by Skye Knizley
It couldn’t be Raven. She’d never come back to the city without telling him, right?
Two hours later, he sat in an interrogation room at District One, a couple cheeseburgers and a large coffee in front of him and an ancient Betamax tape in his hand. It had taken the better part of the morning to find a video player that would even play the thing.
He put the tape in and chewed on a bite of cheeseburger while he waited. The image was fuzzy at first, but after a moment it showed the street a few blocks from the church with a single still image taken every five seconds. Levac pushed the fast-forward button on the old wired remote and watched images flip past until it was almost midnight by the timestamp on the video. At 11:55 p.m. a figure dropped down from atop the church and started running. In the third frame, Levac could see her face; it did indeed look like Raven Storm, with her hair pulled back over her shoulder in a silver clip. He didn’t recognize the outfit, but it was typical of Raven with leather pants and a bright blue blouse beneath a leather motorcycle jacket.
Levac played it back a few times, going over the four frames that showed the woman. Something, aside from it being the spitting image of Raven, was bothering him. Then he saw it. The hair clip. Raven never wore hair clips she said they gave her a headache. She always wore those scrunchy things or barrettes. It didn’t make sense she’d change, even if she was in town secretly.
But if it wasn’t her, who was it? There weren’t many women fitting Raven’s description. Frankly, there weren’t any that he knew of.
He finished the cheeseburger, still staring at the image. No, he decided, it wasn’t her. He was still her familiar and though their connection had seemed weaker since she’d almost died at the hands of Draculia he could feel her and she felt far away. He would know if she was in town.
He tossed the wrapper aside and ejected the tape. He’d give it to Pocock for an off-the-books analysis. While he waited he would dig around Old Town, if there was a Raven Storm lookalike in town it was a good bet someone there had seen her. He wanted to start with that bastard Du Guerre, but it was still daylight so MacLeod would have to do. He saw everything that happened near his restaurant, mainly because he was a nosy old fart.
He knew it wasn’t Raven. It couldn’t be.
So why was it nagging at him so?
LENOX HOTEL
BOSTON, MA. 6:00 A.M.
RAVEN AWOKE TO THE SOUND of her Sony cellphone screaming the first few bars of an AC/DC song, the tone she’d assigned to Abraham King. She slapped at it until the noise went away, to be replaced with King’s voice.
“Good morning, Agent Storm, I trust I didn’t wake you too early?”
Though she’d closed the grey room-darkening curtains Raven could tell by the gloom the sun wasn’t even up yet.
“I’m a dhampyr, King. I only just got to bed, what the hell do you want?”
“I sent you to Boston to investigate a murder, not execute vampires. What happened last night?” King asked.
Raven groaned and stuck her head under her pillow. Kole must have reported the incident with Cade’s thugs.
“It wasn’t Bureau business,” she said. “A bunch of the local Master’s cronies had issues with Chicago’s Fürstin being in town and not kissing their master’s butt. I defended myself, case closed.”
“I see. And neither you nor Agent Kole were injured?”
“Only her pride. She wolfed out too late to join the festivities. Why are you asking, anyway? Didn’t Kole file a report or something?”
Raven could hear the rustle of paper. She’d noticed that King still printed everything.
“She did indeed. But I know of your tendency to leave details out and thought she may have caught the habit. As for today, you have an appointment with Monsignor Quinn’s coroner. Don’t miss it.”
The call ended and Raven turned off her ringer. She’d worry about the coroner once the sun was full up and she’d drunk about a gallon of coffee.
She was almost back to sleep when someone knocked on the door to her room.
“Agent Storm? It’s Wregan.”
It’s going to be one of those days, isn’t it? Raven thought.
“Just a second!”
She sat up and looked around the room for the fluffy pink robe Aspen had given her. She located it on the back of the leather sofa and shrugged into it before shuffling back over the blue carpet to the door. Kole was waiting on the other side, the overstuffed folder held to her chest like always.
“Good morning, Raven,” she said with a smile.
Raven wiped sleep from her eyes. “It’s early, Wregan, what do you want?”
Kole smiled. “We have an appointment with the coroner this morning and I thought perhaps you would like to go over the file b—”
“I don’t need to go over the file,” Raven growled. “I need to get a few more hours of sleep, it was a late night.”
Kole stepped into the room and kicked the door shut with one three-inch heel.
“How did that go, by the way?”
“Fine, I picked up a few more pieces for the puzzle. What the hell are you doing?”
Kole shuffled the file in her arms and smiled. “I told you, I think we should go over things again.”
“And I told you I didn’t need to. We’ll see the coroner in a few hours and then pay a visit to the forensic technician.”
“I’m sure we missed something on the first five go-rounds,” Kole replied. “We can order in breakfast and make a morning of it. Come on, it will be fun!”
Raven rubbed her forehead and choked back her monster. “Kole, I’m going to say this as nicely as I can. This isn’t some weird sorority and we aren’t girlfriends having a sleepover with a murder mystery to solve. This is my room and I’m being kind enough to get you your own room. Down the hall. Away from me.”
Kole blinked at Raven. “You’re grouchy in the morning. Maybe if we got some coffee—”
Raven’s eyes turned and she growled, “I’m grouchy when I’ve been shot at, run into a wall and only had a few hours of sleep.”
“Well, I’ll order some breakfast and you can wake up while I go through the file.”
Kole dropped onto the sofa and dumped the contents of the file onto the narrow coffee table.
Raven glared at her in the gloom. She could either pull the lycan’s head off and send it back to King, throw the kid out or go along with her. Her vampire blood was screaming at her to go with Plan A, but she turned the lights on instead.
“You win. Order the coffee, I’m going to get a shower. Don’t touch anything, you smell like a wet dog.”
She knew Kole had opened her mouth to respond, but Raven didn’t hear her. She was already in the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later she stepped back into the room with a towel around her hair. She dropped onto the sofa and looked at the tray of coffee and food Kole had ordered.
“Great, cop food,” she said.
She plucked a glazed donut from the pile of pastries and tore it in half.
“So, have you learned anything?” she asked.
Kole looked up and her mouth fell open. “I…just learned you don’t have a whole lot of modesty.”
Raven looked down at the bath sheet wrapped around her torso. “It’s all I had. It was your idea to invade my room, not mine. Besides, my partner Levac has seen worse, at least you’re female.”
“Right…um…yeah. Okay, I’ve been going through the file again and I found something interesting.”
Raven dunked her donut into one of the cups of coffee and bit into it. The bitter coffee made the too-sweet donut taste far better.
“Go on,” she said around the mouthful of food.
“It looks like the victims knew each other and even attended school together here in Boston.”
“They were all from Boston?”
Kole pulled a photo out of the pile and handed it to Raven. “That is what it looks like. They are all standing together in the back row. They look a little diffe
rent as high school students, but the roster confirms it’s them. They all knew each other.”
Raven set her donut aside and took the photo. Kole had highlighted a row of six young men standing in the middle of the back row. Though most of the rest of the class was smiling the six boys, along with others on either side, looked serious. Dead serious.
Raven stood. “I want the names of the rest of boys in that row, all of them, and get me an address to the school.”
“What about the coroner?”
Raven dropped her towel and started rummaging through her suitcase. “He can wait. We might have more murders coming, I’d like to stop them if we can.”
She pulled a pair of black leather pants and a fresh red blouse from the case and turned to find Kole staring at her.
“Are you listening to me?” Raven asked.
“You’re naked,” Kole squeaked.
“Focus, kid, I don’t have anything you haven’t seen. Start making those phone calls while I get dressed.”
Kole pulled her phone out of her purse. Raven heard her dial a few numbers then stop.
“It’s only seven in the morning.”
Raven rolled her eyes. “It didn’t stop you and King. Make the damn calls.”
151 COMMONWEALTH AVENUE
BOSTON, MA. 8:15 A.M.
BOSTON’S BRIDGEWATER HIGH SCHOOL LOOKED more like a collection of old buildings than a single coherent school. More than half a dozen three-story buildings made of everything from plain red brick to native stone pulled from the harbor sat right on top of Commonwealth Avenue with nothing but a sidewalk separating them from the freshly paved street.
Raven turned her leather jacket’s collar up against the biting New England wind and hurried up the steps to the administration building. Inside, she walked along the polished tile floor with Kole only a few paces behind. Hanging on the wall to either side of them were class photos, starting with one near the door that was taken in 1855 and showed a small class of only twelve teenaged boys.
Partway down the corridor, they found the same 1977 class photo that Kole was carrying around in her file. A plaque next to it stated that many of the boys in the class had died in a fire that destroyed one entire wing of the young men’s dorm. Only thirty of the boys survived; the deceased were listed on the plaque in memorial.
Raven took a photo of the plate with her phone and looked around at Kole, who was staring off into space, her head cocked.
“What’s wrong?” Raven asked.
“The quiet,” Kole replied. “This is a school, but I can’t hear any kids. It is way too quiet and it’s giving me the creeps.”
Raven cocked her head and listened. It was true, the school was oddly silent, but she could hear students moving about in classrooms in the distance. The kid was just being paranoid.
“This is the administration building,” an aged voice said. “Most of the classrooms are in the other buildings, so it’s always a little quiet around here.”
A man in his mid-sixties had stepped out of a nearby office. He had a close-cropped goatee that was streaked with brown and faded grey eyes that looked out from behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that had been out of style even when the man was young.
He smiled and leaned against the wall with his arms folded. “Good morning, I’m Professor Natale, assistant dean of students. Can I help you with something?”
Raven flipped open her identification. “Special Agents Storm and Kole. We have a few questions about some students from the freshman class of 1977. Can you help us with that?”
“Possibly,” Natale said. “Most of the older records haven’t been computerized yet, but we keep student ledgers and I was a student here myself. Maybe I can find what you are looking for without sending you to the basement archives.”
He ushered them into a modest office paneled in antique wood and stuffed with barrister bookcases and old books heavy with silk marks. Natale went to one of the shelves and pulled out a dusty volume perhaps two inches thick. On the front was simply ‘1977’ in flaking gold leaf. He took a seat behind the desk and opened the book to the last marked section.
“As you saw several of the freshmen boys that year were killed in a fire. Who were you looking for?”
“Let’s start with Ronen Quinn,” Raven said.
Natale looked at Raven over his glasses. “The Monsignor? Such a shame about his death, I hope you find his murderer.”
Natale flipped a few pages and turned it to face Raven. On the page were two young men of perhaps fifteen. Each was given half a page that included a photograph and basic details. Quinn was from Ireland, enjoyed football and baseball, and played the violin.
“This isn’t quite what we were looking for,” Raven said. “The Monsignor’s murder is connected to the deaths of several other men from the same class. We were hoping you could help us find a connection besides the school.”
Kole opened the file she’d been carrying and showed Natale the photograph she’d highlighted. “These are the other victims, if it helps at all.”
Natale adjusted his glasses and picked up the photo.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ve seen them all before.”
He flipped a handful of pages and tapped another photo. It showed fifteen young men and three young women, all dressed in pith helmets and safari khakis. The caption at the bottom read ‘The Young Archaeologists Club.’
“They were all in the archaeology club together,” Natale said. “I was a member myself, though a few years behind them.”
“Do you know if they were involved in anything else together?” Raven asked.
Natale shook his head. “I only remembered this because you showed it to me. You might talk to Dr. Klien, though.”
Kole put the photo back into the file. “Klien?”
Natale pointed to the young man at the end of the top row in the book. “He was their student advisor, a senior at the time. He’s a history professor here at the school. I would assume he would know more about the club than I.”
“Where can we find him?” Raven asked.
Natale smiled. “As it happens he has a free period this morning. He’s probably in his classroom preparing for a lecture. Take the main hall to the John Adams building then the stairs to the second floor. His room is J22.”
“Thank you for your help,” Raven said.
Kole pulled a business card out of her jacket and handed it to Natale. “If there is anything else, please call. Someone is available twenty-four—”
“He knows, come on,” Raven said. “See you, Professor.”
“That was rude,” Kole said when they were alone. “The manual says to explain we never close.”
Raven turned. “You know what you can do with the manual? Tear it up and use it to start a fire. This is the real world, not Quantico.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kole asked.
Raven turned away and stalked down the hallway, heels ringing. “It means real people aren’t nearly as stupid as most manuals make them out to be. Are you coming?”
She could hear Kole hurrying to catch up. “But how do you know when to not use the manual?”
“You won’t know. You will learn as you go, if you don’t get shot in the face first.”
Kole was silent as they climbed the old wood and marble stairs to the second floor. On the landing she stopped, but Raven kept walking.
“Do you think I’m likely to get shot in the face? I mean, does that kind of thing really happen?” Kole asked.
Raven turned at the top of the stairs. “If you don’t stop asking stupid questions, I’m going to do it myself.”
She turned away again and looked around. The nearest door was J20, which meant J22 was nearby. She found it down the hall and waited to enter until Kole had caught up with her. The kid looked a little pale and Raven almost felt bad. Almost. Kole was really getting on her nerves.
The classroom smelled like every one she’d ever been in; teenager sweat, old paper, pencil
shavings and glue all mingled to form a scent that wasn’t so much bad as odd. If someone could bottle childhood, it would smell like a classroom.
The room was spartan, as classrooms went, with perhaps twenty student desks, two wall-mounted blackboards and a teacher’s desk so badly scarred it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been. A row of windows ran down the far wall overlooking the street while the near wall was covered with bookshelves and stacks of old maps.
A rail-thin man with grey hair pulled into a ponytail was behind the desk. He was either muttering to himself or trying to dislodge a popcorn kernel from his teeth, judging by the look on his face. He looked up when they entered and lowered his glasses.
“Good morning, can I help you? I have a class starting soon.”
“Special Agents Storm and Kole, FBI,” Raven said. “Are you Dr. Klien?”
“Yes, what can I do for you?” Klien asked.
“Professor Natale said you might be able to help us with an investigation,” Kole said.
She unfolded the photograph again and handed it to Klien. “The boys highlighted, do you remember them?”
Klien looked at the photo and leaned back in his chair. “I do, indeed. They were all friends of mine until I went away to college. We were in the archaeology club together.”
“At least six of them are dead,” Raven said. “We think the connection might be the school. Do you have any idea why anyone would hate them enough to commit murder?”
Klien paled. “I’d heard of Monsignor Quinn, of course. I wasn’t aware of any others.”
He stood and crossed the room to the door. Raven turned and placed a hand on her pistol, but Klien stopped, closed the door and pulled the shade.
“There was a fire back in 1977 that destroyed most of the Freshman floor of the dorm,” he said. “It was rumored that Quinn and his friends had something to do with it, but I always found that hard to believe. I admit they were odd for a while after the spring trip, but none of them would ever have committed arson.”
“Spring trip?” Kole asked.