its supports, traced the electrical line to the lighting fixture, and yanked it loose. I carried my prize back down. All without proving Occam right, that I needed a minder. “Stupid cat,” I whispered.
I was talking to myself. I remembered my mama talking to herself, under her breath, when I was a young’un. Looking back, I recognized it as a stress reaction. I took a deep breath and forced my shoulders to relax.
Back in the office, I studied the matte brown camera boxing. It had been spray-painted to look just like the barn rafters. And wasn’t that all kinds a sneaky. Finding and removing the memory card was easier than I expected, and the death and decay was less powerful now for some reason. Maybe because I had unplugged it? Could it run on electricity? Had an old affected memory card been removed and replaced with a new one recently, like when the woman had been killed? Had she been killed because she had walked in on the practitioner working on the camera?
Will it ruin my tablet? I asked Tandy.
Probably. But if tablet dies as direct result of case, you can turn it in and requisition new one. Brand-new one. With more functionality.
I sighed. Thought about it. And typed, OK. You tell FireWind.
Deal.
With Tandy’s help, I figured out how to attach the memory card to my tablet, which came equipped with multiple ports. I began downloading and sending the contents of the camera to HQ. There were a lot of photos, all using unencrypted standard digital photo software, according to Tandy. The memory card hadn’t been replaced recently, and it was going to take a long time to transfer all the files. I sent a text with my thanks and a cute dancing-tree emoji to Tandy. Easy as pie, I informed the office.
On my laptop, I sent in my thoughts about the death of the woman found in the barn, and the timing with the reappearance of the death and decay in the basement and finding it here.
I closed the laptop, left my tablet working for me, and carried my paper and pen into the night. Once again, I wondered how law enforcement had ever managed to investigate anything without computers.
Beyond the barn lights, all around the barn, I touched the earth in dozens of places, paying careful attention to the locations I had read on the first night. Unexpectedly, things had changed and not in a way I might have thought. Within an hour, my arm was aching with the cold of death magics and I was longing for a stint in the null room. However, while I was moving ladders and breaking into cameras, T. Laine had moved Ingrid’s body into the portable null room and then pulled the trailer into the pasture. She and Occam were shoveling Adrian’s Hell and the ground under him inside it too. There wouldn’t be room for me anytime soon.
Back in the barn manager’s office, I checked myself for ticks, which I hadn’t thought to do before now, and sat at the table to write up reports. The memory card was still delivering up its secrets, and the barn was quiet, peaceful. As I sat, three horses raced into the barn, tore through the main area, whirled around several times, and raced back out, leaving the whole place in a choking dust. Waving the dust away, I got up and discovered that someone had left one gate in an odd configuration, allowing the geldings into another pasture. “Stupid horses. You should be asleep.”
I looked up at the rafters and couldn’t spot any cats. Maybe because of the remaining stench. Back at the table, I drew out a rough sketch of the house and grounds and marked the places I had touched, giving them numbers between one and ten, with one being the least strong death and decay reading and ten being the strongest. It was clear that the magics had been somehow reinforced and were bleeding out from multiple places.
Not sure what I was seeing, I walked into the pasture, toward Occam and T. Laine, lighting my way with my flashlight, reading the earth here and there with a fingertip. I determined that the death and decay magics were not particularly strong this far away from the house and barn. I assumed at that point that Adrian’s Hell had spent time in the barn and been contaminated there. Or spent time with the death-magic user there. But then, horses are mobile. He