Professional. Just the facts, ma’am. Move along, there is nothing to see here. No need to panic.
This wasn’t my first case and this wasn’t my first murder. It was a chance at work that mattered and I would not blow it by making a spectacle of myself.
Fourteen-twelve Griffin resembled a small hill of twisted metal, decorated with chunks of concrete, mixed with dirty marble, piles of shattered bluish glass, and fine gray dust, the result of magic’s fangs grinding at the substance of the building. A backhoe and some other heavy-duty construction vehicle the name of which I didn’t know sat across the street, next to a tent.
A reinforced tunnel led inside the hill, with two shapeshifters standing guard. The one on the left, in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, was a male bouda in his late thirties, lean, dark, with an easy smile. I’d met him before—his name was Stefan and he and I had no problems. Like most boudas, he was good with a knife and occasionally, if his opponents really pissed him off, he would scalp them after he killed them.
The other shapeshifter, on the right, was larger, younger, and dark-eyed, with chestnut hair cropped short. I inhaled his scent. A werejackal.
I came to a halt before the tunnel. Stefan’s eyes widened. “Hey, you.”
“Hey, yourself.”
The jackal gave me a long look. I wore a white long-sleeved shirt, brown pants, and a leather vest over it. The vest’s main advantage was its million pockets. My two Sigs rested in twin shoulder holsters. The jackal’s nose wrinkled. That’s right, I don’t smell like a normal bouda.
“Jim sent me,” I told Stefan.
Stefan raised his eyebrows. “That Jim?”
“Yup. Did Raphael make it back from the cops?” My insides clenched up.
“Nope.”
Thank God. I was a coward. A terrible, sad coward. “I need to examine the scene.”
The jackal finally identified the scent. “You’re…”
Stefan sidestepped, casually stomping on the jackal’s foot with his steel-toed work boot. “She’s point on this case. Come on, Andrea, I’ll show you around.”
He ducked into the tunnel. I took off my shades, tucked them into a vest pocket, and followed him. A dry stone odor greeted us, mixed with something else. The secondary scent coated my tongue and I recognized it: it was the faint, barely perceptible reek of early decomposition.
When magic attacked a tall building, it gnawed on the concrete first, attacking it in random places until it turned into dust. Eventually the building crashed like a rotten tree. Concrete and breakable valuables perished, but metal and other valuable scrap endured. Reclamation companies went into the fallen buildings and salvaged the metal and anything else that could be sold.
Fallen wrecks like this one were unstable. It took a special kind of insanity to burrow into a building that could collapse on your head at any moment. Shapeshifters turned out to be well-suited for it: we were all insane to start with, enhanced strength let us work fast, and Lyc-V-fueled regeneration knitted broken bones together in record time.
Whatever other faults Raphael had, he made sure to keep the broken bones to a bare minimum. The passageway was six feet wide. Thick steel beams and stone pillars supported the roof and metal mesh held back the walls. I was five foot two, but Stefan had six inches on me, and he didn’t have to duck either. A string of electric lights ran along the ceiling, blinking dimly. Dimly was plenty. We paused, letting our eyes adjust to the gloom, and walked on.
The tunnel angled down.
“Tell me about the building,” I asked.
“It fell about seven years after the Shift, right in line with the Georgia Power building behind the Civic Center. Before it crashed, it was a thirty-floor tower of blue glass shaped like a V. Built and owned by Jamar Groves. Jamar was a real estate developer and this baby was his pride and joy. He called it the Blue Heron Building. People told him to evacuate, but he got it into his head that the building wouldn’t fall. He’s still here somewhere.” Stefan nodded at the ceiling. “Or at least his bones are.”
“Went down with his ship?” The stench of decomposition was getting stronger, clinging to the walls of the tunnel like a foul patina.
“Yep. Jamar was a weird guy, apparently.”
“Only poor people are weird. Rich people are eccentric.”
Stefan cracked a grin. “Well, Jamar owned a huge art collection and he had some interesting ideas. For one, he had a Roman-style marble bathhouse on the second floor.”
“So you’re after the marble?” I asked.
“Screw the marble. We’re after the copper plumbing. The whole structure had old-school copper pipes. Copper prices are through the roof right now. Even copper wiring is expensive. Of course, if you smelt the plastic off of it, it’s worth twice as much, but we won’t be doing that. The smoke is toxic as hell, even for us. There is steel, too, but the copper is the real prize. That’s why Raphael bought the building.”
“He bought the building?” A few months ago when Raphael and I were together, he mostly did work for hire: the owners of various buildings would employ him to reclaim the valuables for a percentage of anything he recovered.
Stefan grinned. “We can do that now. Playing with the big boys.”
The tunnel kept going, lower and lower, burrowing down.
“Why dig so deep under the building? Why not come from the side?”
“The Heron is a toppler,” Stefan said. “It went over right above the sixth floor. And it never caught fire.”
Magic took buildings down in different ways. Sometimes the entire inner structure collapsed and the building imploded in a fountain of dust. More often, the magic weakened parts of the building, causing a partial collapse until the whole thing crashed, toppling on its side. Topplers were valuable, especially if they didn’t catch fire, because anything underground had a decent chance of surviving.
“We were trying to get into the basement,” Stefan confirmed. “There are fire-suppression and heating systems down there, generators, access to both freight and regular elevator shafts—that’s a lot of metal right there. And you never know, sometimes you can get computer servers out. Stranger things have survived a fallen building. Here we are.”
Ahead the passageway widened. Stefan flicked the switch and the twin lamps in the ceiling flared into life. We stood in a round chamber, about twenty-five feet wide. Four bodies lay on the dirt floor, two men and two women. At the far wall, a six-foot-tall disk of metal thrust out, revealing a round tunnel filled with darkness—a vault door left ajar.
“A vault?”
Stefan grimaced. “It wasn’t on any of the blueprints and none of the building-related correspondence we had access to mentioned it. We were merrily digging our way up and ran into it last night. We screwed around with the door for about an hour, but we didn’t have the right tools for it, so Raphael posted two guards here and two by the entrance, and we cleared out. A locksmith was supposed to come in this morning and open the sucker. Instead we found this.”
Four people dead, sprawled in the dirt. Last night they had hugged their loved ones before going on their shift. They had made plans. This morning they were my responsibility. Life was a vicious bitch.
“Okay, let me see the log.”
“The what?”
“The crime scene log? The record of who’s been down here and at what time?”
Stefan gave me a blank look.
“Eh…”
God damn it. I took a small notebook and a pen out of my vest pocket and kept my voice friendly. “I tell you what, we’ll start one. Here, I’ll be the first.”
I marked the date at the top of the page and wrote: “Andrea Nash. Time In: 8:12 a.m. Time out: ___________. Purpose: Investigation.” I signed it and passed the notebook and the pen to him.
“Now you write yourself in. When people come to pick up the bodies, you make them write themselves in, too. We need to keep a record of who comes and goes down here.”
I set my crime scene bag on t
he side, opened it, took out gloves and put them on. Next came the Polaroid Instant Digital camera and a stack of paper envelopes for crime scene photos and evidence. Other cameras took better pictures, but magic played havoc with digital data. Sometimes you’d get crystal-clear high-definition images, and sometimes you’d end up with a blurred gray mess or nothing at all. Polaroid Instant Digital cameras produced photos faster than anything else on the market and stored the image digitally as a bonus. It was as close to an instant record of evidence as we could get.
“Have the bodies been moved at all?”
Stefan shrugged his shoulders. “Sylvia found them, she checked their pulses, examined the vault to see that nobody was there, and backed right out of the dig. We know the drill.”
If they knew the drill, they would’ve kept a log. “Where is Sylvia now?”
“With Raphael, being hassled by the cops.”
In legal terms, the Pack had similar rights to a Native American tribe, with the ability to govern itself and enforce its own laws. If a shapeshifter died in the Pack’s territory, it was a Pack matter. These shapeshifters had died within city limits, and the PAD wanted in on the action. They weren’t exactly shapeshifter fans, with a good reason.
We lived in the gray zone between beast and human. Those of us who wanted to remain human lived by the Code, a set of strict rules. The Code was all about discipline and moderation and obeying the chain of command. Sometimes the human brakes failed, and a shapeshifter threw the Code out the window and went loup. Loups were sadistic, murderous freaks. They reveled in killing, cannibalism, and every other violent perversity their insane brains could think up. The Pack put them down with extreme prejudice, but that didn’t keep the PAD from viewing every shapeshifter as a potential spree killer. Whenever a shapeshifter murder occurred in the city, they tried to muscle in on it.
Not that they would accomplish anything. The Pack’s lawyers were ravenous beasts.
I crouched by the nearest body and aimed the camera. The flash flared, searing the scene with white light for a fraction of a moment. The camera purred, printing out the image. I pulled it out and waved it a bit to dry, before sliding it into a paper envelope.
The dead man appeared to be in his late fifties. Shapeshifters aged well, so he could’ve been in his seventies, for all I knew. The skin on his forehead was olive, a warm shade particular to those from the Indian subcontinent. That was the only patch of exposed skin left undamaged. Large blisters swelled everywhere else on his cheeks, neck, and arms, the skin peeling up from muscle, stretched taut and completely black.
Another Polaroid.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Stefan said.
I had. “Has the ME been through here?”
“Yeah. But we chased them off.”
That’s right, even if Pack members died outside of the Pack’s territory, the Pack still had the right to claim their bodies. And technically the building was Pack property, since Raphael had bought it. I should’ve remembered that. Getting rusty, Ms. Nash. Getting rusty.
I handed him the Polaroid camera. “Could you hold on to this for a second?”
He took the camera. I pulled a knife from my belt and sliced the man’s shirt straight down his chest. The thin fabric parted easily. I made a cut through each sleeve and gently turned the body on its side. A large swelling marked the top of the left shoulder, just above the clavicle. I flicked the knife across the bottom edge of the blister. Body fluids gushed out, black and streaked with blood. The stench hit me instantly, the foul, putrid reek of rotten flesh.
Stefan cursed and spun away.
“If you’re going to puke, kindly do it in the tunnel.”
He bent double and shook his head. “No, I’m good. I’m good.”
I stretched the deflated skin down. Two ragged punctures marked the man’s back, close to the top of the shoulder near the neck. The swelling had hidden them before.
“What is that?”
“A snakebite.”
“Aren’t we immune to snake venom?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not. Shapeshifters don’t exactly advertise this fact, for obvious reasons, but yeah, a copperhead bites you, you’ll feel it.”
Stefan blinked at me. “We regenerate broken bones, and we’re immune to disease and poison.”
“We’re very resistant to poison but not immune. Remember Erra?”
Stefan’s eyes darkened. “Yeah. I remember.”
Erra was Kate’s aunt and her secret. Kate’s family was magic, the kind of magic that leveled cities and altered the course of ancient civilizations. Her aunt had slept for thousands of years, but the onset of magic had awakened her, and she came to Atlanta looking for trouble and nearly destroyed the city. One of her creations, which she named Venom, broke into one of Clan Wolf’s houses in the city and poisoned everyone within. They died in agony. It was a wakeup call to the Pack. The shapeshifters could be poisoned, if the poison was strong enough.
“Most diseases are viral or bacterial in nature,” I said. “Lyc-V is a jealous virus, so it terminates these other invaders. Ingested poison is localized to the stomach. The second it tries to enter the bloodstream, Lyc-V will shut it down. A snakebite is another story.”
I rose, pulled a rag from my pocket, and wiped my hands. “The snake injects toxins directly into the body, and these toxins are biological: enzymes, coagulants, and so on. Some just attack the area of the bite, but some attack the nervous system, and Lyc-V doesn’t recognize them as a threat until the damage starts to spread.”
“So what’s this one?”
“Hemotoxic. Probably from a viper. The moment the venom enters the victim, it begins to coagulate blood and clot the blood vessels. Lyc-V exists in all tissues, but most of it is in the bloodstream. Clog the arteries and the virus can’t get to the venom fast enough to destroy it. I once knew a werebuffalo who fell into a nest of rattlesnakes. Looked just like that when we pulled his corpse out.”
Stefan peered at the body. “How did a snake manage to bite him on his back? He wouldn’t have been lying down in the dirt. Sitting, maybe.”
Shapeshifters took personal hygiene seriously. “Filthy animal” was a common insult people hurled our way. The guards wouldn’t have been lying down in loose soil unless they absolutely had to.
“I don’t know.” I took a ruler from my bag and held it up to the bite marks. Three and three-eighths of an inch. Two inches would mean a big snake. Two and a half inches meant a fifteen-foot rattler. Three and three-eighths was crazy.
“I can tell you that if I was an intelligent snake, this is the place I’d bite,” I said. “If you cause coagulation in the arteries leading to the brain, death will follow like that.” I would’ve snapped my fingers, but I was wearing latex gloves.
“So we have giant super-smart vipers who slithered in here, killed our people, opened the vault, stole something from it, and slithered out, undetected?”
“Appears so.”
“Okay. Just wanted to make sure it wasn’t something dangerous.”
I flashed him a quick smile and set about processing the scene.
The scene was a nightmare. Raphael’s workers had been in and out of it barely twelve hours ago and two dozen scent signatures clung to the ground, not to mention the stench of decay rising from the bodies. In the Georgia heat, even this deep underground, corpses decomposed fast.
A cursory examination of the bodies showed multiple snakebites. I noted four different fang spans and wrote them down. I divided the scene into rows and searched it, wall to wall, picking up every bottle cap and every hair.
A truck arrived from the Pack to take the bodies back to the Keep, the Pack’s huge headquarters just outside Atlanta that everyone insisted was not a castle, despite it being a dead ringer for one. I jotted down some notes for Doolittle, the Pack’s chief medmage, outlining my snake theory. He would be the one examining the bodie
s. I packaged the fingerprints I had collected into a large envelope and addressed it to Jim. The Pack had its own fingerprint database, and Jim was in a much better position to identify the prints than I was. I knew the theory behind fingerprint analysis and had been taught some rudimentary skills in the Order’s Academy, but in practice I just saw a bunch of whorls I had no idea what to do with. I also wrote out a quick preliminary assessment for Jim, requested background files on Raphael’s entire workforce, and sent the whole kaboodle to the Keep with the body crew.
I went into the vault and stood in it for a bit, visually examining the contents. It was filled with antiques. A pair of elegant, long-necked cats, pure black, with eyes of what were probably real emeralds sat against the wall. To the left of the cats, a stone tablet as tall as me rested on the floor, carved with figures in robes and weathered with age. To the right, a small wooden chair, gilded with gold and painted with brown, stood, its feet fashioned into the semblance of lion paws.
On the shelves were an ornate gold necklace resting in a glass box on top of a scarlet velvet pillow; a set of small bottles, crystal wrapped in bands of gold; a wooden cabinet, empty; a large chunk of sea-foam crystal on black velvet with a carving on it—three men on one side and a woman waving good-bye. Or maybe hello.
Nope, it was probably good-bye. Life was mean like that.
Age permeated the scene, emanating from the items like an aroma from a flower. How many people had died for these things? I knew of at least four and I had a feeling the body count would continue to climb.
I called Stefan down and catalogued the vault, item by item, and had him sign the whole thing as a witness. The list was so long my pen was in death throes by the end of it. Something must have been taken out of the vault, but what? I crawled over every inch of the damn place, looking for any indication of a missing item, but the vault was dust-free. No mysterious outline, no empty hooks, nothing that would give me any sort of clue about what had been taken. For all I knew, instead of taking something out, the attackers had put something in. Wouldn’t that be the pits.
By the time I finally emerged from the tunnel, covered in dirt and bone tired, the sun had almost completed its escape below the horizon. Scene processing was a slow and tedious job. The next time, I’d find myself someone to slave with me.
Gunmetal Magic (kate daniels) Page 3