by SM Reine
“Would have made your job easier, huh?” I asked.
He looked surprised. “I might have been able to help you.”
“I don’t think there’s any helping me now.” It wasn’t about me anyway. Even if he could have waved his hand and made the problem disappear, it wouldn’t have fixed anything for Erin.
“You’re a good agent, Cèsar. I don’t have many good agents under me—and fewer that I can trust. I’d hate to lose you.”
Even though I’d killed a woman? “I’ve always appreciated my job,” I said cautiously. “But you didn’t send anyone to pick me up from the 77th Street station. I figured you’d written me off.”
He shrugged. “The paperwork takes time. You never would have gone to trial.”
I didn’t know what to say about that. I opened my mouth then shut it.
A man wearing a black suit and tie stepped into the doorway. He caught Fritz’s eye. My boss stood.
“Finish your drink,” he said. “I have a phone conference I can’t miss.”
What was more important than a fugitive agent showing up at his door?
As if he could read my mind, Fritz said, “There’s been new evidence in your case. They’re debriefing me on it now.” He gave me a sideways smile. “With this new development, I’m sure the meeting won’t last long.”
I didn’t see anything amusing about it. My fingers tightened on the snifter hard enough that the pads went white.
Fritz followed his security guard or assistant or whatever into the kitchen. I could see through the doorway that Fritz’s kitchen was as nice as the rest of his house. Marble countertops, big island thing, cast iron cookware hanging from the rack. There was a freaking waterfall on the back wall.
I wasn’t sure how long it would be until the Union came to take me away, but I felt antsy, like I was going to get jumped at any moment. I paced the room, set the brandy on his antique bureau, checked my reflection in the mirror. The week had aged me. I was scruffy and sunburned and dirty.
I scrubbed my jaw and stared at the face of the man who had killed Erin Karwell. That guy deserved everything he was gonna get.
My hip buzzed.
I just about jumped out of my skin at the sensation. Patted my pockets. Felt something hard on the right side.
Domingo’s cell phone. I forgot that I’d been carrying it.
I glanced up at the kitchen. Fritz was still talking with his assistant, outlined in gold by the light through the window. They weren’t watching me. They didn’t notice when I stepped into the hall and answered the cell phone.
“You have to come back, Cèsar.”
Took me a second to recognize Isobel’s voice. She sounded like she was panicking. “Wait, what? Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Agent Takeuchi—she did it, she was there—”
“Slow down, Izzy. What about Suzy? Where was she?”
“I grabbed some of Erin Karwell’s cremains before we ran. I’m sorry, I know it’s gross. But I used it to raise her again.”
“Why would you—”
“Cèsar, you’re as dangerous as a teddy bear. I needed more information.” Isobel plowed on without waiting for me to speak. The reception was bad—her voice crackled, faded, then came back. “—was there that night. At your apartment.”
What she was trying to tell me started to sink in.
“Suzy was there?”
“She was fucking there, Cèsar,” Isobel said. She didn’t seem to have heard me. I was losing her. “Erin saw her.”
It was impossible. No way Suzy would have been hiding that from me, not without a good reason. It didn’t mean she was a killer—it didn’t mean anything.
“Wait, there’s someone—” Isobel began.
The sound crackled, fuzzed, and cut off abruptly.
The call had died.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Fritz’s front gate was closed. It was tall. And there were two black SUVs parked on the other side. The Union had arrived to arrest me, take me to a detention center, make me vanish.
They were going to be disappointed.
I veered off the path, hurtling through the gardens. “Sorry!” I shouted to a gardener as I pulverized his begonias.
There was a tree planted near the wall. It had been trimmed to keep the branches from hanging over the opposite side, but it was easy to climb from the gardens. Domingo and I had climbed a thousand trees to sneak out and party on the weekends, and my muscle memory hadn’t faded. I was over the wall in seconds.
I jumped over the side. Landed hard on my knees. Got up to run.
Hands grabbed my jacket from behind. I swung a right hook as I turned.
It was only Suzy’s lightning-fast reaction time that saved her from getting a face full of fist. She grabbed my wrist and twisted it behind my back. I felt my elbow pop.
“Suzy!”
She forced me to the ground with her grip on my arm. “Shut the fuck up, Cèsar,” she hissed under her breath. “They’re on the other side of that wall.”
Once she was sure I was quiet, she released me and leaned around the corner to look at the SUVs. Her hand rested on her hip where a holster should have been. For the first time, I wondered why she hadn’t been carrying her sidearm. I hadn’t seen her with it in days.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Looking for you.” She showed me a crystal filled with a faint turquoise glow. “Tracking spell. I used the clothes you left at my house as a focus.”
“Why? Because you want to tell me the truth about what happened the night Erin died?”
The blood drained out of her face. “Cèsar—”
“So it’s true.”
Her lips pressed into a thin frown. “Stonecrow?”
I nodded.
She pushed her hair out of her face, closed her eyes, seemed to think silently for a moment. When her eyes opened again, she looked resigned. “You were drunk off your ass, Hawke. You’d been arguing with the waitress outside. When I saw you leave with her, I followed to save you from a drunken one night stand.”
“And then?” I pressed.
“I confronted the two of you in the parking lot outside your place. I told Erin to go home and offered to pay for a cab.” She glanced at me. Then back down. Couldn’t meet my eyes. “You had your tongue halfway down her throat, but you found the oxygen to tell me to fuck off.”
“So you shot her?”
Suzy’s eyes widened. “What? No. I fucked off, like you told me to. I went home.”
“You knew what I’d done this whole time,” I said.
“Of course I did. I’m not stupid, Cèsar. Everyone knows what you did. Everyone fucking saw you leave The Pit with Erin Karwell.”
“If you were so intent on hiding the truth from me, then why did you take Isobel and me to the morgue?”
“I didn’t think Stonecrow would actually be able to talk to the dead. I read her files. I was convinced she was bullshitting you, bullshitting everyone, and that she’d just make something up that made you happy. I didn’t think she’d tell you that you actually…” She stopped talking. Shut her mouth.
My head was swimming. I felt sick.
I didn’t realize I’d sunk into a crouch until her hand dropped onto my shoulder.
“They’re going to arrest you, Cèsar, and who knows what comes after that? We need to get out of here.”
This time, when she grabbed me, I let her. She ran toward the street behind the house. I followed her.
A black SUV stopped at the end of the alley.
She skidded to a stop. Planted both hands in my chest, pushed me the other way.
But when I turned, there was a black SUV there, too. We’d been caught on both sides. Now men were jumping out wearing tactical gear, shouting for us to freeze, drop our guns, put our hands in the air. Suzy was swearing again.
“I’ll talk us out of this,” she said.
I lifted my hands to my shoulders. My heart wasn’t even beat
ing fast now. I wasn’t scared of facing what was to come—what I deserved to deal with.
The men stepped into the alley and circled us. Six of them, all carrying M16s and wearing ballistic helmets. Their flak jackets had bold white letters on the chest: “UKA.” It was a full unit of Union kopides—and they weren’t messing around.
But when Suzy stepped away from me, saying, “He’s not a threat,” the guns aimed at her.
Not me. Suzy.
“Cèsar!” It was Fritz. He stood just outside the ring of armed men. His shirt was buttoned with a perfect double Windsor at his throat. “Approach me slowly,” he said, holding out a hand.
He was talking to me.
I blinked at him. “What?”
“Suzume Takeuchi, you’re under arrest for the murder of Erin Karwell,” said one of the Union men.
“This was the subject of the conference call, Cèsar. They identified the partial fingerprints on the Glock we found in your apartment,” Fritz said, voice shockingly level. “The gun belongs to Agent Takeuchi.”
“Suzy?” I asked.
Suzy was shaking her head, her expression slowly melting into horror. “It was stolen from my house. My broken windows—they took the Glock—”
A man whipped the butt of his M16 into the back of her head. She cried out, but stayed on her feet and tried to escape. Then there were three men on her, forcing her to the ground facedown. Her arms were twisted behind her back. They cuffed her.
Fritz approached with a black bag in hand. He looked grim.
“I’m sorry, Cèsar,” he said. “I know you were close friends.”
Were—past tense. Like Suzy was already gone.
And then he pulled the bag over her head and cinched it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Everything was a blur after that.
I was debriefed in an SUV as they took me home. Fritz rode along in back with me, fielding multiple phone calls, occasionally barking orders over a Bluetooth headset. He told me that I was totally innocent. He told me that my arrest record with the LAPD had already been wiped.
I asked him what would happen to Suzy.
He said, “She’ll be detained.”
Fritz had no offers of leniency for Suzy, no laments about what a trustworthy agent she was and how much he would miss her. Just a stony glare and a comforting pat on my back.
“I don’t think Suzy’s guilty,” I said.
How could I explain that Erin’s ghost had told me I was the murderer? The dead couldn’t lie. Suzy couldn’t be guilty. But I couldn’t say any of that without giving Isobel away, and it wouldn’t explain how Suzy’s Glock had killed the waitress.
“Take the afternoon to relax,” Fritz said, handing a security badge to the Magical Violations building to me. It had my picture on it and no other information. “I look forward to seeing you at the office tomorrow.”
We’d arrived at my apartment complex.
I stepped out. The SUVs left.
And then I was alone.
My home was totally clean now. Erin’s blood had been scrubbed out of the carpet, and the smell of cleaning fluid lingered in the air. My DVDs were intact. Someone had removed my broken appliances. All my potions and poultices were gone. Aside from that, it looked normal.
It didn’t feel like I belonged there.
And I definitely didn’t want to go anywhere near my bathroom.
Instead, I grabbed Domingo’s Charger from the parking lot near Helltown and went for a drive.
Isobel’s RV wasn’t where she had left it. All I found was a drying stain where her septic system had been drained and tire tracks.
She was gone.
I sat behind the wheel of the Charger for a good twenty minutes, thinking back on our last phone call, the way it had cut off. She’d probably been using a cheap burner phone, since a nomad without a job could hardly get a contract with a major carrier. No surprise that there’d been bad reception. The fact that she was gone probably didn’t mean she was in trouble—just that she’d moved on the way she always had. Off to find another source of income.
Not a big deal. That was her modus operandi. Always on the move. Shouldn’t take it personally.
But I did.
Hey, she’d been the one to kiss me, even when she thought I’d killed Erin. Couldn’t blame me for thinking she might be interested in seeing me again now that I was, apparently, an innocent man.
Whatever.
Fritz had told me to take the afternoon off, but I couldn’t imagine returning to my apartment. It was still early in the day, not even noon.
I turned on the Charger and drove to my first day of work since Erin Karwell’s death.
I had the security badge Fritz had given me, but when I walked up to the monolithic white building of the Magical Violations Department, I didn’t really expect it to work. It felt like everyone was staring at me as I walked through the OPA campus, accusing me of murder with their glares—or worse, of betraying Suzy.
No way they’d let me in. Not after the sins I’d committed.
But the card reader flashed green when I waved the badge over it. The door unlocked. I stepped inside, and nobody stopped me.
My desk was in cubeville on the third floor. The exterior walls were giant windows looking out over the campus. Within those windows, everything was surrounded by boring gray half walls. No privacy for the witches working in Magical Violations.
Conversations stopped and heads turned as I headed for my desk by the north windows.
I sat down at my desk to find that all of my belongings had been cleared from the surface—not just mine, but Suzy’s, too. Every last scrap of it. Her cup of pens. Her computer monitor. The pink and yellow sticky notes we had been using to leave obscene jokes for each other. The three little ceramic cats she used to keep next to the stapler.
It looked so empty.
Aniruddha stopped by, tapping a knuckle on my desk. “Hey, Hawke. You’ve probably noticed something’s missing.”
My eyes were drawn to Suzy’s chair, pushed into the corner with nobody sitting in it.
“A few things are missing, yeah,” I said.
“All of your personal effects and work computer were taken down to processing,” Aniruddha said. “Friederling has requested that everything be returned to you as soon as possible. Luckily your effects didn’t get taken to the warehouse yet, but it’s still going to take a couple hours to find everything. You’ll be back to normal by tomorrow morning.”
Normal. Right.
“Thanks, man,” I said.
He glanced at the empty chair, too. “Never would have believed it. Didn’t believe it when they said it was you, either.”
“Thanks,” I said again because I didn’t know what else to say.
“I don’t think you’ll be able to get any work done until your computer is back. You should go for a walk. Get something to eat. Go home.” He shrugged. “Up to you.”
And then Aniruddha left, checking his clipboard for the next item on his to-do list.
Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea, going for a walk. But I wasn’t hungry. I was still jazzed from all the energy potions I’d been mainlining for the last few days and my stomach had cramped into one hard knot.
I headed down to processing instead. It was the office where they tagged and organized evidence before filing it away in a warehouse for the rest of eternity.
I’d only ever seen one woman working the desk there. Ivy was older than dirt but sharper than shale. She worked in a cinder block room in the basement of the OPA office. Its high windows were barred. There were three aisles of tables with evidence waiting to be filed. Everything was tagged with slips of pink, yellow, blue, and green paper.
I’m sure it seemed organized to Ivy, but it looked like insanity to me.
She snapped her fingers when she saw me come through the door and said, “Case File 4457-A. I’m on top of it.”
“Thanks, Ivy,” I said.
Ivy went searching for my
case file number, shuffling between the tables, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, muttering to herself.
A CD on the table next to me caught my eye. It was sitting in the sunlight label-down and casting a rainbow on the wall. It was tagged with green paper.
“What’s green mean?” I asked.
Ivy didn’t even look at me. “Evidence seized by the Union.”
“It gets mixed up in here too?”
“Oh yes. That’s a good way of putting it. ‘Mixed up.’ I swear to you, if they would just take care to label things before sending them to me…” Ivy sniffed delicately. “The Union is the worst about it, too. I just had two boxes of evidence from Costa and Dawes brought to me, and it’s like they were deliberately attempting to obfuscate their evidence! It’ll take days for me to review and sort through it all. Days.”
The disc had been taken from Eduardo and Joey? While Ivy was still distracted, I flipped the disc over. It had been printed with a time and date—the day before Erin’s murder. And Ivy was right about obfuscation. Someone had blacked out the case number with marker.
I grabbed it. Tucked it into my pocket.
Ivy turned around, setting a box on the table in front of me. It had a pink label. Why did the Union get to be green when Magical Violations was freaking pink? “The personal effects taken from your apartment will take longer to return. We need to seize them from the LAPD. Everything you need to do your job should be in here, however.”
I took the box from her. I managed a smile.
“Thanks.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I went home to check out the CD in privacy.
It was the first time I’d taken my work-issued laptop back to my apartment. I sat at my kitchen table as the disc drive whirred to life, nursing a tall glass of chocolate-flavored protein powder and almond milk. It wasn’t sitting well in my cramping stomach, but I needed the sustenance. Anything but another energy potion.
Before I opened the video program, I checked to make sure the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were turned off—didn’t want the laptop reporting to the OPA that I was reviewing stolen evidence. It might have been paranoid, but whatever. I felt like I had earned some paranoia.