“Jason Mathison.” The wolf put his hands in his pockets. “I’ve been going out with his stepdaughter for about a month. His wife is pregnant. She’s going to have a son in a couple of months. She’s Normal. He’s an elf.”
Jack frowned, stepping inside the house. It looked like a regular house, nothing strange, except he could already sense that creepy sense of stillness. Quiet where there should be noise and life. “Jason Mathison. I know that name.”
“Shield Security Consulting,” Selina murmured.
He blinked. “They installed my security system at home, using bespelled talismans because I have no magic.”
“Mine, too. The electronic system, that is. I do the shields myself.” Selina turned to Alex. “You said the shields were down when you got here?”
A bathroom off the hallway was where the carnage started. It looked like Mathison had been shot there and dragged to the bedroom, a thick blood trail pointing the way.
“Yeah, which has never happened before.” Puzzlement filled the teen’s voice. “Even when he knows I’m coming over, I have to wait on the porch for him to open the shield circle and let me in.”
The bedroom was the same as before. Only worse. The wreckage was just as bad, the splattered blood, the body draped facedown on the bed, the twin holes ripped into the neck, flesh festering from the application of iron.
But this time Jack recognized the face that went with those lifeless eyes. He’d known this man, had worked with him to secure his house even against powerful Magickal beings. It was bitterly ironic that someone who specialized in security would be killed after his house was broken into. Sickness coated his stomach, but he pushed aside personal reaction.
Sirens approached outside, growing louder by the second. Selina turned for the door. “I’ll meet them outside, get the perimeter sealed off. Tess should be here soon to start processing.”
People began trickling into the house. Uniformed officers, a couple of agents in FBI jackets. Jack directed them to various rooms. Alex faded into the background, wandering around the place, not saying much. He eased closer when Selina came back a few minutes later. “It looks like he entered and left through the back door.”
Approaching them, Alex pitched his voice low. “Look, I’ve been here before several times, and there’s a couple of differences I sense that you should know about.”
Selina arched her eyebrows. “What’s that?”
“Well, some of it might be the cops here, but maybe not.” He frowned, shook his head. “Two things. First, I sense a vampire male. One that I’ve ... met before, but I can’t place where.”
“The killer is a male vampire.” Jack’s heart thumped at the thought that Alex might know something they could work with, but how a sense could help them, he wasn’t sure. He’d have the teen walk the perimeter of the house and see if he could pick up the scent again. Considering vampires could fly if they half-shifted, Jack had his doubts the trail would lead anywhere but a dead end. This murderer had been too smart for something so easy to give him away. They couldn’t overlook the possibility, though. “And the second thing?”
“When we came through the house the second time ...” Alex lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. “I sense a Normal male came through the house.”
“I’m a Normal male.”
“Not you. I know your essence, and none of the other men here are Normals.” Alex shook his head. “That’s all I’ve got. Someone was here that I’ve never sensed before. I don’t know if it’ll help at all in your investigation, but ... I sense a Normal male.”
“And I see one.”
The drizzle splashed down on the glass of a sunroom at the end of the hall, but Selina still caught a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. A man stared at her through the glass for just a moment before he turned and fled.
“Don’t move! Stay right where you are.”
He didn’t, of course. He ran as if someone had lit his ass on fire.
“Laramie, cut him off!” She didn’t wait to see if he did as she said. He’d do his job, and she knew it. Her heart leapt into a gallop, and she charged down the hall toward the man. She pulled her weapon and slammed through the glass door on the sunroom, bursting through it so hard it crashed against the side of the house.
Sprinting around the detached garage, she saw the man hopping the back fence.
“Freeze! Seattle PD! Stop and put your hands up.”
Yeah, as if that ever really worked, but it was police protocol to give fair warning before you tackled someone’s ass to the ground and made him eat pavement.
Her heart pounded in her ears as she raced for the fence, grabbed the top, and used a small spell to propel herself over it. She hit the alley beyond at a dead run, sweat pouring down her skin. Rain plastered her clothes to her body, dripping down her face and clouding her vision. Muscles screeched a protest as she pushed for more speed, but she ignored the discomfort. If this son of a bitch turned out to be an innocent bystander who knew nothing, she’d kick his ass.
There. A flash of his dark coat as he went around the corner of a house.
“Freeze!” Jack bellowed as he came up a side street. No luck cutting anyone off.
“Take the north side. I’ll go south.” She spit out the words, her breathing ragged. They split in different directions, Selina following the suspect directly, Jack speeding around the opposite corner to try to cut the man off again.
It was all Selina could do not to fire off a stunning spell, but there could be Normals watching, and she couldn’t risk the exposure. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Holding out her free hand, she flicked off a tiny spark of magic that brought down a pile of trash cans in front of their suspect. He tripped and stumbled over them.
Jack rounded the corner, coming from the opposite direction, and she knew they had him trapped. A fierce smile curved her lips and she kicked in a little more speed, closing the space between them. Alex bounded past her, caught the man easily, and grabbed him by the front of the shirt. Lifting him with one hand, he slammed him against a fence. The look on the kid’s face could chill the blood.
Selina and Jack closed in, tucking their weapons away. Jack pulled out his cuffs from the holster on his belt. “Put him down, Alex.”
The suspect kicked and wriggled, but there was no way a Normal could overpower a werewolf. Alex thunked the man on the ground, holding him while Jack slapped the cuffs on. “Subtle, Nemov.”
Alex had the good grace to look sheepish. “Yeah, you’re right. Don’t tell Merek and Chloe. Or Aunt Millie. It’s not my best day today.”
“I didn’t do nothin’!” the Normal man whined, struggling against Jack, who easily controlled the movements, pushing him until his back was against a fence and they had him surrounded.
Alex snorted and gave the man a hard look. “Yeah, then why do you have Jason’s coat on?”
The suspect’s jaw jutted pugnaciously, dirt so ingrained in his skin that the rain wasn’t having much effect. His filthy hair dripped more dirt. Homeless, probably. Boozer, for sure. “He ain’t gonna need it no more. He’s dead.”
Selina got in his face, wishing she hadn’t when she got a whiff of him, but she refused to back down. She narrowed her eyes to dangerous slits. “How’d you know he was dead if you didn’t do anything?”
The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “No crime against lookin’.”
“Stealing is a crime.” She fingered the coat, glad she was wearing gloves. “Resisting arrest is a crime. Obstructing justice is a crime. Withholding evidence in a police investigation is a crime. Start talking.”
His jaw worked. “You’ll think I’m crazy. Or drunk.”
“Try me.” She straightened back into cleaner air. The man hadn’t bathed in at least a month. “I’ve heard a lot of crazy things from drunk people over the years. Doesn’t mean they’re lying.”
He swallowed. “I saw a man.”
“Yeah, what kind of man?” She folded her arms. “What did
he look like?”
“He was a tall, white guy with red hair.” He went to lift his cuffed hand, but twisted oddly as his other hand came along for the ride. “Really red.”
“And? When do we get to the drunk-crazy part?” She put a subtle truth spell behind the question, a demand for answers that most humans wouldn’t be able to avoid or ignore. It would compel all but the most stubborn of minds.
The Normal’s eyes glazed for a moment as the spell hit him. “He had ... fangs. I know it sounds nuts, but I ain’t had a drink all day.” He shook his head. “Maybe they were caps or something, because they looked like real teeth and not some Halloween costume. But the dead guy had holes in his neck like he’d been sucked—bitten—whatever.”
“Yeah, probably caps, but that’s helpful. Some vampire wannabe.” She glanced at Jack, who was already on the phone, calling for a telepath to come clean up the guy’s memories. “All right, we’re going to have one of our agents get you some food and whatever you need. Thanks so much for your help.”
“I’m not crazy.” There was a sad note of pleading in the homeless man’s voice.
“I believe you. This will help with our investigation.” She gave him a nod. “You did good.”
She took a couple of steps away, close enough the guy wouldn’t be able to escape if he tried anything, but far enough that he wouldn’t be able to overhear.
“Gregor.” Selina and Alex said it at the same time. The bright red hair, vampire, penchant for killing people. There was only one person who met that description. Gregor—a jack-of-all-trades mercenary, bodyguard, and assassin. Deadly, enigmatic, and expert at slipping through law enforcement’s fingers. Everyone on the force in Seattle had taken a swipe at him at least once. If she’d known Bess’s killer all this time, she thought she might be sick.
“I knew I’d sensed that vampire male before.” Alex’s expression was carefully blank, his face pale under his tan. “He was there. When they put a silver bullet in me. And when my father was killed. Now he killed Jason, too?”
She closed her eyes and let her chin drop to her chest. Everything about this case was determined to slam daggers into her soul, reminding her that if she’d caught this guy thirty years ago, she’d have saved so many lives. “Let’s bring Gregor in and ask him what he was doing here. If we can even catch him.”
8
The days were starting to blur together for Jack. Too little sleep and too much time spent twisting every piece of information to try to make them all make sense somehow. They had another victim and were still spinning their wheels. It was maddening.
Peyton was working on tracking down the elusive Gregor. They were still waiting for the New Orleans files. As Jack had suspected, Hurricane Katrina had messed with where they stored the old boxes of cold cases, and they’d been piled in some warehouse since, never reorganized. Luca had finally sent a junior field agent to work with the Magickals down there to sift through and find what they needed. What a snafu.
Grit burned Jack’s eyes as he poured two mugs of liquid caffeine from the espresso machine in the office lounge—one cup for him and one for Selina. She’d be in soon, and anticipation quickened his blood, despite the fact that he’d seen her only hours before, when he’d slipped out of her bed to head home and get ready for the day. He wouldn’t have minded showering at her place and driving in together, but she’d been more than a little resistant to the idea since they started this affair. She liked her boundaries.
He didn’t get why that irked him so much. Most of the time, he was a keep-it-light kind of guy when it came to women. Sure, they were friends, lovers, co-workers, but his wife had pretty much taken any chance of him committing to a real relationship with her when she died. What he had going with Selina should be perfect. He liked being with her, the sex was amazing, and she’d been clear from the start that this was a temporary affair. It would probably end when this case did and she went back to the Seattle PD. So why the hell did he want to push her for more than that? He knew he would never do it, but the temptation was there. He couldn’t even begin to explain it, didn’t even want to try to, so he put it from his mind. Something to think about later.
“Mornin’, Jack.”
“Delta.” He smiled at a blond agent who’d transferred to the Seattle office a couple of months before. Gorgeous vampire, short, but stacked like a brick house.
He wasn’t interested. A few weeks ago, he’d considered asking her out, but now he didn’t have even a smidgeon of desire for that kind of pursuit.
Catching sight of a slender elf walking past the windowed walls of the break room, her stride purposeful, as if she were on a mission, he dismissed the pretty blonde from his mind and followed Selina.
“Grayson,” he called, and she spun around to face him.
She didn’t bother with pleasantries, just dove into speech. “You know, thirty years is a long time for a psycho to go straight.”
Selina opened the door to his office and waved him in, which made him grin. She was lucky he wasn’t the kind of man who felt the need to posture and prove his manhood.
Handing her a cup of coffee, he dropped into his chair and leaned back, rolling her comment over in his head. “I suppose it is, but Magickals like our guy have five centuries, right? Three decades wouldn’t be that long to wait for round two.”
“I don’t know. What we’re dealing with is a compulsion, a sickness. It’s not about thinking, Well, if I have five hundred years, every thirty or so is a nice gap. It’s about playing out that compulsion over and over again.” She settled into her usual chair opposite his desk, dropped her bag to the floor, and crossed her legs.
Damn, he loved her legs. He had to concentrate to keep his gaze on her face. Those legs had been tangled with his while they slept every night. He’d never have pegged her for a cuddler, but he wasn’t about to complain when it meant he had her soft and naked in his arms. Not when it let him think about something other than this total bitch of a case.
She made an impatient gesture. “I haven’t been able to get that out of my head. Why here, and why now? But then I thought ... what if it wasn’t just here and now?”
“Right.” He went with that line of thinking quickly enough, excitement humming through him. “What if there have been killings in between, somewhere else? What if New Orleans wasn’t even his first stop? Maybe we’re only picking this up now because we have you—someone who’s dealt with this before.”
“And Merek by extension, who’d heard me talk about it with Theodore.” She seemed to realize she had coffee in her hand and took a deep swig.
He laced his fingers over his belly, turning his head to look at the whiteboard on his wall. The three victims’ pictures were up there, along with stats and time lines. One Normal, two Magickals. So far. He glanced at Selina. “You think we need to crawl through the databases and look for similarities?”
“Yeah, I do.” She nodded decisively. “What if it was missed before because Magickals try so hard to avoid attracting Normal attention? Maybe one or two deaths occurring in a particular way wouldn’t garner the attention that four would. What if the combination of Normal and Magickal victims has made him impossible to trace?”
“Could be. Our first victim had cut ties with her Magickal husband after she was divorced, which is why she was overlooked until I asked Rick.” The wheels in his head started spinning with more possibilities, further inquiries to look into. “Our killer may not even have stayed in this country, making it even harder to connect the dots. But we have Interpol now, and we can contact them as well.”
“Good. We should do that.”
Many hours and multiple cups of coffee later, they had some answers, and they weren’t good. Thousands of crime scene descriptions and photographs had scrolled by on their computer screens. They’d looked at everything they could get their hands on. Normal and Magickal divisions. Police departments for every major American city, NSA, CIA, FBI, Interpol, Scotland Yard. They’d even looked
through the Canadian Mounties’ files. Or at least the ones that had been digitized. Jack wasn’t quite certain how Luca got the unit access to all the information that he did, but Jack suspected it might not be through entirely legal or legitimate channels. Then again, anything to do with magic and Magickal crimes wasn’t entirely aboveboard. It was the nature of the beast.
They’d hit pay dirt with the Mounties, the Normal side of the FBI, and a few American PDs. The photos had been eerily familiar, the crimes unsolved, and long considered cold cases. Just like in New Orleans. Just like their murders in Seattle.
“Five cities in the last thirty years.” Selina sat back in her chair, her expression stunned, even though the idea to check into this had been hers.
“There may be even more than this.” He had to say it out loud, but his stomach churned all the same. It wasn’t the images that bothered him—he’d seen worse—it was that no one had put the pieces together until just now. Thirty years of unsolved crimes, thirty years of people dying because no one thought to check into Normal victims that hadn’t been flagged as obvious Magickal crimes and taken over by the Magickal divisions. He sighed and let his head drop back for a moment. “I’ll have some people keep digging, see if they find more, but this gives us something to go on. We have to start somewhere.”
“Yeah.” But she looked as grim as he felt. “We need those New Orleans files. I want to go back over them, too. See if I missed anything now that we have this new data.”
All of the other cities had had five deaths, not four. According to the information they now possessed, New Orleans was the anomaly, not the rule.
“Shit. We need to look into Gregor’s history, see how many of these cities he’s been in, when, and if we can tie him to any of the victims.” He rubbed a hand down his face, his eyes burning from staring at a computer screen for so long. While he was glad to have more data to work with, he wasn’t happy that over two dozen people had died before he’d even come on the case. This bastard was careful, he was smart, and he was damn good at covering his tracks. And he’d been perfecting his technique for decades.
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