The Work of Hunters

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Wren was still asking questions. “And none of them were murdered themselves, or died violent deaths?”

  “Not unless you call cirrhosis of the liver violent.”

  “Then probably not.” Wren didn’t look unhappy to have the possibility of a ghost shot down, and Ellen made a note to ask her mentor about her experiences some time. Or not.

  “So we rule out the original participants,” Wren said. “That means starting from scratch. When you’re planning a retrieval, the trick is to go for the simplest, laziest approach, and work backwards from there. I can’t imagine murders are much different — people are lazy.”

  Danny made a ‘can’t argue with that’ face, his shoulders relaxing a little, and gestured for her to go on.

  “So the simplest explanation is…?”

  “Copycat,” Ellen said. “Like you said before, someone who found a record of the original murders, and it triggered something in them, made them want to repeat it — or outdo it. I mean, they’ve killed two, not one, and I think — ” and she shuddered — “they’re going to do it again.”

  He reached out, touched her knee. It was faint, just a brush of his fingers across her jeans, but it helped.

  “Would anyone be able to access that kind of record?” The question was directed at Danny, as the ex-cop.

  “Hell if I know. It didn’t get much newspaper coverage at the time but I’m sure there was some. And if not… a thirty year old cold case? Not exactly the most protected data in the world. You get someone going through the archives, they tell someone else the story as a curiosity, or maybe a reporter looking for a ‘this time before your lifetime’ story to shock the kiddies…” He was ticking things off on his fingers, when he paused. “I bet they’re digitizing the back files, finally,” he said. “Odds are they’re using an outside source for that. They’re all supposed to be discreet, lips zipped, all that, but supposed to and are don’t always even live on the same street.”

  “So what you’re saying is we probably have no way of telling who might have gotten their hands on the story, but anyone could know it by now.”

  He shrugged. “Cold cases. Sometimes someone talking about it is how you shake a new clue loose, so….”

  “So trying to track down the how is probably a waste of time. Okay. But the details of these newest murders is exactly the same?”

  “Enough that someone had to have access to the details, yeah. Or it’s the largest coincidence since Harry met Sally.” Danny started pacing again, holding his coffee carefully so it didn’t spill as he moved. Ellen watched him, trying to see what he was thinking in his body language. She was getting better at it: from the tension still in his back and shoulders and the way he was holding his mug, he was frustrated, and worried… and guilty. Although she could have guessed all that just from knowing him.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said.

  “Isn’t it?” He wasn’t looking at them, staring out the windows, his mug cupped in both hands. “I knew about the first killing and never said anything.”

  He’d given her the opening. “Why didn’t you?”

  He sighed. “Because it would have raised too many eyebrows in my direction, and I couldn’t afford that, not if I wanted to have a career. Because it would have been my suspicion against the word of people with more backing, more reputation. Because…. Because I didn’t see where the world was any worse for not having that scum in it. I’m not a saint, Ellen. I’m not even a particularly good person.”

  There was a snort from Wren, who clearly disagreed. “You fucked up,” she said. “We can play my sin’s worse than yours some other time. Right now, the only solid link we have, other than your guilt, is that this killer has a connection to Ellen, however that happened. By the terms of your agreement with each other, that makes it Sylvan Investigations’ problem, right?”

  Ellen looked at Danny, who lifted his mug at her. “Right.”

  “And which because it involves Ellen, is going to also make it my problem.” Wren took a deep breath, and added, “and the fact that it involves a Talent also makes it a problem for Venec’s people.”

  Danny’s body language changed in an instant, back to the more familiar slump-shouldered slouch. “Oh, give me a break, Valere. We don’t actually know the killer’s a Talent. Isn’t there any other way that Ellen would have picked up on him, in her vision?”

  “Not really. Come on, Hendrickson, get over your control issues and admit that having a PUP along isn’t going to hurt.”

  “Bet it does,” he grumbled, then sat down next to Ellen on the sofa, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Fine. But before we call them in, I’m going to need some Irish in this coffee.”

  oOo

  I never got my whisky.

  Fortunately for all concerned, it was Pietr who showed up at our office, bright if not early the next morning. I could deal with Pietr: he was the mellowest of the team, not that that was saying much, considering they were all hired for get-to-it-iveness and a high level of ego. But he and Ellen got along well, and he was used to being second dog in the sled after Bonnie — and probably after Venec, too, although the surviving founder of the so-called Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators didn’t do much in terms of day-to-day investigating any more, getting stuck in a suit and politics more often, poor bastard.

  We’d agreed that Wren should need to be somewhere else, for this. She and Bonnie were friends, and Ellen was her protégé, but there were still pretty clear divides between what the PUPs did and what she might still do for a living to make it potentially awkward.

  “I brought donuts.” Pietr held up a familiar red and yellow cardboard box.

  “You’re aware that I haven’t been a cop since you were still in diapers, right?”

  “Fine then, I’ll eat them all myself.”

  Ellen snagged the box out of his hands before he could pull it away, and put it on the sideboard next to the coffee maker. The new coffee maker. “Play nice, boys,” she said. “Or I’ll eat all the donuts myself.”

  She could, too. I didn’t know her workout routine, but Ellen was a solid wall of muscle naturally, and since she’d started working with me she’d clearly taken the “occasional physical exertion” part of the job seriously. Whatever she was doing, she burned calories in a way that was impressive even for a high-res Talent. I’d leave most of the donuts to them.

  “So,” Pietr said, metaphorically rolling up the sleeves of his button-down, “Bonnie briefed me on the situation, much as she knew — we’ve got a Talent going around replicating an old crime scene?”

  I nodded, snagging an old-fashioned for myself. “Valere’s pretty sure it’s a Talent, anyway, and possibly a low-level seer, too. Which means odds are good that more than one person knows about what’s going on, because you people are not the silent types.”

  Neither of them objected: I wasn’t wrong. The Cosa gossips like grannies on steroids, and while some fatae are worse offenders, the human members don’t slack in that department.

  “And if two people know about it… ” I trailed off.

  “Then so does a third and a forth,” Ellen finished for me. “So, knowing your methods, that means we get to go poke a few hornet’s nests and see if we get stung. Great.”

  Pietr frowned, and held up a finger. We waited. “You said a Talent and possibly a seer, too?”

  “Low-level,” I confirmed. “Valere thinks that’s why Ellen tapped directly into him, when we went looking, because they’re on the same wavelength.”

  “So he might know we’re looking for him?”

  I looked at Ellen, who gave a faint, damned-if-I-know shrug. “She says he didn’t notice she was there,” I said. “And Wren thinks he’s low-res, so hopefully he’s so focused on getting his jollies that he’s not paying attention to anything coming in on the wires. That’s the best we can hope for.”

  Pietr wiped donut crumbs off his mouth, and slicked back his already smooth hair. “You guys always hav
e the best parties.”

  I shook my head sadly at the Pup. “Weren’t you the sane one, once?”

  “Only relatively,” he said. “Only relatively.”

  True enough.

  oOo

  Ellen refused to worry about the killer being a seer, too. She knew better than the others what that meant, and it generally didn’t mean you ever knew what was coming in your own life. Her main worry right now was seated across the table from her, giving her an ‘are you kidding me?’ look. Ellen had questioned people before, even though Danny had always been there with her, before. She’d even questioned people who looked like they didn’t want to talk to her and might actually get violent if she poked too hard, so if Danny thought she was fine to handle a few interviews on her own, she was.

  “You’re sure there’s nothing you can tell me?”

  It annoyed her that she still took Danny’s opinion as more valid than her own, but her annoyance was probably a healthy step away from assuming she wasn’t capable, and doubting anyone who said she was. Probably.

  “For once, the city’s been quiet, and you want to stir things up?” her companion asked. “You need trouble that badly?”

  “I can’t help it,” she said, forcing what she hoped was a cheerful grin, a la Hendrickson. “I just get twitchy when everything’s quiet.”

  The Talent — an older man, maybe fifty or so, snorted and shook his head at her. “Your mentor is a bad influence on you. She gets twitchy if the city’s not falling apart under her feet.”

  That was unfair: Wren actually preferred it quiet, so she could work. The Retriever just always seemed to end up knee-deep in the chaos, and having to sort it out. Which was part of why they’d asked her to mentor Ellen in the first place, and she was getting introspectively distracted again, she realized.

  “Fair enough. Anyway, I haven’t heard anything out of the usual but — hey Pauly!”

  A heavy-set Indian man behind the counter turned and glared at the older man. “Told you not to call me that.”

  “Cabrón, I’ve known you since you were eleven, I’ll call you whatever the hell I want. Come here and talk to the girl.”

  “Why should I do that? I’m working here.”

  “There’s nobody else in the damn shop, take five minutes and sit down. If anyone needs a muffin, I’ll get it for them myself.”

  It was a kind of ballet, the bickering the two men exchanged, even as Pauly was taking off his apron and dropping it on the counter, and coming around to join them at the table. There were in fact other people in the bakery, but nobody seemed to even notice that the counter was now unattended, busy with their coffee, newspapers, and cell phones.

  “This is Ellen,” the older man said, gesturing at her. “She’s got a couple questions you’re more likely to know than me, seeing as how you see everyone come in and out, and probably hear all the latest.”

  “Even when I don’t want to,” Pauly agreed gloomily, sitting down in the third chair at their table and studying Ellen. “Who’re you and why should I tell you anything?”

  “Manners, Paul. That’s Valere’s mentee.”

  Ellen hid her wince, and Paul did his best to hide his flinch. There was a lot she loved about working with Wren Valere, but this wasn’t part of it. Her mentor had a — rightfully earned — Reputation among the Cosa Nostradamus. In fact, Danny Hendrickson was probably the only person who never seemed bothered by it, which was probably why they’d sent her to him in the second place.

  “I’m not here on her behalf,” Ellen said. “I work with Danny Hendrickson, of Sylvan Investigations? We’re trying to track down something that might have happened over the past week.”

  “Something what?” Paul was still guarded, but his body had eased a little in the chair, and his constant eye-flicks back to the counter could just be normal watching-the-job nerves. She scraped a tendril of current off of her core, watching as it flickered from deep green to a paler neon blue, and let it rise gently, stretching toward the other Talent.

  His own core didn’t react, sitting solid and calm. Either he was so low-res he couldn’t sense the overture, or he was the calmest bastard she’d ever met, and his visible nerves were just for show.

  There was no reason for him to be trying to play her, but Danny’s head in the back of her voice joined Wren’s, urging caution.

  “Ah, if I told you that, it would color your responses,” she teased, instead. She wasn’t comfortable flirting with strangers, but Danny said to just imagine that it was him, and give as good a sass as she could, that being female, and young, she could get them to underestimate her that way. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with that, but if it worked, it worked.

  Paul’s eyes narrowed, and then she felt his own touch of current rising, prodding gently at her. It still felt rude to her, testing another person’s defenses like that, but Wren said that everyone did it, at some level or another. It was like sizing up someone’s watch, or their car, to establish status.

  Paul’s current was sluggish, the strand thicker than it needed to be, and she deflected it gently, a polite rebuff, without showing anything of her own core. High-res got more respect…but it also made people cautious. With luck, he’d think they were evenly matched. He grinned at her when he felt the push-off, the tension still there, but not quite so… tense. “Okay then. Ask away.”

  oOo

  We’d agreed to meet mid-afternoon. I got there a few minutes early, but Pietr was already waiting. He looked almost impossibly clichéd, sitting on the bench in his still—perfectly—pressed khakis and shirt, his hair still neatly combed, a newspaper open on his lap, and I resisted the urge to ruffle his hair, knowing that his slender frame hid a grab bag of martial arts tricks, not to mention some of the best physical control of current I’d ever seen.

  That didn’t mean I couldn’t indulge in some verbal jabs, though. “Is it a law that you have to dress like a prep school dropout, or is that really your style?”

  He closed the newspaper and folded it, placing it on the bench next to him as I sat down. “It’s self-defense,” he said. “The rest of my team have very specific styles, you can pick them out of a crowd at a distance. This,” and he gestured down — is bland enough not to get noticed.”

  “So you can spook through a crowd while they peacock.”

  He waggled his eyebrows. “Exactly. It wasn’t intentional, originally — I just tend to be blander than they are. Even Sharon, yes.”

  I grinned. Sharon could pass for a VP of any small corporation, her suits were so unremarkably well-cut. Even I, who broke out dress shoes and slacks only under protest, could admire her style.

  “And did the bland avenger discover anything?”

  He snorted through his nose. “Nothing. Nobody’s heard anything, nobody’s seen anything, nobody’s spooked to anything. Not that they were going to admit to me, anyway. You?”

  “Maybe. I dig a little lower than your usual class of informants, put my ear down to the street.” And I meant that near-literally. “Nobody came out and said anything, but they’re pairing up and doubling down — ” I paused, realizing that Pietr had no idea what I was talking about. “They’re going to the buddy system for sleeping, where one person naps and the other keeps guard, then they switch off. Ditto for when they have to leave their safe-spots, always having someone watching your six.”

  “Homeless people?” He wasn’t judging — well, the quick glance at my torn jeans and ragged-ass sneakers might have been a little judgy.

  “Homeless people, hookers, dealers. The elite of the street.” Single women and homeless people were, I’d discovered, the best true judges of what’s going on. They’d had to develop gut instincts and the ability to place a person in a glance, for their own safety. It wasn’t nice, or fair, but it was damned useful to a cop — or a PI. “Anyway, when they do that, it means something’s up. They’re jaded as hell, and don’t spook easy, after a few years.”

  I could practically see that sink int
o his brain and start to cook. “That would match up with my usual informants coming up empty. And you think this killer is taking people off the street?”

  “That’s the theory. Neither new victim came up in any database, and nobody’s reported them missing…although with the amount of damage done to the bodies, they could have been….. But yeah. I’m pretty damn definite they’re either homeless or near-as, in terms of being invisible.” That fit with the first murder, too. He’d been off-radar, intentionally invisible to polite society. Too many echoes to be coincidence.

  “I should’ve asked before: any sign of abuse or malnutrition?”

  I did like working with professionals. “None. They weren’t perfect specimens, and like I said, there was considerable damage done, but no obvious signs of drugs or violence, and reasonable health for dead people. But get over your assumptions: not everyone on the street is a druggie or diseased.”