The Vanity Case (Sondra Blake Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Uh, lives with his mother. No listed father.’ Clarke looked back to the screen. ‘But that was when he was arrested. He may not be living in the same place.’

  ‘Huh, no. In fact, if he’s the one we’re looking for, I doubt it. I don’t think leaders of the orcish revolution live with their mothers.’

  23rd February.

  ‘Mister Archer! Mister Archer, could I have a moment of your time?’

  Dillan made the mistake of actually looking at the speaker and he was pretty much caught by the time he recognised Devon Brightman. ‘Mister Brightman,’ he said, fixing a smile on his face. ‘Always happy to talk to a distinguished reporter.’ The man had managed to catch Dillan in the lobby of the hotel! What were security doing? Scratching their butts in the break room?

  Brightman was not that gullible, but he was also not going to let Dillan’s animosity thwart him. ‘Mister Archer, another body found mutilated, and this time it was dropped outside the back door of your hotel. Any comment?’

  ‘I deplore murder… Any form of violence off the screen, really. There is clearly a very clever killer behind this string of murders, and I doubt getting the lead detective thrown off the case is going to help when it comes to stopping him.’ Dillan had been dragged out of bed at seven a.m. by the FBI. They had spent almost an hour interviewing him to absolutely no effect; they just went over things which had already been handled by Sondra. He was quite sure that the two agents he had spoken to were never going to arrest anyone. Saying that the FBI had no hope would not have been good publicity, however.

  ‘You had a personal relationship with Detective Sondra Blake, Mister Brightman. You dated a woman who accused you of–’

  ‘Sondra never accused me of anything. You should get your facts straight. I’m one of the victims here, Brightman. For whatever reason, some sicko is murdering people and trying to tie those murders to my film.’ His gaze flicked up and down Brightman dismissively. ‘Perhaps if you spent less time in the gutter, digging up mud to sling, the best person for the job would still be looking for that sicko. Excuse me.’ Dillan pushed forward, his shoulder bumping into Brightman’s and forcing the reporter aside.

  There were no other questions as Dillan marched toward the doors at the front of the building and his waiting car. He smiled; he always liked it when he got the last word.

  ~~~

  SetaGan, KonTash’s mother, lived in a large apartment block just off West 129th Street. She was up on the thirteenth floor and the elevators were out. Orcs, being naturally pretty healthy creatures, did not care much about elevators, but Clarke would have been happier to have ridden up.

  ‘You need to work on your stamina,’ Sondra commented as they walked out of the stairwell on the thirteenth floor. She did not seem even vaguely out of breath.

  ‘I’m an academic,’ Clarke countered, trying not to sound too winded.

  ‘No, you’re a cop. Take up running. You live near Central Park for God’s sake. This place is clean. No graffiti.’

  ‘Yeah. I just wish they cared about more mechanical building maintenance.’ It was true that the block, for all its aging, somewhat dilapidated appearance, was clean and tidy. There were gang tags on the brickwork outside, but none near the doors and none inside the building.

  ‘Suck it up. You look more like a jock than a nerd, so start acting like one.’

  Clarke blinked. ‘I do?’

  Rolling her eyes, Sondra reached out to a door and knocked twice. Someone called something out from beyond the door and the light flashed in the spy hole. Then the door opened as far as the chain would let it and Sondra looked up to where an eye was peering at them from the gap.

  ‘You’re police?’ The voice was feminine, but it carried the distinctive slur of coming through a tusked mouth and it had a rough quality to it.

  Sondra held up her ID. ‘Detective Blake, Arcane Crimes Unit. This is Detective Delacroix. You are SetaGan? Mother of one KonTash?’

  There was a heavy sigh – orcs were really good at heavy sighs – and the door was pushed to, then opened fully. ‘You had better come in,’ SetaGan said, her eyes downcast and her shoulders slumped. She was an impressive woman, maybe even attractive if you were another orc. She was around six-foot-five with an hourglass figure, sort of. Her hips were broad and her waist narrow. She had substantial breasts hidden under a pink sweater, and the way the garment fitted her, it suggested thick muscles around her ribs and over her arms. The muscles were more obvious on her thighs and calves since she was wearing cut-off, grey denim shorts. Her legs were long and shapely, and it looked like she could crush a man’s skull between her thighs without a thought. There was something exotically beautiful about her face. Her skin was a pale grey with a hint of a green shimmer to it and her hair was brown with a hint of red – an unusual colour for an orc. Her brow was heavy, but sharply defined and came over as attractive rather than brutish. She had broad, quite high cheekbones and a wide mouth from which a pair of short tusks protruded up over her upper lip. Her nose was small, flat, and had broad, upward-angled nostrils, and her slanted, brown eyes fitted her face perfectly. Even her large, pointed ears worked with the look and held back the twin braids she wore her hair in.

  ‘What has KonTash done now?’ SetaGan asked as she folded herself into a large armchair. The room was small and the oversized furniture – a sofa and the one armchair – filled most of it. There was an old TV sitting in front of what should have been an electric fire; orcs were highly cold-tolerant and SetaGan was obviously saving on electricity by getting rid of the extra heating. The room was comfortable, but not especially warm.

  ‘Nothing that we know of,’ Sondra said, settling onto the sofa. ‘We’ve heard his name mentioned in connection to some of the gangs and we’re trying to eliminate him from our enquiries.’

  SetaGan gave a guttural laugh. ‘That is police talk. You think he’s done something or you wouldn’t be here.’ Weirdly, there was a New York accent behind the guttural, slightly slurred speech. ‘He hasn’t been home in over a month, maybe two. I’ve barely seen him in the last half-year.’

  ‘And before that?’

  Sadness clouded her eyes and she looked away. ‘If you think he’s done something bad, he probably has. He… changed. It was around the last Collapse Day I noticed it, but he had been getting worse for months before. He grew callous. He was always foolish. He chased the girls too much. Got himself beaten more than once for coming on to someone else’s girlfriend. Then there was the…’ She trailed off, her face hardening.

  ‘We know about his criminal record,’ Clarke said. ‘He seems to have made some, uh, bad decisions.’

  Anger flashed in SetaGan’s eyes as she looked up at Clarke; anger and some shame. ‘I worked so hard to get him a place with menTaNin TinshoKa. He threw it aside with one foolish action!’

  Sondra’s eyes widened. ‘He was taught by menTaNin TinshoKa?’ SetaGan nodded and Sondra turned to Clarke. ‘Know him?’

  ‘Uh, I think I’ve heard the name…’

  ‘MenTaNin means… master, or leader. It’s a title granted to the most venerable of shamans. Uh, taNinYa, correctly. TinshoKa helped defuse the riots in eighty-eight and ninety-nine. He’s always been a strongly moderate voice, with emphasis on the strong part.’ Sondra’s gaze shifted back to the orc woman. ‘And you managed to persuade him to teach KonTash. That’s… impressive. You are peKnava, SetaGan.’

  SetaGan’s chin lifted a little. ‘Thank you. I was. Bringing up a son who won’t listen has taken some of it from me. KonTash learned, but he was arrogant, impatient. He wanted the world and the path of the taNinYa is not a quick way to power. I think he began to study bethNin after the menTaNin cast him out.’

  Sondra’s eyes tightened. ‘Black magic. That’s… not always as bad as it sounds. Orcs call anything other than their own magic bethNin.’

  The orc’s lips curled into a half-smile, amused. ‘And rightly,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ Sondra replied. ‘
I like to sacrifice live babies to the dark gods on a Monday myself.’ SetaGan gave a guttural laugh in response. ‘Two questions, SetaGan. Where might he be staying if he’s not here? And can we take a look at his room?’

  ‘He has friends. I can write you a list while you look. He took little with him.’ SetaGan pointed left toward a narrow corridor with a bead curtain over it. ‘The room at the end.’

  The corridor had several doors off it. There was a small kitchen and an even smaller bathroom. How a woman the size of SetaGan managed in the shower was a question Clarke felt would plague him for days, and if she managed to cook anything reasonable in the kitchen, she had to be an amazing cook. There was a door on the left which opened onto a bedroom with an elongated double bed and a wardrobe in it. There was also a pile of notepads stacked up beside the bed, which seemed a little odd.

  At the end of the corridor was a room a little larger than the one KonTash’s mother apparently used. Maybe it was just that the bed was a single; a long single, but just a single. There was a wardrobe here too, but also a desk and chair, and a bookshelf. There were not that many books on it, but Sondra crouched down to examine them first.

  ‘Why don’t you run a magical analysis on the room,’ she said as Clarke walked in behind her.

  ‘If he hasn’t been here in a month…’

  ‘We probably won’t get anything, no. But it’s worth a try and sometimes procedure actually pays off.’ She scanned the books and then pulled one of them out. ‘Basic level magical studies textbook. Huh, yeah. Stolen from the university. Looks like he was studying magic on his own, but he left this here. And the others.’

  ‘So he didn’t need them any more. There’s something here. It’s weak, but I don’t like the resonances. I think bef-nin, or whatever it was is right.’

  Sondra flashed him a grin. ‘BethNin. The emphasis is on the first N sound. When someone with your background says he was doing black magic, my mind goes to demons.’

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s too weak. He hasn’t been working here for a long time, but it feels like spirit magic. I mean, magic to affect spirits, or demons.’

  ‘Great. We’ll see where his mother’s list gets us.’

  ~~~

  The answer, as midday approached, was ‘nowhere.’ Sondra was quite sure the list of people and addresses SetaGan had provided was not some ruse to throw them off the trail, but between the riots and the nature of the people they were looking for, they had found no one who knew anything about KonTash. Or no one who was willing to talk anyway.

  The streets were quiet, abnormally so. People who had to be out walked quickly and kept their heads down. There were cars patrolling in pairs, but that was more of a formality and they would probably be pulled out as soon as more trouble started. There were several burnt-out wrecks of patrol vehicles to indicate how useful they were when people were throwing Molotov cocktails at them.

  The gangs and looters had retreated to their strongholds around dawn. Everyone was hoping that that would be the end of it. Hoping, but not really expecting. There was a tension in the air which could be pushed aside, but not entirely and not for long. Sondra and Clarke were on foot, because taking a car into the area seemed like a stupid risk, and they were about the only humans walking the streets. They were stopped once by a patrol car, but when it was apparent that the two officers in the car were more interested in checking Sondra’s ID than Clarke’s, it was Clarke who seemed the most irritated.

  ‘They stopped us because you’re, um…’

  ‘Black? Yes. Don’t sweat it.’ Sondra’s nonchalance just made Clarke more irritated.

  ‘That kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen. How can you be so… happy about it?’

  ‘Practice. Look, I’m not happy, but it’s not like I can do anything about it. I have no command authority over those men, neither do you. Going to their sergeant is going to achieve nothing. Either he’s as bigoted as them, or he’ll file a complaint and then I come over as a whiner. Either I live with it and be an example they can learn from, or I spend my entire life grinding my teeth.’

  Clarke fumed for a second or two and then added, ‘It shouldn’t be like that.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as it was. The assholes have orcs to piss on these days. Back in the day, I refused to use a company car because I’d get pulled over nine times out of ten. It’s easy to be angry about this stuff when it doesn’t affect you, Clarke. Put your white bread attitudes away and let’s do the job.’

  About to say something else, Clarke stopped as they came in sight of their next stop. It was a small garage catering to orcs with the money for a car and a place to park it in the city. It was open, or one of the two bigger shutters at the front of it was up, though there was no sign of any cars in the workshop beyond. There were several orcs, all male, all in casual clothes and showing gang markings. ‘Uh, that doesn’t look like a good place to be,’ Clarke said, instead of continuing the argument.

  ‘Probably a valid assessment, but we’re going to take a look anyway. Just stay calm. They can smell fear.’

  ‘They can?’

  ‘No,’ Sondra scoffed. ‘They’re not sharks or something.’ She set off across the street toward the garage with a swing in her step, all confidence.

  ‘Could’ve fooled me,’ Clarke muttered, but he set off after her, trying to get some of his righteous anger back to bolster his nerve.

  Ignoring the men standing around near the open shutter, Sondra almost sauntered into the workshop, calm, cool, and collected. The place had a couple of lifts for cars, neither of them occupied, and a screen wall with a window and two doors in it. One door probably led to a waiting room for customers, the other – beside the window – to an office. Sondra walked through the open door of the office and smiled at the heavily built orc behind the desk. ‘Morning,’ she said brightly.

  The big orc lifted an eyebrow. ‘Cops.’ He almost spat the word. ‘You got some nerve coming in here.’

  ‘Yes I have,’ Sondra agreed, flashing her ID. ‘You’re perceptive. I like that. Detectives Blake and Delacroix from the Arcane Crimes Unit.’ A facial twitch suggested the orc knew Sondra’s name, even if he had not recognised her. ‘We’re looking for information on an orc shaman-wannabe named KonTash.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘That was a lie. From what I’ve heard, quite a lot of people have at least heard of him.’ Sondra flicked a hand out, vaguely indicating the orc’s arm. ‘That patch says you’re GashdaGa Thon, and we know he was a member.’

  ‘GashdaGa Thon’s got a lot of members,’ the orc replied with a malicious grin.

  ‘Not so many today as they did yesterday, but we’ll ignore that. He has talent for magic. He was training with menTaNin TinshoKa until he got kicked out for being an asshole.’

  Clarke winced. She was trying to antagonise the man into an admission, which was probably a valid tactic under normal circumstances. Right now, it seemed like a bad idea. ‘We have information saying he hangs out here,’ Clarke said smoothly. ‘There’s no point in lying about it.’ He saw Sondra’s shoulders tighten and wondered what he had done wrong.

  The orc got to his feet. He was a big one: easily over seven feet in height, broad shoulders, and arms that looked like tree trunks. He was in a once-white vest which showed off all that muscle, and oil-stained jeans. His fists clenched. ‘You leave now, or you don’t leave ever.’ There was movement outside the window and Clarke spotted the gang members outside picking up tools.

  Sondra glanced around at Clarke, pushing her hands casually into the pockets of her coat. ‘I think we’ve found the right person to tell us all about KonTash, don’t you, Detective Delacroix?’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Clarke replied, though he was mostly concerned with getting out of the garage.

  ‘You were warned,’ the orc said. He took a step to the side to round the desk.

  ‘I am duly warned,’ Sondra said, turning as she did so. She pulled her hands from her pockets, flicking
one of them toward the orc. A charm sailed through the air, hitting him in the chest. His eyes widened briefly, and then he collapsed bonelessly to the concrete floor.

  There was a roar from outside as Clarke went for his gun. Holding off… He had counted six of them and he was not sure an angry orc was going to worry much about a nine-mil bullet or two while beating a cop to pulp.

  But Sondra was still moving, taking a step toward the door and then tossing something about the size of a ping-pong ball out into the workshop. It hit the concrete and exploded. Well, exploded was not quite right. A sphere of bright orange light expanded from where the object had landed, reaching a radius of nine or ten feet before collapsing back in on itself. In its wake, it left six burned orcs, only one of them still standing. All of them had burning clothes they were trying to beat out, except for that last one. His shirt was on fire, but he was ignoring it and starting to run for the office door.

  ‘Stop or I shoot!’ Clarke yelled, to absolutely no avail. He fired, three rapid rounds slamming into the orc’s chest, and this time the man fell, sliding the last couple of yards across the concrete and putting out the flames as he went. ‘Shit!’

  Sondra was pulling her phone from her coat. ‘Never mind the shit. Check him and keep an eye on the others.’

  Crouching, Clarke pressed his fingers to the fallen orc’s neck. ‘There’s a heartbeat. Weak, but it’s there.’

  ‘Right. Ambulances and a car. We’ve got someone to question.’

  ~~~

  ‘The orc Delacroix shot is going to survive,’ Dickerson said, his voice soft in deference to the setting: they were watching Clarke and the leader of the group from the garage through a one-way mirror. ‘The ones you downed with that heat blast are in the burns unit, but they’ll be fine.’

  ‘Orcs even like battle scars,’ Sondra commented. ‘Clarke will be happy about the one he shot. I’ll tell him later.’

  Dickerson gave a soft grunt. ‘What about this one? Is he talking?’

  ‘The problem is getting him to shut up.’ As Sondra spoke, the orc was shouting out various things in Orcish. Even if you could not understand them, they sounded more like slogans than anything substantive and Clarke was leaning back in his chair, looking disgusted and letting the man shout himself out. ‘I’d better get back in there.’