How to be Death (30 page)

“Might I see your tattoo before you go?” Freezay said, smiling innocently up at the other man.

Horace bit his lip, shaking his head as if to say he had no idea what Freezay was talking about. Connie Silver stood in the doorway, her curiosity piqued now that Freezay’s steel trap of a mind was fixated on someone else.

“And what tattoo is that?” Horace asked finally.

Freezay fluttered his long blond eyelashes like a flirtatious slattern and said:

“Why, the one of the dragon on your upper bicep, of course, silly.”

The odd smile returned to Horace’s lips and he nodded. Then slowly, seductively, he rolled up the left sleeve of his white T-shirt to reveal that, yes, indeed, his bicep was ringed by the curving green body of a double-headed dragon.

“Happy now?” he asked, the vein in his left temple ticking in time with his heartbeat—and suddenly the room was pulsing with energy; power, unbound, coursed through the drawing room as Horace dropped his mask, all pretense at appearing human disappearing as a frisson of pure energy pulsed out of every pore. Then Horace pulled the plug, letting the raw power dissipate until all that remained was the unassuming young man with the weird smile.

“Yes, very happy,” Freezay said, holding Horace’s gaze a tad longer than necessary.

“Good. Then excuse me,” he said and walked over to where Connie was waiting for him at the door.

No one said a word until the door had closed behind them—and then Jarvis, who’d been standing by the fireplace, came over and sat down on the edge of the love seat they’d just vacated.

“Amazing,” Jarvis said, shaking his head in disbelief. “How could you have known about the tattoo when I had a clear view of his left side and I never noticed a thing?”

Freezay grabbed a croissant from the breakfast tray and took a bite, the pastry flaking onto his lap.

“Neither of those servers is a caterer by trade. That I can tell you for certain,” Freezay began, wiping buttery croissant residue from his upper lip with the back of his hand. “Did you notice the way she rubbed her right wrist, as if it were a nervous tic?”

I nodded.

“She was obsessed.”

Freezay shook his head.

“Not obsessed. In pain. I suspect carpal tunnel syndrome. She usually wears a brace on that hand—you can tell by the slight difference in skin color between the wrist and the fingers—yet she hasn’t been wearing it. Why?”

Runt sat up. I thought she’d been dozing by the fire, but she’d apparently been awake the whole time.

“Don’t you get carpal tunnel from typing?” she asked.

Freezay clapped his hands together happily.

“Precisely.”

“She almost dropped the tray of sherry she was carrying twenty different times last night,” I added, sitting back in my own armchair, pleased I was able to contribute. “I remember thinking she wasn’t a very good server, that there was something off about her.”

“She isn’t a server,” Freezay agreed. “That’s what’s off about her. I think she works with a computer. In a job that causes repetitive stress on her wrists, forcing her to wear the brace.”

“Now what about Horace and the tattoo?” Jarvis asked. “How were you able to deduce that?”

“The tattoo was an educated guess, based on contextual clues.”

“Like what?” I asked, sipping my coffee, which had started to get cold and chalky.

Freezay stood up, coffee cup in hand, and began to pace in front of the fireplace, careful not to step on Runt, who was splayed out beside the hearth.

“His accent,” Freezay said, stepping over Runt’s tail. “Very slight, but distinctly Mexican, specifically Mexico City—and he smells of sage and rose petals, am I correct, Runt?”

The pup yipped her agreement.

“I knew one of them was a God!” she said, thumping her tail.

“And a God would never sling coffee and Danishes,” Freezay said, stroking the stubble on his chin.

“No argument there,” Jarvis said—and I could tell he was very much enjoying this game of “whodunit.” I wouldn’t have pegged my Executive Assistant for a Sherlock Holmes fan, but he was clearly having a blast.

“Hey, just FYI, I got coffee
plenty
of times for my boss—” I said.

“You’re not a God,” Jarvis replied before I could get another word in edgewise.

“Add to that our victim, Coy, hailed from Mexico, where she ostensibly worked in the field of import-export, though that was probably just something she created to entice Daniel,” Freezay said, hitting up the coffeepot for its last greasy dregs. “Do you know anything about Aztec ritual sacrifice?”

This wasn’t where I was expecting the conversation to go, but Jarvis seemed to have gotten a hold of the same thread Feezay was trailing.

“The head and the heart … of course! You think she was ritually murdered,” Jarvis exclaimed.

Freezay downed the last of the coffee then set his cup back on the breakfast tray.

“The funerary arm cuff leads me to suspect so, yes,” Freezay said. “And the nature of the killing itself can’t be ignored.”

Someone cutting off your head and stuffing it into a bag was just a miserable way to die, ritual or not—although I suspected if Coy had known her final resting place would be a Louis Vuitton travel bag, it might’ve made her feel slightly better about her untimely end.

“I’d noticed earlier that Horace was left-handed, and assuming he actually had the tattoo I
thought
he might have,” Freezay continued, “well, I made the educated guess it would be on his dominant arm.”

“Amazing,” Jarvis said, impressed.

“So, you think Horace killed Coy,” I said, putting into words what I assumed everyone else was thinking, too—but Freezay wasn’t ready to slap the cuffs on Horace just yet.

“It’s still too early to tell,” he said, drumming his fingers on the mantelpiece. “I suggest we speak to the other guests before we rush to judgment. These things always have a way of getting more complicated than we expect.”

“But the book? Do you think Horace has it?” Jarvis asked.

“If that man wanted the book,” Freezay said, raising an eyebrow, “I don’t think you, or anyone else in this room, could keep it from him.”

Freezay was right. If that mini show of power was any indication, Horace was not a man to be trifled with.

“Luckily,” Freezay continued, his brows knitting together in thought, “I believe he came here for an entirely different purpose.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

Freezay shook his head, a smile flitting across his lips before morphing into a frown.

“I have absolutely no idea.”

Leaving the warmth of the drawing room behind as Jarvis led us through the snaking corridors of Casa del Amo in search of our next interrogation victim, I couldn’t help but feel slightly claustrophobic in the semidarkness of the narrow halls. To make matters worse, whenever Jarvis was nervous, he went into hyper–lecture mode, superfluous information leaking from his mouth like water through a sieve.

“And this lovely oil is another Titian. You can tell by the subtle shading of…”

I rolled my eyes, trying to filter out Jarvis’s voice so I wouldn’t have to listen to his single-subject monologue, detailing the provenance of every piece of artwork we encountered as we wound our way through the building.

“Jarvis, no more art talk. You’re killing me,” I said, my words coming out more harshly than I’d intended.

Jarvis got all pouty, his feathers ruffled by my comment, but before he could regress into full-on squawkiness, Runt had trotted ahead of us, giving a short yip to let us know we’d arrived at our destination. Startled out of his snit, Jarvis hurried over to join her in front of the closed door.

“Yes, good job,” Jarvis said, patting Runt on the head. “Now, I need to telephone Wodin and the rest of the Board of Death to let them know what’s transpired, so I’ll leave you to it.”

I’d never seen Jarvis use a telephone before—mostly because he was a stickler for handling things in person; he was always popping off via wormhole to see someone about something—so the idea of my Executive Assistant forced into using a telephone was almost enough of a novelty to make me want to tag along for the show.

“I think we can handle this one on our own, Jarvis,” Freezay said, stepping over Runt and knocking on the door three times in quick succession. “Go do whatever you need to do.”

Jarvis seemed a little hurt that no one begged him to stay and help with the interviews, but he didn’t pout about it.

“Well, you know how the Board of Death likes to be kept in the loop,” Jarvis said, though no one had asked. “And Kali’s gone off, so that puts it all squarely on my shoulders.”

“Well, have fun with the phone,” I called after him as he took off down the hall—but he ignored me, still peeved about my “art talk” comment.

Ah, the silent treatment. Jarvis is going to make me pay for that one,
I mused.

Freezay knocked again as we heard someone rustling around inside the room, and then, a moment later, the door opened to reveal Naapi standing in the doorway, eyelids drooping from an interrupted bout of sleep. He was dressed in a red silk robe and matching slippers, the robe’s sash hanging out of one loop and dangling almost to the floor.

“Please come in,” he said as he ushered us inside, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and pointing to the sole chair in the room: a desk chair he’d dragged into the middle of the floor for the occasion. Freezay inclined his head in my direction, indicating I should take the chair, and he went to stand against the wall, next to a large armoire.

The room that Naapi and Alameda had been given was in the main house just down the hallway from where I’d de-skunked Kali. Like the skunk bedroom, it was decorated in a Moroccan motif, incorporating a rich color palette of indigo blue, sea green, and gold in the mosaic tile work and textiles. It was larger than the room Runt and I shared, but it wasn’t half as opulent. Of course, our bedroom also boasted a dead body, so the Vice-President in Charge of North America and his lady friend were the clear winners on that front.

“I can see that we’ve come at a bad time, sir, so I’ll make this short,” Feezay said, pulling off his bowler hat and running its brim through his fingers as he spoke.

“Thank you,” Naapi said, instantly warming to the deference Freezay was paying him.

There was a rattling sound behind us, and the door opened to allow Alameda Jones to enter the room. If she seemed surprised to find us there, she didn’t show it.

“Excuse me,” she said, making a beeline for the bathroom and shutting the door firmly behind her.

Upon her exit, Freezay returned to his questioning.

“We just need to account for everyone’s movements last night, so if you can be so kind as to tell me where you were after dinner…”

Naapi nodded, more than willing to cooperate.

“I was in the drawing room after dinner,” Naapi said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, legs crossed, his scarlet robe open to show off the red silk pajamas he was wearing. “You can ask Yum Cimil, Jarvis, Morrigan. I never left the room.”

The bathroom door opened and Alameda came out, her lithe body wrapped in a saffron-colored kimono. Long limbs moving with the easy fluidness of a swimmer or long-distance runner, she crossed to the bed and climbed inside, yawning sleepily.

Freezay nodded, as if he had no doubts about Naapi’s alibi, then he turned on Alameda, all deference gone now.

“And where were you, Ms. Jones?” Freezay said as he leaned against the wall, arms folded across his chest, nothing casual about his tone.

Tucking her long legs up to her chest so that her chin balanced neatly on her knees, she shrugged.

“I was in the drawing room with Naapi and the others,” she said, biting her lower lip. “But my sandal strap snapped and I came back to the room to change my shoes. No one saw me and I saw no one.”

As she shifted her position on the bed, her kimono fell open, revealing a strappy bruise-purple silken negligee that showed off her mocha skin and taut, muscular body. It was such a blatant show of skin that I was embarrassed for her.