Tricks of the Trade psi-3

by Laura Anne Gilman

  There was a pause, the click of china cup against saucer, and then she spoke again. “This isn’t about that.”

  Her voice was still the cold, dry tone she had used with him ever since he had first gone up against their home Council, years ago. But Ian remembered the little sister who had clung to his leg when he was a teenager, who had called him every Thursday night when she went away to college to ask his advice about classes, and dating, and talk about what books she had just read.

  Across the office, Ben frowned, but didn’t say anything, aware that on speakerphone she would be able to hear him as clearly as he heard her. Ian didn’t need to ping his partner to know what he was thinking. Ben didn’t trust Aden not to have something else up her ever-fashionable sleeve. That was wise, probably. Aden was not to be trusted any more than he, Ian, was to be trusted. Not when it came to the survival of this office, or of the idea behind it, that no Talent could escape accountability for their actions.

  Aden truly believed that rank had privileges, and one of those was being accountable only to others of that same rank. Or, in the case of Talent, of equal or greater ability.

  She was also his little sister.

  “My choice of time and place,” he told her.

  “Agreed.”

  Ben looked startled, and then covered it up behind his usual stone-faced exterior. For Aden to agree so readily, either she was plotting something interesting, or she genuinely needed to talk to him about something other than their ongoing disagreement. Ian wasn’t sure which one worried him more.

  “Half an hour. The old diner, down in Philly. You know the one?” Ian would have had her come here, but she was still under Council ban from entering New York City limits, and even his direct invite could not put that aside. And in that short a period of time she would not be able to adapt any schemes to the location, or call in backup. Hopefully.

  The click of the phone being hung up on the other end was his only answer.

  “This should be... interesting,” Ian said, his voice as dry as hers had been.

  Ben shoved his hand through his hair, a move that harkened back to when they were teenagers, and scowled. “What do you think she’s up to?”

  Ian laughed: a real laugh, with real amusement. “This is Aden we’re talking about, Ben. Who the hell knows?” He shook his head, dismissing the question for another thirty minutes. “The cops are starting to push for some kind of answer on the floater. They want to know if they can bury the report. And the client called this morning, he’s getting pushy about the break-in – he wants to know what happened to his trinkets. He also wants to know why his anti-magic protections didn’t work.”

  “Oh, Christ.” The cops were a known headache, but Benjamin Venec had no use for fools, Talented or Null.

  “Let’s just get this solved, all right? Take them off the floater if you have to – he’s not going anywhere and if no more bodies have turned up odds are we aren’t looking at the start of a serial killer.”

  “You’re asking us to give priority to a break-in over a murder?”

  “Not priority, no. Just an additional push on that front, for now.”

  Ben wasn’t happy. Ian understood that. Murder should always be the first priority. But the dead have patience. The living did not.

  “Right, fine, whatever. I’ll tell them soon’s their powwow’s over.” Ben stood up, stretching his arms overhead until something cracked, then moved his head side to side, as though loosening knots there, as well.

  “Are you getting enough sleep?” The question slipped out before Ian could stop it.

  Ben looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. “Who are you, my mom? Go worry about your sister, Ian. I’ll whip the puppies into shape. Sleep is for people who don’t have things to do.”

  The moment the door closed behind Ben, Ian stood, as well, moving to the bare corner of the room. Technically you could Translocate from anywhere, so long as you knew that your destination was clear, but it was less of a current-drain if you left from a familiar place, so that your mind and body both knew what to do, instinctively.

  He closed his eyes, visualized the booth in the diner that was always left empty in case a Council member wanted to have a meeting in that city, without fuss or formality. Technically he no longer had the right to use the booth... but the deli’s present owners were old friends of his from college, and would not tell anyone.

  More, they would not give Aden any succor, should this be a trap.

  Drawing in his current, Stosser dropped down into fugue-state, and disappeared.

  In the hallway, Venec felt the gentle movement of current that indicated a Translocation, and shook his head. He wouldn’t trust Aden Stosser to pet a dog without there being trouble for the dog, but it wasn’t his call to make.

  There were raised voices coming from the conference room, indicating that the door had been unlocked and the bosses-out portion of the meeting was over, so he headed in that direction.

  “Mafia!” Nick, gleeful in a way that meant he was intentionally trying to goad someone.

  “There is no Cosa mafia.” Sharon, still patient, so no bloodshed was imminent.

  “You know the name was a joke, right?” Lou, amused.

  “Sort of a joke.” Bonnie. “Okay, not really a joke. But that would require way too much structure. So would a trade union. We don’t enforce, that’s always been the problem.”

  “Someone wants to change that, looks like.” Nifty, the somber note.

  “Yah.” Nick, less gleeful now.

  He paused before opening the door, listening to their voices layering over each other, barely space to breathe in between. He didn’t have to hear her voice to know Bonnie was there, and that she was excited about something. They all were, even Nifty: the pack had gotten a clear scent, and were baying as they tracked it down.

  He thought about leaving them to it, and remembered Ian’s words, and pushed the door all the way open.

  “Hey, boss.” Lou spotted him first, her normally solemn face looking as animated as he could remember it being, since she failed her first field run and had been assigned in-office responsibilities.

  “We figured it out.” Nick looked equally triumphant, although he was always an easier show. “The dead body. We know who killed him.”

  “Technically,” Bonnie said, and her voice was less readable, although she was practically radiating excitement to his awareness, “we don’t know who, as in, a person we can point to. But we’re pretty sure we know why, and the why will lead to who.”

  The others in the room were surprisingly quiet, but no less wound-up. Ian’s instructions would wait – if they could shut this down and get the NYPD off their backs, so much the better.

  He went into the room and pulled out a chair, turning it around and straddling it, leaning his forearms on the back, and catching each of their gazes in turn. “Tell me.”

  It was Bonnie’s case, even though he’d yanked her off it briefly, so she took the lead. “Before it went splooey, my diorama showed me that the body was probably dumped, not way upstream, like we’d thought, but just a little bit above. Anywhere else, the current would have dumped it somewhere else. So that threw our estimated timing off. For it to reach that spot when it did, the body wasn’t dumped in the middle of the night, but early morning.”

  Ben nodded, indicating he understood.

  “So, you have a guy, you want to off him, but even bound hands and feet you don’t slit his throat and toss him into the nearest trash heap. Instead they toss him into the river, right there, at that exact spot. Why? You want to drown the schmuck, okay. Nasty way to kill someone, but why there instead of tossing him off the pier, or dumping the corpse in the landfill, or any of the many many ways there are to dispose of a body? The only reason you’d toss him into the river there is if you wanted the body to be easily found, because if you really want to hide something, you don’t toss it right into the nets. Right?”

  Her logic was convoluted, b
ut sound.

  “They might not have known about the net,” Nifty said, clearly playing devil’s advocate, a role Sharon normally took.

  Lou jumped in, there. “Even if they couldn’t see, or read the signs warning boaters, the net system was on the news two nights before the murder. The city was thinking about cutting the budget and pulling some of the nets, and every network rehashed old stories about stuff that’s been caught in there, over the years.”

  “All right, so if our killer watched the news, he knew. And?” Venec waited; they wouldn’t be this excited if they hadn’t already reached near endgame.

  “The DB worked construction, off-radar, right?” Fatae, except in specific, unusual cases, were all off-the-books. “The off-books construction gig is a tight one,” Bonnie went on. “A few months in the game, and you know pretty much everyone who’s any good, and the ones who are really bad, too. Our DB, being in the freelance construction business, was good... but he hadn’t been working lately.”

  Bonnie’s father had been in construction, Ben remembered. Clearly she had kept some contacts, even after Zaki Torres died. “Because?”

  “Mainly because, according to one of my dad’s old compadres whom I just checked with... ”

  He’d been right, and Bonnie had that canary-aperitif grin just waiting to burst out.

  “Our vic was in the middle of a squabble with several of the folk who slipped him money under that freelance table, about money he says they owe, and they say they don’t.”

  “I thought the report said he didn’t owe... ” Venec stopped, feeling the grins break out across the room, even though they were all mostly work-sober, waiting for him to twig in. “He doesn’t owe. They owe him. Or so he claims... but I bet nobody will back up his accusation?”

  Nick confirmed it. “Because if they do, if they piss off the hiring guys, and then they lose work, too. Yeah. That’s how we’re seeing it.”

  “Was he agitating against these hiring guys?”

  Bonnie nodded, a subtle dip of the chin. “So my dad’s old buddy implied, yeah.”

  “And you think, suddenly, these hiring guys had someone shut him up?”

  “Nope.” And the grin came out in full force, totally inappropriate but infectious nonetheless. “We think his fellow freelancers did.”

  Aden slid into the booth exactly twenty-nine minutes after Ian arrived. She was wearing jeans and a college-logo sweatshirt, and her red hair, darker than his own, was tousled, her face clean of any obvious makeup.

  She barely looked as old as the pups, until he looked into her eyes and saw the utter weariness there. Weariness, and wariness.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked again, and this time he meant it. She was his sister, damn it. Anything that made her look like that, he had the urge to hunt down and hurt.

  She hesitated, her pale fingers twining against each other like a nervous schoolgirl. Ian resisted the urge to put his hand over hers, to warm that chilled-looking flesh. “What’s wrrong?”

  She took a deep breath, and lifted her gaze again to meet his.

  “You’ve been so busy with your... experiment, I don’t know how much attention you are paying to the chatter, these days.”

  By chatter she meant Council gossip, specifically; the constant exchange of information and suggestion that tied the social and political bonds tight. Ian listened in, but not with the finely tuned ear he used to have; too many other things demanding his attention these days, and if it didn’t affect PUPI... “You’ve heard something that upsets you.”

  “There’s... not talk. Not even whispers. Suggestions of whispers. Madame Howe is not content with the status quo.”

  Madame Howe. Leader of the regional Council of the Eastern seaboard and known – with both fear and respect – as the electric dragon. He visualized her in his mind as he’d seen her at their last meeting: a delicate, older woman who didn’t try to hide the spine and balls of steel under the demure and elegant lady-of-an-older-generation exterior. She was a powerhouse of both current and political savvy, with a family history of leadership, both on her own side and through her late husband.

  “Not content, how?” Each Council was independent, and strictly forbidden to interfere with the affairs of other regional Councils. That was deliberate, done with the full knowledge of the personalities who might rise to power within the Council, and had held for over two hundred years, almost as long as the Cosa Nostradamus itself had been in America. Even the old-world members adhered, mostly, to the Council restrictions, these days, and for much the same reasons.

  “She wants to... expand. The whispers say she’s already made outreach to other leaders, offered them... deals.” Aden said the last as though the word tasted foul.

  Ian almost smiled, despite her obvious distress and the seriousness of what she was saying. His baby sister was a traditionalist to the core – her argument with him had never been about the need for oversight and accountability, merely the idea that someone outside of the Council would be allowed to investigate Council matters. The idea that another Council member – a leader as respected as Howe – would go against tradition in such a manner, so obviously forbidden by the very structure and history of the Council itself...

  Ian was older than Aden, and far more cynical, and found the idea of shake-up within the Council less horrifying than intriguing. What new fault lines were developing, in that rarified ground? And how could he use that to forward his cause?

  “What do you want me to do, Aden?” The waitress brought him a glass of iced tea, and he sipped it, more to buy time than any desire for the liquid itself.

  “You still have standing with the Midwest Council.” Standing that, thanks to her recent attempts to shut him down, she had lost. “Talk to them, find out what’s going on, find out if it has spread there.”

  “Investigate, you mean? Use my contacts to find out what she’s planning, and stop it?”

  Aden didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

  The irony was heartbreaking. “I can’t.”

  She glared at him like he had just kicked her puppy. “What do you mean you can’t? You have to! Find out what she’s doing, and stop it!”

  He wanted to. He wanted to do whatever his baby sister asked of him, above and beyond any benefit he or his project might gain from it. But if she was a traditionalist then he acknowledged himself as an idealist, and he could no sooner go against his ideals than she could break tradition.

  “Aden, it doesn’t work that way. You’ve bitched so much about PUPI, you should know how we operate. We investigate, yes. But that is all. We remain neutral, only gathering information, not acting on it. And we cannot go into anyone’s business, most especially the Council’s, without cause. A complaint. A client.” Especially right now, when he was so close to finally gaining their approval.

  There was only one way he could justify poking his nose into this, right now. “Are you hiring us, Aden?”

  She glared at him, and Translocated out in a sulk.

  The waitress reappeared, not at all surprised by one of her customers disappearing. “So, you’re not going to be wanting to order, then, hon?”

  “Short stack of applejacks, extra syrup, and another iced tea, please.”

  He couldn’t investigate, not the way Aden wanted. But he could ask around. If the electric dragon was planning a power grab, he wanted to be well aware of it before the shitstorm broke.

  This was his town now, too. He’d be damned if he let her ruin his plans.

  eight

  It was one thing to gather intel and come up with what we thought was a brilliant deduction. It was another, entirely, to lay it out in front of Venec, and wait for his reaction. We didn’t have to wait long. The moment I finished, he exhaled heavily, the kind of surprised-pleased-thinking exhale, and leaned back a little. You could practically see the thought process racing through his neurons like current.

  “Lawrence. How’s the itching?”

  “Totally gone,” Nifty repli
ed, although I’d seen him scratching his elbow against the chair arm not five minutes before. Either Venec had missed that – unlikely – or he was willing to pretend it hadn’t happened, because he nodded. “You and Pietr go track down the coworkers last seen with our corpse. Ask them a few pointed questions about their feelings about his relations – or lack thereof – with their employers, and how it was affecting them. Don’t be coy. If Bonnie’s info is right, these guys are not going to understand subtle. You may have to lean a little.”

  Well, that explained why he was sending Nifty, who outmassed all of us put together, practically. I guessed Pietr was going along to provide the potential good cop in that scenario?

  “But – ” And Venec held up a hand as the guys stood up from the table, clearly anticipating a nice day out of the office trying to intimidate witnesses. “Any questioning you do, make sure it’s in full view of at least two others, not involved. Do not go with them anywhere, no matter how good an idea it might seem.”

  Pietr really didn’t need the reminder, but Nifty tended to think with his bulk, and while that was fine when facing down humans, against fatae who could maybe, if we were right, restrain a Bippis, maybe less so. From the annoyed “do you think we’re idiots?” expression on their faces, I suspected that the fact that they were being sent to question suspected murderers hadn’t quite filtered into their awareness. But they nodded seriously, and went off to do their dirty work with probably more enthusiasm than was healthy.

  I don’t know why I’d expected more from Pietr – smart guys were still guys, sometimes.

  “All right, that’s being dealt with. Where do we stand on the break-in?” Venec asked, turning his attention to those of us left in the room. I hrrmmmmed and errrred a bit, not having any idea. Thankfully, Nick and Sharon – whose case it had been, originally – had more clue.

  “We finally got a report of what was missing,” Nick said, and from his expression I was guessing that “we” meant “him.” “And confirmed what the owner claimed, that for all the damage that was done, there were only two objects taken – a silver pocket watch, ordinary, and a glass dagger, which looked like an ordinary paperweight, but was actually a memory-glass.”