was slimed all over the outside of the driver’s door handle. Green goo started toward the end of the dying process and after respiration was affected.
I shined my light into the car and studied Cale’s hands, where he gripped the steering wheel. Several fingers were missing. They weren’t in his lap. I borrowed a small step stool from the fire truck. Firefighters had everything. Positioning it at the car door, I got a better angle. The fingers weren’t on the floor of the car. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with autumn’s weather change.
“Occam?” He raised his head from the back bumper and looked back at me. “I think he got into the car after he lost fingers.”
Occam walked to me and shined his light into the car, looking for fingers, as I had. Cale’s face was sludged against the window, sliding down as gravity exerted its power. “HPD got here within minutes of the crash. The officer sent me photos.” Occam paged through his cell. “Cale’s eyes were already whited over.” He studied the goo on the outside of the car door. “This don’t make sense.”
“Unless he was driving after he died,” I said, too softly to be overheard.
Occam’s scarred eyebrow went up. “Like a zombie? Ain’t no such thing as a true zombie, Nell. Just fangheads rising too early, or revenants. And Cale ain’t neither.”
“We know humans and witches can be demon ridden. Is it possible that this body was . . . being ridden? After he was dead?”
“Like a necromancer? Necromancers have never been proven to exist either.” Occam looked back at the man in the vehicle. “But it’s possible, I reckon. Until Marilyn Monroe was staked in the Oval Office trying to turn President Kennedy, vamps hid in the closet for near two thousand years, so yeah. Zombies and necros might be real and not sci-fi, but don’t tell that to the powers that be just yet. We’d need proof.”
“Necromancer,” I said, trying the word on my tongue. That subject hadn’t been covered in Spook School. “So that’s what we call magic users who kill and then control dead bodies?”
“That and dangerous, Nell, sugar. Dangerous as hell. But a better question would be, if the magic user was riding Cale Nowell, why?”
Laine and the North Nashville coven leader waved us over to take readings on the psy-meter 2.0. By the time the government para hazmat team arrived, we had done everything we could without opening the vehicle doors and had peeled off our P3Es. We were waiting in the gray light of dawn, sipping coffee from paper cups poured from an insulated gallon container brought by a day-shift deputy. The PHMT team leader who got out and approached us was midfifties with brightly dyed hair in shades of green, purple, and dark burgundy, clearly a civilian, not a soldier. I had a wig in similar shades as part of an identity created by JoJo, for my one and only—so far—stint undercover.
“Jamie Lee Frost,” she said, shaking first with me and then with Occam as we identified ourselves. “I’ve read your CBRNEP workup of the Ragel farm site.” CBRNEP covered chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear, explosive, and paranormal materials as causative agents. “Your team did good work.”
“We’re not crime scene techs or hazmat,” Occam said, “but we try to not mess up your scenes too much.”
Frost gave a half smile. “Update me on this one?”
“Since the vic is tied to the Melody Horse Farm,” Occam said, “we think we can eliminate everything except paranormal as COD,” he said, referring to the cause of death. “There and here, we’ve given it a prelim classification as a type of death curse, which we’re calling death and decay, because it seems to be normal death and decomp process, but vastly speeded up. Nothing reads like witch magics, but we also have nothing to prove it isn’t being perpetrated by a death witch.”
“If it’s a death working, that’ll be hard to close,” she said, while pulling on a uni. “I’ve worked up exactly one death working and it’s still open.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Four years, twenty-seven days, and counting. And I still can’t get the memory of the withered and desiccated body out of my mind and the smell out of my head. I smell it in my dreams. I had to burn my clothes. Thank God for the better unis. They keep the worst of the stench out. Excuse me,” she said, spotting FireWind.