Blood, Dirt, and Lies Page 14

  “You’re in a shower; people should expect to get wet in a shower,” was his sensible reply. I would have protested again, said something about how unfair it all was but he pulled me toward him, pressing his mouth over my breast.

  There was no prelude, no hesitation, no soft kisses to start with, just the searing ecstasy as his mouth caught the flesh there, his tongue massaging me, while his hands danced along my thighs. My breath stopped, stilled by the power of the pleasure he was giving me. I rode the feeling as he moved from one breast to the other, then stepped back, letting the water run down my body where he had been a second before.

  Hot water and then his tongue, one after the other in a pattern I couldn’t understand, only enjoy. Until finally his hands joined the moment, fingers painting designs on my inner thigh, working their way up to the place between my legs.

  And then they were there, joining the twin sensations of water and tongue, fingers pressing into me. I leaned back against the tile, not feeling the wall behind me, every inch of being focused on him as I screamed his name. His tempo changed, increased to match the pounding of my heart, and I begged him not to stop.

  “Oh God, please Jakob, please.” I wanted to tell him I was on the edge, my body was ready for him, but somehow, he knew. I wrapped my hands around him and screamed, my body exploding in sensation, my legs weak. It took forever but was over too fast, and soon I was panting in his arms, his body supporting my weight.

  He leaned back, rinsing in the clear water, then kissed me. When he stopped his eyes asked a question I didn’t have the breath to answer; I could only nod. He understood, and gently, he entered me, his hard body parting mine and filling me. I steadied myself against the wall, my palms pressed flat as he arched against me, our bodies joined.

  I tried to match his fluid movements, moving with him hot and wet as the shower pounded down. The moment became a frantic rush of sensations, water on my breast, his hand on my nipple, his body stroking inside me, his mouth on mine and then, then finally every muscle in his body clenched in release.

  We stood still joined. I panted while he only held me, whispering in my ear in sweet German. Time passed; I closed my eyes, and rested my head in the curve of his neck, smelling the shampoo and soap. He turned off the water, and with a soft kiss on my forehead left me, returning almost instantly with a wide towel. We made it to the bed, my hair barely wet, while he was already half dry. I curled my body next to him, my eyelids heavy.

  “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten,” he said, shaking his head. I suspected skipping dinner for sex was a fairly big sin in Jakob’s world.

  “Nope. Work was rotten. I want to go to sleep and start over tomorrow.” I moved closer to him. “The only good part of today was the shower with you.”

  He pulled the towel off his waist and half of my body decided we weren’t that tired. I almost agreed with it. The sight of him, the blond curls between his legs still damp from the shower, the rest of him still hard for me, inspired all sorts of naughtiness in my head. But the day had been tedious and stressful; the only thing I was good for was a nap.

  “I can bring you dinner in bed,” he offered.

  “You have breakfast in bed, not dinner,” I mumbled before falling asleep.

  ****

  Jakob’s bed wasn’t any different from mine, not really. It was still a mattress with a box spring encased in a frame. But somehow I slept better at his place, every time. Maybe it was the solid rock walls of the cave and the total lack of light coming in from a window or maybe it was the absence of street noises. I couldn’t be sure why but I woke up on Saturday feeling more rested than I had all week, the frustration of the day before largely forgotten.

  I ate a simple breakfast, fueling for my run but not rushing. My goal for the day was simple: two four-mile loops on the dirt trail that started a little ways from the house, by the stream. I was still in my bathrobe, trying to decide if I needed sun block when my cell phone rang.

  I cursed a little, then remembered it wouldn’t wake Jakob and got over it.

  “This is Mors,” I answered without looking at the number.

  “It’s me,” a voice replied and I recognized Danny when he hadn’t had enough sleep. “We’re on.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve been called in. Hopefully it’s something about the Christine Sweeny case.”

  I groaned. Not the most mature thing to do but hey, it was before eight on a Saturday; I was allowed. I left Jakob a note and headed in to work on my day off. I arrived to find a stack of files on my desk and my half of the squad room deserted. Simon and Danny were in the office with the Lieutenant. I joined them and took a seat. Their attention was locked on the speaker phone.

  “And for that reason, the FBI is willing to bring you into this very sensitive case—” a faceless voice was saying.

  “Detective Mors has joined us,” Lieutenant French interrupted.

  “Well you can brief her on her way to the body. We want this case solved and we want it solved quickly. I don’t have to tell you this is your first priority.” The speaker hung up without another word, the obnoxious sound of a dead phone line filling the room.

  “Okay, someone brief me,” I said. The Lieutenant raised a single thick eyebrow at me, his displeasure as clear as his dark skin, but I didn’t bother to apologize. He might be a tough-as-nails ex-Marine who never grumbled but I wasn’t. I’d finished work last night with people yelling at me about how I wasn’t doing my job fast enough. I was still smarting from it. If they were going to start yelling again I wasn’t in the mood to be nice about it.

  “Representative Lloyd was stabbed with something that left traces of silica, traces that look a lot like petrified palm wood under a microscope.”

  “Petrified palm wood?” I asked clueless.

  “The state fossil of Louisiana,” the Lieutenant supplied. “It’s not usually sharp enough to cut someone, and it’s not easy to shape. If you’ve got a knife made out of petrified palm wood, there was probably an earth witch who made it.”

  “How does that connect to our case?”

  “It doesn’t,” Danny said. “It connects to an FBI case. Someone destroyed all of the equipment at a construction site. No one took responsibility but the FBI suspected organized crime, angry about how the contracts were given out. The only leads they found were traces of silica left behind by the knife they used.”

  I swallowed hard. “Whose body am I looking at?”

  “The dog,” Lieutenant French said and I realized he was as annoyed with this as I was.

  “The dog?”

  “There was a dog at the construction site. He was killed as part of the vandalism. So now, when we have all kinds of people pressuring us and Christine Sweeny being trotted out by the newspapers as an example of our incompetence, you’re going to see the dog’s body.”

  “Seriously?” I couldn’t believe I’d gotten called in on my day off for the dog. Everyone knew animals didn’t talk to me.

  “Oh and the dog in question has been dead for several days, so good luck.”

  “Thanks, I’ll need it.” I sat there a little bewildered. “I got called in to check up on a dog? This has nothing to do with Christine?”

  “It has a tenuous link to Representative Lloyd’s stabbing, but the link is pretty weak. Nothing to do with your case.”

  “And the files on my desk?”

  “Guess what I’ll be going through while you’re gone,” Simon said, clearly unhappy. I looked around the room and realized no one was glad to be here. As we shuffled out of the lieutenant’s office I decided to make the best of it.

  “Is Lucas still on his way in?” I asked, hoping he was and he could grab donuts for us.

  “First night of the full moon, I don’t have a partner for the next few days,” Simon replied.

  “Again?” I tried to make a joke.

  “Yup. I mean it’s the beginning so he could make it in today if it was something important but….” Simon’s voice c
ame up at the end and I realized I’d be hearing about the dog thing for a while.

  “Hey, I’ll bet Rex or Bowser or whoever he is, was a really important dog,” I tried.

  “Sure, laugh it up you two, and when the newspapers print a giant picture of Rex’s mother or worse his puppies that’ll never know him, then how will you feel?” Danny looked at us both sternly. We did our best to stifle the gallows humor but failed. By the time I got it under control I had accepted the bizarre hilarity of my day and we headed out.

  Our first stop was the city morgue. Dr. Mohahan wasn’t in but a helpful lab tech offered to find the body for us if we would wait. Thirty minutes later we were still waiting. An hour after that he arrived, much chagrined, to tell us since this was an FBI case the body had been transferred to their custody. Yesterday my anger would have overflowed into a tirade but today the insanity of it insulated me. We thanked him for the trouble and headed over to the FBI offices.

  The scene repeated itself with the addition of extra layers of security and background checking. In the end, two hours later, the result was the same: the body had been transferred to a vet school. Nearly noon on my day off and I hadn’t done anything worthwhile yet.

  We called Simon, got his order for Chinese, and headed back to the squad room with lunch. The Lieutenant had gone home for the day, which meant we could relax and joke over our take-out boxes. I ate more lo mein than I should have, but I justified it saying I’d run it off this afternoon, and I’d be doing magic later. Simon called me on the last one.

  “Spirit magic is kind of like death magic, right?” he asked.

  “Sure, I’ll give it to you,” I said, ladling more noodles into my mouth with chopsticks.

  “See the thing is, I don’t get anything from animals. I mean, not anything useful anyway. I might get a fuzzy noise of an emotion but not the clear angry, happy, sad I get from people. That’s different for you?”

  “No, you’re right. Animals kind of buzz at me, like static, that sort of noise.”

  “But if that’s true, what’s the point of trying to magic the dog?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “Wrong,” Danny chimed in. “It’ll make the FBI happy, and it gets us overtime pay.”

  ****

  We got back in the car and drove out to the vet school. We hit a little traffic, a car accident that hadn’t been cleaned up yet. There weren’t any dead bodies, and nobody even seriously hurt when we finally got near the wreckage, so the delay was just one more bit of bad luck.

  The clock was closer to two than to one by the time we made it to the school. They closed at two, so there were only a few people left and none of them knew anything about the case. It took two phone calls and a text before we were lead into a room of steel drawers. For Danny it was a quiet room; for me it buzzed like a thousand cicadas on a hot day.

  “Which drawer is he in?” Danny asked and his words barely registered over the din in my head.

  “Uh, umm.” The lab tech, an unhelpful, clearly hung-over young man in a white lab coat flipped through several sheets of paper. “Actually, not this room. He’s in the freezer.”

  We left, shutting the door and the sound behind us. We followed him through a series of wide open buildings with weird harnesses for lifting cows and a treadmill big enough for a horse to a giant stainless-steel door with a large round push button knob.

  “You push this button and it opens. There’s one on the inside so you can never be locked in. If you’re claustrophobic I could go get a cart and bring the body out for you, but you can’t leave the door open for too long. It lets the cold air out.”

  I didn’t bother to mention it was only forty-five outside and the sun was rapidly fading. In the summer, I’m sure his speech would have made a ton of sense, but in the middle of January he sounded silly. Danny nodded and I went along with the nod. The door popped open when he hit the shiny steel button but he just stood there.

  “I uh, I mean, I don’t think you’ll—”

  “You’re claustrophobic,” Danny said. When he wasn’t worried about selkie troubles he was a great detective.

  “Yeah.” The kid swallowed hard.

  “We’ll be fine. We can find our way out to the front desk,” Danny told him while shutting the door.

  The inside of the cooler was only a little bit colder than the outside had been and I buttoned my coat again. The empty rectangle of a room was ringed with shelves holding containers of food and industrial-sized plastic barrels you find in warehouse stores. The wonderfully distracting goods on the wall couldn’t keep me from turning to the table in the middle, which held the world’s largest dog.

  His tawny fur stood with the stillness of death, his black muzzle frosted in the cool room. A normal dog only at fifty times the scale, the body in front of me stretched out for at least four feet.

  “One hundred and seventy pounds,” Danny read from a clip board. “They didn’t have a drawer big enough to hold him. Guess his name?”

  “Cujo?”

  “Tiny,” he smirked.

  “Okay, Tiny, what do you have to tell me?” I put my hands on his stiff back leg. The body was heavy, solid and dry like a piece of brittle wood. The noise came with the touch, a buzzing, quieter than the other room, a gentle hum. I concentrated, pulling the energy into my body like breathing in for a long time, and then poured it over the dog.

  The noise increased and with it came something new, a smell. In a room filled with formaldehyde and cold neutered scents I could smell earth, thick black dirt and plants. It was the scent of summer, of freshly mowed grass and someone digging in the garden. I wanted to press myself against that grass, to lay back and let the sunlight warm my skin. I wanted that summer.

  I chased the feeling, moving my hands up the dog’s body. It grew, the smell of plants and green growing things got stronger as my fingers dipped into a wound. Here, where he’d been stabbed, where valiant Tiny lost his life, the grass was bright green and the dirt was rich. I took a deep breath and caught another scent a flower maybe, a blossom.

  “Why do you smell like flowers, Tiny?” I whispered. The buzzing noise got louder, the sounds drowning out the scent but never forming into words.

  “Mal?” The voice sounded like it came from the other side of a long tunnel. I lay on freshly mowed grass in summer, and the voice came from winter.

  I was lazy with the summer day and it took me a long time to remember how to talk. When I finally did all I could come up with was “Just another minute.”

  “You’ve had twenty,” the voice reported sternly.

  That should have bothered me but I’d never felt anything like this, like earth and summer all wrapped up at once. It was pleasant, sweet, I didn’t want to go yet. I liked summer.

  “Right, that’s enough.” Danny grabbed me from behind and pulled me away from the dog. My hands left those cuts and I was back in January again.

  “Well that was just plain creepy,” Danny announced.

  I didn’t argue with him.

  ****

  I ate two Snicker’s bars and drank a Dr. Pepper on the drive back. I was going to run as soon as I made it to Jakob’s place. There was still a little light, it was only four, plenty of time. Except when we made it back to the office the FBI was waiting for us.

  The hour-long debriefing where I tried to put the summer feeling into words and failed miserably went far too slowly. I shouldn’t have even mentioned it. Finally, they decided I could try writing it up, so I headed back to my desk to struggle through the unfamiliar FBI reports.

  A bad mood comprised of equal parts frustration and exasperation started to come over me as we wrapped up our findings for the day in a report. I fantasized about what was left of my weekend, about Jakob and things that had nothing to do with the office but it didn’t work. I pressed my signature onto yet another page and looked up to find Amadeus sitting in my visitor chair innocently. The minute I saw his smiling brown eyes his know-it-all comments from the ni
ght before came back.

  “Your coffee mug is disgusting,” I said. I didn’t bother to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

  “Then don’t look at it,” he replied.

  “You leave it here every morning with blood in the bottom. It’s unsanitary.”

  “I wash it out every night, besides I can’t get sick.”

  I lost it. “I can. I want it off my desk.”

  “People in hell want ice water,” he replied. “Only half of the desk is yours; you’ll have to put up with it.”

  “Enough.” The lieutenant’s voice cut into our argument. I didn’t have a chance to ask when he’d come into the office. “The mayor is on her way up. Could you two squabble some other time?”

  He barely got the words out of his mouth when the glass doors sprang open. The mayor walked in, efficient and powerful, trailed by at least two assistants. Her black suit and white shirt were as crisp at seven at night as they had been at eight in the morning. Her short blonde hair was expertly brushed to one side as if even it wouldn’t disobey her.

  “Your Honor.” Lieutenant French and Danny greeted her in unison, my own “Your Honor” lagged a step behind.

  Amadeus used a different greeting. “Leslie.”

  “Amadeus? What are you doing here?” she asked him. The rest of us were forgotten as he leaned back on the desk to answer her.

  “I thought it was time to be a detective again. I hope you aren’t here about one of my cases?” He was doing the thing he did, the slightly manipulative tone of voice coupled with a cute-look thing that drove me nuts. Apparently, it didn’t bother “Leslie” at all.

  “No, I’m here to see Detectives Mors and Gallagher.”

  “Oh that case, glad I didn’t get stuck with it. They’ve been busting their ass but when there’s no physical evidence there isn’t much a detective can do.”

  “There has to be something…” Her voice wasn’t sure if she was asking a question or stating a fact.

  “Of course, there’s something; you can wait for someone to come forward. What the case needs is a break and until someone gives you one there’s not much else.” He shrugged. “We can ask until we’re blue in the face. People don’t listen to cops.”