The Demon Hunters

by Linda Welch

  I looked down. “You’re sure?”

  By way of reply, he took my hand and led me down the concrete steps.

  We stepped off the stair directly into a big square room of concrete floor and white concrete walls. Sixteen metal-frame cots were neatly arrayed around the edges of the room. Two square Formica tables occupied the center, each with eight metal chairs nested beneath. It was totally basic, cold and unwelcoming.

  “Wow. This is where they bunk.”

  He nodded “He spends a fortune on décor for his offices, but a pittance on his men’s comfort.”

  “Maybe they’re the sort not used to comfort, or know how to get by without it.”

  Blankets hugged the bunks with military precision and nary a crease. We looked for personal items and found shaving kits and hygiene products, men’s underwear and casual attire in small leather suitcases stowed beneath each bunk.

  My hand still in his, Royal led me across the room, around the tables and to a door in the far wall. This opened to a smaller, more comfortable-looking room with a queen-size bed, a big dresser against the far wall and a square of carpet. But again, nothing personal on show. Another door led to a minuscule bathroom with washbasin, toilet and basic shower unit.

  “I will not believe Vance lives in here. Must be for his second-in-command or some such,” I suggested.

  “I do not think anyone lives here. It looks like a temporary troop billet.”

  We went back to the main room and Royal pointed at another door. It looked like steel, with an opening bar instead of a conventional handle, and a remote entry device affixed to the wall above. “I should think it opens to the outside, the alley behind Murphy’s. Vance must have a remote control in his office.”

  “So his men can come in and out the building and to his office, and nobody any the wiser.”

  Royal turned a circle. “I think we have seen it all.” He offered me his crooked arm. “Shall we?”

  I tucked my hand in his arm. The steel door opened easily. It didn’t have a handle on the outside, but an intercom was attached to the wall.

  We sauntered along the alley. I felt good, invigorated. We were finally making progress.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “What now,” I asked Royal as we cuddled in my bed. I felt heavy, drowsy. I had to force myself to concentrate.

  “We need solid evidence.”

  He was right. Vance’s sixteen thugs, the hidden room, none of it proved Vance was the Charbroiler or the mastermind behind the murders. It gave us something to go on, but nothing we could take to the police.

  “We can’t tell Gia any of this,” I said. “She’ll go after Vance and I don’t see her as the merciful type.”

  “I would rather hand Vance to Clarion PD in a neat little package, all the evidence in place, nothing more for them to look at.” His arms squeezed me. “But if we cannot, we will take care of Vance ourselves. He must be stopped.”

  I sagged. “We? You mean Gelpha and Dark Cousins?” I said into his chest.

  I felt him nod.

  “And you’d stop him how?”

  “I do not know yet.” He shrugged. “And not something we have to think of right now. As it stands, Vance is an innocent man.”

  I raised up, looked in his face. “Innocent my foot. You mean to say, when you were a cop, you always, religiously, considered a suspect innocent until proven guilty?”

  He smiled. “Ah, no. That was the spiel we gave civilians.”

  “Well I’m not a civilian.” I breathed in the scent of his skin, sandalwood and amber. “What’s our next move?”

  He didn’t answer me. He kept his eyes closed. “Royal?”

  He yawned. “I will go in tomorrow night, plant some bugs in his office, in his phones.” He didn’t sound at all alert. “Then, I suppose, good old-fashioned surveillance.”

  “Besides being boring as all get-out, how will that help us?”

  “After what his men saw at Daven’s place, when she killed those bums, he must be looking for Gia. If we hear something, we go from there.”

  I groaned on his shoulder. Nothing can be more boring than sitting in a parked car for hours, or listening in on telephone conversations, on the chance something will happen.

  I smoothed his hair with my palm. I will never get over how it looks like thick metallic threads, but feels like silk, like his skin. He looked so comfortable, lying there with his eyes closed, smiling. I watched his face as his mouth softened and his breathing became heavy and even. A soft snore escaped his lips. He’d fallen asleep.

  I had not turned the air-conditioner on this morning, the room felt warm from the lingering heat of a day in mid-July and the heat of our bodies. The lamp cast a dim glow in my bedroom, creating deeper shadows in the corners and beside my dresser. The old carriage clock tocked away on the mantelpiece. I wanted to turn the lamp off, but didn’t make it. I fell asleep across his chest, my fingers tangled in his long hair.

  ***

  We tried to come up with a plan over breakfast: toaster waffles, strawberry preserve and whipped cream from an aerosol can. I know it sounds revolting, but both Royal and I are fond of the stuff. Royal says it reminds him of the first time he came to my house, when I would not let him have a waffle. Now he buys them for both of us.

  I racked my brains. Use Gia as bait? Somehow arrange for Vance to find her, if that was his game? I played a scenario in my mind: Vance and his goons busting in on well-known author Gia Sabato, carrying cans of gasoline and waving swords. No, would not work. Well it might, but could she take on sixteen macho men while she waited for the police to arrive and witness the bad guys attacking poor Gia for no reason? How to get the police there? An anonymous tip? The thugs who have murdered four people in more than one state are in Clarion and about to do it again? And how do you know that, ma’am? Can you prove it? Sorry, all our units are tied up. We can get there in a couple of hours.

  I groaned and let my head fall in my hands.

  “Breakfast not to your liking?” Royal asked.

  I looked at my plate from between my hands. The cream had separated and the waffle no longer looked appetizing. I slid the plate across the table. “You want it?”

  “I’ll take it! I’ll take it!” Jack cried out.

  “Forget it,” I said, grabbing the plate just as Royal reached for it. “Jack wants it.”

  Royal frowned so hard, little lines appeared between his eyebrows. I grinned and pushed the plate back to him. “Okay, it’s yours.”

  “My god! You are the biggest tease since Eve!” Jack grumped.

  “Me? A tease?” I looked sideways at him. “Eve was a tease?”

  He put hands to hips and cocked his head on one side. “Apple? Adam? Hello?”

  I made a face. “Oh. I guess so.”

  Still frowning, Royal concentrated on his waffles.

  “You heard the one about the naked dead guy?”

  Darn. No escaping him this time.

  “So the doctor goes to see old Mike the first Tuesday of the month, same as always. It’s midwinter and bitterly cold, so he’s surprised when Mike’s wife tells him her husband is out on the balcony. He goes out there, and sees Mike sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of the snow-covered balcony. It’s real cold. I mean to say, there are icicles dripping off the eaves. He walks around the old guy and is pretty shocked to see he’s stiff as a board, wearing a thick sweatshirt above the waist but stark naked below. He can see Mike’s dead, but he gets out his doctoring gear and checks just the same. Then he goes back inside the apartment to Ivy.

  “‘Ivy,’ he says, ‘how long has Mike been out on your balcony?’

  “‘The poor old coot passed away on Sunday,’ says Ivy. ‘I figured it’s cold enough out there to preserve him, but temperatures are climbing in the next two days, so I thought I should get him taken care of.’

  “The doctor hardly knows what to say, but he does his best to remain professional. ‘Very wise of you, Ivy. But, tell me, why di
dn’t you call me, and where are his pants?’

  “‘It’s like this, doctor,’ said Ivy. ‘Every time he went out there to smoke his cigar - I won’t let him do it in the apartment - he got a stiff back. As long as he sat out there, his back set hard as a cast-iron skillet. When he passed over, I remembered that, and it got me thinking. You see, he took his Viagra just beforehand.’”

  I frowned at Jack for a minute, then I got it and a guffaw broke out of me. Jack was delighted. Of course, it didn’t register on his face, but I could tell from the way he gave a little hop and squeezed his shoulders together.

  Royal swallowed his mouthful. “All right, tell me.”

  So I told him Jack’s joke. He smiled, but didn’t laugh.

  I peaked my brows. “I thought you had a sense of humor.” I looked over at Jack, who glared at the back of Royal’s head. “You don’t get it. Jack can’t usually crack a joke to save his life. This one is pretty good by comparison.”

  “Well thanks a lot!” from Jack.

  “No one can crack a joke to save Jack’s life,” Mel said as she came in the kitchen.

  Royal swallowed the last of my waffle. “I’m for a shower.” He stood and left the kitchen, and headed upstairs.

  ***

  Sitting in the kitchen while Royal showered, I thought over what we learned about Vance. If we were right about the guy, he was one sick puppy and so were his men.

  Jack and Mel started in on each other. I put my palm to my forehead. “Here we go again.”

  I ignored their bickering and scraped my leftovers into the bin. Out the corner of my eye, I saw Mel do a swift about-turn and head for the hall.

  “You!”

  She looked back, but didn’t stop.

  “Yes, you. You stay right here. You will not go peek at Royal.”

  She did a U-turn and came back in the kitchen.

  “You neither,” I told Jack.

  Then Gia arrived and I got serious mighty quickly.

  ***

  “Have you checked your e-mail?”

  When Gia walked in, not having bothered to knock or announce herself, Jack and Mel sidled to the corner of the room near the back door. They went stiff. Mac went under the table.

  I don’t know what ailed Mac when Gia was here, but I believe dogs sense what people cannot.

  “Have you?” she repeated in a cold voice as she took off her gloves and dropped them on the table.

  She was so damned arrogant. I struggled to keep my expression neutral. Every time she looked down her nose at me and I thought I was mad enough to tell her what she could do with her patronage, her expression shifted, something to do with the set of her eyes, and I kept my mouth shut. Almost as if she heard my thoughts, or could feel my emotions boiling.

  I bent over to stow dishes in the cabinet. “Not yet.”

  She sat at the kitchen table behind me as I unloaded the dishwasher. She wore all black: high-necked, long-sleeved dress, shoes; even her earrings and finger rings were black, shiny hematite. Unrelieved black against her pale skin should have made her look corpse-like, but instead she looked stunning. Damn her.

  “Daven is on his way home, but he will be several days yet.”

  “That’s your big news?” Because the way she made her entrance, I thought she’d come to tell me hell had froze over.

  “We think we know who betrayed us.”

  That got my attention. I straightened with a pottery bowl in one hand.

  “He was in a village near Nagka and the natives seemed to recognize him. Not him as an individual, but as a member of an ethnic group they are familiar with. To begin with, they treated him like royalty, ousted their mayor from his hut and offered it to Daven for the night as accommodation, and they served a huge meal, like a feast. They seemed to be trying to impress him. One of them mentioned his ‘brothers,’ at which the rest of them shut up. It took diplomacy and reassurance on Daven’s part to get them to open up.

  “According to them, a colony of people like Daven lived nearby. Something happened to them. From a few words he was not supposed to overhear, he thinks the colony was massacred, but naturally they would not admit that to visitors. There was one survivor, an adolescent boy. He lived with these villagers until a visiting white man, a European, took him away.”

  I think I did a pretty good job of appearing calm as I absorbed the information, but inside I quivered with excitement, my pulse jumping. This could be it, the reason Maud sent Elizabeth’s journal to us. This was the connection. The natives recognized Daven for what he was, kin to the lone surviving member of a now extinct colony. This boy had to be a Dark Cousin. He was identifying Dark Cousins for Vance.

  Now what was I to do? Tell Gia about Vance, what we knew of him? I listened for water running upstairs. Royal was still in the shower.

  I put the bowl away, snagged two mugs by the handles and opened the top cabinet. “You think this boy is the one? He somehow ended up in the States and decided to have his people murdered? Why? And where would he get the resources to hire an assassin?”

  With a little shake of her head, she gave me an impatient look, something I do myself. I didn’t like seeing it on her. “We will know when we find him.”

  I nested the mugs atop the others and closed the cabinet. I faced her, leaned back against the counter, bracing my elbows on it. “We can try. I don’t know how difficult tracing a preteen coming into the States from Myanmar will be.” I sighed - no, we couldn’t tell Gia, unless we could prove Vance had the boy. She might decide to take matters into her own hands and go after him. She could destroy what little headway we’d made, not to mention hurting a possibly innocent man.

  If Vance was the European in question. Had to be. Right? “This man. . . . What did the village people say about him?”

  “They did not know his name. They described him as tall, pale skinned and elderly.”

  I felt my eyebrows loft almost to my hairline. Elderly? Definitely not Vance.

  I love when a morsel of new information falls into place.

  I casually took a seat at the kitchen table. “Well, that’s one for the books. What do we do now?”

  She stood, and grasped the back of the chair with both hands. “I do not know. Will Royal be long?”

  Drat. I wanted her gone so I could talk to Royal. “He’s in the shower.”

  “I know. I repeat, will he be long?”

  I shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. He just got in there.”

  She looked me in the eyes. I gave her a bright smile.

  “I will return momentarily,” she said as she took her hands from the chair. I stayed in my seat as she left the kitchen, the house, and walked down the drive to her car.

  “She is one - ”Jack began.

  Rising as she opened the car door, I held up my hand. “Shush!” Then I stepped to the counter, opened my address book, found the number I wanted and dialed.

  “Janine?” I asked as the party picked up their phone.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Tiff Banks. I hope this isn’t an inconvenient time to call?”

  “No. It’s fine. How can I help?”

  “Do you remember when we spoke of Hans Stadelmann? You told me you thought he’s living in Arizona. Did you learn anything more of his whereabouts?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did, and I was going to call you, but it slipped my mind. He’s in Sedona.” She paused. “He is involved in your case.”

  I gave a casual laugh. “Janine. . . .” I chided.

  “I know, you can’t tell me,” she said with a chuckle.

  I murmured a good-bye and let her go.

  “Er . . . Tiff,” Jack said in a voice which sounded more strained than usual.

  Gia stood behind me on the other side of the kitchen table.

  I dropped the phone in the cradle. Goddamn Otherworldy and their sensitive hearing. She heard me from all the way out at the curb. I should have waited longer.

  I would not have been surprised if flames
shot out her black eyes, she was so angry. “Stadelmann was in Myanmar, and he is elderly.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak past the dread lodged in my windpipe

  She stepped around the table. “Where is he?”

  My nails dug into my palms. “I need your word you won’t go ballistic and hurt him.”

  “Where is he?” she repeated through gritted teeth.

  My heart picked up a few beats as I shook my head. “If he did take the boy from Myanmar, I’m pretty sure he’s not the Charbroiler. You should let me and Royal handle this.”

  “I could make you tell me.”

  “You could try.” Did I just say that? I must be insane.

  She took another step. The counter-top dug in the base of my spine. “Give me your word.”

  She made a noise in her throat. “You never learn, do you.”

  Royal came into the kitchen just then, his long hair in wet strands over his naked shoulders. He blurred, and there he stood between me and Gia. I kind of flopped back against the counter in relief.

  I spoke up before he could open his mouth. “Fancy a trip to Arizona?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We demoned to the airport. We could have gone clear to Arizona. I was getting used to demon speed and it’s fast, but I felt ornery. I’d had enough of being taken there, told to come here, do this, do that. Time to put my foot down. We were flying to Sedona. Gia knew she couldn’t dissuade me short of laying into me again, and now she no longer controlled him, Royal might have something to say about that.

  If I’d thought it would come to a fight, I’d have backed down because I thought Gia was stronger and definitely more vicious, and I would not want to see Royal bloodied.

  At the airport, Gia went right to check-in and spoke to the attendant. Then she started through the lounge, stopping for a quick word with people here and there. She sat next to an elderly couple and leaned in close to talk to them. They dressed casual, but wore the stamp of class. After half a minute, they walked out of the lounge. She wended through the passengers again and this time spoke to a tall young guy. He also left the lounge after a minute of conversation. Rather, those three people didn’t speak with Gia, they listened, and they left.