“Don’t know. Unless we can get it to talk, odds are we’ll never know.”
“’Scuse me,” I said, and got up. Venec and Pietr both watched me leave the room, which weirded me out a little; the others kept going on the play-by-play.
I grabbed my bag from the closet, then walked down the hallway to Stosser’s office. The door was open, so Ian had already left to do his political oil thing. I sat down at the desk, and pulled a card case out of my bag. Had I put it in there…I had! Picking up the phone, I dialed the number on the business card, and waited. Venec might have contacts in the police force, but I had friends in lower places than that.
“Sylvan Investigations. How can we help you?”
The voice was pleasant, mellow, and male.
“Can’t afford a receptionist, huh?”
“Bonnie?” The voice made an instant switch from smooth to raspy. Raspy sounded better on him. “How you doing? Why are you calling? Who died?”
“Are you always that paranoid?”
Danny made a rude noise. “Bonnie, when a Talent calls me on the phone, it’s never good news. Unless you’re calling to invite me over for breakfast?”
“Not this time, sorry. I have a favor to ask you.”
“I knew it. All right, Blondie, shoot.”
“Can you dig up any dirt on a guy named Steven Harrison? He’s a history teacher out in Nashville. Yes, Tennessee, you know of another Nashville? He’s not a Talent, so my contacts would be useless. He doesn’t have a police record, far as we know—” if he did, Nick would have found that “—but I figure he’s probably going to have something off-color in someone’s file somewhere.” You didn’t be BFF with a loser like our dead guy without some trouble, somewhere. I trusted Nick’s talents, but there were some things that needed magic…and some that needed old-fashioned snooping.
“This has to do with the case you’re working on?”
“It could help us crack it.”
“And you’ll owe me?”
“PUPI will owe you.”
There was a pause, the sound of papers being shuffled, and he laughed. “I’ll settle for that. How can I reach you?”
I gave him the office number, and, after a second’s thought, my home number, too.
“God, I wish you people could use email like the rest of us. At least you’re not demanding it all be couriered, because P.B.’s rates are getting crazy. I’m assuming that these are landlines?”
“You betcha. I gotta get back into the fray. Let me know as soon as you’ve got something!”
The entire exchange had taken maybe ten minutes, but by the time I made it back down the hall, the chalkboard was already full of names, timelines, and exclamation points, and everyone was talking rapid-fire, bouncing ideas off each other.
“If he was just killed, yeah, there might be suspicion on the event,” Sharon was saying. “But a known sexual predator who gets what’s coming to him? Nobody would be surprised, and damn few would question the actions of the killer…. No, it could work.”
“If he died while committing a crime, though,” Pietr responded, “the insurance company might stop payment, right? What’s the legal ruling on that?”
“If he’s killed in the commission of, or in connection to the commission of a crime, all payments are off. It’s more complicated than that, because if it was simple we wouldn’t need lawyers, but if he was charged with a felony the insurance company would be able to refuse benefits.” Sharon might not have my total recall, but she was damn reliable for legal stuff.
“Legal rulings are moot,” Nick said irritably. “If the girl won’t talk, then it’s he said/she said and there’s enough reasonable doubt to turn him into a possible victim. She doesn’t press charges, there is no crime.”
“And they can’t use the ki-rin’s involvement to prove the assault because that would require Nulls admitting to the ki-rin’s existence,” Nifty added, making a swooping red circle around the ki-rin on the board, and then crossing it, to make the international Do Not Have sign. “So the insurance company has no basis to not pay, even if they smell something off—an investigation would turn up nothing other than the surface report.”
“So our antifatae activists are enabling the scam to go forward, by giving her a reason not to accuse her alleged attacker….” I was trying to catch up with where they’d gone while I was out of the room.
“That would be the end result, yeah,” Nifty said. “I don’t know if it was our perps’ original plan, or just a happy-for-them secondary result of bigotry. But it sure as hell gives her legitimate motivation for keeping quiet, in case anyone—like us—starts sniffing around.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If we’re going to propose that the guy was set up to get killed by the ki-rin, which it sounds like we are…?”
There were nods around the table.
“It all works,” Nifty said, and gestured to the tangle of chalk marks that backed up their thought process. “If she doesn’t file a claim and nobody’s going to fess up that a crazy-ass unicorn skewered the guy, then the death will be listed as by unknown assailant for unknown reasons, case open and nobody expects it to ever get solved. The insurance company might or might not sic their own investigator on it, but they’ll hit the same wall—the girl isn’t talking, the ki-rin won’t talk, and even if they have a Talent highly placed enough in the company to know what happened, I really doubt they’re going to want to put down in writing the cause for refusal, especially if any kind of truth-spell shows what we got, that they were all telling the truth. So the company pays out, eventually, and this Harrison guy pockets the money and comes out nicely ahead, even after the payout he made to have his buddy set up and killed.”
I didn’t have any drama with their logic, just one small tangle in it. “There were three payout chains made. You’re saying that Mercy was part of this. That she…”
There was a weird little silence. They’d been so caught up in figuring out the logic-chain, they’d forgotten that part of it. The fact that she’d been complicit in her own attack. And it had been an attack—if we were right, the dead guy had tried to rape her, therefore triggering the ki-rin’s justifiable-to-the-Cosa’s actions. He hadn’t known it was a setup, and his partner couldn’t have stopped him, or he risked tipping the game. The violence had been real.
“People do a lot of things for money,” Venec finally said, his voice dry. “I can’t speak for the girl, but $25,000 tax-free can make people do things you’d swear they’d never do.”
I thought about Mercy, how subdued and scared she’d been. Subdued, scared…but not traumatized. Not physically or, really, mentally. Not the way a sheltered girl whose first sexual experience had been against her will should have been.
You never want to know what people are capable of. Unfortunately, this job gave us a front-row ticket.
“Losing the ki-rin’s companionship overrode everything else,” I said out loud. “I’d thought she was in shock over that, so it was blotting out the physical aspects, but…”
“But she might have been bruised and battered, and sad but not scarred,” Sharon said. “Damn it. She played us.”
“And the ki-rin went along with this?” Venec wasn’t questioning that, just making us consider all the elements.
Nick shrugged. I was starting to understand why my mentor trained that movement out of me—it really did give a passive-aggressive vibe. “Never assume a fatae isn’t just as eager for filthy lucre as a human. It took a hit in the stock market, so maybe it thought this was an easy way to recoup its losses? If the girl was willing to exchange sex for money—there isn’t anything immoral in that. Illegal, okay, but the ki-rin doesn’t live by our laws. Not for sex and not for murder. So it hears this plan and his companion’s okay with it, for whatever level of stupidity, and hey, it’s just a trash human nobody was going to miss, anyway, right? No, Bonnie, I’m not being a bigot, just pragmatic. I mean, we’re not exactly outraged on the dead guy’s behalf, are we? A
nd we’re the only ones who seem to care what happened to him.”
Ugly, but true. I felt more than a little sick.
There was a chime in the air, similar to the one Stosser used to call us in for a meeting, but with a different pitch. The phone was ringing.
“I’ll get it,” I said before anyone else responded, and dashed down the hallway before anyone could ask if I was expecting a call. There was no way it could be Danny already…. But it was.
“You’re fast.”
“Don’t spread that around, I’ll never get another date. You sitting down?”
I sat. “Talk to me.”
He did. I started to take notes, and then stopped, and just listened.
“Holy… You rock. I’ll get back to you later, k?”
Walking back through the hall, I was trying to figure out how to pass along what Danny had dug up, but in the end, I just walked in, and blurted it.
“The cop who called the Council? First guy on the scene, the one who spread his signature all over the site? The one who claimed he was just doing his civic duty, calling the Council? Drinking buddy to our schoolteacher heir back in college. What do you want to bet he’s got a payoff hidden somewhere, too?”
“Motherf—” Nifty started to add that fact to the crowded board, and just stopped. “Too many connections. There’s no way anyone could think there was reasonable doubt, not with all this. Not the way every single damned player ties back somehow to our presumptive heir. This was all a scam, start to finish.”
“Not a scam,” Sharon said, and her voice was tight with anger. “Conspiracy to commit murder, plus insurance fraud, and…god, I don’t even know what else. The evidence…just the Null-admissible material would be enough, and it would hold up in court, I think, enough to convince a jury, yes. But…it’ll never get there.
“They planned on that. They planned on all of this to cover their asses. The lure, the setup, the conflicting stories that raise reasonable doubt that couldn’t be proven one way or the other because they believed their own truths. Even if someone got on her enough that she had no choice but to press charges, the case would probably be dismissed because she didn’t agree to a rape kit. They even planned for the Council to be involved from the start, the cop calling them in, to ensure the situation was muddied by their tromping all over it. The bastards probably hoped the Council’d help sweep any investigation under the rug, rather than let the dirt surface.”
Sharon had it summed up. Everyone else was pissed and angry, frustrated at having been used, but there was a soft, subtle vibe of satisfaction in the air, too. And it was coming from Venec. I looked at him, my eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“Boss? You have something up your sleeve. What?”
Everyone looked at him then, and Venec smiled, that small, barely there smile that always made me think of a wolf contemplating the lamb.
“It was a very clever scam. Very clever, yeah. It almost worked. But the key word is almost.”
twelve
“What’s going on in that brain of yours?” I asked, but his wall was up and I couldn’t get even a hint of a flicker.
“This needs to wait for Ian to get back,” he said. “You all should go get some lunch. Take your time, I think he’s going to be a while.”
There, I caught just a hint of something…and then it was gone, and I couldn’t tell if it was related to his scheme—and it was definitely a scheme, with that smile—or worry for whatever Stosser was up to.
We grumbled but obeyed—beside the fact that we couldn’t exactly force the boss to spill, our stomachs were all starting to rumble. There was a unanimous vote for pizza, and Venec told us to eat at the restaurant. I think he was afraid that if we stayed in the office, we’d wheedle it out of him or something. Both of us had our walls up, but I swear even as I left the building, I could still feel the tendrils of smug anticipation drifting from him. He wanted to tell us, but wouldn’t.
By the time we came back, filled with Vinnie’s Original and a couple of liters of soda, Stosser had returned, and we were back in business.
“We all good with the public?” Nifty asked.
Boss man looked dead-beat tired, like he’d been running on empty for twenty-four hours, so I was guessing that he’d used a heavy dose of current with his snake oil. One of his more useful—to us, anyway—skills was glamour. Just like in the old fairy tales, yeah, except Stosser used it to enhance his already considerable competence and sincerity, not his looks. He’d cast it on us once or twice, to make a client feel more confident. Like a lot of the old magics, it didn’t create competence, just enhanced it so an observer would get a stronger sense of trust and belief. The glamour-casting elves of legend? Stosser was to them like a lightning bolt is to a lightning bug.
From the look of him, apparently glamour burned calories at a seriously high rate, same as current-hacking. No wonder all the old witches in fairy tales and woodcuttings were skinny—I can’t imagine they were getting enough food on a regular basis to make a house move around on chicken-feet legs, or make it look like it was made out of gingerbread, or whatever it was they did to keep the business going.
He also had a wrinkle between his eyes that hadn’t been there that morning. Something was niggling at him, something he didn’t want to think about, maybe, or didn’t know what to do about. I wasn’t sure if that knowledge came from Venec or my own observation, but I knew it for a fact, and if I knew, so did Ben. Whatever his meeting had been, it hadn’t gone as well as he’d wanted.
“We’re good,” the boss agreed, apparently unaware that at least two of us were on to him. “Just so long as nobody blows anything up or accuses the mayor of sodomizing chickens, at least for a month.”
“No chickens with the mayor, right,” Nick said, making a mock-note of that.
That was about as much levity as we were capable of right now, apparently.
“All right.” Ian stood and walked over to the chalkboard, although he was watching us, not it. “I looked over your diagram. Looks nasty but logical…and there’s no way we can bring this to the Null courts. Yes?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Venec said, and where he should have been annoyed there was still that shimmer of evil delight coming from him. “We don’t have any standing to bring it ourselves, and they’ve muddied the waters with their games enough that nobody else would be willing to waste the time or energy. We can’t connect the lines legally, not without the ki-rin’s involvement, and the ki-rin’s presence is enough to make the entire thing seem too fantastical to be true—and even if by some miracle or maneuvering they got a Cosa-friendly judge and jury, they’d probably side with the ki-rin’s story, and ignore all the other evidence, on sheer tradition.”
“We need the ki-rin to actually testify,” Sharon said. “Put it to direct question. If it can’t lie, truly, then a direct question, the right question, would break it all apart.”
“Forget about it,” Ian said sharply. “It has stated clearly that it will not speak on the matter, not in the court and not to the Council, and certainly not to us. It has the equivalent of diplomatic immunity—there’s nothing we can do or say that will force it to change its mind.”
“And it’s not like brute force is an option, either,” Pietr said, almost regretfully. “None of us could do more than tickle it.”
“What about Bonnie’s bodyguard?” Nick asked. “I bet Bobo could dent its hide.”
I let out a heavy sigh, only partially feigned. “Let it go, Nick.” Bobo would do it, if he thought J would consider it part of his job to keep me safe, but there was no way I was going to be the one to set it up. “I don’t think that would do much for the agency’s reputation, having a fatae enforcer to beat up suspects,” I added dryly.
“I don’t know, some corners, it might enhance it,” Venec said, just as dryly. I started to laugh, and then realized that he wasn’t kidding.
“Even if it did speak up, what good would it do?” Trust Sharon to get us back on track. �
��Ki-rin don’t lie. Its companion was attacked with intent to do serious injury, and it did kill the assailant who did it. By those narrow standards, approved by pretty much the entire Cosa, it did nothing wrong.”
“Hell, by the standards of most of the Cosa and half the Null population, murdering the guy wasn’t wrong, no matter who did it,” Nifty said. “I mean, this wasn’t some upright citizen who got railroaded into a bad gig. He attacked the girl with full willingness to force her. Nobody’s sorry to see this guy leave the planet.”
Put that way, it was tempting to kick back and let it go, yeah. There hadn’t been any innocent victims here. Except that there were, or there might be. If Venec was right, this could spread beyond the four people directly involved, and blow up the entire city, boom.
Plus, us. We had to break the damn case, or risk losing all the cred we’d managed to accumulate so far.
And I couldn’t quite get rid of the look on Mercy’s face, the smeared lipstick and the broken-down insides…
Venec took control back at that point. “It would be nice to keep that bastard from collecting on his friend’s murder, but that’s got to be our bonus, not the main goal, not anymore.”
The satisfied shimmer around him intensified, so much that I was amazed everyone else couldn’t see it.
“The rise in antifatae sentiment in the past few months muddied the waters even more, but that may be to our advantage, not theirs. That movement wasn’t a direct part of the original scam, but their little games have added fuel to the fire, to use my earlier metaphor—and given us the exact tool to put it out. We can make an example of the humans involved…and expose the ki-rin as an accomplice, whatever its reasons, so the fatae will have to back down from their anti-Talent stance.”
There were nods of agreement all around the table, waiting to hear what rabbit he was about to pull out.
“The important thing is to make sure everyone knows what the real motive was, that there wasn’t anything other than greed motivating all this, and force the various factions to back down.”
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