Page 20 of The Sin Eater (Carnival of Mysteries #27)

Ezra

W hen I set myself goals, I’m very good at achieving them, and tonight I wanted to get past the point of caring.

I was almost there, too, all cozy under a pile of blankets and pillows on my chaise, Jack within easy reach, music loud enough for the bass to ricochet off the walls, when my phone makes that weird chirpy buzz that counts as a ring tone.

Who the hell calls me at ten o’clock at night?

Not my ex—he’d send a text. Not my mom. Just... no. I have to close one eye in order to read the screen. Damon. Of course it’s Damon. I stare at my phone, letting it chirp. Buzz. Whatever. And answer because more than anything else, I want to hear his voice. Deep. Soothing. Hot.

At least until he tells me about the picture.

I need to see it. He tries to argue, and while there’s no way I can pretend I’m not drunk off my ass, I need to know if it’s her .

I put away the Jack without even a final hit on the bottle, drag on some jeans, and tug a sweater over my head.

Between the whiskey and the forty-eight-plus hours since I last showered, I smell a little funky.

He’ll just have to deal. I call an Uber and within half an hour, I’m standing in front of Damon’s building.

Too little time for me to figure out how I’m going to explain things if the picture is her .

I buzz his unit and a woman’s voice says, “Come up.” The building’s about the same generation as mine, with a smaller lobby and the same bank of brass mailboxes on one wall and the same deep burgundy, slightly mildewy carpet on the stairs. Jogging up those stairs gets my heart rate up.

Knocking on his door makes it race.

He smiles when he answers, but it’s guarded, and his eyes are full of questions. “Come on in,” he says. “This is my sister Dorinda.”

I brush past him, resisting the urge to throw myself into his arms. Not that he’s offered, and it would be awkward as hell if he let me fall. Fuck, I am drunk .

His sister is noticeably shorter, darker, and has an air of authority that I don’t want to mess with. “Hey,” I say, and she nods, her arms crossed.

Damon stops right behind me and rests a hand on my shoulder. “The picture’s over there.”

I see it. Hell, that’s about all I can see. It is her. I reach for the photo. Damon stops me.

“Don’t touch anything until after the cops get here.”

The whole of it lands on me, a weight heavy enough to make me bend from the waist. The murder I shouldn’t have seen and the woman I shouldn’t recognize. “Who is she? That asshole killed her and we don’t even know who she is.”

“Wait a minute.” Dorinda’s voice cuts through my self-inflicted drama. “How do you know she was murdered and that no one knows who she is?”

I squat down, head in my hands so I can keep it from swimming. I’d spent the afternoon with a dead woman screaming at me. This here is too much. Too fucking much. “Lucky guess?” I manage. I mean, I have to say something.

Damon’s laugh is cut off by something sharp his sister says. “Ezra?” He crouches down next to me. “Come on, dude. If you try and tell me nothing’s going on, I’m calling bullshit.”

I shouldn’t have come over here . They’re going to want some kind of explanation and then... fuck. There is no explanation. I could no more admit to being a sin eater than I could pretend to be straight. I jam my index fingers against my temples. Gotta come up with something fast.

Forcing myself to take a deep breath allows reality to filter into my drunken brain. A sin eater would not have been able to see a murder. Full stop. That means what happened to me wasn’t related to being a sin eater. My gift—fucking curse, more like—has changed, therefore I must be—”Psychic.”

“What?” Damon asks, while behind him his sister says something eloquent like “for fuck’s sake.”

More reality filters in, and I shift my weight so I’m sitting on the floor. “I’m psychic. A little.”

Damon offers me his hand. “Huh. And you, uh, saw the murder or something? In a vision?”

“Don’t put words in his mouth.” Dorinda’s tone makes it very clear she is not buying what I’m selling.

I clasp Damon’s hand, surprised by how warm he is, or maybe by how cold my hands are.

With a gentle tug, he gets me to my feet.

The world swings a little, black spots flashing across my vision.

It takes another deep breath for me to get my shit together.

Or mostly together. Fuck, I’m a mess.

Damon leads me by the hand further into the apartment. “Sit,” he says, pointing at the couch. I do as I’m told, fishing my wallet out of my pocket on my way down.

“Here’s the cop’s business card.” I hand it to him, and he passes it to his sister. I take the opportunity to sink into the soft leather of the couch.

“Tsk. McGraw,” she says, and pulls out her phone.

Worrying about whether that was a good “tsk” or a bad one is interrupted when Damon sits next to me. His value as a distraction drops some when he says, “Tell me what’s really going on.”

I rake a hand through my hair, which allows me to catch a whiff of my funky self, and I wish I’d taken the time for a shower. Closing my eyes, I try to cobble together something that’ll dance around my secret. “So, you know about the prayer thing, right?”

Dorinda’s on the phone, her gaze weighing on me like a hair shirt.

“Yeah,” Damon says.

“When they brought in the body of James Smith, something told me I had to pray over him, which is, um, different.”

“What does that mean, exactly?” Dorinda asks. She must have ended the call and now the full force of her attention is directed at little ol’ me.

“Chill, Dor.” Damon says. “Take off your lawyer hat. He works in the morgue and he was raised to pray over dead bodies.”

“More or less.” I dare to glance at her.

Lawyer. That fits. “And when I was saying the prayers over our buddy James, I saw.

.. “ My voice cracks and I have to stop and clear my throat.

“I saw him murder a woman. That woman.” I turn so I can see the picture over my shoulder.

“She was in her twenties, and between the big hair, drag makeup, and pink polo, I figure she died sometime in the late ‘80s.”

“That’s pretty fucking specific.” Dorinda comes around the couch and sits on the coffee table right in front of me, our knees almost touching. “What else do you know about it?”

“Nothing.” I manage to meet her gaze directly. “I don’t know who James Smith is, I don’t know who the woman is, and I don’t know when or where or why he killed her.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Damon asks, and while he’s a lot more sympathetic than his sister, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“And have y’all look at me like you’re doing right now?

” I stand up, dragging both hands through my hair.

“I get that I’m a weird dude—you don’t have to tell me that, I know already.

Mom used to tell me to shut my mouth whenever the devil was talking in my ear.

” Fuck. Why do I keep telling him the truth?

“Like, at that motherfucking carnival, was I supposed to say, wow, Damon, I just saw a dead woman in a crystal ball ? That’s a whole ’nother level of bizarre, and then what would you have done? ”

He’s still seated, his dark eyes full of sympathy. “I have no idea. Probably respond about like I’m doing now. I want to believe you, but—”

He’s interrupted by a doorbell. Muttering variations on the word fuck, Dorinda goes to an old Princess phone on the wall and gives a terse, “Welcome to crazytown.”

I sag back onto the couch next to Damon, who’s as warm and strong as I could possibly want. His sister, though, turns toward us, her expression somewhere past stern. “McGraw is on his way up, and if you think my questions were tough, wait till he gets through with you.”

For what it’s worth, she doesn’t say it with any enthusiasm. It’s more of a warning, though I’m not sure if she’s warning me or her brother.

Dorinda lets the cop in. It’s the same detective who came to the hospital, the Black man with matching square jaw and flat-top fade. He’s in jeans and a hoodie, and he’s alone, which is odd. Then Dorinda thanks him for coming over during his off hours.

“No problem. I don’t want to say I owed you one, but I owed you one,” he says to her. “And for the rest of you, I’m Detective Marcus McGraw from the Seattle Police Department, and I’m here because you called to report a break-in and with information about a possible cold case.”

“That is correct,” Dorinda says.

Damon stands and shakes the detective’s hand. “I’m Dorinda’s brother, Damon.”

I do not stand. In fact, I wish I could melt into the upholstery or hide in a shadow or something. Detective McGraw looks at me, head tilted. “You’re the guy from the morgue, right?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, my voice like whispery paper.

His eyes narrow as he surveys the three of us. “Okay, tell me what’s going on.”

Dorinda points to the photograph and explains how they found it on their table when they both came home from work.

“You and your brother both live here?” McGraw asks.

Damon answers for them. “Yes. We both happened to arrive at the same time, and we saw the picture and the note.”

McGraw goes over to the table and, without touching anything, reads the note. “I take it you don’t know anyone named Cat.”

“Nope.” Damon sits back down, and when he does, he drapes an arm around my shoulders. I snuggle in, his big body a shield between me and whatever’s coming next.

“So connect the dots for me,” McGraw says. “Why would someone connect you to the murder, and where does he”—he flicks a glance at me—”fit in?”

“Come sit down,” Dorinda says, fighting a smile. “This might take a minute.”

McGraw does, claiming the only chair, and Dorinda sits on the opposite and of the couch from me. She gives Damon a hard look, as if to say, this is on you .

Damon straightens, his arm tightening across my shoulders. “Ezra and I know each other from work—”