Divine Misdemeanors

Chapter Thirty

There was no hand-holding at the crime scene. We were all civilians being allowed into a police investigation. I was a woman and not all human, so I had to uphold the honor of both my sex and my ancestry.

The first victim was curled before the fireplace. It wasn’t a real fireplace, but one of those plug-in electric ones. The killer, or killers, had positioned the body in front of it to match the illustration that Lucy had shown us safe in its plastic evidence wrap, tagged and bagged. She, because it was a she, had been dressed in the same ragged sack clothing as the illustration. It was a story I remembered reading as a child. I’d liked stories about brownies because of Gran. The brownie fell asleep before the fire and was caught napping, literally, by the household children. Gran had said, “Na brownie worth ’er salt would fall asleep on th’ job.” The rest of the story was about the children going with the brownie to fairyland and I knew that was made up, because I’d been there as a child and it was nothing like the book.

“Well, another childhood memory ruined,” I said softly.

“What did you say?” Lucy asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry, but my grandmother read me this book as a child. I was thinking about reading it to my own kids, but maybe not now.” I stared down at the dead woman and forced myself to look at what they’d done to her face. There was a brownie in the story, so they’d made her into a brownie by taking her nose and her lips, and paring her down to what they needed to make the picture.

Rhys came up beside me and said, “Don’t look at her face.”

“I can do my job,” I said, and I didn’t mean to sound defensive.

“I mean, look at all of her, not just her face.”

I frowned, but did what he asked, and the moment I could see her bare arms and legs without the horror of her face getting in the way I understood what he meant. “She’s a brownie.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“She’s been butchered to look like one,” Lucy said.

“No, Rhys means her arms and legs. They’re longer, shaped a little differently. I would bet she’s had some kind of electrolysis to get rid of the more-than-human body hair.”

“But her face was human. They cleaned up the blood but they carved her face down to that,” Lucy said.

I nodded. “I know of at least two brownies who have had plastic surgery to give them a nose and lips, a human face, but there’s no good procedure for the arms and legs being a little thin, a little different.”

“Robert lifts weights,” Rhys said. “It gives more muscle tone and helps shape the limbs.”

“Brownies can lift things five times their size. Normally they don’t need to lift weights to be stronger.”

“He does it just so he looks more human,” Rhys said.

I touched his arm. “Thank you. I couldn’t see anything but the face. They cleaned it up and hid the blood but it’s obviously fresh wounds.”

“Are you saying she really was a brownie?” Lucy asked.

We both nodded.

“There’s nothing in any of her background that says she’s anything but a native Los Angeles human.”

“Could she be part brownie and part human?” Galen had come up behind us.

“You mean like Gran?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I thought about it, and looked at the body, trying for dispassionate. “Maybe, but she’d still have to have a parent who wasn’t human. That shows up in census records, documents of all kinds. There’s got to be some record of her real background.”

“A surface check said human, and she was born here in town,” Lucy said.

“Dig deeper,” Rhys said. “Genetics this pure aren’t that far away from a fey ancestor.”

Lucy nodded and grabbed one of the other detectives. She spoke gently to him and he went away at a fast walk. Everyone likes something to do at a murder scene; it gives the illusion that death isn’t that bad, if you keep busy.

“The electric fire looks brand-new,” Galen said.

“Yes, it does,” I said.

“Was the first scene like this?” Rhys asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Staged with props brought in to make the illustration work.”

“Yes,” I said, “but a different book. A different story altogether, but yeah, props brought in so the staging was as perfect as they could make it.”

“The second victim isn’t as perfect as this one,” Galen said.

We both agreed that it wasn’t. We were assuming that this was Clara and Mark Bidwell, who lived at this address. They fit the height of both, and overall description, but honestly, unless they could be identified by dental work or fingerprints we couldn’t be certain. Their faces weren’t the faces smiling down at us from the pictures on the wall. We’d assume that it was the couple who lived here, but it was an assumption. The police were assuming it, too, so I felt better about that, but I knew it was breaking one of the first rules that Jeremy taught me: never assume anything about a case. Prove it, don’t assume it.

As if my thought had conjured him, Jeremy Grey stepped into the room. He was about my height, five feet even, and was dressed in a designer suit in black that made his gray skin a darker, richer shade of gray, and though it would never be a human skin tone, somehow in the black suit it seemed like one. He’d stopped wearing all gray just this year. I liked the new colors on him. He’d been dating a woman seriously for about three months. She was a costumer at one of the studios and took clothing rather seriously. Jeremy had always dressed expensively in designer suits and shoes, but somehow everything fit him better. Maybe love is the best accessory of all?

His triangular face was dominated by a large hooked beak of a nose. He was a Trow—that was his race—and he’d been cast out centuries ago for stealing a single spoon. Theft had been a very serious crime back then among any of the fey, but the Trow were known for their puritanical views on a lot of things. They also had a reputation for stealing human women, so they weren’t puritanical about everything.

He moved as he always did, gracefully; even the plastic booties over his designer shoes couldn’t make him anything but elegant. Trow did not have a reputation for elegance, but Jeremy did, and it always made me wonder if he was the exception to his people, or if they were all like that. I’d never asked, because it would be reminding him of how he lost everything so long ago. You could ask after tragically dead relatives more politely among the fey than about their exile from faerie.

“The man in the bedroom is human,” he said.

“I’ll have to go back and look again, because honestly, all I could see were the facial cuts,” I said.

He patted my arm with his gloved hand. We’d had to put on all the protective gear but if any of us touched anything we’d have gotten yelled at. It was strictly look but don’t touch. Though honestly, I wasn’t really tempted to touch.

“I’ll walk you through,” he said. That let me know he wanted to talk to me alone. Galen started to follow me, but Rhys held him back. Jeremy and I moved through the strangely dark apartment on our own. It was decorated in shades of brown and tan. That was typical coloring for an apartment, but even the furniture was shades of brown. It was all very somber and vaguely depressing. But maybe I was projecting.

“What’s up, Jeremy?” I asked.

“One Lord Sholto is out in the hallway with the rest of your non-licensed people.”

“I knew he’d be along,” I said.

“Warn a Trow next time the King of the Sluagh is expected.”

“Sorry, didn’t think.”

“But Lord Sholto just confirmed the call I got from Uther. I’ve got him across the street with eyes on this place.”

“He saw something?”

“Not about the case,” Jeremy said, and ushered me into the bedroom where the second body lay. The man had had his face treated the same as the woman, but now that I could look away from the faces, I realized that Jeremy and Rhys were right, he was human. The legs, the arms, and the body build were all proportional. He was wearing a robe that the killers had cut up to resemble the rags the brownie wore in the story, but it didn’t come close to the perfect match of the victim in the other room.

The killers had left an illustration behind, and it did match, but they’d had to improvise the set pieces. They had him flat on his back to match the image of the brownie drunk on faerie wine. Again it was a mistake. Brownies didn’t get drunk, bogarts did, and if a brownie went bogart it became very dangerous, sort of a Jekyll-and-Hyde type of problem. A drunk brownie did not pass out peacefully like a human, but I’d found that a lot of the fairy stories were like that: parts were dead-on and parts were so far off it was laughable.

“They brought the book with them, or they chose this illustration late, so late that they couldn’t get all the props they needed to make it match.”

“I agree,” Jeremy said.

Something about the way he said it made me look at him. “If it’s not about the case, then what could Uther have seen that would be important?”

“Someone on the press out there did a little math and decided that the short woman hanging all over Julian had to be the princess in disguise.”

I sighed. “So they’re out there waiting for me again?”

He nodded. “I’m afraid so, Merry.”

“Crap,” I said.

He nodded again.

I sighed. I shook my head. “I can’t worry about them now. I need to be useful here.”

He smiled at me, and patted my arm again. “That’s what I needed to know.”

I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“If you’d said something different, then I was going to assign you to the party circuit and leave you off the real cases.”

I looked at him. “You mean send me to the celebrities and would-be celebs who just want the princess at their house?”

“It pays extremely well, Merry. They make up cases for us, and I send you or your beautiful men and they get more press attention. It works for everyone, and we’re making money in an economy where most agencies aren’t.”

I had to think about that for a moment and then said, “So you’re saying the extra publicity is actually bringing in more money than if we didn’t have it?”

He nodded and smiled, showing the white, straight smile that was the only “cosmetic” work he’d had done on coming to L.A. “You’re like any celebrity in one way, Merry. The moment the press doesn’t care enough to make your life miserable you are on the downslide.”

“The weight of the press following me crashed through a window last week,” I said.

He shrugged. “And that made worldwide news, or did you avoid the television all weekend so you wouldn’t see it?”

I smiled. “You know I avoid the shows where I’ll see myself, and we had other things to do this weekend besides watch television.”

“I guess if I had as many girlfriends as you have boyfriends I’d be too busy to watch TV, too.”

“You’d be exhausted, too,” I said.

“Are you insulting my stamina?” he asked, smiling.

“No, I’m a woman, you’re a man. Women rule on the multiple orgasms, men not so much.”

That made him laugh. One of the uniforms said, “Jesus, if you can laugh looking down at that then you really are cold-blooded bastards.”

Lucy spoke from the doorway. “I think I hear your patrol car wondering where you are.”

“They’re laughing at the body.”

“They aren’t laughing at the body. They’re laughing because they’ve seen things that would make you run home to your mommy.”

“Worse than that?” he asked, motioning to the body.

Jeremy and I both nodded and said, “Yes.”

“How can you laugh?”

“Go get some air,” Lucy said, “now.” And she made the last word very firm.

The uniform looked like he wanted to argue, thought better of it, and left. Lucy turned to us. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” she said, “and the press have found you, or think they have.”

“Jeremy told me,” I said.

“We’re going to have to get you out of here before the press looking for you gets bigger than the press about the bodies.”

“I’m sorry about this, Lucy.”

“I know you don’t enjoy it.”

“My boss has just informed me that I make more by going to pretend crimes for parties for celebrities than when I do real crime-stopping.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow at Jeremy. “Really?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Still, we need to have you show yourself outside so the press hounds don’t mess up our investigation.”

I nodded. “Did you find out anything more about the woman, the brownie?”

“It turns out she’s been passing for human, but she’s actually full-blooded brownie. You were right about the plastic surgeon needing to know her background before he reconstructed her face. Why is that so important?”

“Fey heal differently from humans, much faster. If a plastic surgeon didn’t know she was a brownie, her skin could actually heal faster than he could work,” I said.

“Or,” Jeremy added, “there are some metals and man-made medicines that are deadly to us, especially the lesser fey.”

“Some anesthesia doesn’t work on us at all,” I added.

“See, this is why I wanted you here. None of the rest of us would have thought of the doctor and what it would mean if she were full brownie. We need a fey officer to help us deal with things like this.”

“I heard you were recruiting pretty heavily trying to get one of us to come on board,” Jeremy said.

“For scenes like this, and just for community relations. You know how it is, the fey don’t trust us. We’re still the same humans who chased them out of Europe.”

“Not the exact same ones,” he said.

“No, but you know what I mean.”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“Has anyone come forward to join?” I asked.

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“How human looking would they have to be?” I asked.

“To my knowledge, they aren’t limiting it to a particular type of fey. They just want someone on our force who is fey. Most of us feel that that would help smooth things. I mean, we’ve got what amounts to a pedophile ring using the fey who look like children.”

“It’s not pedophilia,” Jeremy said. “The fey are consenting and are usually hundreds of years old, so very legal.”

“Not if money is exchanged, Jeremy. Prostitution is still prostitution.”

“You know the fey don’t understand that as a concept,” he said.

“I know that. You see regulating sex the same as regulating what you can do with your own bodies, but it’s not that. Frankly, and I’ll never admit this in public, but if the fey involved look like kids and can satisfy these perverts, more power to them. It keeps them away from the real kids, but we need to talk to the fey involved with the pedophiles to see if they know if any children are involved.”

“We protect our children,” Jeremy said.

“But some of the older fey don’t see under eighteen as children.”

“That is another cultural difference,” Jeremy agreed.

“If you made an exception for the adult fey who catered to the pedophiles, they would help you find the ones who are still targeting children,” I said.

Lucy nodded. “I know they look like kids, fresh meat, some very human, and they get treated like fresh meat, but if they defend themselves with magic it can turn into a federal crime.”

“And what started out as maybe their first arrest for prostitution is suddenly use of magical force, which is a lot more serious jail time,” I said.

“Or what about the fey who killed a man trying to rape him in jail, and now he’s up on murder charges?” Jeremy said.

“He smashed the man’s head like an egg, Jeremy,” Lucy said.

“Your human legal system still treats us like monsters if we don’t have diplomatic immunity and a celebrity princess.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“Not fair? There’s never been a sidhe in jail in this country. I’m one of the lesser folk, Merry. Trust me when I say that the humans have always treated your people as different from the rest of us.”

I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. “Did you ask the plastic surgeon if he’s done more fey?”

“No, but we can,” she said.

“The demi-fey at the first scene looked typical, but check and see if they were doing anything to pass for human.”

“They couldn’t. They’re the size of Barbie dolls or smaller,” Lucy said.

“Some demi-fey can shift to a larger size, between three and five feet tall. It’s an uncommon ability, but if you could make yourself that tall you could strap down the wings, depending on the kind of wings they are.”

“Really?” Lucy asked.

I looked at Jeremy. “One of your silent film stars was a demi-fey who hid her wings. I knew a saloon worker who did it, too.”

“And none of her customers found out?” Lucy asked.

“She used glamour to hide them.”

“I didn’t know the demi-fey were that good at glamour.”

“Oh, some of them are better at glamour than the sidhe,” I said.

“That’s news,” Lucy said.

“There’s an old saying among us that where the demi-fey go faerie follows. It implies that the demi-fey are the first of us to appear, and not the sidhe or the old gods grown small, but actually they are the first form of us.”

“Which is true?” she asked.

“To my knowledge no one knows,” I said.

“It’s the fey version of the chicken and the egg. Which came first, the demi-fey or the sidhe?” Jeremy said.

“The sidhe will say that we did, but honestly, I’ve never met anyone old enough to answer the question.”

“Some of the demi-fey who were killed had day jobs, but I assumed that they were demi-fey. It didn’t occur to me that they could pass for human.”

“What are the jobs?” I asked.

“Receptionist, owner of their own lawn-care business, florist assistant, and dental hygienist.” She frowned at that last one. “I did wonder about that last one.”

“I’d look at the receptionist and the dental hygienist,” Jeremy said.

“What about the rest of them?” I asked.

“One of them worked at the lawn-care business with the boss, and the other two were unemployed. As far as I can tell, they were flower faeries full-time, whatever that means.”

“It means they tended their special flower or plant and didn’t feel the need for money,” Jeremy said.

“It meant they had enough magic to not need a job,” I added.

“Is that typical of the demi-fey, or unusual?” she asked.

“It depends,” I said.

Her cell phone rang. She slipped it out of her pocket, said a few “Yes, sirs,” then hung up. She sighed. “You better go and show yourself, Merry. No hiding with magic. That was my immediate supervisor. He wants you out so the press will disperse. There’s so many of them they’re afraid they can’t get through to take the bodies out.”

“I’m sorry, Lucy.”

“No, the information was all stuff I couldn’t have gotten with just human cops. Oh, and he said to take your men with you just in case.”

“He means the sidhe, not me, right?” Jeremy asked.

She smiled. “We’ll go on that assumption. I’d like to keep at least one of you here until we clear the scene.”

“You know that the Grey …”

Julian added, “And Hart.”

Jeremy smiled at him. “Grey and Hart Detective Agency is happy to help.”

“I sent Jordan home. He’s a little more of an empath than I am, and the residual emotions were getting to him.”

“That’s fine,” Lucy said.

“If you hurry he’s just outside in the hallway,” Julian said.

I studied his pleasant face and asked, “Does he need a ride?”

“He won’t ask for one, but if you go out at the same time he’ll take the ride from you, Merry.”

“All right, then I’ll go and I’ll drop Jordan off at the office so he can type up his report and I’ll maybe see you tonight after dinner.”

He nodded. “I hope you don’t see me.”

“Me, too,” I said and went to the other room to get Rhys and Galen, who as licensed detectives were allowed past the apartment door, and pick Saraid and Cathbodua up from the hallway, which was as far as the police would let her get without a detective license. It was also why Sholto wasn’t allowed at the murder scene. I hoped Jordan was still in the hallway. Julian wouldn’t have mentioned him if he wasn’t badly shaken. I couldn’t sense emotional debris from murder scenes, and any time I watched the effect of it on an empath I was glad all over again that it wasn’t one of my gifts.