The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel

by Shearin, Lisa

For Tasering the happy parts of a Seelie royal, guess whose Taser-carrying privileges were revoked in the political poop storm that followed?

  I eventually replaced my Taser with the tequila squirt gun when I learned that for ninety-nine percent of supernaturals (leprechauns being the exception), Tasers just tickled.

  It was a hell of a night for my first day on the job.

  • • •

  I typed in my computer password and got to work. I opted to start with a Google search rather than going directly to the New York Times and the New York Post. The Times gave you the facts; the Post dished the dirt. I wanted both, but since I didn’t know whether Tarbert was a New Yorker like his brother, I opted to cast a wide net first.

  I was pretty sure the rest of his family lived in New York—or had. I’d imagine that a Green-Wood family mausoleum with occupants dating back to 1851 was about as local as you could get. Nowadays, it didn’t matter where you had lived and died, your family could have your remains put on the next available flight back to the family plot. Or in the Tarberts’ case, the family mausoleum. I hadn’t seen one up close before, but I knew expensive when I saw it.

  I kept seeing James Tarbert lying dead in a cherry Slurpee. Why would someone take out a hit on him? And why and how had his brother died only a month before? I glanced around the bull pen and up at the catwalks. I didn’t know where our Vulcan mind meld people had their cube farm, but I suspected they wouldn’t bring suspects here for questioning—unless they didn’t plan on letting them go. And Ian had said they’d be dropping Tarbert’s killer off at the Seventy-second after they were finished. Ian wasn’t one for volunteering information, but he’d never lied to me, either.

  I Googled Jonathan Tarbert and got more than I’d expected—or ever dreamed.

  For starters, Dr. Jonathan Tarbert wasn’t a medical doctor; he was the research and development/inventor kind. He graduated at the top of his class from MIT, then promptly vanished into the subterranean corridors of the government sector.

  And he was a native New Yorker, all right. The Tarberts had provided their city with five generations of seamy, steamy, back-stabbing entertainment that read like a soap opera. As I sat back and scrolled through the more promising stories, I wished I had some of Kenji’s wasabi peas to pop while I perused all that juicy copy. Rich, beautiful heiress marries ambitious financier, and they have twin sons. The first is a brilliant scientist and gets snatched up by the government, but the only thing the second-born twin was brilliant at was getting his hands on other people’s money. Now both sons were dead, James murdered, and Jonathan was . . . I clicked on his obit in the Times . . . killed in a fire in his lab at GES, Inc. That didn’t sound like a government lab.

  “Must be good stuff,” said Ian from directly behind me.

  I squeaked, jumped, and knocked the tiny tractor off the little car, which bumped the danglies off my leprechaun.

  Ian noted the tractor/car addition to my desktop diorama with approval. “That was fast.”

  My two pieces of flair were cute. Ian’s vast collection looked like they’d come from horror movies and slasher films.

  “Looks like you’ve got a decent start,” he said, indicating the info on my screen. “What’d you find so far?”

  “The Tarberts are local, rich, and could’ve given the Borgias a run for their money—or their lives. And Dr. Tarbert was a government researcher, who doesn’t appear to have died in a government lab, who coincidentally had ‘Property of U.S. Government’ crates hidden in a secret room under his mausoleum.”

  Ian pulled his chair over next to mine. “What department was he with?”

  “Unknown. His last place of employment was GES, Inc.”

  “Which stands for . . .”

  “GES, Inc.”

  “Generic enough.”

  “Yep.”

  “Know what they do there?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t gotten that far. I’m still on the ‘who did what to whom and for how much.’ The Tarberts knew how to make money—or at least how to get their hands on it. They were perfectly fine taking it from others, but apparently what they really liked was snatching it from each other.”

  “Any fatalities from all that snatching?”

  “At least once a generation one of them would off the other, sometimes twice if they were feeling ambitious.” I turned from my screen and looked up at him. “You thinking that James might have killed Jonathan?”

  Ian booted up his computer. “I’ve called an old buddy of mine at the NYPD. He’s going to check if there were any suspicious circumstances surrounding Dr. Tarbert’s death. He’ll e-mail when he has something. While we wait, did you find anything on the newly late James Tarbert?”

  “He was the second born, so Jonathan had the silver spoon, and it seems he also inherited the brains—and the family fortune. James barely graduated from Harvard with a degree in finance. That their dad was an alumnus and major donor might have helped. James worked at Enron, and then was let go from Enron. The last few years he’s been making the rounds of small investment firms as a consultant.”

  “No trust fund?”

  I shook my head. “The Tribeca address on his license is for a one-bedroom apartment. The senior Tarbert died five years ago. Jonathan got the money, and James got an allowance that’d be enough to keep a tasteful roof over his head, and if he wanted more, he’d have to work for it. The society pages were all over that.”

  “I get the feeling James’s career goal was to work as little as possible.”

  “And let everyone else do the work. None of his consulting gigs lasted longer than six months.”

  “Married?”

  “James, no. Jonathan, yes. Tia Sebastian. Divorced last year. That event also got a nice amount of coverage.” I clicked a few keys and brought up a photo from their wedding. “This is from when they could still be called ‘the happy couple.’”

  “How much did she get after the divorce?”

  “Nothing, courtesy of a pre-nup.”

  “Ouch.”

  “And seven months later, Jonathan’s dead.”

  Ian’s computer dinged with an incoming e-mail. He rolled his chair over and opened it. “Looks like I owe Jerry a beer.”

  “Jerry?”

  “Precinct buddy.” Ian scanned the e-mail. “Hell, I owe him a beer and lunch. He came through in spades. Sent the full investigator’s report.”

  I scooted over to have a look.

  Dr. Tarbert looked just like his brother James: brown hair, kind of pale, average-looking features. I couldn’t tell what color his eyes were from the police report photo, but I got the feeling he had a lot going on in his gray matter. He kind of reminded me of a professor I’d had in college—intensely focused on his subject, and the rest of the world might as well not have existed. Intense. Yeah, that was it. Intense and intelligent.

  There was a lot of police-speak in the report, and I didn’t know what half of it meant. “Care to translate?”

  “They didn’t have to cremate Dr. Tarbert any more than he already was,” Ian told me. “He died in a fire, a hot one, completely destroyed his lab. The CSI team found traces of a body at the scene; barely enough to fill an evidence bag, let alone an urn.” He scrolled down some more. “They found the slag of the good doctor’s Rolex among the bits and pieces and the burnt-out shell of his Mercedes in the parking lot. The detectives had two witnesses who saw Dr. Tarbert enter his lab about twenty minutes before the fire started. One of them called nine-one-one.”

  “Jeez, what kind of lab did he have?”

  “Whatever it was, I doubt if it was supposed to have military-grade accelerants in it.”

  “They’re thinking arson?”

  Ian nodded. “With Tarbert inside. Whoever doused that lab didn’t want anything left.”

  “You thinking little brother Jam
es?”

  “That’s exactly what I would be thinking except that he alibied out, which is why he was dead in Green-Wood rather than alive in prison. He was in White Plains the night of the fire, and the witnesses at the scene didn’t see anyone other than Dr. Tarbert in the area.”

  “What about the ex-wife?”

  “In Europe when the lab burned.”

  “Does she have enough of her own money to pay for a little murder and arson?”

  “Unknown, but we can find out.”

  Yasha came out of the break room carrying a massive mug of coffee and heard Ian’s last comment. “I take it death not accident?”

  “Not unless Tarbert accidentally sprayed down his lab like a charcoal grill then started tossing around lit matches,” Ian said. “The case is listed as an unsolved homicide.” He paused. “Of course, there’s another possibility.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That wasn’t Jonathan Tarbert in that lab. No body to speak of, and not enough DNA on what was there for testing.”

  “Faked his own death?”

  Ian shrugged. “I’ve heard of stranger things.”

  I thought for a few moments. “Today, his twin brother gets himself killed while waiting to sell a monster head to Ollie, and while carrying a flash drive that a vampire and his men in black were willing to kill me to get. Is there anything in that police report about the kind of research Tarbert was doing?”

  Ian clicked quickly through the pages. “No info on the research, but a couple of guys in suits were the ones answering the detectives’ questions—or more like deflecting their questions.” He smiled. “But they couldn’t avoid identifying themselves. Department of Defense.”

  We both looked over at Kenji’s still empty computer command center.

  “We need to know what’s on that flash drive,” I said.

  “Kenji has it,” Ian said. “I passed him in the hall. He was just coming out of a meeting.”

  “Meeting about the flash drive?”

  “Possible. Though Kenji prefers to work at his own station.”

  “Maybe someone does not care what Kenji prefers,” Yasha said.

  I did some math. “Okay, we’ve got a possibly dead researcher, probably Department of Defense, and his lab was definitely destroyed. Underneath his family’s mausoleum are crates with ‘Property of the U.S. Government’ on them.” I stopped, baffled. “Who in the government would want a monster head? And why hide a bunch of government crates? Dr. Tarbert’s dead. Well, maybe. Little brother starts selling off the inventory—and the mysterious contents of the flash drive—and gets himself killed for his efforts.” I sat back. “We need to know what else’s in those crates. The Tarbert brothers were the last of the family, so those boxes don’t belong to anyone now—unless Dr. Jonathan puts in an appearance from beyond the grave.”

  “I would imagine they still belong to the government,” Ian said.

  “It’s a big government.” I grinned slowly. “Until we know what’s inside, we won’t know who to return them to.”

  Ian actually gave me a wink. “Which is why a SPI team is emptying the crypt as we speak.”

  Alain Moreau appeared silently on the other side of my desk. I squeaked and jumped again, but didn’t have anything left to turn over on my desk.

  “Madame Sagadraco and the rest of the team are waiting for you in the main conference room,” the vampire lawyer said without expression. “Follow me.”

  “Team?” I whispered to Ian. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Because it never is.”

  11

  THE main conference room at SPI headquarters resembled a scaled-down version of the Security Council Room at the UN. I’d been in here only once before. Meetings in this room were super secret, hush-hush, and meant that the supernatural crap had hit the fan big-time. Needless to say, not many people wanted to be called into a meeting in here. It looked like telling the boss about my adventure in Brooklyn would have to wait.

  A massive U-shaped table dominated the room, with the light from a pair of projectors—one mounted in the ceiling, the other in the floor—coming together to form a hologram of SPI’s company logo, a stylized monster eye with a slit pupil. The eye slowly spun, a placeholder for whatever visuals the boss was going to use in the meeting. Plush and pricey executive office chairs were spaced every few feet around the table, a closed folder at each place. There were only two vacant chairs. Vivienne Sagadraco stood at the open end of the table, arms crossed, remote in hand, perfectly still, waiting. I hoped we hadn’t kept her waiting for long.

  “Be seated,” she said without moving, or looking at us. With a dragon’s sense of smell, she wouldn’t need to look to know who we were.

  We did as told, and Alain Moreau took his usual place in the shadows behind Vivienne Sagadraco.

  The others seated around the table had given us a quick glance when we’d come in, then put their collective noses back into the contents of the folders in front of them.

  I recognized everyone. Some I knew; others I’d only seen but had been told their names and what they did.

  Kenji Hayashi was sitting directly across from us. Ian caught his attention and gave him a questioning look. Kenji nodded once and held up two fingers with the flash drive between them, before tucking it safely back in his shirt pocket.

  That was a relief. It’d be even more of a relief if he’d already looked at it, but when Vivienne Sagadraco asked you to a meeting, you came.

  In addition to Kenji, both of SPI’s monster hunter/commando commanders were there, meaning that the combat boots were about to hit the pavement. One of those commanders was a woman, as were many team members on both squads. SPI was an equal opportunity employer of combat badassness regardless of sex, species, or dimensional origin.

  Ian and I had a copy of the folder and the contents that had everyone else in the room grimly enthralled.

  I opened it. Reports and crime scene photos—both ours and the NYPD’s. SPI had people in the police department who kept us in the loop on cases that involved monster perps. Our people had taken the photos of Kanil Ghevari. The cops had done the honors on what had been left of Dr. Adam Falke. I hadn’t seen the aftermath of the first murder, but I’d seen more than enough of the second so that I didn’t feel the need to linger over the visual records of either one. There was also a copy of the text of the letter that the adversary had sent to the boss.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming on such short notice,” Vivienne Sagadraco said. “You’ve all been briefed on recent events. I’ve called you here because I have just acquired new information that escalates these events to a critical level. As you know, the killers left behind physical evidence at both crime scenes: a claw at the first murder and a lock of hair at the second. These, combined with an artifact recovered today by Agents Byrne and Fraser, led me to contact my counterpart at SPI Scandinavia, Lars Anderssen. He was able to provide a wealth of information.” She paused. “Most notably, confirmation of what we are dealing with.”

  Everyone looked up from their gory photos at that.

  “Director Anderssen sent us this.” She pointed the remote at the empty area in the center of the table. The SPI eye logo vanished, and in its place a nightmare formed from its clawed feet to the top of its leathery head. The boss clicked once more, and the hologram began to rotate slowly so everyone could get the full effect.

  A full effect I could have gone the rest of my life without.

  The monster was gigantic, corded with muscle, and with what looked like veins protruding just under the surface of its skin. I couldn’t tell if the skin was mottled or extensively tattooed. The only difference between the face presented on the hologram and the head we’d found in the box was that it wasn’t desiccated and mummified. It had the same hair, facial features, and mouthful of razored teeth. The monster
’s legs were powerful and its knees slightly bent, but it was the arms and hands that really got my attention. Long and thick with muscle, they extended almost to the creature’s knees, each ending in a hand that could easily encircle my entire waist, and tipped with claws that could have shredded Ollie’s office door like toilet paper and gutted the two of us with one swat.

  All the little hairs on my arms stood straight up, and my bagel threatened to come back up the way it’d gone down. I suddenly felt light-headed and realized that I’d forgotten to breathe. I glanced around the room and saw I wasn’t wearing the only stunned expression at the table.

  “This creature is called a grendel,” Vivienne Sagadraco said. “It was named after two of its ancestors featured in the epic poem, Beowulf. Their present-day habitat is the mountains and caves of Norway and Sweden near the Arctic Circle. As with many supernatural hunters, the encroachment of modern man has forced many away from their preferred habitats. When Beowulf was written approximately twelve hundred years ago, grendels lived as far south as the marshlands of Denmark. As the human population spread, they moved northward and adapted to colder climates. From what details I could give him, Director Anderssen believes that we have a male and female.”

  “Shit,” drawled one of the commanders, a Louisianan named Roy Benoit. “Grendel and his momma.”

  A couple of chuckles made their way around the table.

  Roy had grown up in the swamps of southern Louisiana in a long and proud line of gator hunters. He’d done a stint in the army, become a ranger, then done a longer stint in Iraq. He saw things over there that convinced him that humans weren’t the only alpha predators walking on two legs on this green earth. He’d come straight from Iraq to SPI NY, and was a natural as a unit commander.

  “If I recall correctly,” Benoit continued, “the monster in Beowulf liked it quiet. Loud, drunken partiers—whether Vikings or Times Square tourists—really piss it off.”

  “I believe they were selected for precisely that reason,” Sagadraco said. “According to Director Anderssen, while they can and do hunt alone, grendels prefer to hunt in pairs or small groups. They display a keen intelligence and tactical precision in pursuit of their prey. Our adversary—at least for now—is somehow able to influence the grendels’ aggression, or at least direct it. For those of you unfamiliar with the poem, after Beowulf killed Grendel by tearing off his arm, Grendel’s mother attacked Heorot Hall to retrieve her dead son’s arm and exact vengeance. Beowulf tracked Grendel’s mother to her lair, killed her, retrieved the arm, and decapitated the dead Grendel.”