Divine Misdemeanors (26 page)

If we could help Julian through this rough patch with Adam, then we would. I understood that you could die a little bit every day from lack of the right touch from the right person. I’d spent three years without the touch of another sidhe. I didn’t want to see anyone else go through that if I could help them. And Adam wouldn’t see me as a threat, because I was a woman.

We fished out our IDs and waited for someone in charge to give us permission to cross past the uniforms. We were private detectives, not police detectives, and that meant that no uniform was going to just say, “Come on down.”

We waited in the brilliant sunlight while Julian held my hand and I held his back. I’d have rather helped him with his need than seen more dead bodies, but I wasn’t getting paid to touch my friend, I was getting paid today to look at the dead. Maybe we’d have a nice divorce case next. That was sounding pretty good as we followed the nice police detective through the crowd of police and rescue workers. They were all avoiding each other’s eyes. I’d learned that that was a bad sign—a sign that whatever lay ahead was disturbing to the people who saw a hell of a lot of disturbing things. I kept walking, but now holding Julian’s hand wasn’t just so he could get some touch for the day; it was because touching made me feel just a bit braver.

THERE WAS NO HAND-HOLDING AT THE CRIME SCENE. WE WERE ALL
civilians being allowed into a police investigation. I was a woman and not all human, so I had to uphold the honor of both my sex and my ancestry.

The first victim was curled before the fireplace. It wasn’t a real fireplace, but one of those plug-in electric ones. The killer, or killers, had positioned the body in front of it to match the illustration that Lucy had shown us safe in its plastic evidence wrap, tagged and bagged. She, because it was a she, had been dressed in the same ragged sack clothing as the illustration. It was a story I remembered reading as a child. I’d liked stories about brownies because of Gran. The brownie fell asleep before the fire and was caught napping, literally, by the household children. Gran had said, “Na brownie worth ’er salt would fall asleep on th’ job.” The rest of the story was about the children going with the brownie to fairyland and I knew that was made up, because I’d been there as a child and it was nothing like the book.

“Well, another childhood memory ruined,” I said softly.

“What did you say?” Lucy asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry, but my grandmother read me this book as a child. I was thinking about reading it to my own kids, but maybe not now.” I stared down at the dead woman and forced myself to look at
what they’d done to her face. There was a brownie in the story, so they’d made her into a brownie by taking her nose and her lips, and paring her down to what they needed to make the picture.

Rhys came up beside me and said, “Don’t look at her face.”

“I can do my job,” I said, and I didn’t mean to sound defensive.

“I mean, look at all of her, not just her face.”

I frowned, but did what he asked, and the moment I could see her bare arms and legs without the horror of her face getting in the way I understood what he meant. “She’s a brownie.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“She’s been butchered to look like one,” Lucy said.

“No, Rhys means her arms and legs. They’re longer, shaped a little differently. I would bet she’s had some kind of electrolysis to get rid of the more-than-human body hair.”

“But her face was human. They cleaned up the blood but they carved her face down to that,” Lucy said.

I nodded. “I know of at least two brownies who have had plastic surgery to give them a nose and lips, a human face, but there’s no good procedure for the arms and legs being a little thin, a little different.”

“Robert lifts weights,” Rhys said. “It gives more muscle tone and helps shape the limbs.”

“Brownies can lift things five times their size. Normally they don’t need to lift weights to be stronger.”

“He does it just so he looks more human,” Rhys said.

I touched his arm. “Thank you. I couldn’t see anything but the face. They cleaned it up and hid the blood but it’s obviously fresh wounds.”

“Are you saying she really was a brownie?” Lucy asked.

We both nodded.

“There’s nothing in any of her background that says she’s anything but a native Los Angeles human.”

“Could she be part brownie and part human?” Galen had come up behind us.

“You mean like Gran?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I thought about it, and looked at the body, trying for dispassionate. “Maybe, but she’d still have to have a parent who wasn’t human. That shows up in census records, documents of all kinds. There’s got to be some record of her real background.”

“A surface check said human, and she was born here in town,” Lucy said.

“Dig deeper,” Rhys said. “Genetics this pure aren’t that far away from a fey ancestor.”

Lucy nodded and grabbed one of the other detectives. She spoke gently to him and he went away at a fast walk. Everyone likes something to do at a murder scene; it gives the illusion that death isn’t that bad, if you keep busy.

“The electric fire looks brand-new,” Galen said.

“Yes, it does,” I said.

“Was the first scene like this?” Rhys asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Staged with props brought in to make the illustration work.”

“Yes,” I said, “but a different book. A different story altogether, but yeah, props brought in so the staging was as perfect as they could make it.”

“The second victim isn’t as perfect as this one,” Galen said.

We both agreed that it wasn’t. We were assuming that this was Clara and Mark Bidwell, who lived at this address. They fit the height of both, and overall description, but honestly, unless they could be identified by dental work or fingerprints we couldn’t be certain. Their faces weren’t the faces smiling down at us from the pictures on the wall. We’d assume that it was the couple who lived here, but it was an assumption. The police were assuming it, too, so I felt better about that, but I knew it was breaking one of the first rules that Jeremy taught me: never assume anything about a case. Prove it, don’t assume it.

As if my thought had conjured him, Jeremy Grey stepped into the
room. He was about my height, five feet even, and was dressed in a designer suit in black that made his gray skin a darker, richer shade of gray, and though it would never be a human skin tone, somehow in the black suit it seemed like one. He’d stopped wearing all gray just this year. I liked the new colors on him. He’d been dating a woman seriously for about three months. She was a costumer at one of the studios and took clothing rather seriously. Jeremy had always dressed expensively in designer suits and shoes, but somehow everything fit him better. Maybe love is the best accessory of all?

His triangular face was dominated by a large hooked beak of a nose. He was a Trow—that was his race—and he’d been cast out centuries ago for stealing a single spoon. Theft had been a very serious crime back then among any of the fey, but the Trow were known for their puritanical views on a lot of things. They also had a reputation for stealing human women, so they weren’t puritanical about everything.

He moved as he always did, gracefully; even the plastic booties over his designer shoes couldn’t make him anything but elegant. Trow did not have a reputation for elegance, but Jeremy did, and it always made me wonder if he was the exception to his people, or if they were all like that. I’d never asked, because it would be reminding him of how he lost everything so long ago. You could ask after tragically dead relatives more politely among the fey than about their exile from faerie.

“The man in the bedroom is human,” he said.

“I’ll have to go back and look again, because honestly, all I could see were the facial cuts,” I said.

He patted my arm with his gloved hand. We’d had to put on all the protective gear but if any of us touched anything we’d have gotten yelled at. It was strictly look but don’t touch. Though honestly, I wasn’t really tempted to touch.

“I’ll walk you through,” he said. That let me know he wanted to talk to me alone. Galen started to follow me, but Rhys held him back. Jeremy and I moved through the strangely dark apartment on our own. It was decorated in shades of brown and tan. That was typical
coloring for an apartment, but even the furniture was shades of brown. It was all very somber and vaguely depressing. But maybe I was projecting.

“What’s up, Jeremy?” I asked.

“One Lord Sholto is out in the hallway with the rest of your non-licensed people.”

“I knew he’d be along,” I said.

“Warn a Trow next time the King of the Sluagh is expected.”

“Sorry, didn’t think.”

“But Lord Sholto just confirmed the call I got from Uther. I’ve got him across the street with eyes on this place.”

“He saw something?”

“Not about the case,” Jeremy said, and ushered me into the bedroom where the second body lay. The man had had his face treated the same as the woman, but now that I could look away from the faces, I realized that Jeremy and Rhys were right, he was human. The legs, the arms, and the body build were all proportional. He was wearing a robe that the killers had cut up to resemble the rags the brownie wore in the story, but it didn’t come close to the perfect match of the victim in the other room.

The killers had left an illustration behind, and it did match, but they’d had to improvise the set pieces. They had him flat on his back to match the image of the brownie drunk on faerie wine. Again it was a mistake. Brownies didn’t get drunk, bogarts did, and if a brownie went bogart it became very dangerous, sort of a Jekyll-and-Hyde type of problem. A drunk brownie did not pass out peacefully like a human, but I’d found that a lot of the fairy stories were like that: parts were dead-on and parts were so far off it was laughable.

“They brought the book with them, or they chose this illustration late, so late that they couldn’t get all the props they needed to make it match.”

“I agree,” Jeremy said.

Something about the way he said it made me look at him. “If it’s
not about the case, then what could Uther have seen that would be important?”

“Someone on the press out there did a little math and decided that the short woman hanging all over Julian had to be the princess in disguise.”

I sighed. “So they’re out there waiting for me again?”

He nodded. “I’m afraid so, Merry.”

“Crap,” I said.

He nodded again.

I sighed. I shook my head. “I can’t worry about them now. I need to be useful here.”

He smiled at me, and patted my arm again. “That’s what I needed to know.”

I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“If you’d said something different, then I was going to assign you to the party circuit and leave you off the real cases.”

I looked at him. “You mean send me to the celebrities and would-be celebs who just want the princess at their house?”

“It pays extremely well, Merry. They make up cases for us, and I send you or your beautiful men and they get more press attention. It works for everyone, and we’re making money in an economy where most agencies aren’t.”

I had to think about that for a moment and then said, “So you’re saying the extra publicity is actually bringing in more money than if we didn’t have it?”

He nodded and smiled, showing the white, straight smile that was the only “cosmetic” work he’d had done on coming to L.A. “You’re like any celebrity in one way, Merry. The moment the press doesn’t care enough to make your life miserable you are on the downslide.”

“The weight of the press following me crashed through a window last week,” I said.

He shrugged. “And that made worldwide news, or did you avoid the television all weekend so you wouldn’t see it?”

I smiled. “You know I avoid the shows where I’ll see myself, and we had other things to do this weekend besides watch television.”

“I guess if I had as many girlfriends as you have boyfriends I’d be too busy to watch TV, too.”

“You’d be exhausted, too,” I said.

“Are you insulting my stamina?” he asked, smiling.

“No, I’m a woman, you’re a man. Women rule on the multiple orgasms, men not so much.”

That made him laugh. One of the uniforms said, “Jesus, if you can laugh looking down at that then you really are cold-blooded bastards.”

Lucy spoke from the doorway. “I think I hear your patrol car wondering where you are.”

“They’re laughing at the body.”

“They aren’t laughing at the body. They’re laughing because they’ve seen things that would make you run home to your mommy.”

“Worse than that?” he asked, motioning to the body.

Jeremy and I both nodded and said, “Yes.”

“How can you laugh?”

“Go get some air,” Lucy said, “now.” And she made the last word very firm.

The uniform looked like he wanted to argue, thought better of it, and left. Lucy turned to us. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” she said, “and the press have found you, or think they have.”

“Jeremy told me,” I said.

“We’re going to have to get you out of here before the press looking for you gets bigger than the press about the bodies.”

“I’m sorry about this, Lucy.”

“I know you don’t enjoy it.”

“My boss has just informed me that I make more by going to pretend crimes for parties for celebrities than when I do real crime-stopping.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow at Jeremy. “Really?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Still, we need to have you show yourself outside so the press hounds don’t mess up our investigation.”

I nodded. “Did you find out anything more about the woman, the brownie?”

“It turns out she’s been passing for human, but she’s actually full-blooded brownie. You were right about the plastic surgeon needing to know her background before he reconstructed her face. Why is that so important?”

“Fey heal differently from humans, much faster. If a plastic surgeon didn’t know she was a brownie, her skin could actually heal faster than he could work,” I said.