Banshee Hunt

by Curtis, Greg

  As for his colleagues, they were just as frustrated. It wasn't their fault. They were all good at what they did, and they all worked hard. But this just wasn't what they normally did. In the end they weren't really cops.

  West looked after keeping the unruly in line and keeping everything covered up. He had the magic of prognostication – at least a little. He could see the potential futures that arose from his actions which gave him an edge. He always knew what to do to smooth a situation over. What to say was another matter as the man perpetually seemed to have one if not both feet in his mouth. Still, give him a wizard having a tantrum and he could straighten him out. A mad bomber was something else.

  Peters worked with him, backing him up when he needed it. But his gift lay in wards and runes. He'd laid some of the protective enchantments on James. He was also a walking encyclopaedia on magic. While James would have simply called his attacker a mega, Peters would have been able to pin point every aspect of his gift and given them a detailed report on what he could and couldn't do. But only if he'd had the person or at least a body to work with. A few images of a giant weren't enough.

  And then there was Daniels who fairly much ran what they called intelligence. He looked after the IT stuff and dealt with the technical side of things. If you needed a computer to do something or required some sort of scientific test done he was your man. Unfortunately he was also one of those who believed in being over-dressed for every occasion and most days he wore a three piece suit and brightly polished shoes. His wardrobe had to cost a fortune. Maybe even as much as Yasmin's. But his magic was a strange one. He had the gift of secrets. With Daniels around there was no such thing as a secure password. Maybe that was how he afforded his clothes.

  Unfortunately the best computer in the world couldn't help if it didn't have something to analyse.

  And Yasmin tapping away at her keyboard couldn't help either. Her meta magic was useless at this, and despite being perhaps the best qualified of them all academically she couldn't magically find something where there simply wasn't anything to find. In fact she'd all but given up on the advanced search engines and databases, and was now going through the paper files looking for the man. No algorithms. No search engines. She was just literally looking through every photo they had on file of every single witch or wizard in America in the hope that eventually she'd find the one that matched the giant who'd attacked him.

  James had to give her credit for her dedication.

  He hated this place. He disliked it normally which was why he spent as much time as he could out in the field, but for the last two days he'd been stuck in this office and his hatred of it had grown exponentially. In his mind the office was a victory of style over substance. There was plenty of style here. It was ergonomic, designed beautifully and even showed elements of artistry. But there was absolutely nothing of substance.

  If he'd been back in his old job, sitting at his tin legged desk covered in files, putting up with the noise and the bad air conditioning (not to mention the appallingly uncomfortable chairs) he would have at least been doing something. He would have been chasing down leads, running down suspects, hitting the streets looking for information. He would have been doing something useful instead of simply sitting around waiting for stolen reports to arrive in his inbox.

  Of course if he'd been in his old job the chances were that he would have known nothing about magic, so solving the case would have been next to impossible anyway. And he wouldn't have had the resources to send Matti away to a specialist boarding school where she could be properly looked after. As for his little trick with the fake petrol and his brother – that would have got him fired or at least suspended. Thus far he'd heard nothing from Will save that there had been complaints.

  If he was honest though, it was the case that was angering him.

  Progress was slow. James would have said glacial but that would have been unfair so early in the investigation. Still, they hadn’t learnt a lot. Or rather they had learnt quite a lot, but none of it led anywhere.

  The man's face had been caught on several phones. James had spent hours staring at it. He’d enlarged it and used filters and software to enhance it, but it had been a wasted effort. They still had no idea who he was. Facial recognition had come up blank. Fingerprints had been found on the gun and the spent clip. But they weren't in the system – the man wasn't a known criminal. And DNA was out because they didn't have a body. The man had been vaporised along with two paramedics. An explosion that hot and powerful didn't leave much behind. Naturally they hadn't found any ID. And while the police were launching an appeal for information, somehow James knew that that too would come up short.

  James had already gone through every case he'd been involved in since joining the Illuminati, and in not one of them could he find the man's face. Nor a giant of any sort.

  And though the police were still looking, none of the videos could even tell them where the man had come from. They couldn't seem to back track his movements. It was almost as though he'd just arrived on the street, ready to meet him.

  Perhaps he had? There was magic in the world after all. There were some who could bend light and so appear and disappear out in the open. There were others who could twist dimensions. But really, he wouldn't have thought the man was either of those. His size and his strength suggested that his gift was something else. Something of the physical. And most of the gifted only had one or two gifts, and they were normally closely related. James would have placed him as a mega of some sort. Not a dimension twister like Corinth.

  Any other leads were just as sparse. Despite two days of swabbing and analysis they still had no explosive signature for the bomb. Just normal organic residues. Nor did they have so much as a piece of the device. Not a wire. Not even an explosive wrapper. In short they had no idea what sort of bomb it was or how it had been triggered.

  As for the gun its serial number told him that it was a perfectly legal fifty calibre hand gun bought at a gun show out of state. Exactly the same as a million other weapons. Bought by a Mr John Smith. Clearly no one had been too interested in checking ID's. But in any case the gun was six months old and had been involved in no gun crimes as far as they knew. It told them nothing, he thought glumly.

  Some of that disappointment must have shown on his face.

  “Chin up caveman. You may be an antediluvian throw back, but the rest of us are well and truly up to date with computers and magic. We'll find the bad guy and get this sorted. After that you can go back to your caveman ways. Perhaps then you’ll be able to beat up some wizards.” Yasmin abruptly walked past him with a mug of coffee in one hand, a huge cream filled doughnut on top of it, and a sheaf of reports in her other hand.

  James wasn't quite sure why she was there. Her role was more involved in prisoner handling and transport. And dealing with Warden Jones who he gathered she had seen a lot of in the last few days. Her meta magic gave her a useful advantage in that side of things. But he guessed it was a case of all hands to the pumps. On the other hand she was obviously upset with him about something. He wondered what he'd done this time.

  “You mean you're good at reading reports illegally downloaded from the NYPD's computers. I'm the detective here.” James was tired, and in no mood for her. Especially when he'd read all those reports himself and knew they said nothing. But he was thinking that the coffee looked good.

  “And that's enough of the caveman shit too.”

  “Oh I'm sorry. Did that hurt your feelings? After what you did to your brother?”

  She turned around to stare at him with venom in her eyes and he knew what was bothering her. The warden was rubbing off on her. All this talk about prisoner rights. It was too much. These people were dangerous. They couldn't be treated like normal prisoners.

  “I did what I had to do,” he told her tiredly.

  “You left your own brother a basket case!”

  James decided not to say anything. It would be best. This was an argument he wasn't goin
g to win. And besides, she herself was a witch. She had magic and this was her world. Naturally she had sympathy for others like her. Unfortunately even silence wasn't going to help him as she had more to say.

  “And what did you call me barely three weeks ago? The office house plant – decorative but with not a lot going on upstairs!?”

  “I, er – what?” Had he said that?

  “Senility galloping in?”

  “I don't think I said that –” But then James had to think about it. “… exactly.”

  He dimly recalled a conversation like that. It was a while ago and he remembered making some kind of scathing comment. He might have said it. In passing. To someone in the office. He didn't exactly remember. But he did remember that at the time she'd been making some foolish speech about respecting prisoner's rights. It was noble, he might have agreed with her once. But ultimately it was misguided. Certainly not when it came to the magical. “But if I did I apologise.”

  Yasmin's response was an untranslatable noise followed by her walking off angrily to her desk in the far corner. He guessed she wasn't too happy with his apology.

  “Chin up Yasmin. Take it as a compliment. The man likes his pot plants!” West butted in, laughter in his voice.

  “Yeah! That's why he's so mellow all the time!” Peters, his ever present partner in crime, threw in his own little bit of wit before starting to bray like a donkey.

  James groaned. He was tempted to call after Yasmin that at least he'd said she was decorative – but he resisted the urge. Somehow he suspected that would not go down well. Even he knew that much when it came to women. He didn't seem to know a lot else though. Something that was immediately obvious when he could see other people around the office laughing at him. He wondered which one of them had told her what he'd said.

  “Heads up guys. Walters has just called in.”

  Daniels walked into the office, looking every bit the sharply dressed detective he wasn't. James knew an instant of complete disdain for him. He could never be a policeman. What was this fixation everyone here had with dressing up like models? But he held it in. If Walters had finally been able to see the crime scene they had something new.

  Walters was a meta like Yasmin, but his gift differed a little in its focus. Most metas could identify and take control of only a certain range of magics. But Walters had a slightly different ability. Though his gift for controlling them was more limited, he was a bloodhound when it came to spotting magic. Any type of magic. And not just the smell of the magic in people and what they cast, but also the smell of a spell long after it had been cast. There was a reason he was so highly valued within the intelligence group. The man was a walking crime scene examination lab for the gifted.

  Unfortunately he wasn't actually a crime scene examiner and he didn't work for the police which meant it took a concerted effort to get him near a crime scene or a body. Often they ended up giving him a fake identity and credentials, but it was tricky. There were so many different crimes scenes, so many bodies to examine, and if the same guy kept appearing at all of them with different names someone would eventually notice. This time they'd tried to dress him up as an ATF agent with a speciality in bombs.

  “He finally got to walk the crime scene and he says that the reports are correct. There is no explosive. We're looking for a detonator.”

  A detonator! The word surprised James. He hadn't expected it. And yet it made perfect sense in its own bizarre way. Gifts were categorised in many ways. Physical, chemical, mental, biological, social and so forth. And they could be cast in many ways too. With words and a spell, or a gesture or a thought. It all depended on the person and the nature of the gift. Detonators as their name implied had a strange sort of physical gift. One of the most dangerous. They could shape and reshape chemical bonds. Others could do the same of course, creating new substances out of old. Transmutation magic was common enough. Detonators though were slightly different in that they turned substances – blood or bone for example – into unstable analogues of what they had been. And then they exploded.

  It was in James' view a perfect example of an almost completely useless gift. There was almost no chance for a detonator to make money from it. No career prospects. No real use at all. The closest he'd heard of someone finding a use for the gift were a few who'd taken up operating private mines and saved on the cost of explosives. But it was also one of the most dangerous gifts around, and one that could never become publicly known no matter what. Magic would scare people. The ability to simply blow people up would terrify them. But it explained the crime scene.

  No wonder they had no residue. No body pieces either. The man himself had been the bomb.

  James turned to the computer and started going through the list of known detonators in North America. They had detailed files on every one of the known gifted – keeping track of them was something the Illuminati took very seriously – but after a couple of minutes he knew that his attacker wasn't among them. But then why would he be? He could have come from further afield – outside of North America. Or he could have been an unrecognised wizard. But the likelihood was that he'd been blown up, not that he'd blown himself up. The giant wasn't the detonator.

  Still, they had a lead. Finally. And it was a good one. Thankfully detonation was a rare gift. Even so, he was left with ninety three names and faces to consider. The chances were that one of them had been somewhere at the scene. But more than that the understanding that there was a detonator involved, someone who wasn't the shooter, crystallised some of the thoughts he'd had over the previous couple of days. Ideas he hadn't given voice to. But now he knew he would have to.

  “Alright people,” James said, looking up from his computer to face the others. “There are ninety three known detonators in North America on the database. Let’s see if we can do some facial recognition for them on the videos from the day. You need to look at any video footage you can find that pans across the attack on me and the final crime scene. Also, pay careful attention to the crowd scenes, both before and after the person detonated. Follow up with anyone who seems to be taking a particular interest in what was happening at the time.”

  Was it his place to give them orders? James didn't really know. Will was technically the boss though he was hardly ever in the office. And in his absence it seemed a lot of things fell to the hunter to lead. But even if it wasn't these people knew their jobs.

  “Already on it Iceman.” Daniels smiled at him, setting James to grinding his teeth in annoyance. “IT are going through the videos frame by frame as we speak, preparing them for facial recognition. We should have an answer in a few hours.”

  Iceman! Was that any better than caveman? And when had people suddenly started graduating to openly calling him names James wondered? Still, he kept his thoughts to himself. In the end it was his own doing. Word of what he'd done to Francis was all over the building and he couldn't exactly pretend it hadn't happened. He had done the crime as they said, now he guessed he would just have to do the time. What mattered for the moment was what was being done; not any perceived slights he had to suffer from the others. And there was more to do.

  “Good, then here's something else they can do while they're working on that. If the shooter was blown up by someone else, then we have a conspiracy by definition. We have a shooter and a detonator. And what I remember of the shooter was that he was unnaturally strong and determined. Possibly a mega. If we have two people in a conspiracy, why can't we have three? And say number three is a fascinator. Someone who can persuade one person to commit a murder and then another to blow him up when things went wrong. So when IT go through the videos looking for detonators, have them also look for known fascinators.”

  “And while they're at it, they should look out for anyone who might be associated with the Illuminati, especially with this office. The shooter after all knew my name. And he knew my schedule. He knew where I'd be and when. That strongly suggests we have a mole. So let’s take a think about that too. Abou
t anyone who would have known where I'd be that day. Draw up a list of names. And start doing backgrounds on everyone.”

  As he’d expected, the last drew a round of upset stares, though no one said anything. James had expected that. Just as he'd also known that it had to be true. But someone needed to have told the shooter where and when to be. And perhaps even where and when he'd be vulnerable – unarmed because of the German's rules about patients carrying guns. It had been the perfect place for an ambush and he doubted that was accidental.