Page 4 of Immortal By Morning
It was the cold assaulting her feet as they sank into the mud far enough to allow the frigid slush to coverand seep into her shoes that finally drew her from her shock. Breath leaving her on a gasp, Abril snatched the phone out of her pocket with a suddenly shaky hand. She punched in 911 as she backed toward the edge of the hole, pulling Lilith with her.
The moment her call was answered and the operator asked what her emergency was, Abril cleared her throat and said, “There’s a body in my boss’s garden.”
“Ma’am, did you say there’s a body in your boss’s garden?” the operator asked sounding shocked.
Abril couldn’t blame her. This was a small town on the outskirts of London in Ontario, Canada. Things like this just didn’t happen here.
But apparently, they do after all, her mind pointed out as she stared at the skull now half-exposed in the dirt. Letting her breath out on a resigned gust of air, she said, “I’m afraid so. Or a skeleton, I guess. At least the dog dug up a skull. Can you send someone out, please?”
Two
“Get in, Crispin. We have to go!” Alexander Roberts barked when Crispin opened the passenger door of their assigned vehicle.
Eyebrows rising at his partner’s impatient greeting, Crispinus Delacort slid into the car and pulled the door closed. They’d only separated moments earlier when Roberts had left him to finish a conversation he’d been having with another detective and gone to get the car. His partner had been fine and much more relaxed then. Now he was practically vibrating with excitement. “What’s the rush?”
“We have a case,” Roberts announced as he hit the gas sending the car shooting forward.
Guessing his partner had got the call on the car radio as he’d driven around to pick him up, Crispin quickly did up his seatbelt and asked, “So, what is it this time? A cat up a tree, a kid playing truant, or someone caught shoplifting?”
“None of those,” Roberts answered him. “Murder.”
“Really?” Crispin asked with surprise. As a homicide detective he supposed he shouldn’t really be surprised they’d got called to a murder. But they’d only had eight of them in London over the last year. Half of those had needed little to no detective work done since the perpetrators had called in the deaths and confessed at the same time. That had left four murders that had actually needed solving. It hadn’t made for a lot of work for him and Roberts. Unfortunately, that meant they’d spent the better part of their time helping out with piddling cases like chasing down truant teens. “Are we sure it’s murder?”
“Must be,” Roberts said as he headed out of the parking lot, tires squealing. “A body in a garden.”
“What?” Crispin gaped as Roberts turned on both the lights and siren.
“You heard right,” Roberts assured him, his expression a combination of grim tension and a strange almost glee. “A body buried in a garden. Most people choose a cemetery for the last resting place... if it isn’t murder.”
Crispin understood the glee thoroughly. While it might appear unseemly to most people to have that reaction to a body being found, it was what he and Roberts had been trained for and were paid to take care of. It was nice to actually use their training and earn their pay for a change.
“Where is the garden in question?” Crispin asked.
“Out of the city, just past Byron,” Roberts said.
The news made Crispin stiffen. His voice was careful when he asked, “How far past Byron?”
“Still in our jurisdiction,” Roberts reassured him.
Crispin nodded, relaxing a bit in his seat. It wouldhave been just their luck to get a case like this only to arrive and find themselves muscled out by the Ontario Provincial Police because the case was out of the city’s environs. It appeared that would not be the case, however.
Despite speeding with lights and siren blaring, it took more than twenty minutes to reach their destination. Crispin knew they were getting close when Roberts killed both the siren and lights. Sitting up in his seat then, he glanced around with curiosity. They were passing farms and fields, and then they turned onto another road, a crescent, Crispin saw as he read the street name.
“Wow,” Roberts breathed suddenly, drawing his attention away from the street sign.
Crispin glanced to his partner, and then followed his gaze to the road ahead. It was a truly breathtaking view; dark green grass and large old trees, mostly cedar, spruce, and white pines on both sides of the street. It was like they were driving through a park. He didn’t even notice the houses at first, not until he turned his head to look for them. They were all set back on what appeared to be two or three acres of parkland each, and every one was a different design of large majestic home. Not one was unattractive. It was a vast difference from the cookie-cutter houses on tiny postage-stamp bits of land that had been being built for the last twenty years or so. Which meant these homes were probably twenty-five or thirty years old, he supposed, but not one looked like it was. They were all well maintained.
The house they wanted turned out to be the largest on the road, with the largest property, and sat smack dab in the middle of the curved crescent.
“Wow,” Roberts repeated, as he steered them slowly up the driveway. “So, this is how the other half lives.”
Crispin peered at him with disbelief. “Your house is twice the size of this one, and sits on forty acres.”
“Yeah, but I’m 373 years old,” Roberts pointed out.
“So?” he asked with amusement. Roberts said it as if his nearly four centuries was long-lived. But he was just a babe to Crispin who had been on the earth for nearly three millennia.
“So, I’ve had a lot more time to make the money to buy the land and build my house,” Roberts pointed out.
