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

From what I could see, she was trussed up like a pig at a country fair.

Her arms and legs were tightly bound; only her neck and her ankles would have been free to move, and that hadn’t helped her a damn.

Other than that, her dark green skin told me our victim was a dryad.

And that was about all I could see through the leaves.

My partner, Detective Channing, approached the scene dressed in the uniform of the Connection: black suit, white shirt. His collar was so stiff it looked like he’d starched it and his black shoes had a military shine. ‘Whoa!’ he said as he joined me.

‘Whoa’ was right. Our victim had been found by some hobbyist fisherman at the edge of Grosvenor Lake. What made the scene unusual was that a weeping willow tree had moved a few feet into the lake and was now cradling the body in its long branches.

Weeping willows were often found by the water but not actually in it.

Their long tendrils usually fluttered and floated on the breeze but this one was wrapped up tight, its branches making a solid cocoon in which it held the deceased.

So far, no amount of asking nicely had persuaded it to let us in.

Loki was perched in some of the higher boughs of the willow, observing the scene. He was unusually quiet. Maybe my caladrius was being reverent; stranger things had happened.

I could see some of the corpse through gaps in the willow’s branches.

Despite the dense foliage I glimpsed lurid pink hair, but I hadn’t been able to get near enough to verify death or search the body.

I could have used the IR to blast my way in but doing that would risk the integrity of the scene and could damage evidence.

‘I’ve contacted the dryad grove and asked them to send someone over,’ I told Channing. ‘They’ll be able to get the tree to relinquish its hold on her. In the meantime, summon a sub-wizard in case we need to wipe the witnesses’ memories. They’re Common-realmer MOPs.’

A mop isn’t just a cleaning device: MOPs are members of the public, and the fact that they were Common realmers told my partner that they were wholly human.

They didn’t know about the existence of magic and we needed to keep it that way.

That was one of the core duties of the Connection: to keep us hidden by any means necessary.

Channing nodded. ‘On it.’ He pulled out his phone.

A few days earlier the brass had decided that the Connection needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

All of our work phones now had an app that some joker had named SPEL, which stood for Supernatural Police Evidence maybe there was something comforting about paper and pen, or maybe I was a bit of a dinosaur, but my notebook was still sitting in my breast pocket.

Channing, though, had gone full app and he knew where everything was after doing a deep dive into it during his down time.

He used the app to summon a local subterfuge wizard who was skilled in mind-wiping then he looked up at me. ‘We’ve got Dwayne Witterhall. He’s inbound. Twenty minutes.’

I suppressed a grimace: I wasn’t one of Witterhall’s fans.

Something about the man made my skin crawl, though I’d never once seen him put a foot wrong.

All the same, I was watching him, waiting, because instinct told me he wasn’t on the side of justice no matter the badge he routinely carried as a ‘police consultant’.

When I arrived, I put police tape around the scene as best I could – given that half of it was a lake – and summoned the medical examiner (ME) and the Scene of Crime Officers (SOCO).

‘Thanks,’ I muttered to Channing, vaguely embarrassed that I hadn’t mastered the app. ‘Let’s speak to the witnesses.’

The wits were wholly human, but luckily the PC who’d attended the scene was one of ours. As I approached, she stood to attention. ‘Inspector Wise. Detective Channing,’ she greeted us in a soft Scottish brogue.

‘PC Frost,’ Channing replied with a warm smile. ‘Good to see you.’ I spotted the interest in his eyes and no doubt Frost saw it too.

‘This isn’t a social engagement, detective,’ I reminded him sharply. The last thing I needed was Channing getting flirty in front of the wits.

‘Right.’ He blinked and toned down the smile but couldn’t quite vanquish it. Channing had a crush and I didn’t really blame him: Frost was beautiful with her blonde hair, blue eyes and perfect features. All the same, this wasn’t the time or place for flirting.

I pointedly turned to the human witnesses and quirked an eyebrow, tacitly asking for information. I pulled out my PNB, pen poised, and Channing readied the app to type in information as we received it.

Frost began, ‘This is Mr Fred Cornel and his grandson, Kai Cornel. They were here for an early morning spot of fishing. When they arrived at the lake they found the body weirdly tangled in the tree.’ She frowned and gestured to the bizarre cocoon.

‘Like some sort of sick topiary,’ said the grandad.

Though he spoke gruffly, his skin was pale and he kept fiddling with the white tuft of hair on his chin.

He must have been in his late seventies; his back was bowed and when he’d shuffled forward a few steps to speak to us, his knees and ankles obviously protested.

Sitting with his grandson by the lakeside should have been the perfect day for the old man but murder had ruined it. Murder ruined a lot of things, not to mention the life of the dryad cradled tenderly by the willow tree.

‘What time did you arrive?’ I probed.

The grandson answered. ‘We were here early to get the prime spots. I picked Grandad up at 7.30am, and we arrived at 8am on the dot. I guess we reached the lake at 8.05, and we immediately saw the willow tree like that.’

He looked at me with haunted eyes. ‘I peered in. But … her skin is green. Like the Hulk.’ He shook his head disbelievingly.

Sometimes the Other realm couldn’t hide itself, not completely.

The horror of the victim’s death had bled through the Verdict, the magic that protected our secrecy, letting the human see the dryad’s true form.

That was something we couldn’t allow; just like that, Kai had sealed his fate and his mind would be wiped.

‘Drowning can result in skin discolouration,’ I explained easily, because it was true.

‘Yeah,’ Kai said, ‘but that willow tree isn’t usually there.’ He pointed at the churned-up earth along the path. ‘It’s like it moved.’ His eyes were wide, his tone a shade away from hysteria.

‘Come now,’ Fred croaked. ‘Let’s not be fanciful.’ But his eyes were wild, too.

‘I’m not. Grandad, you know as well as I do, that tree wasn’t in the lake last week.’

Fred frowned. ‘Well no, it wasn’t, but perhaps management moved it. Trees can be moved, roots dug up and replanted.’

Kai stared at him. ‘Why the hell would they do that?’

‘Language!’ Fred chastised him, but his frown deepened.

Yep, we needed Dwayne. It chafed because if I’d been alone I could have slipped into their minds and fixed the problem in a moment.

It would have been risky because I was an unregistered subterfuge wizard, but I’d done it before.

However, with Channing shadowing my every move, opportunities to smooth things over were rare, and the additional red tape and delays annoyed me.

Plus, I trusted myself not to take liberties with their thoughts and memories, and I couldn’t say the same about Witterhall. I didn’t trust him an inch.

We took further details from the Cornels, including their contact information.

Once we had their statements, Frost led them a little way from the scene and stayed with them; we couldn’t let them go until SOCO had arrived and processed them.

We’d need their fingerprints and shoeprints to eliminate them as suspects.

There were some clear footprints by the water’s edge, one set small and narrow –probably a woman’s – and the other set larger and deeper like those of a heavy-set male.

There were also some tracks that suggested the victim had dug in her heels as she’d been dragged forward.

I pushed down a twinge of sympathy. Emotion only served to muddy my clarity of thought.

I studied the marks dispassionately. It felt rather like a pub joke, only no one was laughing. How many people does it take to drown a dryad? Just two: one to tie her down, one to make sure.

Dryads were buoyant, so it had taken some strength to force the deceased under the water and hold her there.

They were part human, part plant, and therefore a hundred percent creature.

In the Other realm divide, they fell on the same side as Krieg.

Hard to imagine that huge hulking ogre as ever being a victim, though. He was all predator.

Irritated with myself, I pushed Krieg out of my mind.

He had no place here, any more than my empathy did.

I knew all too well what it felt like to be tied down, restrained against your will, and I could picture the victim’s struggles and her fear.

In the depths of my mind, I silently vowed to bring her killers to justice.

One way or another.