Ritual of the Broken (Haunted Hearts)

Chapter 8

Chapter

Eight

A drian squinted at Oliver. They’d gotten Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and Adrian drank some of his while trying to follow what Ollie was saying.

“So, the supplier for my quartz crystals decided all of a sudden that he was going to send me rose quartz when I ordered clear quartz crystals. I mean, that’s like giving me a handful of moonstones when I wanted aventurine, you know?” Ollie moved his hands a lot. He talked fast.

Ollie’s insights about the time leading up to Zachary O’Brien’s death added plenty to the investigation. Adrian couldn’t deny it. But now they were in a down time after everything about the case had been discussed, and Ollie felt the need to fill it up with endless prattle about his stupid crystal shop.

That Ollie owned or ran a crystal shop came as no surprise to Adrian. He looked like the type who spent all day talking about how rocks aligned your chakras or dispelled your bad humors or some crap. But the last thing Adrian wanted was to hear him go on about it now, especially when he had a murder to solve.

“Are you nervous?” Adrian asked him, breaking off some comment about candles now.

Ollie seemed surprised by the question. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m starting to wonder if you’re going to pass out from not taking a breath.”

Adrian sipped his coffee. When they got their coffee, it gave Adrian a blissful seven to ten minutes of silence while they had to order, then separated to wait for their coffee at the handoff station.

“Well, uh, I mean, I do tend to talk a lot when I get nervous. But this?” Ollie waved a hand between them. “This doesn’t make me nervous.”

“You smell nervous.”

“Oh, I smell nervous, huh? That’s rich. That’s a—that’s a new one.” Ollie shook his head and drank his latte. “Maybe I make you nervous.”

Adrian had to laugh. “Me? God, no.”

Ollie gave a laugh now. “Mr. Stoic and silent all the time. I just thought maybe you were the nervous one. Me talking, I’m just trying to fill the void left by your lack of conversation.”

“Well, I’m not,” Adrian said. “Nervous. It’s just?—”

Adrian’s phone chimed. The reminder he set himself on his phone to send in a report. He promised Vega .

Ollie looked over his shoulder, and Adrian turned away. “Anything important?” Ollie asked.

“Just… I got to send in a report of my meeting with Yolanda Harbor.”

Understanding dawned on Ollie’s face. “Ah. The powers that be, always pushing for results, huh?”

“I get results.” Adrian looked at Ollie, his gaze firm.

“I’m not saying you don’t.” The grin on Ollie’s face struck Adrian some kind of way. His jaw tightened.

“It’s just a report.” Adrian’s voice was sharp. “I don’t expect you, a civilian, to understand. We have to keep everything in line to create an airtight case.” Adrian squeezed the phone in his hand.

“Okay.” Ollie held up his hands. “I get it. This civilian is telling you to calm down with the anger issues.”

Adrian curled his lip. “I don’t have anger issues.”

“Sure. I believe you.”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

Adrian waved a hand. “Like… that.”

Ollie let out an exasperated sigh. “I thought we were simply having a conversation.”

“We were.”

“Yeah, until you went all toxic masculinity on me.”

The tension in Adrian’s neck was tight enough to snap. He had to concentrate not to crush the paper coffee cup in his hand. Silence fell between them.

“Do you need to get back then?” Ollie shifted where he stood and took a sip of his coffee .

He could just go, head back to the station and continue on the investigation by himself. He didn’t need a mage with him. This was his out. He could face whatever the mage world threw at him. He’d done it before, and he’d do it again this time.

He almost made up his mind. He started to turn. But then he gave Ollie another sideways glance, and there was an expression on his face that made Adrian stop. He tried to get a sense of the tang of his emotions as they rolled off him. He was hit with a sour, almost stagnant note. A hint of desolation came from Ollie, and Adrian actually felt kind of bad about it.

“I don’t have to go,” Adrian said, and he could kick himself for saying so. “I just need to get to a computer.” But there was no telling what Ollie would do once he was out of his sight. No, he was going to keep a tight leash on this one.

After a moment, Ollie finally looked at him. “You can’t submit a report on your phone?”

Adrian looked at his phone. “I can. I just never have. It’s a small screen, and I have big thumbs. I can’t type on it.”

Ollie glanced down at Adrian’s hands, and Adrian suddenly felt self-conscious about their size. “How do you text?”

“I don’t. Not really.”

“Give me your phone.”

Adrian gripped his phone even tighter. “No.” The demand confused him .

Ollie put his hands on his hips. “Are you going to get to a computer and get your report finished?”

“I have a laptop,” Adrian said.

“Is it here?”

Adrian didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of conceding. Instead, with a sigh of resignation, he handed Ollie his phone and they moved to a nearby bench next to a bus stop.

With the phone in his hands, Ollie flipped through the screen. “Is there an app or something?”

“I have to log in.”

“Why didn’t you do that? I don’t know your login info.” He handed the phone back.

Adrian opened the app that connected to the department database, and he typed in his login credentials.

“Oh gods, you are a slow typer,” Ollie said.

Adrian clamped his mouth shut, and he opened up to the CPD reporting system, then he handed his phone back to Ollie.

“All right,” Ollie said. “Tell me what you want to say.”

Adrian went over everything again, covering all the details of his talk with Yolanda Harbor and how he gathered information that shed some much-needed light on the case and Zachary O’Brien’s whereabouts. He covered Zachary O’Brien’s alleged time spent in the hours leading up to his murder. And Ollie wasn’t wrong. He was able to dash off a lot more words on a phone than Adrian could have. “And put something in there about a confidential informant that may have some additional information about the case.”

Ollie shot him a sly smile. “Is that me?”

“Yes.”

“So,” Ollie began, typing some more with a weird smile on his face, “‘A hot guy approached me as I left the bar’—”

“No. God. What are you doing?” Adrian reached for the phone.

Ollie turned away and kept the phone in his hands. “Relax,” he said with a laugh. “I’m just kidding. Look. See for yourself.” Finally, he finished typing and gave Adrian back his phone.

Adrian read over the message that Ollie typed in, and he had to admit, it was pretty good for a civilian. He even managed to make it sound like an official police report, dry and to the point. And there was no mention of anything supernatural. He filled in the other information the report required, things like the victim’s name and the case number, which he got from his inter-office email. And there was nothing about a “hot guy” in the write-up, which was a relief.

“Thanks,” Adrian said. He checked his phone screen. “And it only took ten minutes.”

Ollie shrugged. “It was no different than drunken rage-texting my ex. After he broke up with me, I got super-fast at typing on my phone even while heavily sedated with alcohol.”

He? Adrian didn’t miss that one when Ollie said. Even though the guy didn’t know when to shut up, he had to admit he was someone who deserved a second look. Adrian wanted to say something.

Ollie caught him staring, and thankfully, he spoke before Adrian could open his mouth to say something embarrassing and stupid. “So, confidential informant, huh?”

“Yeah. That’s what you are.”

“Sounds very clandestine. Like a spy novel or something.”

“It’s not. Drug addicts and gang members are confidential informants.”

Ollie still grinned. “I guess this means we’re officially partners, huh?”

Adrian winced at the word. “I wouldn’t go that far. This isn’t a partnership. It’s...a necessity.”

“A necessity. I can live with that.”

“And I don’t want you going off exploring this case on your own.”

Ollie quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t need a baby sitter.”

“And I don’t need you screwing up my case.”

“I won’t screw up your case.”

Adrian harrumphed. “Says the guy who nearly got sucked into some void while snooping around my crime scene.”

“That was a one-time thing. And an odd circumstance!”

But Adrian held up a hand. “Look, I also don’t know a thing about magic. I don’t?— ”

“You don’t like mages. Yeah, you’ve said so,” Ollie said.

Adrian opened his mouth then closed it again. “I was going to say I don’t know enough about the magical world, so someone with your expertise could prove useful in this case.”

Ollie took in a quick breath and blew it out. “Okay. That’s a step up from our earlier meeting,” he said. “What else do I need to confidentially inform you about?”

“I thought we could go to the victim’s last known address.”

Ollie’s grin only widened, something Adrian found both annoying and endearing. He stood up from the bench. “All right, detective. Lead the way.”

The drive to Zachary O’Brien’s apartment took about twenty minutes with the constant stoplights and Chicago traffic. Zachary lived--or, he had lived--in the West Town neighborhood southwest across the Chicago River from where he died. Adrian found it odd having someone in the car with him. He was used to working alone, but now he had Ollie.

And Ollie still continued to talk. A lot. It seemed the guy never ran out of things to say. But by now, Adrian had just come to accept it. He paid attention to the road, and Ollie rattled on about a Cubs game he’d gone to, asking if Adrian was into sports at all. He followed it, but not enough to carry on a dissertation’s worth of words about it. But somehow Ollie knew a lot about the Cubs, which came as a surprise.

“Are you a Sox fan, too?” Adrian asked him as they crossed the river.

That shut Ollie up for a second as Adrian suspected it would. “How dare you!” Ollie said with none of the vitriol of their earlier meeting. “You may have to let me out of this car right now.”

Adrian actually had to laugh. The crosstown rivalry between Cubs fans and Sox fans was legendary.

“Are you a Sox fan?” Ollie asked him.

Adrian shrugged.

“You are, aren’t you?”

“I don’t really pay attention. Baseball, football, any of it. Sometimes it’s just on for background noise in my apartment.”

“Liar. You’re lying!”

“I’m not!”

“Isn’t it against the law for cops to lie?” Ollie was smiling, though. And Adrian found he was, too.

“I did used to live in Bridgeport,” Adrian said, almost like a confession. The Chicago White Sox were located in the Bridgeport neighborhood.

“I knew it!” Ollie pointed an accusatory finger at him. But there was a sense of humor to it, and Adrian actually found himself trying hard to suppress a smile.

Adrian turned the car onto Oakley from Chicago Avenue and drove a little farther before he pulled into a surprisingly free space on the otherwise parked-to- capacity street. He took the space in front of an attractive townhome that looked to have just been renovated with a new paint job and wood accents that made it seem fit for a home remodeling show.

“This it?” Ollie asked, looking out the window.

“It’s the next block down,” Adrian said as he got out of the car.

They crossed a street and stopped before a mid-rise apartment complex that seemed out of place next to townhomes and single-family residences. That was the thing with some neighborhoods in Chicago. A nice townhome could butt up next to a four-story apartment building with graffiti for a paint job. Adrian walked up the brick steps and pressed the button next to Zachary O’Brien’s name, which was written in ink among a panel of other worn and unreadable names.

When he didn’t get an answer, he looked over at Ollie.

“I doubt he’s there, detective,” Ollie said, deadpan. “Being dead and all.”

Saying nothing, Adrian pressed the button for the first apartment on the panel marked with Building Manager. A scratchy voice answered.

“Yes?”

“Chicago PD. Please buzz us in.”

There was a long pause. The curtains in a first-floor unit moved, a face hovering just outside of view, and Adrian held up his badge. The door finally buzzed. Adrian opened it and led the way inside through a dim hallway with a dingy tiled floor to a door labeled Building Manager. Adrian knocked, and a short, wiry man with a scruffy beard answered. “Yeah?”

Adrian showed his badge once more. “Chicago PD. We need to get into Zachary O’Brien’s apartment.”

The man glanced at Adrian’s badge and then back up to Adrian’s face. “You got a warrant?”

“Sorry to inform you, sir, but Zachary O’Brien is dead. Did he have any roommates or anyone associated with the apartment he lived in?”

The building manager shook his head. “No. He’s the only one in the place. His rent is due.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Can you let us into the apartment, please?”

“I can. Do I have to?”

“Technically, no, but I would appreciate it. And it would save me from having to get a warrant and bring a lot more people back here to serve it.”

After a moment, the man sighed. “Let me get a key.” He pushed the door closed so it was open only a crack. Ollie looked at him, and Adrian shrugged.

The manager took them to an apartment on the third floor. “Just remember, I don’t know nothing, so don’t go asking me questions, and don’t go writing down my name or anything. I’m not going to be involved in anything like this.”

Adrian’s eyes narrowed. The man stank, a mix of emotions. Some fear, a hint of guilt. “There a reason you don’t want to answer any questions? ”

The building manager faced Adrian. “I been on vacation,” the man said.

“Like, to Cabo?” Ollie asked, his brow knit with confusion.

Adrian shot a frown Ollie’s way, and Ollie thankfully said nothing else. Then he turned back to the manager. He understood what it meant: the man did time. “I’m not here for you,” Adrian said, “unless we can link you to Zachary O’Brien’s death.”

The man’s eyes widened. “I didn’t kill nobody. I just went in for boosting cars. Nothing else.” Despite the manager’s other smells, this gave him no additional spike in odors that suggested to Adrian he was guilty.

“Then we’re good,” Adrian said. “Thank you. We’ll just have a look around here, and we’ll lock up when we leave.”

“Oh!” Ollie nodded. “Vacation.” He made little quote fingers as he said it. “I get it now.” Adrian tried to ignore him. This guy…

The manager paused again before opening the door. He turned back around. “Somebody going to come get his stuff out of here?”

“That’s up to Mr. O’Brien’s family.”

“Far as I know, he didn’t have no family. None that came around here anyway. Just a bunch of drunks and bagged-up burnouts.” The manager stood where he was a moment more, then waved his hands in a dismissive way. “I’ll give it a week, then I’m calling a salvage crew.” He pushed open the apartment door .

“We may need to access his place again,” Adrian said to the building manager.

The manager squinted, but he let out a resigned sigh and left them alone in the apartment.

Ollie clicked his tongue. “Super nice guy. Wish he could’ve stayed around to chat.”

Adrian gave Ollie a long, assessing stare, long enough to figure out he was being sarcastic. “Let’s see what we can find here,” Adrian said, getting down to business.

Inside, the apartment was about what Adrian expected—a junkie’s abode with a dash of hoarder. The living room was cluttered with tattered furniture, stained cushions, and piles of old magazines and newspapers stacked haphazardly in corners. The lingering stench of cigarettes mixed with the musky scent of unwashed clothes hung heavy in the air.

“Shouldn’t we maybe get some gloves?” Ollie asked, his nose wrinkled as he scanned over the place. And Adrian had to agree. For a guy who was trying to get clean like Zachary O’Brien apparently was, he sure didn’t extend that to his living space.

Ollie walked deeper into the room, his hands gripping his messenger bag in front of him like he was afraid to touch anything. “Okay. So where do we start?”

Adrian took in the space, or lack of it. That was a good question. Something like this really required a team of techs digging through it, probably while wearing hazmat suits. “I was hoping maybe you could tell me. ”

“Oh. Right.” Ollie wiggled his fingers. “The juju. I’m going to need a piece of paper.”

Adrian held his hands wide to refer to the space. “I don’t think Zachary O’Brien would mind if you borrowed something of his.”

“It’s not like evidence or anything?”

“If it has something written on it such as, ‘This person killed me,’ and it has a name, then it’s evidence. Otherwise, I think you’re pretty safe choosing from something stacked in a corner.”

“Cute,” Ollie said with a smirk on his face. He went to one of the corners and grabbed an old Chicago Tribune off the top. As soon as he did, the stack toppled over, and dozens of pages spilled onto the floor. Ollie stood there a moment then turned to Adrian with a bashful grin. “Oops.” He carried the newspaper over to the coffee table. “Who even reads actual newspapers anymore?”

“Apparently, Zachary O’Brien did,” Adrian said.

“Maybe some boomer killed him because he wanted his 1950s back.”

Ollie cleared off some space on the coffee table, which was easier said than done, then he pulled the front page off the newspaper and spread it out. Next, he opened some sort of little kit he pulled from his bag and produced a piece of chalk, which he used to draw a circle with odd markings along the inner perimeter. Finally, he placed four crystals around the circle at what appeared to be the cardinal points.

“You carry all that stuff around with you all the time? ”

Ollie focused on his work as he spoke. “Most mages carry some sort of kit with them with a few often-used components. I have more stuff in my messenger bag. But this box is enchanted to hold a lot more than its true volume. I could hide a BMW in here if I wanted.”

Adrian’s eyes widened a little. “Really?”

Ollie rolled his eyes. “No.”

Standing to the side of the drawn circle on the point that would have been the east, Ollie held his hands, palm down, over the circle. He began to speak words that sounded to Adrian like they were made up. But a thin sheen of sweat broke out on his forehead. He’d been in similar situations like this before, times he’d rather forget.

Nothing visible happened that Adrian could see, but that stench of ozone hit his nostrils and caused him to huff. He could almost taste it, and his lip to curled into a half snarl. “You need me here for this, or can I take a look around?”

Ollie’s annoyed face told Adrian all he needed to know. Shut up, and don’t interrupt. So, as Ollie continued to speak in tongues or whatever it was, Adrian took a stroll through the mess of an apartment.

He went from room to room, starting with the kitchen. He turned on the light and watched bugs scatter from a bag of moldy bread left open on the counter. A round table stood in the corner, a plate of half-eaten pizza left on its surface. Dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, and various takeout containers were strewn throughout on the counters. Empty bottles of alcohol and discarded drug paraphernalia lay scattered on the floor, which spoke to Zachary O’Brien’s troubled existence. Every available surface seemed to be covered with debris, from scribbled notes to old photographs, mysterious trinkets, and random bits of junk.

The odors in this part of the apartment were enough to make even those with a strong stomach wretch. The good thing about a werewolf nose, however, was the ability to pick through scents. Instead of focusing on the ones he didn’t want to smell, he filtered through all the ones he wanted to look for and concentrated on those.

Cigarettes, booze, drugs, and old food, as well as the stink of old clothes marked with the sweat of someone who hadn’t showered for a while. And beneath all that, Adrian picked up on a scent that spoke to him of a person, an essence filled with everything that defined the underlying emotion of Zachary O’Brien. It spoke of sadness, regret, and fear. And all of it was laced with the ever-present chemicals and substances that tormented him. This, Adrian realized, was what he missed from the scent of the body at the crime scene—everything that made him a person.

Something tickled along Adrian’s skin, all over, like walking into cobwebs. It made the hair on his arms and down to his legs tingle beneath his clothing. The smell of magic hit him stronger than before, and something crackled that made Adrian turn back into the living room.

From the coffee table, light swirled around in a circle, much like a tornado. Papers and other bits of trash curled up into a sudden wind.

“What’s happening?” Adrian called out over the steadily rising din of noise.

“Uh...” Ollie’s eyes were wide. “This happens sometimes.”

“What’s it supposed to do?” Adrian yelled.

“It’s supposed to ... nts ... est ...”

“ What ?” Adrian moved closer. Now his hair moved in a wind from nowhere, and the noise was nearly unbearable for his werewolf hearing.

Ollie yelled louder. “I said, it’s supposed to show us points of interest!”

Adrian looked around the room. Streaks of light hit the walls and bounced back. Pages were lit up like they had an inner source of light. Even a bong took on a strange glow. “I don’t think it’s working,” Adrian shouted back.

“What?” Ollie leaned closer.

“I said, I DON’T THINK IT’S WORKING!”

“Yeah...” Ollie looked around the room, his hands still raised like he was about to conduct an orchestra. “I think you may be right.” He put his arms down.

It took too long for the magic to calm. Bits of light lit up in sparks all around the room like a circus of lightning bugs, and finally, the paper that fluttered around the room settled back onto the floor and on the couches and chairs. Oddly enough, the place didn’t look any more of a mess than it did initially .

A pounding came at the door. “What’s going on in there?” The building manager was back.

Adrian moved quickly to the door and opened it a crack. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Police business.” He shut the door before the building manager could say anything else. Wordless, he turned back around and stared at Ollie.

Ollie had his hand on the back of his neck. He looked sheepishly around the room. “That wasn’t how it was supposed to go.”

“I couldn’t tell...”

When Ollie turned toward Adrian, he rolled his eyes when the fact Adrian was being sarcastic came through. “I mean, the lights were supposed to form a guide for us by showing us the things that could tell us more about Zach. And I tried to focus the magic to bring attention to things related to his death.”

“Is magic always like this?” Adrian asked.

“No. Not really.” Ollie gulped. “I mean, sometimes my magic does some crazy things. But generally, the spells I do still work. This one, though...”

“This one, what? Decided to go nuclear?”

“Besides that. It felt ... I don’t know. It felt blocked somehow.”

“And I’m guessing that doesn’t usually happen?”

Ollie crossed his arms like he was still embarrassed. A hint of worry creased his brow. “It’s not supposed to, no. I mean, unless we were looking for stuff in a mage’s sanctum or something where wards might be in place. And, looking around this place, I doubt very seriously that O’Brien was any sort of magic user.”

“Well...”

Adrian should be angry. Magic was not one of his favorite things. It didn’t rank in the top hundred. Not even the top thousand. He had too much history with magic to want to be around it any more than he had to. But as he watched Ollie standing in the middle of the room, the embarrassment etched on every part of his face, Adrian found he couldn’t be mad. Not enough to yell at Ollie or anything. It was like before. The guy had one of those faces that touched a soft spot.

And Adrian liked soft spots about as much as he liked magic.

“Let’s have a look around anyway and see if we can find anything out of place,” Adrian said.

“Does anything really have a place in this apartment?” As he said it, though, Ollie turned and started moving papers around to search for clues.

Feeling a little sorry for him, Adrian reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of latex gloves that he kept on hand for occasions such as this. He walked to Ollie and tapped his arm with the back of his hand. Ollie turned and saw the gloves, then he gave a soft smile that reached his eyes in a twinkle. Adrian had to force himself to turn away to begin his search.

He walked toward the bedroom, which was no better than anywhere else in the apartment, with a disheveled bed that looked like it hadn’t been made in weeks and clothes spilling out of drawers. Walls were stained with substances better left unidentified, and there was a grimy kind of dirt ground into the pillow. He wasn’t about to go rifling around on the bed. He had no desire to bring bedbugs back to his own apartment.

Just as he was about to turn and leave the bedroom again, something caught his attention.

On the wall, just peeking above the headboard, was a tiny speck of light.

Adrian squinted as he moved closer. Then, still closer, bringing him uncomfortably close to the dirty pillow and stained bedsheets. But he was finally able to see it: something carved into the sheetrock.

Alongside the other scratches on the wall, he might have missed it. But this spot glowed. As he peered closer, he saw that it looked like some foreign kind of letter, and it seemed to glow with an internal light.

“Ollie?” Adrian called out.

It took him a moment to enter the bedroom. “What?”

“Any idea what this is?” He pointed to the carving on the wall.

Ollie moved in beside him so that their shoulders were touching. Their faces were close together as well. “Holy shit,” Ollie said.

Adrian glanced at him. “What is it?

With a grin, Ollie said, “I think maybe my spell actually did work.”