by R. L. Naquin
“Do you want weapons? I’ve got some spare Tasers and batons in the van.”
I shook my head. “Three djinn should be able to take down a gorgon without harming her. As long as we see her coming and our eyes are protected, we should be fine. Weapons wouldn’t change that.” As far as I was concerned, we were going in as backup. If I gave weapons to Ash and Tahm when they weren’t trained on them, they might depend on the weapons more than their own senses.
The last time I depended on one of those damned baton things, it had broken and I’d woken up in a warehouse tied to a chair and with a whopping headache. No weapons.
Tyrell went in first, as he’d done before. The OGREs poured into the house in an organized sweep. Two moved through the downstairs on the path we’d taken earlier. The other four climbed the stairs, two by two, weapons raised and mirrored glasses securely guarding their eyes. Tyrell led their slow, careful ascent.
My team’s assignment was to stay put. It wasn’t the most exciting task, but we were there to guard the front door and foyer. If Sister tried to slip out the front, we’d catch her. If she tried to descend the stairs to get away from the OGREs up there, we were there to stop her.
Ash and Tahm and I stood in a circle with our backs to each other. My entire body was stretched thin like a trip wire, and a trickle of sweat ran from my forehead into the corner of my eye.
I moved to take my glasses off to wipe it away, and Tahm elbowed me.
“I can’t believe I nearly did that. Thanks.” I shoved them back on my face and stuck a finger under the lens to wipe away the sweat. My face felt hot, though I wasn’t sure whether it was fear or embarrassment.
He grunted and nodded.
The downstairs team disappeared around the corner into the kitchen, then appeared again on the right in the dining room before walking off into a hallway. So far, they’d found nothing.
Upstairs, the two teams split on the landing and went in opposite directions. The moment they were gone, I held my breath. Sister had been up there this morning. We had no proof that she was still up there, but so far she wasn’t downstairs. Footsteps creaked overhead from different sides of the room.
Stars fluttered in front of my eyes. I let out the lungful of air I was holding and made a concerted effort to breathe. The stars went away after a few moments, but my muscles were still taut. Ash sneezed, and I nearly jumped out of my shoes.
“Sorry.” She sniffed. “There’s a lot of dust in here.”
I nodded, thinking of Paul’s shattered body and his face in the corner. A thought came to me, explaining something that had been bothering me. “Oh.”
Tahm turned his head so his ear was toward me, though he didn’t take his eyes off the entrance to the kitchen. “Oh, what?”
“Oh, I just understood what happened to Jackie.” I rubbed the goose bumps on my arms.
“Yeah.” Ash tilted her head without looking away from the landing on the stairs. “That was really weird. Why did she blow up like that?”
“She was already stone, since she was a gargoyle. I bet Sister whammied her with stone vision and it was too much. The pressure of stoned stone made Jackie...explode.” I shuddered.
Tahm reached down without looking and took my hand, squeezing it. “She probably didn’t suffer. Are you okay?”
I nodded. He was holding my hand. What did it mean? I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to get ahold of all the emotions stampeding through me. This was so not the time to deal with my love life.
Tahm let go of my hand. I opened my eyes and startled when I found a face directly in front of me. My pounding heart took a few seconds to slow when I realized it was Marlene and the troll she’d teamed with to check the downstairs.
“It’s clear down here. You okay to stand guard while we go upstairs and help?” She waited for me to nod, then waved to the troll to follow her upstairs.
They were halfway up when Tyrell and his three teammates appeared on the landing. “She’s gone. We checked everywhere.” He ran his palm over the top of his head. “I’d like to say we took too long to come back, but I have a feeling she got the hell out of here within minutes after we left the first time. We’ll leave someone to watch the place, in case she comes back.” He snorted, nostrils flaring. “I just don’t have enough people yet. The department is too small to handle something of this magnitude.”
His words were muttered, as if not actually intended for the rest of us, but the acoustics in the marble foyer amplified everything he said. I understood what he was saying. It sounded like he was feeling exactly what I had last night. Overwhelmed, underprepared and outmaneuvered.
There was only one thing left for us to do. We’d have to hope Sister planned to be at the convention so we could catch her there. And we had to pray she wasn’t angry enough to try to turn everyone she met into pop culture statues.
Chapter Seventeen
Jyll was understandably devastated when she found out Tracy had been turned to stone. She’d already been considering shutting down the convention for the year—possibly forever.
I was inclined to agree with her. If the convention didn’t happen, maybe Sister would be satisfied and the killing would stop. The OGREs could track her down to arrest her. I’d find a way to convince Wendy and Felicia to let go of their unfinished business and come back with us.
I spent forty-five minutes with her in Tyrell’s office the next day holding her while she cried, handing her tissues. Once she’d cried herself out, she straightened her spine, dried her eyes and announced that she wasn’t going to cancel the convention.
“This gorgon is a serial killer. The only place she might be out in the open for the OGREs is at CanDor. If I cancel the con, you may never find her.” She sniffed. “And to be honest, I can’t afford to cancel at this point. After paying back all the pre-paid tickets and the vendor fees, I won’t have enough to pay for the convention space. I’ll be bankrupt.” She lowered her eyes and fiddled with the tissue in her lap. “I’m sorry. I know it’s selfish. But I’ve been trying for days to figure out a way to cancel without getting a second mortgage on my house. There’s no other way.”
I took her hand in both of mine. “Isn’t there any insurance that will cover something like this?” Even as I said it, I knew there couldn’t be. Insurance was a human thing. Even if it covered the possibility of needing to cancel due to multiple deaths, those deaths would have to be investigated by the very human claims adjusters.
Jyll shook her head. “There’s nothing that’ll help. I have to go through with it. Vendors have been arriving for the last few days already. I can’t turn them away. This is their livelihood. They have to make back their travel expenses. Even if I could give them back the fees they paid me, I couldn’t pay their way here and back. I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t seem right, after so many deaths to...throw a party. Because that’s what this really is. It’s a three-day party. It seems so disrespectful. But I can’t stop it. Not this close to the dates.”
“I understand.” I squeezed her hand gently. If I’d had the money, I’d have given it to her myself. But I could see she’d thought this over and couldn’t think of any other way out.
She sighed, then stared into my eyes with a sharp intensity. “Can you promise me she won’t kill anyone else? I know I’m putting the public in danger, but I’m putting my trust in you.”
No pressure. None at all.
“I’ll do everything in my power to keep everyone safe. I promise.” It wasn’t exactly a promise that no one would be harmed, but it was a promise I could keep. I’d do everything I could, including jumping in front of an innocent bystander and being turned to stone in her place.
It was enough for her. She went home, leaving behind a huge pile of wet tissues, a stack of badges to get into the convention and a dark shadow on my heart.
Before I could slip out the door, Tyrell appeare
d in the doorway with a cup of coffee for me. “Thought you could use this.” He took his own cup and sat in his chair behind the desk.
“Thanks.” I scrubbed my face with my hands and yawned, then took a sip. So much for leaving.
Tyrell slid a folder across the desk. “I thought you’d like to see what we’ve been working on.”
I flipped open the folder. The first sheet of paper was a printout of a text conversation. “What’s this?” I ran my finger down the page, scanning the back-and-forth conversation. “Simon? The makeup guy? Where did you get this?”
“Back when I first investigated his death, I took his phone as possible evidence. I never had a chance to look at it before Ziggy fired us all. The phone was still in the evidence bag I’d put it in, but it was shoved in the back of a filing cabinet.” He leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin. “We wouldn’t even know we had it if Marlene hadn’t been reorganizing the files, trying to get us back on track since Ziggy screwed everything up.”
I looked up from the page. “Who’s Louise? He talked to her a lot.” I flipped through the pages. The stack was thick and would take hours to read. “I remember somebody mentioning that he had a girlfriend.”
“Yeah. That’s the girlfriend. But they never met in person. I’ll save you a little time, since I read it this morning. They met online. She sent him a few pictures of herself. Cute attic monster. A lot of the conversation is him attempting to talk her into meeting in person and her putting him off. We’re trying to track down who she is, but I got the feeling she was catfishing him. I suspect she either isn’t who she said she is, or she at least looks different than the pictures she sent. Might be a dead end.”
I flipped through the stack and caught brief conversations between Simon and his monster roomies. A couple of texts to Brody to say he was going to be late for work. The last page was stuck to the back of the one before it, so I peeled it loose. My breath caught in my throat. “Did you read this part? Louise said she was coming over.”
Tyrell leaned forward, nearly knocking over his cup with his elbow. “What was his response?”
“There was no response.” I shuffled through the papers hoping to find another stuck page. “That’s it. That was the last message on his phone.” I double-checked. “And it was on the day he died.”
Tyrell grunted. “Damn.” He waved a hand at the folder I had open. “Keep reading. There’s more in there.”
I flipped to the next page and found toxicology reports and an autopsy report. “Is this for Simon, too?”
He nodded. “We had to call three districts, but we finally found where the body went. They did an autopsy and apparently sent the results somewhere, but the gods only know what Ziggy did with them. They re-sent them to me.”
I frowned while I tried to understand the doctor stuff. “Snakebite?”
“Black mambas. Just like River.”
I let out a breath. “Wow. So, Louise is Sister. She went to his house and killed him.”
“That’s what we think, yes.”
I closed the file, frowning. “I don’t understand. She killed all those people, but she did it in different ways. Why wouldn’t she stick to one method? Aren’t serial killers supposed to have a pattern or something?” Maybe I’d been watching too many police procedural shows on TV.
Tyrell’s expression was thoughtful. “I have a theory about that, though it’s likely there are still pieces missing. The first two were crimes of passion. She hit them with her car. You can’t really plan that. She wouldn’t know when those women would be in those locations. They were just shopping.”
I nodded. “One was outside a hardware store, and one was outside a toy store. Both are common places for cosplayers to shop for costume pieces.” I lifted my chin, proud to have picked up this small bit of information from my time in the craft store. “Either she’d been following them for a while or she happened to come across them going in or out of a store she was already doing her own shopping.”
“Exactly.” He rubbed his earlobe. “Simon was more personal. Who knows why she went there in person. Maybe she really loved him, and he rejected her when they came face-to-face. Maybe she wanted to deliver his costume in person. We may never know. But she had to get extremely close to him for her snakes to bite. She went to great pains to cover it up though, making it look like a dog hair allergy had caused it. She even moved his epinephrine injector.”
My head swam. “It was an easy ruse to see through, though. Why would she think that would work? Between the lab analysis and the autopsy, it’s obvious.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she knew the OGREs were having management issues. Maybe she just thinks we’re all stupid.”
“She’s not exactly subtle.”
He nodded. “And she was less subtle as she went. By the time she got to River, I think maybe she decided she liked it being personal. And she enjoyed doing it right under our noses.”
“Almost as if she was taunting us.”
“Yes.” He slumped. “I still don’t know how Tracy ended up at Sister’s house. She must’ve lured her there. Tracy’s statue was...posed.”
I rubbed my forehead. “Unless we catch this bitch, I don’t think we’re going to get all our questions answered.”
“I agree. So, we’d better catch her, because I don’t like not knowing the answers.”
* * *
I’d left Ash and Tahm at the boarding house this time, since I hadn’t expected to be gone too long. At the last minute, I stopped and bought a couple dozen donuts to share with the houseguests. Sometimes doing a hard thing like putting people in danger could only be balanced out by doing something nice. Donuts were nice.
Had I stayed two minutes longer at the OGRE station, I’d have been there for the call and known what was going on. Had I gone straight to the boarding house, I’d have arrived before the OGREs. But I hadn’t done either of those things. So, when I arrived at the boarding house carrying boxes of donuts, I walked straight into a raid.
To my confusion—and private glee—the elf sisters weren’t the only ones in cuffs in the middle of the living room. Buzz and Finn stood beside them scowling, hands bound behind their backs and protesting with every breath.
“We had a deal, djinn. Send the OGREs away, and we’ll keep this between us as we agreed.” Buzz struggled to free himself, but the cuffs held him tight.
Tahm folded his arms. “What, and let you take these ladies as slaves for your mob boss? Uh-uh. That’s not how this is going to happen. You said you wanted to shut down their operation in your territory.”
Finn coughed. “Well, yes. Strictly speaking, once we brought them in, they’d be working for our operation.”
Buzz elbowed him in the side. “Shut it, will you?”
I set down the donuts and walked into the center of all the people standing around. “What’s going on? I wasn’t gone that long.”
Eliza’s lovely eyes were swollen with tears. “Oh, thank goodness. Kam, make them let us go. It’s all a misunderstanding. We didn’t steal anything.”
Nessa’s eyes were wide but dry. “Please, Kam. Help us. You know we didn’t do anything. They’re accusing us of taking things that are already ours.”
I snorted. “The puppy eyes aren’t going to work on me. I found your stash, and some of my own stuff was in it. I already know what’s going on with you two.” I pointed at the leprechauns. “But those two are a surprise. What did I miss?”
Tahm tipped his head toward the four of them. “The elves accused the leprechauns of stealing from them.”
“They did! They took an extremely expensive item that’s been in my family for generations. Why aren’t you searching their rooms? You’ll see.” Nessa stomped her foot and stuck her bottom lip out.
“We didn’t take your doohickey, you daft woman.” Buzz was so angry he spat while he talke
d. “If you lost it, that’s your own damn fault.”
Tahm gestured at the leprechauns. “Once the elves let the cat out of the bag about their collection, these two chuckleheads decided it was time to stop taking notes on their thieving abilities and drag the girls in to the leprechaun boss—which they thought I’d be obligated to help them with, since they figured I’d be ashamed to admit I’d been keeping it all from you. I guess they thought they could blackmail me.”
That was hilarious. Tahm was the last person in at least three worlds who could be blackmailed. He always tried to do the honorable thing, and if he didn’t or he made a mistake, he admitted it. Boy, had they partnered with the wrong guy.
The box everyone was arguing about—and that I’d been digging in the night before—sat on the coffee table, its lid standing open. I chuckled. “Is this the doohickey you’re talking about?” I took a cheap gold bangle from the top of the pile, twitched my wrist and changed it into a diamond tennis bracelet. I held it up to the light and watched rainbows flash from its surface. “If you’re going to steal from a djinn, make sure what you’re stealing is real and won’t turn back to something else by morning.”
Eliza opened her mouth in an O of surprise. “You tricked us.” She turned to her sister. “How could you fall for that? I thought you knew what you were doing.”
Tahm laughed. “Nice work. I guess you’re right. We should be working together. It would have been a lot easier.”
I gave him a half-serious, I-told-you-so frown. “And maybe you’ll listen to me when I tell you leprechauns are always up to no good. Always.” I glared at Buzz and Finn. “Assclowns.”
Tyrell chuckled. “I’m going to take them in now if you’re done chastising them.”
I eyed the four criminals, giving them my best stink-eye for a long minute. “Okay. Now I’m done.”
Tyrell’s team took the elves by the elbow and guided them out the door to the waiting van. Marlene the centaur took Finn out next, and Tyrell grabbed Buzz.