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I hate dead babies.
Murder always cut to the core, but when the victim at my feet was an infant, that just made things worse. Okay, what really made things worse was the screaming that no one at this crime scene could hear but me. I looked around at the surrounding authorities in my distraction, but they just talked, whispered, and watched me, oblivious to the mournful wailing.
Sometimes it really sucked to be so damn special.
If they could solve this without me, I wouldn’t be here; I’d still be sitting in a crappy restaurant, pissed-off at one of my two boyfriends over my other special issue. Yet here I was, everyone’s favorite Wiccan police clairvoyant—with a dead baby, and an uncomfortable police contingency team waiting for supernatural answers to a decidedly mundane human crime.
So good to be me.
Too bad sarcasm and inner wit wasn’t doing the hard work. “Pull it together, Zoë,” I whispered.
I fingered the dead leaves around the body bag. Two sizes, the medical examiner had told me years ago—body bags came in only two sizes: little and big.
“You should be glad we don’t use sheets anymore,” he had said, and today I was indeed grateful.
A long jagged line cut down the body from the hollow of the neck just above the sternum to just above the belly button. So odd, stopping there, as if someone had taken a moment in their butchery to consider that perhaps they shouldn’t mar it. I pushed the thought back for later consideration.
The innards had all been removed: heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, all the excess fluid that filled a human body, even one as small as this little girl—all of them gone. The ribs remained intact, like someone had just emptied her out. The initial imagery screamed.
Literally.
It was another reason I didn’t like dead babies—they didn’t know words, and their memories tended to be self-centered.
A deep throbbing headache emerged behind my temples as I sorted through the imperfect pictures. I tried to push the noise away, almost begging with the child’s dead and restless spirit for respite. I needed to concentrate, to discern the details of what had happened here, but the infant only screamed louder, its lungs inexhaustible, as if she knew I was the only one left that could hear her. The sound paused only when I stopped touching her, though that meant she didn’t really pause at all.
Without my fingers on her, she was so peaceful, dark lashes framing blue irises, the beginning signs of decay turning the shiny white into dull matte orbs. A pudgy, healthy baby girl, she had been less than six months old according to the ME. Her hands remained clenched in two little fists.
“Zoë?” Detective Daniel Parsons whispered my name. “Everything okay?”
Of course, everything wasn’t okay. Did he not see the damn dead baby in the body bag? Did he—? I bit back the thought. I was angry over the crime scene, and angry at him for something entirely different—no sense in letting the two things combine.
Working with my boyfriend sometimes created extra challenges.
“How could anyone do this?” His partner, Detective Michael Sully, sauntered over with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his trench coat, his lips turned down into a tight frown. “Children are supposed to be safe, protected.”
I couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind. Of the three of us, only Mike had any children. Was he seeing the face of his daughter in the body bag?
My throat tightened. If this had happened to my niece and goddaughter, Esther, I think I would have been.... There weren’t words for the magnitude of anger that burst inside me just thinking about it.
I looked at the two men in front of me and sighed. We had met almost a year ago under similar dark and blood-soaked conditions, that case ending with a dead serial killer. Two weeks and everything had changed; no longer combatants, we were friends now.
Dead babies were never easy, though, and this one... well, someone had dumped her out here. They left no footprints, no tire tracks, just a discarded tiny naked person inside a small stand of trees inside an off-ramp on I-295.
Douglas Marshall had called it in to the police after having the bad luck of having his car die just inside the off-ramp. He had been waiting for roadside assistance to arrive when the call of nature came, forcing him over the guardrail and into the tree line. In his statement, he had originally thought she was a doll and walked right past her to relieve himself.
On his trip back to the car, the wind had whipped the stench into the air. He’d looked around for a dead animal, but his eyes kept going back to that ‘doll’. When he’d taken those final steps toward her, he’d thrown up all over his shoes. Then he’d called 9-1-1.
At my request, Daniel had let Mr. Marshall leave after verifying his address and phone number. One handshake had confirmed it for me. Not to mention the dried bits of vomit on his nice shoes.
“So?” Mike tipped his hat backward, scratching his head as he fought to keep his eyes away from the tiny bundle. “Anything useful, Zoë?”
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “I need a couple more minutes. I can’t give you anything useful right now. I just... I need... space.”
“Understood.” Mike disappeared from my immediate reach, as did Daniel and the closest parts of the crowd. He must’ve signaled them or something. They were giving me what I’d asked for: time to get back to work.
A cool wind picked up, pushing the moist August heat off my face, but underneath it lurked an unmistakable chill that had nothing to do with the season or time of day. I swallowed hard and reached for the sliver of white skin beneath the zippered mouth of the body bag.
Here goes nothing.
Skin touched skin, and the trees swallowed me.
At first, darkness suffocated me with blanketing heft. Color seeped in, red and radiant. A man stood before a crudely erected stand of stone—maybe an altar?—arms raised above his head. A thin sliver of silver caught my eye. Dagger?
Shit. Not another wayward pagan. I’d had enough of people like that last year—bad apples in the barrel. It always ruined everything.
The baby’s cries, fresh and renewed, spilled from the shadows. My heart raced. A blood sacrifice?
“No! Don’t do it! Take me! Kill me!”
I spun around to find a woman tied to the base of a jagged stone pillar, beaten and bruised, with one eye swollen shut.
“She’s just a baby! She’s just a baby! Please! Show some mercy!”
I knew how this all ended, but that didn’t make it hurt less, didn’t stop the deep-down want to save them both. Just a reminder that I was only a spectator in this memory.
I closed my eyes and focused, and when I looked again, the vision had spread to a movie view, taking me out of the scene completely.
“She has been chosen, just like the others,” the man before the altar whispered. “Her blood serves Him, your sacrifice to build His empire.”
“No,” the mother whimpered and dropped her head. “No, no, no. I never agreed to this! I never agreed to this!”
The mother’s pleas fell on deaf ears.
The baby screamed, loud and in anguish, as the dagger fell, its blade biting into infant flesh. He jerked it down her tiny abdomen.
Then only silence remained.
I came back arched over the dead baby, tears falling unrestrained amid my hysterical, silent weeping. On this side of my reality, a thick, blanketing silence ensued, as if my collapse had somehow warned them that there would be no instantaneous closure in this case.
I smelled Daniel before he made it two feet behind me, his pungent aftershave replacing the acrid scent of death on the ground. He said nothing, only sat beside me where I had fallen, and wrapped his arms around me, rocking me slowly, as if I were a child awakened from a nightmare.
The anger from earlier melted away in my grief, and I let him hold me, burying my head in his chest. I hadn’t expected this. I’d seen murder before, obviously. I’d seen dead kids, dead babies, before, but there was something about this one that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, something different.
I reached out from where we sat and touched her again, the screaming in my head better than the quiet out here. No images remained, and the sound I was counting on had settled into whimpering, that sadness like an acknowledgement that this was it, that the life she’d been given was gone.
Oh, sweet baby.
“Baby girl, it’s time to go.”
She exhaled in one shuddering breath in my head, and then there was nothing.
The sun was setting by the time Daniel helped me back to my feet. The whole team remained present, huddled in quiet clusters around us.
I wiped my eyes with the back of one hand. “Tell them to go home already, Mike.” I waved at the waiting men. “Tell them to kiss their babies. Let’s wrap this madness up. It’s over.”
Daniel led the way to his car as Mike barked soft commands at his troops. Safety was a lie; the image of that child would be forever imprinted on their brains. It was the price of the job, but, by the Goddess, they were not compensated enough for this!
Strong hands lifted my face up, and the blue eyes that I had fallen in love with stared at me, heavy with concern. I tried to smile, but the effort was wasted; he knew better.
“I’m okay.” I wrapped my hands around his. “Really. Nothing that a good cup of tea and a bagel won’t cure.”
He didn’t argue. “Brooks will want to talk before I take you home.” Daniel threw a quick glance over his shoulder at his boss, who had just arrived on scene.
I nodded. I didn’t want to relive the horror of the vision again, but it was my job.
They didn’t pay me enough either.
