Carnal Sin

surprises.”

TWENTY-ONE

Grant had slept like shit. As a result, his migraine was even worse now than it had been last night. When he’d woken up in Julie’s apartment, she was gone and the night was a blur. Unable to figure out what was wrong with him, he chalked it up to exhaustion and a bitch of a case-though deep down he suspsected something far different was the cause of his migraine and fuzzy memory.

After leaving Julie’s he went home, showered, and changed, arriving at headquarters after eight, with an extra-large coffee, four aspirin, and a quart of milk.

His partner was at work on the computer, but before checking in with him, Grant detoured into the break room, swallowing the aspirin down with half the quart of milk. He added milk to the coffee more to cool it down than for taste, and went back to his desk facing Jeff Johnston. Grant growled, “Tell me Cooper and O’Donnell are sitting in an interview room waiting for me.”

“Haven’t seen them.”

“I knew it. I should have put them both behind bars until I figure out what the fuck is going on at Velocity.”

Johnston looked glum. “We got another problem. Nadine Anson’s suicide is all over the Internet.”

“What?” Grant booted up his computer and Johnston said, “Over here; I’m already online.”

Grant walked around to Johnston’s desk.

“At least four people posted their cell phone videos on YouTube. Another blogged about it with a series of still pictures. The major networks posted the videos on their websites. I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it.”

“It happened twelve hours ago; I had shitloads of paperwork and crashed after an eighteen-hour day. Didn’t think that an asshole or four would post a woman’s suicide for the fucking masses to enjoy.”

Johnston clicked Play on one of the videos and Grant stared at the screen for the next minute and forty-nine seconds. The recording caught Nadine midscream as she pulled out a clump of hair.

Johnston swore and said, “I can’t believe that jerk recorded this instead of trying to help her.”

Grant’s anger went from hot to boiling. Someone could have saved Nadine’s life, but they’d done nothing except film her breakdown. Grant was generally a pessimist-two decades on the police force did that-but he still believed in the relative goodness of people who weren’t career criminals. Watching the video squashed that myth.

People were bastards, all of them.

Grant watched the video until Nadine stepped off the curb, then he averted his eyes. He didn’t want to see it again.

“Wait,” Johnston said. He took the mouse and rewound the video ten seconds. “Grant, watch this.”

“I don’t want-” He sighed and reluctantly looked. He didn’t see anything except Nadine fall and the bus that ran over her bump up and down. He heard the screams of the crowd, Moira’s cry from the sidelines.

“There!” Johnston said.

Grant said, “It’s just a reflection. Probably a flash.”

Johnston rewound it again. “Look right next to the bus, before the ad for Disneyland.”

Grant focused on the spot Johnston told him to. It was a flash, but … it looked like a woman stood there. A pale, dark-haired beauty. She was there for a second, then was gone.

“No one could have been standing there,” Grant said. “There was a car right there a moment before. It’s probably a ghost image, left over from other tapes.”

Johnston glanced at him. “Boy, you’re a dinosaur, Nelson. This is digital. Watch one more time,” Johnston said. “I’ll pause it.”

“I don’t know what you think we’re going to get out of this,” Grant said, a sick feeling in his stomach.

The woman looked familiar.

An irritated, very Irish voice behind them said, “I can’t believe you’re watching that damn video.”

Moira was beyond furious. What was the cop doing watching Nadine die like that? Like in a movie. It was sick.

“Should I bring you some popcorn?” she added.

Rafe had his hand on her back. Right. Watch the sarcasm. Maybe she was going too far, but she was ticked off.

Grant turned around and said, “I’m conducting an investigation. Lay off.”

Moira had been forced to watch variations of that video on the television in the hotel coffee shop until Rafe stood on a table and turned it off because the manager had refused to do so. Then the desk sergeant was watching the news when they arrived, and Moira had snapped at him, too. But even if Grant was just doing his job, the circus of the video still irritated her.

Rafe rubbed the back of her neck and whispered in her ear, “Easy, my love.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him and narrowed her gaze to lecture him about how to address her, but his half-smile told her he’d done it on purpose. Some of her anxiety drained away.

Johnston said to Grant, “I took a snapshot of the image and used that image program thing to sharpen it.”

Moira turned to where Grant’s partner was sitting at the computer and looked at the picture. The color drained from her face. She knew exactly what they were seeing.

An astral projection of Julie Schroeder.

“It looks like Julie,” Johnston said.

“It’s a reflection or something,” Grant said. “Julie wasn’t there. We would have seen her. She couldn’t have been there.”

Johnston shrugged. “You’re probably right. But it’s weird.”

Moira wasn’t going to explain it to them. They wouldn’t believe her, for one thing, but the realization that Julie Schroeder had left her body and projected herself at the scene of Nadine’s breakdown changed everything. Dammit, Moira had known that Julie was lying about something! Why did this deception surprise her?

She said, “I don’t know what you both are talking about, but I have places to go and people to see. So let’s get this over with.”

She still hadn’t figured out how she and Rafe were going to save Grant’s ass, but the one thing she did believe after her bizarre encounter with Julie this morning was that the witch really didn’t want her boyfriend to die. Maybe Julie thought that if she killed Nadine she could break the spell. But that made no sense-the demon had already left Nadine before she died. It was the departure of the demon that sent Nadine over the edge.

Maybe Julie hadn’t known the demon had jumped out of Nadine’s shell. Yet she had to have seen how Nadine was suffering, even if she’d been observing from the astral plane. Julie might not have been able to hear everything, but she’d have seen the physical violence Nadine had done to herself. Maybe she’d wanted to save her.

Or she was following Grant. To protect him, expecting that the demon would be going after him next.

One thing was clear: Moira couldn’t trust her. Worse, though, was that Moira had believed her when she said she didn’t want Grant to die. Normally, Moira was an expert at spotting the lies. Was Julie playing both sides? Trying to save Grant Nelson while turning Moira over to Fiona?

“Let’s go to the interview room,” Grant said.

“Here’s fine. Nothing formal. I’m helping you. You obviously watched the video-you have Nadine’s confession and it’s clear we both tried to help her. You have the marks to prove it.” She pointed to the Band-Aid on his face. Then she gestured to the bruise on her cheek. “So do I.”

The plan Moira and Rafe had come up with on the drive over no longer seemed like all that hot an idea. Moira was going to suggest that she tag along with Grant while he finished his interviews, giving him her assessment of “the cult” while keeping an eye on him. Rafe was going to contact Anthony about the chalice and whether it could