She had too much to worry about already and too many secrets to keep. She couldn’t afford to get involved in a murder. And some paranoid part of her wondered if this was all some elaborate setup, if Turner had found out about the jobs she was doing for Eitan.
But her choices were to go home or walk through the fire, and Alex didn’t really know how to not get burned. She texted Turner, and a minute later, the front door opened.
He waved her inside. Turner looked good, but he always did. The man knew how to dress and his khaki, summer-weight suit was all sharp lines and clean creases.
“You look like you escaped from juvie,” he said when he saw her Lethe House sweats.
“I’m getting my cardio in. I jogged here.”
“Really?”
“No. What’s going on?”
Turner shook his head. “Probably an ordinary death that has nothing to do with … hocus-pocus. But after the buffoonery you got up to last year, I wanted an expert opinion.”
“I got up to solving crime, Turner. What did you get up to?”
“I’m already sorry I called you.”
“Makes two of us.”
Inside, the lobby was quiet and dark, lit only by the streetlights filtering through the windows. They took an elevator to the third floor, and Alex followed Turner down a stark hallway bright with overhead fluorescents. She saw a gurney and two men in blue windbreakers from the coroner’s office leaning against the wall, absorbed in their phones.
They were waiting to take the body.
“Where is everyone?” Alex asked. She couldn’t help but think about the circus that had surrounded Tara’s murder.
“Right now it’s looking like natural causes, so we’re trying to keep this quiet.”
Turner led her into a small, messy office with a big window that probably had a nice view during the day. Now it was just a glossy black mirror, and the reflection gave Alex the uneasy feeling she’d slipped into a different version of her life. She’d done stints in juvie and it was only dumb luck she’d never gotten jammed up when she was an adult. Seeing herself in her sad sweats beside Turner in his fine suit made her feel small, and she didn’t like it.
“Who is she?” Alex asked.
The woman was slumped at her desk, as if she’d laid her head down on her extended arm to take a short nap. Her long salt-and-pepper hair lay over one shoulder in a braid, and her glasses hung from a colorful chain around her neck.
“Were you at a bonfire?” Turner asked. “You smell like…” He hesitated, and Alex knew it was because whatever scent was on her was not quite smoke.
“Ritual stuff,” she said and predictably Turner scowled.
But he was still a detective. “It’s not Thursday.”
“I’m trying to brush up before the semester really gets going.”
He looked like he knew she was lying, and that was fine. She didn’t have any interest in explaining that she and Dawes had attempted to yank Darlington out of hell with what could only be described as unexpected results. Turner didn’t even know they were trying.
“Someone found her here?” she asked.
“Her name is Marjorie Stephen, she’s a tenured psych professor. Nearly twelve years with the department, runs one of the labs. The night cleaner found the body and called me.”
“Called you? Not 9-1-1?”
He shook his head. “I know him from the neighborhood, friend of my mom’s. He didn’t want trouble with the cops.”
“Neither do I.”
Turner raised a brow. “Then act like it.”
Every contrary bone in Alex’s body wanted to tell him to fuck off.
“Why am I here?”
“Have a look. Crime scene’s come and gone.”
Alex wasn’t really sure she wanted to. She’d seen way too many corpses since she’d joined Lethe, and this was the second in three days.
She walked around the body, giving it a wide berth, trying to avoid that cold absence. “Jesus,” she gasped when she reached the other side. The woman’s eyes were wide and staring, their pupils a milky gray. “What did that? Poison?”
“We don’t know yet. Could be nothing. An aneurysm, a stroke.”
“That’s not what happens when you have a stroke.”
“No,” Turner admitted. “I’ve never seen it.”
Alex leaned in, wary. “There’s…”
“No smell yet. We’re estimating time of death sometime between 8 and 10 p.m. tonight, but we’ll know more after the autopsy.”
Alex tried not to show her relief. Some part of her had wondered if Dawes was right and their ritual had been the cause of this. She knew stray magic could do real damage. But this woman had died hours later.
