“Be careful, Acelina.”
We hang up, and I speed to the morgue. Technically, I’m not responding to the call. Stolen bodies are all kinds of fucked up, but it’s not what I deal with. Though tonight, I need to find out more.
The morgue owner is inside with several officers, going over the security cameras. I stand behind them and watch, slowly going over the footage. There are exterior cameras on all the doors, along with one in the hall outside the room the body was stolen from.
Three minutes of footage are missing. The screen goes black, and when the picture comes back, the front doors of the funeral home are wide open.
“Ballsy,” I mutter, shaking my head. Whoever stole the body didn’t seem to be worried about getting caught. And leaving the doors wide open like that…it’s either a rookie mistake or done on purpose to get someone’s attention.
“And the alarm never went off?” one of the officers asks.
“No,” the owner says, shaking his head. Thin black hair is combed over his forehead, in a similar fashion to the dead guy’s. I bet he was the one who styled it, and I distantly wonder if he thinks it’s weird to style dead people’s hair like his.
“It went off when I stepped inside. We have motion sensors. I just don’t understand.” He looks at us, expecting answers. “You heard the guy from the alarm company. They didn’t detect a single disturbance. How is that possible?”
“How did you know the door was open?” I ask. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“The wife thinks I stopped smoking,” he admits guiltily. “I go out every night for a cigarette. I guess my cover’s blown now.”
His fingernails on his right hand are yellowed, and he smells like smoke. I’m sure his wife knows he never stopped.
I step away from the computer screen and look around. The entire place is stuffy, with bouquets of plastic flowers placed in every corner and red-and-black patterned carpet that was last updated before I was born.
There was nothing significant about the body stolen. Mr. McGregor’s service is set for tomorrow, and “the usual turnout” is expected. He was seventy-three when he died of cancer, which he’d been battling for the last ten years. A retired school teacher, beloved by his late wife and children. I can’t see any sort of immediate connection to the House of Horrors downtown.
And seeing his ghost? That makes even less sense, though nothing about ghosts makes sense to me.
Whoever broke in and stole the body is good. They left no fingerprints, no scratch marks on the locks. They slipped in and out, completely unnoticed by the cameras and the motion sensors.
I spend an hour combing over the place, walking up and down the path from the morgue to the front door over and over again.
And I find nothing.
Instructing one of the officers to check nearby buildings for cameras that might have picked up on something, I head back out, phoning in an order of four large pepperoni pizzas to one of the only places around here open this late at night.
I’m yawning by the time I pull onto the gravel driveway of my large brick estate. I park and get out, going around to the passenger side to grab the food.
“You got pizza?” Thomas’s voice cuts through the night a second before his feet hit the earth.
If I couldn’t sense his presence a moment before he spoke, I would have startled. His arms fold around my waist, pulling me away from the car. I spin in his arms, hooking mine around his neck. He brings his head down, kissing the side of my neck.
“You smell weird,” he says, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. His tongue lashes out, making me shiver in the warm, humid air.
“That would be from the funeral home.” I arch my back, pressing my core into him, and run a hand down his bare chest. He folds his wings closer to his back, moving his head up to kiss me before pulling away and taking the pizza from the car.
“Do they always smell like that?”
“The ones I’ve been in do.” I go up the stone steps and open the front door. Light from the TV in the living room spills into the foyer, but it isn’t enough for me to see where I’m going. I take off my shoes, then slide my hand up and down the wall as I feel for the light switch.
I take the pizza into the living room, where Hasan and Gilbert are glued to the TV. I swear I’m going to have to set a timer on that thing. Leaving three boxes on the coffee table, I take one outside onto the back porch and wait for Jacques to swoop down from the top of the roof.
“Acelina,” he says, landing without a sound. My grimoire is in his hand, along with a pen and another notebook. “I trust everything went all right.”
“As all right as a murder investigation could go. Only there wasn’t anyone there who was murdered.” I sit on the edge of the porch, folding my legs up underneath me. Jacques leans against the stone railing, impressive wings held out slightly behind him.
“Why were you there, then?”
“The whole thing was weird, and weird is kind of my thing.”
