by Stacia Kane
Wanda seemed to take her silence as a sign that she was dreaming of smearing oil all over herself and sweating in a deck chair. Her tone became knowing. Slightly wheedling. Wholly irritating. “Just the two of you, dinner on the beach…lobster and—”
“I’ll think about it,” Chess said, wanting to focus on work and not on the ludicrous idea of Terrible picking lobster meat from a shell with a tiny fork.
Of course, she didn’t want to offend Wanda, either, so she added, “I sure would love it.”
That sounded so fucking cornpone, but Wanda bought it. Her smile, which had started to falter, came back. “Everyone does. And you know, three of the last five couples we booked to the Caribbean got engaged while they were there...”
Well, goodie for them. She was starting to feel trapped by her smile, like it was a smile-shaped torture device someone had slapped over her mouth. “Wow, that’s amazing. Was—was Alice’s client one of them? The Church employee she was booking, I mean. Was she going to the Caribbean?”
Wanda’s brow furrowed. “I’m not sure where she was going, actually. She left right after—well, when the fire stopped burning, she was gone. She hasn’t been back. Makes sense, poor thing, planning a vacation and suddenly her travel agent just…just burns up.”
Her voice grew hoarse. An uncertain moment passed where it looked like she might lose it, but she pulled herself back together. “It was terrifying. Really terrifying. And Alice, she was such a good friend. She was such a lovely woman. Everyone loved her. So I’m not surprised that girl hasn’t been back.”
“Do you have her name? Or any contact information?”
“Isn’t that in your file, honey? We gave all that information to the man who was here when it happened.”
“Actually…” Chess bit her lip and tried to look sheepish. “I grabbed the wrong file this morning, and I really don’t want to have to go back there and admit it—my superior’s out of the office for the day, so I’d have to tell Elder Dioli about my mistake, and…”
“Say no more.” Wanda’s sweet smile would have made Chess feel guilty if she hadn’t really needed the information. Yes, the girl was probably the lead Will had mentioned, so visiting her would be pointless, but “probably” didn’t mean “definitely.” He’d said his lead hadn’t panned out, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t arrested her for impersonating a Church employee. He would have had to, if he’d spoken to her. But he may not have asked about her cycle or hormones; despite the Church’s constant insistence that men keep such things in mind and the way female employees were expected to be completely open on the subject—female Liaisers, for example, weren’t permitted to work in the City during that week, and some of the female Materials employees had to be restricted to only certain jobs as well—it didn’t always happen. “Give me just a second.”
She slid herself back behind her desk and spent a minute or so alternating between smiling reassuringly at Chess and typing something into her computer. The printer behind her started to whirr, and a few seconds later Chess had a warm sheet of paper in her hand that told her someone named Leanne Ardennes had begun the process of booking herself a trip to Australia, but hadn’t finished or paid.
Chess had never heard of a Church employee named Leanne Ardennes. Or Leanne anything, for that matter. She scanned the paper, hoping for an indicator of employer or position or something, but no. “You said this woman’s tattoos looked like mine? She had as many as I do?”
Wanda inspected Chess’s bare arms, and then nodded. “I’m pretty sure. She was awful covered up with them, and some of what she had looked just like what you’ve got. There—” she pointed to the protective bindrune on Chess’s left shoulder, and then shifted her finger over a few inches to the hafuran and the Church seal— “and there, definitely, and I think most of them on your right arm look familiar from her. Why, is something wrong?”
“Oh, no, not at all.” Oh, yes. Hell, yes. The bindrune and the Church seal weren’t given to everyone. Those went only to employees who engaged in magic regularly in the course of their work, and whose jobs required physical magical protection. Debunkers, Liaisers, Inquisitors, and the Materials employees who created psychopomps. Except the psychopomp creators usually were promoted to those positions later, so had their Church seals in the less prominent places that were still available when the promotion happened.
If Leanne wore those tattoos in the positions Chess had them, the only Church jobs she could hold would be Debunker, Liaiser, or Inquisitor. She sure as fuck wasn’t a Debunker or Liaiser, because if she was Chess would know her. And if she was an Inquisitor she—well, even if she wasn’t involved in the case on a “planned it” sort of level, she wouldn’t have just taken off as soon as Alice started to smoke. She would have stayed and identified herself and given a statement and all the official shit Church employees were supposed to do. The official shit Chess herself had done, the day before. Instead Leanne had melted—no pun intended—into the ether, and the only reasons Chess could think of for her doing that were either she was awful at her job or she wasn’t an actual Church employee.
She’d find out more about that when she visited that address, and she’d do that as soon as she finished with Wanda. “Ma’am? While I’m here, have you ever seen someone selling jewelry and stuff, like from a cart or a box or something?”
“You must mean Mr. Harvey. He’s always selling something. Jewelry, or crafts, or socks and things he probably gets at a discount. He’s a nice man. Maybe a little…well, he isn’t all there all the time, if you know what I mean. But he’s a sweet man. We all look out for him.”
“Did Alice buy anything from him?”
“Oh, sure. She bought a pair of earrings just a week or two ago, for the wedding…” Her face crumpled; Chess braced herself for tears, but Wanda was tougher than she looked. “They were real pretty. Set with opals. Worth way more than she paid for them. We don’t know—the jewelry wasn’t stolen, was it? Mr. Harvey isn’t dishonest. He’s not a thief. If he’s been selling stolen goods he didn’t know about it. Somebody had to lie to him. He’s a sweetheart, that poor man.”
Uh-huh. Chess had known a lot of poor sweethearts who were vicious pieces of shit behind closed doors. And she now had “Mr. Harvey” personally connected to two dead women. So she wasn’t going to take Wanda’s teary reassurances of how honorable and good the man was immediately to heart. “Did the first Inquisitor—my supervisor, I mean—did he ask about Mr. Harvey?”
“No, I guess he didn’t. He didn’t ask about jewelry or anything like that. He was more interested in Alice’s family, and her customers and such.” Her expression changed, fear creeping into her eyes and her voice. “He said it was probably an accident or something medical, maybe, or static electricity. You don’t think it’s something else, do you? Did somebody do that to Alice, should we be worried? Do you think Mr. Harvey had something to do with it? Because that’s just not possible.”
“Not at all.” Chess planted her firmest, most bullshit-confident smile on her face, and hoped it would ease some of the suspicion now showing up on Wanda’s. The last thing she needed was for Wanda to think she had to lie to protect Mr. Harvey. “I’m just thinking if he’s around the area a lot he might have something to add, is all. And I’d sure like to see that jewelry, if it’s that good a deal. Do you know where I can find Mr. Harvey?”
Wanda relaxed. Apparently she hadn’t noticed that Chess wasn’t wearing any jewelry at all, and good for Chess she hadn’t. “Oh. Well, he’s usually around somewhere on the street. I bet if you drive up and down for a bit you’ll see him.”
The man in the back corner—shit, Chess had almost forgotten about him—spoke up for the first time, in a lazy, disconnected sort of voice, like he’d been guzzling cough syrup all day. “He’s got a little shelter behind the Stop Shop down the street. I don’t think he sleeps there, but I know he spends time there.”
“Thanks,” Chess said. “And thanks again for all your help.”
Wanda
shoved a brochure at her. “You come back and see us, okay? We can set up something real nice for you, I promise.”
Chess took it, and another, and another, and finally managed to extricate herself from the office clutching a dozen colorful pamphlets for vacations she’d never be close to tempted to take, and the printout with Leanne Ardennes’s information—which included her home address, which would probably turn out to be a vacant lot or something. Otherwise she’d have been arrested when the Squad talked to her, and she had to have known the Squad would be talking to her. She had to know that what happened wasn’t just some kind of electrical accident. If Chess had felt so ill before both of the fires she’d been witness to, Leanne must have felt the same.
Although, “been witness to” wasn’t exactly right, was it? She hadn’t been just a witness. She’d been the cause. She herself had been the catalyst for two fiery deaths in a single day. Fuck, she was getting to a point where it wasn’t safe to walk past her on the street, wasn’t she? People didn’t even have to know who she was, or speak to her, in order for her to damage them.
No, it wasn’t her fault. Technically. That didn’t make her feel any better, or any less responsible.
Maybe Leanne felt the same. Maybe she’d been too scared or upset to stick around. Or—more likely—she either hadn’t given a damn, left to keep from getting busted for her illegal ink, or had planned Alice’s death herself.
But why? What kind of weird-ass crime was that, to sell people bespelled jewelry and then visit them to set off the spell—at random, apparently? What could Alice the travel agent and Harmony the receptionist have done to Leanne, what could Ella the waitress have done, to deserve something like that?
It didn’t really matter. Murder didn’t always have a reason. But it still just seemed strange, and coupled with the skill necessary to create that kind of spell… Yes, her own power had set it off, but so had Leanne’s, and a badly made spell wasn’t going to explode like that no matter whose energy came near it.
Surprisingly, Leanne’s address was real, a squat two-story apartment building with an open walkway stretching the entire front length of it, about a mile and a half from Church headquarters. It was one of those streets that had been built and settled about twenty years BT and never updated, heavy with concrete latticework outside entryways and dark wood accents around windows.
Something was new at Leanne’s place, though: yellow Crime Scene tape over the door of apartment 210, which was listed as hers on Lipton Travel’s printout. So the Squad had searched her place. Well, that was what she expected. What they found, and if they’d found and spoken to Leanne…that was another thing entirely.
They hadn’t found Leanne. That fact Chess learned when she knocked on the door of 209, and was greeted by a tired-looking man in cargo shorts and a plain white t-shirt. “Haven’t heard from her,” he said as soon as he saw Chess’s ink. “Haven’t seen her.”
Well, if he was happy to dispense with all the identification and protocol shit, so was she. “But you knew her?”
He nodded, scratching his stubbled chin and stifling a yawn. Slung over a chair in the living room behind him was a white jacket, the kind chefs wore, so he was probably a late-night worker. Or he just liked to stay up late. Wasn’t as if she could say anything about that, was it? “Only as neighbors. She came into my work a few times for pizza, came over for a beer once or twice with me and my friends. I mean, we’ve lived next door to each other for over a year, you know? And we’re about the same age. Like I told the guys who were here last Wednesday, I wasn’t into whatever she was doing, I don’t know what it was.”
Hmm. So Will had gone there straight there from Lipton Travel, just as she’d figured. “Did she tell you what she did for a living?”
“I told the other cops, she just said she was a witch. Like freelance. I dunno, I figured that wasn’t the only way she was getting money anyway. She always had guys up here, all the time. I kind of got the impression they were paying her bills for her, if you know what I mean.”
“Like she was a prostitute?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d say that. Just, she had a lot of boyfriends and I always figured they pretty much paid her bills. She never, like, offered to sleep with me or my friends for money or anything.”
Chess made a note. “Do you know who any of her boyfriends were?”
“Not really. She didn’t exactly introduce them or anything. One of them was named Miles or something, though. He was the main one. He was around a lot, so I heard her say his name a few times.”
Miles. Well, that was helpful, or it would have been if Miles hadn’t been a fairly popular baby name right after Haunted Week. Elder Miles Watkins was a hero of the Church, who’d died in a ghost attack on a school after rescuing a hundred children. There were thousands of Mileses in Triumph City alone. “Did you ever see him? Do you know anything about him?”
“Didn’t the other cops tell you all this? No, I don’t, really. I saw him a couple of times, he was kind of skinny and had a ponytail. That’s all, though. I really didn’t pay much attention. You know, she was just my neighbor, was all.”
Yeah, she knew. Nobody ever paid much attention to their neighbors. Not always a good thing—how many murderers or child molesters or rapists got away with it for years because nobody bothered to look at them for even half a second longer than they had to?—but something she sure as hell counted on. The last thing she’d ever wanted was for people to pay attention to her.
Not to mention that if Mr. Neighbor—whose name was Brad, he said when she asked—was paying more attention in general, he might be more curious about why she was there, asking the same questions Will had asked the week before. “Is there anything else you can think of? Anything that might be useful?”
“She seemed really busy lately. She wasn’t home much. I thought I heard her say something about moving one night, she was out on the balcony on her phone, but I didn’t really listen. That’s it.”
Moving. “Did she talk to anyone else here, that you know of?”
He snorted. “Half these places are empty, and the rest is old people. I’m leaving soon myself. Cuesta Verde, you know the place? I’ll be there in two months.”
“Sure, I know it.” Knew it, and couldn’t figure out why the hell anyone would want to move to its beige confines. About five months before, she’d been to the place to investigate a Lamaru member who lived there. Cuesta Verde was yuppie horrifying; the sort of place that tried to force its residents to gather for bland jolly-jolly social activities, like an air-conditioned summer camp for twentysomething dullards who really missed high school.
“More space,” he said. “More people.”
By which he probably meant “more women,” but Chess wasn’t going to quibble. She wouldn’t have quibbled even if she gave a shit, which she didn’t.
“Well, good luck,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound sarcastic. “And thanks. Just—let us know if you hear from her, or see her, or remember anything else, okay?”
After he’d closed the door she went ahead and peeked in the front windows of Leanne’s apartment. Looked like the Squad had been pretty thorough. Or maybe Leanne had just been a horrendous slob, but Chess was pretty sure it was the former. No matter how filthy some of the houses she herself had grown up in had been—and some of them were really fucking gross—they were usually dirty rather than ransacked, and Leanne’s place had been ransacked. The couch cushions lay on the floor, the shelves were stripped bare, the furniture had been pulled away from the walls and upended…a thorough search indeed.
She could break in and do her own search. Picking the lock would be easy, and any magical lock set up by the Squad would be Church-designed so she could handle that, too. But the odds that they’d left anything worth looking at, anything that might give some hint as to Leanne’s whereabouts, were slim.
Brad the neighbor was telling the truth about the lack of both younger people and people who had spoken to or w
anted to speak about Leanne. A quick stroll around the place and a few very brief conversations with hostile residents proved that. None of them thought much of Leanne and her loud partying or whatnot; none of them had spoken to her recently or ever if they could avoid it; and none of them had any idea where she might be hiding. Great.
That really only left her one option—or, only one good option. She could go find Mr. Harvey and hope he knew where Leanne might be, but she couldn’t go arrest the girl herself if she found her. Talk to her, question her, yes. But arrest her? No. Debunkers only had authority to arrest people for crimes involving Spectral Fraud, and even if that weren’t the case, regulations required a Squad member to make the arrest of any Church impersonator—at least, they required it unless it was an emergency situation or a Squad member was unavailable, but there was no way Chess could claim an emergency after deliberately hunting Leanne down.
For a second she considered calling Terrible and having him go with her. Together they could hold Leanne wherever it was until she could call Will. But no. Much as she would have loved to, no. He was busy, he wasn’t Church, and it wasn’t her case so she shouldn’t go fucking around with protocol.
Besides, better to just finish this up. Leanne and her boyfriend might at that very moment be tying up the loose end that was Mr. Harvey’s existence in the world of the living. She had to make the call.
Just that short period of time had heated the inside of her car enough that she stood outside it with the doors open and the engine running, air conditioner on full blast, while she brought up Will’s number in her phone and hit the button to dial. A woman’s voice answered it. “Chess?”
Huh? “Blue?”
“Yes. What’s up?”
“What are—” She pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen; it definitely said “Will.” “Are you answering Will’s phone?”
“No. This is just a dream.” A man laughed in the background and murmured something Chess couldn’t make out before Blue continued, “Of course I answered Will’s phone, idiot. We saw you were calling so I picked up.”
