“Who found her?” she asked suddenly.
Larry Spence shook his head. “Anonymous phone call.”
Oh, right, Nest thought.
“There’s some damage to her body, but nothing that isn’t consistent with her fall,” Armbruster observed, already beginning preparations for his work, laying out steel instruments and pans, spreading cloths. “But I don’t think that’s what killed her. I think it was the cold. Course, I might find the drugs affected her heart, too. I can’t tell, until I open her up.”
Nest started for the doors. “Just see that she goes over to Showalter’s when you’re done poking around, okay?”
She was out the door and down the hall in a rush, so angry she could barely manage to keep from breaking down. She was aware of Larry Spence following, hurrying to catch up.
“There’s a possibility,” he called after her, “that the young lady didn’t go over the cliffs by accident. In cases like this, we can’t ignore the obvious.”
Don’t get too close to me, Larry, she was thinking. Don’t even think of trying to touch me.
She walked back through the heavy doors into the little waiting area and punched the elevator button. The doors opened, and they stepped inside. It was uncomfortably close.
“I told you about the rumors,” he persisted. His big hands knotted. “Maybe they weren’t just rumors; maybe they were fact. It’s possible that this young lady was mixed up in whatever was going on.”
You are such a dolt, Larry, she wanted to say, but kept it to herself. He had no idea of what was going on. He couldn’t begin to understand what was involved. He had no clue he was being used. He saw things in ordinary terms, in familiar ways, and that sort of thinking didn’t apply here. His reality and hers were entirely different. She might try to educate him, but she didn’t think he would listen to her. Not about demons and feeders. Not about magic. Not about the war between the Word and the Void, and the way that war used up people’s lives.
“I’ll have to come out to take a statement from you,” he continued. “And from Mr. Ross.”
Her anger dissipated, replaced by a cold, damp sadness that filled her with pain and loss. She looked at him dully as they stepped off the elevator and into the hospital lobby.
“Look, Larry, everything I know is in the missing-persons report I made earlier today. If you want me to repeat it, I will. John will give you a statement, too. You come by the house, if that’s what you need to do. But I’m telling you right now this isn’t about drugs. You can take that for what it’s worth.”
He stared at her. “What is it about, then?”
She sighed. “It’s about children, Larry. It’s about keeping them safe from things that want to destroy them.” She zipped up her parka. “I have to be going. I have to figure out how to tell a little girl she isn’t going to see her mother again.”
She stalked out of the hospital, climbed in her car, and drove home through the snowy streets and the iron gray day. That Findo Gask would kill Bennett Scott didn’t surprise her. Nothing demons did surprised her anymore. But what purpose did this particular killing serve? Why even bother with Bennett? She wasn’t involved in Cask’s effort to recover the gypsy morph. She didn’t even know what a morph was, or what a demon was, or that anything of their world existed.
Her mood darkened the more she thought about it. This whole business smacked of spitefulness and revenge. It smelled of demon rage. Gask was furious at her—first, for taking in John Ross and the morph, and second, for refusing to give them up. The attacks at the toboggan slide and her house had been designed to frighten her by threatening harm to those she cared about. She was willing to wager that killing Bennett was intended to serve the same purpose.
She was angry and unsettled when she pulled into her driveway and climbed out of the car. The first few snowflakes were beginning to trickle out of the sky, and the light had gone darker even in the time it had taken her to drive to the hospital and back. Another storm was on the way. She hoped it would come soon. She hoped it would trap everyone inside their homes, demons included, for weeks.