Remainders: Blood & Bone Series 3.5 Page 5

  Sabira Mallory

  She set the alarm on her phone for six in the morning and regretted that the second she cracked her eyes open the next day. Still, Mallory hadn’t made detective before twenty-seven by being lazy and staying in bed when she had questions. She showered and dressed, being careful about the noise. In her living room, Grace sprawled out in her sleep, snuffling softly into the pillow under her cheek—one of the pillows off Sabira’s own bed, and maybe she should have felt weird about offering it, but Grace hadn’t said anything, and she was the one with a werewolf nose.

  Sabira debated breakfast, before deciding against it. She’d pick something up on the way to Shoreline. She went over to wake Grace.

  “Oh, hey, I’m up—I’m up.”

  “You’re fine. I just wanted to let you know I’m going to get going.”

  Grace yawned and shook her head like a puppy, fluffy hair tangling in front of her eyes. She rose up on her elbows and blinked sleepily. Sabira’s hand pressed warmly against her cotton-clad shoulder without Sabira’s permission. She decided not to feel self-conscious about it when Grace leaned into the contact.

  “You should sleep if you want. There’s a spare key in the kitchen drawer if you decide to leave later.”

  “If?” Grace mumbled.

  “Or you could stick around. I should be back in time for lunch.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Grace fell back on the couch with a muffled noise and Sabira left her there, debating with herself whether she hoped the werewolf would stay or go.

  #

  Grace Clanahan

  Grace woke up again several hours later when the sun slipped through the crack in the balcony door and flirted with her face. She showered and changed back into her clothes from the day before. She ate left over waffles, mourning the lack of bacon, and a messily scrambled egg before searching for the spare key Sabira and mentioned. After that she walked down the street to the coffee shop they’d visited the day before and returned to the apartment a little before eleven. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing sticking around; it was weird, right? Just invading Sabira’s space like this, but despite the sofa’s small size, she’d slept soundly, and she was hesitant to take off for her own dark apartment.

  With time to kill, Grace gave into her nosy instincts and did a little snooping. Literally nosing as she let her werewolf senses do the work of sniffing out the more interesting corners of Sabira’s apartment: lube, condoms, dental dams, and a tasteful lavender dildo in a leather harness that made Grace blush and shut the nightstand drawer. She wondered what kind of guys Sabira liked to date. The laundry hamper was mostly empty, the bathroom a little dusty but clean—actually, that seemed to be a common theme in the apartment “dusty but mostly clean,” as though the only thing Sabira did here was sleep. She had a nice collection of books; a few ponderously heavy tomes that looked like college textbooks on Criminology, Sociology, and Gender Studies took up a couple of shelves before giving way to an impressive collection of trashy sounding urban fantasy novels—all Werewolf Lover, and The Vampire’s Kiss that made Grace grin. Maybe dated scifi wasn’t the only thing that made her quiet detective friend a big giant nerd.

  The only thing left was the second bedroom. It still smelled of another person, the old roommate? What had Sabira called her…Carol? Grace couldn’t remember, but the scent made her sneeze. She left the door open and cracked the bedroom window to let in some fresh air. It was still drizzling outside, grey and smelling like damp cement. The room wasn’t made up like a bedroom, it had been turned into an office, though a telling layer of dust covered the sparse furniture and the small stack of boxes pushed into one corner. There was a three drawer filing cabinet, a printer, a Windows machine and monitor, and a keyboard with half the letters on the left side keys worn off.

  Grace sat in the computer chair, sinking into the thin padding and tried turning on the tower. It gave a pathetic series of ear-splitting beeps, whirred softly, and then died.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” she murmured, opening up the desk drawer in search of a screw driver and a can of compressed air.

  Grace methodically opened up the computer and dusted it out until she was sweaty and covered in grime that made her nose itch worse than the smell of a stranger. She checked the RAM and the graphics card, making sure everything was clipped in tightly, and then put it all back together. This time, the machine booted up with a series of happier noises. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find, but an icon for her own damn game in the top right corner next to the Steam shortcut wasn’t it.

  Heart hammering in her chest, Grace opened the launcher and watched it scan the machine for game files before cycling through to the latest patch update.

  Keys in the front door tore her attention away, and Grace got up to greet Sabira.

  “What happened to you?” the other woman asked, eyes wide when she caught Grace’s disheveled appearance.

  All at once, the perverseness of her own snooping caught up to her and Grace flushed. All this blushing and embarrassment made her feel like she was back in high school. She’d never been this nervous around people she’d actually dated let alone people she’d decided to stalk into friendship. It was a good thing Pat wasn’t around to see her, he’d probably have a few choice words to say about her making things weird with his co-workers.

  “What?” Sabira asked, tossing her keys and coat on the counter. She had a thick official looking folder under her arm; it must have been a productive fact-finding mission.

  “So, do the cases match?” Grace asked desperate to deflect even though she’d left the door open to the spare bedroom.

  “I think so. It’s got all of the same signs. But you didn’t answer my question.”

  Grace huffed a breathless laugh and stuck her hands in her pockets. “That’s why you’re the police detective. It’s nothing I was just…I saw your computer wasn’t working so I kind of…fixed it.”

  Sabira gave her a surprised look and they went into the spare bedroom.

  “Were you trying to play a game? You must have been bored. How did you manage to turn it on?” Sabira asked.

  “I just had to reseat the RAM.”

  “I don’t do technical computer stuff.”

  Grace grinned. “Lucky for you, I do. So, you play this?” she asked pointing at the game launcher.

  Sabira squinted at the computer screen, mouthing the stylized game title silently, and then shook her head. “No. Must have been Carolyn.”

  Carolyn, the the ex-roommate. Grace tried not to feel too disappointed. It would have just been awkward if Sabira played her game, right? Right.

  “You want to go grab lunch? I could use a break from this,” Sabira asked, gesturing with her police file. She set it on the computer desk and waited for Grace to accept and grab her shoes.

  Of course she said yes, and she didn’t complain when Sabira drove them to a noodle house that served tofu in hot broth instead of meat either.

  #

  Sabira Mallory

  Sabira returned to work after her weekend with Grace feeling relaxed and refreshed. She probably should have felt like a lump after spending most of the weekend glued to her couch, or lethargic after that much television, but instead she took the stairs up to Major Crimes and had to work to keep the smile off her face. She arrived to the bullpen early, before the other detectives on the day shift, while the night crew was no where in sight, either out on calls or more likely congregating around the coffee maker down in the break room.

  She picked up her messages from the desk Sergeant and booted up her computer. She had the file from the Snohomish Police, but she wanted to compile her own victim profile for Mrs Jankowski and see if she could draw any connections with Sara Shepherd. The morning passed in a haze while Mallory sipped her dirty chai and read everything she could find on Miriam Jankowski of Mountlake Terrace—it turned out to be a surprising amount. She’d lived in the Seattle area for thirty years and was a long-standing member of t
he Ladies of the Rose & Sword, a local occult group of Wiccans. Mrs Jankowski was a small time witch and palm reader who for the last four years had been a staple presence at the Shoreline Farmer’s Market.

  That might be her connection, she’d found tarot cards in Shepherd’s apartment too, not that that meant she’d been a palm reader but maybe connected with am occult group of her own? It was something to look into. Sabira checked the Shepherd file, but couldn’t find any information about her job.

  “Good morning, Mallory,” Bukowski greeted her with a smile that showed his teeth and a quick once over that again didn’t meet her eyes. “You’re in early.”

  She made an acknowledging noise and shrugged, excusing herself from replying by taking another sip out of her chai, disappointed to find it empty.

  “And you’re here a little late, aren’t you?” she asked, glancing at the clock on the wall. It was all for show, the cheap bit of black and white plastic didn’t work, its batteries had probably died back in 2000 along with the Y2k panic.

  Bukowski’s expression soured and he slammed the drawer on his desk, ignoring her.

  Sabira shifted the focus of her searches to figuring out where Shepherd had worked: as a physical therapist it turned out, so that put a damper on her theory. Still, she figured it wouldn’t hurt to talk to the Ladies of the Rose & Sword. She looked up their number and spent twenty minutes on the phone listening to someone named Tara talk about what a valued sister Miriam Jankowski had been before informing Sabira that unfortunately she’d never heard of a Sara Shepherd.

  “Oh, well, thank you for your time.”

  “Of course, dear.”

  Mallory spent the next couple of days chained to her desk, finishing up her research on uses for human blood in spells, taking a detour through a frankly terrifying bestiary about all of the supernatural creatures who sustained themselves on human blood. Thankfully, werewolves had not been listened in that one. And further fleshing out her profile on the two dead women. By Wednesday, she’d decided to expand her search to other unsolved deaths in the Seattle area to see if there were any others in the suburbs with similar earmarks that no one had connected.

  She and Grace had exchanged a couple dozen texts, mostly Grace rambling about some drama with a character modeler at work. Sabira wasn’t entire sure what a character modeler did, but apparently this one had horrible taste in “raiment design,” that was giving Grace a headache. And Grace had the gall to call Sabira a nerd, but she didn’t do it professionally.

  “Are you supposed to be smiling at pictures of dead bodies?” Grace’s voice interrupted her thoughts.

  Sabira turned, surprised to find the werewolf hovering over her shoulder with a squint. As she watched, the blonde’s face paled and her green eyes widened.

  “Holy crap, those really are dead bodies. I was just joking but—”

  Sabira spun her chair around, forcing Grace’s attention to her and asked what she was doing there.

  “I took a half day before I punched Pete in his stupid face.”

  “Are you sure you want to be admitting those compulsions to a police officer?”

  Grace rolled her eyes and huffed. “It’s the full moon. I’m taking the rest of the week. I was hoping you’d want to grab lunch. Unless you’re too busy with…” She pointedly snuck another strained look at the computer monitor.

  “I could take a break.”

  “Oh, thank the moon.”

  Sabira turned off her computer and collected her badge and gun since she was technically still on the clock and then led them downstairs. “What did you have in mind?”

  Grace shrugged and squinted up into the soupy white-grey sky. “What’s good around here?”

  Sabira pulled out her keys and drove them a little out of the way to a Teriyaki restaurant she knew served up a lot of delicious barbecued meats, hoping that it would satisfy a hungry werewolf’s stomach. The werewolf in question made a truly pornographic noise as the doors opened around them, groaning low in her throat and bumping their shoulders together in a way that made Sabira shiver. What she wouldn’t give to hear that noise in another context.

  “Oh, wow, good choice,” Grace grumbled, grabbing a booth and slinging off her damp coat. Sabira took the opposite bench and nearly jumped when she felt Grace stretch her legs into the space between them, propping her sock covered feet onto the cushion next to Sabira’s thigh. She watched the blonde pour over the menu and then watched with even more amazement as she proceeded to order what sounded like half of it.

  “Hungry?” she asked, watching Grace chew on the straw in her water glass.

  “Starving. I feel like my stomach is trying to claw its way out through my gut.”

  Before she could reply, her phone buzzed. Sabira answered it and listened to Dispatch explain that they’d had someone call about Sara Shepherd and could they transfer it to her?

  “Hey, I’ve got to take this. I’ll be right back,” Sabira said, standing awkwardly. Grace frowned but waved her off, pulling her legs back and sprawling into the corner of her side of the booth. Sabira ducked outside the restaurant and waited for Dispatch to connect her to the caller.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, this is Detective Sabira Mallory. You had some information about Ms Shepherd’s death?”

  “What? No. I was hoping someone could tell me what’s going on.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The voice was a woman’s. “Amanda Wallace.”

  “And how did you know Ms Shepherd?”

  “We—” Wallace’s voice trembled slightly and then came back sounding hard and irritated. “We were friends. I talked to a different cop after—I’m the one who found the— He said he would let me know what he found out, but he still hasn’t called back.”

  “Do you remember this officer’s name?”

  Wallace huffed and said that she didn’t.

  “I’m very sorry, but I hope you realize I can’t just offer information about an ongoing investigation over the phone,” Sabira admitted. Her gut wanted to believe Wallace’s story, but it was against policy to divulge information to anyone except the family and unprofessional besides that. “You said you were friends? I’ve been looking for someone to ask about Ms Shepherd’s personal life, hobbies, maybe we could meet for coffee and you could fill in some blanks?”

  There was silence for a couple seconds before Wallace agreed to meet Sabira in an hour at a coffee shop a couple miles away. It wasn’t ideal, but she couldn’t sacrifice a lead just because Grace was in a bad mood. Feeling guilty all the same, she returned to the booth just as the server arrived with their food. Grace had already broken out the chopsticks and was shoveling strips of grilled chicken into her mouth. Her feet reappeared on the bench next to Sabira, toes slipping slyly under her thigh.

  “Every thing all right?” Grace mumbled in between bites.

  “The friend of one of the victims checking in. I arranged to meet her in a little while, to ask some questions. The original case officer didn’t get very far, and I’m trying to establish whether or not my case connects to another I found.”

  “That dead woman from the news.”

  “Right.”

  “You have to go?” Grace looked up, face drawn into serious lines. Her hand shook a little where she was holding onto her chopsticks.

  “Just enough time to eat quickly and take you back to the station. I’m sorry.”

  Grace swallowed visibly, scrunched up her nose, and sniffed, but then she was shaking her head and waving away Sabira’s apology. “Can’t help work.”

  They ate; Grace grabbed the check and paid before Sabira could even look at it, and then she drove them back to the station, one eye on the time.

  “Maybe we could do something later?” Grace asked, drumming her fingers against the glass.

  “I don’t know how long this will take.”

  “It’s just an interview.”

  “But if it gives me a lead I can follow.”


  “So, how late do you think? Five-thirty?”

  Sabira glanced at the werewolf, the way she fidgeted in her seat. “I guess that would work.”

  “Then I’ll see you later,” Grace said, slipping out of the car and jogging over to a nondescript grey Volkswagen parked one row over.

  Sabira was already running late. She pulled out of the parking lot and took back streets to reach the coffee shop as quick as possible. She was still almost twenty minutes late as she cast a close eye over the cafe patrons, looking for a middle aged woman. A brunette seated at a little two person table with her coat still on and her hands wrapped around a paper cup of coffee caught her attention. Sabira watched the woman glance over at the door and then start in her chair as her eyes met Sabira’s. She frowned and half rose.

  “No, sit. My apologies,” Sabira said, crossing the room. “Amanda Wallace?”

  “Detective?”

  She uncovered her badge and took the empty chair. “I’m afraid the traffic was worse than I expected.”

  Wallace’s mouth pinched into an unhappy line. “So, what did you want to know? I have to pick my kid up from school in a little while.”

  “Then I shall try to keep this brief.” Sabira pulled out a pen and notebook, flipping to a blank page and labeling it: SHEPHERD/INTERVIEWING: A. WALLACE. “How did you know Ms Shepherd?”

  “That’s it?”

  “It helps to start with context.”

  “We were friends. We met in college.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to harm her?”

  “The other detective already asked me this sort of thing. All I can tell you is what I told him: she wasn’t dating anyone, she hadn’t been dating anyone, she hadn’t had any bad break-ups that I know of.”

  “Is it possible there were ones you didn’t know about?”

  “I doubt it. We spoke regularly.”

  “Was Ms Shepherd in any way connected with the occult?”

  “Why do you ask?” Wallace asked with a suspicious squint.

  Sabira leaned back in her seat, one leg crossed over the other and considered Wallace, buying herself a moment, and pleased when it paid off and Wallace continued on her own.