Ashes Reborn

by Keri Arthur

  I checked out the rest of the folders; while each one contained a different man with Hamberly, many were not only sexually explicit, but also veered heavily into BDSM, piss play, and even some erotic asphyxiation.

  “Hamberly’s been photographing his conquests,” I said. “Some of these images are . . . interesting, to say the least.”

  “I don’t think I want to know,” Jackson said. “But this is where he’s processing them—it’s a fully kitted-out photo lab.”

  “Well, he certainly wouldn’t be getting these images printed down at the local office supply place, let me tell you.”

  A door creaked. “There’s also a small photography studio set up behind the lab. The setup looks professional.”

  I put the folders back and walked over to the first of the taller cabinets. It wasn’t locked, but the number was so familiar, I stared at it for several seconds before it actually registered.

  It seemed I was wrong, and Jackson had been right.

  Wilson did have something to do with Hamberly, because I’d just found the lock that matched the second damn key.

  CHAPTER 11

  I grabbed the key from my bag and shoved it into the lock, just to be doubly sure. It turned. “Houston, we have found the cabinet.”

  “What?”

  “The missing cabinet—the one that matches our second key—is sitting here right next to Hamberly’s desk.”

  Jackson hurried back, his expression one of disbelief. “Why the fuck would Professor Wilson have a key to Hamberly’s filing cabinets?”

  “I have no idea.” I started going through the files and discovered—rather unsurprisingly given what I’d already seen—an extensive catalogue of explicit photographs.

  “He can’t have been involved in whatever scheme Hamberly was running,” Jackson said. “The government would have run background checks on everyone involved in the virus research, and something like this—which rather looks like some sort of blackmailing scheme if Rosen’s check is anything to go by—should have had alarm bells ringing.”

  “You’d think so.” I paused to open the next drawer. More photos, but this time, they were simply nudes rather than sexually explicit images. “Maybe Hamberly was running a photography studio, and the blackmail portion of it was just a profitable sideline . . . Most of these look rather professional.”

  “To what aim, though?” He picked up a folder and skimmed through it. “Surely there can’t be much of a market for naked middle-aged men?”

  “We’d probably be surprised.” I closed the drawer and moved across to one of the smaller units. It had the same key number, as did the one next to it. I guess it was easier than wrestling with a multitude of different keys, although it still didn’t answer the question of why Wilson had a copy of the key in his possession.

  I pulled out the top drawer and discovered invoices and receipts rather than photos. I plucked one folder out, dumped it on the table, and started going through it.

  Jackson opened another drawer and flicked through the files. “Ah, here we go.” He pulled a folder free and opened it up. “Rosen Junior in all his glory—and in some compromising positions with several older men.”

  “Is one of them Hamberly?”

  “Yes. They weren’t taken in the studio up here, but rather in the bedroom below.” He turned one of the photos around. “Shot from above, too, so I suspect Junior wasn’t aware of what Hamberly was up to.”

  “Or he didn’t damn well care,” I said. “He didn’t have a very high opinion of his father, remember.”

  “But he did have a good opinion of Hamberly, and I doubt that would have been the case if he was aware Hamberly was blackmailing his father.”

  “It would certainly explain the check, and why Janice was handing it over rather than Rosen. He wouldn’t have risked going anywhere near his blackmailer. He wouldn’t want anyone wondering why he was so regularly meeting someone he supposedly hated, and to start investigating.”

  “True,” Jackson said.

  I opened another folder, and the signature on the first invoice immediately caught my eye, simply because it didn’t match the signature on all the other invoices I’d seen so far.

  “Can you decipher that?” I offered the invoice to Jackson.

  He glanced at it, and his eyebrows rose. “No, but I don’t have to because I’ve seen it before. That’s Professor Wilson’s signature.”

  I flicked through the rest of the invoices. “He’s signed most of these, so he was definitely involved in at least the official portion of Hamberly’s business, if not the unofficial.”

  “Yep.” Jackson handed me back the invoice. “I guess the unanswerable question—at least until someone finds the professor—is how the hell the two of them knew each other. They didn’t exactly move in the same sort of circles.”

  “No, but maybe they were school friends or something.” I put the folder back and picked up another. “Or maybe the professor had a secret salacity for men and that’s how the two met. He certainly had the money to help set up this sort of operation. From the little I knew of Hamberly, he didn’t.”

  “But surely if the professor was bisexual, Amanda would have picked up on it . . .”

  “Not necessarily. Plenty of men the professor’s age prefer to hide their true sexuality under the banner of ‘normality.’ And Amanda was fucking him for specific information. If the professor had been closeted for years, she probably wouldn’t have even noticed.”

  Jackson grunted. “If the two of them were partners, then there’s a small chance Wilson might have kept some information here. And that means we’ll have to go through every damn drawer and file.”

  “I don’t like our chances of finding anything.” I nevertheless dragged the chair across to make myself comfortable for the long task ahead.

  As tasks went, this was even more tedious than going through every number on Janice’s phone.

  Dusk came and went, and my stomach was beginning to send out serious “Feed me or else” signals by the time I reached the final cabinet. I pulled out the first folder, then paused as I caught sight of something sitting at the very back of the drawer. I pulled the files forward, then reached in and grabbed it. It was a small cash tin. I shook it lightly, and something rattled inside—and it didn’t sound like change.

  I sent a sharp blast of heat at the padlock, melting it in an instant, then pulled it free and opened the tin’s lid.

  Inside were more than a dozen USB drives.

  My heart began beating a little faster, even though I knew it was totally possible these drives held nothing more than explicit photographs.

  I rose, turned on Hamberly’s computer, and tapped my fingers on the desk as I waited for the thing to boot up.

  “You found something?” Jackson slammed the third drawer closed and opened his final one.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  Thankfully, Hamberly didn’t have his laptop password protected, so I shoved in a USB and opened it up. Inside was a series of Word files—most of them at least five years old. I picked one at random and double-clicked it. What it revealed were research notes. Not the ones we were looking for, but research notes nonetheless.

  “Looks like I was wrong again, and you were right,” I said. “I think we might have just found the missing notes. And if we have, that means Wilson wasn’t only involved in this little blackmail scheme; he was also storing the backup copies of his research here.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “No.”

  I ejected that USB and inserted another one. More Word files, more research notes. Jackson came up behind me, watching as I continued searching through each of the USBs. We didn’t hit anything useful until the eighth one, and while it wasn’t about the virus, it certainly was about the telepathy inversion device.

  I glanced at Jacks
on. “Was Wilson working on that before he was given the virus project?”

  “I have no idea. Try the next one.”

  I did, but it was back to older notes. The tenth one, however, very much reminded me of the earlier notes I’d taken for Baltimore, Wilson’s counterpart over at the Chase Medical Research Institute. The remaining USBs were more up-to-date; we’d definitely found our pot of research gold.

  “The question that now has to be answered,” Jackson said grimly, “is what the fuck do we do with them?”

  I frowned. “We give them to PIT—”

  “The minute we do that, all bets are off with the sindicati, and we don’t really need to be dealing with their shit when Rinaldo is still on the loose.”

  “But we can’t leave them here—given the amount of time we’ve been in this place, anyone following us is going to suspect we may have found something.” I waved a hand around the room. “This space isn’t exactly hard to find.”

  “No, but it won’t matter if we hide them out in the open. I doubt Rinaldo or even Paretti will suspect USBs placed in the various folders hold anything more than backup naked pictures.”

  “Probably not, but it’s still a hell of a risk.”

  “But less of a risk than taking them with us and getting stopped again.”

  I hesitated, then nodded. He was right; they probably were a whole lot safer here than they were with us right now. Especially given the possible leak at PIT.

  We proceeded to randomly scatter the USBs through the various folders and also placed a couple in the chemical storage unit inside the photo lab. All we had to do now was try to remember all the different locations.

  “That’s something PIT can worry about,” Jackson said as we finally headed out of the house. “After all, we’re only associates.”

  “And hopefully not even that once all this shit is over,” I said. “But I’m thinking, given what Lan—”

  “Ms. Pearson,” an aristocratic and familiar voice said from the shadows of the gate.

  I squeaked in fright and jumped several feet sideways, fire automatically leaping to my fingertips—a reaction I was going to have to watch as I really didn’t want to out myself as something other than human.

  “Sorry, I did not mean to frighten you,” Parella continued, amusement clearly evident as he stared at us down the long length of his nose.

  Jackson stopped beside me. “Why the fuck are you here?”

  “We did have an agreement, remember—one that you are not living up to,” Parella said. “I thought a little chat might be in order before I ordered a resumption of hostilities.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend doing that,” Jackson said rather philosophically, “because we’re both over being attacked, and are just as likely to kill first, ask questions later, right now.”

  “So I gathered from that little spark display.” Parella shed the rest of the shadows from his body. If he was in any way perturbed by the thought of being crisped, it wasn’t showing. “What else did you find in Brooklyn? Or what remains of it after you burned more than half of it down?”

  “Other than rotting red cloaks, I’m gathering?” I asked.

  He raised a silvery eyebrow. “Why would the cloaks be rotting?”

  I shrugged. “The jury is out on whether it’s a natural progression of the virus or the result of Luke’s death.”

  “So the rumors are true—you did kill him.”

  “And his tame witch.” I paused. “Said witch was also Rinaldo’s thrall. It seems you and your bosses were more than a little wrong about the threat he represents.”

  “We are beginning to see that.”

  “Then why aren’t you taking the fucker out?” Jackson said.

  “We might be able to if he’s now without both his sorcerer and the spells that have been keeping him hidden,” Parella said. “What is the situation with the research notes? Did you find them in Brooklyn?”

  “No. We found Luke’s office and a rather stout-looking air lock.”

  “Has PIT accessed that air lock?”

  I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as ours. It isn’t like they’d tell us, and we can’t exactly ask anyone else, given Luke is ash and the cloaks haven’t a brain between them.”

  He raised an eyebrow. I suspected amusement, though it wasn’t actually showing in his expression. Maybe it was such a foreign emotion, his face was incapable of making the appropriate movements.

  “What was in the backpack the rats said you carried out of Brooklyn?”

  “Laptops with nothing more dangerous than office supply orders.” I shrugged. “We gave them to Rinaldo to get him off our backs.”

  “And why would you do that without informing us, the rats, or the wolves?”

  “Because Rinaldo’s tame witch was infected, and Rinaldo was using him as a conduit to control the cloaks. He threatened to infect the city if we even thought about mentioning them to anyone else.”

  “Which, I hate to admit, is a perfectly good reason to not set up any sort of trap.” He paused. “Why are you here?”

  “We’re here because Janice Green had Hamberly’s name on her phone, and considering the hatred Rosen had of the man, we figured it might be worth searching his house.”

  Parella frowned. “But Wilson had no connection to Hamberly, so why would you think the notes would be found here?”

  “We didn’t,” Jackson said easily. “We’re just covering all our bases.”

  “I’m still not seeing the connection—”

  “James Hamberly had some very explicit photos of Rosen’s son with a number of men,” I said, “and he was blackmailing Rosen to the tune of a couple grand a month.”

  “Given it was possible he went after more than cash,” Jackson continued, “we searched the place from top to bottom. Unfortunately, the only thing we discovered was that Hamberly and his many photo subjects are into some serious kink.”

  “But you’re more than welcome to go discover that for yourself.” I stepped to one side and waved a hand toward the house.

  “Thanks, but I’ll take your word on that particular matter. Hand over your purse.”

  I did so without comment. He found Wilson’s key and held it up. “What is this?”

  “The other key we found at Wilson’s. We’re still searching for a damn match. You already have the information we found with the first key.”

  He replaced the key and then handed back the purse. I slipped it back over my shoulder, glad he didn’t bother checking my phone, which held all the photographs of the notes we’d found at Junior’s—notes he didn’t have.

  “I’m gathering you and your sindicati cronies haven’t found the research notes De Luca’s hidden somewhere?”

  “No, we have not.” He paused. “Nor does anyone in his den appear to know.”

  “You know the den is working with Rinaldo, don’t you?”

  “No, we did not.” He contemplated me for a moment. “I don’t suppose you would consider working with us when the current search is over? You are very good at uncovering information few others seem able to.”

  “It’s amazing how well the fear of fire will loosen lips,” I said. “But you and I working together? One of us would be dead within hours, and it would not, I’m afraid, be me.”

  I’d been wrong before—his face was capable of cracking a smile, but man, it was a scary thing to behold. “Shame. We could have had an interesting partnership.”

  “Getting back to the business at hand,” Jackson said, his voice holding an edge that expressed amusement rather than annoyance. “I gather you’re still having us tailed.”

  “No need to when the rats are playing that particular game. They certainly don’t miss much of what is going on in this city.”

  “Except when it comes to Rinaldo,” I said. “Did you know he has a source in PIT
itself? And that he might actually be two people rather than one?”

  “The rats told us the latter. And I suspect it’s not so much a source at PIT as someone he’s able to read from some distance.”

  Which is probably why the inversion devices were taken from Rosen Pharmaceuticals, Jackson said. Despite their denials of a leak, maybe they suspect one of their people is unwittingly passing on information.

  Possible. To Parella, I added, “How did you know we were here if you’re not tailing us? The rats again?”

  “Yes. The fact you were in the house so long had them suspecting something might have been found.”

  “But why would they then contact you?”

  “We have an agreement in place regarding any virus research they might acquire. Because you’re a major part of the current search for said research, we’re also regularly informed of your whereabouts.”

  “So why didn’t they come here and confront us? Why did you?”

  The rather scary smile flashed again. “I always make a point of seeing those I suspect might be playing me for a fool, as I believe in giving everyone a chance before I step in and kill them.”

  How very civilized of him. Jackson’s mental tones were dry. But I’m betting there’re hundreds—if not thousands—of corpses rotting in the ground who’d dispute that statement.

  “So this,” I said, trying to stop my lips twitching in amusement, “is our first—and only—warning?”

  “Yes. Give me information as you find it, or we will come after you whenever we suspect you have something. And if innocents get hurt in the process”—he shrugged—“so be it.”

  “Warning heeded,” Jackson said. “Just don’t expect goddamn miracles, because we’ve done nothing but chase dead ends these last few days.”