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wardencommanderrodimiss · 6 years ago

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Witches, Chapter 19: yeah there’s actually still one last little bit of investigation left in this case. I’m sorry too. Now who wants backstory for side characters in a DLC case!

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

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For all her bluff and bluster about getting back to investigating in the face of Blackquill’s disdain, Athena doesn’t seem to have a clue what they should do next. She tromps in stocking feet back into the aquarium, Phoenix and Pearl trailing behind her, and stares at a poster on the wall with life cycle facts about penguins for five minutes before she suggests that they go visit Sasha, because if Blackquill was here, then he had to be done interrogating her, right?

Pearl remains behind at the aquarium to get settled in, and Athena complains the whole drive to the detention center because Phoenix made her put her wet shoes back on instead of driving barefoot. “I’m wearing tights!” she insists. “It’s not barefoot!”

“Shoes, kiddo.”

“They’re wet! It’s gross!”

“Should’ve thought of that before you threw a bucket of water at a witch.” Or whatever he is. Fae-adjacent, the same vague broad classification to encompass Phoenix and Trucy and Klavier and Thalassa. Apollo’s not quite there yet.

“Wicked witch of the bench afraid he’d melt if it hit him, you think?” She steps out onto the parking lot asphalt and winces at the tiny rocks digging into her feet. “Okay,” she sighs. “Shoes.”

As they wait at the detention center for Sasha to be brought out, Athena turns, very seriously, to Phoenix. “Alright, Boss, we’ve gotta cheer Sasha up! If you’re feeling bad about the investigation, don’t you dare show it!”

The door on the other side of the glass opens and an officer escorts Sasha in. She wears a grin on her face but has a wild look in her eyes. “Ahoy, me buckos! Worry ye not about me! My spirits be good and ol’ Prosecutor Nostache won’t keep me down!”

“Uh.” Athena blinks and turns to Phoenix. He shrugs.

Sasha’s entire posture collapses. “Well that was an anchor,” she says. “Straight to the bottom. I wanted to make you feel better for all the trouble I’m causing…”

“We were hoping to cheer you up,” Athena says.

“Maybe you both can just act natural,” Phoenix says. Not that telling anyone to “act natural” ever leads to any normal or natural behaviors. Certainly not if he ever told Maya that, though after the first time he learned to add the qualifier “act what might be natural for a human”.

“Anyway.” Athena inhales deeply and the large, forced smile that she had put on calms down into something still friendly, still smiling, but closer to neutral, and much more natural. “What we’re here for, Sasha, is to tell you that we’d like to represent you in court tomorrow!”

“What!” Sasha shoves herself backward from the sill, her chair screeching horribly across the floor until it gets stuck, and she still pushing tips herself and the chair over backwards, thudding out of sight to the ground.

“Sasha?” Phoenix asks. “Is - is something wrong?”

She doesn’t stand back up. Athena pushes herself up on the sill and presses her forehead against the glass, trying to peer down to see if she’s okay. “Pros - Prosecutor Blackquil s-said--” Sasha’s shaking, shuddering breathing interrupts her words. “Said that you w-wouldn’t show up. You’d abandon me.” She’s definitely crying now, loudly and messily. “And you’re here! You - you’re - you’re h-here. To rescue me.” She rights the chair, rubbing tears off of her cheeks and out of her bloodshot eyes.

“No, Sasha!” Athena still has her face up close to the glass and she presses her palms up against it, too. “We would never! Even Prosecutor Blackquill should know that! I would never! Don’t cry!” The next loud sniffling comes from Athena.

Oh boy.

“These are happy tears.” And Sasha is smiling, beaming really, even blinking furiously to stop further tears from falling. “I’m so so glad I met you both! For Orla and me a-and—” Another shaky breath stops her for a moment. “Okay. I’m okay. I’m okay! You’ve probably got questions, right? Fire away!”

What she tells them of cleaning the orca pool that early morning is a review of what they’ve already heard, up to the point that she readily tells them she was arguing with the captain. She talks more about Orla’s tricks, says that the calendar with the seven am meeting with the captain is definitely not hers, and when they tell her that they dropped off her medications - it was Fulbright who tasked them with this, but it still had to be cleared with the prison so that they know no one is trying to smuggle in something illegal like white powder (Apollo is way too straight-laced for an Anything Agency and it’s hilarious every time he smacks inconsequentially up against that wall) - she starts getting weird. Like she’s trying to distract them from the fact that she’s on medication at all, which isn’t really working. “Are you sick?” Athena asks. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s all just peachy!” Sasha says with false, feigned cheer; the fact that she couldn’t drum up a fish pun to use really seals it. (Wait, isn’t a drum a kind of fish? Why’s he know more about fish than flowers? And seals - god damn it.)

Athena stares doubtfully at her. Her shoulders slump. “I guess I could just tell you, huh,” Sasha says. “It’s for a heart condition but—”

“A heart condition?” Athena cries, her voice high and shrill.

“—but it’s not that serious—”

“Not that serious!” Athena’s second echo isn’t quite as much of a piercing shriek, but it’s even louder, an angry yell. “It’s your heart! Don’t tell me not to worry!”

Sasha heaves a sigh. “This is why I don’t tell people,” she says. “Because you freak, and then I’m trying to reassure you that you don’t need to treat me like I’m fragile, and I’ve got to explain that I’m not dying, so on, so on.”

“Oh,” Athena says. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s okay.” Sasha shrugs. “I’m sorry for snapping at you like that. It’s not you. It just gets a little tiring going through the same song-and-dance every time I tell someone. Much less fun than putting on the same song and dance with Orla every show!” Athena laughs and Sasha sticks her tongue out at her. “And I’d just had that argument with the captain the other night, too. The one that came up in the trial this morning. He knew about my condition, and I’d told him that I’d scheduled the surgery that would fix it, and he was worried and he told me that’d been thinking, and he was taking me out of the show. You saw the new flier, right? That I’m not in it?”

Phoenix nods.

“And it was supposed to debut yesterday. But I needed to go out there and perform yesterday. It was the anniversary of Azura’s death, and I had this crazy idea that I would go in front of the audience and tell them all that her death was just an accident, that Orla didn’t kill her, and now the captain wasn’t going to let me out there. So what I did” - her smile is somewhere between devious and sad - “was move the skull rock from the show stage. Put it back in the orca pool, figured the captain probably wouldn’t look there, and if he couldn’t find the major prop for the new show, we’d have to do the old one again, right? Marlon gave me a hand with it, while he was watching Orla at the stage pool.”

It was a bold plan, is about all Phoenix can say to that. “Azura is the orca trainer before you?” he asks.

“Yeah. Azura Summers. She taught me everything I know - she was a year older than me and we were like - anemone and clownfish. Remora and shark!” Phoenix doesn’t speak marine biology but Athena is nodding in solemn understanding. “She was a year older than me. She was the best - you ever meet someone and just, hit it off immediately, you just know that they’re someone who’s gonna be so important in your life?” Sasha stares down at her hands, fiddling with something. “And then she was gone.”

“That must’ve been awful,” Athena says. “Losing someone you loved, and then having everyone else say that your friend was the one that killed her, and no one believes you when you know otherwise.” She sniffs again. Poor girl and her sensitive hearing and hyperempathy.

Sasha nods. “Azura was like family, since my own family was never exactly supportive of my career path.” And not that Phoenix wants to downplay the severity of family disapproval, how much of a mess of hurt their influence can make, but he can’t exactly say he’s surprised to hear that a selkie’s family might think that her getting a career with an orca was bad news. “I can only imagine what they’re saying now after the captain’s death now too.”

He doesn’t want to pick at a reopening wound, but he never knows what strange little pieces of information will help, and so he asks, “Were you and Ms Summers - involved?”

“Huh?” Sasha blinks at him. A moment later the meaning clicks. “Oh! No, she was straight. She had a boyfriend that I never got to meet, but I’d help her send him videos of some of our orca-training sessions, because I mean, getting to see your cute girlfriend hanging with a cute orca, what could be better?”

“Toss a cute penguin in there too!” Athena suggests. “And then you’re golden!”

“Athena, I love the way you think!”

Phoenix clears his throat. Something more for his “legal etiquette Athena needs to learn” list: the detention center is not a place for hitting on people. Or maybe it’s more Sasha hitting on her. Or maybe they’re just like this.

Sasha’s face falls and her eyes turn downcast. “She had this matching charm with her boyfriend that I’d wanted to return to him after she died, but I didn’t know enough about him to find him, so I just hung onto it myself. Swore on it that I’d become the best orca trainer ever, for her.” She holds up the charm; it hangs from a cord with a bead strung on it, and looks like a little talisman or envelope one would find at a shrine. “Just like the captain always used her walkie-talkie after that. It had teeth marks from Orla in it, when she brought Azura back up from the water…”

Jack Shipley’s death must be like reliving a nightmare for her.

(But also, remembering the photo of the body, Phoenix did not see a walkie-talkie in the victim’s holder for it.)

“Wait, you didn’t even see her boyfriend at her funeral?” Athena asks.

Sasha shakes her head sadly. “She didn’t even have a funeral. We held our own memorial for her at the aquarium, but her family just sort of - showed up and took her away. I’d suggested that we get an autopsy or something done, to know how she actually died and that it wasn’t Orla, but we needed her family’s permission for that and they wouldn’t give it.”

Her face is turned toward them, and her eyes are, or should be, but she has the spaced-out look of someone not seeing what’s right in front of her. “They had this huge row with Dr Crab about something, too. I wonder if that’s part of what changed him. He and Azura were pretty close, and he started acting so different after she died - talking about how he was going to euthanize Orla, when before he said he’d never do such a thing. He thought she did it! He still always keeps poison on hand, ready to put her down at any moment! If she’d been found guilty today he would’ve just done it, right then!”

Phoenix has a very good idea of who they need to talk to again, next.

Back at the aquarium, they find Dr Crab in his laboratory, with Pearl, who is holding a furiously a squawking Rifle in her arms. “—correct, she does hate me. Since this little annoyance” - Dr Crab gestures at Sniper, who is for once free of the nest of his hair and waddling about the lab - “imprinted on me right out of the egg, she thinks I stole her baby. I didn’t want to steal her baby! But I guess she feels like the human parents of a changeling would.”

“That’s very sad for both of you,” Pearl says seriously. Rifle’s wings flap against her hands. “Your job involves inducing animals to vomit a lot, doesn’t it?”

The doctor snorts. “Today’s just been a hell of a day.” He squints down at the strange machine in his hand, something too boxy to be a regular tablet, with a small screen that flips back on a hinge. “Now let me see if I can find out when she ingested that foreign object.”

“Hi Mr Nick!” Pearls releases Rifle to the ground and the penguin makes an immediate beeline for Dr Crab’s shins. Absorbed in whatever he’s looking at on his machine, he doesn’t seem to notice. “Watch the penguin vomit! It’s for Sniper to eat!” She directs his attention to a pile of, yes, penguin vomit, that he doesn’t want to consider any further, but that Sniper is pecking at. “Mr Doctor told me that mama penguins partially digest and regurgitate fish for their babies to eat, because it’s easier for them to eat that mush!”

“You two seem to be getting along well,” Phoenix says. “You and Dr Crab, I mean.” They already knew that Pearl hit it off with Rifle, somehow.

“Rifle ate something she shouldn’t so I was helping him get that out of her.” Pearl gestures now at the corner of one of the lab tables, where an object, familiar though it’s partially covered in mushed-up fish, lies. Phoenix takes a few more steps forward. The mess doesn’t smell as fishy as he expected, or perhaps he’s lost all sense of smell, and yes, whatever it is that Rifle ate looks a whole hell of a lot like the little talisman Sasha had, that once belonged to Azura. And there was supposed to be a second one, that Azura’s boyfriend had, wasn’t there?

“Excuse me, Dr Crab?” Phoenix says. He grunts. “Can we take a look at that charm that Rifle swallowed?”

He grunts again. Phoenix decides that’s a “yes”. Investigations don’t get anywhere fast, otherwise. He gingerly picks up the cord on the charm and lets it dangle. Yeah, that’s definitely the same thing as—

“Hey! What are you doing with that?” Dr Crab snaps out of his reverie, with all the anger of a man who’s only just realized something is happening that he would’ve liked to have stopped sooner. “Put that down! That’s Azura’s!”

Phoenix drops it back on the table. Dr Crab, with no regard for penguin barf, snatches it away. “What the hell was it doing in Rifle’s stomach?” He drops it back into the pocket of his lab coat.

“Would this one happen to have belonged to Azura’s boyfriend?” Phoenix asks.

“I don’t make it a habit to discuss the affairs of the deceased! Especially not with you people!”

Bit of a fraught subject, there. Sasha did say that they were close. “Yesterday was the anniversary of her death, right?”

Dr Crab’s sigh sounds more like a growl. How close is Phoenix to being kicked out of the lab? “That’s right,” Crab says. “A year since the orca killed her.”

“You really think Orla did?” Athena asks. “I don’t believe it!”

“And I was there, Ms Lawyer. I saw Orla bite her. Maybe she didn’t mean to kill her, who’s to say - but what I do know is that Azura is dead.” The point he puts on his last several words closes down the topic even more firmly than his outraged yelling did. Satisfied that he’s shut Phoenix up - for the moment, because Phoenix refuses to be done until he’s run out of questions and he’s still got plenty - he returns to studying the data on his machine.

Who knows what might be important information for a trial? “So what’s that there?” Phoenix asks.

“Monitoring system. Collection of medical records for all the creatures. Between it and the cameras I can monitor them all constantly, twenty-four/seven. Company secret, that’s all I’ll tell you.”

“Really?” Phoenix asks. “Aren’t medical records just like - past exams and stuff? How can you get present, constant data from that?”

“Good point,” Crab says, after a slight pause. A sneered, thin smile stretches out across his face. “I can see there’s no fooling you.”

“Are you trying to fool me?” Phoenix asks.

The two Psyche-Locks that clang into place answer that question for him.

“You tell me,” Dr Crab says.

“Clearly,” Phoenix says.

“Excuse me, Mr Doctor?” Pearl asks. She scoops Rifle up into her arms to stop the penguin from resuming an attack on Dr Crab’s shins. “Mr Nick is a very good lawyer who always finds the truth but he needs to know everything he can to do so. Even if you don’t think your monitorings have anything to do with the case, it might be the information that Mr Nick needs to bluff himself into a better position to win!”

Dr Crab stares at Phoenix, his eyebrows raised. Phoenix wishes Pearl had found any other way to phrase that. “And it would be very kind and helpful of you to do,” Pearl adds.

The lab is far from silent - the hum and murmur of computers, Rifle’s struggles to break free and attack, Sniper eating, Athena cooing at Sniper. But it still feels quiet and empty as Pearl waits for any response and reaction at all from Dr Crab. He says nothing. She narrows her eyes, glancing from Rifle to the floor, like her next step in convincing him will be to sic a penguin on him.

Instead she simply readjusts her hold on Rifle, pulling the penguin up further in her arms, and says, much more seriously, no longer with any sort of pleading edge, “You asked for my help to examine Rifle and I gave it to you, remember? It was just a few minutes ago, right before Mr Nick came back, but I didn’t just offer that on my own.”

“Son of a bitch,” Dr Crab hisses. “That’s exactly what happened, isn’t it? I asked her if you could grab her for me and - damn, now I owe you, don’t I?”

He and Athena both glance over at Phoenix’s sharp intake of breath. Pearl doesn’t do this; she cares about human standards of fairness and tends to cancel debts made out of careless words of people who don’t know better and don’t know what she is. This situation, this case, she thinks is desperate. And Dr Crab saw what she is. It’s fair.

Pearl, unblinking, hollow-eyed, nods. “And I think you should answer Mr Nick’s questions about your monitoring,” she says.

Dr Crab shakes his head. “Well,” he says. “Shit. I got careless and that’s on me - to the victor go the spoils. So if I answer whatever questions our Mr Lawyer here has about my monitoring equipment here, then we’re settled, yes? No debts after that.”

“No debts after that,” Pearl agrees.

They both wait for Phoenix to say something; it’s a bit tricky, he thinks, to follow up a top-tier negotiation such as Pearl’s. “So. Twenty-four/seven monitoring. How’s that work?”

“It’s an ecological data organization system developed in Europe. Teleobservation Realtime Pertinent Data Organizer, TORPEDO for short.”

Phoenix decides not to try and suss out how well that acronym actually fits it, and not just because the whole name has already been ejected from his brain and he couldn’t repeat it back if he tried. Tele-pertinent real-time data what?

“It records information on its subjects constantly - heartbeat, vocalization, movements, temperature, and so on - through sensors placed on or near the subject. All that gets sent to me and my equipment here. Rifle has her sensor attached to her flipper ID tag.” Pearl takes Rifle’s wing in her hand and holds it out to examine the tag in question. “For Orla and the fish, it’s attached to the side of the tank. Now here we go, what’s it say about Rifle’s feeding?” Dr Crab glares down at the terminal in his hand. “Four am on the nineteenth is when she swallowed that. What a weird time. And - shit, Orla didn’t eat at all that night until the next afternoon.” He shakes his head. “What is going on here?”

“Maybe that’s why Rifle wouldn’t eat my fish but Orla would.” Athena sounds slightly cheered at the prospect that it wasn’t her causing personal offense to Rifle - Rifle just wasn’t hungry.

Phoenix clears his throat. “Why keep it a secret?” he asks. “This monitoring system - it’s clearly helpful and it’s not like we’re competitors trying to come in and steal your secrets.”

“Let me preface this by saying” - nothing good ever starts that way - “that this system has been tested rigorously and approved as safe and legal in many countries. Just not this one.”

Ah, that would do it. “You’re breaking the law?” Athena asks, startled.

Dr Crab grimaces but it ends as something more like a grin. “That’s why I keep this terminal with me at all times. Lucky, else the police might’ve been poking their noses into it yesterday. None of the rest of the crew knows - keeps them safe from the legal repercussions, but I had Jack’s permission for this. He felt, and I agreed, that giving the best care possible to our animals was more important than legality.”

“But - but you’re breaking the law! And that’s—” Athena sputters, searching for a solid objection. “That’s breaking the law!”

Yeah, she’s a smart kid but hopefully she’s not going into a trial without a co-counsel any time soon.

“And if breaking the law betters the lives of our animals? Are we supposed to just sit and wait for the law to change, when in the meantime we can have more information and act quicker to help them - to save their lives?”

“But…” Athena glances to Phoenix for backup she won’t find. Not that he’s not a hypocrite, but he’s not going to step into this debate just to be one. It’s disconcerting, again, every time he realizes that part of Athena’s admiration of him comes only from the fact that she doesn’t know him as well as Apollo does. She’s arguing against the logic that bore him his ace in the hole. And he can’t blame her; it took him a long, bad time to get there. “You’re just - twisting it around, now.” But she looks rattled, not sure how to square this away with the foundation of her career.

“Dr Crab,” Phoenix says. “I might need to use this information in court tomorrow. But that would obviously cause serious problems for you and the aquarium.” He isn’t asking permission, but this isn’t quite an apology, either. It’s just a statement of what it is, regrettable, inevitable.

“You’ve gotta do your job, Mr Lawyer, and I do mine.” Dr Crab shrugs, more resigned than bothered. This must be a prescient concern, for however long it’s been since they installed this system at the aquarium. Maybe it’s even a relief by now, to no longer be hiding. “I stand by my convictions and don’t have regrets, and I hope you won’t, either. I can’t blame you, or her, for that.” He nods at Pearl.

“I appreciate it.” Nice to not have a witness biting his head off, even if in this case it would be - not deserved, he’d like to think, but understandable.

“Hmph. Any last questions on that or can I—”

A loud peeping begins, like the chirps Sniper made but louder and constant. Dr Crab frowns and slips a phone out of his pocket. “Hello? Crab here.”

“That’s a ringtone?” Pearl asks. “That’s adorable!”

“I don’t think Maya’s gonna let you change mine,” Phoenix says to her.

“I didn’t think that Dr Crab liked the penguins that much,” Athena whispers. “But I guess he’s just a big softie, really!”

Were he actually listening to them Phoenix has no doubt the doctor would consider those fighting words. As it is, his fighting words are for whoever is on the other end of the line. “Son of a bitch, you people again! What more do you—”

He storms from the lab and slams the door behind him. Athena looks at Phoenix. He nods. She creeps closer to the door to listen, crouched with her ear by the crack where it closes, though Phoenix isn’t sure she needs to be that close to actually hear. “He’s saying that Orla was found not guilty,” she says, “and that should be enough - stop harassing him, he knows that - if it comes to it he - Mr Wright!” She tried to spring back up but smacks her head against the bottom of the doorknob on her way up, and wincing and grumbling to herself, stands tall again. “He said - that if he has to he’d euthanize Orla!”

“No!” Pearl gasps. Rifle wriggles around in her arms and Pearl sets her on the table. “She’s not guilty! In a court of law! She can’t be punished!”

Knowing that the whole orca pool can function as a faery ring makes Phoenix even more nervous that she’s going to commit larceny as soon as anything starts seeming tense. Grand Theft Orca. This is not something he ever thought he would have to consider.

The door swings violently inward, banging hard into Athena’s shoulder. She stumbles away, cursing under her breath again. Phoenix picks out pieces of several languages. (He really should ask her how to say “fuck you” in German. It would be funny.)

“Where’s my goddamn calendar?” Dr Crab storms back in, sweeping a dozen takeout containers from the desk in front of the largest screen into the trash can strategically positioned right next to it. A few fliers for the orca show drift to the floor. “Son of a bitch, where did I leave it this time?”

“Calendar?” Athena perks up. “It wouldn’t happen to be one of those cute penguin ones, is it? Mr Rimes found one in the nap room and—”

Dr Crab snatches it away from her and scans the mess of his desktop for a pen and scribbles something on it. “Yes, that’s mine. It was a gift, all right?” He sighs. “From Azura. She designed the calendars for this year and this was the prototype.”

“Oh.” Athena’s smile vanishes. And then, seeming to take a cue from Phoenix’s line of questioning of Sasha back at the detention center, she asks, “Did you and Ms Summers happen to be, erm, romantically involved?”

“Of course not!” He bristles at the suggestion, almost weirdly defensive, so while he sees no Psyche-Locks, Phoenix still won’t take it as the end-all-be-all. Maybe he’s defensive about the calendar for what’s written on it, that meeting with the victim at seven am. Could he, at that time, have committed murder? “Were I even so inclined to partake of ‘romantic feelings’” - he doesn’t make them with his hands but Phoenix can hear the air quotes - “I certainly would not involve myself with—” He stops. He glares at Athena and Phoenix in turn. “What business of yours is it, anyway?”

“I just heard a lot of sadness in your voice when you mentioned her, and the calendar,” Athena says. “And I wondered—”

“She was a good friend and now she’s dead, of course I’m sad!” Though he’s probably not sad now, just mad at them and their prying questions. “How can you possibly think that’s related to your defense of Sasha, or do you like using the excuse of being lawyers to pry into people’s personal lives?”

Seems like it’s time to redirect; this thread when pulled on isn’t going anywhere good. “Your phone call just now - what was that about?”

“Heard all that, did you now?” Dr Crab sighs. Phoenix skips the part where he clarifies that Athena did, because she has better hearing than the human and fae also in the room. “That’s the Center for Dangerous Animal Control, insisting that if Orla ever attacks anyone again, we’d better not bother with this rigamarole and just put her down immediately.”

“But that’s not fair!” Athena has her fists raised, ready to fight the shadowy specter of this vague organization. “Did you agree to that?”

Dr Crab is quiet for a very long time. “Sometimes,” he says finally, “unfortunately, things happen. As a veterinarian, I am prepared to do whatever needs to be done.”

“Sasha says you keep poison on hand to always be prepared to put Orla down!” Athena levels the accusation with fury that Sasha would be proud of.

Dr Crab reaches into one of the pockets of his lab coat and pulls out a tiny plastic bag that contains within it a red and yellow capsule.

One that looks exactly like that they found mixed in with the contents of Orla’s stomach.

Phoenix is very, very glad they didn’t show it to him.

“That’s awful!” Athena says. “How dare you!” She’s livid enough that Phoenix isn’t sure she realizes this pill is like the other one, and while that’s something they’re going to have to work on - making sure she’s clear-minded enough to make all the connections that matter, for now she’ll have him or Apollo with her, and Phoenix is just glad she won’t blurt it out to Dr Crab. He wants to keep this one close to his chest until he sees the best opening to play it.

“Sasha thought the same thing.” Dr Crab drops the pill back in his pocket. “When security around Orla was tightened last year, she insisted that I not be given a key card to access the orca pool room. Thinking, I imagine, that the chances of Orla having a medical emergency when either she nor Jack were here to let me in were lower than the chances of me doing something to her.” He huffs derisively, Athena still seething.

“Dr Crab, I have a last question for you,” Phoenix says. “This - Center for Dangerous Animal Control.” Or however the words were ordered. “Ms DePlume told me something interesting earlier today.” That the Center had made this same demand a year ago, and for some reason relented, but the aquarium has been making large monthly payouts to someone or somewhere ever since. Phoenix repeats this fact to Dr Crab’s expressionless face, and adds, “It’s clear that there’s something going on behind the scenes here, and I suspect that it has something to do with this murder.”

“Do you.” He’s good at responding by saying nothing, but any words at all are sometimes enough to trip the trap, let Phoenix know exactly how much a witness is hiding.

Five Psyche-Locks this time, the appearance punctuated a moment later with loud footsteps and a louder yell. “Dr Herman Crab! Sorry to interrupt, but Prosecutor Blackquill wants to speak with you!”

“Son of a—” Dr Crab punctuates his speech by smacking his calendar down hard on the the table. “What the hell else could you possibly have to ask me?”

“We were hoping to have Mr Rimes testify at tomorrow’s trial, but we’ve been having some trouble getting him to cooperate. As such, Prosecutor Blackquill would like to call you instead!”

“Hmph.” Crab takes a moment in which he clearly is sizing up and assessing Fulbright, deciding whether he can get out of this and if he wants to tangle with Blackquill in that way. Surprising that he didn’t manage to coerce (or threaten) Rimes into talking and has to go for a backup. “Fine. But I’m not giving my opinion on what happened. I’ll tell you what I know, but I’m not taking sides.” He turns to Phoenix. “Until tomorrow, Mr Lawyer.”

Neither Trucy nor Apollo notices when the office door opens. Trucy has her laptop in her lap and is furiously scrolling, glancing between the screen and the notebook Apollo is still trying to write it. It’s a silent and periodic scuffle between the two of them as Trucy grabs it and yanks it toward her to check something, and Apollo pulls it back to continue writing. Phoenix shudders to think how unreadable his handwriting is from this. “Commonly for a number of heart conditions,” Trucy mutters. “Is this relevant, Apollo?”

“Of course it is!” He reaches across her keyboard and turns her screen toward himself. “Go back to the book - the picture. If she had a heart condition and a physically intensive job—” He taps his pen against the screen. “There’s no visible injury, look, wouldn’t you think a killer whale could cause some damage—”

“Oh! You think that—”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, guys,” Phoenix says. “What are we working on?”

They shriek in tandem, Apollo flinging the pen and Trucy knocking the notebook to the floor and almost dropping her laptop. Athena claps her hands over her ears, belatedly, and braces herself against the doorframe. “Yes, we’re back now,” Phoenix adds. “What’ve you got?”

“First: the capsule!” Apollo moves his hand like he means to gesture with the pen to the capsule in a bag on the coffee table, except the pen is no longer in his hand, so he’s just sort of waving, and his voice still as enthusiastically loud as ever. “It’s a sleeping drug! That’s the brand name on it, ‘3 Zs’. The Shipshape Aquarium vet recently bought a bunch of it from Hickfield Clinic - it’s meant for people, but apparently would work on other mammals.”

“A sleeping drug?” Phoenix repeats.

Apollo nods.

That had been Phoenix’s first thought, when he first saw that capsule, but Dr Crab called it poison - sure, enough of it could certainly kill, but he’s a veterinarian. He’d be legally able to get some kind of actual euthanization drug instead of trying to overdose an orca on sleeping pills - if that was actually what he intended with it, and not something else. Why pretend it’s poison?

“And the other thing - Shipshape Aquarium had the woman who died last year, Azura Summers, right?” He doesn’t wait for Phoenix to confirm he knows and barrels on, “She was getting medication prescribed by Hickfield Clinic to help her manage a heart condition.”

“I found an illegal download of that writer lady’s book!” Trucy pipes up. Bless that girl.

“A heart condition?” Phoenix can’t do much but echo right now, but his mind is racing. What was Apollo saying when they walked in? Jack Shipley removed Sasha from the show for fear that she would come to harm because of her condition - theoretically, that could’ve already happened. “Do you know what the medication she was on was called?”

“Uh…” Apollo glances down at his notebook. “I wrote it down? It’s like—”

Phoenix takes the notebook from him. The writing is exactly as messy as he imagined, jagged pen lines trailing off across half the page when Trucy grabbed it. “That’s the same medication that Sasha is taking,” he says to Athena.

“So what’s that mean?” she asks.

“I have no idea.” That’s a hell of a coincidence, but he doesn’t really see how it could be anything but an unfortunate coincidence, even as a man whose policy is to not believe in coincidences. Orla isn’t on trial now, and wasn’t on trial for Azura’s death, either, yesterday. But maybe this information could offer some reassurance, and closure, to Sasha and the rest of the aquarium crew. “But that capsule, now that’s something. Nice work, Apollo.”

Apollo gives Phoenix a wide-eyed, startled look. Has Phoenix really complimented him so rarely?

“Where’s Pearly?” Trucy asks. Her face falls. “Did she go back home already?”

“She’s staying at the aquarium to help out with Orla, with so many of the staff dragged out to testify and everything.” There she goes again, slotting herself perfectly, naturally, in somewhere, like she’s meant to be there, so that no one even questions letting a strange little faery girl in so far behind the scenes.

The only thing to put him slightly at ease is that she said she would be ready to call in, from the aquarium, through video phone during the trial tomorrow, which holds the implication that she’s not going to spirit Orla off to the Twilight Realm in the middle of the night to keep her safe.

Though she didn’t promise for sure that she wouldn’t, so he should probably call her and extract that promise from her, before he ends up defending in a case of orca larceny.

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

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