Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  “We need to dive deep into the history of everyone involved thus far,” Hunt said. “I’m almost certain that the victims and the perpetrator intersected in the past. And while Cunningham might not have had any involvement with the victims, I strongly believe he knew the perp as well. Very little of this scenario strikes me as the result of random chance.”

  Liam bobbed his head. “I’ve already got a guy doing background research on Cunningham and the Avery family, but there’s only so much that’s going to be available through digital channels, especially for the shifters.”

  He raised his voice slightly to address the whole room. “While I definitely don’t want to incite any sort of ‘witch hunt,’ everyone who knows the affected families should try to figure out why they would be the targets of this kind of violence. The reason might be something completely innocuous—like both families were present at a gathering where the perp felt they were victimized in some way.

  “I’m not saying that any of the victims are to blame for what happened, but the perp is picking these people out using some organized means. It could be that the perp is simply using the phone book. But as Mr. Huntington pointed out, given the degree of brutality involved, it’s likely that these families have something in common, even if it’s just a club membership or a school district.”

  Pockets of murmuring rose here and there, as everyone wondered if they might be next on the list.

  The buff man quieted the talking with a loud cough. “How about we community leaders work on figuring out the common denominator among the victims, while you and yours work on the mystery surrounding the ad man? We can keep a constant exchange of information going between us, so everyone stays up to speed, but…”

  “The shifter community is fairly insular,” Cortez finished, “as you know, Mr. Crown. If non-shifters go knocking at shifter doors, it might cause people to withdraw rather than confide.”

  Mutters of agreement washed through the crowd.

  “We can work with that setup,” Hunt said, “but I think it would be useful if we could ‘borrow’ a shifter or two for our side of the investigation. You have many skills that we do not, and this is a situation where having a well-rounded team could make a big difference in the outcome.”

  Cortez nodded. “I agree. We were too slow to catch up to you during the attack on the Wilsons. From now on, I personally will stay in close contact with you, to make sure at least one shifter arrives on scene in short order if and when another attack comes. Would anyone else like to volunteer?”

  The buff man opened his mouth, but Cortez cut him off. “Preferably not a community leader. I think the rest of you should focus on the internal matters, given the substantial size of the shifter population in this city. It’s going to be a massive chore, working through all the potential intel.”

  The buff man ran a hand over his short hair. “I guess you’re right. Anyone else?”

  A young man with red hair and freckles, who couldn’t be much older than eighteen, pushed through the front of the crowd. “I’ll do it.”

  Cortez frowned. “You’re a strong shifter, Casey, but Peter Avery was your cousin, which puts you very close to the center of this tragedy. And this is not the time to act on passion alone.”

  Casey swallowed. “I won’t, ma’am. I promise. I can do this.”

  The five community leaders exchanged glances, silently debating for almost a minute.

  “Very well,” Cortez eventually said. “But do not act with aggression unless you have my express permission.”

  Casey bowed his head and stammered out, “Thank you, Ms. Cortez. I’ll do my best.”

  That settled, the community leaders, except Cortez, rose from their seats at the circle, tapping the shoulders of various older shifters to form groups of authority figures to whom everyone else would listen. The leaders passed on specific instructions to these groups, things like “contact everyone in your network and inform them of the danger” and “find homes where multiple families can stay for the protection of greater numbers until the situation is resolved.”

  Once the leaders answered all the questions that got thrown in their faces, the crowd dispersed, the shifters rushing home to prepare for the possibility of another attack. When the double doors finally thunked shut, only Cortez, Casey, and the non-shifters remained in the room.

  Kat slumped down in her chair, sucking in a haggard breath. The air had felt like concrete in her lungs for the duration of the meeting. She didn’t like having so many eyes watching her like a hawk. It reminded her of her time in the A9 lab, all those people masquerading as doctors staring at her while she writhed and screamed at the hands of their latest unethical experiment.

  She didn’t think she would ever feel comfortable being the center of attention. Maybe she had been that sort of person once, extraverted and outgoing, but her old personality had been lost with her memory of the life she had before A9.

  She was Kat King now, and Kat King preferred to be a wallflower. Unheard and unseen—until she had a reason to kick some ass.

  “So,” Cortez began, “besides looking into Cunningham’s history, how should we go about uncovering clues to the identity of the demon summoner?”

  Liam rubbed his chin. “Well, we could always—”

  He was silenced by a loud buzz from the phone in his coat pocket. Fumbling for it, he found the screen lit up with an incoming call. “Oh, speak of the devil. That’s my guy. Maybe we won’t have to use any alternative routes of investigation. Might get everything we need right now.”

  Swiping to answer, he tapped the speakerphone option and said, “Hey, Nick. What do you have for me?”

  “Yo, Crown,” came Giannopoulos’s excited voice. “So, I am going to send you the info pack in the morning, but I already got some juicy stuff here that I think you ought to know.”

  “Let me have it.”

  The loud sound of someone slurping through a straw came across the line, and then Giannopoulos said, “As far as I can tell, you were right about that Cunningham guy. He’s not directly involved with the supernatural. But he does have a big mundane problem that might’ve gotten him into trouble with the sups in some way.”

  “What’s that?” Liam asked.

  “He’s got a secret gambling addiction.” Giannopoulos took a big bite of something crunchy and spoke while he chewed. “Guy’s thirty grand in debt to the city’s shadiest bookie, Rickie Maitland. That dude is majorly bad news. He’s rumored to have connections to all sorts of criminal orgs up and down the East Coast, including sup criminal orgs.”

  Liam clenched his jaw. “What do you have on Maitland besides rumors?”

  “He’s got connections. Serious ones.” The slurping noise crackled through the speaker again. “There’s practically nothing on the guy in the digital sphere—which is real weird in this day and age—and as for government records, well, they don’t exist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Besides his National ID number, the guy has zero records on file. No driver’s license. No car registration. No tax filings. Nothing. And I can’t find anything on him in the private sector either. No employment records. No insurance of any kind. Nothing. If it wasn’t for his reputation in the criminal underground, the guy would be a total ghost.”

  Liam rapped his knuckles against his knee. “Has he never been arrested for any of his criminal activity?”

  “Funny you ask that.” Giannopoulos snorted. “Maitland got arrested once, for selling heroin, three years ago. He was released in a matter of hours, and not only was the whole thing swept under the rug, but the arrest record was also deleted from the police database, to make it seem like the whole incident never happened.

  “I wouldn’t have even known to go poking around in the PD’s system to look for the discrepancy if a lucky journalist hadn’t been on scene when Maitland was arrested. A tiny little sidebar article in the Herald is the only
proof that the guy had a brush with the law. Someone cleaned up everything else.”

  “But that’s…” Liam struggled to find words. “No one, mundane or sup, in the Salem’s Gate criminal underground has that much clout.”

  “No one who’s known to be a part of the Salem’s Gate criminal underground,” Giannopoulos countered. “Maitland obviously works for somebody with big pockets and a wide reach. Probably a rich and prominent member of the city’s upper crust. Can’t imagine anybody else could pull strings with that much sophistication.”

  “Do you have any idea who that person could be?”

  “No, but I’ll keep digging.” Giannopoulos resumed eating noisily. “Anything else I find I’ll include in the email package tomorrow.”

  Liam sighed. “I don’t suppose you have an address for Maitland?”

  Giannopoulos chuckled. “You always underestimate me, Crown. Of course I’ve got a lead on the guy’s address. He’s got no official place of residence, naturally. But I know a few guys who, uh, like to play the ponies, and they use Maitland as their bookie. Occasionally, he does his business in an apartment on the south side, in Bletchley Heights.

  “Building’s called Richland Apartments—which is pretty funny, considering it’s a total shithole—and Maitland’s got Apartment 305. I’m guessing it’s not Maitland’s only place, but my guys say he hangs out there at least three days a week. Friday is one of those days. So you might find him there tonight.”

  Kat almost made a comment about the irony of Giannopoulos calling someone else’s apartment a shithole, but Liam cut her off with a shake of his head.

  “Awesome work, Nick,” Liam said. “That’s exactly the kind of lead we were hoping for.”

  “Always a pleasure to do business with you, Crown. Hope you and that sexy sidekick of yours have better luck taking down Maitland than the actual cops.”

  Kat forcefully coughed. “You’re on speakerphone.”

  Giannopoulos fell silent for a second, then sheepishly said, “Whoops. My bad. I, uh, got to go now. Bye.”

  He hung up.

  “Sorry.” Liam shot Kat an apologetic smile. “He does solid work, but he can be a little sleazy at times.”

  Kat waved him off. “It’s fine. We got what we need.”

  Franc, who’d been sitting silently through both the meeting and the phone call, finally spoke. “Okay, so I can pretend that I didn’t hear anything about a man with terrible manners hacking into government databases, but assuming you’re planning to confront this Maitland guy at his apartment…”

  “You got to keep your distance.” Liam nodded. “You can’t make any overt moves against Maitland without legal justification, and you certainly can’t bust into his apartment without a warrant. Which is perfectly fine, because I don’t want you doing that stuff anyway. I want you to hang back and be prepared to call in the cop cavalry, if and when you think it’s appropriate to do so. I trust your judgment, Franc.”

  She threw up a wan smile. “Thanks. I trust yours too. Though I got to say, I’m not comfortable with where this investigation is heading. If this Maitland guy really is under the umbrella of one of the city’s social elite, this could get real nasty real fast.”

  “It’s already nasty, from our perspective,” Cortez threw in. “Shifters are dying, and that must stop as soon as possible. Or upsetting the delicate sensibilities of some rich bastard with his hand in the crime jar is going to be the least of the city’s problems. And if no one else does, I’ll make sure of that.”

  Franc paled at the implication that even someone as level-headed as Cortez would threaten to instigate mass shifter unrest in the face of injustice. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t pursue this case to the best of our ability,” Franc replied. “I’m just saying we should tread lightly until we have the full picture. This is getting complicated. If we rush into any sort of action against people of significant influence, we could wind up causing more problems than we solve.”

  Cortez rose from her chair with all the grace of the jaguar that lived beneath her skin. “I understand that, Sergeant Baker. But at the end of the day, I will put the well-being of my people over the well-being of any ‘people of significant influence.’ No matter the complications that may cause within the city’s mundane government. The shifter community of this city, and at large, has been wronged far too many times since the Unveiling for us to hold any other position.”

  Franc visibly swallowed, and Kat felt for her. The young sergeant wasn’t qualified to handle a problem of this magnitude, but she couldn’t go to her superiors with any of this information. Not yet. Because if they told the wrong person the wrong thing too early—someone who, like Maitland, was tied to a certain individual’s string—then the effort to find the summoner and end the demon attacks on the shifters might crash and burn before it ever got off the ground.

  Powerful people, Kat knew from experience, didn’t like it when “peons” tried to air their dirty laundry. Just like A9, whoever was behind Maitland would do all in their power to stay in the shadows.

  Slapping his hands against his pants to break the tension between Franc and Cortez, Liam said, “Let’s just agree to keep everything on the down low until we know more. And to learn more, let’s head over to Bletchley Heights and find out what Maitland does or does not know about how a man who owed him thirty grand wound up becoming a demon’s host.”

  10

  Liam

  Bletchley Heights was the worst neighborhood in Salem’s Gate. It hosted all manner of criminal activity. A prostitute on every corner. A drug deal in every alley. A gambling den hidden beneath every empty restaurant.

  During Liam’s time as a cop, catching a case in Bletchley Heights had been considered an omen of death. Anybody with a badge was constantly harassed as they tried to do their job, and if you poked the denizens of the Heights too hard, their jeers would follow you all the way home. More than one cop had quit the force and left the city to free their family from a never-ending barrage of threatening phone calls that started during a case worked in the Heights.

  Liam had been lucky back in the day—his precinct was so far from the Heights that his cases had only brushed its boundaries—but the few experiences he’d had on the neighborhood’s dirty streets had left a revolting taste in his mouth.

  As he slowly rolled the Wrangler through a tight intersection, eying every shadow and stoop, half expecting to get bum rushed by hooded men armed with blunt weapons and bad attitudes, that taste coated his tongue once again. It was all he could do not to retch. He hated this place, this hive of all things wrong with the world.

  It was the perfect business hub for a man like Rickie Maitland.

  Richland Apartments sat on the corner of Boris and Brawn. It was a five-story complex made of mud-brown stone that hadn’t looked appealing even when it was new. After thirty years in the middle of the Heights, it looked like a strong rain would melt it down to its metal bones.

  Most of the building’s windows were unlit, the residents asleep (as much as anyone could sleep in a neighborhood like this) or partaking in other activities that thrived in darkness. One of the windows of Apartment 305, however, was framed by a dim yellow glow.

  The living room light in Maitland’s apartment was on.

  Somebody was home.

  Liam parked the Wrangler in an alleyway that was just wide enough to fit the vehicle, hoping to keep it hidden from prying eyes for the duration of their encounter with Maitland.

  Franc and Casey Green, the young bear shifter volunteer, coasted past in Franc’s personal vehicle, an off-white beater that didn’t look too out of place in the neighborhood. They were going to park on the street a block farther down and stake the apartment out for signs of trouble while everyone else participated in the neighborhood’s favorite pastime: breaking and entering.

  Liam cut the Wrangler’s engine. “Anybody got a serious objection to the pla
n before we get the ball rolling?”

  The plan was relatively simple.

  They would use magic to break in from two directions: the main hallway in which the apartment lay, and the fire escape that ran up the side of the building.

  Liam and Hunt would take the hall entrance, as their particular magic skill sets allowed for subtle manipulations of the environment that would hopefully result in little collateral damage to the building’s interior if the encounter with Maitland devolved into a fight.

  Kat and Yun, meanwhile, would wait on the fire escape in case Maitland tried to bolt that way. If he was packing any weapons, they could use the extra open space to throw their magic weight around without having to worry too much about injuring residents in the other apartments.

  Gabby, with the immense strength of a jaguar shifter, would guard the stairwell door to the third floor. If Maitland came running down the hall, she’d deck him. If anyone came running to Maitland’s aid, she’d deck them.

  “No objections here,” Yun grunted out. “I just want to get this over with and take a damn nap.”

  Yun had downed a startling amount of aspirin from Liam’s stash in the Wrangler to combat the migraine that had resulted from the demon’s psychic attack. It was abating now, but the stress had left her bushed.

  Liam would have sent her home to rest, but since he didn’t know what they’d be facing in Maitland’s apartment, he’d erred on the side of caution and elected to bring her along. Yun’s ability to throw massive lightning bolts could eliminate a great many dangers.

  He’d send her home as soon as they were done here. There were still plenty of hours left in the night for her to recharge. But if they missed cornering Maitland this evening, they might lose track of him for days. With tension and fear rapidly rising in the shifter community, that wasn’t acceptable.

  If this dragged on too long, not only might more shifters get murdered by Glasya-Labolas, but the inevitable riots would raise the death toll even higher.