Heaven can Wait Read online

  There was another police officer inside the building. He was at the furthest door along the hallway. The door he was outside was closed so I couldn’t tell which room it would open into. The first doorway I passed led into a living room so it would probably turn out to be the kitchen or a dining room that was the primary crime scene. I flicked my eyes sideways to get a better look at the living room when I passed. It was a pretty standard sort of thing, sofas, TV, ornaments and pictures. My eyes locked on one picture in particular and I stopped in mid-step. Most police officers and crime scene investigators wouldn’t have stopped, most civilian consultants who had advised on as many cases as I had done wouldn’t have stopped. When you are involved in the sort of stuff that I was called in for most people soon realised that it was better to distance yourself from the parties involved. It was better not to think of the victims as human. Pictures of happy, shiny people tended to do to good a job of reminding people that what they were looking at used to be a person with a life, ambitions, a future that would never be, friends and family that would mourn their passing.

  But I stopped to get a better look at the people in that photograph. Whoever the victim was I wanted to remember why I was here. I was here because a crime had been committed against one of those people. There were four people in the photograph, it was one of those professional efforts with the family all set up in a row against a basic background. Going by the styles of the clothes and their hair it had been taken about ten or fifteen years earlier. The twin boys on the right hand side, differentiated only because one of them had lost his front teeth and had a gap in his grin, would be in their twenties by now. The parents, beaming over the tops of their children’s heads would be pushing on towards middle age. The fact that the family portrait was still in a prominent position indicated that the couple were probably still together. Or they had been.

  Something very bad had happened in this house, even with myself shut down, as I was by necessity most of the time to keep myself sane, I could feel the pain in this house. Someone in that picture had died a painful death here this morning and the survivors in that picture were never going to get back the rest of the time with that loved one who had been torn away from them.

  I didn’t want to keep myself distanced, I wanted to think of them as people. I was here so that my advice could help to catch this killer and I would work better knowing that, rather than trying to convince myself that this was some sort of abstract puzzle to be solved.

  I brought my eyes back forwards and continued the rest of the short distance down the hall. I could hear what was probably more police or their forensics people moving about up the stairs that went up on my left side. The officer at the door had a pale sort of faded look to his face. The droop to his eyes told me that the sallow look to his skin probably had more to do with what was waiting for me behind that door than it being his natural complexion.

  This officer, another uniform I didn’t know, took a brief look at my badge glanced up at my face and then back to the badge. He didn’t smile but his face relaxed when he looked at my face for the final time, doing better than the officer outside and keeping his eyes there. He also relaxed his posture taking his hand away from the weapon sitting on his hip. Until a couple of years ago it hadn’t been common practice for the police in this country to routinely carry firearms, though from what I had seen most of them were taking to it very easily.

  "Ms Jones, if you will just wait here a moment?" the cop said. He was already anticipating my answer in the affirmative and had turned to open the door a fraction.

  I answered anyway; "Sure."

  The officer spoke to someone inside the room and then pushed the door open fully for me.

  Even before the door had been fully opened I had known that this would be a bad one. What people who had only experienced violent death through television and films often forgot was that you didn’t just experience the scene through vision. Even seeing an actor react as though there was a smell didn’t seem to fix in most peoples minds. Those who had experienced the aftermath of a violent death first-hand would never forget the stench. It wasn’t just blood. Blood on its own could be dealt with easily enough. It was that a violent death was rarely a time when most people could maintain any dignity. If they didn’t loose control of themselves during the build-up they often lost it at the moment of death anyway. And that was without the way some killers chose to butcher their victims, exposing things from inside the human body that were never meant to be seen outside of skin.

  I had a pretty good idea of what would be revealed when that door was fully opened, if a little vague on the specifics. I was fully expecting the blood that had seeped out to cover all of the kitchen floor. The bare patches I could see through the sea of red were covered in a pale blue linoleum, no carpet to soak in any of the fluid so it was all right there in front of me. The crime scene investigators would have been through and collected all the evidence they could so I wouldn’t be contaminating the scene with my shoe prints. I wished someone had offered me some of those plastic booties anyway, it was a heck of a job getting blood out of anything.

  "Jones, over here." Detective Braun never called me by my first name, perhaps it was something that happened to cops over a certain age, they were always doing that in the films as well. His silver hair, what there was of it since he kept it shaved close about his head, certainly marked him as being of that certain age.

  Detective Braun, his Christian name was James but until he called me Faith he would always be Detective or Braun to me, gestured for me to move over to him. The way he was looking over the breakfast bar made me not want to go over there. I didn’t really want to see what had happened to make all this blood. But in the end the same force that had motivated me to absorb as many details from the photograph as I could also forced me to take those extra paces.

  Braun took a step away from the breakfast bar. He had plastic booties over his shoes and he even had the bottoms of his trousers tucked safely into them. He was well practiced in moving through slippery substances in footwear that wasn’t designed to provide much in the way of traction, but he still kept a cautious eye on what his feet were doing. I watched where his feet cleared tracks through the slowly congealing blood to the linoleum below. The clean patches were rapidly covered over again.

  I really didn’t want to make the final movement and look over that bar. I took a step and looked over.

  "So, what do you think?" Detective Braun asked.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was only the fact that I knew it was a body that let me identify it as such. If I concentrated hard enough on one particular chunk then I could make out particular details, a hand here part of a face there, but there was no way to reconcile the remains I saw with a whole and cohesive human being. For one thing there didn’t seem to be enough parts to make up a full human being, not an adult at least.

  I felt something churn inside me at that last thought. The hand looked too big for a child’s but: "Who is it?"

  Braun spoke from behind me. "As far as we can tell, and this is only preliminary, as you can see we don’t have a whole hell of a lot to get an ID from, this is Andrew Jacobs. Well, what’s left of him."

  I nodded, what was left of him was right. Even though a lot of what I could see looked like just so much meat, a human being was made up of more meat than was here.

  "Your forensics guys have been in here right?"

  "Sure," Braun answered me. "Why, do you want to know if you can touch some of that?"

  I turned to face him, less to aim the glare at him that his comment deserved and more to get my eyes away from those remains. I swallowed my breakfast back down and was about to speak but the time for a witty retort had passed. Timing was all important with the off-the-cuff quip.

  I settled for asking my intended question. "Did they take samples from the body?"

  I could hear as well as see the smile Braun was wearing because he had gotten to me, maybe you needed a slightly off-kilt
er sense of humour to stay sane in his line of work. "They took samples, most of what is missing was missing when we got here. You know how this works."

  I nodded, I hadn’t expected them to have been the ones to take the pieces of the body but I would have looked stupid presenting some theory without checking to make sure I had all of the available information at my disposal.

  But just looking at the evidence wasn’t going to ensure that I had all of the information at my disposal. The only reason most of the police tolerated having somebody like me in the vicinity of a crime scene, for some of them the only reason they tolerated me being anywhere, was because of what I could do and they couldn’t.

  I am an empath. I can feel emotions, not just my own but those of anyone around me. Sometimes, usually from humans or other creatures with some form of psychic ability even latent ability, I got hit with emotions so hard it was difficult to work out where my own emotions ended and the emotions I was receiving began. My ability to read emotions doesn’t end with people either, I can pick up the lingering emotions of a place for hours or sometimes days afterwards. With a high-traffic area one set of emotions tends to become muddled with another until it is like picking individual ingredients out of a soup. This ability came in useful even when I knew contacting the deceased was futile.

  I had known even before I got involved with them that it was very difficult for most humans to control what they were feeling and that you couldn’t really hold their private thoughts against them. But I had quickly learned that humans spent a lot of time thinking and feeling some damn unpleasant things. And being surrounded by a press of humanity and all those emotions could drive a person crazy. So I just as rapidly learned how to shut my talent down. How not to feel.

  But now I had to open up again. Normal human emotion could be overwhelming in itself when felt strongly enough, I didn’t class anybody who could do something like this to another human being as normal. I had been to a number of murder scenes, admittedly none quite as bad as this last, and what I had picked up of the killer’s emotions had been twisted each time. I was almost afraid to take a piece of whatever could do that to another human being inside of me. It felt to me like screwing a rapist, and I didn’t get my rocks off by experiencing sick thrills.

  I took a resigned breath and cleared my mind of my concerns for myself. I wasn’t here because I wanted an easy existence. If it could help stop this murderer from killing again I could put up with being uncomfortable. Well that's what I told myself anyway, if I keep telling myself often enough I might even start believing it.

  With my mind cleared I opened that part of me which was receptive to other people's emotions. I can't really describe what I do in any great detail because it comes so naturally to me, it's kind of like the ability to roll your tongue but not. What was unnatural was my shutting the ability down.

  But most of the people I came into contact with didn't see it that way. They want to know how I do what I do and they sometimes turned hostile, or rather more hostile, when I told them I couldn't explain it to them. It had been particularly difficult when I first put myself forwards for this consulting position. That I was even offered an interview had been promising, obviously I had had to reveal my heritage to explain how I could be useful to them. Whether it was by some fluke, a lame idea of a joke or whatever I got the interview and had to prove myself to a panel of senior police offices and civil servants. No less than three members of the panel had stormed out during the interview. One of the officers who had left was a devout Christian who had yelled that I was a blasphemer and worse. I had forced myself to remain silent through the tirade, belief could be a strange thing for some people. I wasn't down here to preach. Explaining that there are only certain areas of heaven that can be accessed even by us, that the grand plan had been revealed to most of us through a limited number of prophets just as it had been delivered to mortal man wouldn't have made things any better. If I had revealed that many of my memories of my time there had been blocked by the elders when I defied them would have made things even worse.

  I shook my head and cleared it again, emptying a mind could be more difficult than it sounded. I dropped my carefully constructed shields more quickly this time before I could occupy my mind with random memories again.

  With the barriers down I was open to all of the feelings around me. The first things into my mind came from Detective Braun. He was appalled by what he had seen but had put the horror deep down. There was a professional desire to catch the killer, anticipation that what I told him could bring him closer to this end, apprehension, and a range of others riding below the surface that Braun wouldn't consciously even know about.

  I focused and shut Braun back out, I closed out each of the police officers emotions almost as soon as I got them so that I could concentrate on what had gone down here.

  I screwed up my eyes, the external signs of my concentration. I opened myself back up fully because what I was feeling wasn't making any sense.

  At each of the other murder scenes they had called me in on there had been some strong emotion. There was usually the killer's anger, rage, desperation and even guilt. There had always been a strong taint left by the victim, fear and pain had been omni-present at every single crime scene I had visited.

  But here I got none of that.

  "This seems wrong," I eventually verbalised, half talking to myself.

  "No shit," Braun said.

  I shook my head. "No, not that, well yes that, but it feels wrong. I'm getting none of the strong emotions I should be getting from this."

  I started pacing in the pool of blood, I stopped when I almost slipped. "I can accept that maybe the victim died too quickly to feel any fear or even any pain but I should be getting something. Some killers feel anger, some guilt, some even joy but they all feel something. But not here."

  There was noise from the entrance to the kitchen.

  "I could have told you the freaky bitch would turn out to be a fraud."

  Officer 068 stood just inside the kitchen. He was leaning at the side of the door with his arms folded across his chest. He was positioned just so, so that the creeping pool of blood didn't quite reach to the toes of his slightly scuffed shoes. He was watching me and there was no disguising that the lustful glances of earlier had been replaced with contempt. Officer 068 must not have known about my particular brand of consultation and what I was when he 'greeted' me at the door. Somebody must have told him since then.

  The officer who had been stationed at the kitchen door stood just behind 068, aiming an apologetic glance over his shoulder not at her but at Detective Braun.

  "That's enough, Perkins," Braun said.

  I felt the older cop stepping forward from behind me and held my hand out to my side to indicate that he should stay where he was.

  "I can handle this," I said.

  It was a choice between keeping the wrath of my eyes on 068, Perkins I wouldn't have guessed he was a Perkins, and watching the floor to make sure I didn't fall on my ass. I elected to check my progress on the floor every so often and give up the full effect of my glare, it would be worse if I fell on my ass.

  As I closed up on Perkins I re-opened my empathic barriers so that I could get a read on him. I smiled knowingly as his emotions poured through me. He looked all calm and confident standing there but inside he was a pot on the boil. I put a little extra swing to my hips as I closed up with him and let my breasts sway as much as my bra allowed. His confused feelings grew even more so.

  "You think I'm a fraud, Perkins?"

  Officer Perkins nodded easily his false bravado still secure, externally at least. "You haven't done anything to impress me, freak."

  Braun moved again and again I held out my hand. The older cop sucked in air through his teeth but he stayed where he was and didn't admonish officer Perkins.

  "You were impressed enough by me earlier before you knew what I was. Even now you are standing there wondering what it would be like to screw me. You want
me because of my body but there is more to it than that. It would give you a thrill to dip your wick into some supernatural pussy wouldn't it, Perkins?" I very rarely use that sort of language but sometimes it felt good to let my ire show. Selene would have approved.

  Perkins face ran through a whole load of emotions and his body tensed as well. The officer behind noticed it because his hand went to the butt of his weapon. Now Braun came forwards and bustled Perkins out of the room. I let him.

  The officer who had been positioned outside the kitchen regarded me a little warily. I let out my frustration with my breath and offered a smile to the remaining cop. I had erected the barriers in my mind so I could only judge his reaction to me by the reactions of his face and his body language. Judging by the tells of a rigid posture and a closed face, what I had done to Perkins had him a little on edge.

  I sighed, Perkins had needed to be put in his place and I hadn't been as harsh as I could have been with him, but my flaunting of my abilities had reminded this officer of the fact that I am not human and it had put him on guard. I should have known better. The humans like Braun, those who could handle being around non-humans when we showed off that which set us apart from humanity, were few and far between. Even the most liberal individuals could become bigots when they were faced in the flesh with creatures whose very existence placed doubt on the veracity of their most deeply held beliefs concerning the world and how things were meant to be. For an angel, albeit a semi-selfexcommunicated angel, like me, I am all too readily aware of how extreme certain humans could become when their religious beliefs were challenged. The last thing I, and the others like me, needed was to alienate ourselves by reminding otherwise friendly humans what it was that made us different. I kept a friendly smile on my face while I looked at the officer but the damage had already been done. Damn.