Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3)

by SM Reine

  Pop-Tarts and breakfast pizzas for the homeless. Nourishing.

  “Do you have any cash?” Mary asked, turning to me.

  I did. I always kept a hundred on hand for emergencies. But I wasn’t contributing to those kinds of shopping habits, especially when those handouts were going to people who couldn’t bother to hold a job down. “No, sorry. I don’t have anything.”

  Judging by Mary’s knowing look, she could tell I was lying. Don’t ask me how. She just did.

  “Get whatever you can, Quinn,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do about this oven.”

  The cook tossed his apron aside and hurried out.

  I was sweltering. Needed to get out fast. “Mary, my name is Agent Cèsar Hawke. I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and I’m here to talk about a volunteer named Jay Brandon.” I tugged on my collar to try to get a little oxygen. “Do you know him?”

  “Oh, I only work at this soup kitchen one or two days a month. I spread my time between so many charities. Maybe too many.”

  Her embarrassed smile was kind of charming. I wouldn’t have ever called her pretty, but she was definitely striking with her strong jaw, bright eyes, and straight nose. She must have been a looker before the years slapped her around.

  “He was a well-built Caucasian man in his thirties with blond hair, blue eyes,” I said. “Probably came in with his mother most of the time.”

  Mary’s hand flew to her heart. Her fingernails were gnarled and tobacco stained. “He was?” Now she was staring at my fake badge.

  “Do you remember him?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. Help me pull this oven away from the wall so that I can look at the power cord.”

  She sounded so authoritative about it that I moved to obey instantly. My Abuelita had conditioned me to respond to that sharp old lady voice from an early age.

  I dragged the oven out a few inches. Mary checked behind it. “Definitely the power cord,” she said with a disapproving headshake. “The mice weren’t a problem before the health department made us get rid of our cats.”

  “Jay Brandon had an altercation with one of the bums that comes here for food. You might have heard about that.”

  “Parishioners,” she said, searching through the drawers.

  “What?”

  “They aren’t ‘bums.’ They’re members of our church, and we feed them.”

  Whatever. “Did you hear about the fight?”

  “Yes, sad thing,” Mary said. She pulled a roll of black electrical tape out of one of the drawers and shuffled back toward me. I hadn’t noticed before, but she had a pretty bad limp. “It was Matt. He’s been struggling this year. Really struggling. Incredibly desperate. I wish there was more we could do for him than fill his belly and pray for his soul, but…well, we’re lucky on the days we can keep half of our parishioners from leaving hungry.”

  “Matt? Is that a nickname for Matthew?”

  I tried to pull out my Steno pad, but Mary shoved the electrical tape into my hands.

  “Be a dear and see if you can do something about the power cable for the oven. We can’t afford to replace it.”

  I was ready for the all-too-mundane witchcraft of her grandmotherly command this time, but I still sidled behind the oven. It was dusty back there—dusty, and filled with mouse poop. I was wearing one of my good suits.

  “I’m not here to volunteer, ma’am,” I said.

  “God brought you to us for a reason. I’m hoping that it was to fix the oven.”

  “I don’t think He cares about your oven.”

  She flapped her hands at me. “You would be surprised. Go on. See what you can do.”

  At least it was an excuse to take my jacket off and roll up my sleeves. I crouched behind the oven to inspect the cord. It looked like a whole legion of mice had been stripping the thing.

  They were lucky the damn kitchen hadn’t burned down by now.

  I’d managed to salvage a couple of old eight track players in much worse condition, and I was stuck at the soup kitchen until Sister Catherine came back. Might as well get dirty.

  I unplugged it from the wall and pulled out my pocketknife. “Matt. What’s his full name? Matthew…?”

  “Not Matthew. Matteo,” Mary said. She was already moving around the kitchen, pulling out more food supplies that looked like they were intended for dinner. Cups of noodles and dried potatoes. “Matteo Lanham, if I recall what the police called him. I usually don’t know their names. Sometimes they don’t seem to know their names, either.”

  “Why was he desperate enough to attack Mr. Brandon?”

  “He wasn’t. He was disoriented. He’d been in rehab, but I believe that he relapsed. A volunteer attempted to restrain Matt and ended up on the receiving end of his violent attentions. I expect that was Mr. Brandon.”

  I cut through the oven’s power cable, severing the worst of the chew marks, and discarded about a foot of mangled plastic casing. “Do the—uh—parishioners know where volunteers live?”

  “We’re all family here,” Mary said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “You know where I can find Matteo Lanham?” I stripped a few more inches of insulation from the remaining cable, leaving the wires inside exposed.

  “He didn’t kill anyone.”

  I hadn’t said that anyone was dead. I straightened, setting my pocketknife on the counter. “I thought you didn’t know anything about Jay Brandon.”

  “You referred to him in the past tense, and you’re an FBI agent,” Mary said. “It’s not a difficult puzzle to solve.”

  Guess not. Subtlety had never been my strong suit.

  I grabbed the electrical tape and hunkered back down with the mouse shit. “Does he still come around here?”

  “Unfortunately, Matt has been banned from the church. I haven’t seen him since the incident.”

  It only took a few seconds to wrap the wires together and reconnect the plug to the oven. Then I mummified it in electrical tape. It didn’t look fancy, but it was probably a little bit less of a fire hazard than what the mice had done.

  Mary left the room long enough to take soup out to the serving line. She returned in time to see me plug the oven in and turn the knob.

  The light actually came on. I was one miracle closer to being canonized.

  “God is good,” Mary said, beaming at my side.

  “I don’t know about God, but I’m not half bad.” I flipped my pocketknife shut.

  “He works in mysterious ways, Agent Hawke. Today, He worked through you. The church appreciates it.”

  If God was working through me, I sure as hell hoped that He would stick around long enough to help me find justice for Jay Brandon, too.

  Sister Catherine showed up when I was on my way out the back door, and I thought she had to be the least nun-like woman that I’d ever met.

  She was old and scrawny, like a clothes hanger had been unwound and stretched out to its maximum length. She was wrapped in a pantsuit that must have been fashionable in the seventies and had been dry-cleaned a few thousand times since. Her blond bob looked like it had been cut by one of the volunteers in the front yard.

  “I wasn’t expecting a visit from the FBI.” The way she stood between Mary and me, I thought she was trying to form a wall with her body. She just didn’t have much body to act as a block. No shoulders, no breasts, no hips. If she turned sideways she might have fallen through the floorboards.

  “I’m here to talk about a volunteer,” I said. “Jay Brandon.”

  The lines on her face deepened with worry. “Mary, I need you to take a message to Father Phillip.” She bent to write a note on paper branded with the logo of a real estate agent’s office. Apparently, donations weren’t enough to buy stationary with their own name on it.

  “We’re almost out of food here, and there are more parishioners we need to feed,” Mary said.

  “Don’t worry about that, dear. Breakfast hours are nearly over. This message is urgen
t.”

  I’d heard that sugary-light tone from women before, the one that said “you better listen to me or I’m going to wreak passive aggressive hellfire on your life.” My brother Domingo’s wife used to use that tone all the time before she left him.

  “I understand,” Mary said, hanging her head.

  Sister Catherine folded the note into the volunteer’s hand. “Thank you.”

  Mary limped out the back door, the way that the chef had gone.

  And then I had the nun’s full attention and I kind of regretted it.

  “I know what happened to Jay Brandon,” Sister Catherine said in a low voice. “I received the phone call from your colleague last night. We have no information on him that the LAPD doesn’t already possess. We haven’t seen him since the incident with one of our parishioners. If you have any questions, they’d be better directed toward Detective Hanson.”

  “The local police don’t appreciate intervention from the federal level. They’re not cooperative.”

  “I have much more urgent concerns on my hands than your politics, Agent…” She trailed off, leaving expectant silence at the end of her sentence.

  “Agent Cèsar Hawke.” I showed her my badge. She didn’t look at it.

  “My heart breaks for the Brandon family. I held vigil for him last night, and I can only pray that his suffering was brief and that he’s now in a better place.” Sister Catherine nodded toward the door. “There are living men in need of God’s grace—men that we’re still capable of helping.”

  She shed her jacket and hit the dirty dishes with gusto. Her cross necklace caught the light through the window and cast dancing golden shapes on the wall.

  “I only need a few minutes of your time, if you’ve got it,” I said.

  Sister Catherine peered through the door to the food line. “Well, I don’t. Look at those people. Have you no sympathy, Agent Hawke?” she asked.

  I had sympathy all right. I had sympathy in fucking spades for the man I’d found mutilated on the floor of a kitchen. “Sorry if I’m more concerned about bringing a man’s killer to justice than a bunch of vagrants getting their handouts fast enough.”

  Wrong thing to say.

  “I hope you’ll return with a warrant next time,” Sister Catherine said tightly, “because you’re not welcome here otherwise.” She scribbled off a note and pushed it at me. It was the address for a local church. “It seems that you need to spend less time questioning and more time listening to greater powers. I’ll pray for you.”

  I didn’t take the paper. “And I’ll be in touch, Sister Catherine.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE CANYON CREEK BAR was on the north side of the OPA’s campus. It was always busy enough that a guy could feel anonymous there, but not so busy that the waitresses hadn’t quickly come to recognize me. Not just me—pretty much everyone who worked with me, too.

  The Magical Violations Department used to go to a place called The Olive Pit to celebrate holidays, finishing tough cases, or days that ended in the letter Y, but it turned out to be run by murderous incubi. We shut that shit down within hours of the discovery.

  It hadn’t taken us much longer to find a new place to waste our measly government paychecks.

  Canyon Creek didn’t have the glossy charm of the Pit, but it had everything else we needed. It was a big, dark room decorated with the skins of steers and deer. Wagon parts were suspended from the ceiling. It felt like a dark, musty barn where you could grab moonshine before heading out to the lake for the weekend.

  The wings were cheap, it was dark, it was weird. What else could you want?

  Personally, I didn’t go there for the alcohol. Never had. But it’s always a little easier to think through a case over a bowl of pistachios.

  I took a booth in the corner and spread my notes across the sticky table. I tried to think of it as being a kind of corkboard rather than being just plain disgusting.

  On one side, I had Jay Brandon’s face glaring at me with his missing bits highlighted: nose, lips, and heart. On the other side, I had all the boring details of his interview with Isobel. The neighbor that had visited him. The fact that he had watered his mother’s plants that morning, then gone down for a nap. His visit to the soup kitchen.

  My notes on the soup kitchen were in the middle. I had Matteo Lanham’s name there, a few observations about Sister Catherine, some info about Mary and Quinn.

  None of it felt meaningful or connected. I might as well have been trying to read an illuminated text in ancient fucking Greek for all that it meant to me.

  But there had to be something there. Something I just couldn’t see yet.

  “What happened to your missing parts, Jay?” I muttered to my illustration as I cracked another pistachio.

  His face and heart hadn’t been found at his mother’s house. Someone had removed them from the scene.

  Or eaten them.

  I wrote a few notes on a fresh page. Mangled body to prevent identification? I crossed that line out immediately. The killer had left his wallet, and it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out he was the homeowner’s son besides.

  Eating the pieces? That went on the second line. It made my hair curl just to write it, but this was a demon we were talking about here. They considered human organ meat a delicacy.

  But the nose? The lips? Didn’t seem likely for food.

  A few more thoughts came after that, each increasingly ridiculous. Replacing his own body parts? Making a new body, like Frankenstein? Gift for a friend? Just being an asshole?

  For all I knew, any of those could have been true. My gut told me they weren’t.

  Someone slipped into the booth across from me.

  Suzy.

  “Whiskey,” she told the waiter as he passed, and then she focused on me. I could tell by the way she quivered that she had a lead. When she got excited, it radiated from her freaking pores.

  “I hope it’s good,” I said.

  Suzy practically squirmed. “Oh, it’s good. Remember how Jay Brandon mentioned that he got a visit from a neighbor? Bubba Tanner?”

  I peeled one of the papers off the table, the one from our interview with the murder victim. I’d written Bubba Tanner’s name at the top. “Did you find him?”

  “I found him.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “Nothing,” Suzy said. “But his wife had a few interesting thoughts to share with me. In fact, she had a lot to say about her husband’s death.”

  The paper slipped from my fingers. “Another murder?”

  “Nope, aneurysm.” She was still grinning. “Guess when he died. Guess.”

  “Well, it would have had to be after he talked to Jay Brandon on Friday night, unless he was a zombie. Please don’t tell me he was a zombie.”

  “Your guesses suck, Hawke.” Suzy leaned on the table to give me a stare so intense that it was kinda starting to freak me out. “He died at three thirty-seven in the morning on Saturday.”

  The one paper in my file I hadn’t been looking at were the details of the anonymous tip that had brought us to Cherry Tree Lane in the first place. It hadn’t seemed too important in comparison to what I’d learned since.

  The anonymous tip had been placed at three fifty in the morning.

  Suzy snagged her whiskey from the waiter and lifted it as though in a toast. “Yeah, that’s right. Bubba Tanner died right about the same time as the clocks stopped in Jay Brandon’s house, and right before we got the call.”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. I’ll admit it—I jumped. It had stopped ringing by the time I succeeded in pulling it out of my pocket.

  The number for the missed call wasn’t in my contacts. But a text message blinked to life a half-second later: “What’s taking so long, Special Agent Hawke?”

  Apparently, waiting overnight had been longer than Isobel Stonecrow had been hoping for.

  But I had her number now, and we had a fresh lead.

  Seemed like it was time to have
a chat with Bubba Tanner.

  Mercy General Hospital was about forty years old, but time hadn’t been kind to it. The place looked like it was easily a century old, and it felt more like an asylum than somewhere people went to get better.

  Suzy paced me as I strode through the halls, even though her legs were about half as long as mine. She didn’t look like she had to struggle to keep up and people stayed out of her way. Maybe it was the gun under her arm, maybe it was the power suit, maybe it was the way she seemed to vibrate with urgency. She was a woman on a mission and nobody was going to fuck with her.

  The nurses’ station was protected by bars and glass, and the women sitting behind it had that look to their eyes—the same kind of look beat cops got after handling unruly criminals for too many years.

  These women had seen every kind of ugly death bestowed upon the innocent. They handled the dregs of society because they wanted to make society a better place. But they looked like their dreams had been crushed under an endless onslaught of people who just couldn’t be saved.

  If I ever quit working for the OPA, I definitely wasn’t going to get into the medical field, let me tell you.

  Suzy flashed her badge at the window. “Agent Takeuchi. This is Agent Hawke.”

  “What do you need?” The nurse’s nametag identified her as Nurse Barrow. She was a heavyset black woman with no-nonsense eyes and muscular arms.

  “We’re picking up a body from your morgue. You should have already gotten the fax,” Suzy said. It hadn’t taken any effort to convince Fritz that we needed this body; he’d started writing the email about five seconds after I called him. “Last name of the deceased is Tanner.”

  Nurse Barrow wheeled herself back to the fax machine and shuffled through the pages waiting on the tray. She plucked one out of the middle.

  “I see,” she said. “Just a moment.”

  She turned to her terminal—a relic of the eighties. The screen was black with blurry amber text. Must have been a pretty fancy system when it had been installed, but it looked like it hadn’t been updated since its implementation, just like everything else in the hospital.