They’d entered sometime late last night or early this morning, judging by the number, and by the fact that some of their eggs had already hatched.The gossamer-fine trails they’d left in the air had been picked up by the spell, forming an almost solid, ghostly drapery between the body and the broken pane, as if delicate sheers were fluttering inward in a soft breeze.It was strangely pretty, and it wasn’t the only thing.
A few radiant moths fluttered across the beam of sunlight, ghostly rats scurried along the baseboards, and the memory of an owl, which should have been just a pale smudge on the air because of the rapidity of its transit, gleamed in exquisite detail over by a counter, its wings outspread and a mouse in its beak.
The accuracy and precision of the spell depended on how often something had been here and how long it had lingered.The longer the better, as it shed more skin cells, hair follicles, and powder down in the case of the bird, that way.The owl showed up as it had a nest on the shelves that used to hold cartons of cigarettes before this place went out of business, and had been in and out so often feeding its young as to leave an imprint.
“Ooh, look!Babies!”Kimmie said, spying the half-grown chicks, who were watching us through huge, reflective eyes.
“We’re not here for birds,” Caleb reminded her.
There was little sign of the two war mages who had taken a brief look this morning and then noped the hell out, just a few shimmery outlines on the air, blurred by their motion.And even less of the magical scavengers who had spied the body from the doorway after noticing theOcculto,which had been so bad that it attracted attention instead of repelling it.But the spell did provide one piece of useful information: a host of fingerprints spotted the landscape like gleaming polka dots.
Caleb summoned them, and they peeled off the shelving and walls and floated into the air, flushing a rainbow of different colors to differentiate the various individuals who had left them behind.And there had been many recent visitors to the long-defunct grocery store.Too many.
“Drugs?”Caleb guessed, thinking the same thing.
“What?”Kimmie asked, trying to look like she was paying attention to something other than the chicks.
“Something in here was a big draw,” he explained, as the prints drifted over and solidified, waiting for their turn to tuck themselves into the evidence case.Most were fresh, but some had the half-decayed look of ones left days ago.Somebody had been here for a while and met with others, yet the prints were the only sign, with not even the blurred outline of a body that habitual presence should have created.
Caleb noticed and glanced at me, and I shook my head.I didn’t know, either.The only other time I’d seen something like that had been a drug seller who’d appeared as a column of solid, glowing white, perched on a chair in an alley at the Jersey Shore, while the people who bought from him had been barely whisps on the air.
But the sea breeze had been responsible for that, clearing out the evidence as fast as the buyers shed it, as well as the brevity of their visits.Leaving only the dealer’s hours-long presence as truly discernible.Yet there was no breeze in here, and even the perp, who must have been bent over his victim for a while, judging by the state of the corpse, wasn’t so much as a smudge.
“The ceiling collapse?”Caleb guessed because that must have happened after the crime, as the debris partly covered the body, and could have scattered some of the evidence.But all of it?
“Or a scouring spell,” I said.“With the ceiling used to cover it up.”
“Yeah, but why use a scouring spell to clean up the crime scene and leave the body, the biggest piece of evidence of all?”
“Point.”
“You know, the idea of teaching usually involves telling the rest of us what’s going on,” Dimas said sourly.
“There aren’t as many traces here as we’d expected to find,” Caleb explained, and didn’t elaborate.
But I decided that Dimas had a point, and castAbsconditus,both to give us more to work with and toprovide a lesson for the kids.I knew from my own training that crime scenes tended to focus the mind, at least until you became somewhat numb to them, and the instruction I most vividly remembered had taken place standing over a body.Use what you have, I thought, and went into lecture mode.
“Human police used to tell their recruits that there are only three ways to catch a perp.He takes something from a crime scene that can later be used to identify him; he leaves something behind with the same result; or someone witnesses him committing the crime and talks.That definition has had to be expanded somewhat with the rise of cybercrime and increased surveillance, but it often still holds.A digital footprint is still a footprint, and facial recognition is still recognition.
“For magical crimes, though, there are additional options.One of them is the reveal spell you just saw, which we discussed the other day.It’s usually employed first on a scene because it paints a sketch of recent activity: how many people were there, where the locus of action was—”
“I think we know where the locus of action was,” Aki said dryly, pointing at the body.
“You’re assuming,” I chided.“Never assume.The spell can detect activity in a corner or under some stairs where it shouldn’t be, indicating trap doors, hidden rooms, or even warded spaces, as it sees through most wards.But some enchantments see even more and are cast second, like peeling back the layers of an onion to reveal the whole story.One of the most powerful of those secondary spells isAbsconditus,which shows any magic used on the premises recently.”
I’d expected to end on a flourish, with the spell, which took a moment to do its thing, lighting up the room even more brilliantly.But my visual aid fizzled.No ghostly spells streaked the gloom, no burnt-out charms blazed briefly back to life, and no wards lit up areas in faint but discernible ways.
With one small, scattered exception.
“This is powerful?”Aki said, confused, but was ignored because I was busy shielding my hand and pawing through the fallen ceiling material to retrieve something shining softly through the mess.
There were ten or fifteen somethings in all, but even when I pulled them free, I had no idea what they were.Small, round, wrinkled, brownish things, hard to the touch, and dusty.I rubbed my finger over one, which cleaned it off, but didn’t help much with identification.Could be some kind of wood; the guys in the lab would have to help on this one.
Caleb didn’t look impressed when I put them in an evidence bag.“Weak-ass bought magic,” he sneered.“Probably off some kind of protection amulet.Everybody’s wearing them these days.”
“But no sign of anything else,” I frowned.
“Not even the magic we exhale with every breath,” he agreed.“If I had to guess, I’d say there weren’t any magic users on the premises, at least not lately.”
