Witch Hunt(33)

“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.”
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.