James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-12-31 18:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | james hutchins, jd cartwright |
Fresh Eyes
Who: James, JD
What: Running Into Each at the Crime Scene (Witch Hunter Plot)
When: Around Christmas
Where: 4570 Churchfield Circle, Las Vegas, NV
Rating: Moderate Language, Descriptions of Violence
Places with memories didn’t get to James. Neither did anniversaries of bad things. Time and again, he’d go back to those spaces, or open the vault of his memories, take what he needed and leave. If he had to stay, he’d smudge away the energy and keep going. The only enemy was not being tough enough to grind his way past it. But standing outside his father’s house with an empty backpack on his shoulders, James found he had a hard time going inside.
He took off his helmet. Underneath, his hair was a wreck. The beard needed trimming. There was time to do it while he hung around an antiseptic-smelling hospital room, but he sorely lacked the motivation. So he was doing this instead: coming to Sam’s house to get things from home for the older man. A change of clothes, toiletries, items his dad would pack if he was leaving for a few days. And maybe, if he could get it past the watchful eyes of any cops hanging around, who had undoubtedly invaded every ounce of privacy Sam once had, some of his supplies.
There was crime tape on the side gate, his usual entrance, so James used his key on the front door and walked inside. He left his helmet and gloves at the coat rack.
Crime scenes fell into a variety of categories. From completely useless through to pristine. This one fell right smack in the middle. Messy, completely useless in the way of detailed evidence, and a waste of time when it came to finding anything that would be useful in court. Not that JD suspected this would end up anywhere near the court system.
He stood up from where he’d been crouched beside the fire pit in the back, straightening his right leg gingerly as he looked around the yard and back down at the pit and the wreckage around it. None of it was of much use, again, too many people, too much interference, nothing able to be confirmed as being ‘as it was’ when the victim and the resident exchanged whatever they exchanged in the lead up to one’s demise and the other’s injury.
From the small details JD could pick up, such as the one wine glass, he was surmising the ‘guest’, now deceased, was not there for a social visit, enjoying a drink with the resident. From the injuries on the ‘guest’, carved into his forearms, he was led to believe the two were both involved in the world that included creatures that generated ‘goop’. There was plenty of it there.
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, shrugging his right shoulder to get some more blood flowing through the joint, as he made his way back inside. The markers on the granite top of the island bench clearly indicated what the deceased’s skull had connected with, but JD couldn’t figure out just how the impact had occurred. The angles were wrong for it to have happened in either a fight or fall. He looked around the kitchen, looking for anything that might tell him how the skull had impacted, and shook his head. The old man couldn’t have physically pushed the kid hard enough, and that wouldn’t explain the angle. Which left him with a third party. A very strong third party. And one that didn’t leave human DNA. The lab had found nothing fresh, just another set of samples of the ‘goop’.
He was standing in the kitchen still looking around the walls and ceiling when he heard the front door open.
James came through to the entrance of the open common area, living room to his left, kitchen to his right, and stopped. The man didn’t take off running through the back door, so James’s money was on ‘supposed to be here’, even if he was wearing plain clothes instead of the uniform of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. He looked around for other faces and, seeing none, surmised that this was probably one of those married-to-the-job types, one who had been assigned to a very complicated case.
Feeling a wave of something like weariness, he dropped his key ring on the counter, far from the area of marked evidence. “I’m James Hutchins,” he said, figuring the man would be familiar with his name and, by now, the photo on his driver’s license and an old mugshot from his twenties. “I came by to get some things for Sam. You a detective?”
JD nodded, automatically taking his ID out and flipping it open, as he introduced himself. “You called it in,” he stated simply as he returned his wallet to his pocket.
“Yeah,” he said. “I called in this, too. Apparently you can’t just barge into crime scenes,” James said, the twitch of his eyebrows almost over before it began. His mind marked the name. Cartwright. He thumbed the area near his hairline. “I’m gonna head to the master.” He might as well get that part over with. Taking care to keep away his boots from the markings on the floor, and his eyes off the broken coffee table, he went down the hall to Sam’s bedroom and stuffed pants, a shirt, underwear, and socks in the backpack. In the bathroom, the light blinked on. Rustling sounds traveled down the hall as James went through the cabinet under his father’s sink until he found a plastic bag full of travel-sized toiletries that Sam kept when he traveled for retreats.
Back in the hallway, James paused outside a door. One of the small bedrooms housed Sam’s magic supplies. He kept more of them in the house than he used to, now that he was a part-timer at Curiosities. James thought twice and then went inside, the door creaking on its hinges. It was clear from a quick perusal that someone had already gone through Sam’s things, scouring for clues or being nosy about the strange, old occultist who’d been beaten up in his own house. The altar wasn’t put back right. “For fuck’s sake,” he muttered, setting down the backpack to fix it, knowing that of all things, this was the one that would piss Sam Hutchins off if he came home to it.
James’s whole body twitched like a live wire. He caught the mental ‘if’ and despised himself for it.
JD watched the man go, shrugged, and returned to what he’d been doing. It used to piss him off the way people expected them to find killers, find the guilty, solve crimes, put the bad guys away, all without disturbing their little worlds, but now he couldn’t care any less. He finished his inspection of the kitchen and started to move into the room where the paramedics had basically left behind an almost completely decimated crime scene - not that he minded, given they were trying to save a man’s life. From their report the deceased had been that way when they arrived, but the old man was being ‘worked on’ by his son, none other than the man who’d just arrived.
Moving back into the kitchen again JD studied the floor, and the drag marks out into the other room. The marks on the floor indicated the final location of the body, but JD was puzzled as to why it was moved. He walked back into the lounge room and stood in the centre and turned a full circle. Gingerly he moved around the room, looking around, up at the ceiling, and across the walls and windows and finally came back to where the two had lain, one dead, one close to it, from all accounts.
James searched through a messy, teetering stack of books and papers, then a drawer and a box, grateful that he was somewhat in tune with his dad’s sense of organization, and located a particular book of spells, which he stuffed in among the clothes. Next he grabbed a tin of medicinal balms and herbs and sandwiched that into the bag, then rezipped it and left the tiny spare room.
On his way back up the hallway, James spotted JD looking at a very particular trail and paused at the threshold. He had been waiting for someone to start this line of questioning, or for a paramedic to tip off the police about Aaron’s blood on Sam’s torso, but no one had. James figured the strangeness of the scene, the absurdity of melted chairs, broken floorboards, dangling ceiling fans, and ooze made a bit of misplaced blood seem small.
“Got what I needed,” he said.
JD glanced up and nodded. “How’s he doing?” he asked. The last report JD had received was that the old man was still critical, but stable, which was all well and good, but it didn’t give JD much to go on. The only photo he’d seen of what was on the man’s body had been taken by a nurse who had interest in wicca, in the emergency department, and wasn’t all that clear.
“Has he responded to anything?” he added.
“Same,” James said. “He’s breathing and his heart’s beating. He’s got brain activity. He’s just not coming out of it.” The distance to his keys wasn’t far, but it would take him past JD, past the chips of tempered glass, pieces of which had tracked all over the house. James took a breath and made himself look at the living room. Things were strange when viewed through the lens of crime scene analysts, like the items they had marked as ‘of interest’. Some of them, which were related to Sam’s life as a practitioner, had nothing to do with the incident. At least on paper.
How mind-numbing it had to be, to be a cop in this city and bang your head against a wall on things like this — some of which James had caused — and never find the answers or anyone to pin it on because the things that went wrong didn’t exist in any criminal code, and they didn’t always have a human cause. James almost felt bad about it. Most of all, he wanted the investigation done and out of his father’s house. If he had his way, the police never would’ve been involved, but that wasn’t how it worked when a kid was dying on the floor and you dialed up an ambulance.
He went into the kitchen. Instead of grabbing his keys, James poured himself a glass of water out of the tap. “You know what my dad does for a living. It doesn’t matter if you believe in the same things. What’s important is that he does, I do, and so did Aaron Turner, who was a warlock,” he offered. “I didn’t know him. No one I asked did. But he must have had a gift. That kind of gift on a loner can be a problem.”
JD followed James out into the kitchen. He was used to dealing with people who were going through traumatic upset, and potential, or sudden loss. Some turned to jello, did and said nothing that made any sense to anyone, probably not even themselves. He’d had those who lived on the great big river called ‘De Nile’, wanting to make out like nothing had happened, that it was all just a misunderstanding, and Fred, Joe, Harriet or Mary would be home shortly, smiling and wondering what all the fuss was about. And there were those who were the screamers, and nothing other than a medically induced stupor would quiet their pain. Plus the pricklies. Who only knew how to attack, throw sharp edges, who believed that no-one knew anything, or understood, and cops were all morons and clueless. And of course his least favourites, the amateur sleuths, who figured that no-one was going to solve it other than with their help.
And all the combinations and mixes of those. Twenty years on the force in ‘Sin City’ had taught him to let people vent, grieve, rant, fling insults, cry, scream, crumble, whatever. It wasn’t about him, it was their journey. He was to some a sinner and others a saviour, and when he’d started working with hunters all those decades ago he had to wonder at times how anyone could even think about ‘drawing a line in the sand’ or the law being ‘black and white’ when there were so many angles, and so many shades of grey. He didn’t see any point in beating around the bush. James was clearly not a fan of JD or his profession. JD didn’t care.
“I tried to drop in to the store, Curiosities, last week to talk to someone, but it was shut. A young woman, Shannon Foust, frequented the place. Young wicca found dead,” he said, eyeing James as he spoke. “Matched the MO of another three victims found a week earlier, and now this.” He indicated the scene with a sweep of his eyes.
“This Aaron Turner wasn’t known to any of you?” he asked, a little puzzled. Even though it was underground he had the impression most who moved in that world were known to someone who knew someone. If James wasn’t able to find anyone who knew the kid JD was going to have to look elsewhere for leads.
James swallowed and shook his head. “No,” he said, wiping a drop of moisture off the corner of his mouth. “He might’ve bought online.” That didn’t surprise him. Like any kind of radicalization, a lot of it took place in dark corners of the internet, or just the dark chapters of books purchased on the black market. When he was a teenager, James hadn’t had much trouble buying occult supplies outside of Sam’s circles. It was what to do with them once they were in the house that was a conundrum. “But I did know Shannon. Sam did, too. She took up magic a few months ago. She came in a couple times a week, buying things, asking for advice. Sam liked her. He gave her a necklace.” He tipped his head, still horrified by what happened to her so fast. How had he gotten to the cusp of thirty-eight years old?
“The news didn’t say much about her or the witches on Haverford, but we had a feeling it wasn’t normal. Otherwise, they’d have given a cause of death.” He set the glass beside the sink.
JD didn’t respond to the assumption. It didn’t matter. Whether or not they released the cause of death was not dependent on whether it was ‘normal’, but more on what they wanted people to know, and it was often withheld to prevent the conspiracy theorists from having a party at the expense of the truth.
And in this particular instance the cause of death was exactly what it was in more than ninety percent of deaths - heart failure. What, and who caused the heart failure was what he had to figure out.
He recalled the necklace the young wicca was wearing, the silver moon pendant with the tiny glass ‘bubble’, and he nodded slowly. So she was a very regular visitor to the store, he noted silently, the detail added to his mental file. They had already ascertained she’d been there a number of times from the dates on the receipts they’d gathered at the young woman’s apartment. But to be at a level of friendship where gifts were given was something they hadn’t known identified.
“Do you know why this Aaron Turner would show up here, at your father’s home, instead of going to the shop?” he asked.
“It’s warded,” James said. “More heavily than a private residence. More heavily than Sam knew. Nothing was getting to him there.” He set the glass in the sink, the noise loud in the empty basin. The shop might’ve been more his domain nowadays than Sam’s, but his dad’s house was his castle, even if it leaked like a sieve. “Even if Aaron got past the front door of Curiosities, and that’s a strong if, what he wanted to do wouldn’t have worked.”
JD nodded. That made sense. He didn’t think the location really mattered much at all, given where they’d found Foust’s body, but he was trying to figure out firstly how Turner had ended up being a victim in a stranger’s house, and whether he was involved in any of the other scenes.
“And those marks on his arms, Turner’s,” he continued, clarifying. “They looked fresh. I don’t suppose you could help me with what they were about, could you?”
James leaned against Sam’s counter, juggling the weight of the conversation he was having with a police officer against the normalcy of things, like the stained dish towel hanging from the handle of the oven and the toaster full of crumbs at his back. He wanted to ask how much of what he was talking about — the occult, magic, etc. — JD actually believed in, but did it matter? Whether he was a magic user telling the truth, or a criminal making up lies, questions were questions, and police were used to getting an earful of stranger-than-fiction tales, half-truths, and things they didn’t believe.
“He was trying to summon something,” James said. “Usually a magic user would draw those marks in a sacred circle, or on a piece of paper, or any kind of object that could be destroyed. The fact that he was using his arms, to me, means he wanted to be able to do it anywhere, anytime. The ritual might’ve called for blood. Maybe even a witch’s blood. Otherwise he’d get a tattoo.”
JD nodded and looked back at the floor, where the boards had been twisted by something beyond ‘the norm’. He then looked up at the ceiling fan still hanging, but also tethered to hold it securely rather than some poor forensic intern end up with a blade in the back of their head.
“Do we assume he was successful?” the detective asked, looking from the wreckage of the kitchen back at James.
“I do.” James nodded, then added, “Unless the autopsy revealed Aaron had a set of tentacles.” He gestured up around his neck, to where Sam’s long, thin burns had been.
He didn’t know why it hit him at that moment and not before, but judging by the knitted brows and sudden darting of his eyes, it hit with the force of a moving vehicle. “I need a piece of paper.” He opened a series of drawers in the kitchen until he located a skinny notepad used for grocery lists. James tore out the first clean pages he found and flipped them to the back, away from the watermark of a local business. “In theory,” he murmured, clicking a pen, “you should be able to use the sigil for summoning an entity to create a ward against it.” James began to recreate Aaron’s marks from memory. “It won’t send it back where it came from, but it’ll make it unwelcome in a particular space. Like a magic shop or a witch’s house.”
He stopped drawing, studying the other man’s work for the hundredth time, trying to pull the demon’s name from the scant letters he could make out in the ancient figures, which had undergone only slight modification in Aaron’s hand. But he didn’t need the formality of a name to do this part. James mouthed something to himself, thinking, and used the other clean sheet to mimic the shapes on the first, but with a few additional marks and letters. When he was done, he took a photo of it and passed the original closer to JD. “In case you believe,” he said quietly, “or you want it to look like you do when you’re talking to people. Either way, there might be a few witches who sleep better with that on their doors.”
While JD didn’t think he knew any witches on a personal level, he could imagine that this sort of information might be appreciated by any he needed to talk to, and may help him get some on side when it came to finding out who this Aaron Turner was, and what he was up to. Plus it might be of interest to Tasha, and the other hunters he knew.
“Thanks,” he told James as he picked up the paper and stowed it in his pocket after taking a photo of it too.
"So tell me, this Aaron Turner? You say you didn't know him, or know of him? Are you an active participant in your community? Would you know all the other practitioners? Or is he possibly a new arrival in town?"
“Active enough,” James hazarded. “We know the owners of the other shops, and some of the covens in the state. If I put out a call to that phone tree and nobody’s heard of him, it says something. People like Sam. A lot. They’d offer it up if they had anything.” He frowned. If Aaron Turner had an above-board employment record, if his name had been on any leases or utilities, or if he had a valid driver’s license, the police ought to know roughly how long he’d been there. James wondered where JD was going with this. Maybe he was trying to figure out if Aaron was really acting alone.
“If you’re thinking he’s got a few friends, I’ll do whatever I need to do to help you find them. My main focus is evicting what he pulled out of thin air in my dad’s backyard. Aaron s—“
James abruptly stopped talking, eyes drifting down from the detective’s face to his shirt. He asked himself if he wanted to keep going with this conversation. It was just as Izzy said: he didn’t have to say anything. This was a police officer, and while James knew enough about himself and his magic to be confident that he wouldn’t get caught in any jail cell for the rest of his life, he didn’t want to disrupt the rest of his life, either.
JD saw the sudden stop and frowned. He had some information on Turner, and the new scars on the young corpse’s forearms gave weight to him being heavily involved in whatever it was that had happened. But the neighbours had provided some varied views on Sam, and his son. Plus further enquiries were indicating that the son had appeared back on the scene at the shop suddenly, with a partner, and Sam was being ‘retired’. At this point in time JD was undecided on James’ involvement, he had no reason to suspect the son of taking steps to get rid of his old man, but he’d seen sons do a lot worse, and behave all dewy-eyed for the cops and cameras, or determined to revenge their patriarch's demise, right up until they were found guilty. The main reason he wasn’t focused on that as a direction was the tying in of the other two cases, all three undeniably linked by the actual evidence. But they were all details the detective filed away.
“Aaron…what?” JD repeated, as a prompt, his eyes now on James’ face, studying it.
James hesitated, not only because he was unsure about whether to say this to JD, but because he was questioning his take on what Aaron said the night of the attack. The spellcaster stood there, frozen, replaying it. “Aaron said, ‘He left me.’” Without waiting for a response, he walked over to the back door of the house, which stood open to the backyard, like it had been the other night. He made himself look at the room again from that perspective.
“I saw the door was open and I came in. Aaron was in front of the counter.” James pointed at the kitchen island with the bloody corner. “Sam was on the coffee table, but I couldn’t see him. Aaron looked up at me. He said it and then he smiled. That’s the only thing he said. I thought he meant what he summoned, that it used him to get to this side and then it left him to die. I dunno, maybe he did. Demons are assholes.” James rubbed the lower half of his face.
He raised his eyes to JD’s face. “Shit.”
JD huffed a laugh and shrugged. “Haven’t met one yet that I liked,” he replied as he pushed himself off the countertop he’d been leaning against. “But it’s usually around about then that I call in the ‘specialists’, so I haven’t really reached first name basis with any.”
He could see the shock and surprise on James’ face from having said what he had about demons, so gave him time to recover. “So Turner was conscious and standing up when you arrived,” he continued, making some more mental notes. “But there was no-one… or nothing else here,” he checked, turning to look at James again.
“Conscious. Not standing,” James corrected. “He was slumped against the side of the cabinet, half sitting up, like he landed like that and couldn’t bring himself to move. He was looking around, talking. I didn’t know his skull was fractured until after I moved him.” Scalps bled a lot from the smallest wounds, something James knew from witnessing enough bar fights over the years. A person could look like they’d taken a blood bath from a nick, and apparently they could also form lucid sentences, for a short time, with an exposed skull.
“It was just him and Sam. The back door was open and the screen door was hanging off. There was slime on the side of the house, about this high,” James said, indicating chin level, “All the way to the gate. It was bloody near the back of the house and clear at the front, like it wiped off by the time it got out the gate. It was on the latch, too.” James remembered another detail. “The neighbor’s dog was going nuts, about a block over.”
The comment about the dog matched a few witness reports JD had read earlier. He’d seen the ‘goop’ all along the fence, one of the uniforms had been smart enough to identify it early on, probably to save everyone getting it on themselves. One thing as a cop you learned pretty quick was it wasn’t the most pleasant of ways to end a shift to find you were unknowingly carrying parts of a crime scene home with you. Especially when first on scene, without the benefit of forewarning, like the forensics team had.
“And you didn’t see anyone, or anything, when you pulled up out front?” he asked. He’d observed that James was walking himself through the scene, reliving it as he spoke. It was always helpful when witnesses did this voluntarily, without the aid of anything or anyone else. “Or when you drove up?” he added, then corrected when he recalled the sound of the motor bike arriving, “...rode up?”
“No.” James replayed the driveway and front of the house in his head. The front door hadn’t been touched; there were takeout menus stuck to it. A couple of newspapers lay in the driveway. Sam’s car looked fine. But he had known something was wrong in his gut, hadn’t he, something that only had a little to do with Sam not answering his cell phone. Was it knowing about Shannon that made him feel that deep sense of unease, Arnette’s cryptic holiday card, or another thing that only registered subconsciously?
James squatted in the empty space by the door, back against the frame, hands steepled in front of his face, and he scoured his mind for it. “But the plants were dead,” he said after a while. “I called out for Sam and the echo was different.” James got up and looked out the back. As he suspected, the plants his father had grown for their magical properties were shriveled and brown. It wouldn’t have been such an odd thing for a gardener to lose their flower beds in early winter, especially an inexperienced one, but that wasn’t Sam and these weren’t ordinary plants.
What else was out of place?
“And the altar wasn’t right. Back here.” James gestured at JD to follow him when he took a second trip down the hallway and swung into the spare bedroom. There, on a wooden table covered in an altar cloth, were the items Sam typically used. One that he didn’t now sat on a shelf beside it. James looked around for a piece of cloth and ended up using one of Sam’s sweaters, which was hanging on the back of a chair. “When I came in here earlier, this was on the altar,” he said, picking up a small, inscribed bell with his fingers wrapped in the cloth. “Bells can be used to welcome spirits or warn them off. That’s not really not my dad’s style. Maybe somebody thought this was his and tried to put it back, but somebody else might’ve dropped it.”
Dead plants, echoes, and altars were not the norm when it came to piecing together evidence, but it wasn’t the first time JD had been given information that most cops would secretly roll their eyes at and nod disbelievingly to soothe the giver of the information. It’s why JD usually ended up with these cases, and how he’d built a reputation for being ‘different’ from the run-of-the-mill cops. There wasn’t much that he discounted, even when it proved to be fake, or irrelevant. It just added to the profile he would build of the individuals he was working with.
As he’d followed James to the spare room he’d already figured it was time he called in for some help from the ‘specialists’. He tried to follow James’ logic about the bell, and which ‘someone’ was who.
“So ‘goop’ monster is here, courtesy of Turner, but there might be someone else, who Turner said ‘left me’ about? A demon? And the bell was on the altar, but you’ve already moved it off? And it doesn’t, or didn’t, have goop on it when you moved it the first time?” he asked, indicating the item James was now holding with a jumper.
“Sorry, I’ll back up.” James formulated the best entry point for his hypothesis, one that didn’t involve digging too deep into the alternate realms that he knew existed, both hellish and ordinary, and didn’t include the name Izzy Shaw. “Aaron Turner summoned something using the sigils on his arms. We could call it a demon or a goop monster, whatever works. Just from looking at Sam, we could guess it’s big, it’s slimy, and it’s got some unusual anatomical parts. Aaron did the ritual at least three times: once on Haverford, then over by UNLV, then here. He went after witches. This time, he died, but the thing he summoned left without him. It might have had help.”
He lifted the bell, its light toll carrying in the confined space of the bedroom. “It might be worth checking this for prints, because there’s a decent chance it’s not Sam’s. I moved it when I came in here before because I knew if he had one, he wouldn’t keep it on his altar.”
JD resisted making any comment about touching anything that was ‘out of place’ being a really unwise act, regardless of any sort of supernatural critters or not. Instead he fished around in his pocket for an evidence bag, something he always carried, and held it out for James to drop the offending bell into.
While JD was drawing conclusions about the wisdom of James moving around his father’s house, at the other end of a sloppy, days-old crime scene, James was elsewhere in his mind, thinking that it would be the magical world — not one of protocols, evidence chains, and a legal system — that was capable of putting a stop to a summoned demon, whether Aaron Turner had a human companion or not. But they could do this part, they could talk out ideas and make connections, if it scratched one another’s backs or led them to another magic user capable of pulling this off.
“I’ll need to get your prints for elimination,” he pointed out as he made a note on the information panel. “And basically we are now looking for a ‘goop monster’ who might have had some help from someone or something else, other than Turner, and gets off on killing witches,” he surmised as he tucked the evidence bag into his pocket. He was trying to make sure he had all possible information he could to pass on.
“If I’m not a suspect or under arrest, I’ll pass on the fingerprinting,” James said calmly. “Sam’s wide open in a hospital room and I’ve got some research to do.” It wasn’t his first conversation with law enforcement and he was well-enough versed in case law to know how it intersected with the fourth amendment. If JD wanted to compare against a set of partials, he had a slip of paper in his pocket that would do the trick. It would save James a trip to Metro and the later headache of getting the police to expunge his full set of prints from the record, which was easier said than done. “I pinched the top of the wooden neck when I picked it up. The bell and the clapper are clean.”
Once the object dropped into JD’s bag, he put Sam’s sweater back where he’d gotten it. Then he headed back through the common area into the kitchen, taking the time to wash his dirty glass and look around to see if there was anything else he ought to grab and take to the sterile hospital room that was hosting Sam and him for the foreseeable future. Seeing nothing, he picked up his backpack and key ring.
JD took a look around the room again, the tiny details of the new information giving him a different perspective as he took in the items and their locations. It meant nothing to him and his completely unfamiliar eye, and given it had taken even the knowledgeable eye of James a second take to notice it, he couldn’t even be sure what he was looking for. The placement of something that didn’t belong in that place. Was it accidental? As if trying to cover up other things that were moved? Was it intentional, and meant to carry a message to someone? If it hadn’t been Turner, and wasn’t the creature he’d summoned, who was it? JD rubbed his chin and shrugged to himself, finally taking a few additional photos for comparison to the original shots taken before turning and exiting the room.
Having gotten all his things, James hooked his index finger into the key ring and stopped at the front door. “I’ll call the station if I turn up a new name,” he said, not knowing how that might come to pass, but knowing it would be better if he made that promise than to let himself be alone with another living, breathing, uninjured human who was responsible for what happened to his father and Shannon Foust. “Cartwright,” he added, letting the detective know that he knew whose desk to ask for.
James opened and closed the door behind himself, shuffling the helmet and gloves in the crook of his arm. One of the menus from his father’s front porch flipped end-over-end and blew onto the dead patch of grass, down the driveway, and onto the windshield of JD’s car. The logo on the front read 10th Street Diner.