Redemption Alley

Jacinta Kutchner’s corpse hung from a white and blue striped nylon rope looped over an exposed ceiling beam creaking slightly as the house settled for the night. She wore a pale blue housedress and one slipper, and had been dead for a while, if the state of the body was any indication. The air conditioning had been turned off sometime in the recent past, and the house was breathlessly hot and stale.

Not to mention reeking of decay.

I folded my arms, doing my best not to lean against the wall. The forensic techs were hard at work, gathering evidence, photographing, trying to ignore the smell. A few of them had Vicks smeared on their upper lips, it was that bad. A few days in desert heat will dry a body out, but hot moisture in an enclosed house is bad for dead human tissue.

“I don’t like this.” I kept my voice low. The techs were giving me little sideways looks, except for plump brunette Piper. She was off maternity leave and slimming down again, my very favorite forensic tech and my particular liaison with that department. Not much disturbs her serenity.

Maybe it’s having kids that does it. I’ve never seen Piper even blanch. She’s even been known to whistle Disney tunes at scenes.

The mind boggles.

“I don’t either.” Monty looked miserable. I didn’t blame him. One suicide is chance, two coincidence.

I didn’t want a third.

“This isn’t my type of case,” I said again. “There’s no smell of anything hinky on this one. Not extra-human hinky, that is.”

“What about human hinky?”

You don’t want me to tell you anything you don’t already know, Montaigne. You just want someone else to say it out loud. I glanced around the living room. “What the hell did she stand on? She’s only five-three, recent stretching notwithstanding.” It felt horrible, but you don’t last long around violent death without evolving some black humor. I ticked them off on my fingers. “Where’s her other slipper? Not to mention most women want to look pretty right before they take the plunge. They usually hang themselves in more private places, too.”

A fresh wave of stench rolled toward me. There was a large stain on the carpet below the body, and the insect life was having a ball. Not as much as there would be outside, but you’d be surprised how little time it takes for six-legged critters to find a recently deceased piece of meat.

“I thought about that too.” His gaze came up, touched my face, skittered away. He palmed a couple of Tums up to his mouth and started chewing. “Goddammit.”

Full night had folded around the house, darkness swirling in corners where it wasn’t driven away by electric fixtures and portable lights brought in by the crime-scene team. The shadows in the corners had weight, only seen through my blue eye.

Seen from between, violent death has its own eddies and currents. She had suffered before passing out of this place and into whatever awaited her.

This isn’t one of yours, Jill. Get going, there’s other things out there tonight you should be taking care of.

But I made no move to leave beyond shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Carper said irritably from the entryway, hunching his shoulders. His sharp blue eyes flicked once over the scene, taking everything in.

In his sneakers and tweed jackets, Carp looks more like a college professor than a homicide deet. Behind him, his partner Rosenfeld was conferring with the blue holding down the site log. Rosenfeld’s spiky auburn halo threw back what little light made it past the long mirror on the wall.

“Relax, Carp.” I let my shoulders drop. “It’s not one of mine.”

He looked only barely relieved. “Great. What’re you doing, then?”

“Conferring with Montaigne. If that’s all right with you.” Don’t get snitty with me, Carp. I’m not in the mood.

“Hi, Jill.” Rosie ambled past her partner, bumping him with her shoulder. Her jaw would have done a prizefighter proud, and her leather jacket creaked a little bit. The Terrible Two of the Homicide department, appearing nightly on the scene. “What’s going on?”

It was an excessively casual question. Santa Luz’s finest get a little bit nervous around me, though they take bets on where I’ll show up next. There’s a whole system of verifying hunter sightings left over from Mikhail’s time.

It’s when they lose track of me for a few weeks that everyone gets jumpy.

Still, very few cops like being around me. The mandatory class I put all rookies through takes care of that. My tiger’s eye rosary bumped my stomach as I shifted again. “Not much for me here. See you later, Monty.”

He couldn’t quite bring himself to ask me, but he spread his hands as I passed, brushing close to Carp and almost enjoying when the man stepped away. He used to be able to get a rise out of me. Now Carper and I just go through the motions. It’s a comforting routine on both sides.

He rolled his eyes, and I gri

I paused at the entryway, next to the blue. He didn’t offer me the site log, but he gripped it until paper crackled. If I looked closely I would probably remember his name. “Monty.”

“Yeah?” He palmed another couple of Tums. The vacation was wearing off.

What else could I say? He wanted me to look into it, and someone else was dead. Worst case of suicide I ever saw, the tagline to an old joke floated through my head. “I’ll be in touch.”

Then I was out the door, plunging into the night, crossing the street to the Impala. She stuck out like a sore thumb, having no flashing lights, and I noticed something else about the neighborhood.

Jacinta Kutchner’s neighbors didn’t come out to see what the fuss was. At all.

So much for suburbia.

Chapter Four

Gray predawn was breaking, again, when the phone rang and my pager went off simultaneously. I left my trench dripping on the rack in the utility room and hobbled through the hall, through the cavern of the sparring space and living room, every muscle I’d pulled singing its own separate note in the orchestra of pain. I’d broken my left arm this time, the arkeus I’d run across on the east side of town had put up a hell of a fight.

Get it, Jill? A Hell of a fight? Arf arf.

But I’d found out, to my lasting satisfaction, which pile of hell-soaked waste had given the mad accountant his power. It was unmistakable, especially when an arkeus pulls a flame-jet six feet long out of its mouth and tries to feed it to you.

The scar provides me with faster healing and damage regeneration, but when it’s busy splinting bones and replacing a few quarts of blood, pulled muscles heal more slowly. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if it started spreading, or if Perry decided it wasn’t such a hot idea to have me drawing on a hellbreed’s tainted power if he wasn’t getting anything in return—even if it was his own damn fault.

Don’t think like that. The phone brayed, the pager buzzed against my hip, and I stopped short of picking up as the answering machine clicked. There were a few moments of silence, then a beep.

“Hey, kitten.” A voice I knew as well as my own slid from the speaker, only slightly distorted. “Guess you’re out—”

My pager quit buzzing. I was already scrambling for the phone. I scooped it up and pressed the talk button, and the machine clicked over with a feedback squeal. “Sorry about that.” Breathless, now, I folded down on the bed. “God, it’s good to hear you.”

“Hey.” Saul sounded tired. “Glad I caught you too, kitten. What’s happening in the big bad city?”