Pack of Lies [2]

by Laura Anne Gilman

  We didn’t have many meetings here—maybe one a month—but we’d already established a routine, doing a subtle push-and-shove to get at the three armchairs that fit in the space in front of Ian’s desk. As usual, Nifty claimed the largest one, since he held on to the muscled bulk that had made him such a hot draft prospect in college. Sharon claimed the other on the basis of a short skirt not really suited for sitting on the floor, and Pietr ghosted into the third chair in that spooky way he had before anyone saw him moving.

  Nick and I were relegated to sitting on the floor. Again. Thankfully I’d opted for black cargo pants and a black hip-length sweater today, in honor of the still-raw April weather outside. Spring in New York City was better than spring in Boston, but not by much. I tucked my legs up in front of me, elbows on my knees, and watched while Venec took his usual spot, holding up the wall behind Stosser’s desk.

  Ian Stosser and Benjamin Venec. The Big Dogs. The two men were an interesting contrast, and not just physically. Even after all these months, we didn’t know much about Benjamin Venec, who was a closemouthed bastard when he wasn’t tearing us new ones in the name of keeping us smart and alive, but Ian Stosser was—on the surface—an open book. High-placed in the Midwest Council once upon a time, he had made a very public break with them about a year ago. A few months after that, he came to the East Coast with the idea of holding Talent—both Council and the Unaffiliateds, or lonejacks—accountable for criminal misbehavior of magic. To do that, he created PUPI.

  Why? What had happened in Chicago to send him here? That was where the book closed and not even my mentor, a man of considerable high-level connections himself, could get a read.

  With Stosser’s reputation, and the tendency of some Talent to misuse their skills, you’d think people would welcome us with open arms, glad that someone was there to ferret out wrongdoers…not exactly. The first few months we’d been open for business had been tough. Not everyone in the Cosa Nostradamus thought having us poking our noses into magical crimes was the best thing since sliced bread. Stosser’s own sister was opposed to the very idea of PUPI, enough that she tried to get us shut down by any means possible.

  Having the office rewired had saved us when one of those means, involving a current-strike against the building, coincided with the killer we were trying to take down deciding to take us on directly. Saved us—but not a teenage boy who had been in the elevator when the rest of the building went off-line.

  I still occasionally had nightmares about that.

  In the eight months since the boy died, and Little Sister had been disciplined, nobody had taken potshots at us—physical or magical. We’d even gotten a few jobs; a jewelry heist, the organ-legging gig, but that didn’t mean we were wanted yet, or trusted. We had to do everything perfect just to be considered acceptable, and never mind that what we were doing—creating investigative tools that gave measured and quantified results out of a naturally chaotic and individualized power source—was totally made up as we went along. No pressure, right. I knew for a fact that Sharon was developing an ulcer, and I’d started chewing my fingernails again.

  And all that got us here, waiting in Stosser’s de facto office, hoping that this might be the job to finally break that last hesitation, and make us legitimate.

  Venec closed the door behind us, for some reason—if someone Translocated into the office, we’d have bigger problems than them overhearing us—and Stosser dropped the news.

  “No time to give you a full briefing—this one’s hot, and might get hotter. But for once, somebody with a bit of authority used their brains instead of their hair spray, and had us called in right away, so we have a chance to actually pull something off the scene.” Ian paused, his gaze meeting each of us in turn, assessing us the way he always did, like he was ready to demand the impossible. “It’s hot, and it’s ugly. A girl was attacked early this morning, downtown, an attempted rape. Her companion murdered one of the assailants and partially disemboweled the other.”

  I could feel Nick, who was sitting beside me, shudder a little, although I wasn’t sure which of the events caused him to react that way. I wasn’t exactly cackling with glee at this assignment, either. Murder was… I wasn’t jaded, but I’d seen a lot of death already. Rape? Okay, that was a trigger-point for any female, no matter how tough you were, but he’d said attempted rape. The disembowelment…that was, um, new. And carried a nasty visual I wanted very badly to get rid of. Thanks, boss.

  Behind Stosser, Venec’s heavy gaze held steady, but there was a twitch over his left eye that gave it away. Big Dog was a hard-ass, but I knew from personal experience that there was actual give-a-damn under that bastardized exterior.

  “So why’d we get called in? I mean, if they caught the guy, and it was obviously self-defense or near enough…” Nifty was asking the practical question, beating Sharon to the punch. We were, in theory, all equal to each other, but like any pack there were alphas and omegas, and those two competed for lead the same way they fought for the chairs, using every angle they had short of stomping over each other. Sometimes I thought it was just Venec’s glare that kept the stomping from happening. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other—they did. We all got along fine. They were just fierce competitors; stomping was what they did for fun.

  “You’re right,” Stosser said. “It should have been an open-and-shut case, none of our business, except for two things.” He paused, as though he was trying to choose his words carefully. Anything that made Ian Stosser hesitate was not going to be pretty. I braced myself, mentally.

  “One, both the victim and the perps are Talent—” someone snorted, Talent being no proof against being a scumbag “—and two, the accused killer is a ki-rin.”

  That made the room go quiet. I felt something catch in my chest: not pain, but something fierce and hot. A ki-rin. Dear god and a merciful universe, a ki-rin, here, in the city. A ki-rin, accused of murder.

  I suddenly understood why things moved so fast on this one—and why we were called in. If anything went wrong, we were going to take the fall.

  “This needs to be as clean and as tight as a waterproof drum,” the boss man said, standing up, his words confirming my fears. “I want everyone on this, right now. So let’s move, people.”

  We moved.

  two

  Normally we didn’t all haul ass to a site—we didn’t really have a normal yet, even after eight months—but Stosser had indicated all of us, and so all of us went.

  Well, all but one. “You take them,” Venec said to Ian as we grabbed coats and kits out of the closet and headed for the door. “I’ll see what I can drag out of the unusual suspects.”

  Overhearing that made me feel better about this case. Based on the rather interesting individuals he brought in to lecture us on lock picking, surveillance, scams, and other things your mother wouldn’t want you to know, Venec had collected an assortment of contacts in various low places. When we got back, I’d lay money that he’d have a full dossier on anything and everything there was to know about the people involved, even better than the official files.

  Stosser looked like he was going to argue, then nodded instead. He wasn’t happy about it, though, and shoved us into the elevator with a look on his face that made us all hush our usual chatter. Not that anyone was feeling much in the way of wisecracks. Organ-leggers lent themselves to the bad jokes, the more disgusting or punny the better. Attempted rape and actual disembowelment, not so much. Add in a ki-rin… We were all quiet, locked in our own thoughts, in the time it took to get to the lobby and out to the avenue.

  There was an SUV with TLC plates already waiting outside our building. Obviously the boss had made some calls before he brought us in. Stosser got shotgun, the rest of us were in back, elbow-to-rib and knee-to-knee. The car came with a manic driver who swung through the morning traffic like he’d been a Shanghai cabbie in another life, shoving us around even as packed-in as we were. Nobody complained. The subway might have had more room, but it
would have taken too long. Since we opened our doors for business, the main problem had been that we weren’t called in until after everyone else had tromped all over the scene and made things harder for us to sort out. Today, we’d been given time to get in and take a look while things were clean…but the clock was ticking and the twenty minutes it took us was nineteen minutes too long.

  I sat back in the seat, stuck in the middle, trying to ignore Nifty’s elbow hitting my ribs, and Nick’s cheap, toxic cologne in my nose, while Sharon and Pietr got the very back seat with all our kits. Four basic black hardcases and one bright red one: Pietr’s, as though to make up for his unwanted but useful ability to disappear when you were looking straight at him. Sharon had added a discreetly stylin’ silver tag to hers, and mine had a glittering 3-D ice-spider decal on the side, just where anyone looking to steal it would see it and be freaked out. Nifty and Nick didn’t bother with anything, far as I could tell.

  I stared up at the ceiling as we zoomed through lights that were yellow-turning-red, trying not to guess at what we were going to find on the scene. The trick to scene investigations was to look without expecting to find anything, examine without assumption. Current was directed by what we desired; even without the words of a spell, you could possibly create something just by assuming strongly enough that it was there.

  Or so Venec warned us, at least twice a week.

  The driver let us out on the corner, and zoomed off like he had to be in Queens three seconds later. The minute we got out, I was shivering inside my coat, but it wasn’t because of the sharp wind coming off the river. Something had walked over my spine, and that was never a good thing. I had a slight touch of precog, what my mentor J called “the kenning,” and it told me this was a bad place to be. Bad things happened here.

  No choice, though. This was the job: investigating bad things.

  The others were already walking toward the scene, and I had to stretch my legs to catch up. We weren’t the only ones interested; there was a small crowd already gathered around the scene of the attack, maybe twenty people, and even from the street you could tell that the mood was not good. Sometimes there was a weird party atmosphere when people rubbernecked a crime scene. Not here. I could practically smell the current on them, crackling like ozone, and I knew the rest of the team was getting the same vibe: Talent, wanting to know why another Talent was dead, and a second wounded, at the hands—horn—of a fatae.

  Normally interactions between fatae and humans in the Cosa Nostradamus were cautious but healthy, but something like this… I didn’t need Stosser’s warning still ringing in my ears to know that things would get a lot worse, and fast, if we didn’t get the evidence sorted and delivered, soon.

  I wondered, suddenly, why so many Talented bystanders were here. Coincidence? Or had someone put the word out, in the time it took for us to get called in? And if so…why, and who?

  Questions I didn’t have answers for, yet.

  Someone in the crowd noticed our arrival, and a low mutter went up, like the first roll of thunder. Hot and ugly. Ian had it on the nose.

  Stosser had already given the crowd a once-over, and was issuing orders. “Cholis. Run the tape. Lawrence, crowd-watch.”

  “On it, boss,” Nifty said, and he and Pietr moved toward the crowd, walking like men with purpose. The tape wasn’t the yellow crime-scene tape so beloved of Null cops, but a thin red extrusion of current that flickered and snapped in the cold air as they spun it out, walking a circuit around the scene. The tape was invisible to Nulls, but warned Talent and fatae alike away from the investigation. If they trespassed, Pietr, our rope-man, would know.

  “Hey!” Pietr scowled at a lanky figure that brushed against the wire leaning in to get a better look. “Back off!”

  “Or what, little man?” The intruder—your basic suburban white-boy macho wannabe in clothing too expensive to be tough—loomed over Pietr, who seemed to almost fade from sight, the way he did when stressed. There was an instinctive urge to go to Pietr’s defense, but I checked it. We would all be given our particular assignments, and that wasn’t mine. Nicholas James Lawrence wasn’t all that big, for an ex-college linebacker, but he presented like a big-ass mofo when he wanted to. Nobody threatened a coworker when Nifty was around.

  Satisfied that the guys had things in-hand, I turned my attention back to the boss. Ian’s long orange-red hair was covered by a black wool watch cap, making him tougher to identify at a distance. I wasn’t sure if that was intentional or not, since he was normally a flamboyant publicity-magnet. Oh, hell, Ian never did anything unintentionally. He was letting us go public, and playing it close and quiet himself. Interesting. Not useful, right now, but interesting.

  “How virgin is the scene?” I heard the word come out of my mouth and winced. I’m not normally big on tact, but that had been particularly ill-chosen even for me.

  Stosser didn’t even seem to notice, although Sharon’s cheek twitched a little in response. “Thankfully, one of ours was with the first responders, and was quicker on the draw than most of his peers. Paramedics took the human bodies, but the cops haven’t gone over the scene yet.” A grim smile touched his face. “New York’s finest decided to wait for someone to come down and take care of the ki-rin before they approached the scene itself, so the area’s about as untouched as we’re going to get.”

  I couldn’t blame the cops—I wouldn’t want to deal with a ki-rin in a bad mood, either.

  “Not that there’s any doubt of who did what,” Stosser went on, “but I am informed that the fatae community’s already screaming for blood—more blood, I mean. They don’t like that a ki-rin’s been shown disrespect, disrespect being anything other than kissing its hooves in abject adoration.”

  Wow. That was the bitterest I’d ever head the boss man get. Normally he left the snide comments to Venec.

  “What kind of blood do they want?” Nick asked.

  “Who the hell knows.” He seemed to remember he was talking to staff, not himself, and I saw the usual cool exterior go back up. “Our contact thinks the fact that there was any investigation by Nulls at all set them off. They’re already demanding that the ki-rin be released, and nobody’s even questioned it yet.

  “The one thing everyone agrees on is that this needs to be cleared up and closed down as soon as possible, if not sooner. That means we have to determine exactly what happened, who did what, and in what order.”

  “That’s what you built us to do,” I said. And then, since he hadn’t really answered me before, I prompted him again. “The scene?”

  Stosser looked up at the sky, checking the thickness of the clouds. Normally we—Talent—like storms, since electrical storms are natural generators of current, but rain right now would seriously screw things up by compromising the scene. Magical trace washed away the same as physical, especially if there’s lightning involved—current from the electric bolts could wipe the slate clean in one flash—and being wet made me look like a drowned albino rat.

  “Like I said, reasonably untouched, for NYPD values of reasonable. Ground’s been trampled by a couple-three cops, one of whom is our first-responder lonejack.”

  Poor guy must have shit a brick when he saw the ki-rin, and realized what he’d gotten. Ki-rin were not only rare, they were ancient, as a breed. Like dryads and greater dragons, they were given respect by every other fatae breed, and any Talent with a lick of sense or tradition. We were lucky our first responder didn’t panic, and luckier still that he called the Council, and not one of the lonejack elders. The Cosa Nostradamus’s relationship with the NYPD is a long and fragmented one, but something like this was going to get every alarm jangling everywhere, and the Council—much as a lonejack would hate to admit it—was the best way to handle things. Council had the protocol.

  “We have a signature on the cop?” Signature was the way we identified Talent, the way their current “felt.” It was individual, like a fingerprint—but you had to know what it looked like, first. Problem was
there wasn’t a database for us to check, which mostly made identifying a particular signature near-impossible unless we had access to everyone on the scene, to tag them for comparison, and rule them out of any evidence we collected.

  “Not yet. Nick, go find and fetch.”

  Nick rolled his eyes, then saluted crisply, and turned on his heel and headed out into the crowd. That left me and Sharon.

  “The deceased has been carted off to the morgue, while his companion is on his way to the hospital, presumably doped to the gills.” That was standard for Talent in those situations—current is only under our control by conscious effort: when stressed, we can go haywire. Pietr was unusual in that he faded from view as a protective measure—most of us just shorted out sensitive electronics like, oh, life-support systems and finely calibrated medical apparatuses. Emergency-room staff hated to see us coming.

  Ian went back to issuing orders. “Mendelssohn, I want you working the crowd. Listen, don’t talk. If there’s anyone out there with more than a prurient interest, or says anything—anything—that gives you a twitch, I want to know, immediately.” While the Guys had us stretch in training, or on low-intensity cases, when we were on a sticky job they preferred to match people up with their native skills, and Sharon had a seventh sense about if people were lying or not. My teammate, characteristically stylish in a long black suede coat and a black wool beret over her blond hair, nodded and went off to do our master’s bidding

  And that left me. And the scene. No surprise. I didn’t need to hear the band playing to know what my marching orders were.

  “You okay with this?” Ian generally played the compassionate soul to Venec’s hard-ass, but he really wasn’t much on the touchy-feely when it came to us, more likely to toss us in without a by-your-leave. I blinked at his concern, wondering what triggered that, and then shrugged it off. No way I was going to make him think I couldn’t handle it.