“Not sure. Someone who was willing to pay premium, you know? But Saul didn’t drop any of it himself.”
Jax spoke up, his voice more melodic and comforting than mine could ever be. “You came home and Saul had scored from his dealer friend. Did you use right away?”
“No,” she said, burrowing a little deeper into her sweatshirt. “We just had it, you know? I came in the door and he was all, ‘Hey, let’s have some food and then we’ll see the stars.’”
Seeing the stars was another new phrase, one that hinted at the investor at the center of the snake oil plague. I inhaled deeply. No smell of burning food. A glance at the hotplate confirmed that there was no breakfast cooking, though the dirty dishes in the sink looked to be relatively recent, holding the remnants of leftover red sauce.
“But you never got around to food, did you?” I moved to her side. I didn’t feel any threads there, either. That was even more of an indication that she wasn’t using snake oil. Of course, it could still be on the other side, or her back, or only wrapped around herself.
“Nah, we didn’t.” She trailed off, as if pining for that last meal together with a friend.
“What happened?”
“I walked in and he was dropping on his own.”
He’d been sneaking in a quick hit.
“And then?” I said.
“We started arguing. About him dropping, but mostly the dishes.”
I glanced back at the dish pile, confirming my earlier observations. It was small, smaller than my own pile at home, which served just one person and a cat. For two, it was even more discreet. “What about the dishes?”
Donna worked her lips. “It was . . . I don’t know. It just really got under my skin, like there was something he should’ve been doing.” She pulled her hair away from red-rimmed eyes and sat up straighter. “My mom used to warn me about running into a hade on the ice plains.”
“A hade,” said Jax. “Like the spirit?”
“Yeah.” Donna’s shoulders shook, though from sorrow or agreement, I couldn’t tell. “The ones that whisper and lie, the unforgiving dead who try to lead you off your Path.”
I knew what they were. A Barekusean word, “hade” carried two meanings, a type of ghost and the sound of newly thawed water trickling through a snowbank. That whispering sound of liquid moving behind a frozen mass was said by the Barekusu to mimic the murmurs of lost spirits. It was the old joke about the city name. Titanshade or Titan’s Hade, depending on how you said it. Every Titanshader knew the legends of wanderers on the ice plains being led to their death by the whispering dead.
But the legends were lies.
“The dead aren’t unforgiving,” I said. “They only want closure. And,” I spoke slowly, attempting to give my words gravity, “they want the living to admit to what they’ve done.”
Donna’s shoulders rose, defensive, about to share something she wasn’t proud of. “I got mad.” She glanced at Jax as he joined us, keeping a discreet distance. “Real mad, like I’d been drinking. I don’t drink no more, because of my temper.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s smart.”
“Like I said, I got mad. But Saulie, he wouldn’t listen, no matter what I said, he wouldn’t listen, and the buzzing in my head kept growing—”
“Wait.” I felt Jax tense beside me. “Buzzing?”
“Yeah, like a . . . radio station out of tune.”
“You ever have that before, when you get angry? When you’re drinking, maybe?”
“Nah. Never.” Her shoulders slumped, defeated. “I don’t know why it happened now, either. I really don’t. I just—I was so mad, you know? Like he’d done real bad by me. And it got so bad so fast, it was like I had to hit something or I’d burst. And when I hit him once, I couldn’t stop.”
“What’d you hit him with?”
“A book.”
“Okay.”
“One of them carabella record books. Great players, famous matches, that kind of thing. Saulie got it at the secondhand store. He loves carabella. Loved, I guess—” She broke off, swallowing a cry, and Jax hummed some words of comfort.
“Donna,” he said, “you can take all the time you need. But first we need to look in the other room, okay?”
My eyes met Jax’s, and he nodded. I stepped away and he moved ever so slightly to her side, one hand drawing closer to his belt. I was glad my partner had the foresight to carry cuffs. One benefit of working plainclothes is that we didn’t have to carry the utility belt full of items that a patrol cop did. The downside was that we weren’t as prepared for any eventuality, and the rarity with which we made arrests meant that most days my cuffs were sitting back in the Hasam or on my dresser at home.
I moved as well, more conspicuously than my partner, like a stage magician’s distraction. “So you know what happened to Saul is serious, and we have to take you into custody, right? Do you understand that?”
She nodded, and I followed with, “Can you put your hands behind your back?” the agreement to the questions priming her for the agreement to be handcuffed, and laying out the implicit agreement between her and us. “My partner’s going to take hold of your hands now, okay?” Sometimes you need to bark orders, and sometimes you need to take a softer touch. Jax slipped her hands together and bound them in handcuffs, linked metal bracelets designed to restrain and protect.
With Donna controlled, I walked to the bedroom. I slipped open the door and saw the splattered evidence of Donna’s blind rage.
The victim—Saulie, apparently—was wedged in between the beds. There were two of them, just as Donna had said. Both were relatively neat and tidy, one made with a flower-print bed cloth, the other more rumpled, like I usually left mine. Both of them were spattered with blood.
The murder weapon was evident, a book with red-soaked pages warping and curling in on themselves, abandoned on
