“Adam Kamen,” Rene said. “Thirty-eight years old. Brilliant engineer, genius applied-magic theorist. We were hired to guard him while he worked on a valuable project. Adam was financed by three separate investors.”
“How well?” I asked.
“Well enough to pay for an elite guard unit.”
That was some serious cash. Elite Red Guard units didn’t come cheap.
“We put Adam into a safe house in the middle of nowhere. The property was protected by two defensive wards: an innerperimeter spell that shielded the house and the workshop and a wider, outer-perimeter spell that protected a quarter-acre area with the house in its center. The house was watched by a crew of twelve people: four per eight-hour shift. I cherry-picked every one of the guards. All of them had passed background checks and showed long records of distinguished service.”
Rene leaned back. “Last night Adam and the prototype vanished. His absence and the mutilated body of one of the guards was discovered this morning during a shift change.”
Okay. “Mutilated how?”
The line of Rene’s mouth hardened. “You would have to see for yourself. I want you to find Adam and retrieve the device.”
Figured.
“Which of those two is top priority?
“Obviously my employers would prefer to recover both. The official line says the device has priority; personally, I want Adam saved.”
Once a bodyguard, always a bodyguard. Rene had been hired to guard Kamen, and she took her job personally.
Rene braided her long fingers on her knee. “Right now only four people besides the guards and those of us in this room are aware of this issue. Three of those four are Adam’s investors, and the fourth is my direct superior. It’s essential that no information is leaked. The damage to the Red Guard’s reputation would be catastrophic.”
Lovely. We would have to look for him without making any noise. My investigative technique mostly consisted of going through the list of interested parties and making as much noise as possible, until the culprit lost his patience and tried to shut me up.
Rene focused on me. “Being subtle is very important in this case.”
“We can do subtle,” I assured her.
“It’s our middle name,” Andrea added.
For some odd reason Rene didn’t look convinced.
I took out a pad of paper and a pen. “What was the nature of the device?”
Rene shook her head. “We weren’t privy to that information. To my knowledge, it was never successfully tested.”
Okay. “I need the inventor’s full name, address, family, and known associates.”
“His name is Adam Kamen. We know that he is thirty-eight, a widower. His wife had diabetes and was undergoing dialysis for kidney failure. Eventually, the disease killed her. Adam was severely traumatized by her death. His work is connected to that event, but I can’t tell you how. He spoke without an accent, he didn’t seem religious, and he expressed no strong political views.”
“How long have you had him?” Andrea wrote a note on her own pad.
“Ninety-six days. He had no visitors while in our custody. Beyond that, we know nothing: no address, no known relatives, no information about enemies or friends.” Rene picked up another piece of paper. “This is the latest image of the device in question.”
On the picture a metal cylinder stood level with a worktable, approximately three feet tall and probably a foot in diameter. Odd patterns covered the gray metal, some pale, almost white, some with a familiar yellow sheen of gold, others a dozen shades of silver and blue. They twisted and overlapped one another, some so elaborate it must’ve taken hours of work and jewelers’ tools to create them.
I glanced at Rene. “The main cylinder is iron?”
“Iridium. The squiggles on it are gold, platinum, cobalt, and lead. He has half of the periodic table in that thing.”
Hmm, all metals, all rare, all expensive, and all took enchantment extremely well, except for lead. Lead was magically inert: magic bounced off it like dry peas from a wall. Why build a magic device and add lead to it? “Any idea at all what it was supposed to do?”
Rene shook her head.
“Do you have any thoughts as to who might have wanted to steal him or his device?” Andrea asked.
“No.”
I tapped the paper. “Can you give me the names of the three investors?”
“No.”
Andrea frowned. “ ‘No’ as in you don’t know who they are, or ‘no’ as in you won’t tell us?”
“Both.”
I tapped the paper with my pen. “Rene, you want us to find you-don’t-know-who and to retrieve his you-don’t-know-what for you-won’t-tell-me-whom?”
Rene shrugged. “You will have full access to his workshop, the safe house, and the body. You can interview the guards and you will have our full cooperation. I’ll give you a code and advise the master sergeant that you’ll be coming. The investors’ identities are confidential by contract—if they want to approach you, they can, but we can’t force them to do it, so my hands are tied there. As to Adam, we were hired to guard his body and his work, not interview him about his family history.”
“I heard background checks are a standard requirement for the Red Guard.” I tapped my paper with my pencil.
“They are.”
“So why didn’t you do them?”
“Because the client gave us a truckload of money.” Rene smiled, a controlled sharp baring of teeth. Some unsettling emotion flickered in her eyes and vanished. “We aren’t investigators. We’re bodyguards. We need a professional to resolve this situation. Hiring the Mercenary Guild is out of the question: they don’t know how to be discreet. Hiring the Order isn’t an option either: I don’t want their fingers in our pie, because they’ll try to claim ownership of the whole thing. That leaves us with a private firm. I know you, I’ve seen you work, and I know you will do it cheaper than anybody else in town, because you have no choice. You opened up shop a month ago and you have no clients. You need a significant case to put your name back on the map, or you’ll go out of business. If you succeed in assisting us, the Red Guard will publicly endorse you.”
Rene nodded to the guy on her left. He set a small duffel bag on the table. Rene pulled it open. Five stacks of bills looked back at me.
“Ten grand now and ten grand plus expenses when Adam and/or the device are returned to us. Twenty grand if Mr. Kamen is alive and free of life-threatening injuries.”
Twenty grand and an endorsement from the best bodyguard outfit in the city or sitting on my ass, drinking motor oil coffee. Let me think . . .
Rene watched me. There it was again, an odd flicker of distress in her eyes. This time I was ready for it and I caught it—fear. The woman who used to run security for Midnight Games was scared out of her wits, and she was trying her best to hide it.
I glanced at the two men behind her. “Can we speak in private?”
Rene waved her hand, and the twin walking arsenals departed.
I leaned forward. “There are several experienced PI firms in the city that would be happy to take care of this for twenty grand. The Pinkertons, John Bishop, Annamarie and her White Magnolia, any of them would take that paycheck and say thank you. But you came here.”
Rene crossed her arms on her chest. “Are you trying to talk me out of hiring you? A peculiar business strategy.”
“No, I’m stating a fact. We both know that my reputation is now shit, because Ted Moynohan told anyone who would listen that I was the stray rock in the gears of his great plan.”
On the right Andrea’s jawline hardened—she’d clenched her teeth.
“Moynohan says a lot of things,” Rene said. “He’s damaged goods, and nobody likes excuses.”
“I have no formal investigative training and my résumé is short. My point is, if I had lost a valuable object and my career were riding on retrieving it, I wouldn’t hire me. I might hire Andrea, because she has both experience a
nd formal training. She can tell you the height of the attacker from the trigonometry of the blood spatter, while I’m fuzzy on what trigonometry is. Hiring us because of Andrea would make sense, but you had no idea she worked here until you walked through the door. The only time you’ve seen me do my thing was in the Pit.” Where I killed things with much bloodshed.
Rene gave me a flat look. “Go on.”
“You didn’t come here looking for a detective. You came here looking for a hired killer. So why don’t you level with me. Why do you need me?”
A strained silence hung between us. A second passed. Another.
“I don’t know what Adam was building,” Rene said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I know that when I told my direct supervisor that Adam and the device were missing, he called his family and told his wife to pack the children, throw the bare essentials into the car, leave for North Carolina, and not come back until he called them.”
“He told his family to get out of town?” Andrea blinked.
Rene nodded. “My brother is bedridden. He can’t be moved. I can’t take him out of the city. I’m stuck in Atlanta.” She leaned forward, her face grim. “You care about your friends, Daniels. Enough to jump on a sword for them. You have a lot to lose and if you get worried enough, you’ll strong-arm the Pack into helping you, which is a lot more manpower than I can muster. Find Adam and find his device for me. Before the thief turns it on and does something we both will regret.”
* * *
THE DOOR SHUT BEHIND RENE. ANDREA ROSE AND moved to the narrow window, watching her and her goons cross the parking lot to their vehicle. “I’ve been hired for two hours and we already have a client and a job from hell.”
I took five thousand dollars out of the bag. Andrea moved away from the window, and I handed the duffel with the rest of the money to her.
“What for?”
“Gun budget.”
Andrea ran her thumb, riffing through the stack of twenty-dollar bills. “Cool. We need ammo.”
“Did she look scared to you?” I asked.
Andrea grimaced. “She is a cold bitch and she masks it well, but I spent my entire childhood reading faces so I’d know where the next punch was coming from. And I’m a predator. I lock onto fear, because it signals prey. She’s really rattled. We’re probably going to regret this.”
“Maybe we should take the other offer. Oh wait. We don’t have another offer.”
“You are so witty, Miss Daniels. Or is it Mrs. Curran?”
I gave her my hard stare. She barked a short laugh.
I set my bag on my desk and unzipped it to check the contents. Dead bodies had the annoying tendency to decay. The sooner we got to the scene, the better.
Andrea checked her guns. “So Ted told everyone you ruined his parade?”
“Pretty much.”
“One day I’ll kill him, you know.”
I glanced at her. She was deadly serious. Killing Ted would unleash a storm of catastrophic proportions. He was the head of the Atlanta chapter of the Order. Every knight in the country would hunt us down to their last breath. Of course, Andrea knew all that.
“I’m over it.” I swiped my backpack off the desk. “Ready to go?”
“I was born ready. Where is this workshop anyway?”
I checked the directions Rene had given me. “Sibley Forest.”
Andrea swore.
CHAPTER 5
I OWNED TWO CARS: AN OLD BEAT-UP SUBARU NAMED Betsi that ran during tech and a horrid nightmare of a truck called Karmelion. Karmelion took twenty minutes of intense chanting to warm up and made more noise than a gaggle of drunk teenage boys in a bar on a Saturday night, but it ran during magic.
Unfortunately the Beast Lord had condemned both vehicles as unsafe and instead I now leased a Pack Jeep I called Hector. Equipped with dual engines, Hector worked during magic or tech. He didn’t go very fast, especially during magic, but so far he hadn’t stalled on me either. As long as our high-speed chases stayed under forty-five miles an hour, we would be all set.
Andrea eyed Hector. “Where is Betsi?”
“She’s back at the Keep. His Furriness made me lease Hector from the Pack instead. Betsi didn’t meet with his exacting standards.” I climbed into the driver’s seat.
Andrea popped the passenger door open and Grendel bounded into the space behind it, where there once was a rear seat and now was space where I stored equipment. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I believe the exact words he used were ‘a deathtrap with four wheels.’ We had a glorious fight about it.”
She grinned and patted Hector’s dashboard. “You lost.”
“No, I chose to gracefully accept the Pack’s generous offer.”
“Aha. Keep telling yourself that.”
Careful, thin ice. “A third party explained to me in detail that when you’re running a business, people judge how successful you are based on your appearance. If you’re driving a shabby vehicle, they think you need money and your business is struggling.”
“That sounds like Raphael,” Andrea said.
And she nailed it. “Yep.”
She clamped her mouth shut. I started the engine and maneuvered Hector out of the parking lot.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
“So who is he hooked up with now?”
Three seconds. That was all she lasted. “Nobody that I know of.”
She stared straight through the windshield. “I find that hard to believe.”
Given that Raphael was a bouda and they viewed sex as a fun recreational activity that should be practiced vigorously and often, normally I would’ve agreed with her. But Raphael was a special case. He hounded Andrea for months until she finally gave him a chance. For a few blissful weeks they were in love and happy, but then Andrea had to pick between the Order and the Pack and it all fell apart.
“He hasn’t been with anybody since you had that fight,” I told her.
She snorted. “I’m sure some cute piece of ass will catch his attention sooner or later.”
“He’s too busy moping.”
Andrea glanced at me. “Moping?”
“Pining.” I made a wide curve around a large pothole filled with odd-looking blue goo. “If he starts singing sad Irish ballads, we’ll have to stage an intervention.”
“Oh please.” Andrea turned to her passenger window.
“He withdrew from the bouda clan.”
“What?”
“Not officially, of course.” I shrugged. “But he stopped doing whatever it is that the bouda alpha male does.” In the bouda clan, as in nature, females were dominant. Aunt B ran that clan with steel claws, and Raphael, being her son, served as the head of the males. “He killed Tara.”
Andrea’s blue eyes went big. “The third female?”
“Yeah. Aunt B mentioned it in passing the last time we spoke. He was in the bouda clan house for some sort of business-related thing and Tara came up and grabbed his balls. Apparently she wanted to check if they were still there. He punched her in the face. She shifted into a warrior form and went for his throat. From what Aunt B said, he didn’t just kill her, he ripped her to pieces. He hasn’t been to the clan house since.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I said.” It was one of those idiotic things that could’ve been resolved in a split second. Tara had no right to touch Raphael, and once she did, he had every right to punch her. She should’ve left it at that, and now she was dead because she didn’t. Bouda males voluntarily took the beta role, but in a fight they were vicious, and Raphael was the best of their lot. I wouldn’t fight him unless he left me no choice. I could take him, but he’d tear me up before I finished him.
“I keep thinking about the People thing,” Andrea said. “I think something went very wrong in the Casino.”
And we’d changed the subject. Andrea one, Kate the matchmaker zero. “How do you figure?”
“Two navigators fainted, both while pilotin
g the same vampire.”
And one of these navigators was Ghastek, who could pilot a vampire through an obstacle course studded with rotating saw blades and pits of molten lava while carrying a full glass of water and not spilling a drop. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say the People had stumbled onto something, some sort of magic that was too much for them, and it had somehow tainted the vampire. But getting to the bottom of this mystery would be impossible. And besides, nobody had hired us to resolve the People’s navigation issues.
“Of course, it could be a coincidence.” Andrea shrugged. “We don’t know anything about the woman who fainted, except that she was supposedly pregnant. We don’t know what relationship she and Ghastek had prior to this mess. Maybe they went to breakfast together and ordered a bad omelet.”
“That would be a hell of an omelet.”
“I don’t know, have you eaten at the Grease Trap lately? Their omelets are gray.”
Technically the place was called the Greek Wrap, but nobody called it by its real name. The Grease Trap served breakfast 24/7, offered token wraps that had nothing to do with Greek cuisine, and openly admitted to having rat meat on the menu. It was the kind of place you went when your earthly troubles became too much for you and you were looking for a creative way to commit suicide.
“Why the hell would anyone be eating at the Grease Trap? I’ve seen flies die from buzzing by that place.”
Andrea crossed her arms. “Oh, I don’t know, probably because your career just ended and you are depressed and don’t feel like breathing, let alone going out, but your body still needs food and that’s the closest place to your apartment and they don’t mind if you bring a giant dog with you.”
“What, you couldn’t find a Dumpster that was closer?”
Andrea glared at me. “What are you implying?”
“The Dumpster would have better food in it.”
“Well, excuse me, Miss Fine Dining.”
“Ghastek wouldn’t be caught dead at the Grease Trap.”
Andrea waved her arms. “It was just an example.”
I glanced into the rearview mirror at Grendel. “What kind of brave canine companion lets his human eat at the Grease Trap? You are so fired.”
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