love at all.
If we could help Julian through this rough patch with Adam, then we would. I understood that you could die a little bit every day from lack of the right touch from the right person. I'd spent three years without the touch of another sidhe. I didn't want to see anyone else go through that if I could help them. And Adam wouldn't see me as a threat, because I was a woman.
We fished out our IDs and waited for someone in charge to give us permission to cross past the uniforms. We were private detectives, not police detectives, and that meant that no uniform was going to just say, "Come on down."
We waited in the brilliant sunlight while Julian held my hand and I held his back. I'd have rather helped him with his need than seen more dead bodies, but I wasn't getting paid to touch my friend, I was getting paid today to look at the dead. Maybe we'd have a nice divorce case next. That was sounding pretty good as we followed the nice police detective through the crowd of police and rescue workers. They were all avoiding each other's eyes. I'd learned that that was a bad sign - a sign that whatever lay ahead was disturbing to the people who saw a hell of a lot of disturbing things. I kept walking, but now holding Julian's hand wasn't just so he could get some touch for the day; it was because touching made me feel just a bit braver.
Chapter Thirty
There was no hand-holding at the crime scene. We were all civilians being allowed into a police investigation. I was a woman and not all human, so I had to uphold the honor of both my sex and my ancestry.
The first victim was curled before the fireplace. It wasn't a real fireplace, but one of those plug-in electric ones. The killer, or killers, had positioned the body in front of it to match the illustration that Lucy had shown us safe in its plastic evidence wrap, tagged and bagged. She, because it was a she, had been dressed in the same ragged sack clothing as the illustration. It was a story I remembered reading as a child. I'd liked stories about brownies because of Gran. The brownie fell asleep before the fire and was caught napping, literally, by the household children. Gran had said, "Na brownie worth 'er salt would fall asleep on th' job." The rest of the story was about the children going with the brownie to fairyland and I knew that was made up, because I'd been there as a child and it was nothing like the book.
"Well, another childhood memory ruined," I said softly.
"What did you say?" Lucy asked.
I shook my head. "Sorry, but my grandmother read me this book as a child. I was thinking about reading it to my own kids, but maybe not now." I stared down at the dead woman and forced myself to look at what they'd done to her face. There was a brownie in the story, so they'd made her into a brownie by taking her nose and her lips, and paring her down to what they needed to make the picture.
Rhys came up beside me and said, "Don't look at her face."
"I can do my job," I said, and I didn't mean to sound defensive.
"I mean, look at all of her, not just her face."
I frowned, but did what he asked, and the moment I could see her bare arms and legs without the horror of her face getting in the way I understood what he meant. "She's a brownie."
"Exactly," he said.
"She's been butchered to look like one," Lucy said.
"No, Rhys means her arms and legs. They're longer, shaped a little differently. I would bet she's had some kind of electrolysis to get rid of the more-than-human body hair."
"But her face was human. They cleaned up the blood but they carved her face down to that," Lucy said.
I nodded. "I know of at least two brownies who have had plastic surgery to give them a nose and lips, a human face, but there's no good procedure for the arms and legs being a little thin, a little different."
"Robert lifts weights," Rhys said. "It gives more muscle tone and helps shape the limbs."
"Brownies can lift things five times their size. Normally they don't need to lift weights to be stronger."
"He does it just so he looks more human," Rhys said.
I touched his