The Lost of New Bristol (Lila Randolph Book 2)

by Wren Weston

  Twenty minutes later, Tristan parked a block from the corner of Antigua Way and Achilles Drive. The whole area had been filled with factories, though half had been shuttered when the last round of environmental regulations had passed a decade ago. She and Tristan were so far from downtown New Bristol that the skyline had pinched into a small cluster. Twelve towers poked out from the mass of metal and glass behind them.

  Her mother would soon raze Wilson Tower, as dictated by tradition. The skyline would change again after the Parks built their tower inside their fledgling compound, marking them as newly highborn.

  But Achilles Drive was far away from all that. The sidewalks had been matted by weeds and dirt and cigarette butts, and the voices on the street sounded tinny and quiet and eerie.

  “It’s that one.” Lila jutted her chin to an abandoned factory. “There’s another on my list nearby, but this one is more likely.” The properties on all sides had been abandoned, leaving it inside a strange pocket of protection. Boot prints marked the dried mud around the perimeter.

  “Guards,” Lila whispered.

  Tristan frowned. They’d been dodging the occasional guard all day.

  Still they pressed on. Though Lila didn’t spot any cameras, she turned on her jammer. They followed the prints, noting that none of them looked all that fresh. When they saw no evidence of a patrol, they peered into one of the dusty windows. Lila didn’t see anything at first. Just a dirty floor and a few tables far in the back.

  Then she saw the toe of a worn boot and a pool of crimson nearby.

  Lila pulled away from the window and grabbed her tranq gun and hood, while Tristan tapped upon his palm and sent for the others.

  Fry, Dice, Frank, and a yawning Dixon soon appeared behind them, just as Lila slid her mesh hood over her face.

  “Hood and I will go around the back,” Tristan said. “Fry, Dice, and Frank, take the front. Dixon, you’re up top.”

  As Fry and Dice slipped around to the front of the building, a pale Dixon struggled up the fire escape, his boots quiet as he scrambled onto the roof.

  Lila typed a code into the security box by the back door.

  Tristan gagged slightly as it opened. The smell of rotting meat was light on the air but strong enough to claw at their throats.

  Lila had smelled it before on patrol. “Pull the others back to the trucks,” Lila said, dragging him away from the door before he vomited. “Call Frank. Have him retrieve my satchel.”

  Tristan nodded quickly, gulping quickly several times. After a long moment, he pulled out his palm and relayed her instructions.

  Frank didn’t do much better. He turned a rather odd shade of green as he stood near the door, and seemed more than happy to return to the truck.

  Lila removed her hood, then pulled covers over her boots and donned latex gloves. “Are you better now, Tristan? Can you go inside?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “If you throw up, you’ll leave your DNA behind. Take a moment if you need it.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She helped Tristan fit covers over his boots and gave him a pair of latex gloves. “Don’t touch anything if you don’t have to,” she whispered, handing him a camera.

  Tristan took it uncertainly and followed her inside, the smell growing worse in the closed warmth of the heat wave.

  The scene chilled her, not due to the violence but for the lack of it. It was as though Natalie and her people had fallen where they stood, not even wasting the time to face their attackers. A half-eaten donut lay near one of the guards, his mouth still full. Near another, a tranq gun had fallen from its owner’s holster, unused. Laptop cords wound around a few tables in the room, the computers missing. A tray of croissants and pastries had been placed upon the tables, half the food uneaten.

  More disturbingly, a blue teddy bear lay discarded at the side of the room near a large dog crate. If Oskar had been inside, he’d barely had room to stretch.

  Knowing Natalie, she’d bought him a dog collar and a leash to complete the look.

  “Oskar was here.” Lila picked up the bear with gloved hands. She breathed out in relief when she turned the toy over and found no blood. “They took him.”

  “Are you sure?” Tristan said, his voice muffled as he pulled his scarf over his mouth.

  “I know this teddy bear.”

  Tristan crouched in front of the crate. “No blood. If they wanted the boy dead, it would have been much easier to shoot him here. They didn’t do that. He’s still alive.”

  “Maybe.” Lila tossed the toy into the crate and slammed the lid. Oskar had slipped further away. “I was supposed to find him today. I was supposed to bring him back safe, so I could start looking for the others.”

  “We’ll find him. We’ll find all of them,” Tristan assured her, tugging her back from the crate. His gaze swept the room. “I count ten bodies.”

  Lila turned, counting as well, trying to keep her mind on the case. Natalie and her people had perished in the dim factory, bullet holes adorning their chests and foreheads, all lying in blood, little of it disturbed in last-minute death throes. One in the head, two in the heart.

  “You think they were drugged first?”

  Lila shook her head. Too many had died with their eyes open, their pupils seeming to follow her around the room.

  It was Reaper all over again.

  It was Hans Schulte.

  “Take pictures of the scene. Make damn sure we aren’t in them. Not even a finger or a hem.”

  While Tristan sent his people a short message to return to the shop, Lila took a blood sample from each body. If the food had been drugged, it might explain how ten experienced thugs had been slaughtered before they even managed to draw their weapons.

  She put the samples into her satchel and searched each body. Unfortunately, it appeared that the killers had already done the job, though poorly. Lila managed to find a palm hidden in a bag of clothes in the back of the room, stitched into a hidden pocket.

  That wasn’t the only thing she found. In the corner of an office, she discovered a ladder propped against the wall, one so tall that it nearly scraped against the ceiling. After dragging it out, she scrambled to the highest rung, peeking over the steel beams that ran the length of the factory’s ceiling.

  “I’ll be damned,” she whispered, sliding out to snatch a palm. She found another on a second beam near the entrance. Taking out her laptop from her satchel, she backed up each palm’s contents, then replaced them where she’d found them.

  She did the same with a star drive around Natalie’s wrist, lost amid a charm bracelet. “I knew her,” Lila said while she worked. “She wasn’t like Patrick. She never hid. She never pretended to be anything but what she was.”

  “A sociopath?”

  “A monster. If someone pissed her off too badly at school, she’d kill their pets, even a teacher’s once or twice. No one could ever prove she’d done it, though. Did you know her?”

  “Not well, and for that I’m grateful. She didn’t visit the Beaulac compound very often.” He dropped the camera to his thigh. “When do you think they died?”

  “No idea. We have daily wellness checks for the at-risk and elderly back at the compound. I’m used to fresher bodies. With this heat?” Lila considered the pastries on the table. “I’m guessing this morning from the food. It’s still soft. If I’d just gone home last night and finished the list, we might have—”

  “Stumbled into an execution? No, thank you. I’m happy with how things turned out. She deserved what she got. She ruined more than a few lives.”

  “I’d rather she be in a holding cell.”

  “Why? So she can be hanged after a drawn-out trial? She deserved death for more than just Oskar, you know. Someone should have shot her a long time ago.”

  Lila frowned, not sure whether she agreed with him,
the oracle’s words fresh on her mind. “You sound like you wish you could have done it yourself.”

  Tristan shrugged.

  As much as she wanted to pry, it wasn’t the time or the place. “Oskar was easier to track when we could follow Natalie. Now I don’t have the faintest clue how to find him.”

  “You have a few palms and Natalie’s star drive. That’s a good start.” He showed her the photos stored in the camera, and she pointed out a few shots he’d missed. “They used bullets, Lila. You know what that means.”

  “No, I don’t. I need to look at all the data first. Then we can draw conclusions.”

  “You can draw a few already,” Tristan said as he snapped the last photo. “Few in the Allied Lands use bullets. That means that unless the purplecoats have gone into buying princes, then Natalie tried to sell Oskar to German mercenaries. The mercs surprised her, offed her and her people, then took the boy and everything tying them to the scene.”

  “Anyone can use bullets.”

  “How many people do you think stormed in here, Lila? I could see two or three risking the hangman’s noose for the promise of quick money, but not a dozen.”

  “At least a dozen.” The pair tidied the scene and stepped through the back door. Lila tossed their gloves, booties, and the camera back into her satchel. “Just don’t jump to conclusions before I look through the data, okay?”

  “Fine,” Tristan said as they stalked back to the truck, rubbing out their footprints. “How do you think they found her?”

  “I have no idea, but I doubt they found her like I did. They probably followed her. Natalie wouldn’t have held a drop in the same place she was staying. She would have taken precautions.”

  “They found her somehow.”

  “Yes, they did.” Lila slipped into the truck and slammed her door. “I’m just not sure how yet.”

  Chapter 17

  Tristan parked a block away from the garage that held Lila’s Adessi and promised to call Natalie’s murder into Bullstow’s anonymous tip line when he returned home. He snatched her hand before she could disembark. “Don’t go. Come back to the shop with me.”

  “I can’t. Time’s ticking for Oskar,” she said, unsure if she’d be able to say no if he asked again, but knowing full well she had to. If she and Tristan had not been together the night before, she might have found Natalie before the massacre. Oskar might have been saved.

  She had to focus, and that meant staying away from Tristan.

  “Time’s ticking for all of them. Let us help you.”

  When she didn’t answer, Tristan rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. “Is it that you don’t trust us, or you just think we’re too stupid to be useful?”

  “You’re not stupid, just unskilled when it comes to militia business. When’s the last time you went through crime scene data?” Lila handed him an extra star drive from her satchel. “If you want to help, then give this to Toxic. It’s a copy of all the palm data. I don’t know who the devices belonged to, so I’ll be looking at Natalie’s star drive first. Message me if she finds anything. I put the crime scene photos on it as well.”

  “Come back with me.”

  “I don’t have time for sex, Tristan.”

  “I didn’t ask for it.” He dropped her hand. “Besides, I think my libido burned out from the smell and the sight of that place, Lila. I just want to make sure you eat dinner and sleep tonight.”

  “I might not have time for that, either.”

  “You have to live sometime.”

  “Those kids need to live too. Besides, I have a High Council meeting tonight.”

  “Fine. Give me something useful to do. I’m tired of chasing leads that go nowhere.”

  Lila opened her satchel, took out the oracle’s files, and slid them over. “I don’t have time for these right now. Look them over. See what you see.”

  She slipped out of the truck before he could say more.

  Hopping into her sedan, she sped back to the compound, and parked in front of the security office. On the fifth floor, she filled out a request for lab work, marking the blood samples as a rush order, and handed them personally to Captain Regina Randolph. “Run the tests yourself and send me the results. Destroy all paperwork after.”

  Captain Regina raised a brow, but she wasn’t so suspicious that she’d go against Lila’s orders. She wasn’t so suspicious that she’d send the data to the chairwoman, either. Lila had put loyal officers in charge of her departments. If loyalty wasn’t enough, she’d made examples of two spies in her first week as chief, had ruined them so completely that her people were more afraid of turning on Lila than not spying for their matron.

  Being thrown out of the militia had just been the beginning for the two women. Everyone had skeletons in their closets, and Lila was very good at finding them.

  She was even better at seeing them prosecuted.

  No highborn wanted to spend time as a slave.

  Lila jogged down the steps and got back into her Adessi, wondering if Bullstow had arrived at Natalie’s hideout. She planned to break into their records and go over their reports later. Shaw and his men sometimes caught things that she missed.

  Besides, she had no idea how to trace bullets.

  Isabel knocked as soon as Lila stepped from the shower, bearing a silver platter with none of Alex’s grace or sarcasm.

  She only bowed and waited for a reply.

  Lila didn’t have to peek underneath the platter to know what it hid, and it wasn’t anything like the meal she’d eaten at El Dorado. “A missive from our illustrious matron for a family dinner, I suppose?”

  Isabel bowed again. “Chef said you’ll be dining on wild salmon.”

  “Well if we’re having wild salmon, then how could I say no?” Lila snatched up the cream-colored envelope. She had absolutely no reason to say no to her mother’s summons.

  Why hadn’t she stayed with Tristan at his shop?

  “Chef is making petit fours. I saw those little chocolate ones you like so much.”

  Lila’s mouth watered. Her appetite seemed to have recovered somewhat after her lunch with Tristan. “Have I mentioned how much I love Chef lately? The woman has a sixth sense for when I’ll need chocolate or pancakes.”

  Isabel smiled shyly, took Lila’s grin as an affirmative, then carried the silver platter away.

  Still in her robe, Lila sent Max her last communications with Reaper’s partner. She then flipped on her desktop computer and proceeded to hack into Natalie’s data. After sending the decryption codes to Toxic, she poked through Natalie’s star drive and skimmed through several spreadsheets of Sangre sales, black market absinthe, and another product she couldn’t identify for half an hour.

  People, she discovered after penetrating the star drive further. Natalie Holguín ran a brothel, perhaps more than one. Since there were no outgoing expenses for labor, it was obvious that her workers had never signed up for it. Natalie had been stealing them from auction houses across the region, slaves arrested for petty theft, shoplifting, vandalism, trespassing, minor in possession—

  Minor in possession?

  Teens?

  Gods, Natalie was selling children.

  Lila shook her head and kept digging. The kids were mostly workborn teens who had no one to prod Bullstow after they’d gone missing, no one to keep their cases fresh in the minds of the blackcoats. They existed as nothing more than torn and dirty fliers on a bulletin board, as ones and zeros in a computer file that hadn’t been accessed in years, as nagging paperwork that no one could quite clean off their desks, but wasn’t that bothersome so long as you put other paperwork on top of it.

  You could almost forget about it entirely.

  Now it seemed that Phillip Wilson had been among them, judging from the last line entered on Saturday night. It made sense. His parents had been casualt
ies of the Wilson riot, and anyone close to him had been taken into custody for their actions. Given how the family had been split apart, most of them had too many problems in their own lives to worry about a child who never made it from the auction house to his new master. Perhaps they thought he’d slipped away on his own. Perhaps they cheered his mischief.

  It wasn’t mischief that got him out of his slave’s term, though, a term that would have only lasted a few years after his eighteenth birthday. Now he’d go to work immediately, his body given over to anyone with a few credits, to workborns who wished to take out their frustrations with the highborn on a child.

  Phillip would never have been so disdainful of Tristan’s help if he’d known.

  Lila wanted to call it in immediately, wanted to rush to his rescue and save him, to save them all. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? If Natalie ran one brothel, she probably ran more. Calling in one location to Shaw would merely drive the others deeper underground. She had to dig deeper into Natalie’s files, and she couldn’t do that until after dinner and the council meeting.

  Perhaps not until after she’d found Oskar.

  What would Tristan have done if he’d found out before Natalie’s death? Would he have killed her? He didn’t seem that averse to the idea at the warehouse.

  The oracle had claimed that Tristan would take to killing.

  Was this how it started? A week ago, she wouldn’t have believed it. Reaper’s death still haunted him, and that had been an accident. The Wilson child still weighed on his mind as well, dead in the middle of a riot.

  Then again, Tristan had wanted to kill Natalie at the factory for her crimes. He’d always believed that he and his people were locked in some class war against the highborn. That stealing from them wasn’t wrong. That hurting them might not be wrong, either. The idea of casualties had not dissuaded him from planting a bomb at Slack & Roberts.