of death. Which leaves me wondering if the angel was the one who actually caused the death or not. He, although angels aren’t gendered, isn’t supposed to be a reaper or an angel of justice. Araziel is a collector, a sorter. I’m still trying to figure out what the angel has to do with any of this.”

The detective sucked down a large gulp of his beverage and trained his steely, hazel gaze on me. “And what does the guy who you claim was killed by an angel in the park have to do with the ritual murder in the Mall. What’s the connection beyond the freak factor?”

Here is where I admitted to lying to the authorities of the land. “I was one of the women who discovered the dead man in the park. He had a paper in his cape pockets with the address in Old Town Mall. That’s why I went there.”

“Rifling a dead guy’s pockets. Taking photos of a murder site. I worry about you, Ainsworth. This isn’t sane behavior, you know.” Tremelay rubbed his forehead. “Besides that, I checked into that park case. We’re still waiting for the coroner to tell us what exploded the guy’s chest outward and where his lungs and heart went to. You think the same freaks who sacrificed that woman in Old Town Mall sent a killer angel after the guy in the park?”

“They’re related, I just don’t know how. Yet.” And now for my big favor. “I need to go back to the Mall, to look for something. Can you accompany me?”

I needed him to bring legitimacy to my investigation, and to bring the murderers to civil justice if they were of the human and not supernatural type. And he needed me. Otherwise he’d be chasing his tail, looking for Goth Satanists who most likely had nothing to do with any of this.

“I’ll take you, but that building is still considered a crime scene. I can’t have you contaminating anything.”

“It’s the side buildings I want to look at.”

He raised an eyebrow. “The building across the street from the murder, the one written on the piece of paper you found on the dead guy in the park? Does this have something to do with the saucepan with burned twigs?”

I nodded. “A smudge stick. The buildings on either side of the murder site should have the same, as should the building behind it. Four quarters. Compass points. The murderers wanted to keep something outside of their ritual. If I can find out what, that will help me figure out exactly what they were doing when they killed that woman.”

“Bethany Scarborough.”

I blinked, thinking his interjection of some woman’s name to be downright random.

“The victim.” Tremelay consulted his notebook. “Fifty-five. Unmarried. Lives alone aside from a cat. She’s an insurance adjuster working at an office in Columbia. Lives in Westminster.”

And she was a death-magic sacrifice in Baltimore. None of that made sense. “Did she do drugs? Did she make it a habit of dating men she met on the internet?” Or perhaps Janice was right and she’d pissed off the wrong mage.

The detective shrugged. “I’ve got interviews this afternoon and tomorrow with her co-workers. Family is from out of town and they were shocked to find out she was dead. According to them, she was a stereotypical, unmarried, cat-lady, spinster homebody. Of course, family are always the last to know, especially when they don’t live nearby.”

I shook my head wondering how the woman he’d just described had wound up the subject of a magical ritual. An insurance adjuster from Westminster?

“I need to bring her killer to justice.” There was something in Detective Tremelay’s eyes that I completely identified with. There was a reason he was a cop, and I wanted to believe it was the Templar blood in his veins.

“Me, too. And I want to make sure what happened to Bethany and Ronald doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

“Do you think there’s something at these other buildings that will lead us to the killer? I know you said the guy in the park was killed by an angel, but this woman at the Mall definitely died by human hands.”

Maybe. Eventually. “I don’t know, but I’ll do my best to find out. Magical societies are a tight bunch. There are areas of specialty and practitioners tend to know who does what. Once I figure out the a few things, then it’s just a matter of time until I find the mage responsible.”

I thought once more about my conversation with Raven. She’d known about the death magic. She’d wanted me to get out of town. There was a chance she knew the killers. Although getting her to cough up names would be pretty close to impossible. Mages were tight-lipped, even with rivalries and feuds. She was Haul Du. I was a cast out. We might be making baby steps to repairing our friendship, but that didn’t mean she was going to start ratting out fellow practitioners.

“What if we find out it’s some druggie on bath salts? Or a Satanist?”

Oh for crying out loud, not the Satanist thing again. “I doubt someone on salts would have a steady enough hand to draw those symbols, let alone conduct a ritual murder. And followers of the Church of Satan don’t do conduct ritual murders.” They didn’t conduct murders at all, but I doubted I would be able to convince Detective Tremelay of that fact.

He stood, taking his latte with him. “I’ll pick you up at your place at five. And the only reason I’m entertaining any of this is because I want this sicko behind bars as soon as possible. Anybody with such a careless disregard for human life isn’t someone I want loose on the streets of my city.”

And on that, we were in complete agreement.

T
HE NOTE ON
my door was short and to the point:
Fort McHenry. 3:00
.

I ripped it from the door and ran for my car, knowing I’d have to hustle to make this meeting. And hustle to get back in time for my five o’clock with Tremelay. I know it sounds weird that I’d go haring off like this to meet up with some weirdo that stuck a note on my door, but it wasn’t the words that had me squealing down the road, it was the symbol under the place and time—the same home-grown symbol used in the sacrificial ritual I’d discovered last night.