Magie Noire

By Rurouni Star

Chapter Three

Marcone knew far too much.

The walk back did jog my brain, but not with regard to the case itself. Instead, I found myself lingering over the details he'd mentioned. Marcone knew there were two bodies — well, fine, maybe he'd bribed someone at the hotel. But he also knew that we hadn't found the woman's identity yet.

That meant the rats were closer to home than I'd hoped.

Marcone's flowery metaphors about real evil and things that prey on humans surprised me. Some of the very bad men I'd met sometimes needed to draw a line, to find some sort of behavior worse than theirs so that they could reassure themselves they weren't the worst thing out there. But Marcone hadn't struck me as that sort. It occurred to me that my intuition might have gone wonky during my time behind a desk. The department hadn't dared put me in the field until I finished testifying in court — and though I'd never admit it aloud, riding a desk was probably good for me, given that I was still recovering from medical fallout. A face full of Three-Eye will do that to you.

I shuddered at the thought. Even the briefest mention of Three-Eye was enough to send my brain hurtling back to that hideous stretch of time, after one of my pissed-off coworkers dosed me up with the shit in retribution for my testimony. All the fucked up hallucinations I'd seen were still fresh in my mind, stuck in full technicolor clarity. The department shrink said that sometimes happened with traumas. I really didn't like that term. Trauma. It implied that a single inadvertent brush with a drug was something my brain considered on par with being in a war zone. That was dumb. It was weak.

But it was true. I still had nightmares, more frequently than I dared to admit. Worse, I sometimes felt real-time echoes of that weird trance-like state I'd been in while I was under the influence. I'd had to fight to get even this comparably shitty assignment in S.I. If I admitted I'd never fully gotten over the Three-Eye incident, it would be all the department needed to force me into early retirement. Too many assholes would be too happy about that for me to let it happen.

Carmichael was pacing when I headed back into the conference room. He wasn't a man that paced often, given his sheer girth and his affection for sitting. Relief flickered over his face as he saw me enter, but some uncharitable part of me wondered whether it was faked. Ron would be a great choice for a mole, my brain suggested.

But no. If Marcone had Carmichael in his pocket, why would he bother with me? Carmichael had access to exactly the same information I did at any given time. I'd shared everything with him so far, and only Marcone's conversation with me gave me any reason to wonder whether I should continue doing that.

"You okay?" Carmichael asked carefully.

"I'm back, aren't I?" I asked. I'm sure my face must have been a thundercloud, based on his flinch. I headed over to the whiteboard and angrily scrawled Jennifer Stanton and Velvet Room onto the board.

Carmichael considered that stonily. "So he did give you something?" he hazarded.

I tossed the marker down. "Yeah," I gritted out. "He also made me an offer. I wasn't a fan."

Carmichael knitted his brow. "Shit. He tried to bribe you? I thought it was common knowledge by now that's a bad idea."

I shook my head. "He thought we'd cuddle up and be buddies on the case. He implied he knew lots more than he gave me, that he'd share it all if I just promised to report to him first." I grabbed my now-cold coffee from the table and chugged a few swallows to rinse the disgust from my mouth.

"You coulda just pretended to take him up on it," Carmichael mused.

I shot him a flat look, and he shrugged. "Okay, maybe bad idea. Still, at least we've got a lead now."

I stared him down over the table. His eyebrows knitted together. I stepped back to close the door to the conference room.

"I want to get one thing straight," I said. "Marcone wants what he wants. If I don't give it to him, I'm pretty damn sure he's gonna go around me and ask you instead." I fixed Carmichael with a hard look. "You're gonna turn him down too, Ron. I want you to promise me that, to my face."

Carmichael frowned. To his credit, he didn't pretend to be insulted. Cops on the take liked to go straight for the "how dare you imply I'm dirty" line, because it allowed them to protest without actually saying they weren't.

"I'm not gonna make that promise," Carmichael told me. My jaw clenched, but he held up a hand. "Murph, I like you. I respect you. But I gotta tell you, it sometimes feels like you've got a little bit of a deathwish. I don't got that. You know as well as I do that the department likes to jerk us around, send us out there without an ounce of backup. Now, I'm not normally the kind to chat up mobsters, but if we're out there with our asses in the wind against the kind of psychopath that tears out people's hearts, I think my conscience might be clear this one time just letting the psycho and the mobster beat the shit out of each other."

He met my eyes. "What I will promise is that if I make that call, it won't be about money. And I won't do it without tellin' you first. I hope that's good enough, because that's what I've got for you."

I clenched my fingers into fists. I had some uncharitable instincts running through my head. If you weren't willing to risk your life, why become a cop? I wanted to demand. The deathwish comment had hit a little too close to home, though, and I recognized the way it got my blood going. I took a long, deep breath.

Carmichael had a point. It was one thing to risk your life knowing that the department would do everything in its power to make that a worthy, calculated risk. It was another thing entirely to put yourself in the middle of a mafia spat with only your partner for support.

I didn't like it. I didn't agree with it. But it wasn't unreasonable, and at least he'd been up-front with me about it.

"This conversation's not done," I said, reluctantly. "...but I appreciate you being straight with me."

Carmichael shrugged. "Figure I'd better," he said wryly. "Last guy who wasn't straight with you ended up in prison."

The room got uncomfortable after that comment. He must have realized the dark humor had gone a little too far, because he sighed. "Sorry, Murph. That was a joke, in case that wasn't clear."

"I got it," I said stiffly.

Thankfully, the sound of Carmichael's cellphone broke the silence. He picked it up after the very first ring, anxious for the distraction. "This is Ron," he said.

A rushed, excitable voice on the other end tumbled out of the phone. I couldn't hear the words, but I saw Carmichael sigh. "Yeah. Uh. Sure. One of us'll be over soon."

He closed the line, and gave me a pleading look. "You wanna go down to the morgue, Murph?" he asked. "The M.E. on our bodies wants to see us. I figured I could, uh. Go chat up Vice about the Velvet Room."

I frowned. "What's wrong with the M.E.?" I asked defensively. I'd grown a lot more fond of both the forensics crew and the medical examiners since my shuffle to S.I. They still bothered to take my calls, unlike the rest of the investigative division.

Carmichael winced. "It's nothing personal," he said. "I just hate polka."

0-0-0-0

It sounded like an Oktoberfest concert in the morgue.

I heard the downbeat as I walked down the hall toward the exam room, fresh scrubs pulled over my clothes and little blue booties on my shoes. You could always tell which medical examiner was on duty based on the music that filtered out. Polka meant you'd find Waldo Butters behind the door.

I had to knock more than a few times to get his attention. Eventually, though, the music paused, and the M.E. opened the door for me.

"Karrin!" Butters beamed at me from behind his glasses. "Great to see you! I didn't realize this was your case!" He was a comparatively small man, only a few inches taller than I was. His short black hair always ran a bit wild, so that he had a kind of perpetually surprised look to his face. But he was one of the friendliest guys I worked with, which meant that I could forgive him an awful lot — up to and including his love of polka.

"I'm actually the primary," I said. "But we tend to put Ron's phone number on just about everything these days." My name on the paperwork tended to get things lost or shifted to the bottom of the pile. I'd long since given up that fight. "Anyway, it's nice someone's glad to see me."

And it was. I'd nearly forgotten what it felt like to be treated as a trusted friend instead of a pariah. The expression on Butters' face warmed my heart just a little.

"Oh, come on in," Butters stuttered out belatedly, opening the door wider so that I could step past him. "I'm particularly glad it's you, actually. I'm about to say some crazy stuff, and Ron really doesn't like crazy."

"And I do like crazy?" I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but Butters treated it seriously.

"I mean, maybe you're not a fan of it either, but at least you don't look at me like I'm insane when I give it to you straight," Butters said. He headed over toward two side-by-side gurneys, where the bodies from the scene had been laid out. "Good news on these — I didn't even have to crack the ribs open. That's my least favorite part, you know. It's hard to get the right leverage when you're this short."

I grinned. Butters and I had commiserated more than once on the woes of living in a world that was built for taller people. "I'd say I know what you mean, but I really don't. I'm comfortable with a lot at this point, but cracking ribs is still over the line for me."

"Well, I guess that's why we're in our respective corners," Butters said cheerfully. "Anyway, I still want to show you something, just so you know I'm not pulling your leg."

Butters pulled down the sheet that covered a body I was now about ninety-nine percent sure belonged to Tommy Tomm. He'd left the chest cavity open, which meant that he'd probably finished the exam only a minute or two before his phone call. "Look inside the cavity here. You see these bits inside, embedded in the back wall?" He reached gloved fingers right inside, so he could point out what he was talking about directly.

I grimaced, but followed his direction. I wasn't really sure what I was looking at, but I did see some kind of soft tissue scattered across the back of the chest cavity. "Okay. I see them. What are they?"

"They're bits of heart," Butters told me. "They got blown backward, hard enough to stick. I mean, most of the momentum was clearly still forward-focused, but some of it went the other way, too."

I knitted my brow. "I get that's weird," I said slowly. "But I'm not clear on what it means."

Butters blinked behind his glasses. "It means that whatever force blew the heart out of the chest cavity came from inside the heart."

"Uh," I said intelligently. I stared at the place his fingers still pointed. He was right — it did sound crazy. It was a good thing I was looking right at the evidence.

"Right?" Butters said. "Weird. Something inside the heart basically exploded. But nothing's burned, so it had to have been a purely kinetic force. I'm really unclear how most of the force got directed forward. I'm even more unclear how you implant a purely kinetic explosive in two people's hearts without leaving surgical scars or causing heart failure. And, uh. That's the only theory I've got so far." He sounded duly sheepish about that fact.

I shook my head. "Jesus. Yeah, I've got nothing."

Butters pulled his fingers out of the chest cavity. "I'd really take it as a favor if you let me know when you find out what did this," he said. "I'm dying of curiosity."

"Phrasing, Butters," I joked.

He laughed nervously. "Right. Uh. Well, as far as other stuff goes — they were definitely having sex at the time, but I figure you knew that already. They probably died from shock well before they would have died from lack of circulation. Both vics had alcohol in their system — enough to be buzzed, not drunk. I didn't find anything else on a standard tox screen, but some of the more complex tests haven't come in yet."

I looked over the woman. "Breast implants?" I asked, remembering my previous suspicions.

"Oh, yep," Butters said. "I checked the serial number on the implants. We've positively ID'd her as Jennifer Stanton."

Marcone wasn't pulling my leg, I thought.

"I haven't got a whole lot else, but I'll let you know if any of the other tests come in useful," Butters told me.

I nodded. "You can call my phone from now on, if you want. Doubt you'll have trouble getting through."

Butters paused at that. His face softened. It was a weird look on him, given that he was currently wearing bloodstained blue scrubs.

"I'm really sorry, Karrin," he said. "For what it's worth."

I swallowed. "You don't have to be sorry," I told him. "It was a joke."

Butters chewed on his lip. He seemed to consider shutting up about it. But Butters wasn't a cop; he didn't have the same aversion to emotional subjects that seemed to pervade the department. "I don't like what happened to you," he said. "I don't think it's fair."

"I did my job," I said, with an edge in my voice. "I paid a price. It wasn't the worst thing that could have happened to me. I could have shown up down here."

"It doesn't have to be the worst thing to be bad," Butters said. "Uh." He looked embarrassed now. But there was an odd determination in his squared-off shoulders. "I don't like it. And you can't make me like it. I just want you to know some people around here still have your back."

I pressed my lips together. His voice was earnest, sincere. The words did mean a lot. I didn't want to pretend that they didn't. And I knew Butters wouldn't think any less of me for showing it.

"...thanks," I said. My voice came out a little bit hoarse.

Butters blinked. He smiled gently. "Yeah. Uh. Of course." He made a move as though to hug me, but stopped himself just in time, glancing down at the bloodstains. He stepped back and cleared his throat. "You, uh. You let me know if you want to come to the fest this year or something. I'm around for stuff. Coffee. Whatever."

I nodded. It was a nice gesture. I'd lost a lot of longtime friends — and god knew I wasn't welcome at the usual cop bars anymore. I wasn't the biggest polka fan, but I seriously considered taking him up on the invitation anyway. I could do much worse than hanging out with Waldo Butters.

"I'll work on my ear for polka," I told him. "Send me some recommendations."

The beaming smile that crossed his face nearly made up for the blood and dead bodies that surrounded him.

As I walked back out of the morgue, I realized that I'd been carrying around a heavy weight — and that it had lifted off my shoulders just a little bit.

It was good to have friends again.