“There are traces of death magic on the floor in the entry.”
The sandy-haired man’s eyebrows shot up. Everyone at the other end of the room looked their way except Hannah. Drummond’s scowl didn’t budge. “You’re sure.”
“Positive. Death magic has an unmistakable texture.” Like ground glass and swamp goo. “It’s faint, but it’s there. I haven’t picked up any traces on the carpet yet. I need to walk around.”
“Hell, no. Your method doesn’t get us anything admissible, and I don’t want my scene contaminated.”
“Such faint traces as I picked up are going to fade quickly, and I cleaned my feet thoroughly in the foyer.”
“Climb down, Al,” Hannah said, frowning at the carpet near the body. “It’s my scene until I say you can have it. You said the maid vacuumed in here this morning?”
Drummond’s mouth was tight. “That’s what she said.”
“Huh.” Now she looked up. “Lily, you can come do your thing, but for God’s sake—”
“Don’t touch anything,” Lily finished for her.
Hannah’s mouth crooked up. “Right.” She gestured at the man with the video cam. “Get her movements on record.”
Drummond scowled at Lily. “You’re here to check the knife. That’s priority.”
Lily held out her hand again. “You might as well shake hands. It’ll save us both the embarrassment of me having to find some excuse to touch you.”
He rolled his eyes, shoved his hand out, and took hers.
Firm grip, wide palm, long fingers, no magic. Lily nodded, dropped his hand, and walked slowly forward.
The quickest path to the other end was straight down the middle. She wandered from side to side . . . yes. “I’m finding something. A trail. Faint and spotty, but . . .” She dug in her tote, pulled out a pack of Popsicle sticks, and laid one on the carpet where she stood. Another went a foot back where she’d first picked up the trail. “I’ll mark where I find death magic residue.”
“Knife first, dammit. Do you in any way grasp the concept of taking orders?”
“It’ll come back to me.” She moved slowly, pausing now and then to place another Popsicle stick. About five feet from the body she stopped and put three sticks down. “Stronger here.” Another step. Another, and another Popsicle stick. A couple more and she set down her tote and crouched, studying what was left of Bixton.
The senator had dressed for the day in a crisp white shirt and what looked like the same slacks he’d worn to question Lily, but without the vest and suit jacket. His tie was red again, but this one had little gold dots as well.
He lay on his back near an overstuffed hassock looking mildly offended. One hand rested at his side, palm up, fingers curled in. The other arm was flung out, the fingertips brushing the hassock’s skirt. No visible defensive wounds. His eyes were glazed, his mouth open, his body slack with the peculiar stillness of death. That always struck Lily, how motionless the dead were. Dead people don’t look like they’re sleeping or unconscious. They look dead.
They often smell bad, too. All the muscles relax at death. Bixton had died with a full bladder, but without much in his bowels, judging by the smell.
The knife protruded from the fleshy place between the armpit and the top of the rib cage, just under the collarbone. Not much blood. The knife itself looked old, with a carved handle that might be bone or ivory or something like that. She could see about two inches of the blade.
Didn’t get it all the way in, did you? No bone there to stop the blade. Either you aren’t very strong or you didn’t care how deep it went, didn’t need the steel to kill him. It was just the means of delivery. Lily reached out a hand.
“Careful,” Drummond snapped. “Don’t get fingerprints on it.”
Lily pressed the back of her hand to Bixton’s palm. “Special Agent Drummond, sir, you aren’t Unit.” She checked Bixton’s throat next, paused there briefly, then pressed the back of her hand to his face. “You haven’t worked with a sensitive before. But you might try pretending you think I’m a professional.”
“Are you going to professionally check the damn knife anytime soon?”
Anger prickled over her skin almost as tangibly as magic. She clamped down on it. Truly she was out of practice at the subordinate thing . . . oh, yes, she’d grown unaccustomed to assholes giving her orders. “If Bixton was killed by magic, some residue may still be in his body. Where the magic lingers and how much is present makes a difference in determining the type of spell used.”
“Does it matter what kind of spell it was? Killed by magical means is a capital crime. Doesn’t matter what kind of chanting went into it.”
“If he’d been shot, would you want to find the bullet? Maybe—I don’t know—run some ballistics tests?”
He grunted. “So what did you find?”
“Nothing in his hand or face. A very small trace on his throat. I’ll need to loosen his clothing to check elsewhere, but I’ll do the knife first.” Now she pressed the back of her hand to the knife’s hilt. And grimaced. Ugly. “Death magic and lots of it. This won’t fade anytime soon. You’ll be able to get confirmation from the coven.” The only magically produced evidence that was admissible in court was that obtained by a certified Wiccan coven. The coven couldn’t do what Lily did—Gifts were stronger and more accurate than spells—but with that pretty dagger loaded with so much death magic, coven spells would do the job just fine. “Have you contacted Ms. O’Shaunessy, or shall I?”
“Your man Croft’s supposed to be handling that. Go ahead and check for lingering magic elsewhere.”
Maybe the asshole was capable of learning. Lily glanced at Hannah.
Her mouth tipped down unhappily. “Okay, but I’ll unbutton him. You got more of those baby wipes?”
While Lily cleaned her hand, Hannah knelt on the other side of the body and bent low, studying the starched landscape of Bixton’s shirt. After a moment she grunted, motioned to one of the other techs, and got tweezers and an evidence bag from him. “Looks like one of Bixton’s,” she said, depositing a single short, white hair in the Baggie, “but you never know.”
After that, Hannah undid four buttons—enough for Lily to slide her hand in between cloth and cool, clammy flesh. Bixton turned out to have a hairy chest. That surprised her, somehow.
“One spot where the death magic is concentrated,” she said after a careful grope. “Over the heart. It thins out evenly as I move my hand away from the center of the chest. I didn’t touch the wound, but did touch about two inches from it.” She withdrew her hand and twisted to grab her tote.
“What does that tell you?” Drummond demanded. “Where the magic is and isn’t. What does that mean?”
Lily scrubbed her hands with another wipe as she stood. It wasn’t touching a DB that made her feel unclean. It was the death magic. “First, that he wasn’t killed by death magic directly. It was used to power the spell that killed him, not as a sort of blunt force trauma all on its own.”
“You can do that?” His eyebrows lifted in surprise and for a brief moment he didn’t sound pissed. “Just blast someone with death magic and it kills them?”
“I can’t,” she said dryly, and started back toward him, avoiding the trail she’d marked with Popsicle sticks. “And I’m really damn glad to find out this perp can’t, either.” The only time she’d run up against that kind of killing, it had been done by a madwoman using an ancient staff created by the Great Bitch. The woman was dead, the staff destroyed, but presumably she could make another one if she wanted. “That the magic was heaviest over his heart suggests the spell targeted his heart specifically.”