“I’ll check.” He clicked his mike and asked someone about that. “The dad just arrived. Mr. Samuel Springer.”
“If Karonski doesn’t finish up pretty soon, I’ll—”
“I’m done,” called a voice from below. “Come on down. Carefully.”
Lily didn’t waste any time following that order.
The ravine wasn’t deep, but it was steep and covered in bushy growth. Only one good way down, so they weren’t using it. The perps probably had. The next-best access was about ten feet to Lily’s right. She headed there, sliding the strap of her purse across her chest messenger-bag style so she’d have both hands free. That let her scramble down quickly, hitting the bottom of the ravine several yards from the body.
Karonski met her. His face didn’t tell her much. The lines were grooved deeper than usual, but that might be fatigue from the spell.
“Well?” she said.
“We’ll share notes after you’ve checked things out your way. Stay back as far as you can. Don’t cross the circle.”
“It’s not active, is it?”
“No, but don’t touch it. Just touch one of his hands for now.”
She nodded, slipped booties on over her shoes, and advanced carefully. She’d already mapped out her route from above.
The circle around the victim had been drawn with a thick line of powder the color of unburned charcoal. It was scuffed in several places. Inside it—in addition to the body—were simple runes sand-painted on the earth. They were a pale, chalky yellow. It looked like there’d been nine of them, though several had been obscured by the arterial blood that had fountained up and out, covering a large swath of the ground . . . except in one spot, near the victim’s head. The place where his killer had squatted to cut his throat.
Blood splatter doesn’t show up as starkly on dirt and rocks as it does on a white wall, but from above Lily had been able to map out a fairly clear path to one staked hand. She sniffed as she drew near and frowned. She’d expected the sour, butcher-shop stink. There was a lot of blood. Some had soaked into the ground, but the ravine was rocky. Not enough soil to absorb however many quarts he’d lost before his heart quit pumping it out.
She had not expected the faint stink of decay. Visually, the body seemed fresh. Some lividity, sure, but while that didn’t hit maximum for six to twelve hours, it set in pretty early. No signs of animal depredation, and while the day was warm, it wasn’t hot enough to speed decomposition. Last night had been cool.
Well, figuring out time of death was the ME’s job, not hers. She stopped and crouched. Someone had a very sharp knife, she observed. They’d sliced his neck open with a single stroke. No false starts. Took a good blade and some strength to do that. Might take some practice, too. Had they used the same blade to carve that rune on his chest? If so, it was fairly narrow.
She could reach one of the staked hands without crossing the scuffed circle. She did that, pressing her fingers to one mutilated hand.
And fell back on her butt.
FOURTEEN
“LILY?”
“I’m okay.” Embarrassed, but okay. Lily put both palms flat on the ground, patted around, and felt nothing but dirt and rocks. So she pushed back into her crouch, steeled herself, and stretched out her right hand to touch dead flesh again.
When she’d learned everything she could, she stood and walked back to Karonski, digging in her purse with her left hand for a wipe.
“Obviously you felt something. Death magic?”
“I don’t know. That first touch . . .” She repressed a shudder and started scrubbing her right hand with the wipe. She wished she had some holy water like Cynna used sometimes. Clorox didn’t seem like enough. “Maybe it’s a variation on death magic. Is there such a thing? This stuff is every bit as repellent, and the sensation is similar, but not quite the same. Mushier. Whatever it is, there’s a lot of it, and it . . . it’s in motion. It’s crawling around on that body.” This time she couldn’t keep from shuddering. “It tried to crawl up my hand.”
“Son of a—Lily, are you—”
“I’m okay. It couldn’t stick to me. It tried, but it couldn’t. Take my hand.” She held it out.
“I didn’t touch the body,” he said, but he let her check anyway. His palm was firm and slightly moist, and the only magic she felt was the kind he’d been born with. Karonski’s Gift was a variant of Earth magic called psychometry—the ability to read emotions from objects. A strong psychometor could pick up images and thoughts if they were connected to strong emotion. Karonski’s Gift wasn’t that strong, but he was exceptionally well trained. When Lily touched him, she felt moss-covered stones. Stones were Earth; the mossy sensation was how her Gift interpreted both his particular variant and his years of training.
When she dropped his hand he asked, “Is this stuff anything like what you touched on the amnesia victims?”
“I don’t know. What I’m aware of touching is magic—nasty, icky magic, and lots of it. Trying to find some arguai mixed in with that would be like trying to spot the Big Dipper when the sun’s up. I can’t do it. Karonski, we need to make sure no one touched that body. The first-on-scene said he didn’t, since the vic was obviously dead, and I shook hands with him. I didn’t feel any trace of magic. But the boys and Hardy—the boys say they didn’t touch him, but we need to know for sure.”
“Shit. You don’t feel any magic in the air, do you?”
“No, and I checked the ground. The dry ground, that is. Nothing there. I can’t say about the blood-soaked area. I didn’t think I should touch it.”
“You’ll probably need to, but later. Let’s go.”
She tucked the wipe in a pocket and started up out of the gully. Up was harder than down, and she needed both hands for the first part. The paramedics were going to have a fun time getting the body up if they used this route . . . if the body could be safely handled. “How do we keep the icky magic from crawling on people?”
“Silk, maybe. It’s worth a try. I’ll need you to check to see if it can get through silk.”
That was going to be fun. “What did your spell tell you?”
“Two spells, actually. The first one should have let me see if there was any death magic in the area.”
“Should have?”
“The results didn’t make sense.” He was huffing a bit from the climb. “You want the long version? It’s technical.”
“Later. What was the other spell for?”
“It’s a way to contact the vic’s ghost, if there’s one around. Nonverbal, since ghosts mostly aren’t good with words. That spell would have let me see what the ghost remembered about his death.”
“It didn’t work?”
“No ghost this time. Speaking of ghosts . . .” He paused to catch his breath. “Have you heard from yours?”
Lily scrambled up the last bit and saw Officer Crown waiting. He looked very curious. She grimaced. She hated it when people referred to Drummond as her ghost. “Not since last night. I could try calling him. He said that wouldn’t work as well this time, but I could try.”
That was too much for Officer Crown. “You’ve got a ghost?”
“I have occasional contact with one. Karonski? Should I call Drummond?”
He heaved himself up onto level ground. “Probably, but you need to check out the kids and Hardy first. Officer, I’d like you to stay here, where you can keep on eye on the scene. We’ve got a serious magical contamination problem. No one can approach that body but me or Agent Yu for now. No one. The mayor shows up, you keep him away.”
Crown’s eyebrows lifted. “Yes, sir.”
Lily and Karonski set off at a quick jog. “I’m betting on at least two perps. You?”