He looked like he was trying to decide what to say in response.
“Come on,” Nick said, annoyed for real now. “Take a fucking joke, will you? Jesus. We really are going to miss the train. Just from standing here, sword-fighting like assholes.”
Jordan’s face turned even redder.
In the end, he followed the motion of Nick’s jaw and chin, walking to and then up the stairs leading into the pearl-colored train with its rounded, darkened windows.
Minutes later, Nick slumped into a seat in the cubicle they’d reserved, watching Jordan warily as he took the seat across from him. It was a four-seat area, but they had the whole thing. Seeing the satchel Jordan had on him, Nick frowned.
“What’s that?” he said, gruff.
Jordan glared at him.
“Jesus,” Nick growled. “I’ll buy you a fucking sandwich. If that’s evidence, I’d like to see it… assuming it’s not already stored on the network.”
There was a silence, then Jordan exhaled, as if in defeat.
Opening the satchel, he yanked out a stack of dark green and manila-colored files, tossing them on the table that stood between them. They were thick, brimming with papers, and all seemed to be tied shut, either with string-ties or, in one case, with what looked like a piece of dark blue twine.
As Jordan let them fall, a discordant, minor tone sounded overhead, right before the loudspeaker came on.
“Prepare for Express Shuttle to the Northeastern Protected Area departure. Train is now leaving the station. All passengers please remain seated.”
The melodic, yet metal-tinged voice rolled out smoothly, oddly feminine, and probably meant to be reassuring. It wasn’t reassuring, though. It was more like an old-school nurse who is pretty and smiling at you, but who is about to prick you with a two-inch syringe.
“Expected arrival in two hours, forty-three minutes,” the voice continued brightly. “Expected arrival time is ten forty-eight a.m. Please remain seated until the train has reached maximum cruising speed. Cabin doors will be locked until acceleration is complete—”
“It’s not on the network,” Jordan said, drawing Nick’s eyes back to him.
The detective met his gaze, his expression still hard.
“That’s why all the dead wood. Boss said to keep it off for now. That means no notes recorded either, Midnight. Personal or otherwise. Nothing pertaining to this information. No written correspondence mentioning it, either.”
Nick frowned, picking up the file on top. “Where’d he get it?”
“Archangel Industries.”
Nick froze, mid-motion, in spite of himself.
Coming out of it hastily, he finished pulling the top file into his lap.
When he raised his eyes to Jordan, he found the human watching him minutely, a harder scrutiny in his enhanced-function irises.
“That name mean something to you, Midnight?” the human said.
Nick found himself wondering just what the human could see with those enhancements.
“No,” Nick said.
Jordan grunted in clear disbelief.
Rather than confront him directly though, he finished answering Nick’s question.
“They sent it over to the precinct this morning, just before dawn,” he said flatly. “Courier left it right on Morley’s desk. Morley brought it to me. He was waiting for me when I left my house to come meet you. He said the two of us should do a preliminary scan of the files on our way to the school. I was to share it with you, and no one else. At least for now.”
Nick frowned.
He almost asked why Morley would bring him into this, then thought better of it.
“So Morley looked at it?” he said instead. “Everything in these files?”
“I’m assuming so. Enough to want to keep it quiet.”
Still glaring at Nick in open suspicion, Jordan scowled, folding his arms and flexing them as he leaned back in the contoured, padded seat.
“Oh, and another thing, Midnight,” he added sourly. “The box was addressed to you. ‘Detective Naoko Tanaka Midnight, Care of the NYPD, 19th Precinct, Attention: Detective IV Morley’… so Morley says. A big note on top. Handwritten. In cursive. Said it looked like a woman wrote it, but that was just a guess.”
Nick stared at him.
Then he blinked.
Frowning faintly, he shook it off, pulling more of the files onto his lap.
“You know someone at Archangel, Midnight?” Jordan pressed.
When Nick glanced up, the other detective was still glaring at him, his folded arms emphasizing his broad, muscular shoulders, making him look even more like a fighter. When Nick didn’t answer, Jordan shook his head in obvious irritation.
“Morley was pretty curious,” he said, leaning his head back on the chair, gazing up at the cubicle’s high ceiling. “He wondered if that run you wanted to do inside the Cauldron last night was bullshit. He said according to your implant, you were inside the River of Gold last night. That you only went to the Cauldron for a few hours.”
Jordan paused, as if waiting for Nick to explain himself.
When Nick didn’t, his voice grew harder.
“Morley and me, we wondered if maybe you were hitting up contacts you had here from L.A. Like maybe someone from Archangel. Maybe you know someone there personally… from their early days, maybe? Like back when you were human? Or sometime during the wars?”
Jordan paused meaningfully.
“Morley says you visited Phoenix Towers. That it looked like you went all the way up to the penthouse. That old lady, St. Maarten… turns out she owns the whole floor.”
Nick frowned.
It irritated him more than he hoped showed that they’d checked the GPS tracker on his implant before he had a chance to think up a good story for the night before. Then again, he supposed he had St. Maarten to thank for that, too—of course a delivery like this, of old-school paper files, addressed to Nick himself, would raise some eyebrows.
Still, it annoyed him.
The cops in Los Angeles were mostly cool about that. They pretended to be, at least. If they checked on where he’d been, they generally didn’t throw it in his face.
“I got a tip,” Nick said. “In the Cauldron.”
At Jordan’s snort, Nick gave the other cop a hard look.
“I got permission to question humans by feeding on them,” he added. “Her name came up as someone who might know our artist. So I called the lady. Through her secretary. She agreed to meet with me, if I went straight over. Truthfully, it surprised the hell out of me. I didn’t think I’d get through in a million years. I thought it would take days, if not weeks, to get in to see her.”
That part was true, anyway.
Pausing, Nick added, “All of this was going into my report, Jordan. I just haven’t stopped long enough to log any of it.”
“And?” Jordan prompted. “What happened? With the old lady?”
Nick shrugged. “Nothing. And she’s not that old, by the way… she still looks damned good, and not just for her age.”
“What do you mean ‘nothing’?” Jordan said, frowning. “What did she say?”
Nick shrugged again. “Not much. She and her secretary wouldn’t tell me shit.” Frowning at the other’s disbelieving snort, Nick motioned over the pile of hardcopy files on the table between them. “I intended to tell you all about it, Damon. It didn’t pan out, so it seemed like less of a priority than whatever this is—”
“Didn’t pan out?” Jordan frowned, gesturing at the same pile of paper. “Looks like it panned out pretty fucking well to me, vampire. What the fuck did you say to her?”
Nick returned his hard look.
“I just told you. I asked her about the artist. I told her I was investigating a murder. I asked her if she knew him… showed her pictures of his art, and the CCTV footage. Truthfully, I’m not convinced she doesn’t have some awareness of him, but she claimed to not know him, or where he lived. She claimed she didn’t know a
nything at all about the murders. As far as I could tell, she was telling the truth about that.”
That much was more or less true.
“Did you get a name?” Jordan frowned. “On the artist?”
Nick hesitated, then shook his head again.
“No. She claimed not to know it. She might have been telling the truth… technically, at least… but it definitely felt like she was leaving things out. Like she might at least know something about his art in the Cauldron.”
That was close to being true, as well.
Shrugging, Nick added,
“I looked it up. Archangel has two assembly plants in the Cauldron. One is only a block west of that mural I found.”
“So you never met her before last night?” Jordan said, his voice still openly skeptical.
Nick shook his head, once.
It irritated him to realize, a second later, he’d done it seer-fashion.
“No,” he said, consciously reverting to a human shake of his head. “I’d never met her before. I’d never even heard of her.”
“You never ran with Archangel? Before the wars? When you were human, maybe?”
Nick gave him a cold look. “No.”
“You sure, Midnight?”
“Pretty fucking sure, yeah.”
This was getting old, fast.
Moreover, Nick wondered how much of this was coming from Jordan, and how much from Morley, who definitely seemed to be watching Nick a lot closer than he would have liked.
He wondered if Morley had I.S.F. watching him more closely too.
Remembering his last conversation with Kit, who felt the need to chew him out again about smuggling in the little girl, even though she conceded—reluctantly—that he seemed to have been appropriate with her, Nick frowned harder, still staring at Jordan’s face.
Jordan might know more about Archangel than most.
Morley might, too.
It didn’t make them right about him.
Even so, and despite his irritation about having to go there, Nick decided he had better be a little more forthcoming with his homicide colleagues. Maybe they’d start trusting him more, if he didn’t hold everything so close to the vest.
Still thinking about this, he emulated a human sigh.
“Look,” he said. “I really don’t know anyone at Archangel Industries. Unless you count meeting St. Maarten and her bodyguard last night.”
Focusing back down on the dark green file folder, he frowned as he unwound a small red string from a round locking mechanism at the end of the file, something he hadn’t seen in about fifty years, if not more. Glancing up once he got it undone, he gave Jordan a hard look.
“I never worked for them,” he added. “Not once. Not as a merc. Not as private security. Not as anyone or anything else. But I knew about them. I knew who they were… before they went legit. I knew about them before the wars.”
“How?” Jordan said, refolding his arms. “Morley says almost no one knew about them in those days. He says they were completely dark.”
Nick frowned, narrowing his eyes.
Morley was right.
That did raise questions on how Morley knew that.
Nick wasn’t about to start digging into his boss’s history or contacts, though. He also wasn’t about to get into his own background with Jordan, not to that level of detail. Not when it came to Archangel or much of anything else from those years.
His willingness to be transparent with his new work colleagues only went so far.
“Was there a note with it or anything?” he said, pulling open the first file. “Anything that indicated why they’d sent it to me?”
Jordan just stared at him for a minute.
Then he exhaled, rubbing a hand over his short hair.
“No,” he said, obviously annoyed.
Nick thought of something else then.
Hesitating, he looked up at Jordan. He wanted to ask about the third painting.
In the end, he decided against it. Either Bird would send it in to the NYPD or he wouldn’t. In any case, Nick had to hope Jordan would tell him, if something like that showed up at the precinct, whether via electronic transmission or in person.
“Still think that’s a pretty big oversight, Midnight,” Jordan muttered, frowning. “Your idea of ‘it didn’t pan out’ is pretty different from what Morley would have said. Me, too. Maybe next time, you should get your reports in a little faster.”
Pausing, he went on when Nick didn’t answer.
“Anything else you ‘forgot’ to mention, Tanaka?”
Nick barely heard him.
He found himself staring down at the file on his lap, at the photograph on the very first page when he opened the cardboard cover.
The face of a young girl smiled back at him.
It wasn’t Tai.
Still, she looked almost familiar… like he almost recognized her.
Maybe sixteen years old. Maybe younger. Blond. Cute smile. Dimples. Hair cut in one of those retro, feathered styles that was in again. Her brown eyes had a mischievous, happy light in them, like she was about to burst into a laugh.
Tearing his eyes off that light-filled face, Nick skimmed her stats.
Birthplace in Florida Protected Area. Parents now living in New York.
Two siblings—an older brother and a younger sister. All three of them attended Kellerman Preparatory School in the Northeastern Protected Area. The girl in the picture, Clarissa Grace Worthington, was in her third year of high school.
Fifteen years old.
“Keep flipping, Midnight,” Jordan said, his voice hard.
Nick glanced at him, frowned.
Then he did as Jordan said, turning the page.
A second photo stared up at him, that one a boy, also young.
Also a third-year student at Kellerman.
He turned another page, and another.
The first eight files were all third-year students at Kellerman. Every one of the faces looked vaguely familiar to him, and by now, he guessed it was from Malek’s oil painting down in the Financial District, not to mention the dead bodies, at least those who still had distinguishable faces by the time Nick arrived.
After that, the faces grew more varied.
Nick saw files for people of all different ages and ethnicities. He didn’t recognize any of them, but he already found himself thinking he knew what linked all of them.
He didn’t voice the suspicion aloud.
He didn’t look up at all, not until Jordan regained his feet.
“I’m going to find that sandwich,” the other man grunted, making his way past the table to the cubicle door.
Nick glanced up at the warning light over the door, and realized it had been shut off.
The train had accelerated up to full speed without him noticing.
Barely giving Jordan a glance, he considered asking him to bring him coffee, then figured it would probably end up dumped on his head if he did.
Jordan unlatched the cubicle door, and entered the corridor on the other side. Nick watched him consult a panel on the wall through the frosted glass, then make a right, presumably towards the restaurant car.
Nick returned his attention to the pile of paper in his lap.
File after file with the basic stats of different people. Different ages. Different locales. Different ethnicities. Headshots with each one. Medical records.
All of them seemed to come from the United States, but from pretty much all over the country. He saw files from Los Angeles Protected Area, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Denver, San Francisco… even Alaska.
None of them listed a race, much less a specific blood type, but Nick suspected he knew why that was, too.
Archangel had been tracking hybrids.
Probably seers, too, Nick’s mind muttered wryly.
It had already occurred to him that Malek and his little sister, Tai, may not have come here by themselves.
It also occurred to him that Arch
angel might have an interest in the two of them beyond Malek’s talent with a paint brush, and his not-very-whimsical ability to see into the future.
In particular, Nick wondered if Archangel’s interest didn’t center on Malek at all, but rather on a cute kid with ice-blue eyes who liked cookies and cheeseburgers, and sparkly T-shirts—and who might also just be a deadly and dangerous baby telekinetic seer.
Thinking about that now, Nick grimaced.
Telekinetic. Jesus.
Nick didn’t know Tai was telekinetic, of course.
It was only a guess.
Telekinetics were rare as shit.
Hell, they were almost unheard of in the seer world.
They were also ticking time bombs… ticking time bombs that could turn into walking nuclear bombs, if trained to use their abilities to their full potential.
Malek’s mural, combined with his cryptic comments about “getting his sister help,” and both him and St. Maarten being noticeably weird about her, definitely suggested there was something dangerous about that kid, no matter how frickin’ adorable she was.
He’d made it through the first green file folder, at least in cursory examination, by the time Jordan returned.
He was just setting it on the floor by his feet, picking up the next one in the stack, when Jordan shoved open the frosted door, holding a clear, biodegradable bag that was steaming on the inside, and a travel mug that must be filled with the coffee he wanted.
Looking at Jordan more carefully, and more as a person, maybe for the first time, it occurred to Nick that the human looked exhausted.
It hit him in the same set of seconds, he wasn’t doing himself any favors, constantly antagonizing the guy.
It irritated him that they might even have been friends, if Nick didn’t have the bad judgment to be kidnapped and tortured by vampires a few hundred years earlier.
“When did you and Morley finish up last night?” Nick said.
Jordan gave him a sharp look, one containing no small amount of surprise. He paused where he’d been in the process of sinking down to the contoured train seat. Finishing the motion and setting his bag of food down on the table, he exhaled, seeming to realize Nick meant the words as a kind of peace offering.
Vampire Detective Midnight Page 16
