Bobby cursed.

Rats scampered off at the sound. Leaving their meal behind. With a sigh, he walked past his ‘assistant’ to the door. She stood, frozen, staring at the body with wide eyes and a slack mouth.

He rolled his eyes. Never seen a corpse before.

“Don’t move.” He stood, listening. Listening for danger. Looking for a hint of it. They stood in the carcass of an abandoned warehouse, shoes sunken in the grime that had gathered over the autumn months. It stank of rotting wood, urine, and rat shit.

The excuse for a building groaned its protest against the harsh wind. It was a marvel that the thing hadn’t collapsed onto itself. Yet.

In the light of the oil lamp, crates stacked haphazardly along the walls cast a foreboding shadow on the rotting walls. Many were cracked open. Splintered. Contents half-vanished—stolen, spoiled, or forgotten.

It wasn’t that an empty room bothered him per se. What did bother him was that with winter so close, he expected this warehouse to be brimming with salted meats, dried fruits or bags of flower. Anything really.

Nothing gave away that the place was less deserted than initially thought, so he stepped outside. Leaving her with the body. The wind slapped him in the face. Hints of chilly autumn intertwined with the last scraps of summer.

Not a cop in sight.

Unsurprising.

With a quick glance he made sure there was no one on the street. He didn’t want to show his pathetic excuse for a gift in front of the wrong people. There was trouble, and then there was trouble. A good thing was that most of the cops were elementalists, so they didn’t care much.

He held the lamp in front of him, the little flame’s light was sucked into the black houses around him. Bobby had never bothered to master his element. Manipulating oxygen was like trying to force smoke up a chimney, and Bobby was more like a sieve.

With his free hand he felt for the warmth of the flame. The trick about making a fire signal was to make a line of oxygen straight up where you wanted it to go. In his mind he imagined a line, crooked like a bolt of thunder. The hairs on his body rose as the magic tingled through his arm. Then he bent his fingers and shot his arm up toward the sky. The flame chased the line. Until a gust of wind broke it.

The flame halted above his head and then faded. The only thing that was missing was the wet sound of a raspberry. He barely had enough in him for a parlor trick. Enough to entertain his daughters. But in times like these, it was terribly handy if he could actually do something.

Bobby tried again. The magic already dragging at his eyelids. He wasn’t rested enough to do anything worthwhile.

The signal would have to be higher for any cop to spot it. Last longer too. He sucked at his teeth and tried again. He took his time to stack the oxygen like little threads of invisible silk up to the sky. Then he added more and more. Tying two strands together the flame shot up. This time it rose, a thin flame that tossed and turned in the heavy wind. It didn’t want to be there any more than Bobby did. It hit the sky and lit the street around him for a moment.

A flash further away answered, and told him his signal had been seen by the cops. Good. He didn’t have enough energy to do that again anyway. The small gesture had exhausted him.

He ducked back inside, the tugging wind calming as he closed the door. At least the cops would be there soon.

“Write this down,” he ordered Samira.

A sharp intake of breath that sounded like the word ‘please’ was the only response he got, followed by the rustling of cloth.

He didn’t bother to respond. She was the one who wanted to be here. He’d told her, in various levels of politeness, that he didn’t want her there. First with a smile, then he plain ignored her for several days. When that didn’t work, he tolerated her like a severe headache. She held on to him like a tick on a mutt. He was just waiting for her to fall off on her own, with little encouragement on the way.

With a finger, he lifted the hair out of the dead man’s unseeing eyes. His fair complexion was covered in streaks of crusted mud and filth. Both were available around him. It would be impossible to figure out if the man was dirty from the floor here, or somewhere else. “Male, brown hair, between 30 and 40 years of age, broken nose, twice.”

He fished his pocket watch out of his pocket and glared at it. The girls would be going to bed soon, and he had promised them a bedtime story.

Instead, he was looking at the back of a missing man. A dead one. It probably wasn’t the first one this building had hidden, but that wasn’t Bobby’s problem now. He wondered when he had gotten so comfortable around the dead. The pen whispered behind him.

He ran his hand over the man’s oilskin coat. It was a decent one if the stitching was anything to go by. But not fashionable enough for the first ring. Far too lavish for the third.

“Comes from the second ring.”

The pen behind him scribbled again. A man who had no business in a place like this. Meaning that he was here on secret business, not wanting to be found.

Bobby’s fingers trailed over the material, leaving dark marks. Wet. He sniffed his fingers. Tasted it. Water. It hadn’t rained today. Interesting.

The man wore a silver ring on his left hand, it had been a beautiful piece, once. Now it was covered in scratches and dirt. He took the ring off the rat nibbled finger and studied the inside. It was smooth and clean. It had been regularly removed. No text on the inside to indicate anything.

“Married. A string of affairs.”

Bobby sighed. His gut told him it was the missing person they were looking for. But the man’s death pointed at something much more sinister than some debt. It tugged at him. His employer would not be happy about this, more often than not it would mean they didn’t want to pay him anymore.

“What did you get into?” Bobby mumbled while inspecting the fingernails. They were dirty and cleaved. With grime. “Help me roll him over.”

“You’re joking. We can’t touch a murder victim, the police aren’t here yet.”

“Where did you get that idea from?” Bobby looked back at her. She wasn’t looking at him, or the corpse. He had the eerie feeling she was looking at something he couldn’t see just past his left shoulder. Feeling manipulators tended to do that. He didn’t even want to know what she was seeing, it made him nervous.

“The Policemen's handbook, chapter six, paragraph nine.”

Bobby blinked a few times and looked at her, not sure if she was being serious or sarcastic. Her face didn’t betray a thing. He knew for a fact that she was right. It annoyed him.

“Help me roll him over,” he repeated.

Samira chewed her lip and stared back at Bobby, then huffed. “On your head be it.” She stepped forward, her expression blank but her skin moist as if she was about to be sick. She removed her satin gloves, and together they rolled the stiff body to his back.

She, unencumbered by the corsets and layers of skirts usually worn by civilized women, because she was once again dressed in a tunic and trousers. The single thing feminine about her was her curly red hair that she wore like a crown that somehow balanced a top hat even while bending forward.

Either rigor mortis set in early, or… A shiver ran through him, and the hairs on his neck stood on end. He hadn’t seen bodies like this since… The ceiling creaked, causing him to wince.

“Gunshot killed him, obviously,”  Samira said with an unearned arrogance. “Robbery gone wrong?” She wiped her bare hands on her jacket. As if death were contagious. Stupid assumption, a robbery. The police would probably make the same one.

Bobby shook his head. She wasn’t all wrong, just partly. “No blood spatter. No exit wound. He still has his jewelry.” With two fingers, he tore open the man’s gray dress shirt. The skin around the bullet wound was fractured and splintered. A proper shot would have made the flesh tear, not shatter it. There were no burn wounds, and this shot had been up close.

“There is an entry wound, and people heard the shot,” Samira said, but sounded less sure. She stepped closer. Bobby stuck his finger in the wound, and her eyes grew wide. But at least she didn’t squeal and faint like a proper lady.

The bullet was still there, cold. Ice cold. The flesh around it was also hard, cold, unyielding. It was autumn, but it hadn’t frozen yet. Like the men during the war, their eyes open to the sky, their bodies frozen on soft ground. Not an act of nature.

He stood with a grunt -knees stiff from sitting on the hard ground. “I know enough, I’m going home. You can take him to the morgue.”

“Me?”

Bobby shrugged. “Seems like the right thing to do, and the police will be here soon.” He was pleased to see that Samira turned green at the thought. “You can report to Deseros while you’re at it. It comes with the job.” The words came out sharper than he had intended, but he didn’t care.

“My job was to shadow you, not clean up after you.”

“This wasn’t my mess,” Bobby motioned at the body gaping at the ceiling. “It was like this when I got here.”

Samira grimaced at the dead body. They both knew she didn’t want it, they also both knew she had to. She was ordered by her superiors to keep an eye on him. Of course, Bobby had no intention of letting her off easy. If anything, he would make it so horrible for her that she’d back out. He gave her a week.

“Bobby!” Samira said as he was halfway to the door, the oil lamp cast weird shadows around him.

He called back to her. “We’re not getting paid for this one, I’m not lingering.”

He could feel Samira rolling her eyes at him. “That’s not what I mean.”

“What then?”

“Painting supplies.”

Bobby stopped in his tracks. Shit. He had absolutely forgotten his youngest daughter’s birthday. He closed his eyes, swallowing his pride. “Any idea where to get them at this hour?”

Samira shrugged, only for Bobby to curse again.

Assistants were useless.