Deadly Sin (Cassandra Farbanks) (7 page)

Chapter Four

I walked into Homicide as someone who had an appointment to keep – although in truth, it was rare for me to call ahead. I got into a bad habit of expecting people to expect me. So when I got there, Hamilton was not in his office. I was even more surprised to find a man with a neatly trimmed beard manning a spare desk.

The desk in question was at a right angle to Hamilton’s office and although it had held a computer, a filing tray and a phone, no one had ever sat at it before.

Almost unconsciously, I approached the new person when he looked up. His eyes were very dark and, like Hamilton, had to be in his late thirties or early forties. I guessed, as he was sitting, that he was about my height. A little short for a guy, but he was a boulder of a man. He had the neck and shoulders of someone who hit the gym and weight room very seriously. Those dark, intelligent eyes weighed me, hiding under thick, black brows that matched his wiry hair and beard. Although the beard had a little red in it, maybe it was really dark brown, not black. His nose was a little crooked like it’d been broken once in a fight – whether that had been on or off duty I couldn’t tell. He raised his brows, scanning me from my feet up. I was glad I’d buttoned my coat so that he couldn’t see that I was wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. When he reached my face his eyes lingered there, looking at my chin and lips intensely before looking into my eyes. I knew the exact moment he did because I was waiting for it. I stared him down, letting him know I was every bit a match for him. He coughed, giving himself an excuse to look away first while he rose to his feet. I was right about his height.

“Can I help you miss?” His voice was surprisingly higher that I imagined, but then I half expected him to just grunt and growl to communicate.

“I’m here to see Paris,” I said. He too was surprised by my voice which was more contralto than soprano. Hamilton once said to me that I had a very “come to the bedroom” voice that threw most men off when I was just talking about nominal things like socks. Apparently, I made socks sound sexy. He looked me up and down again, making another, quicker assessment of me. The next time I got a flash of those dark eyes I could clearly read the thought in them. He believed that Hamilton was having sex with me. Just a work colleague wouldn’t have used his first name. I meant to show that I knew Hamilton well, but accidentally portrayed too much intimacy. I also got the feeling that he knew Hamilton well enough not to believe that he could just be friends with me.

“Who are you?” I asked him. If his eyes could be so rude, I figured my mouth had the right to be. “I’ve not seen you here before.” I implied that I came in more often than I did. If he asked me to name any of the officers now watching our exchange he’d know it wasn’t true.

“Detective Sergeant Martin Butcher,” he said, slipping his hands into the pockets of his impeccably starched black pants, “I’ve been away.”

I thought about that. The first time I came across Hamilton was just over a year ago. He didn’t have a detective sergeant then, so Butcher has been on leave a long time. I held out my hand, forcing him to shake it.

“I’m Cassandra.” He blinked and did a double take. He’d heard my name before. I wondered if that was good or bad.

“You’re the Farbanks woman?” I don’t think I’ve heard it put more gruffly. I expected, “oh, you’re that witch” or “yes, Hamilton’s mentioned you”. I was sure Detective Sergeant Butcher officially decided he wasn’t going to like me on principle. The principle was a mystery to me. He shoved his hand back into his pocket and silence fell. We reached a conversational impasse.

“Hamilton in?” I pointed to the door ajar, even though I knew he wasn’t in.

“He’s just popped downstairs to the lab.”

“I’ll just wait in his office then till he gets back.” He was going to object but the set of my shoulders brooked no discussion. I pushed open the door, went inside and shut it behind me. I watched his silhouette through the glass as he walked around to his desk and picked up the phone. I knew he was calling Hamilton back upstairs which was fine by me. I wouldn’t have to wait long. There was a manila folder sitting on Hamilton’s desk he’d been reading when he got a call to go down to the lab. Thinking it might be information pertinent to the case – okay, I was just being plain nosy – I turned the file so I could read what was inside. There were three pieces of paper. One was a grainy photocopy of a birth certificate for Ozborne Farbanks listing his parents as a V. Toogood and a H. Farbanks. The second was a print out of a marriage license of Ozborne Farbanks to a woman whose name was so scribbled you could only just about make out that her initials were M and perhaps a D, B or R. The last page was a search from the national database of marriages, births and deaths for Worcester where my name had been put in but there were no results.

I was stunned to complete silence. Even my breathing stopped just for a minute. Was Hamilton investigating me? He’d been searching for my birth certificate and found no record of my birth. Which after a minute of thinking, its absence made sense to me. My mother hid me. She had a home birth and wouldn’t register that fact.

The thing was I knew I had one. I’d seen it. It had my name, date of birth and my parents listed as Morganna and Ozborne Farbanks. It wasn’t a forgery. They waited till they’d crossed over to register me. They had forty two days to do it. I got back to the matter at hand. Why was Hamilton digging into my past? I could show him a copy of my birth certificate if he just asked me. They’d be the same in both worlds or near enough. I heard a voice outside the door and saw a hand turning the knob.

Hamilton came in and found me sitting in one of his guest chairs, the folder exactly the way it was when I walked into the room. I looked up at him and he looked uncertain for a moment, expecting me to jump down his throat about investigating me. I beamed at him and he relaxed, incorrectly thinking that I hadn’t read the file. That I’d been a good girl and just sat in a chair and waited. That was what I wanted him to believe for the moment. I was still wrapping my head around it. There were few people I thought I could trust and I thought Hamilton had been one of them. I didn’t want him to know that I knew he was investigating me. It would be an unspoken secret between us. He walked around his desk with another manila folder in his hand, nonchalantly using it to move the other one to his filing tray.

“I’m glad to see you Cassandra. I take it you’re here because you’ve got something.”

“I might have but I think we should talk about a couple of other things first.” He paused on the way down into his chair, looking distinctly guilty about something. I pointed to the folder on the desk.

“Is that the autopsy report? Do we finally have cause of death for…” I let my sentence drop off, obliging him with a slow slice of my hand to tell me the man’s name. Hamilton relaxed back into his chair.

“Callaghan, John Callaghan. Yes, Doc Cameron just finished compiling his findings from the autopsy and Doctor Soltaire’s finding from last night.” I motioned with my hand for him to continue.

“So what did John Callaghan die of?”

“He drowned.” I arched a brow and shook my head sure I had misheard him.

“He drowned? How? We found him in the dining room, not the pool.” Did the house even have a pool?

“You can drown in other things than water, Cassandra.” He said, shaking his head.

“Okay, color me confused. How did he drown?” Hamilton opened up the report and spread out the contents before continuing.

“It looks like he ate so much that his stomach burst. There was massive tissue trauma to the whole belly area. It didn’t kill him though. Doc Cameron tells me it takes up to two weeks to die from losing your intestines.”

“Doc Cameron is always full of fun little facts to show and tell. So his stomach explodes? How did that cause him to drown?”

“The intense sudden pain caused him to go into shock. He vomited, but because he was still shoveling food into his mouth, it couldn’t come out and then he passed out.”

“Gross. You’re telling me he drowned in his own vomit?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. His lungs were full of it. We can’t understand why. He just didn’t stop eating. Your stomach is supposed to send a signal to your brain to tell you it’s full, it’s like someone turned off the relay and he just kept eating and eating…”

“So, unless I can definitively prove magical involvement, it’s like he did it to himself. I need to prove he was compelled to eat himself to death.”

Hamilton looked at me expectantly and I motioned with my hands to put it to one side. I needed a minute to, for lack of a better word, digest the information.

“Before I tell you what I’ve found. I need to make the subject personal.” Again, Hamilton looked like he’d been waiting for this. I reached into my pocket and pushed its contents across the desk to him.

“My stalker is back. This was in my mailbox this morning.” Hamilton’s attention sharpened and he tipped the contents out into his waiting palm. I watched him push the key aside with the tip of his finger so he could read the note that accompanied it.

“You got any idea what it’s for?” he asked, holding the key between two fingers and looking at the patterned head.

“Not the foggiest, unless he plans to send me the thing the key fits, later. More importantly does this signify a new wave of gifts?” Hamilton put the key and note back in the envelope and into his pocket to deal with later.

“It’s certainly in the same style as the previous notes, but why now? He’s been gone a good while after his first attempt failed.” I nodded. There hadn’t been a single gift or creepy message. I’d also worked a better ward so now dark shadowy familiars with a Cheshire cat grin couldn’t get into my apartment. Hamilton obviously thought back to the events that surrounded those messages, my accident with the wall, because he focused on my left arm.

“How’s the arm now?”

“Good, it goes a little stiff now and then but the doctor tells me that’s to be expected after major trauma.” In fact, there was no stiffness to my arm or sore spots, and there hadn’t been since two days after the injury had occurred. One of my wonderful, new powers was a natural ability to heal about as fast as a shifter could. I had the use of my arm on the third day after the wall was pushed on me, but I wore it in the sling, in public for the full six weeks. DJ called me a coward. I wanted to control who knew about me and when. I wasn’t ready to see who would and who wouldn’t accept me; who was my friend; and who was just pretending. I already lost Anton and my friendship with Incarra was dangling by a thread. So my connection to my daytime world was crumbling. Hamilton watched me curiously stretch the arm and show him the mobility.

“That’s good,” he said slightly smiling as I stretched both my arms and locked my fingers in the air above my head. I realized this made my chest stick out and quickly relaxed.

“So, are you going to tell me what you found?”

“Sure.” I crossed my legs and cupped my hands over the knee. “The symbol on Callaghan’s forehead was a Chinese character.”

“A Chinese character?” I furrowed my brow and swore Hamilton’s interest peeked.

“Yes,” I said examining and smoothing the furrow away with great effort. “For pig to be exact.”

“Pig? That’s kind of fitting. How does it factor in?” He leaned back in his chair and it squeaked.

“I can’t work that out at the moment. I have no idea why the Chinese character was chosen. It’s the pig that’s important, along with the fact that it glowed orange.” I uncrossed my legs and re-crossed the other way.

“The pig and the color orange are associated with the seven deadly sins, in this specific case Gluttony.”

“Gluttony makes sense and there was that huge roasted pig in the middle of the table. This guy seems to be big on his symbolism.”

“Yes, I guess so. Did you talk to the wife?”

Hamilton removed another folder from his filing tray, careful not to bring attention to the one he put on top of it earlier. He opened it on his desk.

“Yes she came in this morning. I can see why he married her and why they got divorced. According to Mrs. Callaghan, her husband had great trouble with his weight and eating habits from his pre-adolescent days up to his early twenties. He loved his food and she loved him and married him when he was a fat, fairly jolly man. Her words not mine. He was in a car accident where he was trapped for hours because he was too big. He needed to be cut out. He lost a lot of weight during his hospital stay and kept going. He’d become a different man. She couldn’t bring a candy bar into the house or cook a romantic meal without him blowing up at her. She would watch him binge on bad foods when a case didn’t go his way and throw it back up afterwards. His behavior worried her but she couldn’t get him to seek help. The final straw was when he turned his obsession on her, convinced she too was overweight. She’s only a size twelve.”

I harrumphed, as I was also a size twelve and took great offense at Callaghan. Women were meant to have curves. If you wanted a size zero model, you might as well date a thirteen year old boy in a dress and a long wig. I said as much to Hamilton and he laughed.

“I do like my women with a little meat on their bones.” I nodded in acknowledge, but used my words to steer him back on course.

“From what we know, who would want him dead? He must have been a good lawyer. I could tell from his house.”