Ghostly Justice (Seven Deadly Sins, #2.5)(39)

Because of the destruction of the room, it was impossible to see what might have been on his desk. A phone had been pulled from the wall and thrown into the corner so hard it had left a deep gouge and now lay broken on the floor. Maybe Bertram had gone to his desk to call the police because of a break-in, the attacker grabbed the receiver, yanked the cord from the wall, and threw the phone. That theory seemed to hold with the evidence. But why would Bertram have used a house phone? Wouldn’t he have a cell phone? She made a note to locate his cell phone and pull the records of both his cell and his house phone.

A file cabinet had been pulled away from the wall and rested precariously at an angle on the extended drawers. Papers were strewn everywhere. Pictures broken. Glass shattered. Skye couldn’t tell if the destruction was out of anger or if the killer was looking for something. Or both.

She snapped several pictures with her phone so she could look at them later. It might take a day for her office to get the official crime scene photos.

“Shit,” Rod Fielding said as approached her and looked into the room. He was alone. “I told the crime techs to hold up for a minute because I didn’t know what to expect when I heard the victim was Bertram. But this looks like a run-of-the-mill murder. I hate to say I’m glad.”

“It’s still Bertram. Nothing run-of-the-mill about him.”

“Are you worried about Cooper?”

“Bertram was his doctor. Rafe believes Bertram kept him in an artificial coma for who knows what reason. Bertram has denied it, and that’s it. There’s no way to prove Rafe’s accusations, especially without bringing in the idea of witches and demons and all other manner of weirdness.”

Rod asksed, “Is he still staying with you?”

That would certainly be a conflict, not that where Rafe Cooper now lived wasn’t.

“Rafe and Moira moved into my dad’s old cabin halfway between town and the Mission. It was getting a little crowded in my small house with them and Anthony.”

The Santa Louisa de los Padres Mission—also known as the Lost Mission of California—was thirty minutes out of town up a winding mountain road. Skye’s dad had been a forest ranger before he’d died when he fell off a cliff. The cabin had been in Skye’s family for generations, and her dad had fixed it up over the years so it now had running water, an inside bathroom, and kitchen. Skye couldn’t bear to part with it, though she’d rarely gone up there since his death.

Her boyfriend, Anthony Zaccardi, hadn’t liked Moira and Rafe moving into the cabin together. He didn’t like a lot of things about their relationship, and Skye hated being the mediator. She loved Anthony—sometimes, she became terrified that she loved him too much. It had been her idea to get Moira and Rafe out of the house and into the cabin, because the tension between the three of them—Moira, Rafe and Anthony—was giving her an ulcer. Anthony’s thinly veiled anger and hostility toward Moira troubled her, but it had improved since Rafe and Moira moved out. Unfortunately, Anthony spent far more time at the Mission supervising the reconstruction, reading his books, sleeping there as much as coming to her bed. She hadn’t seen him in two days.

She felt she was losing him. Especially since he’d returned from his trip to St. Michael’s in Italy three months ago. He’d gone to Olivet, an American monastery in Montana, several times for so-called meetings and refused to discuss anything with her. She didn’t completely understand his work as a demonologist, but she did get that it was important. They were all working double-time to locate Fiona and Serena, to track down the remaining Seven Deadly Sins, and to stop the violence that seemed to become the life-blood of Santa Louisa. But Anthony’s distance from her had increased, and that disturbed her on multiple levels.

“I love you, Skye. Trust me.”

She wanted to trust him, but it was becoming more difficult as time passed.

Skye pushed aside thoughts of her struggling relationship. “Deputy Jorgenson is working on locating potential witnesses—when Bertram left the hospital, when he came home, if anyone heard anything.” That was doubtful. Bertram lived on a winding street in the hills above Santa Louisa. The nearest neighbor was more than a hundred yards away. “TOD would be helpful, the sooner the better. Cause of death seems obvious. The killer may have left prints or DNA all over the place, considering the destruction.”

“It’s odd, from a forensics stand point, that the violence is contained to this one room.”

“Maybe this is a simple homicide, as you said when you first got here,” she said. “Nothing unusual about it.” She didn’t believe it, and neither did Rod.

“Sure, if you say so.” He sounded skeptical.

“You think I should call in Moira.”

“I didn’t say that.” He paused. “But I was thinking it.”

She’d been thinking the same thing.

She didn’t want to bring in Moira O’Donnell unless she had no other ideas. She could wish all she wanted that Bertram was killed by a drugged out thief or a golfing buddy gone mad, but Bertram was in the middle of everything odd and weird and most likely, something equally odd and weird was responsible for his murder.

Some people, the few who accepted supernatural reasons for the rising crime rate and unusually high murder rate, called Moira psychic. Moira said she wasn’t. What she did do was sense both magic and demonic activity—something Skye had never believed in until she’d seen it with her own eyes. If something supernatural was at work here, then Moira would know exactly what and how. Maybe she could ask Moira to come over simply to rule out the woo-woo whacky stuff so that Skye could focus on what she did best: investigate a homicide.