“Maybe. But it is my fault we’re in this mess, so stop pretending it’s not. You’d never have been at the U Street shelter if I hadn’t called you. If I’d just gone back with Carla, you’d never have picked Molly up.”
Carla is Deo’s mother. Every few years, she decides to enter Deo’s life again. That decision usually coincides with leaving her abusive husband, Deo’s stepfather, whose approach to family relationships begins and ends with his fists. Her bravado usually lasts a few weeks, then Carla convinces herself that Patrick has really changed this time. That he’ll be good to her and good to Deo, too. He just needs to scrub that eyeliner off his face and act like a real boy. Then maybe Patrick wouldn’t get so angry at him and they could be a family again.
It’s exactly like Molly’s mom crawling back to Lucas each time. Minus the drugs—but there are different kinds of addictions.
Different types of blindness too, I guess. I’ve been so caught up in my own guilt that this stupid curse of mine picked up Molly. I never even noticed that Deo was feeling guilty about pulling me into this situation.
“I . . . think it might have happened anyway, D.” The dramatic roll of his eyes suggests that he gives that idea a big fat zero on the old plausibility meter, but I can’t really elaborate on why I think I’d have ended up on the Delphi radar at some point. Not here, not with Cregg listening. And we’ve got other issues to worry about aside from our collective guilt burden.
Looking back at Lucas’s three victims, the first thing that strikes me is the garbage bags. I don’t want to see their bodies, but I know Cregg is right about their spirits being here. I felt the change when we walked in. Whatever fragments of their consciousness that exist are hovering in this room. I remember Molly saying that she stuck with her body for a long time. And it just feels wrong for these people to see their remains being treated like garbage.
“Did you look at them?” I ask Deo. “I mean, did you see the bodies . . . afterward?”
“Yeah. My eyes . . . well, they were shut when he fired the third bullet, because I was pretty sure number four had my name on it. But then, when I realized he wasn’t firing again, I looked.”
“How bad is it?”
He gives me a WTF face. “They’re dead, Anna.”
“I know that. I just mean, is it . . . graphic? As much as I don’t want to see them, the garbage bags . . . well, they feel disrespectful? And I may need some visual backup if they don’t believe they’re dead.”
“I’ve seen worse,” he says. “I mean, not in person, but . . .”
That doesn’t exactly make me feel better. Deo has been known to watch some pretty gruesome stuff.
“Are we talking CSI or Tarantino?”
“In between. But a little closer to CSI.”
“Let’s do it, then.” I step toward the body closest to me. I didn’t see this person before he was shot, but the body is large enough that I’m pretty sure it’s a man.
Deo grabs my arm. “No, just stay back. I got this. I’ve already seen it once, and . . . I don’t want you close to all three of them at once. I’m going to . . .” He pulls in a shaky breath. “I’m going to move the chairs a bit farther apart before I uncover them. And you need to work on diverting power to shields, if you know what I mean.”
I do. I take a few deep breaths, close my eyes, and focus all of my energy on my walls—both front and back—as I listen to the scraping of metal chair legs when he moves the bodies across the floor.
Then comes the rustle of plastic, and a few muttered curses from Deo.
“Okay,” he says. “Just . . . you might want to stay in front. The back is a little . . .” He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to. I get it.
It’s not as bad as I’d feared. There’s blood—a lot of it—but the shots are relatively clean, all three to the right temple. Mostly I feel sad. And furious that anyone would even consider the murder of three innocent people in order to test me. Both the girl and the third person at the end, the guy I didn’t see when Lucas opened the door earlier, appear almost peaceful. The guy with the dreads, who is the oldest of the bunch by about a decade, is in the worst shape. I think he may have struggled.
I move toward the girl first, but Deo stops me.
“The guy at the end. Jaden Park. Or maybe Parks. He said for you to grab him first.”
“What?” I ask, in a low voice, even though I’m pretty sure Cregg has equipment that could hear a pin drop in here.