by SM Reine
Priestesses like Isobel, who used to serve in a Helltown temple.
“Any of those priestesses have cloven hooves?” I asked.
“Not that I’ve seen.”
Damn. Guess it had been a long shot. “Did she smuggle a body into the Ministry recently? As in, this week?”
“Not smuggled, no, but she brought a man who requested burial on our grounds here yesterday.” Father Phillip stood. He was shorter than me, but then, most people were. “Is he a victim?”
“His name Roberto Tanner?”
“The kopis? Yes.”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I’d sure love to find out. I’m going to have to seize the body so I can investigate.”
“We’ve already laid him to rest,” the priest said. “You’ll have to disinter him.”
The day just kept getting better and better.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ROBERTO “BUBBA” TANNER WASN’T looking great after spending a day buried in Helltown. He didn’t look like he’d died the same morning as Jay Brandon. He looked like he’d died weeks ago and had flies picking at his skeletal corpse in the open sun.
Isobel said that it was something to do with the supernatural effect preventing bodies interred on site from being resurrected. Guess if they rotted quickly enough, their bodies would be useless to death witches in more ways than one.
Considering the condition he was in, if it had taken another day to find Bubba, we might have never found him at all.
“That’s a smell,” Fritz remarked.
It wasn’t just a smell. It was a stench. We’d brought Bubba’s body to the Golden Fields Funeral Home and the ventilation system wasn’t doing its job. The fumes put off by his rotting flesh were that putrid.
At least I wasn’t the only one bothered this time. Everyone was standing on the fringes of the room: Fritz, Suzy, even Isobel, and she dealt with bodies all the time.
“Well, we got what we wanted,” I said. “Let’s take advantage of it and talk with him.”
“You’re right. I should call him forward,” Isobel said, but she didn’t move closer to him. And who could blame her?
Suzy waved a hand in front of her face. “You guys are alone on this one. I’m going back to the office. I’m waiting on emails from the LAPD, and I want to keep digging back in the phone records and ATM security footage.”
“What, giving up before me for once?” I asked. “Pretty sure I get bragging rights on this.”
“I’m not giving up. I think I’m close to finding the crank caller.”
After all the actual bodies, I’d forgotten about the fake calls leading up to Jay Brandon’s discovery. They hadn’t seemed important anymore. “Don’t you think that’s a waste of time?”
“What if it was one of Sister Catherine’s volunteers making those calls?” Suzy asked. “Would you think it’s a waste of time, or would you think we’ve found the possible culprit?”
“Good thinking, Agent Takeuchi,” Fritz said.
She slipped out of the room with a hand over her nose.
“Okay,” Isobel said, approaching the body. “What did you say his name was?”
“Roberto Tanner,” I said. “Bubba for short.”
She lifted her hands over him. She didn’t look directly at the body and her nose was wrinkled. “Bubba Tanner, come to me.”
Considering the stink that the body was making, I was half-grateful for the way her magic closed my throat. I coughed into my sleeve. Gasped in a lungful of air that tasted like bad hamburger.
Bubba Tanner shimmered, and the residue from his spirit rose to stand beside the table.
He looked a lot better as a bald, naked apparition than he did as a rotting corpse. He was in pretty good shape for a fifty-year-old man. He was stocky, but muscular. The layer of thick body fat made him look like a biker rather than someone who ate too many potato chips.
I’d never seen a demon hunter as old as Bubba Tanner before. All the kopides that worked for the Union were practically kids. Half of them couldn’t even grow beards.
Looked like life treated a hunter pretty well if he could survive the demons for a few decades.
“Hello, Roberto,” Fritz said.
Isobel spoke for him. It was strange hearing his words coming out of her soft, feminine voice. “Call me Bubba.”
I wanted to make this fast. Get our answers, get out of the room, send the body back to Helltown. So I asked, “Why did you visit Jay Brandon on Friday night?”
“I was worried about him,” Bubba said through Isobel. “I could feel his visitors. He’d been getting some weird house calls over the last week, so I wanted to make sure he was safe.”
“You felt his visitors?”
“Their energy, I mean. It’s been a long time since I felt some of that. It wasn’t the witch getting me worried; I run into those all the time. They’re a dime a dozen in Los Angeles.”
I checked my Steno pad. Bubba lived all the way down the street. It was an impressive distance to “feel” anyone.
“So he was being visited by a demon?” Fritz asked.
“No,” Bubba said. “Something much worse than that.”
Unease crawled down the back of my neck, making my hair stand on end. “What’s worse than a demon?”
“Something good gone sick. Perverse. I don’t know—I’m not sure what it was, but I’ve got my suspicions.” He turned his empty eyes on me, and it felt like he could look right through my skin. “Have you ever met an angel before?”
His question was met by silence from all of us.
I knew that angels existed, and that was the complete extent of my knowledge about them. I think they were supposed to be the good guys. The positive energy to balance out the bad energy that demons made.
“Are you saying that an angel visited Jay Brandon?” Fritz asked, breaking the silence. I noticed that he didn’t answer the question.
“Like I said, I don’t know. I felt angel power, but it wasn’t right.”
“What’s angel power feel like?” I asked.
I wasn’t all that surprised when Fritz answered. “I feel demons on the back of my neck, all the way down my spine. I feel angels in my crown. It’s like a weight pressing down on the top of my head.”
Guess that answered Bubba’s question as well as it answered mine.
“It was like that, yeah,” Bubba said. “Except that this one felt sick. I couldn’t handle it. Every time I felt that power, I just about passed out.” And then he had “felt” that power once, and it had killed him.
“Do you have an aspis?” Fritz asked.
“I used to.” There was a whole lot of history behind those three words. It weighed heavy in Isobel’s voice.
After an aspis died, his or her kopis was left without protection. Bubba would have been just as susceptible to a demon’s power—or an angel’s—as any other guy. Maybe even more sensitive. I’d still never heard of anything that could kill from a distance just by existing.
“What’s the last thing you remember, Bubba?” Fritz asked.
The apparition frowned and Isobel frowned with him. “I was making coffee. I felt that energy again—a big strong push of it—and then my head hurt.” The necrocognitive touched her forehead. “I died, didn’t I?”
I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to answer that. This wasn’t really Roberto Tanner. It was just residue. But the last time I’d seen one of these “residues” realize she was dead, she’d started screaming.
But Fritz said, “Yes, you died. Your service to this world has ended. Thank you, Bubba.”
The apparition actually looked relieved.
“Took long enough,” he said. “I can’t wait to be with Sally.” That must have been his aspis.
And then Isobel let him go.
Fritz caught up with me outside the morgue. Isobel had brought her RV to a nearby gas station, so she didn’t need a ride home for once. “Come with me,” he said, steering me toward his Bugatti.
I grimaced. “Time to meet with Lucrezia de Angelis?”
“No. I’ve gotten you out of that for now.” There was something ominous about the way he said “for now.”
“Then what can I do for you?”
“We can’t discuss it here,” Fritz said. “Do you have the briefcase I gave you?”
“In my car, yeah.”
“Then let’s grab it and get going.”
I stopped by my car then went to the Bugatti, which looked ridiculous sitting outside the aging funeral home. It would have looked ridiculous pretty much anywhere but Fritz’s fancy-ass mansion, though.
Fritz had the courtesy to keep his jock jams turned on low as we drove. I could almost tune out the obnoxious music.
Once we got on the freeway, I started to speak. “So this drive we’re taking. Is it—”
“Wait.”
Did he think his car was bugged or something? After everything I’d found in my apartment, nothing would surprise me.
I kept my mouth shut.
He headed past all the good parts of town and straight into the bad one. Not the kind of place that I would have felt safe driving a Bugatti, but Fritz didn’t even bat an eye.
Guess if his car got jacked, he could always just buy another fleet of them.
We parked on a graffitied street corner that was marked as a fire lane. “The curb’s red,” I said.
“And?” Fritz asked.
If risking his car meant nothing to him, then I guess a parking ticket wouldn’t, either.
I leaned forward to peer out the narrow windows at the street beyond. It was getting dark and it was hard to tell where we had gone. It wasn’t until I saw the mechanic’s yard filled with wrecked cars that I realized where Fritz had taken me.
We were at the Saint Benjamin Soup Kitchen.
I looked askance at Fritz. He said, “You’re going to be my aspis. This is the first thing we are doing as a team.”
“Sounds bad,” I said.
“It could be.” He pulled the breast of his jacket open to show me what was inside. He carried a long, slender dagger sheathed in the inner pocket. It glinted red in the corner of my vision, which made me think that thing wasn’t just sharp, but also enchanted.
“Killing vagrants isn’t actually a solution to the homeless problem.” Bad joke, I know. Sudden adrenaline does terrible things to my brain.
“It’s only for self-defense. Hopefully, we won’t need to use it.”
I sure hoped he had something a little more deadly than that on him if he wanted to fight with an angel. I hadn’t had time to retrieve my Desert Eagle.
We got out of the Bugatti. It was a hot, humid night without a breeze to offer relief, but Fritz didn’t take off his jacket, so neither did I. In fact, he buttoned his. Business mode. I tucked the briefcase under my arm and followed suit.
The yard was looking a lot cleaner now that Sister Catherine’s volunteers had gone through it, but there was already new trash blowing in, some weeds, a few beer cans. The path to the front door was clear.
It wasn’t busy tonight. Didn’t look like anyone was there to eat. Inside, several volunteers were sweeping, mopping, sterilizing the tables.
A man met us at the door. His greasy hair was held back by a net.
“Can I help you?” he asked, looking us over. It was the cook that had left as soon as I showed up in the kitchen. What had the other volunteer called him? I couldn’t remember.
“I’m Fritz Friederling. This is my associate, Cèsar Hawke.”
“Quinn Humphreys,” he said, thrusting a hand at Fritz.
The cook was caked in dirt and grease, but Fritz didn’t hesitate to shake hands with him. “Tell me, Mr. Humphreys, how much does it cost to run this soup kitchen for, say, three years?”
Quinn gave Fritz a second look, more analytically this time. My boss and I weren’t dressed all that differently. We were both wearing black suits, white shirts, black ties. But my suit was off the rack, and Fritz’s had probably been made to his exact measurements. His shoes came from Italy. Mine came from Kohl’s. Even his tie was just that much nicer.
You look at Fritz closely enough, you can tell he’s not like everyone else.
The cook looked close enough.
Hesitant excitement sparked in his eyes. “I don’t know, exactly. Sister Catherine handles the budget. I think we’re running on twenty grand a year right now.”
Fritz pulled his checkbook out. It was in the pocket opposite the enchanted dagger. “Seventy-five thousand, then. Who besides Sister Catherine has access to the charity’s accounts?”
“Father Phillip. Hector Phillip.”
“Excellent.” Fritz wrote the check. I had to watch him do it—I’d never written a check for anything bigger than rent and a down payment, and it was surreal to see him write a number like that. It had a lot of zeroes.
He signed with a flourish, ripped the check off, and handed it to Quinn.
“I want a tour of the facility,” Fritz said.
Needless to say, we got the tour.
Not that there was a lot to see. There was the cramped, outdated kitchen, a musty pantry, and the dining room. One other closet held the folding furniture. There was also an office even smaller than that closet wedged behind the pantry.
That was it.
Quinn explained the program as he showed us around. He told us about the backers, the people it was helping, Sister Catherine’s accomplishments. Fritz watched him attentively and I watched Fritz.
I’d never seen Fritz looking dangerous before, but there was tension coiled in his muscles waiting to be unleashed. He was a bloodhound on the hunt as we moved from room to room.
What he was hunting for at the Saint Benjamin Soup Kitchen, I had no idea.
There was a volunteer check-in sheet in the tiny office. I skimmed the list of names while the other two men were distracted. Quinn had been the first to arrive that night, and Mary had been second, but I hadn’t seen her anywhere.
“Where’s Mary?” I asked.
“She’s here somewhere,” Quinn said. “I saw her a minute ago. Maybe she ran off for a smoke.”
Probably better that she wasn’t around. Mary would find something else for me to do and we’d end up stuck at the soup kitchen all night.
Fritz perused the list, too. “Do you keep comprehensive records of your volunteers?”
“We do background checks for anyone who handles money and arrange food safety training for the cooks,” Quinn said. “We’ve got all of those records filed in the cabinet.”
“I’d like copies.”
Quinn shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I have to ask Sister Catherine.”
“Do you?” Fritz asked.
A long moment of silence. Quinn licked his lips, looked at the check in his hand again. “Nah,” he said. “Not really.”
We left ten minutes later with a list of volunteers and without getting attacked. After flashing that big knife at me, I’d been so sure we were going to see action.
There was a parking ticket waiting for us back at the Bugatti. Miraculously, it hadn’t been keyed.
“What was the point of that?” I asked, leaning my elbows on the roof of the car. “Aside from throwing wads of money at a charity run by a murder suspect.”
“I was confirming a suspicion.” Fritz plucked the parking ticket off of the windshield, crumpled it in one hand, and lobbed it over the soup kitchen’s fence. I’d have called him out on it if he hadn’t just funded the program for the next three years.
“And is it confirmed?”
He grimaced. “Yes. Unfortunately, it is.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FRITZ WAS PENSIVE ON the drive away from the soup kitchen.
“Well?” I asked.
“Wait,” he said again.
We didn’t talk until we got to Fritz’s mansion.
One time, when I first moved out on my own, I took a bus tour of the celebrity houses of Los Angeles. Don’t ask me
why, I don’t know. Boredom or something.
Fritz’s mansion was one of the places the bus passed in Beverly Hills. The tour guide hadn’t said who lived there—the Friederlings were obscenely rich, not famous—but I recognized the place after he hired me.
Getting a job offer from a billionaire had been one of the less surreal things about starting to work for the OPA.
The gate opened when his car approached it. We passed sculpted topiaries, a fountain, some fancy rock formations.
Servants waited for us on the stairs at the end of his looping driveway. One of them opened the door for me. Fritz handed his keys to another. “We’ll have brandy in the parlor,” he said.
“Right away, sir,” said one of the servants.
Our footsteps echoed in the foyer. Everything was all marble and platinum. He had a water feature down the hall. I could hear it echoing all the way through the first floor of the house.
A servant met us in the parlor, where she was stocking the bar. Another member of his staff was building a fire. I swear, Fritz employed about half of Los Angeles just to keep his house running.
“Thank you, Gertrude,” Fritz said.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked, closing the glass doors sheltering the fireplace.
“Only privacy. Thank you.”
They left us alone.
I’d never been in the parlor before, so I paced around the room to check out some of the stuff he had on display. He had an antique globe of the Earth that must have been designed by someone on acid, considering the way the countries were laid out.
Another set of globes didn’t look like Earth at all. They were dusky red, laced with gold threads, and the names stamped on each ball definitely weren’t human. Dis. Malebolge. Coccytus.
I was starting to check out his bookshelves when I realized he was watching me.
“What?” I asked.
“I forgot to mention that I finished all of the books you loaned me,” Fritz said.
A laugh escaped me. I’d been expecting some kind of announcement of doom and gloom, and instead, he wanted to talk epic fantasy. I’d given him my hardback copies of the A Song of Ice and Fire series a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t actually expected him to read them.
