Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Meanwhile, our two darlings were facing off, literally.

  “You’re a know-everything busybody but that doesn’t mean you have a clue about how the real world works.”

  “Oh, because spending four years knocking people down with big bad muscles makes you so smart? You’ve never even worked in—”

  “Children!” That vinegar was back in Stosser’s voice, and it splashed over them, stopping them hard. I guess class was back in session. “You can fight out your alpha pack issues later. Right now, there’s work to be done. Lawrence, Mendelssohn. You two need to work together, not against each other. Go over the physical trace Shune sent back. A 3-D sketch before you touch anything, and then lift any prints you can find. Odds are they’re useless, but we have to document everything, so anything we find is validated. Shune, are you up for work, or do you want to watch this one?”

  Nick flexed his arm carefully around the makeshift sling Sharon had rigged for him, and managed a one-armed shrug. “I’m better as a pair of eyes at this point, boss.”

  “Fine. Torres, you do the same. Try to learn something useful. Cholis, come with me. I have a job for your particular skills.”

  Pietr’s expression verged somewhere between pleased and really worried. I didn’t blame him, but was more worried about having to get between Sharon and Nifty without making things worse. They exited, and the four of us were left standing, silently, in a really awkward face-off, two glaring and two trying to look anywhere but at each other.

  “All right.” Sharon was the one who capitulated first, surprising all of us—including, I think—Sharon. Her body language was still tense, but her shoulders relaxed a little under that linen blouse, and I didn’t feel the same electric vibe off her. “It’s been a really long day that we weren’t expecting, and this is stupid. Nick, you’re the one who handled the stuff. You direct us.”

  Nick looked started as hell, but rallied. “All right. Who’s got a decent handle on the 3-D sketching?”

  “That would be me,” Nifty said. His voice—and vibe—still had a bit of challenge in it, but not anything that demanded a takedown. Anyway, it was true; I was an abysmal failure on that level, and I’m not sure the others were much better.

  “All right, then you get started with that, and Sharon, you’ve got the best recovery skills. When he’s done with the sketch, see if you can lift anything useful off anything. Bonnie, we need to get it all cataloged, before we forget what was found where.”

  He dispatched us with evident satisfaction, and a little arrogance, but probably he hadn’t been deferred to a lot in his life—if you’re skinny, geeky, and not a tech-god, you don’t get a lot of respect, no matter how smart you are—and damn, Sharon had managed us Council-worthy. If she’d chosen me, Nifty might have felt it was a girl thing, and if she had pushed herself forward we all would have been annoyed, but this way Nifty was appeased, and Nick felt gratitude toward her, and me…. I didn’t care one way or the other, I realized. I was still worried about who the hell had shot at us, and part of my mind was still chewing over how easily Nick had pushed that supervisor into letting us go, and there was another part of my mind still working on the concept of the white virtual storeroom, and wondering where the hell Venec was and what he was doing, and there just wasn’t any room left in my head for dealing with intragroup politics.

  I’m crap at group politics, anyway.

  We broke for the second workroom, where Nick had sent the materials.

  “So what happened to the trace you picked up?” Nick asked me, quietly enough that the others might not hear. Information was power. I guess he was playing, too.

  I thought about how I’d not let Stosser know I knew he was upset, and figured we all were playing, one way or the other.

  “It’s dumped and safe,” I said to him. “But we’re supposed to focus on the physical first.” Physical was easier to work through, Venec had lectured us. Current left a trace on the physical that was harder to blend into the original form, and could be broken down more easily for investigation.

  That was the theory we were working under, anyway. Reality didn’t always scan with theory.

  The gleaming white worktable looked more barren than I’d expected: from the expression on Nick’s face, he’d thought he’d brought back more, too. I ran over the checklist in my mind, and it seemed to match the items laid out and casting dark shadows on the table surface. I guess it just seemed like more, in the stress of the situation. Interesting.

  “Bonnie?” Nick had gotten out the evidence logbook—a fancy name for a plain three-ring binder we’d never used before–and settled himself at the empty edge of the table. He was looking at me, his little ferret nose practically twitching.

  Right. Recall time.

  “Three crumpled wrappers, wedged deep into the backseat; a wad of dried gum from the floor mat; ash from the bottom of the otherwise-emptied ashtray; a couple of hairs taken off the upholstery, passenger-seat headrest, and one from the backseat behind the driver’s seat; a scoop of mud from the front half of the undercarriage; a scratch of dried crud from the rear left fender; and what I thought was a nail clipping that got caught under the door handle of the driver’s side.”

  “You thought?” Nick paused midscribble. “We’re not supposed to think, Bonnie, just report.”

  “Fine. A fragment of something that looked like a fragment of nail, caught under the door handle. Better?”

  “Don’t snarl at me, I’m just trying to do this right.”

  “You want to see a snarl, ferret-boy? I’ll show you a snarl.”

  “Ferret?” His voice rose and the tip of his nose twitched, only enhancing the resemblance

  “Children,” Sharon murmured, taking one of the stools at the table across from Nifty, down at the evidence-laden end. “You need a score card to tell who’s squabbling with whom around here.”

  I laughed because it was true.

  Maybe it was just me and that connection-thing we had going on, but I knew without looking the instant when Venec came into the room. He was almost as quiet as Pietr, but there was some difference in the air when he entered that distracted me from my study of the sketch of the nail clipping—and I was right, it was a nail—and made me look up to see him walking through the workroom door.

  Unlike Stosser, he didn’t change his clothing like a runway model; jeans and a dark blue knit sweater that made his eyes look even darker, leather shoes and a single silver strand around his wrist that I hadn’t noticed before. Interesting. Silver wasn’t the magical element the fairy tales claimed, but it did have certain useful properties I wondered if he knew about….

  “You’re back,” I said, to alert the others. “Did you find out who shot at us? And why?”

  He shot me a glare that could have wilted a redwood. “Yeah, you’re number one on the Chicago cops most-wanted list. Relax, Torres. It was just an overeager security guard with rubber bullets, alerted by the fact that neither of you bothered to wave your passes over the exit bar when you walked out. It’s been taken care of.”

  Oops. In our defense we were a little distracted, but the look on Venec’s face suggested that he didn’t want to hear even justifiable excuses.

  “What do you have? Show me.”

  I slid away from the table, hearing everyone else do the same, so the boss could have a better look at the 3-Ds. They floated above the table and turned slowly to display all sides, black lines and white spaces tinted with just faint bits of color, like pencil and watercolors. Most of them were actual size, but Nifty had enlarged the nail at my request, so that I could determine if it was a fingernail or a toenail or something else entirely.

  “And have we gotten anything out of this motley assemblage of crap?”

  Fucker. We’d been busting our current for three hours on that “assemblage of crap,” and he walks in and dismisses it out of hand? All the hot in the world, and I was still ready to throw something heavy and pointed at him.

  His hands came d
own on the table next to me, and the table creaked as he leaned on it, looking at my sketch. The edge of the object was ragged and thick, and there were striations along the surface that looked weirdly familiar.

  “Toenail?”

  “Looks like. Except it’s damned unlikely.”

  He looked at me, and I remembered again I wasn’t supposed to have an opinion, not yet, just evaluations. I backtracked a little, and made a full report. “The clipping is in the shape of a half-moon, with a jagged edge that suggests either being bitten or torn off. A nail. It was found under the driver’s-side door handle. Unless we’re dealing with someone who is extremely prehensile, it seems unlikely a toenail would have gotten caught there.”

  “All right. A reasonable assumption within the context of the findings. But don’t rule anything out just yet. Is the nail necessarily human?”

  I stared at him, my mouth falling open. Bastard. I hadn’t even thought of that.

  “Lawrence.” He moved on, leaving me scrambling furiously, trying to think of some way to compare the sketch against all the known clawed fatae breeds. We hadn’t learned how to run DNA tests using current yet. I had a feeling they’d be in our near future, though.

  “There are distinct tooth marks in the gum, but I don’t think we’d be able to tell anything except that whoever chewed it had molars.” Nifty stared at his sketch, and then looked into the air at nobody in particular. “I don’t suppose anyone’s got some brilliant ideas on how to get a sample of saliva off old dried-up gum?”

  Nobody did.

  “That’s your assignment, then,” Venec said. “Find a way.”

  Nifty’s jaw dropped; I had a feeling a lot like the way mine had, and then he shut it with a snap. He put his game face on, and nodded tightly. “Yessir.” He might squabble for captainship of the team, but Nifty knew who the Coach was.

  I guessed that made Stosser the owner of the team?

  Nick had been working on the ashes. “I compared them to some fresh cigarette ash….” He saw Venec’s expression, and hurried to add, “No, I didn’t bring them in. I went outside and found some, okay? Not a total idiot to compromise evidence.”

  That earned him a grudging nod of approval. “Go on.”

  Nick shrugged. “It’s cigarette ash. According to the police report, both victims smoked. So, hardly a surprise. It was high-quality tobacco, though, from the looks of it. Goes with the victims’ backgrounds—they weren’t the kind to be smoking cut-rate cheapies.”

  “Verify that.”

  Nick nodded.

  Sharon was next. She shrugged. “There were hairs. I couldn’t tell anything from just a sketch.”

  Venec’s glare returned. “You couldn’t tell how long they were, if they were straight or curly, bleached, dyed, or naturally colored? Graying? Blond or brunette? Split ends or recently trimmed?”

  Oh man. I suddenly felt as though I’d gotten off easy. His words were like bullets, hitting Sharon hard, right in the chest.

  “Hey.” Nick slammed his hand on the table. From his wince, I guess he hadn’t meant to hit that hard. “Give us a break, okay? We’re making this shit up as we go along, in case you’ve forgotten, and you and Ian both disappeared on us.”

  Venec looked around then as though just realizing that his partner wasn’t in the room. “Where did Ian and Cholis go?”

  We all shrugged. “Stosser said he had a different job for ghost-boy, and away they went,” Nifty told him, his face still closed and tight. He could pick on Sharon, but Boss-Guys couldn’t? I tossed that around and decided that it felt right.

  “Damn it, I warned him…” Venec muttered, then seemed to recall that we were all looking at him avidly, waiting to see what he said next. Apparently, the Guys weren’t entirely in accord. That was so not reassuring.

  “All right, no matter. You have your observations recorded?”

  We all did.

  “Then it’s time to take a break, get some fresh air. Unlike what you see on TV or read in books, you can’t work days straight and expect to get anything other than punch-stupid. Go, get a drink, use the bathroom, walk around the block, and get yourself some lunch. Shune, have that bandage checked. It looks like you’re bleeding again.” Directions given, he turned and walked out before we could recover enough to ask him anything more.

  We all looked at each other, and I got the distinct feeling that nobody was going to take more than a bathroom break before we returned to the table.

  I got up, feeling my lower back complain. Damn but it had been a long day already, even without the time-shift from here to Chicago and then back again. What time was it, anyway? “Right. There’s a decent pizza place on the corner. I should bring back a pie or two?”

  “Make it three,” Nifty said, to nobody’s surprise. Current burned calories, yeah, but his metabolism still thought he was in training or something.

  “And a Diet Coke.”

  “And a regular Coke. Not a Pepsi. And an iced coffee.”

  Good lord. Offer to do a favor, and that’s what you get. “Give me cash then, people. I’m not the damn pizza fairy.”

  On my way out through the lobby, a wad of cash stuffed into my front pocket, I saw a guy walking in, and did a full turn-and-walk-backward to watch his progress, because damn, he was worth the obviousness. Oh-my-god tall, and the kind of golden-blond that makes me feel washed out. Total surfer-boy tan and build, and dressed in a kind of uptown casual that said money but also that he worked for it.

  He caught me watching—not that I was hiding anything—and smiled at me. Not an ah-hah smile either, but a really nice, warm, hi-there-yourself kind of smile.

  He wasn’t a local boy, that was for sure.

  And then I was out the door and he was in, and I tucked the memory into the folder titled Fine Men and focused on remembering the lunch order.

  I came back twenty minutes later to shouting.

  “You’re taking advantage of her grief and her hopes, and I call that fraud, at best!”

  The voices were coming from the chat room. Not loud, as shouting went, but audible from where I stood. I looked down the hallway at the other end of our space, where the workroom was, and hesitated.

  Oh hell. I’d never make much of an investigator if I didn’t investigate, right? I put the pizzas and bag with the drinks down in the hallway where anyone with a nose could find them—hoping they’d have enough sense not to eat in the workroom—and moved as quietly along the hall as I could manage. Needed to get Pietr to teach me that ghosting thing, if he could.

  The chat room’s door was open just a chink, as if it was inviting me to snoop.

  “Your mother has engaged us—” Venec, and I could tell that his temper was about to snap. Uh-oh.

  “My mother is deluded.”

  The snap was audible even out here in the hallway. “Your mother is in full possession of all her faculties, and possibly a few you seem to have abandoned. Or do you really believe that your grandparents sat in a car that didn’t belong to them and willed themselves to die, when they were both in excellent health, excellent finances, and with excellent prospects?”

  “There was no sign of it being anything else. The police and the local Council both investigated….”

  “The police were handicapped by not knowing that your grandparents were Talent. And the Council…” Venec’s voice didn’t get any softer, but it went from lecturing to conversational, in the space of one word. “The Council has its own reasons for wanting the case closed. Your grandparents had both friends and enemies in high places, and none of them are interested in close examination.”

  “You really believe that they were murdered?”

  “We are not willing to let any assumption stand without looking at every possible angle and scrap of evidence. What that evidence tells us…we don’t know yet. That’s what the ‘unaffiliated’ in our name means. We don’t answer to any authority except the evidence.”

  “I don’t like this. You said it yourself. There
are reasons not to dig into this.”

  “No, I said that there were people who would rather we didn’t dig. I never said they were reasons I accept.”

  Steel would have bent before Benjamin Venec would, and in that instant, I admit it, I was almost embarrassingly proud to work for him.

  “Now, Ms. Torres, if you would join us?”

  Bastard, I thought for the third time that afternoon, and pushed the door all the way open to see Venec and the surfer-god from the lobby both looking at me.

  “Hi.” No excuses: he caught me, fair and square, and I already knew excuses didn’t fly with the Guys. “I’m Bonita Torres. I’m one of the investigators working on your mother’s case.”

  “Yes, we…met, if you can call it that.”

  For a moment I thought he meant in the lobby, but then I remembered the four-way telecurrent conversation I’d been on the edges of, and blinked. “You look better when you’re less staticky,” I said, without thinking, and then felt my skin flush bright red from knees to ears. So much for my suave professional veneer.

  He grinned, Venec looked even more stone-faced disgusted, and I tried to extract my foot from my mouth without choking.

  “We were just about to get back to work,” I said to Venec, trying very hard not to look him in the eye. All I needed was to get tangled up over that, too. I swear, I hadn’t been this awkward since I was a hormone-riddled thirteen-year-old. Damn it, neither of them were that much all that.

  “Didn’t I tell you to take a break?”

  “Pizza and caffeine for everyone. But we all felt like we were on a roll, so…”

  I hoped to hell I was saying the right things. How much did you say to the boss, in front of the disgruntled son of a client, without actually letting them know that we weren’t so much on a roll as freaking out about our jobs going down in flames if we didn’t produce something?

  “Excellent,” Venec said. “Now, if you will excuse us?”