None of the faces Dusk Shine saw had the look of a Crystal cultist to them. There was a certain resting-state that cultists' faces naturally fell into, a commonality that eventually burned itself into each and every member, given time and sufficient supplies of crystal molly.
Cultists always looked happy.
None of the people swept up in the vicinity of the unexpected corpse on Dusk's block were happy. They'd be mad to be delighted to be crammed into an aging police station at a quarter to ten on a school night, and even the cultists that Twilight Sparkle had come to know wouldn't have been able to quite achieve that sort of mindless cheerfulness, so this wasn't exactly dispositive evidence.
But the Crystallers – even the occasional disturbed or irate Crystaller – still carried under that surface layer of emotion an underlying substrate of bliss which colored every other emotion they displayed. After their anger passed away, their faces returned to their natural resting state – a placid smile.
The people that Dusk Shine saw sitting or standing all around her were by and large normal – pissed, tired, curious, worried. Her rather rag-tag neighbors, no longer amused by the chaos now that they'd been scooped up like the rest of the crowd. The funeral home employees, clustered tightly together around a set of chairs on one side of the outer lobby, like a herd of gazelles packed tightly together for mutual defense against predators lurking in the tall grasses around them. A scattering of older couples and their respectable-looking adult children, grouped by family resemblance in three or four-member clusters.
And the bikers and their women. Those just sprawled out wherever they found the space, in between those people who were not biker outlaws. You would have been able to tell them at a glance, even if they weren't dressed distinctively in the outlaw-biker fashion that might as well have been a uniform, for its supposedly-rebellious lack of variance or individualism. The men stood about in their identical leather vests and riding-leathers; the women slouched beside their menfolk in practical boots and t-shirts and jackets that were as close as possible to the leather vests the menfolk wore, without daring to actually be said vests.
Dusk Shine looked down at Skyla's head in her lap, and noted by the evenness of the little girl's breathing that she'd actually dozed off this time. Dusk gently brushed Skyla's hair, trying her best not to wake her up. She wished she'd insisted on Flurry Heart dying those distinctive colors out of her hair the way that Twilight had dyed the stripes out of her own hair; they made Skyla far too easy to identify in a crowd. But her hair was one of the few reminders to Skyla of her actual mother, and Dusk Shine couldn't take that away from her.
It made her too damn memorable, though. Especially that unique gradient which you only really found in that particular family. Even the baleful Sombra, with his jet-black hair, still had a strange look to him that drew the eye to his impossible head of hair. As far as Twilight had ever been able to tell, the impressively aged Sombra had nonetheless never used any sort of dye to maintain that lustrous mass of dark locks.
Dusk Shine tried to forget Twilight and her memories, and concentrate on the individuals in the crowd. The neighbors were scruffy, but harmless, she thought. The only one she'd put a name to was old man Chalk Stick, who lived upstairs and fought constantly with the two couples who lived on the first floor. The various families looked too stuffy and embarrassed to be here, to be part of this. The funeral home employees… some of them looked kind of shifty. She'd have to keep an eye on those. Especially the owner, Bees Wax's mustachioed, unctuous nephew Lost Wax. Dusk marked the ones that she didn't have names for, but still looked too studiously bored or unaffected.
The bikers were all over the map, some as stolid as cigar-store Indians, some strutting around like peacocks, ostentatiously proud to be in trouble yet again. Their womenfolk mostly rolled their eyes at the antics of the hyper ones. All except for a trio of girls at the far side of the lobby, who were clustered together more like the civilians than the other biker-culture barbarians. One towered over the other two, with a lustrous head of long, pink tresses, a terrified look on her face, and wearing a stupid-looking T-shirt proclaiming her 'Property Of Sapphists MC'. When one of the other two turned, Twilight saw that the leather vests the shorter ones were wearing said 'Sapphistic Motorcycle Chicks', in parody of an outlaw biker's cut. Both of the shorter biker-chicks had the look down cold, shaved bald on one side, with shocks of uneven, longish hair on the other side. The shorter one had white hair with streaks of grey the shade of fly ash. The slightly less short one was built like a whip-handle, but her hair looked like a pride parade flag.
That can't be popular in this crowd. What are they doing here?
Dusk Shine couldn't see Silver Back anywhere in the crowd, or his Probie, Flash something or other. Sentry? But Thunderlane and an angry, bruised-faced old man stood nearby, muttering angrily to each other. The one Dusk couldn't put a name to kept shooting furious glares at the three lesbian bikers at the back of the lobby.
Hopefully that doesn't break out into anything while Skyla and I are here.
A pair of harried looking desk-sergeants came stalking out through the crowd, and Dusk Shine shifted Skyla's head to the seat-cushion under her hip, and lurched to her feet to buttonhole one of the sergeants.
"Sir! Sir, please, my girl has school tomorrow, can I get to the front of the line for interviews? I can't be here all night. Please, today was her first day of classes, and mine, too. I need this job, and she needs the stability."
The sergeant grunted noncommittally, and disappeared through the doorways into the innards of the station.
The station was a breathtakingly ugly building, as modernist and horrible as the rest of Dashville was charming and heart-warming. It was as if they'd distilled all of the misery and brutality of Twentieth Century architecture in town, and bottled it behind the doors of police headquarters. It was all naked concrete, and nonfunctional 'exposed' aluminum, and mirrored glass.
Twilight found herself staring at Dusk Shine's face in the glass opposite of her in a window, and fixated on the strands of hair which she had to keep dyed to obscure her once-distinctive natural striping. She'd been slacking on that, you could almost see the pink and violet roots starting to show, down near her scalp.
Skyla had curled up like a kitten beside Dusk Shine, and Dusk now had nothing better to do with her hands than to open up her huge ruck-like purse, and fiddle with some of her projects hidden in the depths of that bag. She felt around and pulled out a completed device by touch, feeling the individual stones and crystals spaced out on the bracelet-like widget. It was complete, she could use it if she found an opportunity to emplace it. Not sure how far the transmission elements would extend without boosters, though.
Dusk Shine reached up to her earrings, and pulled one of the garnet-stone earrings out of her ear-lobe. She took her hand with the earring, shoved it back inside her purse, and fumbled around until the stud impaled the threading of the bracelet-device. The two earrings were entangled with each other, it wouldn't matter if the two of them were across town, she'd still have a circuit between them.
Just as she'd finished that particular bit of fiddling about, she looked up and found the desk-sergeant she'd accosted in front of her and Skyla, glaring down at her.
"Detective Soft Eyes wants to see you now."
"Uh, can I get someone to look after my daughter?"
"Do we look like a babysitting service, lady? I don't care what you do with her."
"Skyla, wake up, we're next, come on, baby."
Dusk Shine peeled Skyla off of the bench they'd been sitting on for what seemed like hours, and followed the desk sergeant into the back of the station, into what looked like a repurposed storage room, with a table shoved up against the back corner, and boxes full of files haphazardly stacked against the other walls.
Dusk sat Skyla in one of the two chairs sitting by the battered table, and looked around for a third chair, or for that matter, the detective. Nothing.
Dusk was speculatively eyeing a pair of relatively sturdy-looking crates next to a sleepy Skyla when the door burst open again, and a short, balding man came pouring into the room, a tall, pale kid in an ill-fitting coat and tie drifting in his wake.
"Heya, there, hon, I'm Soft Eyes, sorry it took so long to get around to you and your lovely little girl there. I guess we have things ta talk about, don't we?" The brusque little man sat in the first chair without offering it to Dusk Shine, and the other detective simply leaned against the wall next to the door. "Let's start with somethin' simple. Who are ya?"
"D-Dusk Shine, sir. I lived, I live at the back of 112 Woodsdale Road, apartment C. I found that horrible body."
"You found that body? Are you sure, you don't sound sure."
"Er, I'm pretty sure? I –"
"Mommy, it's OK," interrupted Skyla. "You can tell them. I found the man. Are you a detective?"
The lead detective looked at Skyla with some surprise, as if a box of files had suddenly began giving testimony, or the chair had accused the table of criminal behavior. Even the junior detective by the door turned to look at Dusk's little girl.
Dusk Shine took the opportunity to drop her primed bracelet behind the crate she'd been fiddling with earlier, while the detectives were distracted.
"Yes, sir, I'm afraid that's true. The parking lot was strangely dark, but Skyla ran ahead of me, and then came running back saying there was someone on our steps. That was the body."
"And that was the first time you ever saw that body?" asked the young idiot by the door. His superior frowned at him, but didn't say anything.
"Yessir. Never before in my life. Not that I spent much time looking at his face, or him in general beyond what I had to, in order to see that it was a he, and had been killed."
"You could tell that, could you?"
"Even I can tell when someone's opened up like that, it's not likely to be an accident."
"Oh, you'd be surprised. All sorts of horrible things can happen in accidents. Can't go too far in front of the evidence, you know."
"I suppose, sir. I got Skyla away from the body, and I called 911."
"You called a friend, too, didn't you?"
"Poppy Seed, yes. A friend of the family. The only person I really knew here before we moved into town."
"It's good to have friends, that's true. But I meant the young men in the leather vests."
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. There were people out on the sidewalk, and up front around the funeral home. But I didn't know any of those people."
"None of them? Never met any of 'em?"
"Other than the young gentleman who escorted Skyla and I through the crowd, no, and him only because we encountered him over on Spring Street, where he and his friend – or perhaps employer, I wasn't exactly clear on that – had been looking at my car, which was parked on Spring. I hope it's still there, with all of those cops, I'd hate to think someone stole it in the chaos."
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. The Steel Horsemen don't really dabble in stolen cars, nor would they steal in their own hometown even if they did. Not a worry, not a worry." The little man looked at a file that he had spread out in front of him. Skyla was peering at it, craning her neck trying to read the contents from the other side of the table.
"You moved here from Santa Monica?"
"Yes."
"Many bikers in Santa Monica?"
"Less so than in most other parts of Southern California."
"Expensive town, Santa Monica."
"It was why we moved out east, and to get away from places that reminded us of my late husband."
"Oh, yes, you were married to a policeman? So you're used to this sort of thing?"
"Not in the least, Santa Monica was a quiet, peaceful town."
"Not so peaceful your husband didn't die on duty."
"In an automobile accident. I don't see what that has to do with anything."
"How did you know Poppy Seed?"
"She was a friend of Gleaming's."
"That'd be your husband?"
"Yes, of course…"
It went on and on, the little man rattling off stupid, pointless questions, seeded dangerously with alarmingly appropriate ones. About halfway through, Skyla laid her head down on the table and dozed off again. Finally, the younger detective raised his watch and pointed at it, and Detective Soft Eyes closed up his file with the page and a half of written notes he had jotted down, and he got up to shake Dusk Shine's hand.
"Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Shine, but we need to be thorough. An officer will drive you and your lovely daughter home, the forensic techs ought to be done with your front steps by now. Please contact the city if they leave a mess. Good night."
And then a uniformed cop came into the room, and Dusk Shine and Skyla were hurried on out of the police station at high velocity, shoveled into the back of a cruiser, and driven the half-dozen blocks back to their apartment. Dusk got Skyla out of the car, her head spinning a bit, and they wobbled across the now-empty parking lot, past the police-tape and the bits and pieces of rubbish the crowd and the police had left all over the place. Dusk Shine lifted Skyla over the front step that neither of them really wanted to come into contact with.
At least there wasn't any blood on the pavement, or the sidewalk, or the steps. If it wasn't for the police tape and all the trash all over the place, you wouldn't even have known that a terrible crime had occurred not six feet from Dusk Shine's front door.
Dusk Shine slammed the door behind them as they fled inside, and Twilight Sparkle turned the bolt and the lock as Flurry Heart flipped on the hallway lights and kicked her shoes off into the box they kept by the front door for this purpose.
Flurry fled into her bedroom beside the front door, and slammed the door shut, locking it behind her.
"Skyla!" yelled Twilight Sparkle through her niece's bedroom door. "Get to sleep, now. You have very little time before we have to get up again in the morning. Are you sure you don't need some milk?"
"No! Go away!"
Twilight sighed, added her flats to the shoe-box, and stumped on back down the hallway into the dining nook, turning on the lights as she went. She sat down at the table and reached up to her remaining garnet earring, tapping it on.
Come on, come on…
"…so would you say that you deal a lot with dead bodies in your line of work, Mr. Lane"
Twilight fiddled with the earring again, and increased the thaumic gain.
"…Thunderlane, not 'Mr. Lane'. And my business has nothing at all to do with dead bodies, detective. Even my hobbies don't really have much to do in that line."
"Ah, so you have dangerous hobbies, Mr. Thunderlane?"
Twilight pulled boxes of energy crystals from under the table, and began to daisy-chain the ones from the charged box into a powered array with some prepped cording. She took some wire from a spool, and connected her power-array to the back of her garnet earring. The sound transmitted by the surveillance bracelet in that interrogation room in the police station half a mile away was now as clear as if she was listening over an intercom in the next room.
Twilight began adding obsidian recording-bead rings to the array, and set up a testing sub-device to check that the recording was saving to the data-rings.
While she worked, she listened to the detectives grill the Steel Horsemen's 'sergeant at arms'. Taking a brief break, she reached over to her refrigerator, and got out one of those caffeine-overdosed energy drinks. She probably wouldn't have much opportunity for sleep tonight. And she would desperately need the energy before she and Detective Soft Eyes were done for the night.