Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) (7 page)

“I found him.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Nothing,” Suzy said. “But his wife had a few interesting thoughts to share with me. In fact, she had a lot to say about her husband’s death.”

The paper slipped from my fingers. “Another murder?”

“Nope, aneurysm.” She was still grinning. “Guess when he died. Guess.”

“Well, it would have had to be after he talked to Jay Brandon on Friday night, unless he was a zombie. Please don’t tell me he was a zombie.”

“Your guesses suck, Hawke.” Suzy leaned on the table to give me a stare so intense that it was kinda starting to freak me out. “He died at three thirty-seven in the morning on Saturday.”

The one paper in my file I hadn’t been looking at were the details of the anonymous tip that had brought us to Cherry Tree Lane in the first place. It hadn’t seemed too important in comparison to what I’d learned since.

The anonymous tip had been placed at three fifty in the morning.

Suzy snagged her whiskey from the waiter and lifted it as though in a toast. “Yeah, that’s right. Bubba Tanner died right about the same time as the clocks stopped in Jay Brandon’s house, and right before we got the call.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I’ll admit it—I jumped. It had stopped ringing by the time I succeeded in pulling it out of my pocket.

The number for the missed call wasn’t in my contacts. But a text message blinked to life a half-second later: “What’s taking so long, Special Agent Hawke?”

Apparently, waiting overnight had been longer than Isobel Stonecrow had been hoping for.

But I had her number now, and we had a fresh lead.

Seemed like it was time to have a chat with Bubba Tanner.

Mercy General Hospital was about forty years old, but time hadn’t been kind to it. The place looked like it was easily a century old, and it felt more like an asylum than somewhere people went to get better.

Suzy paced me as I strode through the halls, even though her legs were about half as long as mine. She didn’t look like she had to struggle to keep up and people stayed out of her way. Maybe it was the gun under her arm, maybe it was the power suit, maybe it was the way she seemed to vibrate with urgency. She was a woman on a mission and nobody was going to fuck with her.

The nurses’ station was protected by bars and glass, and the women sitting behind it had that look to their eyes—the same kind of look beat cops got after handling unruly criminals for too many years.

These women had seen every kind of ugly death bestowed upon the innocent. They handled the dregs of society because they wanted to make society a better place. But they looked like their dreams had been crushed under an endless onslaught of people who just couldn’t be saved.

If I ever quit working for the OPA, I definitely wasn’t going to get into the medical field, let me tell you.

Suzy flashed her badge at the window. “Agent Takeuchi. This is Agent Hawke.”

“What do you need?” The nurse’s nametag identified her as Nurse Barrow. She was a heavyset black woman with no-nonsense eyes and muscular arms.

“We’re picking up a body from your morgue. You should have already gotten the fax,” Suzy said. It hadn’t taken any effort to convince Fritz that we needed this body; he’d started writing the email about five seconds after I called him. “Last name of the deceased is Tanner.”

Nurse Barrow wheeled herself back to the fax machine and shuffled through the pages waiting on the tray. She plucked one out of the middle.

“I see,” she said. “Just a moment.”

She turned to her terminal—a relic of the eighties. The screen was black with blurry amber text. Must have been a pretty fancy system when it had been installed, but it looked like it hadn’t been updated since its implementation, just like everything else in the hospital.

Nurse Barrow’s fingers flew over that keyboard. It only took a few seconds for her to turn back to us and say, “He’s not here anymore.”

“What do you mean, Tanner isn’t here anymore?” Suzy asked.

“His body has already been transferred to the family’s church for a service.”

“Which church?” I asked.

The hospital lights flickered before she could answer. The nurse’s brow furrowed, and she rapped a finger against her keyboard. “That’s not normal,” she said. I leaned around to see that her monitor was flickering, too.

A light bulb popped. Sparks showered over me, down the neck of my jacket, burned my skin. I leaped away from the counter slapping at my back.

Everything went dark.

Not just the lights, but
everything
. The computers, the beeping life-support machines, the clocks, the air conditioning system.

The hospital was dead. And so were many of the patients inside, if the power didn’t come back fast.

I held my breath waiting for it. Should have only taken a second or less before everything turned back on. Medical facilities should have had redundant power systems—everything they needed to survive several minutes off-grid.

But it all stayed quiet.

I pushed the button on my Bluetooth headset. Not sure what made me do it, since I didn’t have anything to report to OPA headquarters yet.

There was no responding beep.

The silence made me check my cell phone. Also powerless.

“Don’t you people have a UPS?” Suzy asked Nurse Barrow. I could barely see either of them in the darkness.

“Look,” I said, grabbing her arm to orient her, pushing my phone into her face.

The nurses were suddenly moving. Doors were opening, people were rushing through the dark hallways. As curtains opened in the rooms, barred sunlight spilled over the floors, and I could see the fear in the faces passing me.

I felt the thump in my chest, in the ground below my feet. Something had woken up—the generator, utility power, no way to be sure.

But the lights came on.

It had taken no more than a minute, maybe two, but that was a long minute for patients in critical condition to survive without power. Relief didn’t hit me. Judging by Suzy’s expression, it hadn’t hit her, either.

“Damn,” she whispered.

The clocks on the wall had stopped, even though they all must have been on batteries. They all said that it was four fifty-seven in the afternoon.

Dread crawled up my spine bone by bone. My fingers reached the Bluetooth earpiece of their own volition. The
beep
when I pressed the button seemed to echo hollowly through my skull, voided of thought and feeling by the aching knowledge of what must have just happened in that hospital.

OPA dispatch answered immediately, as pleasant as always. “How may I assist you, Agent Hawke?”

“We need a team at Mercy General Hospital,” I said. “I think there’s been another murder.”

THEY FOUND THE BODY in the boiler room.

The security guard who’d located the victim stood aside to let us through. He was flushed red, sweating through his shirt. “Maybe you should take a seat,” Suzy told him.

He nodded. Sank into a chair by the wall. Braced himself on the seat by gripping it with both meaty hands.

Agents were cordoning off the end of the hallway. Nurses and patients hovered on the other side of the tape, trying to see what we were about to see. Crazy assholes. If I didn’t have to see what I was going into, I would never have looked.

Suzy squared her shoulders and pushed the door open.

A short staircase led into the basement. It had already been checked by the hospital’s private security; we knew that there was nobody waiting to surprise us downstairs. It still didn’t feel right to let Suzy take the lead. I stepped in front of her, heading down into that darkness.

It was silent aside from the room humming around us. All the environmental equipment made it sound like we were inside a breathing, pulsing organism.

The basement lights had blown when the power went out, and only one of them had come back. The lone bulb painted the cement wall in a sickly shade of yellow and made the blood look glossy black.

A body waited about two feet from the wall. It was another man. He was wearing a nurse’s scrubs.

“Look familiar?” Janet asked. She was putting on a lab coat and gloves. She reeked of cigarette smoke. Must have just had one before coming downstairs.

She offered us a box of gloves. Suzy took a pair. I didn’t. No way did I plan on touching this body.

He was blond—I
think
he was blond. His jaw was square. Hard to tell when he was lying down, but he had probably been my height while standing up. Narrow in the shoulders. Another guy, like Jay Brandon, who looked like his favorite method of exercise was swimming or jogging.

That was all I could tell about the way he had been before he died.

His eyeballs had been plucked out. The sockets were empty. Fingers had smeared the blood up his forehead, pushed it through his hair. His earlobes had been ripped off, cut off, I wasn’t sure. Hard to tell from that angle.

The blue shirt had been shoved up to reveal his nipples, and there was a pit in his stomach where the killer had gone under the ribs to remove the heart. That was where all the blood came from. This guy hadn’t been drained from his throat like the first one. Probably not enough time for that.

Judging by the staining on his body, it wasn’t just his heart that had been cut out. His dick had been removed, too.

“It’s so different.” Suzy yanked on her gloves. “But it’s the same. The cuts are similar.” She pushed her fingers between the victim’s lips, probing his mouth. “The teeth are gone again, too.”

She sat back on her heels, elbows resting on her knees, and glared at that body.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

“Fuck,” Suzy said. She stripped her gloves off. Wiped her hand over her forehead.

She didn’t want to say it, so I did.

“I think this is a serial killer.”

The murder in the boiler room was a hell of a lot sloppier than Jay Brandon’s, and that was saying a lot, considering that the killer had dragged Brandon between rooms, hung him up by his ankles, and let him bleed out.

Once I adjusted to the horror of what I was seeing—or at least the shock of it—I started assembling events in my head.

This hadn’t been a fight. There was no real sign of a struggle. Whoever had taken down nurse John Sullivan had probably taken him by surprise and then overpowered him by sheer strength.

It was only sloppy because the killer had been in a rush.

He must have already been going to the boiler room for something. An illicit smoke break, I was guessing, since a pack of bloodstained cigarettes rested a few inches from his hand.

The murderer had taken him on the stairs. Pushed him to the floor, flipped him onto his back, and held him down. Sullivan would have initially been too stunned from his fall to fight back.

By the time his head cleared, it would have been too late.

I imagined Nurse Sullivan screaming as a demon jammed its clawed thumbs into his eye sockets. I imagined the murderer keeping one hand on the nurse’s face to hold him down as the knife dug underneath his breastbone. I imagined the sickening
pop
as the heart’s ligaments tore free and how everything must have slurped as the demon withdrew his hand, organ and all.

With all the blood in Nurse Sullivan’s hair, I thought that the killer must have been petting him as he died.

He was just a victim. This was just my job. That was it.

God, it was hot in that basement.

“I think I found his earlobes,” Suzy said from behind the boiler. I could only see the right-hand sliver of her face lit up by her penlight, reflecting in her brown irises, painting her skin LED-blue.

Janet from forensics immediately took a plastic bag over to Suzy to collect the evidence. I didn’t join them. I could imagine what a pair of severed earlobes would look like, and that was bad enough on its own.

“Double ought gauge,” Janet said. “I’m surprised they allowed this at a hospital.”

My curiosity was too much. I leaned around and glimpsed Janet tweezing a piece of flesh encircling a glass ring into a bag.

“Piercings?” I asked.

“Big ones,” Suzy said.

“What do you think, Agent Hawke?” I turned to see Fritz Friederling striding into the basement, leather briefcase tucked under one arm.

Surprise rolled over me. Fritz didn’t come to crime scenes. He sat behind a desk, attended meetings, filled out paperwork. The only time I’d ever seen him on the scene of a crime had been to rescue Isobel and me from incubi, and that had been pretty dire.

I couldn’t help but peer up the stairs to see if Isobel was following. She wasn’t. Fritz must have left her at the OPA offices, where she had been expecting to interview Bubba Tanner.

“What do you think?” Fritz asked again.

Right, he’d been talking to me. “I think this is the same demon who killed Brandon.”

“Are you sure? The methods of murder are drastically different.”

No, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t be sure of anything until I had a confession on paper. Fritz knew that—he was testing me. And Janet was obviously listening in.

“The specifics of the mutilation is different, but there are other identical markers. The power outage, the clocks stopping simultaneously, the physical profile of the victim. There’s no reason to think that it’s another killer.”

“We could ask him,” Fritz said softly. I checked the open doorway at the top of the stairs again. Still no Isobel.

I lowered my voice. “Jay Brandon didn’t remember anything. What are the odds this guy will?”

“Then what do you propose?” Fritz asked.

“I’m thinking it’ll take old-fashioned detective work. Just have to ask a lot of questions, comb the scenes for evidence, put it all together like a puzzle.”

“Or you could behave like the witch that you are and reconstruct the scene magically.” Fritz thrust the briefcase he was holding at me. “This is for you.”

“What is it?”

“Look inside,” he said.

The second my hands contacted the bag, I knew that it was powerful—the kind of powerful that made my sinuses tickle.

I kept most of my magic supplies in duffel bags, like the ones that I took to the gym. Trust Fritz to think that he should stick magical supplies in a designer leather briefcase.