The waitress came back, sliding pancake-laden plates in front of each of us. Once again the conversation was suspended, this time because we were all too busy stuffing our faces.
“What about the psycho pixies?” Zack asked after a moment. “Those came through on their own?”
“Apparently so. They’re called hriss, and I get the feeling they’re like psychic arcane mosquitoes. Make you tired. Just one won’t kill you, but a bunch of them could suck you pretty dry of potency.”
Ryan’s expression darkened. “Wait. Do they eat potency? Or life force?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it, mentally replaying Zhergalet’s difficult-to-follow explanation. “You know, I think the demon was referring to essence.”
“Maybe a herd of them is loose and sucking people dry?”
I pondered it, then shook my head. “No, that wouldn’t explain the … rending. Plus, the faas seemed to think they were more annoying than anything.” Then I frowned, an unpleasant thought occurring to me. “But I’ve learned that an essence-eater could become stronger by consuming another essence-eater …” I decided to leave out how I’d learned that.
“We were talking the other day about how the killer has changed,” Ryan said. “First he was killing them and then sucking their essence up, and now he can kill them by ripping the essence out. Something changed.”
My stomach spasmed painfully, and it wasn’t because of too many pancakes. “You think that the killer got into my aunt’s house, found the portal, and somehow got his soul-eating ability beefed up?”
He shrugged. “I’m just offering up a maybe.”
I shoved my fingers through my hair. “Shit. I’ll ask Zhergalet tonight.” I opened my bag and pulled out the scrawled page with names and lines and circles. “In the meantime, I keep looking at how these murders are connected.”
Zack peered at the page. “Looks like you have a lot of possibles and not a lot of probables.”
“Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “Tell me about it.” I was beginning a deep and morose pondering of the situation when my cell phone rang. “Detective Gillian.”
“Hi, Kara,” a perky voice chirped. “This is Annie at the lab in Slidell.”
It took me a couple of seconds to figure out what lab she was talking about. “Oh, oh, right, the DNA lab! Sorry. What’s up?”
“I just wanted to give you a heads-up about your request. I’ll be writing my official report, but I figured you’d want to know that there was no match.”
It took me a few more seconds to process that. “Wait, which case are we talking about?”
I could hear her shuffling paper. “Um, Carol Roth, homicide. And we had a reference sample for Brian Roth.”
I felt like my thoughts were moving at half speed. “No match. So she did not have sex with Brian before she was killed?”
“Well, I can’t tell you if there was penetration or not. Dr. Lanza would have to be the one to determine that. There wasn’t any seminal fluid, so if she did, her partner was likely wearing a condom. But we tested some pubic hair that had been collected and the saliva that was swabbed. The pubic hair had a root, so we were able to do a comparison. It matched the saliva but didn’t match your reference.”
At least I’d been right about that much. Brian was murdered to protect whoever Carol was having sex with. Didn’t help me much, though, except to confirm what I suspected.
I almost missed what Annie said next.
“Wait, back up,” I said. “What?”
“I said that it was close. It wasn’t a match, but it was pretty darn close.”
“What does that mean?” My pulse quickened. I remembered just enough about DNA from college biology that I had a feeling I knew what it meant, but I wanted her to say it.
“Well, it’s highly possible it was someone related to your boy.”
I could almost feel my mouth hanging open. I wanted connections, and here was a whopper of one. I said something that may or may not have been articulate, then closed my phone, gripping it tightly. A rictus of a grin stretched across my face as I felt the pieces click into place.
“Good news?” Ryan prompted.
“In a roundabout way. The DNA on Carol Roth didn’t match Brian’s.”
He frowned. “And how is this good?”
“It was a partial match. There’s a good chance it was someone related to him.”
“Looks like Daddy Roth has been a bad boy,” Zack murmured with a smile.
“He killed Carol,” I said. “It may have been an accident, but he killed her.”