Page 68 of Mystic Justice
I shook my head. ‘Without Sandra to target, they’ll go for someone else. Which of us would be calm and cool if they were buried alive?’
Krieg shrugged. ‘I’d be okay.’
‘Well, I’d freak the hell out like most people would,’ I retorted. ‘Virtually anyone could be a target – bar Krieg, apparently.’
‘She’s always taken someone from Botany.’ Elvira was playing devil’s advocate. ‘She’s likely to do so again.’
‘Likely, but it’s not guaranteed.’ I thought for a moment then turned back to my phone and dialled Gideon.
He answered with a droll, ‘My dear Inspector, how can I assist you?’
I wanted to insist that he close Botany, but without that location to focus on we didn’t have anywhere else. Calder would stay local; she wouldn’t go all the way back to York, and she had no other properties rented or owned in her name. The properties that had belonged to Harbinger were in the process of being sold to finalise his estate, but none of them were local.
‘We have reason to believe that Sandra Jaxim will be targeted for the next killing,’ I explained. ‘She’s been taken into protective custody. We believe that Jane Calder is responsible for the deaths.’
‘Jane?’ Gideon’s voice was incredulous. ‘That’s absurd. She’s front of house. She’s lovely! She wouldn’t—’
‘Appearances can be deceptive, you know that.’ As a vampyr, he could appear as twelve or twenty or anything else besides, but that wasn’t his true age.
‘Indeed. What do you want me to do?’
‘Warn all of your staff to stay away from her. If they see her, they need to contact us immediately.’
‘I can send a staff-wide email.’
‘Fine – but be sure to remove Calder from the list. Then I want you to do a second email with heronit saying that Sandra will be late today because she has an appointment and you’ll be running things until she gets in.’
‘Ruben would normally—’
‘Ruben’s dead,’ I said bluntly. ‘We’re waiting for confirmation on his dental records, but he was the third victim.’
‘Fuck. Good managerial staff are hard to find,’ he huffed. His callous attitude didn’t surprise me a whit.
‘As far as everyone knows, you’re the manager tonight until Sandra gets in.’ I hoped that would keep the killers’ gaze fixed on Botany and give us a chance to nab them. ‘We’ll be in the bar and monitoring the club from outside. We know what both of the assailants look like and we’re closing in on them.’ I hung up.
Elvira was still reading the journal. ‘Jane got the job at Botany because the temporal guards kick off shift and unwind there,’ she announced. ‘She was hoping to bribe or seduce one of them to let her go through the portal so she could go back in time to prevent Harbinger’s death. None of them would bite and she got warned off. That’s when she dug into her mother’s grimoire. She didn’t find the answer there, so she went to the black market and bought several illegal potions and other grimoires – darker ones. She learned how to raise the dead.’
She looked at me grimly. ‘She killed a human, a homeless guy she bribed to come with her with some food, then she sliced his throat and used his blood to draw the runes on Harbinger’s corpse.’
She read on. ‘Harbinger came back to life as she’d planned, but she complains that it rapidly became clear that he wasn’t himself. He didn’t love her. She needed to fix him.’ She scanned the pages. ‘She found various elemental sacrifice rituals and decided to cobble them together to ground him properly. She thinks that if she kills using all the elements, his personality will be restored and he’ll love her again.’ She sighed. ‘It’s kind of sad.’
‘Feel bad for her when she’s in Wraithmore,’ I snapped. ‘Let’s put a stop to this before Harbinger becomes unbeatable.’
My phone rang.David Evans calling.Dave was the toxicology expert I’d been waiting for. I swiped to answer. ‘What have you got for me?’
‘Hi, Dave? How was Enid’s wedding?’ he said pointedly.
‘All of that too,’ I snapped. ‘We can do that after. What have you got for me?’
‘Well, I’d say your theory that the girl was kidnapped was correct. She’d been fed Potion 203 repeatedly across a number of days.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Trace amounts were still in her bloodstream and her liver was starting to break down. If she’d been fed much more, she’d have died from organ failure before she was drowned.’
‘Potion 203?’ I said, frowning. ‘I don’t know that one.’
‘You wouldn’t. It induces sleep but it was discontinued after the liver issue was flagged up. It was used legally for a short period of time but now it’s black market only and not much used. There are other potions that do the same thing without the deadly consequences.’
