I shut my eyes and tried to take a deep breath. No good. The stench was too much. I was going to be sick, right here, all over my first crime scene.
Bill came up and put a comforting hand on my shoulder.
“Professional and detached,” he said in my ear. “Remember?” It had been one of the first things I’d learned as a detective. You had to separate yourself from the crime, in order to see all the angles. That was the job. It was my duty.
I let out the breath I’d been holding and nodded.
“Who am I looking at, Bill?” I asked, crouching down to get a better look.
“Nichole Barret, age 36,” he said, reading from the file. “Medical transcriptionist. Worked from home. Single. Never married. No kids. Neighbors reported the smell of something burning coming from the open window at 7:32 am. Firefighters responded and made entry. Discovered the body and contacted emergency services.” He flipped the page over, then looked up with a frown. “That’s it. No next of kin, known associates…nothing. Pretty lonely life.”
I could relate. I looked at the body for a long moment, processing every detail.
“He stabbed her, burned her, decapitated her, then poured salt over the body,” I mused, separating the bits of information like a puzzle.
“Not necessarily in that order. We won’t know what happened and when until we get an autopsy report,” Bill said. I straightened up.
“See if they can put a rush on it. Tell them Calloway wants this case solved with a bow.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“Check in with the officers that canvassed the area. Find out who they talked to and if anyone saw or heard anything.”
He jotted a few notes down on the file, said, “I’m on it,” then left to see it done.
“How’s your team doing, Charley?” I asked the team leader.
“Almost finished. They’re packing up most of their gear now. Got the coroner staging down the street, waiting to take the body.” I nodded.
“Okay. You see to them. I’m going to do another sweep of the house, just to check things out for myself.” He nodded and was gone.
I waited until I was sure he’d gone back down stairs and I was alone before retreating into the bedroom and falling to my knees on the carpeted floor. I couldn’t breathe. The pressure in the air had become a throbbing mass, filling my lungs with thick syrup. This wasn’t nerves. It wasn’t even the horror of seeing the mutilated body of Nichole Barret. This was something else. I was under attack.
Most officers carry a backup weapon somewhere on their person, for when shit hits the fan in the most colossal of fashions. I was no exception. But I didn’t have a little Saturday night special strapped to my ankle. Instead, I pulled out a thin, silver dagger (called an athame) from it’s hidden sheath.
It wasn’t very big; no more than ten inches from hilt to tip. It wasn’t even that sharp. But it’s usefulness didn’t lie in how many apples it could peal, but in what a trained witch could do with it.
Oh yeah, I was a witch, able to call upon and manipulate the arcane forces of the universe. I probably should have mentioned that.
Facing North, I slowly started tracing a circle with the point of my athame in a clockwise motion. As I did, I envisioned a white light following the trail, effectively creating a barrier between me and the rest of the house. I raised my power, picturing it as a pool of glowing energy in my stomach and bubbling to the surface at my silent command. Then, pouring it into my words, I chanted:
“Spirits of the North, East, South and West,
Bless this circle and all those inside it.”
As circle castings go, this was about as quick and dirty as you could get. A true casting can be performed in a variety of ways, but usually involve a period of meditation, an anointed candle and a spell that doesn’t sound like it came from a Dr. Seuss book. But I didn’t have the time or ingredients for that.
Still, it did the job. As I completed my rotation, I felt a moment of dizziness as the power I’d been summoning left my body, then spread out all around me and snapped up like an invisible shield.
Instantly, the oppressive weight dragging me down evaporated. The knotted muscles in my back and shoulders relaxed and I drew in great lung-fulls of pure, clean air. There was still the undercurrent of burned flesh to it, but it no longer stuck in my throat and refused to nourish my oxygen-starved body.
I stayed like that for several moments, just enjoying the blessed relief of being able to breathe and not feeling like I was carrying a metric ton of rocks in my chest. If someone had come in right then, I would have looked a sight; kneeling on the floor with a knife in my hand, gasping like a runner who’d just completed a marathon. But they could go suck an egg. None of them felt this place the way I did.
It’s like the house was alive, filled with wrath and sorrow at what had happened here. And, for some reason, it’s total attention was devoted to me. What was that all about?
As I pondered this, I slowly began to realize that I was no longer alone. Another presence had come into the room. Maybe it had been here the entire time, but I’d been so concerned with getting
