I swung out my hands, as if I were helpless in the face of bureaucracy. “Try us again.”
“Saulie’s dead. Killed.”
“Wait, wait, wait . . . Who killed him?”
“Me.” She shook her head.
Jax and I shifted our postures immediately. The woman before us didn’t seem aggressive, but anyone who mentions in passing that they just got done murdering someone needs to be taken seriously.
“Is that true?” I said. “We don’t have time for jokes.”
“You think this is a joke?” Her breathing was hoarse, her head cradled in her hands, hair spilling over her face. “Didn’t they tell you anything before they sent you out here?”
“We’ll need to make a report,” I said, picking my way through a minefield. We had no idea how she’d react to any of this, or even if this Saulie person was really dead. “Do you have ID?”
She dug a hand into her back pocket and pulled out a wallet. Jax took it, then tossed it to me.
I glanced at the card. Her name was listed as Donna Raun.
I made my way to the woman, making enough noise to ensure she heard me coming. I didn’t want to spook her. “I’m a Homicide detective.” I left out my name. With my recent notoriety, there was no reason to make her more uncomfortable or distract her from the information I needed. “You’re Donna?”
She nodded, and I asked, “How do you pronounce your last name?”
Always start them off with softball questions. Teach them it’s okay to tell you things. Ask questions you know the answers to, and watch what they look like when they tell the truth or lie. Then use those to gauge later answers. It’s all in a detective’s bag of tricks. People are puzzle boxes, and we’re trained to find the solution as quickly and accurately as possible. It required putting a certain distance between us and the people we spoke to. But despite my partner’s earlier protestations, we weren’t there for the living. We were there to bring justice to the dead.
She gave me her pronunciation—“Rhymes with Brown”—and I made a note.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, Miss Raun.”
Donna’s nose dripped and her eyes leaked, and it didn’t take me long to mark her as someone who hadn’t meant for things to go the way they had. She didn’t sidetrack, just set in on what had happened and why it wasn’t her fault.
“I came back from the grocery and Saulie was all smug. He’d scored while I was gone, you know?”
“Scored what?”
“Angel tears,” she said. “But with a little extra.”
A tingle of fear danced along my spine, and I traded a look of concern with Jax. Angel tears was a popular street drug, a hallucinogen delivered via eye drops. The “something extra” was a promise of manna slipped into the mix. Maybe it was a lie, maybe it was real, maybe it was anything that would make users believe that they were engaging in some kind of magic ritual. Anything to escape the doldrums of their lives. Either way, that something extra was what differentiated angel tears from its manna-laced upgrade: snake oil. And if there was active next-generation manna in the apartment, I risked crossing the threads, risked giving in to the hunger and coldness that marked my connection with the strange world of manna.
I reexamined the apartment, though it was a useless gesture. Threads were invisible; I’d only know they were present if I felt their tug on my flesh. The place had an unpleasant odor to it, like too-ripe fruit, and the ash cones sitting on a plate in the kitchenette indicated that the occupants had tried to mask it in their own way. All in all it wasn’t too bad, not like the homes of those well and truly consumed by their drug of choice—something I’d seen more than enough of in my time on Vice. In those situations I was mostly concerned about the bug infestations that were usually present in places like that. Saul and Donna were either relatively new to A-list drugs, or they had extraordinary self-control, or someone who cared about them enough to make sure their basic needs were met.
“So Saulie, he’s your partner?”
“Roomie.”
I pulled a frown. “There’s only one bedroom.”
“There’s two beds, if you bothered to look.”
I raised my hands, immediately acknowledging my mistake.
“Okay,” I said. “Saulie got snake oil. Did he do that often?”
“Sometimes. Not often. It’s hard to get. He got some last week, and he didn’t touch the stuff. Just moved it. He sold it to a guy he knows, someone with connections. Said they were gonna dilute it and move it on the street. I’m not involved, but I knew about it, you know?”
“I do.” Snake oil and angel tears were usually sold as eye drops. That made it easier to dilute, as long as the iridescent sheen of manna didn’t fade too much to make it less valuable. And CaDell had said Saul had been a chemical engineer. “He didn’t keep any for the two of you?”
“Course he did. But some out-of-towner asked him for a hookup, and was willing to pay stupid cash. Saul was in a bad way. Money-wise, I mean. Like, I’d let him slide on his half of the rent when he got furloughed from the rig. Thought his luck changed with a job from Vandie Cedrow up at the festival. Then he got laid off from there . . .” She clenched her eyes shut and fell silent. I wasn’t sure if she was angry with herself or her former roommate.
We waited silently for Donna to find her story once more.
“Saul sold what we had to the out-of-town lady, then bought a little back from the dealer he’d sold the rest to.”
“The dealer whose name you don’t know.”
She sniffled. “It’s not healthy to know the names of people like that.”
“Who was the out-of-town buyer?” I already knew, of course. Sheena the dancer,
