by SM Reine
“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 beating 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.
24
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.”
25
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.
Then I clicked the video. I fully expected it to be surveillance of my apartment, or maybe The Pit.
But the gray picture that appeared on the screen was of Suzy’s house.
I felt a wave of shock at the sight of her familiar couches and coffee table. Cat was lying on one of her chairs, kneading a blanket in his paws. The windows were open—Suzy hadn’t been burgled yet. Clicking the fast-forward button, I watched Cat sleep at four times normal speed, his furry flank rising and falling rapidly. He got up, licked his ass, went back to sleep on a couch. Night fell outside. Cat chased a fly and then disappeared.
Motion flashed outside Suzy’s window, but the video was going too quickly for me to be able to tell what it was. I resumed normal speed. Reversed. Hit play.
A human figure crossed through the shadows outside.
I watched the next five minutes with my breath stuck in my throat. The intruder didn’t come through that window. She came in somewhere off screen and walked through the living room with her back to the camera. Fished around under the coffee table, searched Suzy’s filing cabinet.
Then the intruder turned as if she could feel the camera looking at her.
I paused the video.
Her face was square and framed with heavy brown hair. Her lips were full. I would know—I’d kissed those lips.
Isobel had broken into Suzy’s house.
As the video continued, I watched Isobel break into Suzy’s gun safe. She grabbed the Glock. It didn’t look like she was comfortable with firearms; she seemed to accidentally eject the magazine and struggled to reinsert it.
But then she turned suddenly, as if responding to a noise that the footage didn’t pick up. A man walked into the frame. He had a slender figure, long black hair, studded leather jacket—an incubus?
Isobel’s mouth moved silently. She aimed the gun.
He flashed across the screen, moving toward her with superhuman speed.
She fired. The muzzle flashed. Black blood spurted from the back of her assailant’s jacket.
And that was all of the footage.
I replayed it to make sure, searched for other files on the disc, but that was it. There had to be more after that—it just wasn’t on the CD.
I ejected the disc and checked the date again.
It was the day before Erin’s murder. Two days before I’d hunted down Isobel.
But there she was, breaking into Suzy’s house, caught on footage from a security camera that I was pretty sure didn’t belong to Suzy. The OPA had put surveillance in her house. I looked over my shoulder, thinking I’d see a guy in a black suit standing over me, and didn’t find anything. I was going to have to search my whole fucking apartment for cameras and microphones before I took another shower.
I didn’t put the disc back in. The image of Isobel struggling with a demon was still frozen on the screen even though I’d removed the CD.
The disc had belonged to my case, but been deliberately damaged by Eduardo and Joey. Why? What was it about Isobel’s fight with the incubus that they didn’t want anyone to know? Or was it the information that exonerated Suzy that they were trying to hide?
Because this definitely exonerated her—and implicated someone else entirely. Someone I never would have suspected.
Suzy had said that the Glock had been stolen from her house, and here Isobel was, doing the stealing. That Glock had appeared in my living room the night that Erin died.
I slammed the laptop shut and left the apartment.
+ + +
The evening was growing long by the time I reached Helltown. I parked the Charger in the Walmart lot again before heading under the invisible arch.
This time, I thought to duck rather than getting a femur to the face.
The streets of Helltown were just as busy as the last time I’d been there—maybe even busier. It was getting late. The
weaker demons were trying to get inside before night fell, and the stronger demons were preparing for another night of fun. A night that I didn’t plan on sticking around to see.
I’d gone in through the entrance closest to the Temple of the Hand of Death, and I sprinted straight there without looking back. I had to move through shadows to reach it. Every time I left direct sunlight, I felt a chill rake down my spine. Felt like eyes on my back. Creatures watching me. Waiting for a chance to feed. Maybe even Silver Needles closing in to try to kill me again.
I didn’t plan on giving them a chance.
The front door of the Temple of the Hand of Death hung off its hinges. And Isobel’s RV was parked next to the empty gas pumps.
Drawing my Desert Eagle, I threw open the door to her RV and checked inside. There was nothing there but the beaded curtains. No sign of a struggle—but no sign of Isobel’s whereabouts either.
I kept the gun aimed at the ground as I moved into the temple. There were no electric lights inside, so the shadows were deep. An oil lamp left smoky smears on the wall and didn’t penetrate the darkness all the way back to the altar. But it was enough light for me to see that the teenage priestess was sprawled on the floor in a mess of velvet skirts and blood. What had Isobel called her? Ann?
She stirred as I dropped to her side. She wasn’t dead. Thank God.
I holstered the gun. “Are you okay?”
“What do you think?” She pushed her skirts aside to reveal the hilt of a dagger jutting from her fleshy leg. She had been stabbed. My stomach lurched at the sight of it.
She needed medical support. An ambulance. The kind of help that couldn’t come into Helltown.
“Are you alone here?” I asked.
“I am now,” Ann said. She sat straight up, scanning the ground surrounding her. When her gaze fell on the stone scepter that had fallen a few feet away, she immediately seized it. Hugged it to her chest. “They took Isobel.” Still clutching the scepter tightly, the girl yanked the knife out of her thigh.