by SM Reine
“Is this all there is to the church?” I asked.
“There’s a basement,” Isobel said. “And there’s a choir loft.” She turned to point behind me, and surprise registered in her eyes.
I followed her finger to see that someone was standing above us, swathed in shadow behind the crimson curtains of the loft.
Sister Catherine.
Her eyes fell on me. It was like the time I’d walked in on Domingo shoving his tongue down the throat of my girlfriend freshman year, sitting on the edge of my bed—that exact same look of guilt and shock and resignation.
It took me a second to remember that I’d brought a gun, much less that it might be something I’d want to draw. I fumbled at the strap and drew the gun.
“Catherine Reilly, you are under arrest!”
She ran, of course. They always fucking run.
And Sister Catherine was pretty fast for an old lady.
She reached the bottom of the stairs before I could sprint back down the pews. She flung the front doors open and hurtled into the street.
I’m a big guy, but that doesn’t mean I’m slow. Most of my time at the gym is spent on cardio. When you have magicked muscles, it doesn’t take much time weightlifting to bulk, but you still have to put in the legwork if you want to be fast.
I’m definitely fast.
Within seconds, I was about ten feet behind the nun, gun drawn, aimed at the ground.
“Freeze!” I shouted.
I didn’t expect it to work. I wasn’t even pointing the Desert Eagle at her. But Sister Catherine immediately dropped to her knees on the broken pavement.
Her obedience shocked me so much that I almost ran right into her. I managed to stop before ending up in an undignified situation on the ground, but just barely.
She clasped her hands together in prayer and tipped her head back to the sky. “Forgive me,” Sister Catherine asked the…what, the clouds? Oh, right. Prayer.
“You’re begging in the wrong direction, Sister. I’m the one who’s about to arrest you.”
I didn’t have to read anyone their Miranda rights, nor did I have to even tell her why I was dragging her in. One of the perks of working for a secret government organization is a slightly less-than-strict adherence to the laws everyone else deals with.
Sister Catherine just kept praying. Something about Mary and grace and I didn’t really listen so I can’t tell you what else.
I grabbed one of her wrists and wrenched her hands apart.
I used to have two major rules guiding me, both in life and in the business. The first was that I didn’t deal with homicides. Obviously that was shot to hell.
The second rule—the one that I wasn’t about to let slip away from me—is that I don’t hit women and I don’t get rough with them. I’m better than that. Even when I’m arresting a female witch, I do it as respectfully as possible.
But after seeing what Sister Catherine had done to the nurse—seeing what she had done to her own volunteer—I wasn’t feeling extremely gentle.
Taking the cuffs out of my pocket, I yanked her arms behind her and tightened the metal rings around her wrists.
“We’re after you?” Isobel had finally caught up. Now she was staring at Sister Catherine with a hearty heaping of skepticism. “There must be a mistake, Cèsar. She can’t have done anything worthy of arrest.”
“Isobel, my dear,” Sister Catherine said, wincing as I cinched the cuffs just a little bit too tight. “It’s been too long.”
“Over a month, I know.”
“Three months.”
Isobel cringed. “I haven’t been in Helltown lately. I’m sorry.”
“You two know each other?” I asked. Why wasn’t I surprised?
If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought her cheeks were looking kind of pink. She didn’t try to deny it, though. Funny how I could have gone through several life and death situations with this woman and I still knew virtually nothing about her.
“She used to bring me cookies,” Sister Catherine said.
Isobel’s face was definitely red. “I guess I owe you a few dozen.”
“She’s a suspect,” I said, hauling the nun to her feet. “Don’t fraternize with the suspect. Okay?”
“Suspected of what? Being too nice?” Isobel asked.
“Murder,” I said.
Isobel’s jaw dropped open. She’d known we were hunting a murderer who worked at that church, but she just hadn’t connected the dots yet.
On the bright side, it was a really quiet drive back to the OPA headquarters.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SUZY MET ME ON my way into the Magical Violations Department. Aside from her hair being twisted into an unusually messy bun, it was impossible to tell that she’d been drinking until sunrise; her suit was clean, her eyes were clear, and she looked focused.
“Where are you going?” she asked, pacing me down the hall to the elevators.
“I’ve arrested Sister Catherine. Now I’m going to interview her.”
Suzy shoved a folder at me. “Then you’re going to want to know what we found in the closet of her altar room.”
I stopped by the elevator doors to look. There were multiple photographs of plastic bags, jars, and storage tubs. I had no idea what I was looking at until one of the pictures zoomed in on the jars.
“Those are hearts, aren’t they?” I asked.
I took a quick count. There were six of them. We’d only found two bodies.
Suzy looked grim. “There are at least eight different victims suggested by the other trophies she’s kept. Oh, plus we found Nurse Sullivan’s Zippo with the flaming skull on the side.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, I thought you’d be interested in that.” She slapped me on the back. “Good work arresting her. I’m going to contact the LAPD and see if I can track down the other murder victims.”
She left me with the photographs in hand. I got in the elevator and flipped through them again as the floors slid past me, dropping me deep into the cement underbelly of the OPA campus.
A couple of the photos were labeled. It was the only way I could tell that I was looking at severed noses and lips.
We’d found the rest of Jay Brandon.
Isobel’s insistence that Sister Catherine was innocent had been gnawing at me. But now that gnawing was gone.
I’d caught the killer. Now I just needed to find the demon—her murder weapon.
Case closed.
Right?
The guys had put Sister Catherine in one of our special interrogation rooms. We’re used to keeping witches on the premises, and we know how to keep the most powerful of them under control.
She was strapped to a chair in the center of a permanent circle of power that had been carved into the cement floor. The cuffs were padded leather—the ultimate in comfortable government bondage—and stamped with easily activated magical marks that could knock her out in a millisecond if she became difficult.
The walls themselves were drywall, but our insulation wasn’t just fireproof. It was enchanted to be magic-proof, too. Anything cast inside the room couldn’t get out.
Even if one of our suspects broke free of the chair, they wouldn’t be able to bewitch anything outside the room. And good luck escaping with all the armed Union guards waiting in the hallway.
As soon as I got in, I explained the various features of the room to Sister Catherine. It’s not procedure, but I always liked to see how people reacted to hearing about it. How worried they got said a lot about what they knew of magic.
Sister Catherine looked real worried. She knew a lot.
“Why am I here?” she asked. She didn’t bother trying to test the strength of the straps like so many suspects did. She was a skinny old woman; she knew she wouldn’t get anywhere with that.
I took the chair across from her, right by the door to the exit. Put my body between her and the way out. “You tell me why you’re here,” I said. “You’re the one wh
o bolted. You’ve gotta have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.”
“I’ve put a lot of hours into concealing my less traditional charitable efforts, Agent Hawke,” Sister Catherine said. “Can you imagine how difficult it would become to obtain grants and donations if people learned that I also try to bring the word of God into Hell?”
“So you were running to protect the soup kitchen,” I said.
“And several other charities.”
“That’s funny. I thought you were running to protect yourself from getting nailed for the murder of Jay Brandon, among others.”
She paled, but didn’t look surprised.
“Oh,” she said.
I showed her some of the photos from Suzy’s folder—not the ones with the body parts, but the snapshots of her altar. “Tell me about the statues. What’s up with these? Kinda blasphemous for a nun to have, don’t you think?”
She was still trembling from my last accusation and slow to respond.
“It’s not blasphemous at all. They’re not meant to be gods; they’re representative of male and female energy, positive and negative, black and white.” Her hands twitched like she wanted to gesture as she spoke, but she couldn’t move enough to pull it off. “Infernal and ethereal.”
“Like Hell and Heaven. Seems you’ve been a little too interested in the more southerly part of that dichotomy, Sister.”
“If you mean the infernal, Hell isn’t south of anything. It’s not even in our dimension.”
“What do I know? You’re the expert, apparently.”
Sister Catherine just stared at me, like she couldn’t believe how much stupid shit was coming out of my mouth and had no idea how to react to it. I got that look a lot when I tried to joke around with my coworkers. Nobody appreciated my genius.
“You don’t associate pagan worship practices with the Devil, do you?” she finally asked. “I’m only in Helltown to offer support to its residents. There are humans in the neighborhood who are incapable of leaving to worship. They deserve to benefit from the warmth of our faith, too.”
Who was playing stupid now? “We saw the demon you’ve been using as a murder weapon, cloven hooves and all.”
Realization struck her, eyes widening.
“Cloven hooves,” she said. “Demon.”
“So what have you been doing? It’s more powerful than evocation to have brought a physical entity to the Earth. Are you breeding them? Keeping them as pets? Feeding them volunteers from your soup kitchen?”
Sister Catherine sank back against the chair, momentarily closing her eyes. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that she looked relieved.
The sight of it disarmed me. I hadn’t been expecting relief.
Could I have been wrong about her? It felt like I’d just thrown a dart at a target from two inches away and somehow hit the wall anyway.
“Lord above,” she said. “You think I’m dealing with demons.”
I lifted the photo of the jars of hearts. “We’ve got pretty compelling evidence for that, yeah.” Pain twisted her features. She didn’t speak. “Want to give me a story about how you’re just holding these for a friend?”
“I was waiting to give them proper, respectful burials,” Sister Catherine said. “I needed to dispose of them discreetly on holy ground. I couldn’t let them rot, or be thrown away, or…”
“That’s sweet of you, considering you fucking killed people.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. Her eyes dropped to her feet, which were also bound to the chair in leather cuffs.
“You want to confess to anything?” I asked. “Explain why you’re using demons to kill people? Tell me how many other victims we should expect to find? Fill in the blanks for me, Sister. I’d sure appreciate the help.”
The woman took a deep breath. When she returned her gaze to me, she looked resolute. “Yes, I am responsible for the death of Jay Brandon and the nurse at the hospital. I have been in Helltown consorting with demons. Whatever confession you would like me to sign, please present it as soon as possible and notify my lawyer.”
Yeah, my dart had definitely missed. Now she was messing with me.
I stood up and dropped the photos on my chair.
Pacing around Sister Catherine, I pushed back my jacket so I could brace my hands on my hips. Drum my fingers against my belt. It was so quiet in there that I could hear the tap of skin against leather.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re in Helltown to help people.”
“I am in Helltown to consort with demons, which led to the death of Jay Brandon.”
That was what I’d gone into the room expecting to hear. I wanted to hear it.
Now that I had, I wasn’t happy.
“Why?” I asked. “What do you get out of the murders?”
Sister Catherine’s mouth opened and then closed again. Her hands tightened into fists. “Well, what do witches typically get out of working with demons? Power, I’d assume. Yes, I’ve been getting power from this. It makes me stronger in my pagan witchcraft.”
“And what kind of demon is that thing we saw you with, exactly? The thing in the basement of the hospital?”
“It’s so powerful that it’s a breed of its own.” That answer came more promptly. She might have been telling the truth. I’d been reading about demons. The biggest and nastiest were one of a kind.
“And now this thing is roaming around without its keeper?” I asked.
The nun considered this. “No, it only comes out when I summon it. Now that you have me, that demon won’t be causing problems anymore. You shouldn’t bother looking for it.”
Which meant that it was still out there. Probably vulnerable without Sister Catherine and capable of murdering again.
I needed a new tactic.
“How much do you know about the Office of Preternatural Affairs?” I asked.
“Only what I’ve heard people say at the church.” She had the courtesy to look embarrassed. “They don’t say many positive things.”
Yeah, I would bet they didn’t. “When witches break our rules, we make them disappear. Some of them get retrained and hired to work for us. Some of them get relocated where they’ll cause less damage. But we do something else with the witches responsible for killing people.”
She paled. “I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t. Our jails aren’t like mundane jails. They’re bad places to be. You’ll be cut off from your power for the rest of your life.” I was guessing, but it sounded scary enough to suit the OPA. We were scary people. “There definitely aren’t any churches.”
Sister Catherine couldn’t seem to speak. Her eyes glistened, and a single tear rolled down her cheek.
I wasn’t a bad guy. I didn’t want to do bad cop. But the truth was that if Sister Catherine signed a confession saying that she was responsible for everything, she would disappear for a long time.
Maybe I wasn’t a bad cop so much as a brutally honest cop.
“You have given me a really bad weekend, Sister,” I said. “I’d like it if this week was better, so I’ll give you one more chance to tell the truth before we call your bluff and toss you in one of our coldest, darkest cells. What the hell is going on here?”
She swallowed hard. “Exactly what I said.” The nun was trembling all over. “Bring the confession and I’ll sign it.”
Isobel was waiting for me in Fritz’s otherwise empty office. I mean, of course she was. It was nine o’clock in the morning and Lucrezia de Angelis was somewhere on the campus, so Isobel was in the one place where she was most likely to get caught.
And here I’d trusted Fritz to take her back to her RV after we were done in Helltown.
“Jesus, Izzy,” I said, slipping into the office and shutting the door behind me. “Are you trying to get caught?”
She looked irritated. “We were interrupted trying to leave. I’m hiding until Fritz can get me out of here. Have some faith, Cèsar.”
Isobel was doing a terrible job of
hiding. Fritz had a corner office with huge windows and a great view of the entire grassy OPA campus. It also probably allowed anyone on the sidewalk to see us talking.
I shut the curtains so that the only light came from Fritz’s desk lamp.
“You can’t send Sister Catherine to prison,” Isobel said. “Or wherever it is you send people.”
“We have a detention center run by the Union,” I said, “and it’s a horrible pit of darkness where people who use demons as murder weapons deserve to go.”
“She didn’t do it,” Isobel said.
That was exactly what I was struggling not to think.
It didn’t make any rational sense. She had the victims’ hearts at her house. If that wasn’t incriminating evidence, then I didn’t know what was. But her reaction had been all wrong. She was still hiding something. I was beginning to suspect that “something” was that she was actually innocent.
Like I’ve said before, I have a pretty good gut instinct, but a gut instinct against a closet of body parts didn’t mean anything.
“Give me all your evidence for her innocence and I’ll let her go,” I said. “Better yet, find the real killer. I’ll wait here, twiddling my thumbs, until you get back.”
Isobel paced, twisting her hands together. “She’s a good person. She’s selfless. She couldn’t deny a beggar asking for a quarter, much less kill someone.”
“Look, I don’t think you know Sister Catherine as well as you think you do,” I said. I ticked off the reasons on my fingers. “She was hostile toward me when I initially questioned her at the soup kitchen. She just confessed—literally five minutes ago—that she’s responsible for the murders. We found a closet at her house with pieces of the fucking murder victims inside. This isn’t the kind of shit that innocent people do.”
“I bet that if you dig into it, you’ll find that the evidence was planted. And if Sister Catherine was hostile to you, then you were probably acting like a jackass,” Isobel said.