“Can you try to make some kind of sense of this when you finish with the preliminary report? I’m going to meet your buddy Jeff Collins at the scene and start sorting through the records in that second-floor office.”
“Good luck,” he said. “I took a brief look at that stuff. Most of it is handwritten in those hieroglyphics demons use. We’ll have to submit them to a translator.”
With a grin, I said, “No, we won’t. I can read them.” That was one of the strange things about the dreams I had about my father. I had learned to read and speak demon from my dreams. That made it difficult to dismiss them as simply wish-fulfillment fantasies from my subconscious.
I left the car for Novak in case he needed it and hopped on my bike. I stopped by my favorite fast-food place and picked up a crabcake sandwich and a milkshake, then drove out to Pimlico.
If I hadn’t made that detour, I might never have seen the car, since it was parked on a street I normally wouldn’t have driven down. From the Crab Shack, the one-way street leading to the freeway ran the wrong way, so I cut down the alley that ran behind the apartment building where Janice Iranski lived.
The flash of red—an unusual shade—that I caught from the corner of my eye as I passed the parking lot was enough to make me slow down and turn around. The fancy two-seat European sports car was definitely out of place. It was also parked in a place that was the opposite direction from the route Sarah Benning should have taken from Loretta Academy to go home. I had checked, and only two hundred of the cars were registered in the Mid-Atlantic Metro area, with seventeen of them the same year as hers, and only nine of those were red.
I pulled into the parking lot and dismounted, then walked to the far corner where the car was partially obscured behind a trash dumpster. As far as I could tell, it was completely intact. That was unsurprising, considering one of its features was a magitek security system keyed to the owner’s magikal talent. Sarah was an electrokinetic, as was her father. He had told me the car was only tuned to him and his daughter. Anyone else would receive a nasty shock if they tried to break into the car. No signs it had been in a wreck.
The car I was looking at had a slight dent and a scratch on the back bumper, pretty much verifying it was Sarah’s. The license plate number matched. I pulled out my phone and made a call.
“Whittaker,” my boss answered.
“I found Sarah Benning’s car,” I said. “Its location is something of a problem.”
“How so?”
“Circumstantial, but points to the possibility that one of the Hundred is involved in her disappearance.”
He was quiet for a long minute. “Where are you?”
I gave him the address, then said, “I’m supposed to be meeting Sergeant Collins from Vice at that murder scene up in Pimlico. This car looks like it’s been sitting here since Sarah disappeared. Want to meet me here later, or do you want to take care of it?”
“First thing tomorrow,” Whittaker said. “Bring Novak.”
I groaned. Whittaker was a notoriously early riser. “Like eight?”
“Like six. What name do you suspect?”
“Johansson.”
Whittaker hung up.
Chapter 22
Collins was sitting on the front steps of the house in Pimlico waiting for me. The electric-yellow crime-scene tape across the front door was still intact.
“One of the nice things about partnering with Mychal was he could deal with that sort of thing,” Collins said, waving at the tape.
I chuckled and used my magik to deactivate the tape. All mages on the force carried a little magitek box that activated and deactivated the barriers. Not being a mage, such a box wouldn’t help Collins, and I didn’t need the box.
We entered the building, and I took a brief look around before climbing the stairs to the room Collins had labeled the office.
It contained a desk, a credenza, a couple of filing cabinets, and three chairs. The chair behind the desk was demon sized—Collins and I could have both sat in it at the same time. No computer, of course, since demons didn’t ‘get’ technology. The smartest of them could wrap their minds around driving a car, but none of them could fix a car other than replacing a hydrogen canister or plugging it in. Computers were completely beyond them.
Collins picked up a piece of paper on the desk. Squiggly marks in columns ran down the page. “Do you read demon?”
“Yeah. That’s either a grocery list or a list of trafficking victims.” There weren’t any names, of course, just physical descriptions of humans.
He shrugged. “Probably the same thing.”
“Maybe this isn’t about drugs at all,” I said. “Maybe the main business is trafficking, and that’s why the drugs were left behind.”
Collins shook his head. “With demons, it’s always about power and territory. Selling drugs, people, or any other kind of contraband is just a game they play in this dimension. Demons don’t care what the product is, only the profit margins, and money is just a way to keep score. Power in the local demon hierarchy is all they really care about.”
I knew he was right. Minor demons cared about pleasure and food. Major demons fed more on strong emotions than physical food, with anger, fear, and lust being the strongest emotions. Major demons and what we called demon lords were the true enemies of humankind. They were the ones whose magik enabled them to possess other beings. They were the ones who fed on souls.
And that was what scared me about Ashvial. Playing a lust game with him might be amusing, but opening myself might lead to possession. And despite the legends, there was no documented case of a human surviving an exorcism.
We spent three hours going through the documents in that room, cataloging them, and packing them up to transport back to the station. In total, there were records of more than three hundred humans, vampires, and shifters who had been bought or kidnapped and then sold over the past three years. I had little hope any of them would ever be seen again. Some of the descriptions might have matched Sarah Benning, but the dates were wrong.
After I helped Collins load the boxes into his car, I waved goodbye to him and called Novak.
“Mychal, can you meet me somewhere quiet for a cup of coffee?”
“Yeah, sure. Where are you?”
“That house in Pimlico.”
“Do you know The Mean Bean in Mount Washington?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Tell them you’re with me and ask for the table next to the koi pond.”
I drove over to the coffee shop, one that catered to upper-class society. A young woman escorted me outside in the back. The small table sat under a willow tree next to a small waterfall pouring into the pond. Gold and white koi leisurely swam around, providing an almost hypnotic calming atmosphere. The place Novak had chosen was at least ten feet from the nearest table, which was vacant, and the flowing water provided white noise. I ordered an exorbitantly-priced caramel coffee and sat back to wait.
Mychal showed up half an hour later. “The usual,” he said to the hostess as he dropped into the chair across from me. He scrutinized me, then said, “What’s up?”
“I’ve been working on a side case Whittaker assigned me. Daughter of a rich Magi Family went missing.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Her car has been missing along with her. I found the car today. A total accident, really.”
“Okay. So, why bring me into it now?”
“Whittaker said to bring you along when I meet him tomorrow morning.” I leaned close. “The girl is Sarah Benning, Justus Benning’s daughter. Remember me asking Dolin about Magi involved in trafficking?”
Novak nodded.
“Martin Johansson’s name keeps cropping up. He has a fifteen-year-old mistress stashed in an apartment, and I found Sarah Benning’s car parked behind that apartment building.”
He let out a long, low whistle and leaned back in his chair. “He has powerful allies. You do know that he’s close to Akiyama, don’t you?”
I didn’t. Although I probably should have spent more time keeping up on the activities and shifting alliances of the Hundred, I tended to shy away from them. Akiyama was one of the Ten, and my relatives at Findlay believed the Akiyama Family was responsible for my father’s death.
“I wonder if that’s why Whittaker decided to bring you into this,” I said.
“It would make sense. Johansson has a reputation for dirty work, and Akiyama has a reputation for keeping their hands clean. But either one would hesitate to strike at Novak.”
I nodded. “Plausible deniability. Just for the record, I haven’t spent the last twenty-two years plotting revenge. No one really knows what happened to my father, and his body was never recovered. Anyway, Whittaker wants to meet us at Sarah’s car tomorrow morning at six o’clock.”
I gave him the address and let him pay for my coffee.
After I left Mychal, I rode back to the office. Collins had promised to scan all the paper we found. I discovered he was as good as his word, and it was all available when I sat down at my computer.
While the various wars had crushed a lot of industrial infrastructure, computer technology had mostly survived. No one had nuked Singapore, Malaysia, or Boise, Idaho. The pandemics had scattered the computer work force, so programmers were mostly unaffected when Silicon Valley and Seattle were bombed. The computer power the Metropolitan Police Department had available to it was staggering compared to the technology in place prior to the first pandemic.
The first thing I did was set up the three hundred or so descriptions we had found as a search through the Missing Persons database. Then I set the descriptions contained in the buyers’ and sellers’ lists running against the Mid-Atlantic population database.
With that done, I took off for the day.
Chapter 23
The emergence of the Magi as the powers in the world had greatly diminished governments. Other than the police, the primary government functions included providing water and sewer service, electricity, and road maintenance. Almost everything else was owned by corporations, and the majority of the large corporations were owned by the Magi. I knew governments used to have armies, but most of those had been destroyed in the wars. Only the Magi’s private security forces survived, along with mercenaries provided by various Families.
My mother, like me, was a government employee. We weren’t what most humans would call close, but we were friendly, and I tried to drop by and see her at least monthly. Elves lived a very long time, and I guessed it would be exhausting to maintain close familial ties with people over the span of centuries. Kirsten had suggested that since my mom lost her own mother so young, she didn’t have a model for dealing with a grown daughter. But I was her only child, visiting her was relaxing, and with the week I’d had, I felt like I could use a little relaxation.
I hopped on my bike and blasted up the main north-south freeway until I left the city, then I took the road out to Loch Raven Reservoir. The area around the lake was publicly owned, and the water from the Gunpowder River that fed the lake was the chief source of drinking water for the original city of Baltimore.
As the chief ecologist for Gunpowder Falls Park, which included the reservoir, Mom had a house out near the dam. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but it was four times as large inside. And although she was only half elf, her magik was very strong.
Her pickup was in the driveway, so I left my bike under the roof overhang next to the garage. The pickup belonged to the government, and she kept her motorcycle and ATV in the garage.
The front door was unlocked, as it always was. If I wasn’t welcome, the consequences of walking through that door uninvited would be very unpleasant.
I didn’t even have to announce myself. Mom’s voice called, “I’m in the kitchen.”
Her telling me that was unnecessary. The smell of fresh-baked fruit tarts would have drawn me into the kitchen no matter what. And sure enough, a tray of apple tarts, still warm, awaited me.
“I had a feeling you might stop by today,” she said, as she pulled a bottle of golden sunshine wine from the fridge and set it on the table. “Grab a couple of glasses, would you?”
When I was a kid, she always knew what I was doing before I did. She was also a walking lie detector. I tried to avoid trouble, because there was no way I could lie my way out of it.
I retrieved the glasses from a cabinet next to me and brought them to the table. As with all the furniture, the table was crafted out of the same wood as the walls, floor, and ceiling, and looked as though it had grown there.
My mom, Amelie Jorensdottir, was a sight to behold. Six-feet-four, with white-blonde hair, slanted green slit-pupiled eyes, sharp high cheekbones, and a graceful way of moving that always reminded me of a willow swaying in the breeze. Exotic and beautiful, she seemed to have incorporated all the best features of her elven and human parents. She had a doctorate in ecology and taught occasionally at some of the universities in the area, but her main job was overseeing the reservoir area’s ecology, the dam, and its hydroelectric turbines.
I had met her father a few times, but he lived in Iceland, so the opportunities for contact were infrequent. I had never met her mother, who died before I was born. I grew up in that magikal house, with its warm, wooden walls, rounded corners, curved hallways, multiple elevations, and organically shaped windows. The magikally powered kitchen had not prepared me to cook in a human-designed house.
I hadn’t inherited much of her magik. She and Kirsten got along great, trading recipes—for both food and drugs—and spells. When we were all together, I usually felt like a third wheel.
After I finished my first tart, she refilled my glass and asked, “So, what brings you out here, or is this visit simply for the pleasure of my company?”
I lifted my glass and clinked it against hers. “Right on the money. The pleasure of your company. It’s been a hell of a week—murder and mayhem and white slavery—and this is the best place I know for peace and quiet.”
“Who’s being mean to you?” she asked. “Do you need me to beat them up?”
“I think I can handle that part, but do you have an extra boat anchor if I haul the bodies up here some night?”
“I can probably scrounge one up. What’s going on?”
I told her about the drugs and the gang war, and all the human trafficking I was running into. As I spilled out my tale of woe, I realized that the slave trade was what bothered me the most.
“It just breaks my heart,” I said. “Not just the young ones, but the older women who have become resigned to the abuse. We rescue them, and they don’t believe it. And many of them fall right back into it.”
“Professional victims,” Mom said. She held up her hand to stop my protest. “I’m not saying that they don’t deserve sympathy, and someone should do something for them. Break the cycle. But in our society, the government doesn’t give a damn, the corporations could care less, and the Magi are too self-absorbed to care about anything but their pleasures and their power.”
She leaned forward and refilled my glass again, then her own. “Dani, humans and the Magi want to blame all of society’s problems on the Rifters, but the Rifters didn’t bring drugs, murder, and slavery to earth. That shit was here already. But you watch your ass, girl. A lot of things are going to get worse.”
That was strange for her to say. My mom was a perpetual 0ptimist, or as she liked to put it, a realistic optimist.
“What makes you say that?”
“Your grandmother stopped by the other day. Counting my boss and you, that’s three visitors this month. The entire summer, the only people I saw were you and Kirsten and a few hundred idiot tourists trying to drown themselves.”
My grandmother? “What did Olivia want?”
“Just checking in to make sure I’m doing okay. You know, her once-a-decade drop-in to chat. Wanted to know how you’re doing, and whether my wards could withstand a demon horde or a magikal assault. Whether I had any co
ntingency plans for taking you to Iceland in case of a war. You know, just your normal chit-chat over tea and crumpets.”
I stared at her, trying to figure out if she was joking. “And what did you tell her?”
“That I would appreciate a few days’ warning if I did have to relocate to Iceland. You know, at least long enough to locate you and ask you to come along. She said she’d try.”
“You’re not joking.”
She shook her head. “Without actually saying anything, Olivia warned me that the Ten aren’t on the friendliest of terms with each other right now.”
“Wonderful.”
“Yes, and as you told me about your current problems, I heard mention of Novak and Akiyama, in addition to several Families of the Hundred. So, keep your eyes and ears open, and listen more than you talk.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When it was time for me to go, she walked me out to my bike.
“Tell Kirsten I have a bushel of crabapples for her, but she needs to come get them before the end of the week.”
Homemade apple jelly. “I can carry them on the back of my bike.”
“But then I wouldn’t get to see Kirsten. Off with you.”
Chapter 24
Novak was waiting for me when I showed up at Janice Iranski’s apartment building at six o’clock in the morning. No sooner had I turned off my bike than Whittaker drove up.
“The car’s over there,” I told him when he got out of his official vehicle.
We walked over to Sarah Benning’s fancy sports car. He took a look at the license plate.
“Yep, that’s hers,” he said, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “Open it up.”
I put on my own gloves and cast a spell that disabled the security system, then opened the driver’s side door. The magitek security system wouldn’t stop a magitek thief for a minute, but I wasn’t going to tell Justus Benning that. We found Sarah’s clarinet and purse inside.
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