Witch Hunt (11 page)

Isobel kneeled on a clear patch of floor by the tub, clutching her bag from the herb shop. Her face was ashen in the darkness. “So much blood,” she whispered, trailing her hand over the edge of the tub. “How did she die?”

The memory of the bruised handprints on Erin’s throat came to mind. “You tell me.”

She clenched her jaw. Reached into the bag and sprinkled herbs across the floor. Thank God that was some kind of plant matter and nothing animal in origin. “Erin Karwell,” Isobel said, one hand on the herbs, the other hand stretched over a tacky puddle of dried blood. She cleared her throat. When she spoke, she only had a trace of that dramatic, fake Indian accent. “I summon—I summon the spirits to…” She looked at me and trailed off.

“Well?” I demanded.

She put both hands on the tub and squeezed her eyes shut. “Erin Karwell,” she whispered.

Isobel was silent for several long seconds. It was nothing like the cemetery. She wasn’t even pretending to put on a show. She just…sat there. Doing nothing.

And after a minute, her eyes popped open again. “I don’t have the right supplies.” It sounded like she had to fight with herself to make the words come out, like she was confessing to something awful.

“What do you need?” There was a hard edge to my voice. Harder than I meant. “Do you need candles and salt? Do you need raccoon bones? Do you need to take off your shirt?”

“Cèsar…”

“Well?”

“I need a body.”

“You’ve got her blood, you’ve got the herbs,” I said. “Talk to the damn victim, Isobel!”

It exploded out of her. “I
can’t
!”

The force of her frustration punched through me. I stepped back, gripping the doorframe.

So there was the truth. Isobel Stonecrow wasn’t really a necrocog. She was a liar, a scammer. Exactly what the OPA had thought she was.

“The drums,” I said. “The bones. The blood. Fake.”

“Yes, all of that was fake,” Isobel said, scattering the herbs across the bathroom floor as she stood. “And the herbs don’t do anything, either, I was just—I always try to put on a show. But—”

I’d heard enough. I shoved away from the door.

“I can still help you, Cèsar! I just don’t—”

“Forget about it,” I said. The anger burned out of me, dwindling down into a hard iron core of defeat.

Isobel couldn’t raise Erin. She couldn’t give me the truth. I couldn’t get vengeance—couldn’t clear my name, get my job back, get my
life
back.

I didn’t bother with the window. I ripped open the front door of the apartment, tore down the yellow police tape, and stalked away from the home I might never see again.

Isobel followed me to the top of the stairs and gazed at me with wounded eyes.

“Let me help you,” she said. “We can still figure something out.”

What the hell could a scammer do for me? For
Erin
? I froze on the landing and glared at her. “If you’re smart, you’ll get out of town, Stonecrow. And you won’t come back.”

Maybe that was what I should have done in the first place.

THE HOUSE I WAS standing in front of was by far the nicest I’d been to since this whole thing started, so long as you liked suburban sprawl—which I did. It was quiet on this street. The kind of place where everyone was in bed by nine and trouble didn’t roam the sidewalks looking for things to tag with spray-paint. Trees were swaying with the breeze, a dog barked in the distance.

The guy who met me at the front door of the house on the corner looked like he belonged. Sweat suit, nice sneakers, crew-cut hair. His tattoos were hidden by sleeves. “I was wondering how long it would take for you to make your way here.”

I sighed. “I didn’t want to bring this to your door, but I just…I’m out of options, man.”

Domingo pushed open the security screen and held his arms open. I stepped into his embrace, squeezed him tight. I’m not so much of a man that I can’t hug my brother hard when I’m having a shitty week. Domingo hugged back just as fiercely.

“You look like shit on a stick. Do I want to know why?”

“I fought off two assassins in the desert. Kicked their asses. Pulled out all the ninja moves.” I mimicked a few karate chops, and Domingo laughed.

“Sure you did. Couch in the den is yours as long as you want it.”

I didn’t want Domingo’s couch at all. It was stiff and old, and Domingo’s wife wouldn’t be happy to see me on it.

What I really wanted was his ritual space.

Domingo and I had gotten into a lot of bad shit together as teenagers, but we’d gotten into a lot of good things, too. Like magic. Abuelita had been the one to identify that we had the old magic in the first place, taught us how to tap into it, but we’d worked together to find the limits of our abilities. Domingo still had an altar in his basement—everything a guy needed to whip up a batch of strength and energy potions.

The house was mostly dark when he let me in. It was well after midnight, but that shouldn’t have mattered in my brother’s house. He was a night owl.

I leaned around the end of his stairs to check the second floor. All the doors were open and the rooms were dark.

“Sofia already in bed?” I asked.

“She isn’t here.” A sigh. “We’re taking a little time apart. And before you say it—”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“—she’s in love with someone else.”

She wasn’t my wife, but the announcement still felt like a punch to the face. I sucked in a hard breath. “You know who?”

“I don’t, and I don’t want to think about it.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair. He’d always been the spitting image of our dad, except without the mustache. Now, with heartache etched on his face, he was practically Dad’s twin. “Either she’ll break it off with him or me, and I’ll deal with either when it happens. You’ve got bigger problems. Sit down, I’ll get you a beer.”

“Shouldn’t I clean up first?” I gestured at my dusty jacket and jeans.

“I’m not the one in the house who cares about the upholstery, dude.”

There wasn’t
anyone
in the house who cared about upholstery anymore. And his home felt a hell of a lot emptier for it.

I was the one on the run from murder charges, but I’d take my week over Domingo’s. He was nuts for Sofia—she was his moon and stars and all that romantic crap. She was the reason he’d stopped knocking over 7-Elevens for petty cash and gotten a real job. She was the reason Domingo had a nice life in the first place.

I took the couch in the living room. It was a lot softer than the den couch.

“Anyone come looking for me?” I asked, eyeing Sofia’s footstool and trying to decide if I wanted to risk putting my dirty shoes on it.

“You busted out of jail. What do you think?” Domingo called over his shoulder as he went for the kitchen. “Agent Takeuchi hit up Pops first, so I got the courtesy of a warning phone call before she appeared at my doorstep.”

I whistled. “Suzy? Really?” I knew I’d probably been given a file like Isobel’s and assigned to an agent, but I never would have thought that the OPA would assign me to my desk mate. Weird that it was the OPA visiting my family instead of the LAPD, though. “Did Pops have fun with her?”

“He says she’s a gorgeous woman and you should let her catch you.”

Of course he did. “Tell me he didn’t hit on her.”

“What do you think? Seventy-two years old and the man’s still got it.”

“He
thinks
he’s got it, anyway,” I muttered.

Domingo emerged from the kitchen and with two bottles of beer. I took mine gratefully and drank deep. The cold felt amazing going down my throat. And in my hand. I placed the bottle to my forehead and winced when it hit a bruise.

“Tell me what happened,” Domingo said.

“What
hasn’t
happened? I don’t even know where to start.”

“The beginning works.”

The beginning. Right. “I had drinks. A lot of drinks. My coworkers and I were celebrating, and I tried to chat up a waitress—”

“Erin Karwell.”

He knew her name. I grimaced. “Has it been on the news?”

“Oh yeah.” He pushed a piece of paper across the coffee table to me. It was a printout from a news website. There was a picture of Erin on the top—gorgeous, innocent, living Erin, with her hair wild and a huge smile. The words in the headline, “Waitress Murdered,” made me feel like I was falling down a deep, dark hole.

I skimmed the article. My name wasn’t mentioned. One of the few advantages of being a spook, I guess.

“How’d you know that I was connected?” I asked, folding up the article, sticking it in my pocket. I wanted to keep Erin’s face with me. A reminder of why I was doing what I was doing.

“The FBI agent,” Domingo said. “She told us.” He sank into the chair across from me, took a swig of beer. “She was acting real weird. I’ve never seen anyone that pissed in my life.”

That didn’t sound weird—that sounded like Suzy. I leaned back against the couch cushions, shut my eyes, rolled the sweating bottle over my face. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“You can’t even see me right now.”

“I don’t have to see you.” I opened my eyes. Domingo had schooled his face into something so innocent, it looped around about five times and landed right back on guilty. “I know what you’re thinking. I always know what you’re thinking. And Suzy didn’t frame me for the murder.”

“Someone did.”

Lord, it was nice not having to be the first one to say it. A weight lifted from my lungs. I breathed for the first time in days. “Yeah. Someone did. But it wasn’t Suzy.”

“How can you be sure?”

If Suzy had framed me for the murder, then why would she have let me sleep on her couch? She had been nothing but a good friend. A better friend than I deserved. But I said, “She doesn’t have a motive. Why kill a waitress?”

“You said you were hitting on this Erin girl, right?” Domingo asked. “Women get crazy when they’re jealous.”

Jealousy would have implied there was something between Suzy and me other than a cluttered desk and a four-foot wall covered in sticky notes. It didn’t fit. “No way. She’s on my side. She’s been helping me this whole time.” Aside from slamming the door in my face, anyway. But she’d get over that.

“Helping you with what, exactly? How are you going to get over this ‘on the run’ thing?”

“I don’t know anymore. There’s this other woman—”

“Another woman,” Domingo said, as if that explained everything.

I snorted. Unlike him, all of my problems were not of the curvy female persuasion. “This other woman is a witch. She said that she could speak to the dead, so Suzy helped me find her. But Isobel’s a fraud. That was a waste of time.”

A grin. “Isobel.”

“What?”

“I know that tone of voice. Can’t get her off your mind?”

Of course I couldn’t. She had lied to me, convinced me that she could be the solution to my problems. And she wasn’t. But the sight of her standing at the top of the stairs with haunted eyes, pleading with me, asking me to let her help… That was going to stick with me for days. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have a plan anymore.” I ran both hands through my hair, sinking deeper into the couch. “I’m wasted—I can’t even think anymore.”

Domingo set down his beer, pulled out his phone. “That’s why you’re here. Leave the thinking to me. What do you need to get done?”

Shit, I didn’t even know where to start. “The SUV needs to go. It’s parked a few blocks away. It belongs to the, uh, the FBI, and I pulled out the GPS tracker, but they’ll still find it sooner or later.”

“Consider it gone,” Domingo said, typing rapidly on his phone.

“I need another car.”

“Done.”

A smirk crept across my face. “Really?”

“I still know people.” Domingo had been legit for a couple years now—about as long as I had been working for the OPA—but when he had been bad, he’d been really, really bad. People had looked up to him. It was no surprise that he was still in touch.

“I need to know who really killed Erin,” I said.

“That I can’t help you with, but your new car will be here in an hour and you’re welcome to help yourself to my basement. I’ve got some new stuff. Wanna check it out?”

Domingo didn’t even need to ask.

He took me downstairs. He had completely redone the place since my last visit. The walls were paneled half in oak, half in fancy-ass wallpaper. Sugar skulls hung from the walls with candles in their eye sockets. He had a circle of power permanently imprinted on the floor and an altar as big as a bed.

I sneezed as I set foot on the bottom of the stairs.

“Damn,” I said, scrubbing at my nose with my hand. “Nice.”

“Been thinking about starting a coven. I thought, with Sofia out of the house…” He trailed off, gazing around the room with a lost look, as if he didn’t really recognize it. She had never been a fan of the witch thing.

He had some gemstones in a bowl of salt on his altar. Judging by the fact they were directly placed in a puddle of moonlight, I was thinking he had to be infusing them. “What are you working on?” I asked, trailing my fingers through the air over the bowl. I could just make out sparks of blue and white from the corner of my eye.

“Trying to figure out a spell to help me sleep.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Haven’t been resting well ever since…you know. Brain keeps me awake. But I can’t seem to get it right. Last batch made my dreams too vivid. Kept waking up screaming.”

That was a real problem. Couldn’t have Domingo going crazy while he waited for Sofia to get her shit together.

I skimmed his shelves, looking through the herbs. I picked out agrimony and elder root.

“Got any passionflower?” I asked.

Domingo frowned. “Why?”

“You need passionflower.”

I sprinkled the herbs I’d picked out on his gemstones. The aura of magic shifted—couldn’t tell you how, but it did. I’d never been real analytical about my magic. Failed chemistry in high school twice. But I instinctively understood what Domingo needed.

His eyes were shining when he stepped up to look at it. “It’s perfect.”

“Test it out before you thank me,” I said. “Hopefully it won’t make you comatose.” Although it looked like he could have used a few weeks of solid sleep. Maybe going comatose wouldn’t have been the worst thing for him. I kept my eyes on the infused gemstones as I asked, “How long has she been gone now?”