Page 8 of Mystic Justice (The Other Detective #2)

The team investigating Moss’s disappearance had collected her laptop.

The Criminal Investigations Department had precisely one cross-over officer, Detective Sonia McCaffrey.

I’d go through her work later to see if she’d missed anything, but for now I tagged her and let her know her missing person wasn’t missing any more.

‘That was rough,’ Channing said as we walked back to the Palm House.

‘Awful,’ Loki chimed in. ‘Heart sad.’ I wondered whose heart he was referring to, his or Moss’s parents.

‘Notifying someone of a loved one’s death shouldn’t be easy,’ Krieg pointed out. ‘If it is, you’re in the wrong business.’

‘You’re right.’ Channing paused. ‘The dad doesn’t have an alibi.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ I agreed. ‘What does your gut say?’

‘My gut?’ he frowned.

‘Instinct,’ Loki squawked, dive-bombing Channing and making him duck instinctively. He frowned in irritation at my caladrius companion’s antics.

‘The bird’s not wrong,’ I said. ‘You’re picking up on things all around you all the time, things your conscious mind hasn’t noted but some other part of your brain has. That’s all gut instinct is, your mind telling you something you know but you don’t know you know.’

Channing shrugged. ‘Then my gut thinks he hasn’t got anything to do with it. If he was the killer, he’d have made sure he had an alibi.’

‘You’re giving the majority of criminals more credit than they’re due.

The average murder is the result of fury or passion, not cold calculation.

Most of those killers don’t have alibis because they didn’t plan that far ahead – they didn’t plan at all.

’ I chewed my lip, hesitating to share my thoughts aloud, but Channing wouldn’t learn if I didn’t teach him.

He needed to think like a cop, to follow the threads and look at the whole picture they wove.

I continued. ‘I believe that contrasts with our killers in this case. Moss was missing for days before her freshly killed corpse was found. None of her friends had seen or heard from her while she was missing – she wasn’t having a lark or winding up her parents.

There was zero phone or banking activity and that was highly unusual for Hollings, who was regularly on social media.

Add to that the fact that no CCTV was found of her after she arrived for her shift makes me think that she wasn’t missing at all but had been kidnapped, captured by our killers in a CCTV blind spot and bundled away.

That’s why we had no sightings of her, no pings on her phone or her financials.

If she was kidnapped – and it is an if – that shows forethought and planning.

One of those killers would have thought about an alibi and they’d have locked it down.

So the dad doesn’t jibe with me but we’ll run him down all the same.

Get Ji-ho onto it. Give him Sorrel’s car reg and see if he can track his movements through CCTV. ’

‘Got it. I’ll do a request now on SPEL,’ Channing replied.

Okay, even I had to admit that the damned app was a whole lot quicker than waiting until we were in the office to send across the request.

As we returned to the Palm House, Krieg moved alongside me.

His pinky finger brushed against mine, the barest of touches, yet somehow it sent a hot jolt through my bones.

I gave him a warning look, which made him smile.

‘I didn’t even ask to hold hands,’ he whispered innocently, low enough for Channing not to hear.

‘Good, because the answer would be no!’ I hissed back. ‘We are not canoodling at a crime scene!’

His smile widened. ‘Inspector, we’re neither at a crime scene nor are we anywhere near canoodling. I look forward to teaching you the difference.’

Why did that whispered promise get me so hot under the collar? Because he was sexy, that was why, ridiculously, mouth-wateringly sexy. And I had to keep my brain focused on work even though it was unhappy at the idea.

I told my hormones to sit down and shut up, but I didn’t tell Krieg off when his hand brushed mine a second time. He was taking liberties and, God help me, I loved it. Six hundred and eighty-two days and counting. At that stage in my celibacy, I’d have moaned even if a mosquito sucked on my neck.

The Palm House was busy, Common realmer visitors were walking in the glass house, admiring the fauna and flora with no idea as to truly how exotic – and dangerous – some of them were.

‘Psssst,’ a female pixie whispered. ‘Over here.’ Despite the shimmering butterfly wings extending from her back, the foot-tall pixie remained flat on the ground because of all the humans around her.

If the Common realmers saw her, the Other realm would protect itself and instead of a real pixie they’d see a statue of one.

Or maybe a cute, painted gnome – the Other realm had an odd sense of humour at times.

Obviously it was harder to come up with an alternative explanation for something a foot tall and flying.

A drone, maybe? Modern technology had its uses.

The pixie opened a side door by pressing a discreet door-release button at her height and ushered us in.

Loki swooped in before it closed with a clang.

She didn’t take us to the general area but deep into the building, into Peter’s den itself.

I’d never been in a dragon’s hoard and wasn’t keen to enter one now, but nevertheless I pressed on. The job came first.

Dragons were fiercely protective of their hoards – whatever form they came in – and I was conscious that doing or saying the wrong thing could lead to me being cooked flambé style.

Since I was keen on living, I stepped very carefully, making sure to avoid the tendrils of the plants that reached out to touch me.

We made it to the heart of the building where a small female imp was whimpering on a metal potting table that had been thoroughly cleaned.

Amber DeLea was bent over her, painstakingly painting teeny-tiny runes on the imp’s red skin.

Even from this distance I could see the bloody ruined stump of her tail and I winced in sympathy.

Amber’s ever-present protector, the griffin Bastion, whirled around as we entered the room. Some of the tension eased from his shoulders when he saw our Connection uniform but it returned when he saw Krieg. ‘Your Excellence,’ he greeted him tightly. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m assisting the Connection with an investigation.’

Bastion’s eyes flicked to me and a small smile curved up his usually firm lips. ‘Are you, now?’ he said mildly. ‘How interesting. Wise,’ he greeted me. We’d dealt with each other on a couple of occasions but he’d never sounded quite so friendly before.

‘Good to see you,’ I said gruffly. ‘This is my partner, Detective Channing. Channing, this is Bastion.’

Channing’s jaw dropped and he stepped back. ‘The assassin?’

‘That’s the one.’ I suppressed a smile. Bastion was a griffin and, like Krieg, he fell onto the creature side of the fence, but unlike the ogres the griffins were born with the powerful urge to kill.

To channel that urge more … productively, the Connection had agreed that the guild of griffins could form their own assassination business.

For the right price you could get a sanctioned hit on virtually anyone, though the price was incredibly steep.

Despite their wealth, griffin numbers were at an all-time low.

According to our records there were fewer than fifty of them worldwide.

They each carried a life-saving potion that could bring them back from the brink of death, but the potion’s ingredients were incredibly rare and expensive and the witches brewed only one batch every decade or so.

If you received a mortal injury and you’d already used your final-defence potion, you were shit out of luck.

Consequently, the griffins’ numbers continued to dwindle.

‘Can you all stop your chattering?’ Amber said sharply. ‘I’m trying to save a life here, and I don’t need you nattering around me like a vapid harem.’

We fell silent: the Crone wasn’t a woman to piss off. She held the only lifetime role in witch society and was one of the most powerful females around, even on her worst days.

We honoured the requested silence for a full fifteen minutes while Amber worked with painstaking care then, with a subtle motion, she called forward her magic.

The little imp lit up like a Christmas tree, golden light surging through the runes as each one sparked to life.

She gave a blood-curdling scream and promptly passed out.

‘Is she okay?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ Tension slid out of Amber’s shoulders as she watched the imp with an analytical eye. Finally she gave a satisfied nod, set down her paintbrush, tightened the lid on the potion she’d been using and removed her purple gloves. ‘She was supposed to do that.’

Amazed, we watched as the imp’s tail started to grow.

‘Excellent,’ Amber murmured. A moment later she put her hands on her hips. ‘Why the hell do we have another imp with its tail sliced off?’ she asked Bastion. ‘We sent the details of the vampyr responsible for the other attacks to Wokeshire, didn’t we?’

‘Yes. He said the vampyr had been identified but not apprehended.’

Amber fixed me with a look. ‘Apprehend him.’

‘I’ll certainly do my best, Crone. Can you give me a description of their appearance?’

‘I can do better than that.’ She waved a hand at Bastion, who pulled out his phone and showed us an image floating in a bowl. ‘If it’s the same vampyr – and I can’t imagine there are many others running around collecting imp tails – I scried their image from one of the other victims.’

The vampyr the image revealed was male, handsome – as all vampyrs were – and pretty young, eighteen maybe. The problem was that vampyrs could choose to appear any age they wished, eighteen one moment, eighty the next. That made it inordinately difficult to apprehend them.