Page 16 of Mystic Justice (The Other Detective #2)

Chapter Fourteen

I had seriously contemplated not rousing Channing but, tired as we all were, I knew he’d be pissed if he missed the chance to examine the crime scene while it was fresh.

Channing had been introduced to the Other realm at sixteen, way later than the majority of us were shoved through the portal to claim our magic.

I’d been introduced when I was eight like the rest of my family, but even before I’d walked through the portal I’d known about magic.

Magical creatures were as real to me as our family dog, Gus.

Channing hadn’t had any of that. He’d studied hard after being introduced to the Other but he was always playing catch-up. Now that I was aware of that, as his mentor I was duty-bound to even the playing field – and that meant roping him in even when we were shit out of energy.

I looked up as he joined Krieg and me at the scene. He’d arrived promptly, before SOCO. Luckily there were no witnesses to wrangle, no minds to clear; there was just an unholy mess. And Jude Jingo.

The doppelg?nger was visibly angry. A body dumped on your turf was a threat in the Other, a signal that you couldn’t keep out intruders, and the centaur had been dumped in the dryad’s grove. Jingo was the Al Capone of the Other: he couldn’t let such a slur on his reputation stand.

He pointed impatiently at the shattered body. ‘I want to know everything you know,’ he ordered me tersely.

‘I don’t answer to you, Jingo,’ I replied, just as sharply. ‘Tell me who found the body.’

He grimaced. ‘I was holding a grove meeting when one of the dryad’s trees grew distressed.

I went to investigate and I found this.’ He gestured to the mass of blood and flesh that barely resembled anything that had ever been living.

‘Naturally, as it wasn’t an in-house matter I reported it to the Connection as any upstanding citizen would. And here we all are.’

Krieg leaned against a tree. ‘And not because you’re sweet on the Inspector.’

Jingo’s rage faded temporarily to be replaced with amusement. ‘“Sweet on”? How quaint, Your Excellence. And of course, I’m well aware that the Inspector is under your … protection. I wouldn’t dream of stepping on your esteemed toes.’

I glared at them both. ‘The Inspector doesn’t need either of you to protect her. She can protect herself – as your man Lenny found out,’ I added to Jingo.

‘As he did,’ Jingo agreed. ‘That was the start of my fascination with you, Inspector.’

‘Get un-fascinated,’ I barked.

I turned away from the two posturing alpha males to Channing. My partner was visibly worn out but his eyes were alight with interest. ‘What have we got, ma’am?’ he asked.

‘We have a centaur who appears to have been dropped from a significant height. What should you do first?’

Channing blinked. ‘Check the victim is dead?’

I nodded briskly. ‘Do so.’

We both looked at the corpse. The centaur had gone splat, and the idea that anything could survive such a devastating fall was ludicrous, but I’d seen stranger things in my time as an officer of the Connection.

Always verify death. I’d done so the instant I’d arrived on the scene but the exercise was good for Channing; he needed to get used to seeing death, handling it, accepting it.

Being part of the MIT meant that death was our bread and butter.

The quicker he got desensitized to seeing a corpse, the easier it would be on him in the long run.

Channing pulled on gloves and stepped forward, carefully avoiding stepping in the pools of blood and liquified organs. He pressed his fingers to what remained of the neck and waited the obligatory two minutes. ‘Nothing,’ he reported back dutifully.

Despite the horror of the scene, I was pleased to see that he was holding up, though I suspected that was because the centaur was so utterly broken that he resembled meat you’d find at the supermarket rather than a once-living, breathing being.

I turned to Krieg. ‘As my civilian consultant, do you have any observations you’d like to share?’

Krieg examined the body dispassionately. ‘Deceased is male and I’d say he weighed around 700 kgs. Looking at the devastation of the body, I’m going to say he reached terminal velocity at something like 145mph.’

He looked up to the sky and then back down.

‘He was dropped, probably from a height of at least 2,000 feet to have reached that velocity. He landed in Grosvenor Park, right in the rockery, which caused his body to snap and bow with catastrophic results. He’s got a lot of broken bones.

’ He knelt and studied the large pools of blood.

‘These tell us he was living when he hit the ground – he wasn’t killed then dropped out of an airplane, he was alive as he fell and alive when he stopped falling. Death will have been instantaneous.’

Channing looked at Krieg with wide eyes. ‘How do you know all that?’

Krieg shrugged. ‘I’ve dropped a few bodies in my time,’ he said finally.

‘Living or dead?’

‘Both.’

I kept my face blank but it was hard to reconcile that fact with the man who’d been by my side for the last day. That Krieg was gentle and thoughtful, he said please and thank you, and he carried spare clothes for me in his car so my uniform wouldn’t distress my mother.

Obviously I knew that Krieg was High King of the Ogres, a warrior-like people who had found their place in Other society by becoming mercenaries.

I knew that their strength and deadly skills were available to the highest bidder.

But it was something else to see it, to know that he had done something similar to other bodies, to be reminded that one day we might find ourselves on opposite sides of the law.

I looked at the man who thought he was my mate and ruefully conceded once again that getting involved with him was a monumentally bad idea. And yet…

Kate interrupted my thoughts with her own weary arrival. Ed was with her, and I found that I was relieved it wasn’t Sam. ‘Hey,’ I greeted them both.

Ed eyed the scene then looked up and around. ‘Not a jumper,’ he commented. ‘Nowhere to jump from.’

‘No,’ Kate agreed. ‘He was pushed – or dropped.’ She squinted at the body and gave a low whistle. ‘From a significant height.’

‘The velocity really was terminal for him,’ Ed quipped.

Channing sent him a flat look that Ed blithely ignored as he took out his camera and started documenting the scene.

Channing didn’t understand yet that sometimes you needed humour to cope with what we dealt with day in, day out.

It wasn’t irreverent, it was necessary. We all had our coping mechanisms: mine was finding the fucker who did it and eliminating them from society one way or another.

I’d had a good look around before the others arrived. There was no sign of a third party present other than Jingo.

Murderers often returned to the scene of the crime so I was delighted to have the chance to take another hard look at him.

First we’d had a dead dryad and now we had another corpse, this time in Jingo’s own grove.

His anger at the centaur’s presence had struck me as genuine, but he was a doppelg?nger: he stole people’s bodies and assumed their identities.

I had no doubt he could lie expertly; maybe the showy murders were unrelated, but then again maybe not.

And even if Jingo wasn’t the killer, perhaps he or the dryad grove was being targeted in some way.

‘You got enemies?’ I asked him abruptly. ‘Someone who’d kill Hollings and then dump a centaur on your land?’

Jingo looked amused. ‘Inspector, I have more enemies than I could list in one lifetime.’

I sighed. ‘Have you ever thought about being nicer?’

‘I’ve been nice to you and so far it hasn’t done me any good,’ he pointed out.

Loki was hiding in the trees, cloaked by darkness; as soon as he’d seen Jude Jingo, he’d taken to the skies so that the doppelg?nger wouldn’t see him.

Even now, I didn’t know how long Jingo had kept the caladrius in a cage.

All Loki had said was ‘long’. I didn’t like seeing the normally bolshie bird scared.

For all his smiles and supposed civility, I couldn’t let myself forget that what Jingo presented was a front; beneath it seethed a being with no morals and no boundaries. He had no regard for the sanctity of life. Jingo took what he wanted from life and he killed those that dared resist.

It wasn’t a stretch to think that he might somehow be at the heart of this. I could have imagined it was an eye-for-an-eye vendetta – except for the fact that a centaur was now involved and Jingo had willingly called the Connection.

Kate was kneeling by the body. She murmured something and touched it, then runes appeared in a flash of light. They were scorched into the very bone.

Just like Moss Hollings.

It looked like we had a serial killer on the loose.