Page 63 of Mystic Justice
‘Alive,’ I said dully. ‘They were alive. Whoever is doing this needs the pain, the fear.’
Kate’s face was grim. ‘You’re probably right.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Sometimes the evil and cruelty of man still surprises me.’
It no longer surprised me. In my experience most people were good, but I’d had my fair share of exposure to the odious other side, the dark underbelly of existence where prejudice and greed ran rife and coated everything they touched with a miasma of decay and hatred. On days like today, it was harder to remember that goodness existed, the goodness that I fought to serve and protect.
‘Hey, Stace,’ Ed called. I looked up. ‘If I’m going to be working with Unit 13, does that mean we don’t need to keep coming up with weird sports to discuss? Because, frankly, I’ll miss that.’
‘We can still talk weird sports,’ I promised, my heart warming a little. When faced with corpses daily, you needed to find your humour where you could.
‘Good, because you will not guess what I discovered yesterday.’
‘What?’
‘Extreme ironing!’
‘What’s extreme about it?’
‘The location. People do it in weird places, like on a mountain top. We’re talking ironing while hanging from a cliff edge.’
‘Why the hell would anyone do that?’
‘I guess nothing says “I don’t fear death” like pressing trousers at 3,000 feet. Someone even did it while skydiving, like ironing handkerchiefs in free fall.’
‘But how?’ I demanded. ‘Talk me through this. Do they have an ironing board?’
Ed placed a marker next to some flattened grass, though sadly there was nothing so well defined as a print. He snapped a photo. ‘Yup, that’s in the rules. They need an ironing board but they can modify it to their locations. If they’re in the sea, they need a board that will float.’
‘I guess you don’t want a metal ironing board for your water ironing.’ I shook my head. ‘But if you’re up high, surely theironing will get ruined getting it back to ground? You can’t skydive, iron and then land without the hanky getting wrinkled.’
‘Maybe that’s part of the challenge,’ he mused. ‘I’ll watch more and let you know.’
‘You do that.’
Channing walked over looking grim. ‘We haven’t heard from Ruben.’
‘The werewolf?’
‘Yeah. We rang his roommate. Ruben never made it home from his shift last night.’
I rubbed my forehead, guilt licking through me. If I’d used my sub-skills to question every staff member, Ruben wouldn’t be dead – though my mum might be if I was found out, and that stayed my hand each and every time. Searching the thoughts, minds and memories of too many people was dangerous. I’d made the right call for myself and my family, but I had to live with the consequences and today that was hard. Despite our best efforts, Ruben had been taken; our best efforts hadn’t been good enough.
‘The kicker?’ Channing continued. ‘The roommate said he’s afraid of fire, pathological about it. As deputy manager at Botany, he rolled out electrical table lamps instead of open flames. Apparently a seer once told him to beware of fire.’
Well, she hadn’t been wrong. ‘Good work,’ I said tightly. ‘Use SPEL to get McCaffrey to review all of the footage Ji-ho got last night. I want to know everyone that Ruben spoke to, saw, or looked funny at.’
‘Yes, ma— Wise.’
‘Ask Frost to continue talking to the staff. I want to know who is terrified of being buried alive.’
‘I’m on it,’ he promised.
I looked down at the corpse, almost certain now that it was Ruben Jones. ‘Can you identify the body using his dental records?’ I asked Kate.
She leaned over the body, carefully prised the jaw apart and assessed the remaining teeth. They looked blackened and burned to me, but she nodded confidently. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Ed, are you happy you’ve got enough photos of the body in situ?’
‘Yeah, we’re all good.’
