“When all seven of the hells freeze over,” I added, and strolled out the door.
Bryson was sitting on the hood of the car with a chili dog halfway down his gullet. Annemarie looked on like she was watching pigs at the county fair. “Let’s go,” I told them. “Back to the house.” Two cases in one day, after three months of drought. Either I was lucky, or I was cursed.
“I’ll drive.” Bryson inhaled his chili dog and bolted for the driver’s side door. I let him. I was tired already and my thoughts were in a muddle. Plus, my ankle still hurt.
“Did you get rid of that awful man from ATF?” Annemarie asked.
“No,” I said. “He’s going to be working with us for a while longer.”
“Well, shoot,” Annemarie muttered.
“Asshole,” Bryson said around his mouthful, jerking us out into traffic.
“He’s not disagreeing,” I murmured, and stared out of the window at the passing skyscrapers, many of their upper floors vacant and gray with the reflection of the sky. A black shadow passed overhead, something that flicked in and out of vision faster than a breath.
I leaned over and looked out again, between the stone canyons that made up my city. It flicked by again, a black blot on the paler-than-pale sky. I thought it had wings—couldn’t be sure.
We turned and I watched, my breath still and my heart pounding in my chest.
It came again, lower. Following the car. Following me.
“Bryson,” I said urgently. “Take your next right.”
“Huh?” he said. “That’s the Downtown Passage, Wilder.”
“So?”
“So, it’s lunch hour. It’ll be packed.”
The shadow came again, closer. “Take it!” I thundered at Bryson as the light went green. He cut a lane of traffic with tires squealing and merged onto the underpass, a section of Wagon Way that cut under the old central district, before Mainline went up in the middle of the last century. It was theoretically the fastest way back to the Justice Plaza, but it was, as Bryson had threatened, packed.
We ground to a halt, Annemarie’s small frame snapping against her seat belt, at the edge of a sea of red taillights.
From outside the tunnel, I caught a faint cry on the wind, and a pumping of great, heavy wings as whatever-it-was flew away, robbed of prey.
Six
It took Bryson nearly fifteen minutes to cover the two miles back to the Plaza, and he complained every inch of the way.
I floated for a bit after we returned, waved off Batista’s offer of lunch, and shut myself in my office, staring at myself in my dark monitor.
What the Hex was going on in this city? Magick fires, critters that flew, all of the above after me?
Well, I reasoned, they didn’t have to be after me. I tended to get paranoid about things like that, because I’ve had enough people try to kill me to justify it. But two partners in crime, dying hours apart—that was solid. That, I could sink my teeth into.
So quit being self-involved, Wilder, and work your case. I’d find whoever had burned Corley and shredded Manners, and I’d put them behind bars, publicly. I’d redeem the SCS. This little fantasy propelled me out of my chair and into a much better mood, at least for the moment. I was even able to forget about how Fagin smelled, up close.
I stuck my head out of my office. “Hey, Javier—you still on for lunch?”
“Sure thing,” he said, grabbing his wallet, badge, and keys off of his desk. “You doing okay, Wilder? You look a little spooked.”
“Hex me, is it that obvious?” I found my own wallet in the depths of my bag and shoved it into my suit jacket—this one was an old Valentino dinner suit from the seventies that I’d repurposed into something for the daytime by adding a severe red blouse and my trusty combat boots peeking out from under the wide hems of the pants. At the rate I was going through clothes, I was going to have to start shopping at T.J. Maxx. The thought filled me with no small amount of horror.
“A little bit, yeah,” said Batista. “But you hide it well.” He winked.
“I am,” I admitted. “Spooked.” I could tell Javier that much. Batista was a good guy—he kept secrets like nobody’s business. “I ran into these … things at the cottage last night. Spooked me.”
Batista cocked his head. “What things? Like, weres? Somebody messing with you?” Batista is a very good loomer, and he loomed just then, his eyes murderous.
“No, these were women. Women who turned into seals. Three of them.”
“Selkies,” said Zacharias, setting a precarious stack of folders on the desks he and Batista shared. We both stared at him, which made him turn interesting colors.
“Excuse me, Andy?”
He swallowed, his skinny Adam’s apple poking against his throat. “Seal women are selkies, ma’am. Water-going shape-shifters, most often found in Ireland and the outlying islands.”
“With a hunger for were flesh?” I guessed.
Zacharias shrugged. “They’re considered foragers, but they are predators, much as seals are predators in the open sea,” he said.
“Andy, how do you know this shit?” Batista demanded.
Zacharias drew a nervous breath. “I read.” He dropped the folders and scuttled back down the hall to the elevator. Batista shook his head.
“Three months we sit together and he doesn’t say boo to me, and now he’s freaking Monsterpedia.”
I hid a smile. Maybe Andy would make it in the SCS yet. “Let’s eat,” I told Batista. At least I was hungry again.
The elevator doors rolled back as we approached, and a scarecrow shadow stepped out, topped by dark hair going gray around the edges and the too-familiar tired eyes.
“Mac.” I blinked at him. “What brings you to my little corner of Hell?”
He cracked a smile, his long lean face lightening, but his eyes were still somber as a gravedigger’s. “Good to see you, too, Luna. There some place we can talk?”
“I’ll get yours to go,” Batista said, stepping away. Nobody wants to be around when the big kids fight. “You still like it with extra cheese and chilies?”
I shot him a smile. “Thanks, Javier. And get Bryson something that agrees with his diet, will you?”
Mac and I stepped back into the elevator, and I pressed the R button to take us to the top of the Plaza. We rode in silence, Mac watching the lights tick past on the old-fashioned dial above the door, me watching Mac. I took a second look at him, after five years of working together. I tried to figure out what Sunny was seeing.
The elevator chimed and let us off into a small breezeway that led out to the roof. Up this high, clouds were scudding in from over the bay and the air smelled like cold, smoky rain.
“Hell of a view.” Mac leaned on the railing, the wind whipping back his hair and tie.
“Hell of a surprise to see you in my squad room,” I returned, leaning my back against the rail so I could look east, toward the mountains. They wore crowns of ice, the forests below so deep and green I felt like I could sink my hands into them. “What’s wrong, Mac?”
“SCS is not proceeding like the brass hoped it would,” he said. “As department liaison, it’s my job to tell you that if you don’t close the Corley case, they’re going to shut you down.”
I knew that SCS had no friends in the department, but I felt the cold ball drop into my stomach all the same. “Mac … that’s insane. We haven’t been given a chance yet—”
“Three months,” said Mac. “The same chance any task force gets. And what’s this I hear about you getting on ATF’s shit list?”
I groaned and pressed the heels of my hands over my eyes. “If we’re on the subject of rumors, there’s the one about you dating my cousin.”
Mac looked startled when I took my hands away. “She told you?”
“Of course she told me! Hex it, Mac, what are you doing with her?”
His knobby hands curled around the railing. Good—I’d successfully diverted the subject from Fagin and from my squad b
eing disbanded.
“I’m enjoying the company of a brilliant, beautiful woman who for some strange reason agreed to go out with taciturn, middle-aged me. What happened with ATF, Luna?”
Dammit.
“Mac, they can’t shut us down. I’m on to something here. The agent from ATF thinks it’s a gun case, but I know it’s more than that. Corley and Manners were into some bad mojo and now they’re dead.”
“Evidence?” Mac fished in his jacket pocket and brought out a crumpled pack of nicotine gum, shoving three pieces into his mouth. “Sunny,” he explained. “She wants me to quit.”
“Watch out—she’ll have you doing yoga and eating tofu before you can say ‘Kansas City rib eye.’ ” I sighed. “There’s no evidence yet. Just one burnt body, some claw marks, and a distinctly bad feeling.”
“Far be it from me to rain on your parade, Luna,” Mac said, “but I’m here to give the official word. Thirty days with no closures and you’re shut down. Your squad will be reassigned. You, too.” He blew a bubble. “Do me a favor.”
“What, throw myself off the roof?” I slumped, the mountain and sun and clouds mocking me with their serenity.
“Prove them wrong,” said Mac. “Because if anyone can, you can. Take care of yourself, Luna.” He walked back to the elevator, Jack Skellington come to life, and disappeared behind the worn brass doors.
I stayed up on the roof a while longer, wondering just how the fuck I was going to do what he asked.
Pete Anderson and a beef burrito were waiting for me when I got back to my office. “I got something!” Pete announced, waving a file over his head like it was a Dead Sea Scroll.
I tore the wrapper off of my burrito and bit into it. Extra cheese and chilies. Batista was a good man. “Go ahead,” I announced around my mouthful. Pete, Batista, and everyone else currently eating or working in the small basement room would never know what Mac and I had spoken about. They didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t going to happen.
I hoped.
“All right, what we have here is the report on the fire from Egan’s arson investigator,” said Pete. He spread out a bunch of readings and photos on my desk, knocking paper and empty fast-food containers aside. “Egan’s team found that no accelerants were used, as I suspected, but most important …” He ran his hand across the swath of photos. They were burn patterns, fans and arcs of phantom flame against the bones of Corley’s home. “No point of origin.”
“It had to start somewhere,” I said. “They missed it.”
“Nope,” said Pete. “The lead investigator swears up and down by her findings. The fire started everywhere at once—and it started hot. Poor Mr. Corley never had a chance in any hell.”
“Let’s reserve the ‘poor’ part until we figure out why someone wanted to set him on fire,” I said. “What else?”
“It resembles nothing so much as controlled burn,” said Pete. “Except instead of a forest, it was a house. A man.”
“Okay,” I said, pushing back and shoving the last of my burrito in my mouth. “Good work, Pete.”
“I mean, it has to be supernatural, right?” he asked, eyes alight. “Fires don’t just spring up perfectly formed, in a finite area. Notice how even though it was hot and fast, it never spread and the fire crew had no problem getting it under control.”
“It did its job,” I murmured. I banged open my door. “Batista. Where are we on Corley’s background?”
“Still digging,” said Batista. “There’s precious little there.”
“Well, find something,” I said. “Pete, how soon can you get to work on Manners’s computer?”
“Already done,” he said. “I have Technical Services pulling the information on the hard drive. Shouldn’t be more than a few hours.”
“All right,” I said. “Page me when you have it. I’m going out.”
“Where?” Batista called, but I didn’t turn around to answer. I didn’t feel like explaining, anyway.
I skipped the sucky motor-pool car when I hit the main lobby of the Plaza and walked the ten blocks to the federal building on the corner of Devere and Highlands. FBI, DEA, and ATF shared an alphabet soup in a grim gray building with grim gray men and women scurrying back and forth beneath its frowning edifice. I made it to ATF’s floor on my own and caught a passing suit by the arm. “Will Fagin. Is he in?”
The suit jerked a thumb toward the back of the cube farm, looking me over like he thought I might be a salesperson. Or a hooker. Who knew with somebody like Fagin?
Following his admittedly vague lead, I wended my way to the back wall and found Fagin sprawled in his chair, his feet on the desk and puffy sound-blocking headphones atop his scalp. They were mussing his hipster hair.
He was watching information from the ATF database scroll by, fingers tapping his desk in time with the music. I tuned my ear and caught snatches of bass and a pack-a-day woman’s voice. Peggy Lee.
“How retro,” I muttered. I snuck a glance at Fagin’s screen, since he hadn’t noticed me yet. Milton Manners gave me a hangdog look from behind a mug slate, with all of his vital stats displayed.
I dropped a hand to Fagin’s shoulder. “I think now is an excellent time to begin sharing information.”
How it happened I still don’t have clear in my head, but one moment I was leaning down to talk to Fagin, and the next I was on my back staring into the ugly fluorescent tubes that flew low across the office ceiling, my view partially blocked by Fagin and the business end of his service weapon. All of my air went out of me with a whump.
“Jesus,” Fagin breathed, ripping off his headphones and tucking his gun back into its holster. “You should know better, Lieutenant.”
“Apparently,” I snarled, knocking away his proffered hand. Heat started in the place where my shame lives and spread to my face. “What the hell was that, The Matrix?”
“No, that was me being snuck up on when I wasn’t expecting it,” said Fagin.
I dragged myself to my feet. I was winded and startled as hell, but intact. Mainly I was humiliated. It takes heavy-duty reflexes to be faster than a were. “Yeah, well, your technique sucks. You could have broken your own wrist trying to do that move sitting down.”
“That’s what this is about? A critique of my manly prowess?” Fagin twitched his cuffs back into place. I got a glimpse of brass cuff links, dice stamped with three pips on the left and four on the right.
“Lucky seven,” I said.
Fagin blinked. “You’re the only person who’s ever noticed that.”
“What, that you have appalling fashion sense as well as appalling manners?”
He smiled at that, thin and sharp as a razor. “Oh, Lieutenant, we’ve done the snarky banter, don’t you remember? We decided it was beneath you. Now, did you want something, or do you just like to give men heart attacks?”
I opened my mouth to shoot out something else juvenile and pissy, but instead, I stepped into Fagin, forcing him to drop into his chair. I put my hands on the armrests and rolled him back to the desk, hitting with a bang. We were close again, trading breath, my lips an inch from his and my breasts brushing the immaculate fold of the red silk handkerchief in his pocket. I could hear his pulse and smell his sweat, and I slowly ran my tongue across my teeth. “Fagin, if I wanted to give you a heart attack … you’d be flatlining about now.”
Just as fast, I stood up, stepped back, and stuck my hands in my pockets, relaxing and giving him a perky smile. “Now, let’s hear everything you’ve got on Milton Manners.”
Fagin lost his cool for just a second, his eyes darkening and his lips parting. He leaned forward, like he wanted to say something, and then he also snapped back into his pose. “Not a lot to tell. Started as a fence, ended as a wannabe gun smuggler hacked to death by critters unknown.”
“Then read it off the screen,” I purred. “Even you should be able to read, Will.”
He flushed, but he gritted out, “July 1977, possession of stolen property. September 1981, posses
sion of stolen property. May 1987, receiving stolen goods. June 1987, he got two years in the state pen for the same.” He opened his mouth again and I cut him off, leaning over his shoulder.
“On second thought, let’s just read to ourselves.”
Milton Manners’s sad and largely wasted life scrolled by, his arrests getting fewer and far between, his bank account shrinking.
“Wait,” I said, as a line of text flashed past. “What’s that?”
“ ‘November 2003,’ ” Fagin read. “ ‘Possession of a controlled substance.’ ”
I raised my eyebrows. “Does that seem like it fits in with a small-time fence to you?”
He opened the file and read, “ ‘Suspect was detained crossing the border in Tijuana. Suspect was found to be in possession of a large amount of unprescribed pharmaceutical medication, purchased illegally in Mexico.’ ”
“What the hell … ?” I read on. “He was crossing the border with Viagra?”
“Shitty off-brand Mexican Viagra,” Fagin agreed. “Hell of a party.” He caught my look and swallowed. “So I’ve heard.”
“Why did someone like Manners need Viagra?” I muttered.
“You’ve seen the guy. Why didn’t he is the better question.” Fagin closed out the file with a swish of the mouse. “And on the subject of questions: Why did you really come over here?”
“Excuse me?” I gave him a glare. Men questioning my motives is never my favorite thing.
“You could have dug up Manners’s sheet in your own office. Why’d you come over here and bother me for it?”
“I … we’re supposed to be sharing information,” I said. “This is your case, too.”
Fagin regarded me steadily, with dark animal eyes, unblinking. “Okay,” he said finally. “If that’s how you want to play it for now. This is me, sharing my information like a good boy.”
“Thank you,” I said, backing out of the cube.
Fagin caught my wrist. His fingers were corded and cool, not rough in the least. “I’ll get the truth out of you, Wilder. One way or another.”
I smiled, showing my teeth. “You threatening me, Fagin?”
Witch Craft Page 5
