Bait & Switch (Driftwood Mystery Book 1) Read online

  Bait and Switch

  Driftwood Mystery Book 1

  By A.L. Tyler

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  Bait & Switch

  Driftwood Mystery Book 1

  Text © A.L. Tyler 2018. All rights reserved. CopperHarpyPublishing.com

  Edited by Sarah Read.

  Cover art by Fiona Jayde.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination and used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  For Chris, Teddy, and Ozzy.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  IT WAS A FRIGID NIGHT in early April when magic came to Fallvale.

  “Asshole.”

  I looked over at Marge, startled. Already wrapped in a winter coat and ready to leave for the night, she stared down at her glowing cell.

  Her eyes flashed up to meet mine. “Sorry. It’s nothing.”

  The smell of late spring snow clung to the winter jacket draped over the back of my office chair. The smell of storms long past overwhelmed me as I shrugged it on.

  “Jake?” I asked. Two months into the relationship, and Marge was due. It was a breakup.

  She shook her head and her bleached ponytails wobbled. She collapsed back into her office chair. “Why is it so hard to find a good man, Janet?”

  I took a slurp of my energy drink and went back to my computer. Inbox empty, I started to close windows and shut things down.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m not looking.”

  Marge pursed her lips, leaning back to stare at the ceiling. “How do you do that? I mean, are you just surviving on one-night stands, or...?”

  I rolled my eyes at her.

  “Batteries?”

  “Marge.”

  “Fine.” She held up her hands. “I’m just saying, is all. Get a good one while you’re young. By the time you’re my age, everything is sagging and dragging. I can’t compete with the spring chickens anymore.”

  “You’re thirty-eight. I promise you, you’re nowhere near as saggy as you think.” I grabbed my messenger bag from the hook on the wall and put it over my shoulder. When I turned back to Marge, she was smiling a little.

  “I hope you’re right.” She nodded. “Come on, let’s get out of here before the boss man makes us stay late.”

  Famous last words.

  “Seriously, though. If you’re doing the one-night stand thing, isn’t that complicated and messy? With all the ‘hey, not looking for a commitment, so don’t get attached’ and ‘we’re going to end up at one of our houses, and you’re going to meet my cat and see my dirty laundry, but don’t expect to ever see each other again?’”

  I heaved a sigh. She wasn’t going to let it go. “I’m not doing the one-night stand thing, so I wouldn’t know.”

  “Okay.” She pulled out her keys and started to lock the door. The silence lasted all of thirty seconds. “But if you were—”

  “If I was, then I would say it’s only as messy as a committed relationship, with all of the holidays and family introductions and avoided discussions about marriage and kids and moving in together.” I looked her boldly in the eye, my hands firmly planted in my pockets. “But I’m not doing it.”

  The edges of her lips curled into a smile. “Okay. Fine.”

  We turned to go. It wasn’t going to be the boss man who stopped us that night, though.

  “Marge!”

  The hallway was illuminated by cold fluorescent overheads that ran all the way from us to the glass double doors at the other end. Beyond, a pink sunset was yielding to the darkness. Officer Samille came down the hall at a quick clip. She had three large paper bags, heavy at the bottoms and folded over at the tops, clutched in one hand. The red evidence tape that sealed them shut made me frown.

  Samille glanced around for a clock, then pulled her cell out to check the time. “Shit. Are you done for the night?”

  “I am,” Marge said without hesitation. She stood a little taller and threw a nod at me. Marge could be a pushover, and everyone knew it, but we were working on it. I returned her nod with encouragement. “It’s after five, I put in my eight hours, my boyfriend’s being a dick, and I’m off to get drunk. Why?”

  I elbowed her in the side. Marge was also a notorious over-sharer.

  Samille looked from me to Marge. “Big case. I don’t think it’s all going to fit in the lockers.”

  Marge’s smile sank. During the eight hours she’d put in, I knew she had reviewed and dispositioned a good deal of suicide cases. She needed tonight.

  “Use one of the vans,” I offered. It was probably another vandalized neighborhood sign. I wasn’t in the mood to haul in three-foot-tall bronze letters so some HOA could demand we dust every square inch for prints in order to get after a punk teenager with a spray can.

  Samille shook her head. “No. It’s a homicide.”

  In the silence that followed, my ear picked up an eerie, sad tune in the air. Neither Samille nor Marge could hear it, and I wasn’t even sure if I was actually hearing it, myself. As I stared at the brown paper bags still clutched in Samille’s hand, though, I knew I wasn’t hallucinating.

  The song was coming from the bags. It was magic, and as a rare witch born with synesthesia, my brain was interpreting the magic as music.

  But there was no magic in Fallvale. None that wasn’t mine, anyway. I was sure of it—it was part of the reason that I had picked Fallvale in the first place.

  It couldn’t be magic. Could it?

  I tried to convince myself it was my imagination. The more I tried to ignore it, the louder it became.

  “Homicide?” Marge asked, deflated. “You mean a suicide?”

  Samille glanced around, looking for anyone else in the hallway, but we were alone. Dark was coming on fast outside the doors at the end of the hall, and the nine-to-five deskriders had already cleared out.

  “Murder,” Samille said definitively.

  Oh, no. I stepped forward, gingerly turning one of the bags in her hand so I could read the label. Couch pillows. My closer proximity made the music grow stronger. More urgent. Almost like it was reaching out to me. This cannot be happening.

  These objects h
ad been touched by magic. Faint, but it was there.

  Memories of times I had long tried to forget rose like monsters from the depths.

  “There’s more coming.” Samille looked me in the eye. “Table, chairs, drapes... It’s a mess. I know it’s bad timing, but the CSIs are starting to send stuff. This can’t sit in a van overnight.”

  My brain snapped back into the present. “Right. I’ll stay. Marge, you go.”

  “Someone was murdered?” she said in a hushed whisper. “Who?”

  Down the hall, an officer was holding open a door as two more carried in a kitchen table.

  “I mean, why haven’t we heard about this?” Marge demanded. “If they’re sending shit in, they must have been out there processing for a while—”

  “It’s brutal,” Samille said, adopting her officer-delivering-bad-news poker-face. “The chief asked people to keep it quiet. We’re trying to keep it out of the news until we get a better understanding of what happened.”

  “Marge, you go.” My eyes never left the table. They had wrapped it in paper, which meant it was probably covered in blood. As Samille said, this was a kind of brutality never before seen in Fallvale. “I’ll stay. I’ll check in the big items, and we’ll do the rest tomorrow.”

  Murder had come to my little hiding place in this corner of the world, and with it had come magic. That was a problem for me.

  Where there was magic, there was another magic user.

  And the new guy in town, well...

  He was a killer.

  Chapter 2

  I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN it was the calm before the storm. That’s the thing, though—no one ever knows it’s coming. Even when your life is troubled and you have too much going on, and bad luck is the ever-present devil on your back, you look back on those times with a wistful nostalgia when it really starts raining like a bitch.

  I checked in the evidence to maintain the chain of custody. The case report wasn’t in yet, but I already knew I had a problem.

  The magic was everywhere. On everything. It was unmistakable.

  Faint and dizzying, and almost like an orchestrated prayer, it called out to me. It made me shake and sway on my feet, nearly dancing a step before my mind crashed into the tragic waltz of my past come back to haunt me. The notes went high and trilled liked tiny birds hungry in a nest before falling, tumbling, and flowing like waters against a cliff. It was urgent, and sad, and filled with all the hope and potential of a life never lived.

  Where those who kill with magic go, the Bleak is sure to follow. As a fugitive from the Bleak, that was a big problem for me.

  I came to Fallvale about six months ago. But if you ask anyone, they’ll tell you I’ve been around for years. Or at least as long as they can remember. I graduated from Fallvale High with a high GPA before my parents moved away to Pittsburgh or Detroit. Maybe somewhere in Florida—no one is quite sure. I might have had a sister, or maybe a brother, and maybe I took some time off from work to attend one of their weddings a couple of years back, or the birth of a child... something like that.

  The details of the memory spell were fuzzy. Malleable. Fudgeable when I needed them to be. I designed it that way.

  It was hard enough to get a job in law enforcement in the human world without an employment history and references, so I made one up to pass the vetting process. Perhaps the Bleak should have been as thorough, but it was terribly common for them to be blinded by pure talent.

  When the officers were gone and everyone had been properly signed out on the access log, I turned back to the stacks and sighed.

  Shit. It was the only word that I’d been able to think since hearing the chime of another’s music in the hallway. But, to my point, it certainly applied. Shit.

  Wherever the source of the magic was, it wasn’t here. Not yet. Later, I was sure there would be a focal object—something that the caster had used to channel the magic, and that would tell me more about who the killer was and what he was up to.

  Male. Based on subtleties in the notes of the magic, I was sure it was a he.

  But until tomorrow, and a case report, and labs and suspects and the lead investigator...

  Breathe. I shut my eyes and tried to focus. They’ve kept it quiet. The Bleak doesn’t know. Not yet. Focus on your plan.

  The plan would keep me safe.

  This changed the plan, and I needed to think.

  Magic had killed a man, and along with him, all hopes I had of hiding. A murder meant attention for the little town of Fallvale. A magical murder meant something far worse for me.

  Attention from the Bleak and everyone else I had pissed off in the last few years. People were out for my blood, and whoever this killer was, he had just shined a massive spotlight on my hiding place. The Bleak didn’t take kindly to murderers, and less so to those who killed outside the magical community.

  It risked their exposure.

  And this risked my exposure. Whoever this guy was, he needed to be gone. Yesterday. Before anyone else realized magic had killed here.

  I was the best breaker the Bleak had ever seen, but I didn’t do street work. This was the kind of thing they assigned to handlers.

  But I had to find this killer. I had to stop him.

  I had to do it before the handlers came for me.

  Because if they got to me before I got to him, I was a dead woman. They would pin this murder on me and be done with it.

  I left my work at the Fallvale PD that night wrapped in a coat and with my hands aching for relief as unspent magic pooled in them. I liked the nights here, especially in the winter, because I could hang my hand out the window of my car and vent the nervous energy as a plume of steam that looked like car exhaust.

  I thought about getting drive-thru, but with the possibility that I would need to ditch this life quickly, I decided against it. If this was my last night here, it was going to happen at Crooked A’s.

  It was half past eight on a Monday night and the lot was nearly empty. Just how I liked it. The unseasonal Christmas lights strung across the porch out front clashed marvelously with the Hawaiian decor and the smell of beer and chicken fajitas mixed with the lingering frost in the air. I parked in the back lot, as was my custom, because I didn’t like my work colleagues seeing my car from the street and coming in to join me.

  As I huddled in my jacket and my icy fingers fumbled to lock my car, I heard the stranger’s approach before I saw him.

  “Excuse me, miss, but I was wondering if you could give me a drive home...”

  I turned, prepared to dial a cab for someone who’d had one too many after a long Monday.

  And that was when the guy’s fist slammed into the side of my head.

  I went down hard, reeling, but unfortunately for my attacker, I wasn’t unconscious. I grabbed a fistful of gravel and rock salt and scrambled to my feet, throwing jagged grit in his face.

  Hissing in surprise, he tried to block with his hands. I kneed him hard in the groin and he gave a satisfying groan. As he doubled over in pain, my elbow connected squarely with his nose. I smirked as it crunched as loud as the gravel beneath our feet.

  I could have turned him into last July’s bonfire with magic if I wanted to. Pity it wasn’t part of the plan, but sundry self-defense seemed to be working fine.

  I turned to go.

  That was when the second guy grabbed me from behind. I tried to throw my head back to break his nose. He twisted to the side just in time.

  I kicked my legs up to launch us backwards off the car, but I missed my foothold, and whoever had me was strong. Bodybuilder strong, and he was moving with some determination.

  He has a plan. Don’t let it work. Don’t go to the next site.

  I opened my mouth to scream. I only got out a small yelp before he had a hand over my mouth, and the first guy was getting to his feet. In the light given by the single back-alley bulb over our heads, he looked pissed.

  He growled at me, sending a hot plume of steaming breath into the air as he
wiped at the blood dripping from his broken nose. He came at me with his fist raised.

  Both my arms were pinned at my sides, and I was done fooling around. I felt the magic crawling in my fist. I struggled to contain it. If I struck now, my hiding place was blown.

  And then I’d be going down for three murders instead of one.

  I hesitated.

  Follow the plan!

  Too late—I braced for impact and turned my face to the side.

  Chapter 3

  “HEY!”

  The blow never landed. Footfalls on gravel. I peeked out of one eye and saw the bloody nose guy look over his shoulder. He broke into a run, and the guy holding me shoved me to the ground before doing the same.

  “Hey!” The stranger knelt next to me, casting wary glances in the direction of my attackers. I heard car doors slamming and a vehicle peeling out of the lot. “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  I sucked in a breath. The wind was knocked out of me. The frosty patch beneath me and ringing in my ears said I might have inadvertently loosed some magic, too.

  “I’m fine.” I winced at the pain in my palms, which had caught the bulk of the impact, but it was nothing compared to some of my previous injuries. “I’m fine, really.”

  “We should call the police.”

  I groaned. Not now. Not when I had a murderer to catch. “I’m an evidence technician. I work with the police. Did you get a plate number?”

  The man looked uncertainly back toward the end of the alley, squinting his eyes before he looked back down at me with concern and regret.

  “No.”

  Figures. “It’s okay. I’ll tell them tomorrow.”

  I started to climb to my feet, hoping to show my good Samaritan that I didn’t need his help anymore, but he was still standing there.

  He was tall and I had to look up to catch the details of his face. His eyes were mesmerizing; hazel, with dark centers surrounded by earthy green that was rimmed by a thin circle of deep blue. Great hair, athletic build, and well-dressed in a button-down shirt and suit. A knee-length trench coat accentuated his broad shoulders.