The Judah Black Novels: Boxed Set of books 1-3

by E. A. Copen

  Once the computer finally booted up, I went about logging into all the proper BSI databases to file my paperwork, pull files and get all the information necessary so I could brief my team. This was the glorious and fun-filled life of any investigator. Ninety percent of the job was done behind a desk, on a computer, filling out redundant forms.

  The first thing I had to do was the most important. I had to file all the necessary paperwork through BSI’s online database that confirmed I was taking over the case. Until I did that, BSI had no record of what I was doing and I couldn’t get paid for my time. In retrospect, I should have filed the papers before talking to Crux and Sven so that I could claim the forty minutes or so I spent with them in the interrogation room, too. But doing that particular bit of paperwork was something I was dreading.

  A foreign vampire belonging to a prominent and powerful clan had been murdered on my watch. Not only that, but another vampire family, the Kelleys, was tangled up in it. And once I mentioned that my main witness was Crux Continelli, son of the Stryx clan leader, BSI would send a specialist down to stand over my shoulder and make sure I was handling things well.

  The government didn’t trust anyone, least of all its own employees. Once the story hit the news, they’d select someone to handle damage control. The last thing the American government needed was to spark outrage across the Atlantic at how we were handling such a case. Once I filed the paperwork, it would start a timer. Within twenty-four hours, someone from Washington would be standing in my office, telling me how to do my job while only managing to get in my way. It was not something I was looking forward to.

  But, if I wanted to eat, getting paid was a necessary evil. Remember how important eating is?

  After filing the paperwork, I hit the research, pulling together everything I could on Harry, Crux and Sven. Considering how high they were in the Stryx hierarchy and foreign citizens and, therefore, not required to register with BSI, I didn’t find much except for public records. Harry’s film company, though, had an American subsidiary, and that’s where I was able to find dirt on him.

  The Continelli Climax Corporation, better known as Triple-C, was a multi-national corporation with enterprises in Italy, New York and Greece. On paper, Harry was a millionaire. He would have been expected to contribute a large part of his income to the family, and his financial statements showed he was doing his part. Harry was making once a month donations to the Stryx Medical Needs non-profit fund. When I put his information into the INTERPOL database, though, several flags came up. As it turns out, he’d been investigated multiple times for allegations of human trafficking, drug possession, various sexual assaults... INTERPOL was never able to pin anything on him. Mishandled evidence, disappearing witnesses and withdrawn charges made him impossible to hold. The guy was slimy, no two ways about it. I felt dirty just reading about him.

  Crux was cleaner but no less suspicious. While he’d never faced any charges, his name came up in depositions as an alibi for Harry too many times to keep from rubbing me the wrong way. In fact, it looked like the two of them often served as each other’s alibis whenever questioned. Never married, childless and without any strong connections other than to Harry and a few other seedy personalities, Crux stuck out of a Stryx family line-up like a chicken in a peacock parade. While the rest of the Stryx lived life in high society, dining with queens and presidents, Crux partied with strippers and toured the world on private jets and a cruise ship owned by daddy. Knowing he was an entitled brat, even on paper, just made me hate him more.

  But the real discovery didn’t come from reading up on the Stryx. It happened when I pulled Aisling’s financial records. Several public notices came up, showing KK Enterprises, the venture behind the club, was in deep with creditors. The club was hemorrhaging money and had been for months. If things didn’t turn around soon, Aisling would be filing for bankruptcy. No wonder Kim was letting Harry film there, I thought. If the contract included kickbacks from the film, it would help Kim keep the lights on.

  But why isn’t daddy fronting you the cash?

  The Kelleys were filthy rich. Marcus Kelley’s pharmaceutical company, Fitz Pharmaceuticals, had an exclusive contract with BSI to provide all manner of medical supplies and testing for supernaturals. Whenever BSI used a blood test to determine if someone was, indeed, a supernatural, it was Fitz’s test they used. Kim was the daughter of a billionaire. Why was Marcus just standing by and watching his darling daughter’s enterprise sink into failure?

  I went back six months of financial reporting before I found the answer. I’d always thought requiring supernaturally owned businesses to file monthly financial statements with BSI was superfluous but, in this case, it was helpful. Six months before, right around the time Aisling’s financial troubles got started, the club took on two extra-large expenses. The first was a once a month donation to Romanvicorp, which BSI flagged as an Upyri venture. The Upyri were Eastern European vampires, a younger clan but still a force to be reckoned with. They’d been taking small bites out of Stryx territory in a cold war for years.

  The second new debt was smaller but no less important. Those checks for roughly fifteen thousand dollars a month went straight to the Stryx.

  “What the hell?” I said out loud, leaning in closer to my screen. Why had she taken a loan from both clans? It was dangerous dealing. If even one side found out she was making deals with the other, things could get messy for Kim, and fast. No wonder Marcus had distanced himself from his daughter’s business.

  After reading through the files, I threw together a quick bulleted list of things I needed the team to do. I needed Reed’s take on whether there was some kind of demon or spirit behind this. At least a signed deposition from him as a consultant backing my case would be helpful. It was my way of covering my ass at the local level.

  I’d called in a mental health worker, thinking she could help me talk to Sven. Just from my brief interaction with him, I felt it was obvious he suffered from some sort of delay or difficulty. If it turned out my case hinged on his words, I needed to know his testimony was solid.

  The cops would help me check in with the people who fit the profile and Tindall, his partner, Quincy, and I would do the rest.

  While trying to think of another bullet point, I glanced up from my desk, my eyes falling on the corkboard full of smiling faces. My will wavered and my heart sank as I remembered this homicide wasn’t the only case on my desk. The office was overflowing with smaller but still important cases. Those missing fae were just the tip of the iceberg. I still had unregistered supernaturals in the reservation to deal with. There were supernaturals illegally having children without filing for the proper permits, and I needed to go get the paperwork started to make sure all those kids were documented, the parents fined. Add in the thefts, property damage complaints and fraud accusations that crossed my desk and my job was a never-ending nightmare. Tindall and the rest of the force helped but a lot of it was up to me. Many cities had whole departments to do the job I was doing alone. Work was an ocean and I was drowning in it.

  And then there was my secret case, the one I couldn’t tell anyone about. As I thought of it, my hand drifted toward the top drawer of my desk, checking to make sure it was locked, its contents undisturbed. Last year, I’d chased down a pair of wendigoes, one of which happened to be pregnant. She also happened to be Sal’s ex-wife. The stress of the situation ultimately sent Zoe Matthias into labor and complications meant I had to make a choice that still haunted my nightmares.

  Zoe had begged me to save her child. Her frail and white hands gripped my shirt, pulling, pleading for me to cut her open and save the child before I burned her body. I didn’t want to. But I didn’t want another innocent child to die because of me, either.

  My hands shook as I took up the sterile scalpel I’d fished out of the emergency surgical kit in Andre LeDuc’s bedroom. Cutting into her with it was so easy, so painfully, sickeningly easy. I killed her and I saved the child only to have Father Ree
d snatch it away and carry it to parts unknown.

  Because the child was undocumented, because going forward with an official case would have forced me to put to light my part in Zoe’s death and the child’s kidnapping, and because Reed was hiding behind the promise of legal protection from the Church, I had no choice but to pursue the case in secret. Reed would tell me nothing. For so long, I had nothing to go on, no leads. Then, Mara showed up.

  I’d never seen someone so good with tracking magick. With a little preparation, I could scry using a map. If I had blood or hair from the person I was looking for, I could even narrow their location down to a few city blocks if I was particularly well focused. Mara blew me out of the water. Just by holding an item in her hand the other person had touched, she could tap into their senses, feel what they felt, smell what they smelled. Sometimes, she could even see what they saw. More recently, she’d been working with bilocation which allowed her to even project a version of herself psychically across the room. If she got good, she would even be able to do it further.

  With a map in front of her, I’d seen her point out streets and follow people’s movements with her finger, tracking them in real time. She was a human GPS unit. Her skill would be invaluable when she made it into BSI, something I intended to make sure happened for her.

  For months now, I’d been debating bringing her into the secret, off the books case. From the original crime scene at the caves, police had recovered boxes upon boxes of evidence. It took me months to sift through it all before I found what I was looking for: a scrap of bloodstained, white silk sheets. The fabric was beaten and torn but there was no mistaking it. The scrap matched the bedsheets Zoe had been lying on when she delivered a healthy baby girl.

  I intertwined my fingers around the drawer handle, remembering how easily Mara had found me with her tracking spell. To me, the scrap of sheet was almost useless. While I could throw together a tracking spell, it wouldn’t be as good as Mara’s. She was a natural. But she was also a civilian. I’d already crossed the line asking her to track the missing fae, but I hadn’t had to take anything to do that. Everything I’d given her to work with was freely given by friends or relatives of the missing people. Moreover, I hadn’t told her exactly what she was looking for, which kept her out of the case on an official level.

  Prior to sitting in my locked drawer, the scrap had been in a secure evidence locker where it was supposed to stay, especially since I hadn’t officially signed it out. If it was discovered now, the worst I could expect was a strong reprimand. Once I took it out of the precinct and handed it over to a civilian, I’d face criminal charges. And if I handed Mara a bloody sheet to use in a tracking spell, she’d refuse to help unless I gave her the whole truth, something I didn’t want to do.

  Unless I could get Reed to crack and give me more information, a tracking spell was my only lead to finding Zoe’s baby.

  I left the drawer closed and went to collect my papers. Reed would see reason this time. He had to.

  Chapter Seven

  After grabbing all my things from the printer, I went down the hall to the briefing room. It was one of the nicer rooms in the station because it didn’t see much use. A large rectangular table surrounded by high-backed leather chairs took up most of the room. Large floor to ceiling windows on one wall made up for the cramped space, and all the natural lighting made the room seem bigger. There was a telephone in there for conference calls, but I didn’t think it’d ever been used. A projector box hung from the ceiling, ready to throw its images onto a whiteboard. I didn’t have a presentation or anything fancy, so I left the laptop in my office and decided to rely on the papers I’d printed out. Sometimes, simpler is better.

  By the time I arrived, most of the team had already beaten me there. Daphne Petersen, the mental health professional I’d asked for, gave me a slight nod, pushing her plump cheeks up into a smile. She was a member of Sal’s pack and a student pursuing her master’s degree in chemical dependency. This wasn’t a drug case, and she wasn’t a licensed psychotherapist or criminologist, but I trusted her implicitly. The Silvermoon pack had always been good to me and my family. She would also have the training needed to talk to Sven.

  Next to her stood Morris Quincy, Tindall’s longtime partner. He was an apple-shaped guy, an honest to God, gun-toting, steak-loving Texan and proud of it. He tipped his plastic cowboy hat to me and flashed a smile, adjusting the bolo he wore in place of a tie over his white button down. A lotto scratch-off card was sticking out of his shirt pocket.

  Two uniformed officers, Jenkins and Galloway, stood in the corner with Tindall, all three sipping at their coffees. Father Gideon Reed wasn’t there.

  In a hopeful tone, I asked Tindall, “Did you call Reed?”

  “I left a message on his machine,” Tindall said. “He didn’t pick up.”

  Dammit. Strike one for the home team.

  I went to the head of the table with my stack of papers. “Well, can we get started, then?”

  Everyone took their seats, and I passed out the papers. The conference room door jerked open. All six of us looked up as Gideon Reed stepped in. Broad shouldered with the build of a pro-athlete, he kept his auburn hair trimmed and styled above the ears. It somehow gave him an innocent yet powerful look. Instead of the black cassock I’d often seen him wearing before, he’d donned a pair of blue jeans, long-sleeved black button up and, of course, the stiff white clerical collar.

  He didn’t hesitate at the door or wait to be invited in, not even against the glares of everyone else in the room. Reed just slid in and sat in the first empty chair, the one closest to the door.

  “Better late than never,” Quincy mumbled.

  “Welcome, Father,” I said in my most professional voice as I stepped around the table to offer him a paper personally. He said nothing as he took it. Awkward silence filled the room as I made my way back to the front.

  “Okay,” I said once there. “I’m sure you’ve all heard the news about the murder in Eden. I’ve taken over the case looking for the killer. That’s going to go a lot faster and a lot smoother the more hands I have on deck and the more boots I’ve got on the ground. That’s why you’re here. I’m hoping at the end of this meeting you’ll make yourselves available to participate in a task force to help me put this case to bed fast and easy.”

  I raised a copy of the paper I’d passed around. “The paper in front of you is a dossier on one of the victims, Harold Hardrata, AKA Harold Continelli. He’s one of two things that make this case special. How many of you are familiar with the structure and hierarchy of European vampire clans?”

  Daphne alone lifted her hand after some hesitation.

  I nodded. “That’s okay. It’s why we’re here. One of the two largest and most powerful European clans is the Stryx. They control most of the local vampire covens in western Europe. The family in power among the Stryx at the moment, the Continellis, has been in power since the mid to late seventeen hundreds. As you’ll find on your dossier sheets, Harry wasn’t in line for succession to the title but, rather, was a cousin to Crux Continelli who also happened to be the last person to see Harry alive. Consider him vampire royalty, albeit of the extended variety.”

  Quincy raised his hand.

  “Yes,” I said. “What is it?”

  “While I appreciate the history lesson, darlin’,” Quincy drawled. “What’s that got to do directly with this dirt bag?”

  “Do you know how the first world war started?”

  “Archduke Ferdinand of Hungary was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist secret society,” Daphne answered. “The Black Hand.”

  “Right,” I said and turned, searching the whiteboard tray for a dry erase marker. I found one and immediately began scribbling on the board. “The Hungarians implicated the Serbian government and demanded the Black Hand be brought to justice or else Serbian sovereignty would be nullified. Serbian ally, Russia, was insulted by the move and declared war on the Austria-Hungary empire. At the same tim
e, Hungary secured an alliance with Germany, who was also forced to enter the war. It became Russia and Serbia against Germany and Hungary. France, bound by its treaty with Russia, was obligated to enter the war and declared war on Germany and Hungary. England, who was France’s ally, came to France’s defense against Germany along with all of their colonies. Japan had a military agreement with England, forcing them into the war, too.”

  Quincy began tapping his fingers on the table. “I still don’t see how this is related.”

  “The assassination is known as the shot heard round the world for a reason,” I answered, finishing the drawing. “The death of one man, perpetrated and carried out by just one other, activated a domino of global treaties and alliances, forcing the whole world to war.”

  I stepped back from the drawing and pointed to the balloon I’d drawn in the center filled with Harry Continelli’s name. “Harry is our archduke. The Stryx are bound by ancient rights and customs to declare a blood debt.” I slid the marker up a connecting line to Kim Kelley’s name. “Kim Kelley is being implicated, not just by witnesses, but now on television by Sheriff Maude. That’s a fire we didn’t need since the Kelleys owe money to...” I slid the marker up another line, “the Upyri Clan based in Eastern Russia. They also owe money to the Stryx.”

  Tindall let out a quiet curse. “If that goes public, it could ruin her.”

  “If the debt doesn’t ruin her first,” I pointed out. “But it creates a potential powder keg situation. The Stryx have agreements with clans and covens as far away as Peru. While the vampires don’t have political lines and centralized governments to wage an organized war, they aren’t known for their knitting circles, people.”