Now was one of those “not” times, maybe.
Wren, thankfully, let the topic drop. Mostly. “Maybe. I’m still going to have Sergei put out some feelers, see if there’s anything more known about this morning’s events — or the one thirty years ago. And if Danny is hiding something… we’re going to find out.”
Ellen knew why Wren was telling her this. No secrets, she’d promised, that first afternoon when they’d been thrown together. If something was going to cause a blow-up between Danny and Wren, Ellen wouldn’t get caught by surprise.
“If there’s anything to know, Sergei will know it, eventually,” Ellen said neutrally, not commenting on the second half of what her mentor’d said. “Now I’m guessing I get to make up the lesson I missed this morning?”
She guessed right.
oOo
I waited nearly half an hour after Ellen and Valere headed back uptown, ordering another cup of coffee and paying the bill they’d stuck me with, before I reached for my cell phone. There were three messages waiting — you turned your cell phone off when you were lunching with high-res Talent, even if they weren’t upset — but I ignored them, and instead dialed a landline number that had been beaten into my memory over the past few years.
“PSI Central. This is Pietr Cholis speaking, what miracle do you need us to perform today?”
“The snark-meter is redlining over there today, I take it?”
The exasperated sigh on the other end was answer enough. “What do you need us to do for you, Hendrickson?”
“You wound me,” I said. “And it’s a simple informational request. There was a killing this morning, male, dumpster dumped. Was it one of yours?”
If there’d been the killing of a Talent, the PUPs would know about it. Especially if Valere was right, and the killer had been a Talent, too. That was what the PUPs did — they dealt with current-related crimes within the Cosa Nostradamus, the things the traditional police couldn’t — couldn’t even imagine, most of them.
“Hang on.” There was a rustle of papers, and then a beeping noise. I still didn’t know how they managed to use computers in that office, and wasn’t dumb enough to ask. “Nothing’s on the agenda,” he said. “Is this something we should be paying attention to?”
“Nope,” I said, forcing something that almost sounded like cheerfulness into the words. “Just wanted to make sure that you weren’t going to swoop in at the last moment and steal all my glory when I solve the case and you take the credit.”
“Fuck off and die,” Pietr said. “We see you at the poker game next week?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. Uvidimsya pozzhe.”
“Show off,” Pietr groused, and hung up.
It didn’t quite make me smile, but it was close, and after today? I’d take close. I pushed my coffee mug toward the center of the table, and left a decent tip. It was warm and sunny outside, so I decided to walk, rather than taking the subway. I needed time to think, and walking familiar streets always worked well for that.
It was entirely possible and highly probable that this morning’s killer was Talent. It explained too many things, and I’d discovered over the years that when something fit all the pieces, odds were it was because it was the missing piece.
But that meant we were definitely dealing with a copycat, because the killer thirty years ago hadn’t been Talent.
The killer thirty years ago was dead.
Everyone involved with the murder back then was dead.
Except me.
I dodged around a clump of tourists huddled over a map on their tablet, and crossed the avenue at the light, cutting through the waiting cars rather than bothering to go all the way down to the crosswalk. How can you tell a New Yorker? We don’t lift our heads when we jaywalk.
Thirty years ago. I’d been a rookie. And an idiot, although the two together are redundant, according to my old sergeant. Wet behind the ears and filled with a desire to do something positive, to prove I was more human than faun. If they hadn’t changed the regs, made it harder to hide my genetics, I probably would have dyed my hair grey and retired when I got my twenty, and felt that I’d served my time, made my difference.
It hadn’t ended that way. And I’d walked away from the NYPD carrying secrets.
The case hadn’t been mine, and for that I thanked fate on a regular basis.
But fate — and those secrets — seemed to have caught up with me.
The woman passing me heard my muttered curse and looked askance, although I suspected it was more my tone than her knowing Greek. Then again, this was New York, so who knew.
I didn’t bother going back to the office. Nothing I needed was there; it wasn’t a case file or tax-related. No, what I needed was in a small grey lockbox in the back of my closet, under the matching lockbox that held my original birth certificate and my retirement papers.
People are sometimes taken aback when they walk into my office. “Sylvan Investigations” makes them think that I’m awash in nature, maybe, or that I’m at least making an effort to be Green. But the office is work, and work needs to be straightforward and focused, giving the impression of competence as much as compassion. And, anyway, I have a black thumb. We only keep the plants we do have alive because of Ellen.
My home, though. I’d painted the walls and ceiling a pale blue, and covered the windows with a thin scrim that changed daylight to a faint green haze. The furniture’s wood, the upholstery dark brown Ultrasuede, and the rugs thick and green. I can feel my blood pressure lowering the moment I step through the door, and kick my boots off.
This is my refuge, my home. My bower, if you use faunish terms, which I try not to. I didn’t even meet any of my cousins until I was a teenager, and spent the next decade or so trying to not be like them. But in the end, some genetics will out. Living in the city is my choice, but my soul needed the glades.
I touched the display set into one wall, and the faint strains of Clapton’s guitar seeped into the air. That’s another reason I tend not to invite people over: most of the folk I spend time with are Talent, and I’m not letting any of them near the obscenely expensive and incredibly high—tech audio system I set up. The music suited my mood, so I let it play, and headed directly for the bedroom. No point putting this off.
One slender manila envelope, the paper slightly discolored now, the original seal unbroken, untouched. I’d sealed it myself, saliva and dark red security tape, as much to keep myself from it as anyone else.
I’m no Talent, and any connection I have to current is muted, sketchy enough to not exist at all. But even I could feel the tension stretched in the air, drawing across my fingertips where they touched the envelope. Opening this could mean nothing. Or it could mean… what?
That was what I needed to know. I’d spent my entire life protecting people, finding the ones who got lost in the edge between worlds, who wandered unknowing into danger. The fact that I knew these particular shadows so well changed nothing.
I was going to keep telling myself that, all the way down.
I cut open the tape and lifted the flap, letting the contents slide out onto the bed next to me.
Three photographs, two glossy black and white, one color. One sheet of paper, typewritten, the marks almost hard to read after so long using computer printouts. A carbon copy of the coroner’s report. That was it.
I looked at the color photo, then at the matching one in black and white, comparing the scene to the one I’d seen that morning. I hadn’t been wrong: it was identical. The only difference was the color of the victim’s skin, both photos making it clear.
A flitter of panic tried to shape itself in my gut, and I forced it down. It happened thirty years ago. It had been a one-off, my only connection to it a badge and a uniform I’d put away nearly two decades ago. And there was nothing to connect me to this, no reason it should come back to haunt me now.
But the third photo stared up at me, the closed eyes and grey-toned skin a silent reprimand.
A f
ragment of a poem came to me, the lifetime legacy of my mother’s bedtime reading habits, a line about hunters taking apart a stone wall to get at a fleeing rabbit, and the farmer who had to come after them and repair the damage done…
The rabbit was long gone, the hunters long gone, but their handiwork remained. The damage had never been repaired.
I’d promised Ellen I’d never lie to her, not even for her own good. It was the basis we’d formed our relationship on, that I would trust and respect her.
Even if it might break her trust in me.
I reached for my phone and dialed the number for her answering machine, a low-tech piece of junk that probably only her mother and I ever called.
“Hey. When Valere lets you loose, come by the office. I think I might have a lead on this morning’s case.”
Case, even though we had no client, technically. Lets you loose, not when you’re free. If I’d trained my Shadow properly, she’d know that meant not to share this with her mentor.
I slipped the evidence back into the envelope, and tucked the flap under, then got up and took my rarely-used briefcase down from the closet shelf and slipped the envelope inside, snapping the latch shut with an almost-reassuring snick of metal on metal.
You could tape things up, lock them down, but things escaped. Always.
oOo
Ellen hadn’t gotten Danny’s message until late that night, staggering home half-drained and wanting nothing more than a hot shower and cool sheets. But she always checked her answering machine, and she always went when Danny called. Especially when he left a message like that, cryptic as fuck.
Their office building was creepy at night. Never mind that Ellen was pretty sure she could hold her own now against anything human and most things fatae, it was still unnerving to walk into the lobby after midnight, when the air was filled with shadows and silence. The only light came from the emergency exit signs, and the elevator console. They never turned those off, Danny said; security risk balanced against safety risk, since there wasn’t a night guard, just an empty desk in the narrow foyer.
The elevator was even creepier inside, rattling and humming to itself, the light here slightly bluish. She looked down at her arm, watching the way that light chased across the skin, making her flesh almost disappear into the shadows.
Was this how Wren felt, always somehow slipping off the radar, even in the middle of a crowded, well-lit room? She’d never asked; it always seemed too personal somehow, too private a thing.
After those shadows, it was a relief to see clear, warm light coming under the office door. She turned the key, and pushed inside. The outer room was empty, but the door to Danny’s office was wide open; the light was coming from there.
“Hey.” He didn’t even look up; then again, who else would be showing up at ten-thirty at night? “Sit down.”
There were two chairs in front of his desk. Client chairs, padded to be comfortable, comforting. She sat down in the nearest one, and waited.
“Good workout?”
“She had me running control sprints.” It was about as exhausting as anything you did holding completely still could be, all the effort happening inside, in her core. But there was no way she could explain it to Danny; he wasn’t Talent.
“Mmm,” he said, his thinking clearly elsewhere, then pushed back in his chair, leaned back, and sighed.
“What?” and she knew it was the defensive, bracing-herself what, the kind she’d promised not to do, but that sigh brought it out involuntarily.
He pushed some papers across the desk to her. She leaned forward and took them. Three photographs, old-style glossy paper, and two sheets of a formal report from the New York City’s coroner’s office, on copied letterhead.
She bit down the urge to ask what all this was — if he wanted to tell her he’d have told her — and looked at the photographs. She’d never seen them before, but felt a shock of unwanted familiarity. “This is evidence from the first murder?”
“Mmm.”
She looked at the report, but the typewritten letters were hard for her to make out, the photocopying blurring them even more, and the few words that leapt out at her were unfamiliar medical terms.
“You had evidence from the first murder. You kept evidence from the first murder.” Because even with his contacts, he couldn’t have gotten them this quickly. Could he?
“Mmmmhmm.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You said it wasn’t your case.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Did you kill him?”
That surprised a harsh laugh out of him, and he sat up again, a half-quirked smile on his lips, like she’d said something unintentionally funny. “No. Although it’s interesting that was your first thought.” He waved away her stuttered apology. “I didn’t kill him. But I knew who did. And I protected him.”
Ellen sat back in her chair as though his words had slammed her in the gut.
His voice was thin again, distant. “I was a kid. A little older than you are now, but even with human blood, that’s still young for a faun. I should’ve been frolicking in the countryside, causing havoc, not carrying a badge and a gun. But I was curious, wanted to know everything, be as street-smart as the guys around me. And I overheard things I shouldn’t have heard.”
He rubbed his hands over his face, and for an instant she could see the years on him, then they were gone, and it was just Danny again. “The guy who was killed was scum, El. The kind the world’s better without.”
She knew the sound of those words: they were the sound of someone who’d repeated something over and over again, so they’d believe it. She’d done the same thing, telling herself the things she saw weren’t real, the things she could do were just hallucinations, that everyone was right and she was crazy, not that the world had gone crazy around her.
You did what you had to do, to survive.
“Okay.” She wasn’t going to argue with him about that; he already knew that was bullshit. “And someone decided to do cleanup?” She tapped one of the photographs with her forefinger. “That’s why the dumpster. It wasn’t convenience, it was… a message?”
“More a statement,” Danny said. “They took the trash out.”
She nodded, his words connecting with her own thoughts, just hours earlier.
“Who was it? You can’t protect them this time, Danny, they’ve killed again, and — ”
“They didn’t.” He cut her off sharply. “They couldn’t. They’re dead. Have been for years. And so’s everyone who knew about them.”
“You’re sure?”
He gave a single sharp nod. “On my mother’s honor.”
His mother had been a Navy officer, and he adored her. He meant it.
“And yeah, I know, that makes me the connection,” he said, beating her to the punch. “If there is a connection, and it’s not just some sick Talent who found a mention of the old murder and decided to play copycat, and Christ, when that’s our best option we’re screwed.”
Ellen looked at the photographs again, splaying them out under her hand and forcing herself to really look at them. Her vision was blurred by now, the memory softening and washing out around the edges, but there was enough there that she knew. “There’s a connection. Part of what Wren and I were doing tonight, trying to identify any threads that could have tied me to the killer, made me pick up both murders and not just the new one, connect me to their thoughts rather than the victim’s. But we couldn’t. Because we were missing a piece.”
He met her eyes then, his jaw twitching slightly. “Me.”
“You.” She felt ill.
oOo
Getting things out into the open, even only partway, always hurts more thinking about it than actually doing it. That didn’t meant doing didn’t hurt like a bullet. But it felt good to be able to dig into the problem, instead of just worrying at it. “What’s the first rule of the PI biz?”
“Twenty percent retainer before we do anything.”
�
�Wiseass.” But if she was snarking at me, she was recovering her balance, and that was good. I only wished I could say the same. I was running on fumes, both physical and emotional, and that wasn’t good. I needed to watch myself. “The first rule is to know what you’re investigating. So strip out the emotional crap, any personal twitches, and look at the facts.”
Friends would laugh to hear me saying that — I might have a slight reputation when it came to people in distress — but the rule was true. You couldn’t be effective if you were hamstrung by personal emotions.
“Even tho — ” she started to ask, and I nodded. “Especially because.” I leaned back in my chair, swung my feet up on the desk — my normal working pose — and asked the ceiling, “So what do we know to be fact?”
The Work of Hunters Page 5