"Just lie there. That wasn't Jackie. Just lie still and let the earth give you strength."
Kate shook her head, slowly, as if it hurt. "They never found her body."
Alice nodded. "They never found any of the bodies. We know people died at the Pratts' place. We know people died in that cigarette boat that blew up and sank out in the bay. No bodies, anywhere. But that girl wasn't Jackie. Big kid, maybe, but three or four inches shorter than either of you, most likely a couple of years too old, and she wasn't a natural blonde. Brown roots."
Not to mention the nipple ring and a couple of raunchy tattoos. But Kate didn't need that level of sharing.
And the kid's heart was somewhere else, along with four or five liters of blood. Bled dry like a slaughterhouse pig, but not by slitting her throat. Big jagged hole in her chest, with a tiny razor-sharp flake of obsidian imbedded in the cut end of one rib, a flake that Alice had left in place for the M.E. to find and puzzle over. Anyway, the shadowy perp hadn't killed that girl here. But the stones still felt angry.
Kate wrinkled her nose. "Sooner or later we're going to have to talk to them."
"Sooner." The ground seemed to throb under Alice, Maine granite sending code to the base of her spine where she squatted in the grass. "Talk to them here. That'll cut down on the awkward questions."
"Huh?" Kate hoisted herself up on one elbow, blinking as if her brain fuzzed with the move. Then her skin flushed slightly from its pale, waxy color. Blood pressure rising. Good, even if it was her temper.
"Talk to them here," Alice repeated. "But you may have to bring the Forensics team back again tomorrow. They'll have a hard time finding the place without you. Harder time remembering what they've found. They'll have trouble recalling anything they didn't write down or photograph."
Kate's skin reddened further, almost back to normal, and her eyes narrowed. She sat up. "They'll have a hard time finding the place? Remembering? You been getting into the scheduled drugs at the hospital?"
You'd think the girl would start to believe in magic, the things she's been through. "The stones like you. Damned if I know why, but they wanted you here. You. Then you called me, and then you called dispatch. If you hadn't been here, if the stones didn't know you, none of us could have found this place. Can't you feel it?"
That Power crawled over Alice's skin, helping her help Kate. But it focused on Kate, only using Alice because she was available.
Kate frowned. "Feed it to your roses. Somebody called me. Set me up. Since when do rocks use telephones?"
"Silicon, kiddo. Silicon and germanium and gallium and a bunch of other minerals. And copper and aluminum and gold. That's what they make computers out of. Computers and radios and cell phones. And rocks."
The Power flowing through this place nearly stood Alice's hair on end. She couldn't use it, it wouldn't feed her magic, but by the Jesus she sure could feel it. Couldn't use it except to help Kate.
Kate shook her head and rolled her eyes. "Crazier than a shithouse rat. And you ain't even pretty. Damn good thing you're rich. Weren't for that, they'd have tossed you in the nut bin before you were out of diapers." But her face softened while she spoke, fond smile lines tugging at the corners of her mouth and eyes.
Alice felt her heart twist around in her chest. The big ox wasn't going to die on her. The big, scarred, numb-as-a-stump-but-she's-good-with-her-hands ox who didn't believe in magic wasn't going to take her magic away. Besides that personal thing, the House needed her.
Kate shoved over onto her hands and knees, winced, and then stood up, swaying. Alice didn't try to help her. With the difference in their sizes, the best she could do was stand by and try to break the fall if Kate passed out. The shock wasn't an act. Kate really had thought she'd found her daughter's body.
But as for acting . . .
"Just tell them what we talked about. I got here a few minutes before the first cruiser, you don't know the exact time. I was closer when I got your call, nothing suspect there. I peeled enough plastic back to see that the corpse wasn't Jackie's. By then, you'd flopped on your face in the blueberries and everything else is fuzzy. Trust me, they won't ask a lot of questions. The stones won't let them."
"Shit they won't. DA tried to get the town to fire me. State cops won't talk to me on the radio, always just out of range when I transmit. MDEA and the Feds think I ratted out that drug raid over at Tom Pratt's, because Jackie was there and I'd heard ahead of time the raid was going down. That left 'professional courtesy' stinking like a week-old roadkill skunk. I turn up with a murder in the puckerbrush, you think they won't sniff it up one side and down the other? 'Specially if I'm the only one who can find it?"
That flinty smell had returned, the first thing Alice had noticed when she got out of her car. "The stones own this place. They say what will happen and what will not. Trust them to protect you."
Kate looked like she'd bitten a lemon. "Lying to cops. Interfering with a crime scene. I used to be a cop, dammit!"
"Still are. You're just exactly the kind of cop that Stonefort wants. That's why the
