Page 60 of The Hearth Witch’s Guide to Magic & Murder (The Hemlock Saga #1)

Avery

Reporting back to Detective Lahiri about Alistair Campbell had resulted in the request for a warrant to search his home from a magistrate of the Winter Council.

The warrant took a few hours to acquire, and even once it had been, it limited their field of search specifically for items found in the partial fetches such as straw or documentation relating to the creation of fetches.

This irritating bout of red tape was insisted upon as “proper protocol.”

Avery suspected it was more likely the council feared backlash from a powerful family like the Goffs, especially as it was clear now that fey ran somewhere in their bloodline.

Were all parties involved Mundane, she knew all too well there would be little need in the council’s eyes to make time for proper procedure.

They arrived in Mayfair late in the afternoon in Lahiri’s unmarked car, their fancy bit of authoritative paper in the detective’s hand. Calls to Alistair Campbell’s office had confirmed he had not been in since prior to the funeral.

Avery exited the car barely after they’d stopped, taking a sweeping appraisal of the location.

Park Street was a narrow lane, bordered by a majority of redbrick and stone buildings.

It was a wealthy neighborhood, and judging by the uniform buildings, it was held to a very specific set of standards by some sort of housing authority.

Beyond its lack of personality, Avery found nothing that qualified as suspicious or nefarious. 58

“You should wait in the car.” Detective Lahiri scowled at Saga as they both joined Avery on the sidewalk. It was the most disagreeable Avery had ever seen him. His face seemed unnatural without what she had come to believe was a permanent grin.

“I’m consulting on this case,” defended Saga.

“You’re emotionally compromised.”

“I’m emotionally invested. There’s a difference.”

Avery didn’t agree with that assessment, but she knew better than to insert herself into a family squabble. Instead, she drew their attention back to the case at hand. “What sort of vehicle does the doctor drive?”

Detective Lahiri fumbled through the file on hand. “A silver Audi e-tron S A8 is registered to one Alistair Campbell. Purchased earlier this year.”

Avery hadn’t the foggiest idea why she thought that question would yield any answer she would have understood.

There were many cars parked on the street, but damned if she could identify them by what sounded like little more than a chemical equation—and nearly all of the cars were silver.

She cleared her throat, attempting to maintain any air of authority she could muster. “Do you…see that…anywhere?”

Lahiri checked the file, then one of the parked cars. “License plates match too.”

That was unexpected. She’d assumed Dr. Campbell would be gone at that point—or at least in hiding—why else would he not be present at his job without a word?

Avery’s stomach churned. It was possible he’d taken a cab, or perhaps even public transport.

It was possible he had fled the country and didn’t wish to be easily followed—there were multiple options for a man of Alistair Campbell’s means, and yet…

She approached the door. The threshold—in its physical sense, anyway—appeared undisturbed. She knocked.

Then again, what reason did Alistair Campbell have to think he would need to cover his tracks? Had Saga said something? Unlikely. She was untrained but intelligent, and the only time they had spoken, he had not yet been considered a viable suspect.

If Alistair Campbell was not on the run, yet had failed to call out for work as well as return the calls of his employees, then there was only one other likely, yet unfortunate possibility.

No answer.

“We should have called for backup,” Lahiri murmured.

“No need,” said Avery. “In order to remove the organs, he would have had to genuinely believe he was not going to harm anyone. Truly, if it was possible to create an organ from a fetch—completely artificial and powered by magic—one could reason that it would have been even stronger than its original counterpart. It would have been impervious to disease, perhaps it could even heal the organs around it depending on the exact spell components—”

“What’s your point?” The frustration Lahiri felt at Saga’s involvement in the investigation was starting to spill out in other ways.

“A man whose modus operandi is not only to bring back his late great patient, but to improve the lives of the organ donors he used to give her that second wind is not a violent criminal. We do not need to arm ourselves with force, merely the truth. The good doctor may not even be truly aware that his plan has taken an unsavory turn.”

That was, of course, if he was still alive. A theory Avery was finding harder and harder to believe in. She knocked again. “Doctor Campbell?”

Of course, there was still room for alternatives—and Avery was willing to believe her own margin for error was much wider these days.

She believed Esteri when she said that it would improve in time, but it felt too brazen to hope it would be anytime soon.

Much had happened in two hundred years, and it wouldn’t be learned in a few days.

Reza reached forward and more or less banged on the door with the side of his fist. “Alistair Campbell, this is Scotland Yard, we have a warrant, sir.”

The silence that followed left a ringing in Avery’s ears—the imperceptible death knell.

“I suppose we’ll have to break it down,” muttered Reza, handing the paperwork to Saga to hold.

“There’s no need to get aggressive,” said Avery.

The door itself was in a recessed alcove designed to shield a caller from weather while awaiting to be let in, but for Avery it created a dark patch of shadows in the two upper corners.

She reached up and dragged her fingers along the darkness as if she were clearing a cobweb, but as she pulled it back, the shadows rested in her hand like translucent clay.

She took a moment to mold them, re-creating the lockpicks she had used to enter Highgate.

“Cover me,” she muttered and dropped to her knees to work at the lock.

Saga took a step nonchalantly to block the street’s view of Avery and pretended to dig around in her purse.

“This is breaking and entering,” hissed Lahiri under his breath.

“No, what you wanted to do was breaking and entering,” chided Saga.

“We have a warrant—”

“Did you or did you not literally just say we’d have to break the door down?” Saga asked. “Break, enter. Breaking and entering. At least this way the doctor gets to keep his door intact.”

A few clicks as the tumblers fell into their respective places and Avery stood.

“Oh, how odd, Inspector, it appears the door has been unlocked this whole time,” she deadpanned, uninterested in hiding the lie.

Lahiri pursed his lips, unamused, and the changeling smiled impishly, swinging the door open.

They’d taken two steps in before the smell confirmed Avery’s suspicions. It was eerily reminiscent of the flophouses of her time before the great sleep. She removed the white handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to her face. “I hope you both can breathe through your ears…”

The scent of death was a distinct potpourri of unpleasantness one did not soon forget.

There were some aspects to decomposition that could not be likened to any other, as flesh broke down and tension left the body, but they were intermixed with a confusing mixture of rotting eggs, cabbage, and garlic, with hints of an unexpected chlorinated musty scent.

“Oh no…” Saga whispered as she stepped inside, bringing up her sleeve to cover her nose.

“Gloves,” said Lahiri, pulling a pair from his coat and holding them out to her.

Avery studied the doorframe. No sign of forced entry. No sign of a scuffle. She craned her neck toward the staircase that would have led them up toward the living quarters. Worth investigating, but unlikely the location of the source of the scent.

The floor beneath them was lacquered wood. Sealed. Easy to clean if someone was determined and diligent. The walls were an eggshell shade, but adorned with art and accented by dark wood beams that made up the visible bones of the room.

This theme continued farther down the hall, which branched into other rooms: an empty sitting room, an unoccupied office. But the scent was stronger now.

Avery held the handkerchief over her nose and mouth, continuing down the hall until it opened up into the kitchen…and the crime scene it had become.

What had once been Doctor Campbell was pinned back onto a butcher block with one large knife driven through his forehead. He’d been cut open and—at first glance—eviscerated.

“Oh, fates, Saga—don’t look,” Lahiri warned.

“I would be more worried about the smell.” Avery stepped carefully through voids in the blood on the floor to get a closer look.

This was not the same work of careful premeditation, this was an act of rage; a violent crime of passion without remorse for the life it had ended.

“Victim seems to have sustained multiple stab wounds, though which dealt the killing blow will be hard to tell without an autopsy.” She made a motion above the body, mimicking stabbing the punctures she could see.

“A very frenzied attack. If he was lucky he died well before our killer opened him up. What do you think?”