by Хлоя Нейл
Luc nodded, then picked up a remote that sat beside his mug. “In that case, a little more good news to brighten your evening.” He held up the remote and mashed buttons until the clip on the screen began to play.
It was a recorded news program. We caught the end of a story about international warfare before the headline switched to read, “Vamp Violence in Wrigleyville.” The female anchor —polished in her jewel-toned suit, her stiff hair a helmet above her head—offered up the rest.
“In this morning’s top local news,” she said, “an uptick in violence in the city is deemed the result of a drug called ‘V’ that’s circulating among the city’s vampire community.”
They cut to an image of a white V tablet in someone’s hand, and then to a shot of Temple Bar.
“One such event was last night’s disturbance at a Wrigleyville bar with ties to Cadogan House.
We were live on scene last night, and here’s what one local resident had to say.”
They cut to video of the two frat boys from Temple Bar.
“Oh, those traitorous little shits,” Lindsey muttered. “Those are the humans Christine talked to.”
“It was awful in there,” said the taller of the two boys. “All those vamps just wailing on each other. It was like they just went crazy.”
“Did you fear for your life?” asked an offscreen reporter.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “How could you not? I mean, they’re vampires. We’re just humans.”
“The atom bomb was invented by ‘just humans,’” Malik muttered. “World War II and the Spanish Inquisition were perpetrated by ‘just humans.’” We were clearly not a receptive crowd for muckraking journalism.
“Aldermen Pat Jones and Clarence Walker issued statements this morning calling for investigation of Chicago’s vampire Houses and their role in this new drug. Mayor Tate responded to events this morning after meeting with his economic council.”
The newscast cut to a shot of Tate shaking hands with a woman in an unflattering suit.
Beside a plain-looking bureaucrat, he looked that much more like a romance-novel hero: seductive eyes, dark hair, wicked smile. You had to wonder how many votes he’d gotten because voters just wanted to be near him.
When reporters began peppering him with questions about the bar fight, he held up both hands and smiled affectionately. That smile, I thought, walked a thin line between empathy and condescension.
“I have made Chicago’s Houses well aware of their responsibilities, and I’m sure they’ll take whatever precautions are necessary to put an immediate stop to the spread of V and the violence. If they don’t, of course, steps will have to be taken. My administration is not afraid to take those steps. We’ve done a lot of work to remake this city into one that Illinois can be proud of, and we will continue to ensure that Chicago remains a place of peace and prosperity.”
The anchor popped on-screen again. “Mayor Tate’s approval rating remains consistently high even in light of the recent violence.”
With that, Luc reached up with the remote and stopped the video again.
The room went silent and heavy with concern.
I guessed I now knew why my father had called.
He was probably dying to berate me for being a vampire and sullying the family name—despite the fact that I’d had no say in becoming fanged, and I was trying my best to keep the peace in Chicago.
Unless his tone had changed about that, as well.
“Well,” Ethan finally said. “It does comfort me so to know that Mayor Tate’s approval ratings remain strong.”
“Tate must be feeding the anchors with information,” I offered. “We only barely know about the uptick in violence, and my grandfather promised to keep V out of the press.”
“So Tate’s using vamps to make political hay?” Luc offered. “I guess it’s not the first time a politician’s taken advantage of chaos, but it sure would be nice if it wasn’t at our expense.”
“And if he didn’t have an arrest warrant ready,” I agreed.
“Way to put the city first,” Lindsey said.
Luc glanced over at Ethan, concern in his expression. “Anything from Darius?”
“He’s still on radio silence.”
“It’s not going to go over well.”
“Drugs and violence in my bar? Drugs and violence covered by local paparazzi that will probably spread to national coverage, if it hasn’t already? No, I don’t imagine he will be pleased, and there’s a good chance the House will suffer for it.”
“Tell him the other part,” Kelley said.
“The other part?” Ethan asked, his gaze shifting from Kelley to Luc.
“The other part,” Luc confirmed, picking up the tablet and tapping its screen. The image on the projector shifted from the newscast to a black-and-white live feed of a dark neighborhood street. During my stint as an on-duty House guard, I’d seen that feed enough times to be familiar with it.
“That’s outside Cadogan House.”
“Good eye, Sentinel,” Luc complimented.
“Indeed it is.” He tapped the tablet again and zoomed into the feed, fixing on a boxy sedan that held two passengers. Both wore suits.
“Kelley went for a run. She noticed the sedan when she left, and she noticed the sedan when she came back.”
“Twenty-six miles,” Kelley put in. “It took me an hour and twenty-four minutes.”
Not bad for a marathon-length run. Chalk one up for vampire speed.
“That’s a long time for two guys in suits to be sitting in a car outside the House,” Ethan said, then looked back at Luc. “It’s an unmarked CPD car.”
“That’s our thought. Neither the car nor the suits seemed like McKetrick’s crew, so we figured detectives. We called the Ombud’s office to confirm, but they had no idea about the car.”
I muttered a curse. “They had no idea about Mr. Jackson’s rave, either. Tate isn’t being entirely candid with the office right now.”
“A lack of trust?” Ethan wondered.
“Or perhaps a fear that the Ombud’s office is tied too closely to Cadogan House,” I suggested.
“Tate’s office doesn’t give the Ombud’s office all the information, which acts like a check and balance on my grandfather.”
Lindsey grimaced. “That’s a slap in the face.”
“Yes, it is,” I agreed. “I guess the cop car signals Tate’s lack of trust in us, too?”
Ethan shuffled in his chair. “Given the fact that he’s got a warrant for my arrest ready to go, I’d say so.”
My cell phone buzzed. I pulled it out and checked the caller ID. “Speak of the devil. It’s Jeff.” I flipped it open. “Hey, Jeff. Got anything for me?”
Jeff chuckled. “Of course, I do. But I’m strictly off-limits now. You know, ’cause of the little lady.”
“No disrespect meant to you or yours. Hey, I’m in the Ops Room with Ethan and everyone.
Can I put you on speaker?”
“Knock yourself out. Probably helpful for all to hear.”
I put the phone down in the middle of the table, then pressed the speaker button. “Okay.
You’re live. What do you have?”
“Aw, if only I’d prepared a monologue.”
We heard Catcher’s voice in the background.
“Focus, kid.”
“Well,” Jeff said, and I heard the clacking of keys, “it turns out the security cameras are live, and Colin and Sean do record the video. It’s stored in the bar on a dedicated server, and there are also external backups just in case some bad stuff goes down. I was actually pretty impressed.
You don’t expect bars to have that kind of security protocol.”
From the looks of the crusty back room, Temple Bar definitely did not seem like the kind of establishment with a “dedicated server,” not that I could differentiate a dedicated server from an undedicated server.
“So, anyway, I grabbed the video and uploaded it.”
I l
eaned forward, linking my hands together on the table. “Tell me you found something, Jeff.”
“It took some spooling,” he said. “Trucks use the alley quite a bit to make deliveries. There’s also the occasional catering-truck pickup, garbage trucks, taxis, bar drop-offs, et cetera, et cetera. But beginning two months ago, every couple of days, usually in the wee hours, a vintage Shelby Mustang—wicked car—pulls into the alley. Sometimes the car sits there for a few minutes, nothing happens, the car drives away.
Sometimes a driver gets out.”
My heart began to beat in anticipation. We were getting closer, I knew it. “What did the driver look like?”
“Well, although the backups are impressive, the video is for shit. Very grainy. But I did manage to pull a still for you. I’m going to send you a pic.”
“Use this e-mail,” Luc said, reading off an address to Jeff and picking up one of the tablets from the desktop. “That way we can project the image.”
“Done and done.” Jeff had barely gotten out the words before Luc’s tablet dinged, signaling a new message. His fingers danced across the tablet, and an image popped onto the screen.
The guy was short—maybe five feet in shoes—older with slick, dark hair and bulbous features. There was nothing especially remarkable about his face, but I would have sworn I’d seen him before.
“Does he look familiar to anyone?” I asked, but got muttered “no’s” around the room.
The others might not have recognized him, but I had a sense Sarah would have.
“He matches the description of the guy Sarah—the human at the Streeterville party—met,” I said. “Make my night and tell me you got a license plate on the car, Jeff.”
“Because I am, in fact, awesome, I was able to zero into the video. I got the license of the car, then ran it through the DMV system. The car is registered to one Paulie Cermak.” Jeff read out an address. “The interwebs say his address is near the Garfield Park Conservatory.”
I made plans to pay Mr. Cermak a visit. I also opened my eyes again and smiled at the phone.
“Jeff, you are a paragon of man.”
“The funny thing is,” Jeff continued, “the car’s title shows a recent sale—only a few months ago to our Mr. Cermak. But there’s no information about the prior owner or who he purchased the car from.”
I frowned at the phone. “That seems weird.”
“Definitely weird,” Jeff agreed. “When we’re looking at records, too much data usually signals a plant. Not enough data signals a scrub. Vehicle sales are almost always in the system; there’s no reason not for them to be. This file had scrub all over it. Oh, and that’s not all.”
“We’re listening.”
“Because I am, in fact, not just supremely awesome, but also all that and a bag of chipspreferably kettle-cooked jalapeño of some kind—I checked Mr. Cermak’s criminal record in the Cook County DB. I mean, probably not supposed to go into their system without permission, but what else is a boy to do when his favorite vamp makes a call?”
“Indeed. What did you learn?”
“Factually, not much. There’s one sealed criminal record in the file, and that’s it.”
“Do you think that file was scrubbed, too?”
“Eh, not necessarily. You can seal criminal files for all sorts of legitimate reasons. To protect the victim, because the perp’s underage, because the perp’s a brains-eating mind-dead zombie with no mens rea whatsoever—”
“Sealed record?” Ethan prompted.
“Yeah. So, the file is sealed, and I can’t access any data. They’re actually rocking some pretty good encryption on the sealed records. I’d need the access key or password, or you’d have to get a court order to pull the file.”
“So a dead end there?”
“Ha! You made a joke. But yes. Very dead.
Dead as a doornail. Dead as a doorknob even, although I’m not sure I know what the difference is between those two things.”
“We got it.”
“Oh, one final thing.” I heard more key tapping, the sound overlaid by Jeff’s humming. It sounded like “White Christmas.”
“Little early for Christmas carols, isn’t it, Jeff?”
“Never hurts to get into the holiday spirit, Merit. Okay, so the video isn’t great, and the alley by the bar door isn’t very well lit. But occasionally, on a full moon, the light shines just right. . . .” As he trailed off, I heard more tapping. “Okay,” he said again. “I’m going to send you another image.”
This one was a fuzzy black-and-white shot of a car in the alley. Jeff was right—the image was grainy, but the vehicle it showed was undeniably a classic Mustang, complete with racing stripes and side vents. And that wasn’t all.
I squinted at the picture, trying in vain to bring it into focus. “Is that a woman in the passenger’s seat?”
“It appears to be so,” Jeff said. “It’s more of a shadow, but it does appear to be a woman.
Curves, ya know?”
“We know,” Ethan said dryly.
“Anyway, I was checking out the shadow of the lady in the video, right? I’m running the film at like half speed, and I find something else. I’ve got a close-up, and I’m going to send it to you.”
Again, the tablet beeped, and a new black-and-white image replaced the previous one on our screen.
I squinted at it, but predatory eyesight or not, I still couldn’t get a good read on the woman in the car. In fact, I couldn’t get a good read on anything other than pixels.
“What are we supposed to be looking at?” I wondered aloud.
“Check the middle of the image,” Jeff said, “approximately where her collar would be.”
I’d just opened my mouth to protest that I couldn’t see anything—and that was when I saw it—around her neck, an undeniable glint of light.
“Jeff, that looks like a House medal.” Not unlike the one I’d seen Celina wearing the night she returned to Cadogan House.
“That’s what I thought, too.”
“Can you zoom in any closer?” Ethan asked.
“Unfortunately, I can’t give you any more details. The camera’s sensor just didn’t record any more data. But that’s something, isn’t it? It kind of suggests you’ve got a House vamp involved in this drug business.”
Malik and Ethan exchanged a heavy glance.
“It does suggest that,” Ethan agreed. “But for now, let’s keep this between us, shall we?”
“You’re the boss,” Jeff pleasantly said.
“Thanks, Jeff. We appreciate it.”
“Unfortunately, I’ve got bad news to go along with the good news.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Paulie Cermak’s the only suspect we’ve got for distributing V. I narrowed down the video late last night, and had to turn it over to the CPD this morning.”
“Of course,” I said. “Detective Jacobs would have been interested in the video.”
“Is and was. They sent detectives to Cermak’s house this morning.”
Ethan frowned at the phone. “Did they find anything?”
“Not a thing. The house was clean. The car was clean. They’re still processing some of the stuff they lifted for trace evidence, but there’s nothing that ties him to the drugs or the raves. As far as we know, he’s just a guy in a public alley.
He had every right to be there.”
Be that as it may, my gut said Paulie Cermak was more than a passerby, and I’d bet that if we called up every Cadogan vampire who’d been in Temple Bar in the last month, they could pin him as the guy who’d been loitering outside and pushing V. Of course, that would require calling out each Cadogan vamp. I wasn’t willing, at least at this point, to drag the individual vampires into it.
“Thanks, Jeff. Any objections if I pay Mr.
Cermak a visit on my own?” At my suggestion, Ethan’s head shot up, but he didn’t voice an objection.
“Not from us. And CPD doesn’t have to know.
“Thanks, Jeff,” I said, then tapped off the phone.
The Ops Room was quiet for a moment.
I looked up and around at the vamps in the room. “Any thoughts before I visit our apparent drug pusher?”
“How opposed are you to capital punishment?” Luc growled out.
“I’d prefer not to play judge, jury, and executioner,” I said. “But if you have any strategic or diplomatic suggestions, I’m all for them.”
Ethan patted my back good-naturedly. “Good Sentinel.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE PERP
Lindsey escorted me to my room so I could change back into boots and grab my sword. I usually skipped bringing it along on public outings, but Paulie Cermak was quite possibly a drug kingpin, and I was heading to his home turf.
No way was I going on that field trip without steel.
It wasn’t until we were inside with the door shut, Lindsey on my bed while I sat on the floor, sword unsheathed before me to ensure it was in fighting shape, that she made the confession she’d apparently been holding in.
“We made out,” she said.
I wiped the blade down with a sheet of rice paper. “I don’t recall making out with you.”
“I made out with Connor.”
I looked up at her and couldn’t help the disappointment that crossed my face. Connor was a vamp from my Initiate class, a sweet kid with whom Lindsey had been flirting since our Commendation into the House. He was cute and charming in his way . . . but he was no Luc.
“When did that happen?”
“I got back from Temple Bar, and a bunch of us were talking in the downstairs parlor, and then everybody got tired and left. Everybody but him, I mean. And then one thing led to another. . . .”
The blade clean, I resheathed the sword again.
“One thing led to you making out with a newbie vampire?”
