I could apologize. Or not. “Yeah, I know I slapped you. You knock me over and I’ll do it again.Pay attention. Oh. And jist so you’uns—you—know,deathenergies are more powerful in this office than anywhere else in the barn. You know who the death witch is yet?”
FireWind dropped the glare and shook his head no, then yes.
“Is that a maybe?”
FireWind chuffed a happy sound, let his tongue loll out one side of his mouth. He gave me a doggy yes and began to snuffle all around the office, up on the cabinet, under the table, shoving my chair around.
“There’s a camera.” I pointed up. “You agreeable with me climbing up there and getting it down?”
He chuffed again and whirled from the office, back into the barn.
I interpreted that as a yes, but to cover myself, I made photos of the camera and texted Tandy what I was planning to do. While I waited for a reply from HQ, I hunted for a ladder and found one leading up into the loft. I brought it into the office, propped it against the rafters, and braced the rubber-coated feet. If the ladder somehow slipped, I’d take a nasty fall, but that wasn’t likely. I climbed the ladder to get a good look at the metal frame holding the camera in place, and determined that I’d need a screwdriver. I climbed back down and rummaged through the tack room until I found a toolbox, which I brought back to the office. I stuck two sizes of Phillips head screwdrivers into a pocket, pulled off my work jacket, and unfolded a medium-sized evidence collection bag from my pocket. I checked my cell for permission to remove the camera.
Tandy’s response was,This is covered under current search warrants. If MC is present, call and I’ll walk you through downloading it.
“MC? Memory card. Excellent,” I said, setting the cell phone down, “because I’m way better with a screwdriver than I am with computer stuff.” I pulled on nitrile gloves, climbed the ladder, reached for the camera, and got a jolt ofdeath and decay. I nearly did fall, and that woulda proved to Occam that I couldn’t do my job. “Dagnabbit,” I cursed.
I shook my death-cursed fingertips, which were hidden inside blue nitrile gloves. The magics on the camera were much stronger than the other ones in the barn, and even stronger than the ones in the coffeemaker. Had the death witch put this up? If so, why wasn’t it disintegrating? There were cobwebs all over one side of it, so it had been here a while. “Death energies are really strange,” I muttered. And then I realized that the clean side was cracked, just a bit. Thedeath and decaywas only on one side. And there were smudges on the clean side, like fingerprints.
Carefully, not touching anything I could avoid, I disconnected the camera from its supports, traced the electrical line to the lighting fixture, and yanked it loose. I carried my prize back down. All without proving Occam right, that I needed a minder. “Stupid cat,” I whispered.
I was talking to myself. I remembered my mama talking to herself, under her breath, when I was a young’un. Looking back, I recognized it as a stress reaction. I took a deep breath and forced my shoulders to relax.
Back in the office, I studied the matte brown camera boxing. It had been spray-painted to look just like the barn rafters. And wasn’t that all kinds a sneaky. Finding and removing the memory card was easier than I expected, and thedeath and decaywas less powerful now for some reason. Maybe because I had unplugged it? Could it run on electricity? Had an old affected memory card been removed and replaced with a new one recently, like when the woman had been killed? Had she been killed because she had walked in on the practitioner working on the camera?
Will it ruin my tablet?I asked Tandy.
Probably. But if tablet dies as direct result of case, you can turn it in and requisition new one. Brand-new one. With more functionality.
I sighed. Thought about it. And typed,OK. You tell FireWind.
Deal.
With Tandy’s help, I figured out how to attach the memory card to my tablet, which came equipped with multiple ports. I began downloading and sending the contents of the camera to HQ. There were a lot of photos, all using unencrypted standard digital photo software, according to Tandy. The memory card hadn’t been replaced recently, and it was going to take a long time to transfer all the files. I sent a text with my thanks and a cute dancing-tree emoji to Tandy.Easy as pie,I informed the office.
On my laptop, I sent in my thoughts about the death of the woman found in the barn, and the timing with the reappearance of thedeath and decayin the basement and finding it here.
I closed the laptop, left my tablet working for me, and carried my paper and pen into the night. Once again, I wondered how law enforcement had ever managed to investigate anything without computers.
Beyond the barn lights, all around the barn, I touched the earth in dozens of places, paying careful attention to the locations I had read on the first night. Unexpectedly, things had changed and not in a way I might have thought. Within an hour, my arm was aching with the cold of death magics and I was longing for a stint in the null room. However, while I was moving ladders and breaking into cameras, T. Laine had moved Ingrid’s body into the portable null room and then pulled the trailer into the pasture. She and Occam were shoveling Adrian’s Hell and the ground under him inside it too. There wouldn’t be room for me anytime soon.
Back in the barn manager’s office, I checked myself for ticks, which I hadn’t thought to do before now, and sat at the table to write up reports. The memory card was still delivering up its secrets, and the barn was quiet, peaceful. As I sat, three horses raced into the barn, tore through the main area, whirled around several times, and raced back out, leaving the whole place in a choking dust. Waving the dust away, I got up and discovered that someone had left one gate in an odd configuration, allowing the geldings into another pasture. “Stupid horses. You should be asleep.”
I looked up at the rafters and couldn’t spot any cats. Maybe because of the remaining stench. Back at the table, I drew out a rough sketch of the house and grounds and marked the places I had touched, giving them numbers between one and ten, with one being the least strongdeath and decayreading and ten being the strongest. It was clear that the magics had been somehow reinforced and were bleeding out from multiple places.
Not sure what I was seeing, I walked into the pasture, toward Occam and T. Laine, lighting my way with my flashlight, reading the earth here and there with a fingertip. I determined that thedeath and decaymagics were not particularly strong this far away from the house and barn. I assumed at that point that Adrian’s Hell had spent time in the barn and been contaminated there. Or spent time with the death-magic user there. But then, horses are mobile. He could have come into contact with the energies most any time. That was the problem with death. The energies got out of control when they were used and spread to the ones the user loved, like my bloodlust could do if I wasn’t very, very careful. If the maker of thedeath and decayhadhidden her power from the world, controlled her magics all her life, and then suddenly started using them, they might now be impossible to restrain. It was like letting the djinn out of the bottle—impossible to get the evil thing back in.
Back at the barn, all the photos had been downloaded to my tablet and sent to HQ. And my tablet had died deader than a doornail. I sat again, thinking. Calm settled in the air. A slow rain began to fall, whispering down, which was going to make moving the dead horse more difficult. Tree frogs began calling, a raucous concert of mating. A horse neighed in the distance. My chair creaked softly.
I might be in a griping mood, but the quiet night was bringing back calming, soothing memories of my youth: the wind moving over grasses, the stamp of hooves, the rare horsey snort, the smell of hay and feed, the bark of dogs and clucking of chickens, the sound and wet feel of rain. Happy memories of time in the Nicholson greenhouse, feeding the basils, making them grow. Not everything about the church was a bad memory and it was good when I could overlay the bad with something wonderful. I rebooted the laptop and amended reports.
By the time midnight approached, I desperately needed sleep. And I heard footsteps approaching. The cadence didn’t belong to Occam or FireWind. My breath hitched.
TWELVE
Moving slowly, I eased my weapon from its shoulder holster and slid it to my lap, pointing above my thighs and at the door.
“Hey! Who lef’ da ligh’sss on?” a voice slurred. “Who’s here?”
