Night of the Raven (16 page)

On Hezekiah Blume. And all

Who share his blood, will share his fall....’”

“I wouldn’t call that especially kiddie-like.”

“It is if you live in the Cove or the Hollow. Did you talk to the sheriff about Westor?”

McVey nodded. “He’s sending some people to retrieve the body. We didn’t kill him, Amara. Remember that. And whoever did will pay.” When his phone beeped, he reached into his jeans, pulled it out and hit Speaker. “What is it, Jake?”

“It’s a pair of frigging feet’s what it is. I was moving a nosy Parker along and he tripped. Fell on some trash bags. He started flailing because they smelled bad. When he got clear’s when I saw the feet.” Jake’s voice tightened. “They ain’t moving, McVey, and they ain’t the right color, either. I’m thinking we got us a corpse.”

* * *

S
HE’D BEEN UP
since 6:00 a.m., Amara reflected. Barely four hours. And already two people were dead.

She spotted Jake squatting in a sea of green trash bags and carefully made her way with McVey into the side alley.

“Report, Deputy,” McVey said as they got closer.

Her cousin looked up. “She’s dead.”

Amara skirted him, hoping for a clearer view.

“Her face is familiar.” Jake screwed his own up. “I just can’t place it.”

“Mina.” Amara knelt beside the body. “That’s her name. Mina Shell. She was in the pharmacy the day Westor grabbed me. He grabbed her, too....” She bent closer. “What’s that in her hand?”

McVey shifted the green bag that partially covered the woman’s right arm. “A rag stuffed in a bottle. It’s a Molotov cocktail. The one that started the fire was tossed through the window at the street end of the alley.”

Puffing hard, the sheriff, a short, potbellied man, joined them. “Is this the firebomber, then?”

Because she was closest, Amara sniffed the rag. Over the odor of rotting trash, she caught the distinct smell of gasoline. “I am so lost.” She sighed. “Mina said she came here for the Night of the Raven, but what she really intended to do was blow up the Red Eye? Why?”

“Gonna have to leave that one for now, Red.” McVey moved more of the bags. “She’s wearing a watch on her right wrist. And her left thumbnail’s shorter than the right, possibly for texting purposes. She could be left-handed.”

“What difference does that make?” Jake frowned when McVey didn’t answer. “Does it make a difference?”

Amara sat back. “She’s holding the bottle in her right hand, Jake. If she planned to throw it, shouldn’t it be in her left?”

“You saying it was put there after she was dead?” Jake’s frown deepened. “By who?”

“Whoever firebombed the Red Eye.” McVey shrugged. “Theoretically.”

Amara thought back to the pharmacy. “I think—I’m not sure, but I think—Mina reached for the lipstick with her left hand. Having said that, of course, she might have been holding the bomb in one hand with the intention of switching it to and throwing it with the other.”

McVey ran his gaze over the body. “I only see one entry wound. One shot, middle of her throat. Someone knows how to kill quickly and efficiently.”

“Someone like Willy Sparks.” Amara assumed. She rubbed a sudden chill from her arms. “Westor said, ‘Never be a witness.’ He must have seen this happen, or certainly something that happened here last night.”

Jake slashed a hand in front of him. “Wait a minute. Are we saying this woman did or didn’t throw the first Molotov cocktail through the window?”

“We’re saying we don’t know who did what to whom, when or in what order. Yet.” McVey regarded the portly sheriff. “It’s your call, Walt. Do you want to stay here with this or make the trip up to Bellam Manor?”

“Best if I stay and you take the teams up. I’m a damn sight better at solving murders than I am at navigating shaky bridges.”

While they talked, Amara regarded Mina’s lifeless body. Three people were dead, and only one of those deaths made any kind of sense to her.

Like Hannah’s, Mina’s glassy eyes looked up at nothing. Her mouth hung open and there was a smear of pink lipstick on her upper teeth.

Had she and Westor simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had they been in that place separately or together? Stranger things had happened, and for all his leers and lewd remarks, Westor had been a hot-looking man. Maybe Mina had slept with him— And where the hell, Amara wondered, was she going with that idea?

Not a cop, she reminded herself.

She tuned back in when McVey came up behind her.

“Time to roll, Red. The sheriff’s got this one. We’re down a few people on each team, but we’ll manage. Hannah’s death needs investigating as much as Mina’s.”

“And Westor’s.”

“His, too.” McVey held her gaze. “I don’t want anyone else winding up in the morgue.”

Amara nodded. She needed quite badly to believe that no one else would die. But in her mind, she saw the raven watching her from a branch above Westor’s body while a dead man’s last words echoed eerily in her head.

Never be a witness....

* * *

T
HE DRIVE UP
Bellam Mountain was nothing next to the step-and-cling crossing of Bellam Bridge. McVey took the less-encumbered team members up the steep stone path. Amara and the others made the longer trek to the manor via the twisty access road.

The unseasonably hot day had turned out muggier than expected. McVey hadn’t moved Hannah’s body, and the central kitchen’s windows faced north. It would have received a strong dose of morning sun.

A note from Brigham on the door told him the big raven tamer had been watching the manor. No one had come near the place or attempted to disturb the body, making it unlikely in McVey’s opinion that they’d find a murder weapon. Still, procedure dictated that a full-scale search be undertaken.

Amara arrived twenty minutes later. She wore his Dodgers baseball cap, oversize sunglasses and had her jacket tied around her waist. His blood did a lot more than stir when she herded her group into the manor and he caught the subtle scent of her perfume.

This was death and a decomposing body. He had no business thinking about Amara’s soft skin, her silky hair or how her mouth would taste. And it seemed just plain weird to wonder what it would feel like to make love to her in the grass next to the pond they’d passed the other night on the way to the raven tamers’ camp.

Thankfully, his iPhone beeped as the last few team members passed between them. He kept his eyes on Amara’s face when he answered on speaker. “More problems, Jake?”

“We can’t find her purse.”

McVey had to kick-start his brain.
Her
could only be Mina Shell. “How large an area have you searched?”

“Most of the alley. Sheriff made me call up to Blume House. She’s not registered there.”

“She could have been camping.”

“Maybe, but not at the Ravenspell campsite.”

“Run her name through the DMV, see what comes up. Has Westor’s body been recovered yet?”

“Just.” The deputy grunted. “Think I might know where he was flopping. There’s an empty apartment in Yolanda’s building. Turns out maybe she wasn’t harboring a fugitive after all. The lock on the empty place was jimmied, and the Hardens found stuff on the floor. Food wrappers, wine bottles, sleeping bags, a .30-30 rifle, a couple boxes of bullets.”

“Dust for prints and keep me informed about the woman.” McVey signed off. “What?” he asked when he saw Amara drawing an air picture.

“I’m thinking back.” Her brows came together. “She didn’t have paper or a pen. I tore off a sheet of paper and gave it to her. That’s when Westor grabbed me—us.”

“And translated that means?”

“I told you earlier, Mina found the lipstick she wanted behind the cosmetics counter in the pharmacy. She picked it up with her left hand, but even more significant, she took the pen I gave her with the same hand. That still doesn’t prove she wasn’t simply holding the bomb bottle in her right hand, though, does it? Ah, except...” She swung around. “That’s not the point. The point is, why would Mina want to set fire to the Red Eye in the first place? We’re saying the bottle might have been planted on her to deflect suspicion from the real firebomber.”

“Head of the class, Red.”

“With a detour you apparently didn’t take.” Smiling, she strolled up to him and tapped a finger to his chest. “Guess that’s why you wear the badge.”

“Lucky me.”

“The day’s young. We’ll see.” She kissed him so thoroughly that bullets of lust shot off in multiple directions. He started thinking perfume, skin, sex and, oh, yeah, pond all over again.

Unfortunately she stepped away before he could pursue any of those thoughts. “Back in the real world, what’s happening with Hannah?”

A picture of the older woman’s body flashed in McVey’s head. No question, there were times when a grisly visual was far more effective than a cold shower. “Let’s say she’s looking a little less healthy than the last time you saw her.”

“He means she’s gone gray and putrid.”

Brigham approached from the side. His arrival wouldn’t have surprised him, McVey reflected, if he hadn’t let the idea of sex with Amara tie his senses in knots.

“We’re heading down to the Hollow.” The big man jerked a thumb. “Taking our ravens and our bits and pieces for the street show/parade with us. You figure on spending the night up here?”

McVey glanced at his phone. “It’s almost two o’clock. I’d say there’s a fair chance.”

“Everyone or just you and Amara?”

“Just us. The teams know the way back.”

“Uncle Lazarus asked me to pick up a number of Hannah’s personal effects and bring them down,” Amara said. “Mostly small items. Some of them might be tricky to find.”

“Yeah, well, just so you know, the rain’s coming back.”

She held her smile at Brigham’s dire prediction. “Of course it is. Because legends rule here, and according to one of them, it always rains at night up on Bellam Mountain. Has to be Sarah’s doing. What else would a mad witch jailed in an attic room do but put nasty spells on everything she could think of?”

Brigham gave her a deliberate once-over. “You being her offspring, so to speak, and common to us tamers now, maybe you could spend a few minutes working out how to stop the wet. One more mudslide and we’ll have to move our camp.”

Which they probably did every few years in any case. But right then McVey had weightier problems to handle in the form of three murders, no solid leads and still way too much sex on the brain.

He used the familiar routine of police work to combat the latter. But four frustrating hours into it, they still hadn’t turned up a single piece of evidence in or around the murder scene.

“She died where she fell.” The head of the forensic team wiped a grimy arm across his face. “Blood loss tells us that much even without a weapon. Seeing that leg of hers, though, I can’t imagine why she came to this derelict part of the manor. It’s a head-scratcher, McVey, and that’s a fact.”

Another fact, McVey noticed when he took a moment to look outside, was that Brigham’s forecast had been dead-on. Black clouds were massing over the water, and they appeared to be creeping inland.

It took the better part of another hour to stretcher and bind Hannah’s body, then pack the equipment for the return trip. Once the teams were ready, McVey secured the central core, separated Amara from her new physician friends and pulled her toward the more livable west wing.

Digging in, she glanced behind them. “There must be more we can do here, McVey.”

He kept a firm hold on her hand and a close eye on the clouds. “There’s more, Amara. It just can’t be done in the dark or by us alone. Brigham left some wine, you want to go through Hannah’s things, and I want a shower before whatever’s blowing in with those clouds knocks the power out for the better part of the night....” Mild impatience brought his brows together. “Why are you dragging your feet?”

“Because I’m superstitious enough not to like what’s sitting on the lamppost outside Hannah’s door.”

“You’re half Blume and you don’t like ravens?”

“One raven’s not a problem. Two, I can deal. Three starts to freak me out.” She continued to resist his pull. “Is it staring at me?”

“If it is, and it’s a boy bird, it has excellent taste. If what you really want is for me to shoot it, tell me so we can get inside the damn house.”

She twisted her hand free. “You don’t shoot a raven, McVey, or anything, for staring.” Her declaration ended on a shiver. “I knew this would happen. I’m letting the legends get to me. It’s the curse of being a Bellam-Blume. You get swept up.”

“There’s a thought,” he said, and, sweeping her into his arms, carried her past the watchful bird. “What do you know?” He deposited her on the porch. “You’re still alive.”

“And kicking,” she said, but left it at a cool verbal threat rather than a physical demonstration. “First shower’s mine. You’ll want to batten down the hatches. And the shutters.” When he narrowed his gaze, a smile blossomed. “Add my warning to Brigham’s and heed it. With the thunder will come strong winds.” Stepping closer, she stroked a deliberate finger from his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth. “Trust me, McVey, however many storms you’ve experienced since you arrived in the Cove, this one will top them all.”

His eyes glinted in the shadowy half light. “Are you trying to convince me that you’re a witch or frighten me with your ominous prediction?”

Letting her hand fall, she hooked his waistband and tugged him forward. “I’m not a witch, McVey, I’m a woman.” She turned her face up to his. “And right now I want.”

He thought he detected a rumble of thunder and maybe a warning burst of wind. But all he really heard was the rush of blood in his head and the roar of it in his ears. He felt it pulsing in his groin as her mouth fused itself to his and hurled him—hurled them—into a far more frightening fire than the one they’d taken on last night.

Chapter Fourteen

Amara intended to get what she wanted—hot, steamy sex, with a hot, sexy cop. She didn’t care where it took place. Outside, inside, on the floor, on a bed, on the table. She wanted McVey’s mouth on her mouth, his body pressed against hers and his hands anywhere at all.