Seeing Red

by Lyra Evans

  Niko cocked his head to the side. “Wasn’t what?”

  “Driving.”

  Cobalt downed the rest of his bottle and got up to refill it. “How do you mean? He was found in the driver’s seat.”

  Preston watched Cobalt out of the corner of his eye. He waited until the tap was turned off again to start speaking. “You could sit a dog in the driver’s seat of a car, but that doesn’t not mean it was driving it. Furthermore, there is no evidence of any kind from before the crash.” Preston shrugged.

  “So what are you saying?” Cobalt asked, eyes narrowed.

  Niko ran a hand through his midnight blue hair. “He’s saying there was another person in that car. Someone who survived, maybe was driving. Someone who staged the crime scene to make it look as though the kid who died was the one who’d caused the crash. But who then? There were no reports of car crash victims that night in the hospitals, no victims with consistent injuries, nor any report of a stolen car fitting that description. It’s a dead end.”

  With a slow glance down at his fingernails, Preston bit on his lower lip. “Interesting, isn’t it, that Chief Banyan is taking such an active role in the investigation of Hemlock’s murder and your disappearance.”

  Niko was about to open his mouth, to make some quick remark about why it made sense given the circumstances and ask what the fuck those two things had to do with one another—when a seemingly offhand question echoed in his mind. How is your son, Chief?

  The world seemed to stop spinning, everything lurching sideways as Niko’s mind set the pieces into place. The heat of the evening and the fire in the hearth could not warm his iced skin. Was this what it looked like?

  “She—she wouldn’t,” Niko said, a knee-jerk reaction he knew he didn’t even believe anymore. He’d witnessed the conversation, the promises to ‘take care’ of Niko. He had had so much trouble accepting Chief Banyan was dirty, working with the Woods, because he couldn’t understand why she would be. But now he had an answer. He felt sick.

  “Wouldn’t she? For the life of her son?” Preston asked, shrugging as though it was hardly earth-shattering news. For him, perhaps, it wasn’t. But to Niko, it was a coordinated assault on the foundation of everything he’d ever believed in. Justice, the police department, truth, that no one was above the law—it all fell to pieces if the woman in charge of the police had done something this corrupt.

  “You mean to say Chief Banyan’s son was the one driving that night?” Cobalt asked, perhaps slower to piece it together than Niko was, or perhaps more wary of the source than Niko was. Perhaps Niko should have been warier, but it was difficult to deny the way the case unfolded in his mind now, each detail suddenly explainable with this answer key. “Why was he not hospitalized, then? The extent of the damage to the car was severe. Impossible the driver could come out of it without some kind of injury.”

  Preston nodded. “He didn’t,” he said. “But money and power pay well for favours. Doctor friends come to see to your child in their time of need, if you have enough pull. Maybe they do it without ever making a note. Maybe they give the kid drugs to recover without a prescription. Maybe friends in the records department are even willing to lose the documentation for your kid’s car. Maybe files disappear here and there. Maybe you can save your son’s life—both in the short term and long term—if all you do is move his already dead friend into the driver’s seat. No saving that kid, anyway, right? He’s already gone. And he can’t suffer anymore, so saying he was the drunk driver doesn’t matter.”

  “Except to his family,” Niko muttered, suddenly full of rage and loathing. The dead in that case were not the only victims of it.

  “But those people aren’t wealthy and powerful,” Preston said, as though it was obvious. “They don’t matter much, do they?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but Niko wanted to slam Preston’s head into the wall just for saying it. The shadow that passed over Preston’s face as he spoke was the only thing stopping Niko. He didn’t really mean those words, Niko could tell. It was the shade of the Preston who invested in the Selkie auction who spoke them, as though they were two separate people. And the Preston that revealed the Woods’s secrets now was very, very tired of the other one.

  “I thought I knew her,” Niko said aloud without intending to. He would never have called the Chief a friend, but he’d respected her and her work. He respected the way she ran the MCPD. She had done so much good, frankly, supporting the communities that usually got neglected. She’d set up programs to connect the police with the people living in those communities so they didn’t distrust each other so much. She’d spearheaded charity campaigns to give back to the those in dire need. How could a person like that so easily turn her back on victims to serve her own ends?

  “Everyone has a price,” Preston said. “Hers was her son. All it took was one short conversation, one disappointed comment about how her son had had so much potential, could have done such great things were it not for this one terrible mistake for her to sell her soul. And the Woods is always buying. She asked for one favour, and they owned her.”

  Niko got to his feet, needing to move, to breathe, to think. He paced the small area of the cabin, feeling hot again and unable to take it. There was a rot at the centre of Maeve’s Court, and it had spread to his police department. The thought drove him mad, and Niko was determined to excise it. No matter the cost.

  “So what was yours?” Niko asked sharply, his eyes back on Preston. The Werewolf gave him a slow look. “What was your price?”

  A soft smile played on his lips, but his eyes spoke of grief. “Maybe I never had a soul to sell,” he said. Niko only stared at him, and then Preston looked away, out the window, through the curtains, to the trees. “You could have bought me with a kind word. Once.”

  Niko didn’t know what to make of that. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Preston shrugged. “A story for another time, perhaps,” he said. “In the meantime, perhaps you’d like to know who actually killed Sade Hemlock.”

  Pupils contracting, Niko stepped closer to Preston. Cobalt perked up but didn’t stand. At the back of Niko’s mind, he thought that odd, but he was so focussed on Preston’s pleased look he didn’t question it.

  “So you do know who did it?” Niko asked.

  Tilting his head to the side, Preston hedged. “Not precisely. But I’ve got an idea. I may be able to narrow it down if you describe the crime scene to me,” he admitted, and when Niko rolled his eyes and stepped away, he added, “There are only so many details in the papers.”

  Niko shot him a dark look. “I thought you had connections. Lots of friends?”

  Pursing his lips, Preston said, “I have been out of contact with almost everyone since I’ve been here. Only one of my contacts has been keeping me informed since the auction case.” He said this with a clipped tone, and Niko raised his eyebrows. There was a pause, then Preston pushed, “Do you want answers or not?”

  “I told you what we found,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the chair where Preston had been tied up. “Stun gun, leather flogger, rusty pipe—”

  “No, no, I want you to analyze the scene,” Preston said, waving him off. “Look at it like a detective. What do you know about the killer from what you saw? Do your job.”

  “The job I no longer have?” Niko asked, glaring. Preston met his gaze, and Niko looked away. He studied Cobalt for a moment, who nodded gently at him. The Selkie looked pale, and he took another drink of water. “It was clean. Organized. Controlled,” he said, thinking back to the lack of prints and blood evidence, to the planning involved in catching Sade off-guard and subduing him without much struggle. He thought to the careful, specific ordering of the torture and injuries, the clinical approach to the abuse, all of which indicated a cold and calculated approach. Until Niko remembered the pipe. “Only it wasn’t.”

  “Interesting. How do you mean?” Preston asked.

  “The pipe,” Cobalt said, and Niko nodded.
“The torture prior to that point was mechanical, purposeful only in framing Niko for the death. But the pipe…”

  “It was frenzied,” Niko said. “Full of rage and instinct. Violent for the sake of pain, purposeful to punish in the way the rest of the torture wasn’t. The cigarette burns were clean, round circles. The sodomy was—brutal.” Niko shook his head. “They lost control. Then the killer emptied an entire clip into Sade’s dick. Overkill. Way too much. Anyone who knows me knows I burn cold when I’m angry.” He glanced at Cobalt again, remembering his outburst in the jungle-forest. It was the only time he’d blown up in a completely uncontrolled manner. Even launching himself at Preston earlier had been very intentional, reined in from what he wanted to do. But in the jungle-forest, his heart had been involved. He had no feelings where Sade was concerned except cold loathing.

  “I see,” Preston said, running his tongue over his teeth behind his lips. He nodded shallowly. “I wasn’t sure that was the way it would go, but I suppose when needs must…”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Niko asked.

  Preston said, “Based on what you’ve told me, I believe I know who murdered Sade Hemlock. She’s the only one who would be trusted with a job like that, frankly. I don’t know why I questioned it at all.”

  “Get to the point,” Cobalt snapped.

  “Who was the killer?” Niko asked. “And how can I find them?”

  Preston smiled slightly. “Oh, you’ve already met her. It’s Noor Juniper.”

  Chapter 18

  Noor Juniper was the former CEO and founder of Desert Sun Productions. Former largely due to her contribution of a company sound stage to host the Selkie auction months prior. The fallout of that case hadn’t implicated her directly in any specific criminal act, but the board of directors of the company apparently decided the bad press was reason enough to force her out. They’d paid, of course, a hefty sum to take the company from her. But Niko was certain the exit had stung in ways she would never show. It was the only major ‘loss’ anyone from the evening suffered, and it was hardly suffering considering how much they’d paid her. Juniper did also have other companies to occupy her time, Niko was sure, but Desert Sun was the only one she’d founded alone.

  She’d mostly disappeared from the spotlight following the announcement in the business section of every newspaper. There was never any direct mention of her name in conjunction with the case, which Niko suspected was very intentional, but he was certain Juniper would not forget what had caused her to lose her company. Nor who was responsible, in the end.

  But given that Noor Juniper was usually only in the papers in photographs as part of glamourous celebrity events, it wasn’t terribly surprising Niko hadn’t heard much of her since. Winter was the low season for pretty much everything in Maeve’s Court. And though that didn’t mean an end to the customary partying unique to Fae, it did translate to the best time for many to take vacations up North. Niko supposed he’d assumed Noor Juniper was simply up in Nimueh’s Court visiting with her sort-of girlfriend Miranda Goshawk. At least, until he’d seen her in Chief Banyan’s sitting room. That she was acting on the Woods’ behalf with the Chief was surprising enough; Niko would have guessed she was too high up to be doing that kind of job. But now Preston was asserting Juniper was essentially acting as a killer for hire for the Woods, and that took some effort to believe.

  “Noor Juniper,” Niko repeated, thinking of the woman of indeterminate age with powder blue hair and a skin-tight cocktail dress pleasuring Miranda Goshawk in public. “She’s Sade’s killer.” It wasn’t a question, but as Niko saw it, it wasn’t fact either.

  “Based on what you said, yes,” Preston repeated. “She’s the only one I know that—a certain person—would trust in a matter this important and delicate. And she’s also the only one I know who would snap the way this killer did.”

  Niko’s mind was still stuck on the few interactions he’d had with her. She’d obviously had the same penchant for violence and abuse that Preston and Ambert Redwood did, getting excited when they thought Cobalt had tortured and abused Niko to the point of shooting him in the chest for his own pleasure. But the assault on Sade hadn’t seemed rooted in pleasure in any fashion at all. It was rage Niko saw. Loathing. Revenge.

  “What do you mean? Why would she snap like that?” Niko asked.

  “She did not seem to have any difficulty watching torture when we met her,” Cobalt added.

  Preston shook his head. “She doesn’t have an issue with torture,” he said, “when it’s performed on men. Or on women by women.” He moved toward the bookshelf for a moment, and Niko braced visibly. Preston held up his hands as though to calm him, then picked up a leather-bound book from the bottom shelf where Cobalt had knocked it over. Opening it, it revealed pages of photographs. They seemed mostly candid, though some were posed, and they were all rather amateurish. He plucked one out and held it up to Niko. It showed Noor Juniper with the same group Niko and Cobalt had met at The RACK months earlier. Preston stood next to Ambert Redwood, who had his arm around Preston with an arrogant smile on his face. Miranda Goshawk leaned her head against Noor’s shoulder, a silly smile on her lips. Noor, meanwhile, was not quite smiling. She seemed to be caught unawares, her eyes fixed on Ambert Redwood in a sideways look, while everyone else looked into the camera. The expression on her face was unmistakably distrust. “Did you notice she was always between Ambert and Miranda?”

  Niko held the photograph, studying it. The space between Noor and Ambert was significant, considering the closeness of the photograph. But beyond the awkwardness of Noor’s body language, the photo communicated something else—a camaraderie between them all Niko might have qualified as friendship were they any four other people.

  “She didn’t seem to have much of a problem with him at the club,” Niko said. “Wasn’t he torturing that worker in the glass case?”

  Preston shook his head again. “Hardly qualifies as torture,” he said. “The machine she was hooked up to was meant for pleasure. Ambert pushed her beyond her limit, sure, but she wasn’t being tortured. Noor wouldn’t have stayed if Ambert had decided to let his real impulses loose, and she certainly wouldn’t have allowed Miranda to stay.”

  Cobalt got up, refilled his bottle, then moved over to the couch to be closer to them. He fell back into the sofa without even trying to look at the photo. Niko noticed the skin along his forehead seemed almost flaky. His hair seemed flatter than usual.

  “You mean to say she only objects to torture when men are torturing women? But everything else is a-go for her?” he asked.

  “It isn’t a question of objection,” Preston said, closing the album and setting it on the shelf. “It’s a question of trauma. Seeing women tortured by men triggers memories of her past.” He moved to the couch as well. For a moment, he appeared to want to sit immediately next to Cobalt, but the Selkie eyed him with such a sharp look, Preston moved to the very opposite end and seated himself there. “She was a victim of abuse as a child,” he went on, slightly stilted after his no-go with Cobalt.

  Niko was jarred by the revelation and the nonchalant way Preston informed them. “There’s no record of that in the system,” Niko said, thinking back to their checks on Preston, Noor, and Ambert before the auction.

  “There wouldn’t be,” he said. “Her family’s wealth and position protected them from almost everything.” He shrugged, thinking it over. “Except Noor, in the end.” Cobalt gave him a look, and Preston elaborated, “Oh, Noor killed her parents. Did I forget to mention that?” Niko simply stared at him.

  “It appears you did, yes,” Cobalt said, affecting the same false lightness Preston used.

  “Well, her father was the one abusing her. Her mother knew about it all and never did anything to stop him,” Preston shrugged. “As Noor saw it, they were both culpable. One day she snapped, murdered them, and got away with it because she already had very good friends. One in particular, if you catch my meaning.” He leaned back again
st the couch, crossing his arms. “Of course, it turns out her mother never acted to protect her because she had been the outlet for her husband’s abuse before Noor was born. The trauma did irreparable damage to her, but here we are. I suppose it did irreparable damage to Noor too.”

  Niko looked out the window, his head spinning with information. The sky had turned darker out there, night falling over the Court. He suddenly realized how easily time slipped away from him. They hadn’t checked in with Starla or Coral. Were they still all right?

  “So why snap on Sade? She was torturing him,” Niko pointed out.

  “You’ll have to ask her that,” Preston said. “But I imagine it has something to do with his history. She would have learned all there was to know about Hemlock before going through with it, which means she would have learned about how he treated all his captives, not just you. And before you were there, he had to have played with other people.”

  Niko thought of Starla again, of how she’d suffered, of how she’d been taken when she was still a child. Even if Sade had never harmed another girl or woman in any way, if Noor had learned about Starla’s experience, it would be more than enough to trigger that reaction, he imagined.

  “So take us to her,” he said suddenly. If Noor was the real killer, Niko would get her to confess. He would take the confession to Uri and the Captain and—he wasn’t sure what came next, but he needed to prove he was innocent. He needed to clear his name so he could then clear the rot from the police department.

  “For what reason?” Preston asked, his face a mask of confusion.

  “To get her to confess, of course,” Cobalt said. “We need supporting evidence to show—”

  “Who?” Preston interrupted. “The police that operate under Chief Banyan? Or the Courtiers who are nearly all compromised? Maeve herself? Do you have her personal number?”

  “You let us worry about that,” Niko said dismissively. His temples burned with the problem, unable to see the solution—yet. “You just get us to her. Get us in the door.”