Page 25 of Mystic Justice
Moss had died on Saturday night. If Sandra had closed up Botany at midnight and then run all the way to Grosvenor Lake, she might just have made it there within the window. I’d have to see what Kate said about the time of death before I could rule Sandra in or out.
‘You’re a witch?’ I asked. That question was rude, but politeness had little place in a murder investigation.
She pressed her lips together in disapproval but answered all the same. ‘Yes.’
‘Which coven?’
‘Liverpool coven.’
I nodded. I’d have to reach out to Kass, get her impression of Sandra and ask her to pull the CCTV footage for me. There was something off about the woman and I was going to find out what.
Just as Sandra had said, everyone was overflowing with praise for Moss and in tears that she was gone. Her work bestie, Lena Shaw, was so overwrought that she cried pretty much all the waythrough her interview. She was a witch like Sandra, but what was interesting was the fact that she’d been off shift on Saturday night. She said that before she’d headed out to meet friends at 10.30pm, she’d seen Sandra at the coven tower.
I’d check the cameras at Botany too, but it looked like Sandra was telling porkies.
Chapter Twelve
The owner of the Botany, Gideon Merrick, proved elusive so after interviewing all the staff who were there, we headed off to the morgue. I rode with Krieg. He stayed quiet as I mentally rifled through the interviews and made notes in my PNB of my impressions of each person I’d spoken to.
I had access to all of Channing’s notes through SPEL, but there was nothing in them to send up any red flags. I wasn’t worried; we still had another six staff members to interview as well as Merrick, and we’d run them down tomorrow.
It was rare for murders to be wholly random: probability and experience told me that Moss had probably known her killer at least a little. I just needed to keep tugging at strings and at some point I would unravel them.
Kass had texted back; she was still in Edinburgh but she had greenlighted for her coven to give me the CCTV footage. Her impressions of Sandra were brief: not her favourite person, she didn’t have much of a spine and she had a pathological need to be liked.
Kate was my last stop for the day and I hoped she’d found some evidence that would tell us in big neon letters who the kidnappers and killers were.
When I pushed open the door to the morgue, it was unmanned: it appeared that Kate’s dryad sentinel, Sharon, had already left for the day. ‘You stay here,’ I ordered Loki. The last thing we needed was for him to poop on evidence or rain feathers down onto the corpse.
‘Stay?’ Loki spat in outrage. ‘I not dog!’ He flew to the bonsai tree in the corner and pointedly turned his back on me.
‘We won’t be long,’ I promised and made sure to flick on Sharon’s extra desk light in case the motion-sensor light blacked out while we were in the heart of the building.
I walked ahead of Krieg and Channing, leaving a sulky Loki squawking grumpily to himself. I couldn’t hear all of his comments but his muttered ‘Pigdog’ was clear enough. Even so, he relocated to Sharon’s desk to be near the light.
Kate looked up as we walked into her domain. She was obviously tired: her usual red lipstick had long since faded, leaving an inelegant pinkish stain in its wake; her riotous curls were contained with a hair tie, and her glasses were sitting on the end of her nose like they’d slid down and she was simply too tired to push them back for the thousandth time.
‘Hey. You okay?’ I asked with real concern.
She summoned a weary smile. ‘This one was draining,’ she admitted. ‘I justknewsomething was off but try as I might I couldn’t quite work outwhat. I used my magic to call up any runes on her skin but there was nothing to see.’
‘You’re a witch?’ I asked, genuinely surprised. I had always assumed she was a wizard, and she’d never mentioned a coven.
‘Yes,’ she admitted tightly. ‘My sister and I are covenless – by choice.’
I blinked; that was a rare choice indeed. ‘Okay, so you tried to see if any runes were present?’ I prompted.
‘I ran my magic through Miss Hollings in case she’d had runes painted on her that were invisible to the naked eye,’ she explained patiently. ‘I felt my magicpull,but nothing happened and no runes lit up. I searched every inch of her. I was confused by what was happening so tried it a few times. Each time I realised I was getting more and more exhausted.’
Using your magic could make you tired but the lines on Kate’s face spoke of something more than an average day’s work. ‘Something is draining your magic,’ I surmised.
Kate gave me a relieved smile. ‘I knew you’d get it! Absolutely – something was draining me and I couldn’t see what. I left that alone after a few failed attempts and started with the post-mortem. I found something you need to see.’
The body on the gurney was covered with a sheet. Kate carefully peeled it back to reveal Moss’s youthful face framed by bright pink hair and a chest cavity that had been opened wide and the internal organs removed. I leaned closer to see what Kate wanted to show me and gaped.
Inside the cavity, the ribs were covered in runes. They were black and looked like they’d been scorched on somehow. Next to me Channing paled and took a step back, looking like he was about to throw up. Before I could tell him to get out if he was going to hurl, Krieg pushed his head between his legs and Channing took some steadying breaths. I ignored the men and turned back to the corpse that was demanding justice.
‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ I murmured, looking intently at the ribs. ‘How is it possible that the runes are internal?’
