Sloe Ride (20 page)

“Hi! Can I borrow you for a minute?” She bounced in, her body packed tightly into a pair of yoga pants and an eye-bleeding neon-pink tank barely strong enough to hold her chest in. “I wanted to talk to you about my paper.”

She looked familiar, and Quinn frowned, knowing he’d seen her somewhere. Something about her wiggle and flashing white teeth triggered a spark in his memory. “Oh, ‘Industrial Revolution and its Artistic Influences.’” His brain crackled, chasing down the threads connecting her to his class and then her assignment. “You didn’t turn your paper in. It’s… a week late, I think.”

“Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” She moved aside to let Graham pass by, pressing herself up against Quinn’s desk.

“I’ll see you later, Dr. Morgan.” Graham’s mouth was a thread of flesh in his gaunt face. “You’re coming to the readings tonight, right?”

“Oh, yeah. Um, I’m bringing a friend of mine. Rafe. He said it sounded like fun.” The word fun was stretching the truth, but Rafe’d been enthusiastic. Quinn shrugged at Graham’s raised eyebrows. “Okay, so he said interesting, but he wanted to go.”

“You’ve got a boyfriend?”

LeAnne—her name popped into Quinn’s brain, slamming into the space behind his forehead. Her wiggling against his desk stopped.

“Wow, you so don’t even—I mean, I didn’t—”

“I’ll see you there, then, Quinn. Try not to work too late.” Graham’s eyes washed cold over LeAnne as he left. “And I’ll leave the door open unless you want it closed.”

“No, open’s fine. Thanks.” Quinn waved LeAnne over to the chair Graham’d been sitting in. “Okay, tell me, what do you think there’s left to talk about?”

B
Y
MIDAFTERNOON
Quinn’d gone through a lot of coffee and most of his patience. After LeAnne, there’d been a river of students with elaborate claims of alien abduction, paper-hungry dogs, and in one case, a vomiting baby and a ruined laptop. The last one he gave a pass on, especially when she’d brought the baby in a tie-dyed sling and it proceeded to provide a repeat performance of its assignment-ruining act over Quinn’s desk and, more importantly, in his coffee cup.

Shoving aside deadlines meant more papers shored up onto one end of his schedule, and Quinn cursed his calendar, inputting the last realignment for the day. Muttering as he cross-checked the regurgitation victim’s name against his student list, Quinn caught a glimpse of his clock and nearly panicked.

“Shit, the bridge is going to be a mess getting across.”

His office was relatively small, a tiny oasis of chaotic calm in the middle of a busy hall of other professors. Somehow he’d gotten a corner square—possibly an ex-broom closet—but he hadn’t cared. It was an office, his own space, and more importantly, came with two wide sash windows overlooking the greensward beyond. His desk was an old one he’d dragged from his parents’ house and refurbished after a
tsk
from his father about the band stickers his youngest sister stuck to its sides.

He’d lost some wall space placing it against the wall next to the door, but the tree-line view was more important than storage at the time, and he had no regrets since. There was enough storage on the bookcases lining what wall space was left, with enough space for an old leather wing chair and an iron chandelier lamp, two other refugees from the Morgan furniture stash.

It was homey, a warm space with buttery cream-painted walls, a beaten but still serviceable Persian rug his mum bartered off a man at a garage sale when he’d been ten, and a mounted wooden sign from the Whistling Penguin pub he’d helped Kane steal during a visit to Dublin in their teens.

The office was as much of his home as the house he’d torn apart and rebuilt, and Quinn
needed
to be in a space of his own—especially since he was still living in Miki’s warehouse without a vacate date in sight.

“Shite, I’m tired.” The Gaelic came easier to him sometimes. Better than English when his tongue was too curled up in his mouth to speak.

It was tempting to close the door. His office hours were done for the day, and the siren of a final cup of coffee called to him. Well, murmured at least. Quinn regarded his much abused and now clean coffee mug. The watery porridge sluice did help him clean his space, and he’d quickly discovered there wasn’t a lot on his desk he couldn’t live without. He had a minor debate on whether the tiny cactus needed yet another rinse but didn’t think the prickly ball could take much more dousing.

“Steady on, Spike. You’ll be okay.” Quinn hit the power button on his laptop and sniffed at his shirt, sure he’d somehow gotten splashed in the onslaught. “Let’s go back to the insane asylum and shower.”

One thing about having a family of cops—besides running amok over their siblings’ privacy—was the fear of death they could put into a university administration about where Quinn should park his car. He hadn’t permission to use the closest structure. Only tenure, some odd ranking of politics and possibly a mythical ritual performed with eggs from a virgin platypus, could provide that, but somehow Kane’d wrangled him a spot.

A few hundred feet of grass and sidewalk lay between him and the second Audi he’d begged from the dealer. Digging his keys out of his coat, Quinn muttered at the fob, still confused by the plethora of buttons needed to open and start a single sedan.

The cold was brutal on his face, scraping at his cheeks and nose, and Quinn sniffed at the air, wondering if a hard rain wouldn’t be too far behind the thick fog rolling up into the hills. His sniff reminded him of Graham, with his prim, martial walk and tilted-up nose.

“Like a stork,” he chuckled, staring down at the fob. The path to the structure was clear, a brisk five-minute walk, and then he’d be tucked inside a car with a suspension as thick and unwieldy as a truck. “Five more weeks, Q, and you’ll get your baby back. They promised.”

Something lingered on the wind, a sharp sting in the chill. Quinn glanced around, letting his eyes drift over swells of faded landscape dotted with sparse-leafed trees and beds of dormant ice plant, a slumbering wealth of green and purple waiting for the first burst of spring. The hall loomed behind him, unimpressive compared to the colleges’ other buildings but renowned for the nearly mazelike confusion it cast on unsuspecting freshmen.

He’d grown up in the hall, Quinn mused, turning his back on the building. Stumbling up its concrete steps and through its plain doors, he’d gotten his first whiff of old papers, dead languages, and centuries of layered culture and fallen in love. Next to his parents’ home, the hall was the closest thing to home—probably even above his own house—and Quinn briefly debated if he could somehow sneak a futon into his office and camp out there until the nonsense moving against him was over.

Pleasant thought—he smiled, finally deciphering the spray of rubbed-off buttons on the fob—but impractical. If only for the lack of a shower and the clomping of feet in the outside hall as soon as the front doors were thrown open for the day.

“Oh, but it would be awesome.” He wrinkled his nose. “Okay, maybe not for Harley and her litter-box excavations.”

He was five feet from the short wall cordoning off the structure when Quinn caught the scent again, slightly pungent and abrasive. It grew stronger, fouler as he turned the corner to use the pass-through into the structure, when the rankness hit him full in the face.

The Audi had been white. Not a color he wanted in a car, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially when he’d pretty much gotten the last one blown up. A fire he could handle. This time Quinn wasn’t sure he had it in him to stay conscious, much less do anything productive—like dial for help.

His fingers were cold, numb from the shock slowly shutting his body down, and he had a hard time finding his phone despite his messenger bag being nearly empty. He finally found it hidden behind his tablet, but it swam away from him, avoiding his grasp. Another glance at the car changed nothing. Did
nothing
but etch the horror of what he’d seen further into his brain.

Profane.

Quinn’d never truly contemplated the concept before—not until he stood cold from shock and horror in the middle of a campus parking structure and took in the remains of a young woman spread across the hood of his borrowed car.

He’d spoken to her only a few hours before. Listened to her tell a long, convoluted story about how she couldn’t write five thousand words on probably the easiest topic the British Industrial Revolution had to offer. They’d danced about the topic until he’d pushed her into a corner and half walked her through the steps of researching cosplay and steampunk. Short of writing the paper for her, Quinn’d sighed and let LeAnne Walker head on her merry little bouncy way.

Not knowing she’d end up dead and spread out on his car like a biology experiment gone wrong.

The blood was everywhere. Her blood, Quinn corrected himself. A part of him wanted to check to see if she were okay, as if she’d somehow survived someone slashing her open and peeling the skin back from her torso. LeAnne’s head rested on the windshield, her eyes open and emptily staring at him as if she knew he’d come across her, too late to do anything but choke down his own cries. She was clothed, barely. Her killer’d pulled up her shirt to expose her belly and sliced her open at least once. Quinn couldn’t be sure. Her pants appeared to be up but were soaked through in blood, her exposed skin pale against the drying umber wash.

Quinn couldn’t stop staring at her belly, or what her killer’d left of it. The carve was deep and vicious, slicing her apart in a jagged half-moon stretching under both sides of her ribs. Gravity or her murderer pulled her insides out, her intestines a loose spill of mass, pouring out of the crater carved out of her belly to dangle down between her spread legs. The punctured loops dripped copiously, nearly weeping fluid, seeping down the Audi’s front bumper and onto the parking garage floor.

It was the sickening rotten green of her torn guts he’d smelled on the wind and the taint of her blood chasing its foul stench with a metallic thread. Her blood was sticky wet, a drying crimson pool on the Audi’s white paint, and Quinn backpedaled when something dark slithered out of the cut above her mons and nearly slid free of her body. It caught itself, pulled back on a stringy mess of greenish-beige ligaments, bouncing back up in a yo-yo spiral against her ribs.

“Coronary ligament.” He hated the machine-gun fire of information his brain was offering up to him. Quinn didn’t need to know he was staring at LeAnne’s hepatobiliary tree or the left lobe of her liver. Neither did he care about intestinal contents being isotonic or anything else the fucked-up part of his mind decided to dish up to him.

There was enough sense left in him to stumble back out of the parking structure. He had to be sick, but it couldn’t be too close to the scene. There was evidence, probably footprints in the damp grass and mud he’d walked through. Quinn needed to get farther away, distance himself from contaminating the area, but he’d gone only a few feet when he lost control of his stomach, and the coffee he’d drank all afternoon burned up his throat and into his mouth.

Bent over, staring at the grass now covered in his vomit, Quinn found he had the taste of LeAnne’s death on his tongue and the stink of her slaughter on his conscience.

This time it was easy to find his phone. Blindly dialing, Quinn wasn’t even sure who he called until he heard a rough light bit of Irish brogue answer and his own last name barked back at him.

“Kane? This is Quinn.” He shivered, wondering if he’d ever be warm again. “I need you to come here. There’s been a murder.”

Rooftop at Sunset

Damie: How much coffee do you drink, Sinjun. Give it a guess.

Miki: Not as much as I’d like. Why?

D: Think about how much more calm your stomach would be if you cut it in half.

M: I think about cutting you in half because I’d be calmer, but then common sense kicks in. So I don’t.

D: And you’d miss me. Admit it. You’d miss me.

M: Not as much as I’d miss coffee.

Y
EARS
OF
nuns, rulers, and long walks down to the principal’s office should have inured Rafe to hard, cold stares and off-the-cuff judgment. He’d had bottles thrown at him while playing and more than once been booed off stage by a crowd and stared down by truckers at two in the morning in a roadside diner skanky enough to star in its own horror flick.