Dragon's Teeth Page 2

  The stone-smell closed in on her, a pressure against her skin like simmering anger. Kate felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. That flashing came again, beyond the stones, rattling, the sound of plastic sheeting in the wind.

  Something lay there, long, narrow, wrapped in builder's poly, displayed on a flat boulder or outcrop of ledge centered in the curve of stones. Kate stopped and stared, suddenly chilled in spite of the clear sun on her back. That shape reminded her too much of a body bag waiting for the medical examiner's meat wagon. She'd seen them all too often, car wrecks and drownings and the occasional "domestic." She'd seen one just two weeks ago, her ex dead of a lifetime of whiskey and she'd found the body when he hadn't answered his phone for two days . . .

  But she was a cop. Not a cop in favor with the county DA right now, but still a cop. She shook her head, watched her feet to avoid stomping on any clues, and crossed the last twenty or thirty feet to the center of the stone circle.

  A body, fresh enough it didn't stink. Wrapped in several layers of poly sheeting, six mil by the look of it, tied in place with green nylon net twine circling the bundle at six different points. Nude body, apparently, or flesh-colored underwear, lumps in the plastic looked like female. She didn't touch anything to find out more. And then she reached the head.

  Blonde hair. Cut short. Damned tall body for a woman, broad shoulders like Kate's own. The ridge faded around Kate, and again Jackie flashed across her blurred eyes, face teen-age sullen.

  They'd never found her body, after that shoot-out and fire at the Pratts' place. Found blood and bone and brain tissue spattered across the gravel, but they'd never found the body.

  Kate was sitting. Her back leaned against something cold and rough. Blueberry bushes prickly under her butt and against her arms through the sleeves of her work shirt. Stone, stone at her back, stone solid and reliable, guarding, she'd never get shot from that direction.

  Kate stared at the cell phone in her hand. Left hand, missing half the index finger from a second's carelessness with a power saw. Call in. Nine-one-one, report to dispatch, easier than groaning to her feet and limping back down the ridge to her truck and the police radio under the dash.

  She felt the chill of those hostile eyes again and looked up. Jackie. Jackie standing by the tree-line, calm, weighing, nodding, then fading into nothing like a proper ghost. Kate's vision blurred, black dots swirling into a tunnel, and she blinked tears away. The edge of the field stood empty again, bracken and grass and blood-crimson blueberry bushes undisturbed.

  Her right hand made its own choice and poked at the buttons for a memory number, memory number one, Alice, cell phone in her car or at the hospital or wherever. Anywhere except the House. Cell phone wouldn't work in the House. House didn't like it.

  Get her out here before the sheriff or the state patrol, closest real cops. Too many things wrong.

  Chapter Two

  Alice tucked the foil blanket tighter around Kate's shoulders, gently forced her lover's head back down on the improvised pillow of a wadded-up jacket, and checked her temporal pulse again. Still weaker than normal, even lying in the grass with her head downhill. Then Alice looked up, glaring at the state trooper. Wescott, according to his nameplate. Not local. Both good and bad sides to that.

  "Shit, yes, I touched the body. I used sterile gloves and left them lying on top of the plastic wrap in case they picked up any forensic goodies. In my professional opinion, as a registered nurse specializing in ER trauma and as an EMT, my patient needed to know that corpse was not her missing daughter. Life-or-death, extreme clinical shock. Now fuck off! I'm dealing with a medical emergency here."

  A mix of code words and crude emphasis, shorthand that should penetrate even the thickest rote rule-book cop skull. State troopers weren't dumb, none of them. Even if they sometimes acted that way.

  And he could see her industry-standard EMT crash bag and her photo-ID from Sunrise General clipped to her shirt pocket and the stethoscope draped professionally across her shoulders. Badges of authority, added to the command voice.

  And since Wescott wasn't a Stonefort boy, he wouldn't know Kate was about as fragile as one of those boulders in the stone circle. Alice was just buying herself some space. Yeah, it sounded cold and calculating. Her lover lay under her hands, pale and clammy and her blood pressure down around sixty from shock, and the Haskell Witch subprogram had taken over Alice's brain, manipulating people and weighing which of their buttons to push.

  It worked. The cop left, shaking his head.

  But that trooper would be asking some damned awkward questions if he ever found out that Alice landed on the crime scene at least half an hour before the nine-one-one call. That she'd studied the wrappings and the knots on that do-it-yourself body bag before untying and opening it up to find out what was inside, to look for clues that the Medical Examiner would never understand. Photographing stuff with her digital camera. And then closing everything back up and matching all the original knots, including the botched ones. Whoever had wrapped that package wasn't a sailor or a fisherman.

  Kate opened her eyes and stared up into nothing, unfocused, blue sky reflected in sky-blue eyes. Alice glanced over at the cops and forensics guys, checking just which way they were looking, and then bent down and gently kissed her on the forehead. She fed power through her hands, feeling it drain out of her own body and wake up the ache in her back and chest. Do much more of that and she'd end up on a gurney herself. But Kate's eyes came back into focus, and her pulse strengthened.

  "Just lie there. That wasn't Jackie. Just lie still and let the earth give you strength."

  Kate shook her head, slowly, as if it hurt. "They never found her body."

  Alice nodded. "They never found any of the bodies. We know people died at the Pratts' place. We know people died in that cigarette boat that blew up and sank out in the bay. No bodies, anywhere. But that girl wasn't Jackie. Big kid, maybe, but three or four inches shorter than either of you, most likely a couple of years too old, and she wasn't a natural blonde. Brown roots."

  Not to mention the nipple ring and a couple of raunchy tattoos. But Kate didn't need that level of sharing.

  And the kid's heart was somewhere else, along with four or five liters of blood. Bled dry like a slaughterhouse pig, but not by slitting her throat. Big jagged hole in her chest, with a tiny razor-sharp flake of obsidian imbedded in the cut end of one rib, a flake that Alice had left in place for the M.E. to find and puzzle over. Anyway, the shadowy perp hadn't killed that girl here. But the stones still felt angry.

  Kate wrinkled her nose. "Sooner or later we're going to have to talk to them."

  "Sooner." The ground seemed to throb under Alice, Maine granite sending code to the base of her spine where she squatted in the grass. "Talk to them here. That'll cut down on the awkward questions."

  "Huh?" Kate hoisted herself up on one elbow, blinking as if her brain fuzzed with the move. Then her skin flushed slightly from its pale, waxy color. Blood pressure rising. Good, even if it was her temper.

  "Talk to them here," Alice repeated. "But you may have to bring the Forensics team back again tomorrow. They'll have a hard time finding the place without you. Harder time remembering what they've found. They'll have trouble recalling anything they didn't write down or photograph."

  Kate's skin reddened further, almost back to normal, and her eyes narrowed. She sat up. "They'll have a hard time finding the place? Remembering? You been getting into the scheduled drugs at the hospital?"

  You'd think the girl would start to believe in magic, the things she's been through. "The stones like you. Damned if I know why, but they wanted you here. You. Then you called me, and then you called dispatch. If you hadn't been here, if the stones didn't know you, none of us could have found this place. Can't you feel it?"

  That Power crawled over Alice's skin, helping her help Kate. But it focused on Kate, only using Alice because she was available.

  Kate frowned. "Feed it to your roses. S
omebody called me. Set me up. Since when do rocks use telephones?"

  "Silicon, kiddo. Silicon and germanium and gallium and a bunch of other minerals. And copper and aluminum and gold. That's what they make computers out of. Computers and radios and cell phones. And rocks."

  The Power flowing through this place nearly stood Alice's hair on end. She couldn't use it, it wouldn't feed her magic, but by the Jesus she sure could feel it. Couldn't use it except to help Kate.

  Kate shook her head and rolled her eyes. "Crazier than a shithouse rat. And you ain't even pretty. Damn good thing you're rich. Weren't for that, they'd have tossed you in the nut bin before you were out of diapers." But her face softened while she spoke, fond smile lines tugging at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

  Alice felt her heart twist around in her chest. The big ox wasn't going to die on her. The big, scarred, numb-as-a-stump-but-she's-good-with-her-hands ox who didn't believe in magic wasn't going to take her magic away. Besides that personal thing, the House needed her.

  Kate shoved over onto her hands and knees, winced, and then stood up, swaying. Alice didn't try to help her. With the difference in their sizes, the best she could do was stand by and try to break the fall if Kate passed out. The shock wasn't an act. Kate really had thought she'd found her daughter's body.

  But as for acting . . .

  "Just tell them what we talked about. I got here a few minutes before the first cruiser, you don't know the exact time. I was closer when I got your call, nothing suspect there. I peeled enough plastic back to see that the corpse wasn't Jackie's. By then, you'd flopped on your face in the blueberries and everything else is fuzzy. Trust me, they won't ask a lot of questions. The stones won't let them."

  "Shit they won't. DA tried to get the town to fire me. State cops won't talk to me on the radio, always just out of range when I transmit. MDEA and the Feds think I ratted out that drug raid over at Tom Pratt's, because Jackie was there and I'd heard ahead of time the raid was going down. That left 'professional courtesy' stinking like a week-old roadkill skunk. I turn up with a murder in the puckerbrush, you think they won't sniff it up one side and down the other? 'Specially if I'm the only one who can find it?"

  That flinty smell had returned, the first thing Alice had noticed when she got out of her car. "The stones own this place. They say what will happen and what will not. Trust them to protect you."

  Kate looked like she'd bitten a lemon. "Lying to cops. Interfering with a crime scene. I used to be a cop, dammit!"

  "Still are. You're just exactly the kind of cop that Stonefort wants. That's why the selectmen didn't fire you. And you aren't lying. Just not telling everything. Nobody ever does."

  Not that the town selectmen would ever fire the Haskell Witch's lover. All of them came from old Stonefort families. They knew. And even without that, "foreigners" like the DA could go to hell. If it came to a vote, more than half the town would decide to blow up the Salt Hay Bridge and ignore Sunrise County, ignore Maine, ignore the rest of the Boston States.

  Kate limped away, over to the clump of uniforms hovering next to the stone circle. Alice winced, sighed, and shook her head. Those wounds lingered. It seemed almost like Jackie had rubbed poison on the slugs before she fired. The kid had sucked life from her mother since before she was born, and now she continued from beyond the grave.

  If she had a grave.

  Wescott intercepted Kate, fancy folding aluminum clipboard in hand, got to get those forms filled in. She settled herself on one of the boulders, moving carefully, shoulders slumping. She still didn't bend very well. Then her back stiffened and her shoulders drew back as the land fed strength to her, free gift. That girl didn't believe in magic?

  Alice rubbed her eyes, shuddered, and opened them again, hoping the scene had changed. It hadn't. She'd seen this stone circle in a nightmare the House had brought her more than once. A nightmare of Kate standing behind that stone altar with a bronze knife in her hand, Kate dressed in some Medieval get-up of baggy handwoven wool trousers and pullover wadmal top and a garland of mistletoe around her straw blonde hair, and the sacrifice lying naked on the stone was also Kate.

  The House remembered things. The ghosts that haunted the House remembered things. Alice had never stood on this ridge before, but some ancestor had. Had seen sacrifices here, had seen blood soaking into that stone.

  And that scene was Kate. If Kate thought she had to do something, she did it. Whatever it cost her. You'd get farther trying to talk gravity into giving up.

  Another uniform split from the group by the stones and headed across the field, brown and tan instead of blue-gray, a sheriff's deputy. Questions for Alice. She made a show of gathering up her gear and repacking the crash bag, slow, precise, setting things so she wouldn't have to search the next time she needed nanoseconds. Stripped off her gloves. Tucked them away for bio-waste disposal. Tobacco stink invaded her space, another smoker, cigars this time. Cheap cigars, rum-soaked crooks. Alice looked up.

  Andy Page, she knew him from the ambulance and crash scenes, a boy from Winter Cove on the mainland. Not "local" but not "from away." The clipboard hung loose in his left hand, backside up. Not open for business.

  "Kate going to be okay?"

  "Yeah. She really thought that was Jackie. Just saw the blonde hair through the plastic, saw how long the body was. Freaked."

  "Still no word on her kid?"

  "Nada."

  He glanced around, as if checking the distance to other ears. "Look, off the record, most of the force thinks the DA is full of shit. We know Kate. If she'd found out about the dope, she'd have busted her own kid. Cuffed her and stuffed her and dumped her at the jail. She's that kind of cop. Tell her that."

  "Thanks. I will." The District Attorney thought she was a native because she'd been born in Portland. That tended to get the locals' backs up. Hell, that was barely in the same galaxy as Stonefort.

  The deputy muttered something that could have been "Boston bitch." Then he lifted his clipboard. Back on duty. "When did you arrive at the scene?"

  "Best I can say is, less than five minutes after I got her call. I was already headed down through Grants' Corners, coming home from work."

  "Did you see anything unusual, any tracks or other evidence?"

  Alice rolled her eyes. "Unusual, like a body dumped in the middle of the field? Sorry. Not unless you count the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

  Page blinked, then seemed to get the Sherlock Holmes reference.

  Alice nodded. "I didn't see any wheel tracks in the field. Checked before I pulled over to the side, to make sure I didn't mess up evidence. I saw Kate's foot trail through the dry grass and blueberries. One trail going in, none coming out. She'd left the grass bent in the direction she walked. Nothing else."

  He frowned at that. "Can you give me the exact time you got here?"

  She waved down at the bottom of the field, at her rusted-out Subaru wagon parked on a patch of ledge. "My car clock hasn't worked in maybe five years, and I left my watch at Sunrise. Got blood all over it, that wreck up on Connors' Hill." All true statements. She had about a dozen watches, identical fifteen-buck Casios, including two more in the bag. But he didn't need to know that.

  He made a note, then the clipboard dropped again. Semaphore signals. "The Collins kid going to make it?"

  Alice made a face. "Yeah. But taking five seconds to buckle her seat belt could have saved her a year of surgery and rehab. And her left eye."

  He winced and then shook his head with a wry smile. Cops and EMTs spent too much time at crash scenes. They really got tired of people who sat on their seat belts.

  God, I'm tired. Just got off two eight-hour shifts, back to back and snatching naps on a gurney in the corner, and now this. She opened her eyes again and looked up.

  The deputy shook his head in sympathy, the bond of combat vets crouching in the same foxhole. His clipboard came up again, and the pen waited.

  "Any idea why she called you in?" r />
  As if he didn't know. "We share a house. She moved in with me after we both got shot. We take care of each other. She can't bend over, I can't lift either arm above my shoulders. Between the two of us, we can reach all the kitchen cupboards." And between the two of them, they might be able to let Caroline fly back out to school in Arizona in another month or so. Alice knew the girl had other things to do besides cook and clean up for her doddering aunt. Like grad school and her thesis.

  "Did you recognize the corpse?"

  "Don't think I've ever seen her before. Best guess, a runaway. Hair looks like a city job. Nobody around here does that kind of cut. Maybe drug scene, maybe prostitute. Too old, too big for kiddie porn." She didn't mention the piercings and the ink.

  The deputy nodded, her guesses echoing his own thoughts. Outside trouble, city trouble, Naskeag Falls or even Boston, dumped back here in the puckerbrush for the clamdigger hicks to solve. He filled out a few more blanks in the form, snapped his clipboard shut, and glanced over at Kate still talking and sitting on her rock.

  "Take care of her. Okay? That trooper has a ramrod up his ass. I'll try to pry him loose."

  And then he walked away, almost marched, radiating an air of Professional Police Officer. Alice shook her head. Surprising how macho men like the deputies were much more tolerant of lesbian or bi women than they were of gay men. Put a fag in Kate's position, they'd make life pure hell for him or kill him outright. Instead, Kate was just one of the boys.

  Probably didn't hurt that she could squash any one of them at arm-wrestling. Or could have, before she took two bullets.

  Alice zipped her bag shut, slapped the side pockets to set the Velcro, and hauled herself upright. She gritted her teeth against the ache throbbing deep under her left shoulder blade. One 9mm slug in the back could ruin your whole day. Or life.