I paused and looked up. “The kind that’s none of your business.”
He glanced at me. “Look, Cupcake, I get that a lady likes to have her secrets, but as long as we’re working together on a case involving your ex, that history has a direct impact on my well-being. So spill it.”
“There’s not much to tell.” I handed him the package of lab slides I found in the bag. As I did, I noticed those scars again. Curiosity itched the back of my brain, but he would never share his secrets until I spilled mine.
He accepted the slides with his right hand. “We both know that’s bullshit. I saw you two today. There’s some shit between you that time hasn’t erased.”
I sighed. “We didn’t end … easy.”
He snorted. “What relationship does? Otherwise why end it?”
“True enough.” I was stalling. “The short of it is, I wanted out of the coven. I finally convinced Uncle Abe to let me go—”
“Why did you want out?”
Now that topic was definitely off-limits. “Let’s just say I lost my taste for magic and leave it at that.” I could tell he wanted to press me, but he nodded. “Anyway, Abe was ready to let me go, but John—not so much.”
“You dumped him?”
I nodded. “And I said some things to make sure it stuck.”
He whistled low. “Guy like that doesn’t seem like he’d take rejection well.”
My stomach clenched at the memory of that night. I pushed it ruthlessly aside. “Anyway,” I said, “today was the first time we’d been in a room together in a decade.”
Morales nodded but I could tell by his expression he was mulling it over. “Do you think he’s guilty?” He nodded toward the body bag to indicate Marvin’s murder.
I blew a long breath out through my nose. “Do I think he’s capable of murder? Yeah. Do I think he’s responsible for this particular one?” I paused. “Not really. I mean, someone on Gray Wolf probably killed Marvin. And maybe Volos put that potion on the street. But did he send a hexhead hopped-up on his new junk after Marvin as retaliation for talking to us?” I shook my head. “Seems like a stretch.” Low-level guys like Marvin never knew enough about what happened at the top to be a threat.
“Hmm,” Morales said.
Clearly he wasn’t ready to tell me his own theories, which was fine. I was tired of speculation. We needed to find some hard evidence soon or our case was going to get torpedoed by the mayor and Volos’s lawyer before we could say “warrant.”
“What about this Bane angle he threw out today?”
I shook my head. “Also a stretch. Bane’s a lunatic, no doubt, but he’s a blood magic wizard. To pull off this kind of alchemy?” I sighed. “It’s not impossible, I guess, but he’d have to have help. And the only wizard I can think of who can pull off a spell like this is—”
“Volos.”
I nodded. “Round and round it goes. There’s got to be something we’re missing. Hopefully Marvin will help us.” I looked down at the body. On the way over, Val had sent a text confirming his identity from the print database. “Did he have any next of kin?” Morales had pulled Marvin’s file from ACD at the crime scene.
He shook his head. “Never married, no kids. Mother died ten years ago.”
A loud snap sounded. I looked up to see him pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. He leaned over the body and began to inspect it for Lord-knew-what. With nothing to do, I scanned the rows of drawers, wondering which one held Ferris Harkins’s body.
“How’d you hook up with Harkins as a snitch?” I asked to distract myself.
“He’d served a couple years in Crowley,” he said referring to the penitentiary for magic criminals on Philosopher’s Island. “His roommate was a CI of mine from a case I ran a few years back. I remembered him talking about his buddy who lived in the infamous Cauldron. Tracked him down through the shelters.”
I raised my brows. “What was he hooked on—before the Gray Wolf, I mean?”
Morales shrugged. “He worshipped at the altar of the Os for a time, but he claimed he’d been clean for a while.”
As if Harkins hadn’t been unsavory enough, I thought with a memory of him grabbing his crotch and shuddered inwardly. It was hard not to picture the werewolf he’d become humping away at someone like there was no tomorrow.
“And you believed him—about being clean, I mean?”
“He didn’t show any signs of heavy use,” Morales said. “When I found him he was washing dishes in the kitchen at the Catholic mission on Salado Street.”
I didn’t ask why Harkins had become a CI. If he’d been living at the mission, the income alone would have been enough of a motivator. Experienced CIs with excellent intel raked in decent paydays, but even a low-level guy could make a nice little nest egg—or potion bankroll. But now Harkins’s body would be donated to the state’s alchemy labs for experiments, and Marvin would probably end up in some remote potter’s field. Crime and snitching might pay, but, as they also say, you can’t take it with you.
“So what exactly are we looking for here?” I asked.
He looked up from scraping under the nails and carefully placing the results on the glass slides. I glanced to make sure Janet wasn’t looking. If Frank saw Morales taking evidence off a body, we’d be toast. “I’m hoping Marvin struggled with our perp. Maybe some DNA under the fingernails.”
“Good luck with that. The state lab will take months to run that sample.”
Morales snapped the lid on the test tube. “Don’t need the state’s lab—we’ve got ourselves a Mesmer.”
Chapter Seventeen
That night, I went to Pen’s to pick up Danny because he’d gone home with her after school, since Baba had her weekly smutty-book-club meeting that night. I had to make three passes before I found a spot halfway down the block from her building. I killed the engine and soaked in the silence, trying to collect myself before I headed in.
But soon the silence was pushed aside by a jumble of worries that stumbled noisily into my head. To escape them, I grabbed my purse and hauled my tired ass out of the car. Pen’s apartment was on the first floor of a building that used to be a whorehouse. Back when the Mundane mob ruled Babylon—back before the magical criminals took over—they’d used this place to stash their ladybirds.