Body Swappers 16
Ruth suspects Maya.
We’ll meet at your office tomorrow to compare notes and come up with next steps, Robert messaged Ruth and Maya. On the day of the meeting, his car was already in the parking lot when she pulled in. “Come on!” she grumbled to herself. She’d put in effort to be early, and she was still the last to the meeting.
She went back to the corner office, and stopped in the door. The energy was off. There was a strangely high amount of orange. Ruth and Robert both gave her assessing looks. “What’s up?” she asked, closing the door behind her.
“I did some research of my own,” Ruth said, her mouth pulling down.
“Oh?” Maya asked, settling into the chair beside Ruth. She might have preferred the other open seat in the room, but it was professional to sit by one’s own true coworker.
“Remember how Jennifer Raines’s husband was killed so soon after your intervention?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t that long ago.”
“I looked into it, and his death was similar to the others we’re looking at. His neighbor did it, when there was no clear motivation. It’s funny how it’s never the next door neighbor, isn’t it? Anyway, I thought if someone is going to great lengths to possess others and murder people, there does have to be some kind of motive, even if these random neighbors don’t have one. So I started knocking on the victims’ next door neighbors’ houses. The story was pretty much the same every time. They didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, but yes, now that I mentioned it, they did hear a lot of fighting coming from the house before the murder. The wife or girlfriend always looked a bit sad. And they took some comfort in thinking maybe she’d be better off on her own.”
Maya frowned. “So the murder victims were all abusers?”
“I think so.”
Maya lapsed into silence. What did this say about the person they were hunting? Their goal seemed to be to rid the world of a certain kind of person. Maya wasn’t even sure she disagreed with the purpose. But the means, using magic and innocent people to accomplish it, that was certainly twisted.
In a low, clear voice, Ruth asked, “Did you do it?”
Maya was shocked from her reverie. “What?!”
“I know you despise abusers. I just have to know: did you do it?”
Maya could feel her outrage building like a tidal wave. She sputtered, trying to find the words.
“She didn’t,” Robert said.
Maya whirled on him. He’d known Ruth was going to ask her this, had gone along with it to watch her. “How do we know he didn’t do it?” she spat, gesturing at him. “He has a vigilante code of honor. He only takes on innocent clients! Our justice system relies on the guilty being so fully proven guilty that not even the best attorney can get them off!”
Robert’s aura briefly flashed red and green before settling back down. Maya gestured at the colors. “See? Who keeps their cards so close to the chest save those with something to hide?”
“I may only take innocent clients,” Robert said, cocking an eyebrow, “but you know my sense of justice isn’t vindictive.”
She dropped her eyes to the table, cheeks burning. And mine is, she thought.
Ruth put her hands out. “I’m sorry. I understand you’re hurt. I didn’t want to make you feel bad, but before we moved on I had to be sure.”
“I can’t believe you thought I might be the murderer,” Maya muttered, her shoulders slumped. She felt very tired.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth said again. “Does it help at all that I’m glad you’re not?”
“Why would that help?” Maya asked, annoyed herself at how much whine was in her voice.
“Well, that would have been a conveniently easy end to the investigation,” Ruth said. “But I’d much rather live in a world where I can trust my partner as we’re stumped together, than in one where I have to watch her fall from grace.”
Maya looked up, and found Ruth radiating warmth, and almost a full rainbow. Yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink stretched out from her toward Maya.
Maya took a deep breath. When she let it out, she felt a little lighter. “Are we stumped?” she asked, straightening. “Because it seems like we just discovered a big clue. All the murder victims are abusers. Who wants to kill abusers?”
Ruth said, “Abuse victims who have had enough of being victims.”
Maya nodded. “Survivors.”