“Would you please tell me what this is about?”
You’d think by now I’d know better than to expect an answer.
Namid began to fade from view. “Tread like the fox, Ohanko. Be wary.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, watching as he vanished. “Damn ghost!”
But he was gone.
I went to my desk and retrieved this morning’s paper, which was folded beneath the day’s mail. The story was right there on the front page. Top headline.
“Claudia Deegan Found Dead. Senator’s daughter may be latest ‘Angel’ Victim.”
I almost called Kona back then and there. I had just gotten through tracking down a runaway and dealing with the life crises of the rich and famous. Involving myself with the Deegans would be ten times worse. I didn’t want any part of this case.
Or did I?
The PPD had been trying to solve the so-called Blind Angel murders for just shy of three years now. So had the Feds. The FBI came in with a lot of fanfare and press after the third or fourth murder and did their best to take over the investigation. After a while, though-after months stretching to years of being unable to find the killer-they began to lose interest. They cut the size of their task force in half, and then did so again and a third time, until they had basically ceded the investigation back to the Phoenix police.
If Claudia Deegan was this wack-job’s latest victim, she would be number thirty-one, that we knew of. I had worked the case when I was on the job, and Kona and her new partner, Kevin Glass, were still part of the investigative team. Being a weremyste, I had realized from the very beginning that magic was involved: I could see the residue of power on the bodies. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that every killing occurred around the same time in the moon cycle. I was convinced that our killer had taken a life every month for the last three years at least, and that there were still bodies out there as yet unfound.
Of all the cases I’d been working at the time I left the force, this was the one I most regretted not seeing through to the end. The idea of having another crack at it had definite appeal. On the other hand, as much as I missed being a cop, I didn’t miss the jerks who had forced me off the job, who had assumed that my descents into psychosis each month were signs that I was a drunk, or an addict, or both. Even now, there were people in the department-men and women in positions of power-who would have loved to humiliate me all over again, to pay me back for disgracing the force.
In the end, I think that if Namid hadn’t shown so much interest in my conversation with Kona, I might have called her back and told her I wasn’t coming. As much as I wanted to find the Blind Angel Killer, I didn’t need the kind of heat this case was going to generate. But for whatever reason, the runemyste had made it clear that this was a job I had to take. I remembered my scrying, and that evil red hand. Namid seemed to think it was all related, and who was I to argue?
Yes, I had been a cop, and that would always be in my blood. But I’m still a weremyste, and I will be until the day I die. And for better or worse this was where my magic was leading me. I could tell that much from one glance in a mirror, be it a looking glass or a scrying surface.
CHAPTER 3
I read the rest of the article about Claudia Deegan, my insides winding themselves into knots as the details of the “Angel Murders” investigation flooded back into my mind.
Murder cases are never a picnic, but trying to chase down a serial murderer is about the worst part of a homicide detective’s job. You feel that the killer is mocking you with every clue he leaves behind, and you feel responsible for each new murder he commits after you’ve taken on the investigation. But bad as that is, the worst part is the time in between killings, when you know another one is coming and that there isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop it. It’s no wonder that cops who investigate serial killings become obsessed with their victims and suspects, and that they’re even more prone to drinking, drug use and emotional problems than their colleagues.
Kona and I worked the case from the beginning. We were the first detectives on the scene when Gracia Rosado was found in Red Mountain Park three years ago. It didn’t take either of us long to realize that this murder was unlike any we had seen before. Gracia herself was all too typical of murder victims in the Phoenix area. Young, pretty, poor, Latino. She’d been involved with drugs for a couple of years and in the months leading up to her murder had started turning tricks to pay for her habit.
But in every other way, Gracia’s killing was chillingly unique. Her body was found by a jogger in a small ravine deep in the park. She was fully clothed and there was no sign that she’d been sexually assaulted, which is pretty much the first thing you check for in a case like this. There were bruises on her neck, but I knew right away that her killer hadn’t strangled her to death. Red magic shone like fresh blood on her face and chest, though I was the only cop working the scene who could see it. On the other hand, every cop and reporter there could see that her eyes had been burned out of her skull.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new freak to track down,” Kona said at the time, staring down at Gracia’s body and shaking her head. “Just what Phoenix needs at the start of the damn summer.”
“It’s worse than you know,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“What do you mean-?” She stopped and stared at me. “Oh, don’t tell me, Justis, because I don’t want to hear it.”
Kona was the only person on the force who knew I was a weremyste. I’d told her early on, following number seven of my father’s ten rules for being a successful cop: “Never keep secrets from your partner.”
She hadn’t believed me at first, but it hadn’t taken more than a spell or two to convince her. And after my magical abilities helped us clear a couple of cases, she began to think of it as a good thing, even if it did render me useless three nights out of each month.
But on that morning in June, standing over what turned out to be the first of at least thirty murder victims-thirty-one, if the papers were right about Claudia Deegan-she wasn’t amused at all.
“Talk to me, Justis,” she said. She and my father were the only people who called me Justis rather than Jay. “What are you seeing?”
“There’s red magic on her face and chest. Powerful magic-it’s already starting to fade.”
“If it’s already starting to fade-”
“The faster the residue fades, the more powerful the sorcerer,” I told her for what had to have been the twentieth time.
She nodded. “Right. I always get that backwards. So you’re saying she was killed by magic. For sure.”
“For sure.”
“Well, that’s just great. What do your magic senses tell you about that shit her killer did with her eyes?”
I shook my head. A white sheet lay over Gracia’s body, but I could still see her ravaged face in my mind. In fact, I still can see it to this day. “I have no idea,” I told her at the time.
The second body was discovered about a month later. Also a young woman, also killed by magic, her face mutilated in the same way. Others followed, some of them men, though most of the victims were women. All of them were young, and all of them died the same way. And, it turned out, all of the killings took place about a week before the full moon. Sometimes it took longer to find the bodies, but always the coroner put the time of death around the first quarter moon. I still have no idea what this means, but I know it’s important.
Each body had been found in either Red Mountain Park, east of Mesa, or in South Mountain Park, on the west side of Tempe, so those of us working the case referred to our perp as the East Side Parks Killer. But the media fixated on the ritual aspect of the killings-the facial mutilation-and dubbed the killings the Blind Angel murders.
There had been no shortage of media coverage of the killings, but now that Claudia Deegan had been murdered it was likely to turn into a frenzy. Randolph Deegan, Claudia’s father, was Arizona’s most powerful and popular politician. Word was that he was running for governor this year, and that a presidential run might be in his future. Everything the Deegans did was news. Claudia’s death would be on the front page of every paper in the country; the Arizona papers wouldn’t be covering anything else.