And suddenly I knew where I had seen her before. In the book of potential play partners at Dorothy’s Dungeon.
“As to the frost demon,” Quinn continued, “definitely killed by magik. His internal organs looked like they’d been cooked. Quite a trick, considering they were still inside his body. The goop leaking out his ears has the same chemical composition as demon brain tissue, but it’s been reduced to a chemical sludge with no intact biological cells. And before you ask, no, I’ve never seen anything like it, and I can’t find anything in any of the databases.”
“Lavessinel,” I said. “I was told that was the demon’s name. Sergeant Jeff Collins in Arcane Vice identified him. Can you tell if melting his brain killed him, or did it happen afterward?”
“Considering the cooked internal organs, I can’t give you an official answer,” she said. “But my bet would be that the brain is the COD. Demons are damned hard to kill, and I’m not sure the other damage would have done it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I had another murder a couple of days ago, a devil killed with a fire lance out in Middle River. You wouldn’t happen to know who conducted that post-mortem, would you?”
I heard her chuckle. “Yeah, that was me. What do you want to know?”
“Did you get an ID?”
“Sure. Hang on and let me look it up.”
I waited for a couple of minutes, then she came back on the line. “I got a hit on his DNA with a record in the system. His name was Megistifal, standard devil. File number zero-zero-five-eight-seven-four-six.”
“Thanks, Doctor Quinn.”
I called up the devil’s file and saw that our first record of him was twenty years old. He had been captured during a Rifter raid on a hospital in Georgia. His latest bust was for selling drugs five years before he died. Devils were minor demons, just the type of being a major demon, such as Lavessinel, would use as a distributor.
A note in Collins’s file on the massacre caught my attention. He said that ‘someone’ needed to go through the ‘office’ on the second floor and catalog the paper found there. He said that some of it looked like business records. Someone. He hadn’t looked terribly busy or overworked when we visited him. I gave him a call.
“Sergeant Collins? Lieutenant James in Major Crimes.”
“Well, hello! Calling for a date? I knew my animal magnetism would make an impression.”
The God’s-gift-to-women attitude I could hear in his voice set my teeth on edge.
“It did,” I answered. “I have a couple of burning questions. First, do you keep a litter box in your office or in the men’s restroom? And second, do you know if anyone ever went through all that paper in Lavessinel’s office?”
Silence, but I could hear breathing on the other end of the phone. I waited. Eventually, he said, “As far as I know, the office is still untouched. No one from Vice has searched it.”
“Since the recently deceased was a drug dealer, don’t you think someone in your office should do that? Or are you hoping someone else will do your job for you?”
His reply had a bit of heat to it. “It’s a Major Crimes case, Lieutenant. I’d hate to overstep.”
“Oh, you want supervision? Not a problem. I’ll tell you what. Meet me there in an hour, and we’ll go through it all together. Cover both our asses.”
I hung up, not giving him a chance to say no or give me an excuse. I handed everything I’d been looking at to Novak, including my hand-drawn chart.
“Can you try to make some kind of sense of this when you finish with the preliminary report? I’m going to meet your buddy Jeff Collins at the scene and start sorting through the records in that second-floor office.”
“Good luck,” he said. “I took a brief look at that stuff. Most of it is handwritten in those hieroglyphics demons use. We’ll have to submit them to a translator.”
With a grin, I said, “No, we won’t. I can read them.” That was one of the strange things about the dreams I had about my father. I had learned to read and speak demon from my dreams. That made it difficult to dismiss them as simply wish-fulfillment fantasies from my subconscious.
I left the car for Novak in case he needed it and hopped on my bike. I stopped by my favorite fast-food place and picked up a crabcake sandwich and a milkshake, then drove out to Pimlico.
If I hadn’t made that detour, I might never have seen the car, since it was parked on a street I normally wouldn’t have driven down. From the Crab Shack, the one-way street leading to the freeway ran the wrong way, so I cut down the alley that ran behind the apartment building where Janice Iranski lived.
The flash of red—an unusual shade—that I caught from the corner of my eye as I passed the parking lot was enough to make me slow down and turn around. The fancy two-seat European sports car was definitely out of place. It was also parked in a place that was the opposite direction from the route Sarah Benning should have taken from Loretta Academy to go home. I had checked, and only two hundred of the cars were registered in the Mid-Atlantic Metro area, with seventeen of them the same year as hers, and only nine of those were red.
I pulled into the parking lot and dismounted, then walked to the far corner where the car was partially obscured behind a trash dumpster. As far as I could tell, it was completely intact. That was unsurprising, considering one of its features was a magitek security system keyed to the owner’s magikal talent. Sarah was an electrokinetic, as was her father. He had told me the car was only tuned to him and his daughter. Anyone else would receive a
