But he was upstairs, and there were no cops in my place. Didn’t mean they couldn’t sneak up on me. Had to go fast.
I’d lived in the apartment for as long as I’d worked with the OPA—two years. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was the first place that I’d lived without Pops breathing down my neck, so it was mine. Those movie posters on the wall? The Blu-ray collection? All the Brandon Sanderson books? Mine. And it felt like a major violation to have that stuff taped and tagged. Bet you anything that they’d photographed everything, too. Even my damn underwear drawer.
Judging by the blood on my hallway carpet, the crime scene hadn’t been scrubbed yet. Guess they would probably leave that to the landlord so that he’d have to pay the cleaning bill, too. I didn’t really want to know if Erin was still there, but I checked—bathtub was empty. The blood smear was just the way I’d left it, but there was a clear spot where her body used to be.
Didn’t look real in the dark. Black blood, white floor. Looked like crime scene photos.
Yeah. A crime scene photo. I could keep detached.
What would I have been looking for if this had been an investigation?
I headed into my living room and looked around. Suspect was obviously a social recluse. Spent too much money on movies—definitely didn’t have a girlfriend. Had been three years since the last girlfriend, actually, which was something I acknowledged with a pang of annoyance. And none of that information helped me figure out who could have actually killed Erin Karwell.
Ah, hell, I couldn’t keep detached here. Not in my place.
Better get what I’d come for and leave.
They’d collected a lot of the objects in my living room for evidence, but the gun safe was bolted to the floor. It hadn’t budged.
I opened my gun safe by passing my hand over the handle. Magic flared and a lock clicked inside. The door swung open.
There was one gun in my gun safe, and I kept it there unless I was doing fieldwork. It was a Desert Eagle that Fritz had given me for my birthday. It wasn’t required for OPA agents to pack heat, so it was the first firearm I’d ever owned. I hated that thing. Felt like carrying it around meant I was expecting to shoot something, and I didn’t do that.
But I grabbed it, along with the belt. If someone was out to frame me for murder, I had better be ready to defend myself.
The Desert Eagle was the only weapon in there. Most of the space was taken up by trophies from resolved investigations. I had gris-gris, charms, potions, photographs, even one of Black Jack’s tarot cards. Call it research. In that theoretical “someday” where free time and motivation intersected, I wanted to figure out how to deconstruct the spells cast by the OPA’s Most Wanted and put them to practical use. For now, it was basically a big box of useless crap.
The drawer at the bottom of the safe, however, was filled with dozens of Steno pads’ worth of personal notes. I took those. If the OPA cracked my safe, they would put them into storage and I’d never get them back. Their warehouses were worse than the ones in Indiana Jones; once something went in, it never came out.
There was one active case file in the safe, too. I’d locked it up before heading to The Olive Pit the night before.
This new case was supposed to be my reward for taking care of Black Jack so quickly. An easy bag-and-tag. The suspect was named Isobel Stonecrow—possibly a necromancer, probably a fake—and she had been earning money by claiming that she could connect them with their dead loved ones. If she was a mundane human having fun, she would be shocked when the actual witches showed up at her door. And if she was the real McCoy, we had even more unpleasant surprises in store for her.
I took that file, too. Might as well. Hopefully I’d be getting back to work soon anyway.
After that, it was a matter of getting dressed in comfortable clothes again. Jeans, a black tee, my favorite leather jacket. The inner pockets could hold my notebooks easily. I threaded my belt through the Desert Eagle’s holster and wore it on my hip.#p#分页标题#e#
I was pulling the window screen down again when I heard the lock on the front door click.
I froze halfway out of the window, one foot on the fire escape and the other on the carpet. My hand went to my hip but my brain stopped working.
My visitors were probably the cops or the union —neither of whom I wanted seeing me here—and that meant I should probably run. But there was a small chance that it was whoever had killed Erin coming back to look at his handiwork. Witches would do that sometimes. Go back to where they performed a ritual, clean up their residual energy, collect supplies. Made it easy to catch them.