In Truth and Claw (A Mick Oberon Job #4)

by Ari Marmell

  “Fine.” I started to take another drink, realized I’d finished the cream, and near stood up from the chair just so I could kick my own keister. I’d gotten distracted, chugged the rest while we were jawin’. Top shelf stuff, and I didn’t even remember tasting it.

  I glared at the bottle, snapped, “Fine!” again, and put it aside by the typewriter. “The Unseelie stay on the list, not that we got any good way to investigate ’em.

  “But I still guess a mortal’s more likely. Ramona, you’re completely sure it ain’t—”

  “I’m sure.”

  Her tone said, Don’t argue, so I didn’t. Pete wisely kept his trap shut.

  I went through the roster, same as I’d done when this whole shindig kicked off, and it wasn’t any more helpful this time around.

  Once, centuries ago, I saw a cu sidhe get rip-roaring lit—this was in the Otherworld, so findin’ stuff for Fae to get drunk on ain’t a problem—and spend an hour chasin’ her own tail like a common hound, only even clumsier. Trippin’ over her paws, fallin’ flat on her snout, even tumbling ass over ears a couple times. When we talked the next day, she admitted to me that part of the reason she’d been havin’ so much trouble tryin’ to catch her tail was that’d she’d been seein’ three of ’em, and they weren’t even waggin’ in unison.

  I was startin’ to feel like I imagine she must have.

  “Um.”

  Me’n Ramona both craned our heads to look Pete’s way.

  “I’m not the expert in the room where Fae or vampires or any of that’s concerned,” he said. “And I’m just a beat cop, not a detective. And, uh…” He hesitated, shot me an apologetic smile. “And I know you’re usually able to fit the puzzle together around the missing pieces, and then go find ’em.”

  “But?”

  “But maybe we don’t worry right now about who the best suspect is. Maybe we just go back over the evidence and see where it leads us.”

  “Oh, look at the evidence! Damn, I’m such a bunny! Why didn’t I ever do that?”

  He scowled at me. I don’t blame him.

  “I’ve been over it all, Pete. It led me to right where we’re sittin’.”

  “That was a few days back,” Ramona chided. “There have been a few more murders, if nothing else. And we weren’t here to look at it with you.”

  So, without any better ideas, I hauled out the copies of the police reports, the map where I’d marked off the sites of the murders, the autopsy reports on the victims. All of it. The three of us bent our conks over it all and got to readin’.

  Sadly, after a few hours at it, we still had bupkis. I hadn’t stumbled over anything I’d missed the first time, and they hadn’t spotted any new details or been struck by any new inspiration.

  We added the newest bloody deaths to the map, but if it held a hidden picture, the damn thing wasn’t comin’ into any better focus. Same as before, other’n a few outliers, most of ’em were clustered in one chunk of Chicago—but because of how quick and how far vampires can travel in their hunts, it was a large enough chunk that it was basically unsearchable.

  Pete seemed particularly glum. I guess he’d hoped his suggestion mighta broken the whole thing open. “I’m sorry, Mick.”

  “Me, too.” Ramona stubbed out a butt in a small saucer I’d given her to use as an ashtray. “Maybe if we knew more about how the magic had been cast in the first place, I might come up with something, or at least have some idea which of the boss’s grimoires to consult. But without knowing what we’re looking for, I’m afraid I—”

  I straightened up from the desk. “Hold up.”

  I chewed on her question. I looked at the pile of records and reports. I studied the map. I removed a crumpled mass of paper from my pocket and laid it out beside that map.

  And damn if they hadn’t been right. It was because of Pete’s suggestion to go back over it all, and because of Ramona’s comment, that it came to me.

  Not an answer. Barely even a lead. But at least it was a direction.

  “Get your coats, folks. We’ve got a trip to take.”

  Pete grinned and sidled over to the stand. He started with Ramona’s coat, not his own, and held it for her. Her smile nearly bowled him over, and she’d barely given him half strength.

  “Where to?” she asked as she slipped an arm through a sleeve.

  “Only the nicest places for you, doll,” I told her. “We’re headin’ to the morgue.”

  * * *

  The morgue attendants somehow managed to look both overwhelmed with work and yet bored to tears, and they weren’t real keen on seeing me again.

  “We’re already showed you everythin’ there is to see. There ain’t no more.”

  “The new stiffs don’t got anythin’ on ’em the old ones didn’t.”

  “We got too much on our plates to be wastin’ time like this.”

  But I had my authorizations, and we had Ramona’s smile, and we had Pete’s badge. (Also, I suppose I oughta mention we stopped by his digs so he could put on clothes that actually fit, so he didn’t look like he’d shrunk in the wash.)

  Plus, of course, I coulda made the ginks change their minds if I needed to, but we hadn’t come to that. Yet.

  Point is, despite the grousing and delays, they hauled open a disturbingly large number of refrigerated drawers and dumped a stack of reports on an empty steel table so we could examine to our heart’s content.

  Too bad for them I didn’t actually need anything from these bodies. I was just reestablishing my bona fides as an investigator on the case and otherwise double-checking before I got to the real meat—so to speak—of our visit.

  I gave ’em a casual slant, then wandered over to the leaning tower of paperwork, tapped it to get their attention, and then plunked my marked-up map down on top if it all.

  “Swell. Now I wanna see all the stabbings and other sharp-force deaths brought in from this chunk of the city—I circled it here so you don’t gotta go tryin’ to figure out addresses—in the two weeks before this string of bloody killings started.”

  Well, you woulda thought I’d just demanded they yank the fillings from their own pearly whites to hand ’em over.

  “You got any idea how many reports we’d have to go through?”

  “Most of those bodies ain’t even here anymore!”

  “Does it look like we’re just sittin’ around? We’re workin’ here!”

  “Besides, you ain’t even authorized to see those! The department’s only given you access to the one case!”

  I wanna state it clearly, on the record, that I did try to be reasonable. I explained that this was part of the same investigation into the same case. I pointed out that diggin’ through reports was part of their job. I told ’em that “most of the bodies” bein’ gone meant a few were still here, waitin’ to be claimed. I even offered ’em a bit of folding green as incentive, though I only had a few bucks to give.

  Only after alla that flopped did I catch their gaze, one by one, and play kick the can with their emotions until the resentment and suspicion and laziness had all landed way down the road and I found a clear path to more cooperative moods.

  Took a while, even after that. I mean, they weren’t wrong that it meant searchin’ through a lot of paperwork, seeing which murders had the right cause of death and fell within the zone, checkin’ evidence labels, wheeling the bodies out from cold storage (since, as older cases, they weren’t takin’ up space in the drawers). After loitering for an hour or two, though, we had our prizes.

  Seven stiffs, a few dozen boxes of evidence, and another tower of folders, some with a single form, others stuffed thick to bursting.

  I sent the attendants back to their other duties, leaving me, Pete, and Ramona gathered at the far end of the cold, tiled room.

  By this time, both of ’em had completely run outta patience.

  “Okay, Mick,” Ramona demanded. “You’ve got your bodies. Would you please tell us what the hell we’re supposed to be looking f
or?”

  Pete added, more’n a touch grumpily, “Yeah, that. But without the ‘please.’”

  “We’re startin’ with two assumptions,” I said, wandering back and forth between the tables of corpses. “One, the vampires’ current lair is the same spot they were summoned to in the first place, or at least pretty near. And two, that this was also the lair, or at least the workspace, of whoever summoned ’em. He’d want to know the area, have time to set up the ritual, et cetera.”

  Two nods. They were on board so far.

  “So if those’re both accurate, it makes sense that the sacrifices, the murders used to invoke the spirit-summoning ritual, would also come from that same area.”

  “An area that encompasses a sizable portion of the city,” Ramona protested, “and that you said, more than once, was too large to reasonably search.”

  “Yeah. Until you’n Pete made me stop and think, and I realized I might know what I was lookin’ for.

  “Orsola’s notes,” I explained. “It occurred to me, what if she wasn’t bein’ metaphorical? When she wrote about ‘heart’s blood,’ what if she meant it literally? So, that’s what we’re lookin’ for in our sacrificial victims, lady and gentleman.”

  I’d told Laurelline even I wasn’t good enough to separate a handful of sacrifices from all Chicago’s murders. But a handful of sacrifices from a smaller subset of Chicago’s murders, when I had a pretty good sense of what those murders’d look like, sounded a lot more doable.

  Which ain’t remotely the same thing as “easy.”

  There was a lot to go through. Gettin’ plugged is certainly more common, but stabbin’ ain’t exactly unheard of in the Second City. We spent hours in that chilly morgue, being bumped and glowered at by assistants and coroners whose space we’d annexed, suckin’ up foul mixtures of chemicals and cleansers and rot, tryin’ to pinpoint those tiny details that just might, if we listened real intently, whisper to us that, yeah, this was the one.

  We read reports until the letters stopped makin’ sense, looked over boxes and bags of evidence, examined bodies that’d long been washed of almost everything that coulda been useful.

  By the time we were done, we were all of us irritable, frustrated, ready to blow our lids at the slightest inconvenience. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to put my companions on one of these steel slabs, or just say nuts to it all and let ’em lay me on one.

  But we’d found it.

  One of the stiffs we still had—and four others, based on the written reports—stood out to me. They’d been shivved straight through the pump, all five.

  They weren’t the only stabbin’ victims we looked at, by a long shot. Not even the only ones stabbed in the heart. But it ain’t as easy as you might figure to croak somebody with a single thrust, not if they’re movin’ or aware that you’re comin’. And if you do manage to make a sneak of it, get ’em when they’re none the wiser and drop ’em in one stab, it’s almost always gonna be from the back.

  These five? Dropped by a single, neat thrust, from the front.

  One or two? I coulda bought that as coincidence, maybe wouldn’t have been convinced I was on the right track or that I’d interpreted Orsola’s chicken scratch right. But five, in the same week, week and a half?

  Yeah. We had our sacrifices.

  So I dove right back into it, examining that one body and those four reports closer’n you’d ever wanna get. Read over every word, every note, every number. Opened bags I wasn’t supposed to open. (Because let’s be square: If anyone caught this bastard, it was gonna be us, in which case “proper procedure” and “chain of custody” wasn’t gonna matter squat. I did juggle a few memories, though. Didn’t need it gettin’ back to the department that I was the one who’d ruined the evidence; not if I ever wanted another job with the city.)

  I even, accompanied by a lotta disgusted gasps or snorts from Pete and a few of the attendants, took my time to actually sniff the entire corpse, inch by inch. Always possible the wash left somethin’ behind I could pick up, even if you lot couldn’t.

  And, in fact, on a couple fingers of the left hand, it had.

  Mud, under the nails. Just a tiny few flecks left behind after the wash, preserved by the cold of the freezer.

  More mud, in the evidence. Taken offa two other stiffs who’d been stabbed. Wasn’t any collected or recorded from the last couple, but even if it hadn’t been there—or if the examiners just missed it—three outta five was good enough for me to call a clue.

  Not that the stuff was a clue, in and of itself. Mud? In a rainy month? Big deal, right?

  It had a… tang to it, though. I’d caught just the smallest whiff of somethin’ more’n dirt and water.

  I cleared my head, shouted for quiet, leaned in so close I damn near shoved those two fingers up my nostrils. Soft, gentle breaths. Sniff, don’t snort. Let it come…

  Yeah.

  Stuff had blood mixed in with it. And not just human; you’d expect human blood on shivved dead guys, wouldn’t you? No, this was animal.

  So why… Oh. Well, hell, of course.

  Had a quick flashback to the displays I’d wandered past at the museum, the frozen and almost serene hunts as predators chased, leapt at, brought down prey. The real thing wasn’t near so peaceful, was it? Maybe it woulda never occurred to me without those Field exhibits fresh in my conk, but… all this time I’d been contemplating places of human suffering, fear, death, when nobody’d ever said all of it hadda be human, had they?

  The Union Stockyards were practically their own small town of pens, offices, and more meat-on-the-hoof than you could count, sittin’ smack in the middle of south Chicago.

  And between the damn near biblical floods of bloodshed in the slaughterhouses and processing centers, and the suffering of the poor dumb beasts in conditions that woulda made even a goblin flinch, the place absolutely had the symbolism, the resonance with predation and horror and death, for the vampire-spirit rituals.

  Sure enough, the stockyards, as well as parts of the Packingtown neighborhood where most of its workers lived, fell within the rough circle on my map.

  Pete’n Ramona musta seen somethin’ in my expression, some hint that I’d finally tumbled to it. The both of ’em stood rapt, waitin’ for me to spill. I straightened up from the table, grinnin’ big enough to break my mug wide open, ready to do just that.

  But I didn’t. I froze, and I think my smile mighta cracked a tile on the floor, it fell so hard. ’Cause right then I remembered somethin’ else.

  I remembered when—and on whom—I’d recently smelled the faint whiff of animal blood.

  Every theory I had, my entire picture of the investigation, flipped over in my head, and a ways lower down, my gut was doin’ the same. I snatched the map off the table, crumpled it into a pocket, and made tracks for the door and the nearest L station, my bewildered and ever-more worried friends at my heels.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In case you’ve never seen it, I ain’t kiddin’ about the size of the Union Stockyards. They stretch for block after block. Well over three hundred acres, all told, with more’n two thousand separate livestock pens— plus all the offices, abattoirs, packin’ plants, loading docks, storehouses, equipment sheds, granaries and feed stores… It’s a community unto itself. A community built entirely on pain and fear and death.

  The earth, the pathways leadin’ in every direction beyond the massive main gate, was sludge. Mud and rainwater and the runoff of blood and piss and shit. The stench was enough to choke even a dullahan who’d left his noggin behind in Elphame; I actually hadda use a little hocus-pocus on myself, sort of an olfactory illusion that it wasn’t so bad, to manage it. I wasn’t sure Pete was gonna be able to stick with us, but even though I’d never seen a human go quite that shade of green, he waved us on every time I asked him if he needed to drop back.

  Didn’t seem to bother Ramona one iota, though. I guess, considerin’ where she’s from, she’d smelled worse in her time.

  The
scent wasn’t the worst of it, though. The air felt… sticky. Like all the blood and sweat and the rest of it just sorta loitered around, a spectral miasma haunting the stockyards insteada any actual ghosts. I felt slimy, kinda uncomfortably warm, even though the evening was cool, drizzly, and breezy.

  The place had once been swampland, before people built over it and turned it into what it was. And I think maybe it was usin’ what humanity had done to it to remind everyone of that fact.

  You’d think, in alla that, it woulda been a trip for biscuits tryin’ to find our bad guy’s hidin’ place, the vampires’ actual lair. Turned out it was the simplest part of the whole mess.

  They wouldn’t wanna be discovered, see? The stockyards were never entirely empty, and the last thing the undead needed, if they’n their new boss were tryin’ to lie dormy, was to have workers stumbling over them in the middle of their daytime nap.

  So all I hadda do was find one of those workers—as I said, there were plenty to choose from, even after sunset—and get into his noggin a little. Find out which office or building they’d been recently ordered to stay away from, or had been taken over by a new manager who wanted to be left alone, or what have you.

  And that brought us here. A small wooden structure in one corner of the yards, basically a combined office and storage shed and not much else. It was locked up tight—with, I couldn’t help notice, a swanky new lock—but that didn’t prove much trouble.

  Didn’t look like much on first slant, just a small, dim cave of an office. One hangin’ light bulb, a crummy fan, a desk facin’ a window closed off by a cheap but heavy curtain, and a door leadin’ into the other half of the building.

  We weren’t here for just a quick slant, though.

  The occult runes and glyphs were carved into the floor of the next room, the supply room, hidden beneath some burlap sacks and a barrel of rakes and hoes. I’d never seen that precise combination of symbols before, but then, I already knew this wasn’t any magic I was familiar with. Old blood, dried and flaking, was embedded in the lines.

  Human blood, by the smell of it.