"Dante . . . ?"
"Dante Dire," Rafiel spelled it.
"Who . . . ?"
"Just someone who's been around a lot, and I wonder . . ." He had a moment of fear. What if McKnight stumbled on something that—He stopped. That what? Tipped him to the fact that there were shapeshifters? Not likely. Rafiel suspected that for the average person it would take having their noses rubbed in it. In fact, they would have tumbled on to what was happening long ago if it weren't so. "He's just suspicious," he said. "Nothing definite, so don't break any laws, but check up on him, okay?"
There was a sound from the other side that might have been assent, and Rafiel said, "Right. I'll call back." And hung up. He cut his ignition and got out of the truck. Halfway through stepping down, he saw something through the snow.
He would never be able to swear to what it was. A dog, a bear, something rounding the building, or just—perhaps—a shadow. But he thought Dire, and having thought it, he followed the suspicious shadow around the building to the front.
And stopped, because in front of the building, leaning against the lamppost was the blond girl from the newspaper. There was something odd about her, but he couldn't put his finger on it, and he said, "I beg your pardon, you—"
And then it hit him. His human nose, not as sharp as his lion nose, was nonetheless acute enough to catch the smell of blood—the smell of death. Closer, closer, he saw that the girl was pale, dead—her eyes staring unseeing straight ahead. But she'd been propped up against the lamppost, and her clothes had been put back on. And she couldn't have been dead very long, because there was a steady drip-drip-drip of blood down the front of her clothes, from beneath her ski jacket.
For a moment he stood horrified, but his mind was working, behind it all. Dire. He was sure Dire was involved. Oh, he couldn't have done it now. No way that could have happened. But he had to be involved—somehow.
In his mind it all added up. Dante had killed the girl earlier, then . . . Then led him here. Like a gigantic joke. A joke perpetrated by an unfeeling, uncaring, ancient creature.
Like the shark murders—it would be just Dire's idea of a joke, to set it up, somehow, so that he could push into the tank guys who had been dallying with one of the female employees. The first time they'd seen him was around the aquarium. Perhaps he had a way in all along. Why shouldn't he? Rafiel had managed to get keys easily enough. And it would amuse some thing like Dire to create the impression of a shark shifter and see how they reacted.
With numbed fingers, Rafiel had—somehow—retrieved his phone from inside his jacket. He hit the redial button, staring at the corpse of the blond girl. "McKnight. Send the meat wagon and . . . and come along. There's been a . . . death. In front of The George. And get someone to check the visitor book at the aquarium. Find out if Dante Dire was there . . . anytime in the last month."
* * *
Tom woke up with the phone ringing, and a panicked Notty digging needle-sharp claws into his underarm, where he'd been nestling.
"Ow," he said, grabbing the furry body blindly in his right hand, then looking for the phone on the bedside table with his left. One of the good things of this split sleeping schedule was that he got the bed when Kyrie wasn't here. And her pillow still smelled like her, too.
"Yeah," he said, turning on the phone, and fully expecting it to be Kyrie telling him about some emergency at the diner. Before he heard any sound from the other side of the phone, he'd already covered the possibles in his mind. She might have run out of paper napkins. Or it could be the beef. Did he order more beef? Perhaps it was the dishwasher flaking again. They needed to buy a new one soon. "Yeah?"
"Oh, damn," Rafiel's voice. "Damn, damn, damn."
Tom sat up, setting Notty down beside him on the bed. "What?" His relations with Rafiel had been less than cordial at one point, but even back then, Rafiel had never called him for the purpose of cursing at him.
"Tom?" Rafiel said, as if surprised to hear him.
"You called me."
There was a silence on the other side, a silence during which Rafiel seemed to be taking several deep breaths. "Oh, shit, Tom, we're in so much trouble."
"What happened?" Tom said, jumping out of the bed and looking around for his clothes. He'd showered before going to bed, so he could probably skip it this time. Truth be told he had a shower problem—he enjoyed so much being able to shower when he pleased that he had a lot of showers even when not shifting back and forth. Unfortunately they did not have support groups for the hygiene-dependent. "Rafiel, what happened?" he repeated when no answer came.
"We found . . . a corpse," Rafiel's voice was distant, like he was holding the phone away from his mouth, or perhaps speaking in a tiny voice. "Just outside the diner. I'm calling you while McKnight is talking to Kyrie."
"Outside the diner!" Tom said. "In the parking lot again?"
"No, corner of Pride and Fairfax. By the lamppost. She was . . . propped up. Leaning against the post . . ."
"She?" Tom's mind went immediately to the woman whom Rafiel had found, the woman who was a mouse shifter.
"The . . . Summer Avenir. The reporter for the paper? The one that Keith talked to or brought in?"
"The one that published dragon pictures?"
"Yeah, we're going to have to talk to Conan. And the . . . whoever the triad members are in this area."
"She was killed by a dragon?" Tom asked.
"Well, she was killed by something with really big teeth," Rafiel said, in the tone of a man who has come to his rope's end and still has quite a bit to climb. "And then she was propped up. This is putting a damper on our normal story of attacks by wild animals, you know? It's clear"—he took a deep breath—"very clear it was one of us." He lowered his voice. "I can smell shifter all over the scene, still. I thought I'd seen Dire before, but . . . I don't know."
Tom moaned and dropped onto the bed, to put his socks on. His feet and in fact all his wounds from the encounter with the dire wolf were completely healed and the very faint scars would soon vanish. "We must make sure he stops."
"Who?" Rafiel said.
"Dire."
"Uh . . . yeah. I'd say that's a given. The question is how."
"I don't know," Tom said.
"You could"—Rafiel cleared his throat—"talk to the Great Sky Dragon."
Tom stopped, his hand on his sock, his mouth on the verge of uttering an absolute no. Instead, he took a deep breath. "You must see we can't, Rafiel. You must see we can't."
"Why not? If they are rival organizations, both ancient, why can't you talk to the Great Sky Dragon and make him deal with Dire? I mean, I know that Dire said he had a non-aggression pact with the triad, but it doesn't seem to me as if that pact is much good. How could it be? Otherwise he wouldn't have gone through all that trouble to make sure the triad knew he didn't intend to kill you."
Tom heard himself make a sound that was half annoyance and half anger. "I still can't ask for their help, Rafiel. If we ask for the help of a criminal organization, how can we, in the future, hold ourselves able to stop them? If we ask for the help of an organization that deals in drugs, that kills, that basically seems to view other humans—what did Dire call them?—ephemerals, as mere cattle to be milked, then how can we hope to stand for justice among our kind? Or anywhere?"
There was a long silence. Tom had the impression that Rafiel was running several arguments through his own head and discarding them just as fast as he thought them up. Finally he made a sound somewhere between a huff and a sigh. "Tom, we can't be so pure as the driven snow. I understand what you're saying. And standing for justice is very well—don't get me wrong. I'm as fond of graphic novels as Keith is. And justice and truth and all that, but Tom . . . I'm afraid he's going to kill one of us. I don't even know, you know . . . if he might not have set up the aquarium murders. He's . . . cunning, and he has an . . . odd sense of humor. Look at how he conned Kyrie into going to the house. At any point he could turn and decide to hold one of us—or a
ll of us—responsible for those deaths and just kill us." Pause. "You know, it's quite likely it was him who killed this woman, without so much as a thought."
"Well, she did publish pictures of dragons in the newspaper," Tom said.
"But it could have been Photoshop. I mean, even if she had caught you mid-shifting, do you think that it couldn't be Photoshop? No one will take it seriously. Look at all the pictures of the alien that the tabloids keep following up on and publish. Do you believe he exists?"
"No," Tom said. "And no, I don't think anyone paid undue attention to the pictures. But they are pictures of our kind and . . . well . . . Dire is very old. At least assuming it was him. Though, frankly, the Great Sky Dragon is very old too, and I don't think any of his younger subordinates would have dared point out to him that times have changed."
"No," Rafiel said. "I'm sure they wouldn't. So . . . they killed this young woman. Without a thought. Because she was . . . an ephemeral."
"No, because she was an ephemeral they thought was threatening shifters." Tom found his mind going down the dangerous path that he knew these people's minds must take every time. He said matter of factly, "Think of it from their perspective, how it must have been throughout history. The discovery of a shifter would lead to a hunt for others. Death was always the end. Of course they would kill anyone that was a remote threat."
"Of course? You sound as if you approve."
"No. Understanding is not approving. There is a qualitative difference." He felt suddenly very tired. "You know, when I was on the streets, they had all these programs where you were supposed to mingle with the other runaways and empathize and understand them. Sometimes that's what you had to do for a meal. And the counselors always seemed to think that if you understood someone, you'd like them . . . and you know? It's not true. Sometimes the more you talk to a teenage habitual liar and drug pusher, the less you like them. But . . . but I do understand how they got to be the way they are. And at the same time . . ." He took a deep breath. "I understand how we could go that way. From the best of motives. Protecting ourselves and our friends. I understand how we could start deciding that . . . killing the occasional ephemeral meant nothing. Or even that we should kill a few every now and then, out of the blue, to keep the other ones in fear. I understand them, Rafiel. And it scares me. That's another reason not to ask for the Great Sky Dragon's help. That, and I'd like to continue being able to call my soul my own."
Rafiel huffed again and when he answered he was peevish. "Very well," he said, in a tone that implied it wasn't very well at all. "But I hope you know what to do, because this can't go on. With the deaths at the aquarium—and by the way, the latest one, Joe Buckley, had water in his lungs, so it wasn't a body disposal, it was murder by shark—and now some mysterious animal going around town killing people, not to mention what my colleagues are convinced is some madman who just propped up the body afterwards . . ." This time the sound was just a sigh. "I don't know how to cover up all of this, Tom. I just don't. And I'm an officer of the law. The killings must stop. And I think there's more than an even chance that it's all Dire. I'm . . . following up on it, but I really think there's a good chance he came to town before, you know, when they felt the deaths, and he set all this up. And we must stop him."
"I understand," Tom said and he did, and in this case he could even empathize. "I'll think of something. Look, I'll come down and help you talk to Conan, okay?"
After Rafiel hung up, Tom started tying his boots, a task made more complex by the fact that Notty was trying to help. "I'd better think of something, eh, Notty?" he said, as he petted the little round kitten head. "Or we are in deep, deep trouble."
Notty looked up at him with guileless intensely blue eyes that seemed to say he had every confidence in Tom's ability to make it all right. Tom wished he did too.
* * *
Every shifter could be a target, Kyrie thought. And even as she was thinking this, she had to put up with being interviewed by a young man with sparse red-blond hair and the slightly bulging blue eyes that always give the impression their possessor is desperately looking for a fairytale to believe in. He, somehow, seemed absolutely convinced that Kyrie must have a wild animal stashed somewhere, and must have deployed it to kill this woman journalist.
If only you knew, Kyrie thought, but just looked placidly at the man. "No," she said, in a firm voice, while she kept an eye on Conan who was dealing with the tables. She stood with her back to the counter. On the other side of it, Anthony was cooking orders. He'd been interviewed, but his interview had been very brief, since he hadn't left the stove since he'd come in at about four in the morning. And no, he hadn't seen any dead woman against the lamppost, though, frankly, if she'd been propped up and looked natural, he might not have noticed. After all, he'd been running in, and he'd been working what very much amounted to double shifts because of the weather and their being shorthanded. And now he had to go back to the stove before it went up in flames; did Officer McKnight mind?
Officer McKnight could not persist against Anthony's push to get back to work, and therefore he was now absolutely determined to make life difficult for Kyrie. Kyrie looked up and resisted an urge to smile. She wondered if she was supposed to cry into the table-wiping rag she was holding and confess that yes, she'd done it all.
She decided against it on principle. The man looked like he'd had his sense of humor surgically removed at birth and he might very well take her at her word. Instead, aloud, she said, with increasing firmness, "No, I was not mad at her for publishing the dragon pictures. Why should I be?"
"Well . . ." McKnight said, and looked at her with those bulging eyes, making her think he was going to dart an improbably long tongue out and catch a fly or something. "The thing is Ms. . . . Smith, you and your . . . partner, Mr. Ormson own this diner half and half, right."
"Right," Kyrie said, wishing if he was going to pronounce Smith that way he would add "if that is indeed your real name."
"And this woman published pictures of dragons in the paper and said she'd seen them at the back door of your diner. Now . . . wouldn't you think people might be afraid to come here? That it might ruin your business?"
"What?" Kyrie asked, completely puzzled. "Are you truly asking me if I think that people are afraid of dragons? Are you afraid of dragons, Officer?"
"Well . . . that's neither here nor there, is it? I mean, I know that dragons are imaginary and I . . ." He shrugged. "But this is not about what I believe. Don't you think that people out there on the street might think that there are really dragons and that they might get attacked, if they come here?"
Kyrie shook her head. "No. In fact, considering all the recent movies and stories with good dragons, I think that if they were to believe dragons existed—and frankly I don't think even a lot of our college student clientele believes any such thing—they would be thrilled. If anything, that picture in the paper might bring us droves of customers." She realized as she said it that this was true, though certainly that was not how she and the others had first thought of it.
McKnight clearly hadn't thought of it that way either. He said, "But—" and then repeated "But, but," like it was the sound his brain gave off while sputtering and trying to start. "But you have to understand," he finally said. "Not everyone might have felt that way. And what if they were scared and stopped coming here. Wouldn't you have hated that reporter? Wouldn't you have thought of doing . . . something to her?"
"Something?" Kyrie said. She frowned. "What exactly are you suggesting? That I roamed the streets looking for a wild animal, whom I then convinced to chomp on this journalist, when she was conveniently just outside our door?" She glared. "Because a death by wild animal attack will, of course, hurt our business far less than rumors of dragons."
"Well, no, but you might . . . you might not have thought of that, as you were, you know . . ."
"Looking for a wild animal to kill her? Tell me, was it a mountain lion or a bear? And how did I keep it from killing me?
My extrasensory powers?"
McKnight looked confused. Or rather, he looked more confused than normal. "But . . . but . . . if you had . . ."
"And what if I had grown wings and flown?" she asked. Which I can't do. Though my boyfriend can. "Do I have to answer hypothetical questions on that too?" She glared at him. "Given an ability to find wild animals disposed to kill inconvenient journalists at the drop of a hat, and supposing I had the superpowers to prevent them killing me, I still wouldn't have killed the journalist."
"Oh? Why not?"
"Because she was a person. A human being. And she'd done me no noticeable harm. Do you often kill people because they're annoying or sensationalist, Officer?"
"Me? Well, no, of course . . ." He seemed to finally realize he wasn't going to win this argument no matter how hard he tried. "Right," he said. "Right. Thank you, Ms. Smith. I will . . . I will go and ask your customers if they've seen anything."
Yes. Do, why don't you? Because that won't affect business at all, she thought irritably, as she ducked behind the counter, and found Anthony's gaze trained on her, half amusement, half awe.
"What?" she said.
"I think you have a bit of policeman caught between your teeth," he said.
"What?"
"Metaphorically speaking. I think that's what Tom calls biting off someone's head and beating them to death with it."
"Well," Kyrie said, deflated, as she got the carafe from the coffee maker and put the latest round of prepared orders on a tray to take out. Conan had been half handling all the orders, but she was fairly sure the breakfast crowd would prefer their eggs before they got all cold and rubbery. "He's dim."
Gentleman Takes a Chance Page 29
