Chapter 3

The Mississippi river wandered through my city in a series of twists and turns, confounding river pilots for centuries. Now the winding pockets formed neighborhoods, one gentle moving dip marked downtown with the night clubs, restaurants, brothels, and every other form of amusement a person could want.

Farther up river, another twist held a wildlife sanctuary and beside it, close enough that development would never encroach on their privacy, a series of old homes large enough to be mansions.

If there was a social elite in Baton Rouge, a group of rich old white men controlling the mechanics of the city with a silent hand, this was where they lived. It was also where Cynthia Sweeny left her car.

The good people of the Rivermont district didn’t have an issue with the five police cars and the evidence truck, or at least they weren’t out in the street telling us they did. On this foggy morning after the storm, with everything still cold but dripping wet, it was only civil servants.

The car buzzed with activity underneath a scene of perfect calm: a tall house with at least four peaks and two dozen rooms all with long windows, set back, far back, on rolling lawns. The house loomed above us, clearly looking down on the work we did, disdainful. But no matter what the house, the neighborhood, or the people in it wanted the work went on. By the time we got there it had been going on for hours, or so it seemed.

“Almost done?” I asked a forensic specialist in a white safety suit.

He nodded, not speaking. SIU had that effect on other cops. I didn’t think it was real hatred, more fear and apprehension they didn’t know how to express. I actually preferred the silence to the quips about ghostbusters and how we didn’t have real jobs. Sometimes being different wasn’t fun.

Danny talked to someone, getting details I’d hear later while I walked the street. The only house for a while was the big one above us. That would make things harder. But there weren’t any trees, nothing blocking the view of the street. That might make things easier. I silently wished Christine had left the car on a crowded inner-city block with hundreds of people watching. In this part of town I’d be lucky if we found a handful of servants and couple of family members to interview.

My mind wandered while the technicians worked. I’d been running more lately and this would be a nice neighborhood to run in, not much traffic, pretty scenery, and to judge from the time it’d taken them to report the abandoned car, a fairly good neighborhood watch system.

Finally, forensics packed up and the car was ours. The squad cars rolled away until the only one left was the heavy tow truck from the impound lot. Its driver was shutting the trunk where they’d taken a dozen small samples and hooking up the back of the car. Danny asked him to give me a minute and I ducked inside.

I sat down trying to get a read, to feel something. Working magic was like flexing a muscle; you didn’t how to do it, you just did it. At least, that’s how it was supposed to work.

I sat down in the new model Acura, took a deep breath and centered myself, blotting out thoughts of the world around me, trying to ignore my five senses and concentrate on the sixth one. I let out my breath slowly, stretched out for the magic but…but nothing, there was no death. Not near me anyway, outside the car my magic happily reported a number of insects dying in the cold, and farther on, out in the lawn a smaller animal, a bunny maybe? Maybe a mouse. But as far as death in this car? I got nothing.

I started again, same technique: deep breath, reaching out, blocking out the world around me to concentrate on the car and…a tingle, the tiniest tingle coming from the trunk. No good, probably meant the body had spent some time there, I wanted something more. Frustrated I reached out for the steering wheel. Reached out but didn’t get it. The steering wheel was completely out of my reach. I remembered the ghost sitting on the couch with me; she’d been about my height. Why was the steering far away?

“Hey Danny,” I called, stepping out of the car.

“Yeah, partner?”

“Sit,” I ordered. He obliged, breaking off his conversation with the tow truck guy who followed him.

Even for Danny, who stood at a reasonable five feet eleven inches, the steering wheel was far away. I looked the tow truck driver up and down.

“What?” he asked, clearly spooked.

“How tall are you?”

“Six foot,” he grunted.

“Sit in the car.” He could grip the wheel, his large frame bent awkwardly into the smaller car. He could reach it but it wasn’t comfortable; whoever had driven the car last had been over six foot tall. I was willing to bet that meant Cynthia Sweeny hadn’t parked here.

There weren’t as many eyes on the street as I would have liked, but there the big house, up high above the road. I suspected it wasn’t a natural hill but something built up so the house could look superior. Either way, it worked. The house made me feel small as I walked up the stepped sidewalk toward the front door. If Danny shared my concerns you couldn’t tell; he walked along smiling.

“So, your uh, your heritage, that’s why you’re not cold?” I asked, freezing in my own coat.

“Pretty much. I mean I do get cold, when I’m like this anyway, but not when it’s forty degrees.”

My reply was more of a groan than words. Forty should have been the low today, not the high. I should have been wearing a light sweater in sixty degrees and sunshine. I stabbed the doorbell with all my bitterness at this unnatural cold snap. The door opened immediately, a white gloved butler from some period movie stared at us. I could only gawk, taken in by the black suit and white gloves, the formal air in an informal town. Thankfully, Danny was a trained professional.

“Detectives Gallagher and Mors, investigating a homicide. Are the owners of the house at home?”

The butler ushered us into a long dark hallway, taking our coats to hang them on a rack made of, well a rack, a deer’s rack, antlers. Someone twisted and curved the sixteen-point antlers into a coat rack. Beside it a hollowed-out elephant foot held umbrellas. I flexed a tiny bit with my magic, to see if it was real. The magic returned with enough force to make me unsteady. There was death in this hallway, dead things at least, the coat rack, the umbrella stand, farther down as I caught up with Danny I saw the rest of it: animals posed and frozen in death. An alligator hide stretched across a wall. So many trophies, all of them whispering with the lightest remains of violent deaths.

I pulled my magic back, closing it like a supernatural fist. I didn’t want to know what else this house held. The butler opened a heavy wood door into a room where the trophies lived in tall glass cases. With the turn of his white-gloved wrist the gas fireplace sprang to life and he left us. I stood by the fire getting warm, looking at a display of butterflies, each neatly pinned in place on black velvet.

Except when I looked closer they weren’t butterflies, they were pixies. Tiny faces with dead eyes, pins through the chest and arms. I turned my head, letting my eyes fall on a shriveled black hand, a human left hand. It gave off waves of violent death even with my mind closed tight, so I abandoned the fire to see what else the room held.

A case with a red velvet backdrop caught my eye; inside was the supposed horn of a unicorn. Maybe it actually was; the box was giving off some pleasant magical vibes.

“Hey Danny, what do you think the chances are this is real?” I asked. When he didn’t answer I turned to see what fascinated him. It was another glass box, this one shorter, about my height. Inside, draped over a dress maker’s dummy was an old coat. With all the amazing things in the room why would a shabby coat leave Danny silent?

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a selkie skin coat,” an accent-less voice told me from the doorway. I’d expected a great white hunter, someone who sounded British to match the butler, but the guy coming into the room was fairly nondescript. Average height, a pot belly, shoulders stooped a little with old age, and a ring of black hair around a perfectly bald spot on the top of his head. He didn’t look like he was responsible for any of this. But he spoke with the authority of an expert.

“They’re extinct now, of course, hunted out in the thirties and forties. They made the mistake of helping the English against Hitler. After that it didn’t matter if half the world thought they had human rights. That’s the coat of one of the last, captured in the 50s.”

“You killed her? Or him?” My mouth hung open while Danny hadn’t stopped staring at it.

“Her, and no I wasn’t lucky enough. My father bagged that one. I got to help with the skinning though. The blood froze as we skinned it, brutally cold day on the Irish Sea. A bit like the storm we had.”

“How old were you?” I struggled to wrap my head around the idea.

“Seven, it was my first great hunt and I’ll never forget it. Good thing too, you can’t hunt like that anymore.”

“No, I guess you can’t,” I agreed with him but I suspected we had very different thoughts on whether that was good or bad. “Detectives Gallagher and Mors, SIU, we’re investigating an abandoned car found along your road. We think it might be related to a homicide investigation.”

“Really? Fascinating. Unfortunately, I weathered the storm in Texas, going after cave trolls. Didn’t see a thing. But if you’re from the SIU are you sure you don’t want a tour? I know my collection beats anything you’ve got downtown.”

I looked over at a werewolf pelt and tried to imagine how Detective Brown, Lucas, our token werewolf would take it. I only had to glance at Danny to see one possibility.

“As much as I wish we could—”

“I can see your partner is fascinated.” He cut me off with a nod toward Danny, who turned.

“I didn’t think they were real,” he said softly. “You hear stories as a kid but a coat like that…well I never thought I’d see one.”

“It’s a prize, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it sure is.” I tried to distract him from Danny’s tone. “Anyway, I’m afraid we need to stay on task with this case. Was anyone at home?”

“Maybe the maid? I’ll have Tom take you down to the kitchen.” He was halfway out the door. If we didn’t want to see the trophies he had other things to do. “If you change your mind about the tour, I’m available.”

The butler summoned the maid from an upstairs bedroom. She wore a dove-gray uniform with a starched white apron but long silver hoop earrings stretched from her ears and there was nothing uniform about her bright red lipstick. We ended up in the kitchen, seated around a table, while she leaned, still in the room but with her head halfway through the door to the outside, smoking a cigarette.

“It’s not that Mr. Meredith doesn’t smoke, ’cause he does. Pipe leaves everywhere, stains on his shirts, the smell of it soaked into the carpet in every room no matter how much I vacuum. But let him catch me smoking in the main house and you’d think I shit on the rug or something.” She stopped to take a long drag.

“Man thinks it’s still 1920 in this house, even if it’s past the year 2000 out there. As long as he pays me in modern money I don’t mind.”

She smiled revealing teeth yellowed from smoking that matched the yellow-white of her skin. I suspected it was important to Mr. Meredith that his staff be white. He hadn’t told me his name, even if he had offered me a tour of the house, and something about that spoke of a quiet elitism that bothered me.

“We’re looking into the car abandoned out front,” Danny said, speaking for the first time since the trophy room with its offensive furnishings caught his mind. I wondered what he could be feeling but pushed it aside to concentrate on work.

“The white Corolla?” She blew out a lungful of smoke, pushing her dull brown hair of out her eyes without putting down the cigarette.

“Acura,” I corrected before I realized I’d interrupted and stopped her from talking. Danny had stopped coaching me on how to interview, but in my head I still saw the dirty look my interruption would have earned me.

“They all look the same to me,” the maid snapped, going back to the cigarette like it couldn’t give her cancer fast enough.

“They’re pretty close, and I’m sure you had other things on your mind.”

“Lord, yes, Meredith goes off hunting and I’m expected to make a place for any trophy he might bring back. ’Cept trophies tend to be a bit harder to come by these days, so I have to figure out a spot, clean it up and get ready but then be ready to move everything back without him noticing when he comes back empty handed.” She stopped for another drag, holding an ashtray in her hand, the chair tilted back on two legs. The precarious pose was at odds with her uniform. I could see up her skirt, but she didn’t seem to care.

“That’s how you spent the storm?” I asked.

“Yup. Can’t say I minded much. Being locked up here for three days was worlds better than being in the trailer with space heaters, and as long as you avoid the study the rest of the house is all right. I don’t mind the Jacuzzi tub upstairs or the big screen.”

“When did you see the car?”

“Just before the storm hit. Two or three people were there, messing with the trunk. I figured they were carrying in stuff for the storm like everyone else. I didn’t think they’d leave the car there, but then the ice came and there it was coated like everything else.”

“Two or three people? Men? Women?” I pushed her along with the story.

“Two women and a guy.” She finished the cigarette grinding the butt out with force. “Does it really matter? I mean I know this is Rivermont and all, but tow the car and get over it. It’s not like anyone got hurt.”

I didn’t bother to correct her and Danny didn’t offer another word during the whole interview. Actually, Danny didn’t offer much for the rest of the day.

Back at the office I pulled the file on Christine and read the details of the case. We stepped in on a case for the narcotics guys, providing our expert opinion that yes, an earth witch could grow marijuana from seed in a few minutes but no, they probably couldn’t make it disappear once it had grown.

There were reports and phone calls, requests for evidence and me setting an appointment to look at Christine’s body but for once my partner didn’t seem to be paying attention.