Chapter Thirty
There was no hand-holding at the crime scene. We were all civilians being allowed into a police investigation. I was a woman and not all human, so I had to uphold the honor of both my sex and my ancestry.
The first victim was curled before the fireplace. It wasn't a real fireplace, but one of those plug-in electric ones. The killer, or killers, had positioned the body in front of it to match the illustration that Lucy had shown us safe in its plastic evidence wrap, tagged and bagged. She, because it was a she, had been dressed in the same ragged sack clothing as the illustration. It was a story I remembered reading as a child. I'd liked stories about brownies because of Gran. The brownie fell asleep before the fire and was caught napping, literally, by the household children. Gran had said, "Na brownie worth 'er salt would fall asleep on th' job." The rest of the story was about the children going with the brownie to fairyland and I knew that was made up, because I'd been there as a child and it was nothing like the book.
"Well, another childhood memory ruined," I said softly.
"What did you say?" Lucy asked.
I shook my head. "Sorry, but my grandmother read me this book as a child. I was thinking about reading it to my own kids, but maybe not now." I stared down at the dead woman and forced myself to look at what they'd done to her face. There was a brownie in the story, so they'd made her into a brownie by taking her nose and her lips, and paring her down to what they needed to make the picture.
Rhys came up beside me and said, "Don't look at her face."
"I can do my job," I said, and I didn't mean to sound defensive.
"I mean, look at all of her, not just her face."
I frowned, but did what he asked, and the moment I could see her bare arms and legs without the horror of her face getting in the way I understood what he meant. "She's a brownie."
"Exactly," he said.
"She's been butchered to look like one," Lucy said.
"No, Rhys means her arms and legs. They're longer, shaped a little differently. I would bet she's had some kind of electrolysis to get rid of the more-than-human body hair."
"But her face was human. They cleaned up the blood but they carved her face down to that," Lucy said.
I nodded. "I know of at least two brownies who have had plastic surgery to give them a nose and lips, a human face, but there's no good procedure for the arms and legs being a little thin, a little different."
"Robert lifts weights," Rhys said. "It gives more muscle tone and helps shape the limbs."
"Brownies can lift things five times their size. Normally they don't need to lift weights to be stronger."
"He does it just so he looks more human," Rhys said.
I touched his arm. "Thank you. I couldn't see anything but the face. They cleaned it up and hid the blood but it's obviously fresh wounds."
"Are you saying she really was a brownie?" Lucy asked.
We both nodded.
"There's nothing in any of her background that says she's anything but a native Los Angeles human."
"Could she be part brownie and part human?" Galen had come up behind us.
"You mean like Gran?" I asked.
"Yes."
I thought about it, and looked at the body, trying for dispassionate. "Maybe, but she'd still have to have a parent who wasn't human. That shows up in census records, documents of all kinds. There's got to be some record of her real background."
"A surface check said human, and she was born here in town," Lucy said.
"Dig deeper," Rhys said. "Genetics this pure aren't that far away from a fey ancestor."
Lucy nodded and grabbed one of the other detectives. She spoke gently to him and he went away at a fast walk. Everyone likes something to do at a murder scene; it gives the illusion that death isn't that bad, if you keep busy.
"The electric fire looks brand-new," Galen said.
"Yes, it does," I said.
"Was the first scene like this?" Rhys asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Staged with props brought in to make the illustration work."
"Yes," I said, "but a different book. A different story altogether, but yeah, props brought in so the staging was as perfect as they could make it."
"The second victim isn't as perfect as this one," Galen said.
We both agreed that it wasn't. We were assuming that this was Clara and Mark Bidwell, who lived at this address. They fit the height of both, and overall description, but honestly, unless they could be identified by dental work or fingerprints we couldn't be certain. Their faces weren't the faces smiling down at us from the pictures on the wall. We'd assume that it was the couple who lived here, but it was an assumption. The police were assuming it, too, so I felt better about that, but I knew it was breaking one of the first rules that Jeremy taught me: never assume anything about a case. Prove it, don't assume it.
As if my thought had conjured him, Jeremy Grey stepped into the room. He was about my height, five feet even, and was dressed in a designer suit in black that made his gray skin a darker, richer shade of gray, and though it would never be a human skin tone, somehow in the black suit it seemed like one. He'd stopped wearing all gray just this year. I liked the new colors on him. He'd been dating a woman seriously for about three months. She was a costumer at one of the studios and took clothing rather seriously. Jeremy had always dressed expensively in designer suits and shoes, but somehow everything fit him better. Maybe love is the best accessory of all?
His triangular face was dominated by a large hooked beak of a nose. He was a Trow - that was his race - and he'd been cast out centuries ago for stealing a single spoon. Theft had been a very serious crime back then among any of the fey, but the Trow were known for their puritanical views on a lot of things. They also had a reputation for stealing human women, so they weren't puritanical about everything.