Bone Driven Read online

  Unable to fall back asleep, I dialed Flavie, a classmate from high school who’d started a weekend lawn care business that had exploded into her adult nine-to-five empire. Chipper as always, she answered on the first ring. “Hey, Luce. I heard about your dad. I hope he’s feeling better.”

  “He’s making progress. I’m hopeful.” The stock answers annoyed me for no good reason, considering I was the one giving them, but I chalked it up to lack of caffeine. “I was hoping you could help me out with a weed problem.”

  “Sure thing.” Lawnmowers buzzed in the background. “You know I dig landscaping.”

  I paid her the obligatory chuckle before getting down to the reason for my call. “There’s a patch of valerian growing in my yard under that big oak in front.” She cut our lawn when we let things get out of hand, so she knew the property well. “Turns out I’m crazy allergic to it. Do you think you could pull it out and comb the yard to make sure there are no more clusters growing?”

  “No problem. We’ll get you squared away.”

  “Thanks.”

  After ending the call, I joined the breakfast in progress in the kitchen. Dad was sitting at the table, and I flung my arms around his shoulders before delivering a smacking kiss to his cheek. The chatter fell off a cliff after my uncharacteristic show of physical affection, but everyone had recovered by the time I plopped down in the chair beside him.

  There was no way to tell them that, thanks to the bond with my coterie, I was healing that disconnect between touch and sensation. Not enough to make me normal, maybe, but enough that I could show people who mattered that I cared in a way that had felt unnatural until other charun came into my life.

  Dad sipped from his mug, casual as you please. “How’s your young man?”

  I almost blurted Cole? before I remembered he had misinterpreted Wu dropping me off as the end of a date thanks to the dress. “We’re just friends.” Minus the friendship. “You don’t have to show him your shovel collection. Promise.”

  Uncle Harold grunted once, and Dad returned the guttural disagreement.

  I almost felt sorry for Wu.

  Almost.

  My phone rang as I accepted the empty mug Aunt Nancy passed me from her place setting, and I elected to ignore the caller in favor of soaking up a peaceful morning with family. I muted the ringer, poured myself coffee from the pot on the table, and doctored it up just the way I liked it. The first sip scalded my tongue, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t until I set down my drink that I noticed all eyes on me.

  “Go on,” Dad urged. “You might as well answer.”

  “The job will just keep calling,” Uncle Harold agreed. “At least find out what it is you’re avoiding.”

  “Whatever it is, it can keep until after she’s had breakfast.” Aunt Nancy pushed her chair back and headed to the stove where all the breakfast fixings had been covered by paper towels. She mounded eggs, bacon, and pancakes on my plate. Usually she only cooked big breakfasts on Sundays, but I wasn’t about to complain about my good fortune. “You’re skin and bones, tater tot. You need to eat more.”

  Between her and Rixton, I was far more skin than bones. Living here a week already required me sucking in my gut to fasten my uniform pants. Much longer, and I would have to file requisition paperwork for the next size up.

  “Rixton feeds me a steady diet of donuts and iced coffee, and Sherry sneaks me frogurt.” I hadn’t been back to Hannigan’s since the night Cole wrote his hefty check for damages, but she knew what I liked. “I don’t think you have to worry about me withering away.”

  “Junk food doesn’t count,” she said, adding extra bacon. “You need to eat real food.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I accepted the plate, bowed my head while she murmured a quick prayer, then shoveled in as much food as possible before the vibration in my pocket guilted me into answering. It was during my second helping of bacon that the knock came at the door. I pushed back my chair. “I’ll get it.”

  “Sit yourself down.” Aunt Nancy pointed her tongs at me. “I’ll get it. You finish eating.”

  She didn’t have to tell me twice.

  “Oh, hello, John. Would you like to join us for breakfast?” Her voice carried down the hall. “We’re just finishing up, but there’s plenty left over.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, but no.” He cleared his throat. “I hate to break up a family meal, but I need to speak with Luce.”

  “Come on in.” Footsteps preceded them into the kitchen, and Aunt Nancy stepped aside to reveal my guest. “Your partner’s here, tater tot. You can take your conversation to the living room.” She stuffed a paper towel crammed with bacon into his hand. “We’ll stay in here and give you privacy.”

  Rixton beamed. “Mrs. Trudeau, if I wasn’t already married —”

  “She would still be mine,” Uncle Harold finished for him. “And don’t you forget it.”

  Chuckling, I guided my chastised partner into the living room and waited for him to get to the point. “Boris Ivashov is awake.” Four pieces of bacon later, he wiped his fingers clean. “We’ve got a short visitation window if you want to bring him flowers.” He crumpled his napkin into a ball. “I understand if you’d rather I handled this solo.”

  All the delicious food Aunt Nancy had spent the last hour coaxing me to eat threatened to spill.

  “I have to go back there sometime.” I had managed to avoid stepping inside Madison Memorial since I signed myself out against medical advice and hitched a ride to the swamp on the back of a dragon. Sadly, that streak appeared to be ending today. “It might as well be now.”

  Rixton left me to dress and grab my things. Aunt Nancy pressed more bacon into our hands on our way out, and I didn’t blink when I noticed Rixton had already sat a box of a dozen classic glazed donuts in my seat. I moved them aside, climbed in, and passed them over as needed during the ride. I was grateful for the iced coffee he left me in the cup holder since breakfast kept sneaking up the back of my throat.

  Paranoia that War had planted more than one of her coterie on the staff at Madison Memorial kept my nape prickling as we crossed the parking lot. Unlike on previous visits to the hospital, I walked right through the sliding glass front doors with Rixton. We both knew our way around, so locating Ivashov’s room only required finessing his number from the receptionist.

  I entered the room ahead of Rixton, eager to escape the nurses lingering in the hall, and approached the bed. The patient had seen better days. The combination of blood loss, white bandages, and strain had sapped the color from him. He opened his eyes when we entered the room, identified us as cops, and managed to pale even further. But a nominee for Madame Tussauds, he was not. Despite his wan complexion, this guy was no dripping wax sculpture.

  Culberson must have been mistaken about the severity of Ivashov’s injuries.

  “Boris Ivashov?” Rixton waited for confirmation, proving he was weighing Culberson’s account against the wan figure reclining in bed too. “We’re here to ask you some questions about the fire.”

  “I want to help,” he rasped, “but the last thing I remember was loading the dishwasher.”

  Rixton made a few notes. “Have you ever used a drip torch?”

  “No.” Wide-eyed, he glanced between us. “Are they saying that’s what started the fire?”

  “No.” I shifted my weight forward. “They’re saying you started the fire.”

  “I’ve worked for Lacy and Peter Culberson for a decade. Why would I set fire to my livelihood?”

  “That’s what we’re here to determine,” Rixton said. “You’re not giving us much to go on.”

  “Atonement requires an acknowledgment of wrongdoing. How can a person ignorant of their own guilt not be considered innocent?”

  I shot Rixton a look that warned this guy might have a few screws loose.

  “You understand the burden of guilt.” Ivashov studied me. “Don’t you, Officer Boudreau?”

  A chill skittered up my spine. “We didn’t intr
oduce ourselves.”

  “You’re wearing long sleeves to cover the markings on your arms,” he reasoned. “I’ve read enough papers and watched enough TV to recognize you.” He tapped his chest. “You’re also wearing a nametag.”

  Reaching up on reflex, I ran my fingers across the bar of brassy metal, feeling the engraved grooves of my name.

  “I got this, Boudreau.” The genial warmth usually found in Rixton’s voice cooled. “Wait for me in the hall.”

  Liquid syllables poured from Ivashov’s lips, tugging on threads of forgotten memories, and I moved a step closer as though proximity might spark comprehension.

  Understanding the charun language was beyond me, but I would recognize it spoken anywhere, and hearing it now tilted the floor beneath my feet. Suspecting War had a hand in this was one thing, but here was proof our arsonist was a charun wearing a skin suit. That made Ivashov a murderer for all that there had been no bodies at the crime scene.

  “Out,” Rixton snapped. “Now.”

  Over his shoulder, Ivashov held my gaze and switched back to English. “I won’t harm him. I give you my word.”

  For some reason, I believed him. That didn’t mean I was going very far. “I’ll be right outside.”

  After ducking into the hall, I dialed up Cole and leaned against the wall. The reward for mashing my phone against my ear was a wince as he barked a gruff hello. We hadn’t spoken since the dragon catnapped on Rixton’s roof, not even to brainstorm, but his curt greeting shook me.

  “We have a problem. I’m at Madison Memorial with Rixton.” I checked the hall for perked ears. “We came to ask our surviving arsonist a few questions, and he popped off in the language you guys use. What do you call that anyway?”

  “Otillian,” he answered. “All conquered worlds are required to learn the fundamentals. It’s a universal language among charun in the same sense as English is for humans.”

  I should have expected his answer, but it was a gut-punch all the same.

  “Miller is in the lobby,” he continued. “Once you and Rixton leave, he’ll go up and assess the situation.”

  “Okay, that works. I’m going to grab Rixton and we’ll —”

  A woman’s voice, husky from sleep, murmured in the background. Cole must have covered the receiver with his palm, because I couldn’t make out what he said to her, only that the words were spoken in a gentle tone, more tender than any he’d used with me.

  I wondered if I had woken him. I wondered if he was in his room, if she was in his bed. I wondered if War had been wrong about him being faithful to Conquest, to me. And then I wondered if there would ever come a day when I stopped caring what Cole did during the hours and days when he wasn’t with me.

  “I have to go.” I ended the call and ignored the phone when it rang a heartbeat later. I was saved from myself when Rixton exited the hospital room. “Get anything useful out of him after I left?”

  “All he wanted to talk about was you.” His worried stare pinned me to the spot. “He must be one of the fanatics. Seeing you excited him too much for him to be of any use.” His expression shifted into a glare. “Don’t apologize. I see the words forming on your lips. We had no idea this guy was a fruitcake.” He paused. “Okay, so we had a pretty good idea he was candied cherry crazy going in, he did light up a restaurant then pull up a chair, but there was no way to know you’d be his trigger. We’re done here. You ready to go?”

  No, I wasn’t. I didn’t have much choice, though. “Yeah.”

  Ungluing my heels from the linoleum took me so long Rixton glanced back over his shoulder. I wanted to hang around and wait on Miller so we could take another crack at Ivashov, but I couldn’t think of a single excuse that would fly. Ivashov had tweaked Rixton’s nose by making his interrogation all about me, and Rixton would no more let me in that room alone than he would toss Nettie into a tank full of piranhas.

  The two halves of me kept brushing up against each other these days, and the friction was brutal.

  Leading a duplicitous life wasn’t anything new. I had always concealed aspects of my nature in order to fake being normal. There had always been the mask I showed the world, and the face I kept hidden.

  These days I was elevating navel gazing to all new heights, and the mask I had worn so faithfully had started slipping. I was peering around its comforting edges at others like me, learning more about my new normal, discovering ways to sink deeper into my own skin. The idea of losing an ounce of my humanity terrified me almost as much as embracing the charun side of my heritage, but in order to remain who I was, I first had to understand who I had been.

  Reaching that new plateau of enlightenment came at a price, and for me, that cost meant leaving behind parts of my old life to embrace a new one. For the first time since Kapoor neatly boxed me into joining his cause, I looked to the future with a smidgen of anticipation.

  There would be fewer lies to remember once I worked with other charun, and I wouldn’t have to break my brain in pursuit of two possible outcomes – the human-friendly one and the truth. Then again, that duality of thinking might always be part of my reality. There would always be two answers going forward, the seen and the unseen, and I would forever be seeking what lurked within the latter. It was part of my nature.

  We must have passed Miller in the lobby, but I didn’t spot him. Ignoring the stab of disappointment at being sidelined, I got in the car with Rixton and left Miller to handle coterie business. He would update me later, and that would have to be enough. With the case against Timmons still making headlines, and Jane Doe a question mark in the public’s collective consciousness, I couldn’t afford the extra scrutiny right now.

  Rixton got a call before we made it out of the parking lot. I didn’t pay much attention to his conversation until I saw he had turned left, heading into town, instead of right, putting us on the road home. I waited for him to finish before raising my eyebrows. “What’s up?”

  “That was Summers. There’s a small problem with your request for the autopsy reports.”

  “What kind of problem?” I checked my phone to see if she’d emailed me, but I came up empty. She had reached over my head to Rixton, which annoyed me beyond reason. Men passing info along to male colleagues was nothing new, but it sucked to see a woman reinforcing those negative behaviors. Summers and I hadn’t crossed paths enough to qualify as friends, but we were friendly, or so I’d thought. “Can she not share them?”

  “The bodies are missing.”

  Jill Summers met us at a Waffle Iron off East County Line Road in nearby Ridgeland, the halfway point between her house and her office. She had secured a corner booth, and we piled on the bench opposite her. The waitress filled our mugs with coffee, her expression tightening when none of us ordered more, and she left us alone to pursue more lucrative tables.

  “I’m surprised to see you here, Boudreau.” She reached for a packet of artificial sweetener and managed to rip the thing in half with twitchy fingers. Fake sugar rained down on the table, and she gave up with a disgusted sigh. “I heard you were on vacation.”

  The annoyance beating under my skin quieted. “Who told you that?”

  “I’m crap with names.” She sipped her coffee black like the jolt might kick-start her brain and flagged the waitress down for a refill. Maybe too much caffeine explained the shakes. “Tall guy, early to mid-thirties. Asian. Black hair, brown eyes. A real looker. Dressed well. Slight accent.”

  Crap on a mother-effing stick. “Adam Wu?”

  “Yeah.” She snapped her fingers. “That sounds right.”

  Rixton swung his head toward me, his stare burning a hole through my right temple, but his question was for Summers. “What did he want?”

  “The same thing as you,” she said. “The coroner’s reports on the Orvis family.”

  “Did he happen to mention why he wanted them?” Rixton rubbed his thumb in the bowl of his spoon. “Who he works for?”

  “He works for All South Insurance.” She
shrugged. “The father, Timothy Orvis, is the beneficiary listed on all the policies. The couple was recently divorced, but they both lived in Madison. Greedy bastard must have cracked the whip on All South.”

  Rixton leaned forward. “What did you tell him?”

  “The same thing I’m telling you. I collected my evidence, MPD collected theirs, and then the bodies were loaded into a transport and taken to the coroner’s office for examination.” She swept errant granules off the table onto the floor. “They never arrived. I spoke with the coroner myself, and my call was the first she had heard about the Orvises. She checked with her staff, but no one had been told to expect burn victims. They scanned their logs. No one had checked out any of their transports, but the odometer on one vehicle read higher than its last check-in. There were enough miles to account for a trip out to the nursery and back with about fifteen miles for padding.”