Trail of Dead

“Then Erin died,” he prompted gently. “What do you know about that?”

Kirsten told him about being unable to reach Erin, about using a locator spell and sending the substitute cleaner to her apartment. Jesse was still itching to know who had helped Scarlett get rid of the body, but Kirsten didn’t use the cleaner’s name, and by her sidelong glance Jesse could tell she knew not to tell him. Dammit, Scarlett, he thought. She must have warned Kirsten.

Jesse was still a little pissed about the cleaner taking Erin’s body, but he did realize that Kirsten wasn’t the person to take it out on, so he pushed ahead. “Was there anything else that the cleaner mentioned?” he asked. “Anything else he noticed while he was there?”

Kirsten held up a hand. “Let me think.” She sat silently for a few minutes, and Jesse figured she was trying to figure out what he should and shouldn’t know. That pissed him off again, and he was about to say so, when Kirsten said, “Two things. First, he said it looked like the body had been crushed, evenly. Not like it had been beaten and bones were crushed, but the whole thing at once.”

That matched what the crime scene techs had said about the bloodstain. “And the second thing?”

She shrugged. “It’s probably nothing, but he said there was a bit of an earthly smell. Like dirt, but sort of…processed.”

That rang an alarm bell in Jesse’s brain. He had forgotten about the dirt being at both Erin’s apartment and the Reeds’ crime scene. “Wait. I gotta stop for a minute,” Jesse said. He took the next exit off the freeway and pulled into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger. Kirsten began to ask him a question, but he shook his head. “Hang on a second,” he told Kirsten, and pulled out his cell phone. He turned off the Bluetooth and dialed Glory at the lab.

The phone was answered by one of her underlings, a bright Asian twentysomething with a Mohawk whom Jesse had met a few times. He informed Jesse that Glory was working nights this week, and Jesse immediately felt stupid. Of course she was; that was why she’d been at the Jeep crime scene to begin with. He hung up and dialed Glory’s cell, glancing over at Kirsten. The witch was calmly playing Angry Birds on her own phone.

“Jesse?” Glory’s voice was sleepy and irritated. “This better be really good. The kids are in school and I was finally sleeping.”

“Listen,” Jesse began, “did you test that weird dirt you found in the Reed Jeep?”

Glory sighed into the phone. “Of course I did.” Jesse grinned to himself. “It was something called…wait, let me remember this right…industrial plasticine. It’s mostly used to make full-size models of cars before they go into production, to see how they’ll look when completed. I just figured maybe Mr. Reed did something like that for work.” She yawned into the phone. “I was gonna call you about it when I woke up.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Basically? It’s man-made clay.”

“Thanks, Glory,” he said. “That was a big help. Go back to sleep.”

He hung up the phone and relayed the information to Kirsten. “I don’t know if that helps us any, but it’s something,” he finished, but Kirsten had frozen in her seat, eyes big and round. Her phone slipped from her hand onto the car floor. “What? What is it?”

“It can’t be,” she whispered. She was shaking her head. “Jewish magics…Jewish artifacts…God, I’m such an idiot.”

“Kirsten,” Jesse said impatiently, and the witch’s gaze snapped over to him.

“It was the witch, the one who’s working with Olivia,” Kirsten said. “She’s made a golem.”

Jesse was a child of the movies before anything else. “Like…in Lord of the Rings?”

“No, no. A golem is a creature, made from clay and shaped like a man. The witch uses magic to animate the clay, sort of like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.” She rubbed her face with her hands like she was scrubbing something away. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

“Is it…alive?”

“I’ve never seen one—as far as I know, no witch has created a golem since the sixteenth century. But think of it more like a windup toy. The witch builds a humanoid statue out of clay and funnels magic into it. That’s the windup. She then gives it a task, usually something simple, like ‘take this heavy box and carry it until I tell you to put it down.’”

“Just to play devil’s advocate here, how do you know that’s what this is? Aside from the bits of clay we found at the scenes?”

She shrugged. “It just fits. Clay is very heavy, and I understand the weight of the spell makes a golem heavier yet. It could easily have crushed Erin to death.” She straightened up in the seat, as if she’d just thought of something. “And in dim lighting, with a long coat and hat, it could pass for human for a few minutes. If the witch and the golem surprised Denise at her car, the golem could easily have carried her to the end of the pier and thrown her over. They’re incredibly strong.”

Jesse tried to picture it. A shadowy figure in a long coat and fedora, marching straight down the pier with a struggling woman…it didn’t fit. “The Santa Monica Pier is crawling with homeless people,” he objected. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed?”

“I told you, there are spells for taking away a few seconds of memory. Or for creating a small distraction, or helping people to sleep…”