I forced myself to nod. “Sure thing, Pellini. Maybe we can go out for a beer and you can tell me about some of the big murder cases you worked in the city.”
His face reddened, and I knew I’d struck at least a glancing blow. Pellini had worked in patrol and then courtroom security. He’d worked in Investigations in NOPD for only a year before coming over here, and that had been in Property Crimes. Not that there was anything shameful about Property Crimes—I’d worked them for two years before taking on the Symbol Man case—but by that measure I had more experience than he did. And I had a feeling that, if we were to compare stats, I’d still have him beat—even with the fact that he’d been in a metro area and I’d been in sleepy rural Beaulac. I still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to talk his way into being a homicide detective over here, but I also knew that wondering about that sort of thing was a waste of energy.
He huffed and stood, tugging at his pants to get them positioned properly beneath the great shelf of his belly. “I’m gonna go talk to Brian’s dad. I’d ask you to come with me, but me and the judge go back a ways from our NOPD days. I’m sure he’s going through a rough spot right now, and he’ll feel better knowing that a senior detective is handling the case. Plus, it’s gonna be a lot of guy talk, and it’d probably be over your head.”
I resisted the urge to be offended by any of the myriad of insults implied in that statement and instead forced myself to be relieved that I didn’t need to spend any more time with Pellini. “No problem,” I said brightly. “Let me know when you need any help.” As long as it’s not with finding your dick under that roll of fat, I thought silently as I left and returned to my own office.
I closed my door, allowing myself to fume for a few minutes, followed by some wallowing in self-pity. Is Pellini’s connection to Judge Roth how he got the cases reassigned to him? He pulled strings? And if so, did the judge know what he was letting himself in for? I briefly debated throwing something heavy and breakable, but about the only thing that fell into that category in my office was my computer, and I wasn’t quite brave enough to go there.
I finally had to settle for wadding up the contents of my printer tray and chucking the paper balls across the room. Nowhere near as satisfying, but by the time I cleaned up the resulting mess, I had pretty much burned through the majority of my ire.
My cell phone rang, yanking me out of my funk. “Kara Gillian,” I answered.
“Hey, Kara, it’s Doc. Got some bad news for you about your councilman.”
“Now what?”
“Well, it wasn’t an accident.”
My stomach tightened. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, unless he fell down and hit his head twice. The impact and positioning’s all wrong for it to be just from falling in the shower. There’s not enough trauma to be life-threatening, but I’m pretty sure he got whacked a couple of times with something heavy—enough to knock him out or stun him—and then he was stuffed into the corner of the shower so that he’d asphyxiate.”
“I hate you,” I said automatically, since that was the reaction he was surely expecting, but my mind was racing a thousand miles an hour.
He laughed. “Sorry. I’ll get back to you later about specifics.”
I hung up the phone, feeling a strange combination of dread and relief. Two homicides. Suddenly I had the possibility of a common thread between Brian Roth and Davis Sharp. But what other connection could Brian Roth have had with Davis Sharp? They were probably at least acquainted with each other, due to Sharp’s restaurant, but that would also apply to half the population of Beaulac.
I waggled my mouse to turn off my screen saver, and started typing in online searches for essence, souls, and anything I could think of that could give me a bit of a clue as to what besides an ilius could consume essence. Brian’s death might not have been my case anymore, but I had every intention of figuring out why the hell both of their essences had been consumed. This wasn’t a waste of taxpayer dollars, I told myself, since technically it did relate to police work, even though it wasn’t anything that would ever go into a written report.
Doing online searches was always a toss of the dice as far as what came back, but I’d been shocked and pleased before at some obscure discoveries, so I always figured it was worth a try. I knew that there were other arcane practitioners in the world—not just summoners—and it made sense that someone somewhere might have mentioned something. In fact, I occasionally found obscure information in the guise of fiction—sort of like how I’d found information on the Symbol Man in a comic book.