Remainders Read online

  “Get a hold of yourself, Mallory,” she muttered into her mug.

  “Damned werewolves,” Captain Augustus grumbled. She leaned against the door to her office, watching the two leave with a very dissimilar expression from the one Sabira suspected graced her own face.

  “Everything all right, Captain?”

  The woman’s dark eyes flicked across Sabira without settling. She frowned, stepped back inside her office for a minute, and then stuck her bead out and shot Sabira an impatient look, gesturing her over. Sabira hurried into the Captain’s office, closing the door behind her and taking a seat.

  “I know you haven’t been given a new active case since Clanahan’s disappearing act,” Captain Augustus began, sorting through a pile of folders on her desk.

  “I am just the junior detective,” Sabira murmured, trying not to sound too irritated even though that sense of unfairness had been growing stronger in her ever since Patrick disappeared. It wasn’t her fault that her partner, her senior partner, had decided to take off.

  Technically they’d been in the middle of half dozen investigations ranging from a mugging to a murder to the grave desecrations that she’d only been able to clear up with the FBI’s help. When Lachlan Graham had started pestering her about his friend’s death a month ago, she’d made the unilateral decision to take the case on herself and put Patrick’s name on it without actually trying to involve her partner in the investigation. He’d been distracted at the time—with this Ethan Ellison, she suspected in hindsight—and hadn’t even noticed either his cosigned involvement with the case nor her work on it, which had suited Sabira’s purposes. She got to work on solving a murder without having to deal with her new partner’s mood swings.

  Since he’d disappeared, Sabira had continued to operate in much the same way, clearing their case queue as though Patrick were still around. There’d been enough work to keep her busy through the end of August and the first couple weeks of September. It wasn’t ideal, and it was possible she’d get in trouble if Patrick ever realized she’d also forged his signature on half dozen reports, but as long as she was thorough with her investigations and arrested the right people, she figured no one would say anything.

  Now, she met Captain Augustus’ distracted eye and smiled her blandest smile, as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. The older woman slid a case file across her desk.

  “Take a look at that and let me know what you think. No reason to leave you cooling your heals because your partner’s fucked off and left us all holding the ball.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Augustus nodded. “If you think you’ll need a partner I can see about assigning someone…”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary, but if I have questions about anything I’ll be sure to ask.”

  “Right.” Augustus sighed. “I’m sorry, Mallory.”

  “About what, sir?”

  The older woman hesitated and then shook her head. “Nothing. You can go.”

  Back at her desk, Sabira opened the case file with that small rush of anticipation she couldn’t help but love even as guilt tempered the edge. Guilt because she shouldn’t be excited by crime scene photos of a dead girl, but yet, there she was, heart picking up as her eyes honed in on the details: the scene, the body, the carefully captured spray of blood across the floor and up the wall. A mystery all at her fingertips. A murderer for her to figure out, to track down, to catch. It was the reason she’d derailed the rest of her parentally approved life and gone into the police academy.

  Thoughts about pretty blonde werewolves and wizard detectives fled as Sabira absorbed the stilted words on the page.

  A body had been discovered in Rainier Beach almost three weeks ago. According to the report, the officer in charge had come up with no leads and nominal physical evidence at the scene. The victim was a woman, named Sara Shepherd, aged forty-two, and unmarried. She’d lived alone in an older two bedroom house in what could only be described as a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. Her throat had been slit, but relatively little blood had been found around the body.

  Mallory unclipped the sheath of crime scene photos and spread them out on her desk, arranging them to mimic the scene itself near as she could tell.

  The body had been laid out lengthwise in the middle of her bed, still wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a spaghetti strap tank top. Blood had soaked into the pillow under her head, but like the report indicated, it was less than you might expect from someone who had bled to death. The medical examiner concluded that there had been no trace of drugs in her system and the cause of death was confirmed: exsanguination. No fingerprints had been found on the body or the bedroom except those matching Shepherd’s.

  At a glance, it looked like Shepherd had been surprised in bed and her throat slit. Between the rumpled sheets and the sleep clothes, there was nothing to indicate that she’d been killed somewhere else and moved. They hadn’t found any signs of a struggle or blood in any other part of the house, which meant whoever had killed her must have taken some quantity of her blood with them.

  “And collected it,” Sabira murmured. Kept the bulk of it from staining her bed.

  No signs of a vampire’s teeth, though that didn’t necessarily rule one of them out. Vampire attacks were rare in Seattle, a city which boasted the lowest population of vampires per capita of any other major city in North America. There was no official recognized coven to boost their numbers, and Seattle still carried a fair few anti-vampire measures on the books. Left over from the turn of the 20th century when the three largest local werewolf packs brokered an understanding with the municipal government. The combined influence of the McClanahan-Maccabeee-Tremblé packs had been enough to pass severe vampire restrictions that still held today.

  She didn’t have a clue who else would be interested in collecting blood, but if it had been a vampire attack, she wondered why they hadn’t taken it all? It seemed like a waste to collect some and leave the rest to soak the sheets.

  Sabira read the report cover to cover and then she grabbed her gun out of her desk and went for a drive to the scene. There was still police tape undisturbed across the door. Rain dampened her hair and clung to her fawn colored trench coat. The key to the front door had been taped into the back of the casefolder and she used that to gain access to the scene.

  Sabira pulled on a pair of gloves and stamped her boots off on the porch before going inside with the pictures, moving through each room with a careful eye until she wound up in the bedroom. They’d had cool weather ever since the summer heat wave broke at the end of August, and someone had brought in a clean-up crew to get rid of the worst of the bodily fluids and ruined laundry, so that now there was but a faintly metallic tang over the scent of cleaning chemicals.

  She took out the pictures of the bedroom and lay them on the bare mattress. If she hadn’t had the visual evidence, she might not have been able to tell that someone had died here. There really wasn’t a speck of blood anywhere else.

  Looking at the mess around Shepherd’s room, Sabira concluded that it looked like ordinary mess, the product of a messy person rather than someone having sorted through her things. There was a layer of dust on every flat surface as well as stray cat hair.

  She frowned. There hadn’t been any mention of a cat.

  Sabira went downstairs to the kitchen and looked through the cupboards until she found a half-empty bag of cat food and a box of kitty litter, as well as a cat flap set into the back door.

  “Poor thing.”

  She hoped that someone had come around to pick the cat up. A friend maybe, since the file indicated Shepherd hadn’t had any living family.

  The woman’s living room was neater than the bedroom. Dark drapes covered the front windows, and the living room was mostly free of clutter, populated by mismatched furniture in dark wood and a sea of plush, embroidered pillows that depicted scenes she wouldn’t been surprised to find in an Hieronymus Bosch triptych. She picked one up to get a better look
at it, squinting at what looked like a scene depicting six goat-legged men fucking one another in gold and burgundy thread.

  Sabira suppressed a grin and examined the rest of the living space.

  She discovered a stash of bagged herbs in a hollow ottoman as well as a healthy collection of candles, incense sticks, tarot cards, and liquors in a rolling bar cart tucked behind the sofa. Some sort of entertainment, she supposed, opening the bags of herbs to take a closer sniff, but nothing seemed too out of the ordinary or screamed illegal: she had sage, lavender, cedar chips, and a couple of other dull green plants she couldn’t identify by name but looked like stuff she could have found in her teta’s pantry.

  Sabira collected her crime scene photos and the case file and left, locking the door behind her and slapping a fresh piece of crime scene tape over the handle.

  She needed to figure out why someone might want Shepherd’s blood other than for sustenance. The tarot cards gave her an idea.

  Chapter 2

  Early October - Sabira Mallory

  According to the time on her phone, she had less than an hour left of her shift, nothing but a three-day weekend stretching out in front of her. It had been a couple of days since Captain Augustus gave her the Shepherd murder case and so far Sabira had turned up relatively nothing new on the investigation. She’d talked to a couple of magic shop proprietors and picked up a book on spell ingredients, which included a lengthy chapter on the variety of ways magic users could use blood: from scrying the future to sacrifices for good luck.

  Sabira planned to take the compendium home with her and dig into it with a glass of wine and take away. She just had to make it through the next half an hour without punching Lieutenant Danvers if he made one more snide insinuation about her absentee partner.

  Technically, he outranked her, though Sabira didn’t have to report directly to the asshole, she wouldn’t be doing herself any favors if she caused hard feelings with the guy. Or got written up for assaulting another officer. But it was hard to grit her teeth and stay quiet; Danvers was the kind of low-minded cretin who gave norms a band name with the supernatural crowd: he’d been working with werewolves and mages for more than a decade but he still treated them like a freak show alien species.

  “Who even knew he was gay?” Danvers asked, voice carrying across the bullpen, clear with disgust.

  Sabira hadn’t explicitly tagged the Lieutenant as homophobic, but it wasn’t hard to believe. She kept her eyes fixed on her computer screen, clearing out emails before the weekend. Unless the Captain decided to give her another murder case, she had zero plans to return to the office before Tuesday.

  Sitting at the desk next to Danvers, Detective Bukowski echoed the Lieutenant’s snort. From the corner of her eye, she could see the two white men exchanging a look.

  “I always figured the guy was some kind of eunuch,” Bukowski replied, making Danvers laugh.

  “Wouldn’t have fucking surprised me. But I guess he finally found someone to replace the stick up his ass.”

  Sabira felt a rush of relief when the land-line on Patrick’s desk lit up with a call, though who’d be calling his direct number she had no idea. She answered in a low, crisp voice, turning her back on the rest of the bullpen to try and block out the mens’ voices.

  “Detective Sabira Mallory speaking; this is Detective Clanahan’s phone.”

  “Hi! I’m so glad you picked up. I wasn’t sure you would.”

  Sabira struggled to identify the voice, greeting the exuberant relief with awkward silence.

  “Sorry, this is Grace. Uh, Grace Clanahan. We met the other day. I’m Pat’s sist—”

  “Of course, I remember. Is something the matter?”

  “You mean ‘cuz I’m calling Pat’s phone? I didn’t think this was an emergency number. Is it? Sorry.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Good. No, I just forgot to get your number, so I figured I’d take a chance and call here. I was hoping you’d be at your desk again. Looks like I was right.”

  Sabira cleared her throat, feeling a tingle of unease blossom in her gut. What could Patrick’s sister need with her except: “Has something happened to Patrick?”

  “What? No. I mean, I don’t think so. He’s pretty incommunicado at the moment so maybe. He could be robbed and stranded in Egypt right now for all I know, but I don’t think so. Wow, this got kind of morbid. I just wanted to see what you were up to?”

  “Working, obviously,” Sabira replied stiltedly.

  “Obviously. But how late are you working? I know it’s not Star Trek, but I was going to go see the new Total Recall tonight, and I don’t have anyone to go with me. Roisin’s got to study for a test. Isn’t that ridiculous? It’s only October and they’re already giving them tests.”

  Sabira had only a vague idea who Roisin was—another sister, several years younger than Patrick, in high school? She couldn’t remember—but this entire conversation felt like it were going over her head as Grace’s words tripped over one another. She focused on the most confusing part.

  “You called to ask if I wanted to go see a movie? With you?”

  “No, by yourself. Yes, with me. Why do you sound so suspicious about a movie?”

  Sabira shook herself. “Well, there’s the fact that we barely know one other. Do you invite strangers to movies often?”

  “I like the way you make this sound sordid. And we’re not strangers.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “You’re Patty’s detective partner, that means you’re practically family. Unless you’re secretly an anti-werewolf bitch, and I just didn’t notice the other day, and Pat failed to mention it. Not that he’s really said much about you. Not that I think you are, a bitch, or that his failing to talk about you is any sort of indication about what he thinks of you… I feel like I should stop myself before I stick my foot in my mouth.”

  “Before?” Sabira asked, dryly.

  “Oh, she thinks she’s funny. You still haven’t given me an answer.”

  Sabira’s first instinct would have been to make a polite excuse and decline the offer. Even if Grace Clanahan liked asking out strangers, Sabira wasn’t one to accept those sorts of invitations, and she wasn’t sure the fact that Grace’s brother was her partner was a pro or con in this situation. It seemed like a bad idea to date a co-worker’s sister, but then again, Grace hadn’t actually called this a date. What was it about the McClanahan werewolves that they seemed determined to give her a chronic migraine?

  “I’m sorry,” she replied, holding the phone closer to her mouth in the hopes that no one would be able to overhear her conversation. “I’m not entirely sure what to say.”

  “Yes. Unless you absolutely hate classic science fiction remakes.”

  A pause, and then Grace continued in a hesitant voice.

  “Oh, man, you do, don’t you? You’re one of those old school Trekkies who probably hates the reboots.”

  Sabira bit back a groan and interrupted, “That’s—way too complicated to get into over the phone.”

  “Even more reason to meet me in person.”

  “What time were you thinking?” Sabira asked, giving in because she wanted to see the movie and she wanted to see the blonde again and to hell with whether it was a good idea to date Patrick’s sister. He wasn’t around to say no, now was he?

  Grace gave her a time and the address for the theater. By the time Sabira hung up the phone, the hour had ticked over, freeing her from the station and leaving her just enough time to rush home for a quick shower and a change of clothes—there was no way in hell she was going to spend the first two and a half hours of her three day weekend in the same stale suit and buttondown she’d been stewing in for the last ten hours at the station.

  #

  Grace Clanahan

  She couldn’t have said what precisely prompted her to try calling Patty’s phone, or why she felt so anxious about inviting his mysterious partner out to go see a movie with her. Sure, she’d driven in
to the city with the intention of hauling Roisin out of some party-hard dorm scene and been disappointed when her little sister had been laden down with books and on her way out the door to go study in the student union building. What eighteen year old had a serious study group in October her freshman year of college? The whole idea made Grace shudder in sympathetic revulsion. But Roisin had been adamant about keeping her study date, leaving Grace at wits end and still with the itching desire to see her trashy science fiction reboot. It was Friday night, damn it, how dare her little sister leave her sad and alone?

  So, she’d called Pat’s desk with the idle hope that his surprisingly nerdy partner would pick up and be available.

  Now, she waited outside the theater, clutching two tickets with her purse stuffed full of illicitly bought grocery store candy, and keeping an eye out for a tall dark haired woman in a neat black suit. What she got was a tall dark haired woman in jeans and a soft turtleneck sweater, her hair falling loose over her shoulders.

  Sabira flashed Grace a bright little smirk and jogged across the street.

  “Sorry, I’m late,” she said.

  Grace grinned and brushed it away. “Not at all. I already got the tickets and food. Do you want to get something to drink or go straight in?”

  Sabira unzipped her shoulder bag, flashing Grace a glimpse of bottled waters. “I’m good.”

  “Excellent.”

  The film was nearing the end of its run, Grace’s preferred showing, which meant a nearly empty theater. They grabbed seats in the middle of a row, two-thirds of the way back, and watched the end of the previews in companionable silence. Grace folded her coat up in her lap and sank low into her seat, feet propped up on the chair in front of her.

  “Thanks for humoring me,” she said in an undertone.

  She felt Sabira shift down so that their heads were on a level.

  “I’ve been wanting to see this anyway. I just don’t usually splurge on tickets,” the human replied.