Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  Eventually you either got used to it or you let it end you, mired down in some dark hole or strung up by a mob wielding pitchforks.

  No one ever told that to a newly fanged Anakim. They still imagined the passage of time as mortals, and a hundred years of slow misery seemed like a lot.

  “It’s better than the alternatives,” Took said with a flash of humor, but it faded as he glanced toward the slab, and then his eyes narrowed as he registered the details of the body. “That’s not Nora Aron.”

  Forrester, secluded firmly on the other side of the table, away from the fangs and the hugging, cleared his throat.

  “Actually,” he said in an uncomfortably tight voice. “According to dental and hospital records, she is. Nora Elizabeth Aron, six years old at the time of her death and unvaccinated on religious grounds. Based on a cursory external examination, she died of either blood loss from a penetrating stab wound to her stomach or asphyxiation once she entered the… ah… lockbox?”

  Took ducked from under Pally’s grip and stalked over to the slab. He studied the girl briefly and then gestured briskly for Forrester to pull the sheet back. Pally made an offended noise under his breath, but Madoc silenced him with a hand on his arm.

  “That looks relatively shallow,” Took said as he studied the livid red slit that cut a crooked line across Nora’s flat, almost translucent stomach. “It might have nicked her stomach or—” He paused to angle an imaginary knife over Nora’s stomach to map out where the point would end. “—possibly her intestines or liver?”

  “Well, yes,” Forrester said with a touch of pique at his role being usurped. “The main problem here was blood loss, not damage to the organs. It looks like it was inflicted from behind, possibly during a struggle, since I found blood on her that didn’t seem to come from her injuries. At that point she managed to get away, fled, and somehow accessed the lockbox. Without treatment the blood loss would probably have killed her on its own. However, there are also signs of asphyxiation on the body as well as—”

  Forrester gripped the girl by shoulder and hip and lifted her up. There were dark, smoldered singe marks on her back, spread across her shoulder blades like wings and cupped around her hips like hands.

  He went to lower her back down, but Madoc stopped him with a quick gesture. He joined Took at the slab and bent down to study the marks. The blistered cracks on her elbows and raw meat on her knees and the heels of her feet where they had pressed against the hot metal of the box. The long vanes on her back looked like something else, the edges curled by heat but worked down under her skin.

  When Madoc traced along her shoulders, he felt no damage to the skin.

  “Does that look like a burn pattern?” he asked.

  Forrester frowned and adjusted his glasses again. “Well, no,” he admitted, “not a common one, but nothing about this is common. The body—”

  “Child,” Pally corrected.

  Forrester cleared his throat and started the sentence again. “The child has, theoretically, been entombed in this box for nearly five years. Sans any of the usual complications, she should have….” He stumbled over what he wanted to say as he looked over at Pally, but there was only one word for it. “Decomposed. There’s no evidence of that whatsoever. Based on the body, she could have died yesterday in that fire. If it isn’t a burn pattern, I should be able to tell you more once I have permission to get started on the autopsy.”

  “Don’t expect that,” Madoc told him.

  Pally stepped forward and produced a black silk winding cloth from his pocket and shook it out. There was enough of it to swaddle a full-grown Biter in his gear. They had no Enochian priests on the team, but Pally’s devotion was close enough for most, and the child fit easily within the folds.

  “We take care of our own,” Madoc told him as Pally lifted the body as though it weighed nothing.

  Forrester gawped for a second and then gathered up his indignation as he cut across the room. He barred Pally’s way out with spread arms and a glare. “The Aron case belonged to Charleston. Whatever VINE’s interest in this child is, you can’t just cut us out of the investigation completely. Dhampir or breathing child, she’s in our jurisdiction and it is our responsibility to find out what happened to her.”

  “I admire your dedication,” Pally said harshly. “But you will not change my mind. Now move or be moved.”

  Forrester looked around the room. Usually it would have been Took he looked to for backup, an assumption more than a few people had made and regretted. Now he just found another Anakim face in a room where one more dead person wouldn’t be noticed for a while—not that Madoc intended to kill the man, but vivid imaginations had spawned more defeats than anything else.

  “I am going to report this,” he warned stiffly as he moved away from the door. “And if this case is challenged because you broke chain of custody….”

  Pally just snorted and walked out the door. It swung shut behind him and Madoc caught it in one hand. “Took?”

  “Just a second.”

  Madoc leaned against the door and waited as Took grabbed a notebook from the table and scrawled something in it.

  “Any trace you find,” he said, “run against this name.”

  Forrester glared at the scrap of paper. “I don’t work for VINE,” he said. “And even if I did think it was a good lead, why the hell should I tell you anything about it?”

  “Because dhampir or breathing, she was just a little girl,” Took said. “So were the others. We’re better equipped than anyone to find whoever did it.”

  MADOC’S PHONE was full of agitated texts and insistent voice messages. NBC wanted a quote about the Aron house, the boyars wanted to speak to him immediately, and the Charleston sheriff wanted a reckoning.

  “Are you going to answer them?” Lawrence asked as Madoc flicked his phone off. She was perched on the edge of one the armchairs.

  He tucked it into his pocket. “I’m an old man,” he said dryly. “Modern technology confuses me. Maybe I got upset and threw it out a window.”

  She rolled her eyes at him and then looked around the small living room. They had decamped to the nearest VINE safe house, which was Took’s current residence. Madoc had braced himself for a fight over it, but Took just shrugged and told them not to bother the cat.

  The cat bothered Madoc. Reminded of its existence, he turned around and, after a quick search, found it crouched on the top of the door—a loaf of white fluff with malicious eyes.

  “It’s not what I imagined his house was like,” Lawrence said, and Madoc glanced back at her. “He was one of the best profilers VINE ever had, and after what happened to him… I mean, you wonder what happens afterward.”

  “And you’d decided?”

  She shrugged. “More Miss Havisham—books and texts and files of old cases,” she said. “Less… renter on a short lease.”

  Madoc tried to see the space with her eyes. He liked it, but then he’d spent a night here tangled around Took. Satiation improved a man’s opinion of a space. There were no mementos, no knickknacks—unless you counted the stake in the kitchen, and Madoc doubted Lawrence would approve—and the layout of the place had the disinterested appeal of the generic.

  It looked much like Took’s old apartment had, just like the small office-library, the only space he’d bothered to claim as off-limits, looked like his desk at VINE. It had never occurred to Madoc, who’d lived in luxury but owned nothing as a cardinal, that it was odd.

  “He’s not a sentimental man,” he said as he walked over to the door. The cat gave him a pink-rimmed glare and leaped down. It darted off down the hall, probably to go glare at Pally, and Madoc closed the door. “What did the Hunter they caught at the scene tell you?”

  Lawrence wrinkled her nose. “Not much. Took was right. He’s not a real Hunter. He’s just some blowhard wannabe who got together with his friends to vandalize Anakim homes and harass Anakim women. He’s a bottom-feeder. Only a few nights ago, the real deal in the mor
gue came to him with an offer he didn’t want to resist.”

  “Did they know each other?”

  Lawrence shrugged. “They used to run in the same circles, but our friend is a dead end for anything that happened between the last time Alan Beam got arrested and what happened after they went to the bar. He did say… well, boasted, that Beam had gotten in tight with some big name.”

  “Who?”

  Annoyance soured the corners of Lawrence’s mouth as she shrugged. “He wouldn’t tell us unless we offered him some sort of deal. The discussions on that are ongoing with the Charleston DA.”

  That did complicate things. VINE didn’t have to negotiate or keep their word if they decided someone didn’t deserve the second chance they had on offer. But while the boyars debated whether to reopen the case, they had to abide by the local rules. At least they did until decided not to.

  It was one thing to wrest the body of a dhampir child from the morgue. To invade the local watchhouse and seize a human who was affiliated, however loosely, with the Hunters? That was a different kettle of sharks entirely, and too redolent of the bad, old days when the only law was what Madoc said.

  Well, some people called them bad.

  “Did you believe him?”

  Lawrence tilted her head to the side as she considered. “Yes,” she said finally. “He’s not bright enough to make something up, and he’s confident his information is good enough to seal him soft time in daylight. Who, though? None of the major Hunter cells have their fingers in Charleston. The Templars?”

  Madoc glanced upstairs to where he could hear the soft creak of Pally’s feet on the floorboards. “If there were, Pally would know. Waiting for them to step out of line so he can come down like the hammer of God is the first hobby he’s ever indulged. I’ll get Quick to run through the chatter, see if anyone has made inroads that we weren’t aware of. You? Stay in touch with the DA’s office. The minute your bottom-feeder spits out a name, I want to know.”

  She nodded and stood up. “Can I stay to see what Quick found out about the Proverbial involvement?” She paused for a second and then punctiliously corrected herself. “If any.”

  Madoc raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re a Biter, Lawrence. I’m not going to dismiss your service because Took is back.”

  “Is he?” she asked. “For good?”

  That was the question and, if Madoc was honest with himself, the answer was probably no. Took had rejected every clean bill of health VINE’s psychs had offered him. He clung to his PTSD like a “get out of jail free” card. Even after the other night, Took still had the date of his last psych eval pigeonholed as his fully pensioned release.

  Madoc resented it. He bridled at the idea that he was bundled in with VINE as a bad memory to be left behind, but he couldn’t entirely blame Took for it either. He suffered because of VINE.

  But probably wasn’t definitely.

  “If he is,” he said, “it’s not as your replacement.”

  “No,” Lawrence said as she pulled the door open. “I was his. There’s one hole in the team to fill, and he called dibs.”

  Madoc laughed with a low, dark growl of sensual amusement as he thought of the other night. The sound made Lawrence go pink around the ears, a flash of awareness that Madoc was wryly pleased to see. His tastes had always run to men, but it was mildly reassuring to see he could still charm a woman if necessary.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” he told her. “You have qualities he lacks.”

  “Like?”

  “Never ask that question. The next person might not have an answer,” Madoc told her. “You are better with victims, your political instincts are impeccable, and frankly, you’re a better tactician.”

  Lawrence snorted. “He took out two Hunters and helped you escape a burning house.”

  “Counterpoint—he set himself on fire, caused a major explosion in a residential neighborhood, and shot a suspect in the foot. It worked, but if we’d planned that, I like to think one of us would have pointed out the flaws.”

  “I can hear you,” Took said dryly from the other room.

  Lawrence cackled despite herself and then sobered as they walked in and found Took at the dinner table with the charred box from the Aron house in front of him. She gagged, one hand pressed against her mouth.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Madoc growled.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “PETER ARON’S father bought that house nearly fifty years ago,” Took said as he tossed his tablet across the room to Madoc. “Fifteen years ago he died and Peter inherited the property. Six months later, one of the neighbors made a noise complaint. It turned out that Peter had decided that he needed to put in a new kitchen for his wife and him.”

  Madoc glanced at the tablet, handed it off to Lawrence, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Your point?”

  Before Took could say anything, Lawrence answered the question without raising her eyes from the tablet.

  “It wasn’t just some weird feature of the house,” she said. “At the least, they knew it was there. More likely they installed it along with their new counters. The question is what for?”

  Took resisted the quick, petty urge to sneer “obviously.” It caught in his throat to see Lawrence at Madoc’s shoulder, but that wasn’t her fault. He needed to remind himself of that.

  “Exactly,” he said stiffly. “There was some paperwork in there with Nora, but between the fire and her blood, it was too damaged to read easily. It looks like the family passports and some medical records, but until the lab gets through with them, we can’t be sure.”

  Madoc, jaw still set in a tight line, walked around to the far side of the dining table and leaned on the waxed, golden wood. He reluctantly ran his eyes over the coffin, his attention caught on the dry scraps of burned flesh in the corners.

  “No one builds a box this size for some papers,” he said. “They just put them in the safe or under a floorboard if there’s something that needs to be concealed.”

  “Contraband?” Lawrence suggested without much conviction. “We’ve had cases before where people smuggled sacred items out of the Nation. The Nations’ reprisals are usually tidier, though, and I’ve never known them to target children. And what’s the connection with the Warings?”

  Took had wondered that too. He didn’t have an answer, so he pushed it back at her.

  “It seems like that would have come up in the original investigation,” he said. Lawrence flushed, two quick stripes of angry color over her cheekbones, as though it were a jibe. It wasn’t, not entirely, at least. “Did you ever find any connection between his victims? Or work out how he picked them?”

  “Took,” Madoc said softly, a warning under his smooth voice.

  “It’s fine,” Lawrence said. She glared at Took and her voice was scathing when she answered him. “And no, we didn’t. All we had to go on was his confession and that we caught him red-handed at a murder scene.”

  “He never confessed,” Took corrected her.

  “He didn’t deny it either,” Lawrence pointed out. “If you hadn’t killed someone and you were accused of something, wouldn’t you say something? React? Respond?”

  Took shrugged. “Probably, but what does that prove? Other than being white and male, I haven’t got much in common with Dom Waring.” It was McCallan’s influence, Took thought dourly as Lawrence glared at him. For the last two decades, McCallan had taught preternatural behavioral science at Quantico and convinced too many of VINE’s best and brightest trainees that empathy was the key to a killer’s motivation. It worked for him, but the rigid old vampire had given his students an unreasonable faith in the idea that they could put themselves in a killer’s shoes. “Did you look for a connection anyhow?”

  “Of course,” Lawrence said as she folded her arms over the tablet. She tapped out a brisk tattoo against the metal back. “We knew… we thought he’d done it, but you can’t predict how a jury is going to react. Especially once Liam Waring ro
lled his political game into full gear. So we tried to belt and suspenders it, but the only connection was that they were mixed families with dhampir kids.”

  “If we assume you didn’t miss anything—”

  “She didn’t,” Madoc interrupted, a flat note of reproof in his voice as he looked up from the box.

  “I might have,” Lawrence said. “I missed Annabelle Franklin.”

  Guilt pinched at the back of Took’s brain, a vinegar sting in the back of his throat. The lash of self-flagellation in Lawrence’s voice was too familiar to ignore. He’d always been a piss-poor teacher, but he could hardly sneer at her for McCallaning stuff up if he didn’t give her an alternative.

  “Always assume you missed something, because you probably did. It’s human nature to edit out stuff we don’t think is important. This—” He tapped his knuckle against the box. “—has to be what links all the others. Somehow. And everyone missed Annabelle Franklin, or rather no one did. She was made to pass unnoticed.”

  That fired a neuron in the back of his mind—a flash-fire burst of satisfaction as he realized that he had the key to stitch all the pieces together. But it turned flat as the inspiration flashed by too quickly for him to catch. It was something, but… what?

  “Do you think the Arons had smuggled things out of the Nations?” Madoc asked. Something clouded and cold flickered through his eyes. “The local gods have been restless of late. Maybe something has moved through. From your research it looked like the Arons were interested in magic.”

  “Human magic—distillations and concoctions, formulas, vials, and control subjects,” Took said. He felt the twinge of “got it” again but ignored it for the moment. He’d have time to worry at that later, pick the neurons apart to reverse engineer the idea. “Besides, even if they were willing to… contract out… the divine to a god they didn’t worship, the Nations’ gods wouldn’t answer. Not their worshippers; not their circus. They didn’t build this to hide something.”