No Humans Involved
Page 66

"Magically drained." Jeremy said.
"I'd say so."
"If it happened here, let's see whether I can find a trail."
I TOOK Hope to the office, saying we should take a look, see whether fresh eyes found anything new, but really, I was just giving Jeremy privacy. There's something very undignified about getting down on your hands and knees to snuffle the ground.
After about ten minutes, Jeremy called us back. The room was thick with trails. From our excursion the night before, he had a good idea which trails belonged to group members, but picking out "which of these doesn't belong" in the tiny closet was probably close to Hope's analogy of a bloodhound in a busy airport terminal. He'd sorted out three, maybe four scents he didn't recognize. One of them, presumably, was the victim.
"The others are probably cult members who missed last night's meeting. All the trails, though, eventually lead there." He pointed down at the trap door, having rolled back the carpet.
"Not surprising," I said. "If they're going to kill someone, that's where they'd do it."
"I'm not sure we have a murder victim. That was my first thought-that Botnick made contact with the group and they demanded proof of his loyalty."
"Human sacrifice," Hope said.
"But for all of the trails that go down, there's one coming back."
"Maybe Botnick lost his nerve," I said. "Or it was just a test to see whether he'd go through with it. In either case-" I pulled open the hatch, "-that means I'm not going to stumble across a corpse or a ghost screaming for vengeance, so I'm good."
"Hope?" Jeremy said. "A lack of a corpse won't make this any easier for you.'"
"I'll be fine."
HOPE STOPPED at the bottom of the ladder, rigid, as if she'd known this vision was coming, and braced for it. When it finished, she gave a soft sigh of relief.
"Same old, same old," she said. "He or she is in the helmet, can't see, can barely breathe, can't fight or scream. For chaos, it ranks about a four. Terror, but it's just fear of the unknown."
We looked around. The cavernous, crate-lined room looked exactly as we'd left it.
"Flecks of blood," Hope said, walking to the middle.
I followed her. "They're from last night. The meeting."
Her face scrunched in distaste. "In other words, as you said, it was consensual. Which explains why I'm not getting much in the way of chaos vibes."
Jeremy hadn't said a word. Not unusual. But when I looked over, I saw him staring out across the room, nostrils flared. He turned his head slowly, inhaling, as if trying to get a fix on a scent. Then his gaze came to rest on a wall of boxes along the wall-the wall with the embedded hooks.
"Those boxes weren't like that last night," I said,walking toward it.
Jeremy called to me, but I was only a few feet away and by the time I realized he was trying to stop me, I could see a foot protruding from behind the stack. I backpedaled to avoid an attack. Then I saw the hook, and the chain pulled taut and, without thinking, I stepped sideways for a better view.
A man hung suspended from the hook by the chain. His feet touched the ground, knees bent, dangling. My first thought was how do you hang yourself if you can touch the ground? Then I saw the choke chain around his neck.
Jeremy put his hand on my shoulder, but didn't pull me away. If I wanted to look, that was my choice. He moved past me to examine the body.
The man's head drooped, but even before I saw his face, I knew it was Botnick. His eyes were bulging. His fingers were wrapped around the chain at his neck, as if he'd tried to pull it free.
"He couldn't get it loose," said a soft voice behind me. Hope's. "They took off the helmet and kicked his legs out from under him, and the chain tightened, but something kept it from loosening, even after he got his footing."
Jeremy moved alongside the body, looking without touching. Watching him, my gaze moved down Botnick for the first time, and noticed something unexpected.
"He's not wearing any pants. Did they rape him?"
"Doesn't appear so," Jeremy said. "There's no sign of struggle. I think that was intentional-using a spell to restrain him-so there wouldn't be any marks. Nothing to indicate he didn't do this to himself. As for the pants, though"
"That's intentional," Hope said. "They've set the scene for auto-erotic asphyxiation."
I explained to Jeremy.
"Ah," he said. "And, given the nature of this room and the equipment upstairs, that's exactly the sort of thing the authorities would expect someone like Botnick to do."
SO WE did have a murder. Jeremy had found a return trail because Botnick had been in and out of this basement several times in the last twenty-four hours.
Had he made contact with the group? Gotten in touch with his former lover, who'd called her former lover and they'd set up a meeting with Botnick? It wasn't the only possibility. Maybe that cult member he'd whipped last night had her "I'm not going to take it anymore" epiphany, and had come back to kill him. Or maybe it was a customer, furious that his "ground rhino penis" hadn't outperformed Viagra, as advertised. Guys like Botnick had their share of enemies-not all the most stable individuals.
But that would be mighty coincidental and wouldn't explain the magical weakening Hope had picked up. So we set to work playing CSI. The supernatural version. The werewolf untangled and followed scent trails. The half-demon reviewed the death vision. And the necromancer tried to contact the spirit of the deceased.