Page 31 of Mystic Justice (The Other Detective #2)

Once again, the body had been dropped near Jingo’s grove so he was in the mix, too.

Someone was working hard to point the finger at him, but he wasn’t stupid enough – or lazy enough – to leave bodies lying around where they could incriminate him like this.

Besides, he’d called in the centaur’s body drop himself, and even he wouldn’t have been arrogant enough to do that if he’d been the killer.

When I messaged Laura and asked for an ETA on the report on Jingo, I got a prompt response that she was still digging into him.

There were a lot of files on him and she was trying to identify the previous bodies he’d inhabited.

I greenlighted more hours on it and asked her to start building a list of his known enemies that I could work with.

I’d asked at the grove for Jingo to come and speak to me so I could start a list of people who’d want to frame him, but I’d been told he was out and they didn’t know where he was.

‘What have we got?’ Ed asked as he ambled onto the scene.

The body was little more than a blackened husk, curled in on itself like scorched paper.

Flesh had fused to bone in places and what remained was brittle, fragile – more charcoal than corpse.

The heat had been intense, leaving no hair, no clothing, just fragments of a shattered life.

Every inch of the skin was scorched, yet I bet if a witch ran their magic through it the runes would arise.

‘Unknown deceased,’ I said briskly. ‘Likely male, given the size of the remains. It isn’t known whether the deceased was killed prior to the burning or during. I tested a small fraction of the ash when I arrived on site and I can confirm the flame used wasn’t a witch’s potion bomb.’

Witches’ potion bombs burned hot and their flames were purple.

They were deadly, one of the witches’ first line of defence.

Their far-slower runic magic meant that in an attack situation they were vulnerable, which is why they each carried a volatile potion bomb.

They also hired wizard bodyguards who served them for years, often becoming fiercely loyal to the coven they lived in.

‘If it wasn’t a potion bomb,’ Ed mused, ‘then this looks like the work of a fire elemental. A fire like this sure as shit isn’t natural.’

‘I know,’ I said grimly. Which was why I currently had an alert out on Jane Calder, the only fire elemental who worked at Botany. I had also fired off a message to Ji-ho, telling him to prioritise digging into Jane ASAFP.

Elvira and Bland were already en route to the fire elemental’s residence to undertake covert surveillance. If Jane was the sole fire elemental who worked at Botany – assuming one of the killers was Jane, and that was an assumption for now – we needed to identify her accomplice, not rush in blindly.

Channing had put up crime-scene tape around the body and it lay forlornly on the green of Grosvenor Park.

The fire had been contained in a neat circle, a sure sign it was magical: the grass was scorched and blackened in a small circle around the body and then, like a finger snap, no other signs of fire existed.

Not a single ember had fallen where it wasn't meant to.

Ed got out his camera and started taking photos.

‘This isn’t on you,’ Krieg murmured to me.

‘No, it’s on the killers,’ I agreed. ‘But I didn’t stop them, so it’s on me too.’ I had no time for guilt now.

I turned to Channing. ‘Get McCaffrey and Frost to call through all of the Botany staff. If anyone doesn’t answer, we need to know about it yesterday.

Ask all the staff if anyone is especially afraid of earth, of caves, of being buried alive, anything like that.

We might be able to identify the next victim and put a guard on them. ’

I should have thought of doing that sooner, though surely most people feared being buried alive. ‘Don’t call Jane,’ I continued. ‘I don’t want her spooked.’

Channing nodded briskly, fingers already flying as he sent through instructions to SPEL. ‘I’ll help too,’ he said. ‘We’ll divide the list alphabetically.’ He walked a few feet away and started to dial.

I watched Kate’s van arrive. She swung down from the driver’s seat, still looking tired. ‘Hey, Kate,’ I said as she approached.

‘Hey. You’re getting me bodies faster than I can process them. I started on Joe Bogan last night but I haven’t finished him yet.’

‘I don’t know how much you’ll get from this one,’ I admitted.

She knelt next to the corpse. ‘The fire was hot but fast,’ she said to herself as she touched the corpse with gloved fingers. ‘I think I can pull something from the lungs so we should be able to determine if they were alive or dead when they were burned.’

‘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 the ironing 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.’

‘Okay. Kate, take him away and get me a positive ID. We think he’s Ruben Jones, a werewolf, but we need confirmation before we notify his next of kin and his pack.’

‘Two lives lost, then,’ she murmured. ‘Ruben and his wolf. I’ll prioritise confirming the identity of this body then continue working on Bogan.’

‘Thanks, I appreciate that.’

And in the meantime, I would prioritise hunting down Jane Calder, the only fire elemental who worked at Botany.

There had to be other fire elementals linked to the club – regulars, perhaps – but I had no names to work with.

Now I was replaying events in my head: the panic on Jane’s face the first time she saw the Connection at the door; the way she’d blurted the news of Moss’s death to all the staff, and that over-dramatic faint of hers.

My gut said she’d been playing a role, acting. Badly.

Yeah, my gut liked Jane for this all right, and if she was the culprit then we had to stop her before we had a fourth goddamn body in the morgue.