War Song (The Rift Chronicles Book 2)

by BR Kingsolver

  Then I turned a corner, and my reflective mood hit a brick wall. Minor demons, vampires, and a few shifters were blocking traffic with a demonstration. It didn’t appear to have gotten violent. Yet.

  I flipped on my radio. “Dispatch, this is Captain James. Any idea what the demonstration in front of Police Headquarters is about?”

  A female voice answered. “Police brutality, Rifter rights, Rifters are getting a raw deal—pretty much the same old deal. The poor babies are treated abominably because they can’t munch on whomever they please.”

  I choked on a laugh. “What’s your name, officer?”

  “Luanne Armstrong.”

  “Who’s overseeing security on the demonstration?”

  “Lieutenant Cargill.”

  I thanked her and disconnected. It took me some time to slowly make my way toward the building without running over anyone. At one point, a couple of vampires decided to beat on my car, but a shot of electricity from one of the magitek devices put a quick end to that.

  Once I was in the office, I looked up Luanne Armstrong. Witch, twenty-three years old, been on the force a year. Exemplary record, although one note in her file from a supervisor said she had a ‘smart mouth.’ My kinda girl. In my new position, I needed an assistant. I checked out the rest of her qualifications, then put in a requisition.

  Next, I sent out a message to Lieutenant Luis Cappellino to have Detective Sergeant Carmelita Domingo report to my office at her earliest convenience.

  And then I opened my messages and wished I hadn’t. There was a reason they paid captains twice what they paid lieutenants—they had to put up with twice as much crap. I started sifting through the cases and assigning them.

  By mid-afternoon, I had whittled my backlog down to a manageable pile. One of the biggest chunks of work still to deal with were the cases assigned to a Lieutenant James. I dealt with them all at once, dumping them on Lieutenant Mychal Novak.

  Picking up the phone, I called Human Resources. “This is Captain James in Arcane. I put in a requisition for an assistant this morning. Where is she?”

  The snotty little girl on the other end of the line started telling me about how they were processing requisitions from two months ago, and that I would just have to wait my turn. I didn’t hang up, I just set the phone down on my desk and walked two flights of stairs down to HR.

  “May I help you?” the receptionist asked.

  “Yes. Where is Dorothy Ridgeway?”

  “Uh, Ms. Ridgeway is busy—”

  “That isn’t what I asked. Where is she?” I pushed my jacket back and put my hand on my hip, revealing the Raider and my captain’s badge pinned to the holster.

  The receptionist had an epiphany and pointed to a cube about thirty yards away. I walked over there.

  “Ms. Ridgeway?” I said to a pretty young thing who was busy painting her nails.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Captain Danica James.” I sat on the corner of her desk, letting my jacket fall open to reveal the Raider. “I don’t know who you are used to dealing with, but you’re dealing with me now. And when the Major Crimes Unit of Arcane Division puts in a request for personnel, I expect you to pay attention to it. Do I make myself clear?”

  She stared at me, her eyes like saucers.

  I reached over, picked up her nail polish and put the cap on it. “Now, pull up all personnel requisitions for my unit,” I said.

  “Personnel files are confidential,” she stammered.

  I didn’t touch her computer, but the information I asked for appeared on her screen.

  “We aren’t going to get along very well if you argue with me and give me excuses every time I ask you to do something.”

  About that time, a man showed up. “I’m Joseph Moskowitz, recruitment supervisor. Can I help you?”

  I smiled at him. “Yes, you can tell Commissioner Whittaker that I’m not happy with the way you and your staff are doing your jobs. Now, I understand the red tape required to hire new personnel. But simple transfers within our division should be pretty easy, don’t you agree? Now, if all of those requisitions,” I gestured to her screen, “aren’t resolved by the end of the week, I’m going to talk to the commissioner myself. Do you understand?”

  “You can’t come in here and intimidate me and my staff! You don’t understand how things are done around here.”

  I snatched Ridgeway’s nail file from her desk and buried it in a wall thirty feet away.

  “Unfortunately, I understand all too well how things are not being done around here. I guess the end of the week is too long to wait. I’ll have to go speak with him now.”

  Half an hour later, a woman in a police uniform, almost as tall as me, with dark skin and black curly hair, stuck her head through my door. “Captain James? I’m Luanne Armstrong. I understand you wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, come on in. Have a seat. We spoke on the radio this morning, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you like dispatch, Officer Armstrong?”

  She reacted with alarm, and I immediately wanted to kick myself.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. Did I say something inappropriate?”

  “No, you didn’t. I’m sorry, I guess I came at this the wrong way,” I said. “You aren’t in any trouble.” I pulled up her file on the computer and turned the screen so she could see it. “I’m looking for an assistant. A uniform who can keep my schedule, keep the brass off my back, take care of paperwork and crap work my partner and I don’t have time for. You may be used as a driver. Part time in the office, part time in the field. Fast track to detective in four years. Are you interested?”

  Fifteen minutes later, I had a new assistant. I was on my way out of the building when Carmelita called me. “Hey, congratulations on your promotion.”

  “Are you downtown?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Downtown. Just got off shift.”

  “Meet me at Whodunit,” I said. The bar next to the cop station was owned by a former detective.

  Sergeant Domingo must not have been very far away, because I met her at the door of the bar.

  As soon as we walked into the bar, I regretted my choice of place to talk to her, as I was besieged with congratulations and offers of free drinks. But Ed, the owner-bartender, put an end to that.

  “Buy her drinks another night,” he announced to the crowd. “Her drinks tonight are on me.” Ed Donatello had been my second partner when I got my detective’s badge. We had made a good team until a demon chewed off the lower half of his left leg, and he took an early retirement.

  “And her drinks are on me,” I said, motioning to Carmelita.

  “Nope,” she said. “I’ll buy her first one. This woman saved my life.”

  Ed chuckled. “A lot of cops can tell that story.”

  He filled our orders, and I led Carmelita to a booth in the corner.

  I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as I did with Luanne, so I said, “I need a new partner, interested?”

  Her brow furrowed. “I didn’t know captains had partners.”

  “This one does. The Commissioner considers me too valuable to sit in the office.” That wasn’t exactly what he said, but I figured he didn’t want my head to get too large.

  She smiled. “Sure!”

  We clinked our glasses together, and then the bomb went off outside, blowing in the front door of the bar. I ducked under the table and met Carmelita there. When the debris stopped pattering down and the only sounds I could hear were people screaming, we emerged and looked around.

  “Oh, hell,” Carmelita said. “We’ve been dealing with this kind of crap ever since the Council fell apart.” She took a long pull on her beer, jumped up, and headed for the entrance, pulling her pistol as she went. Another girl I figured I could work with.

  Outside, we discovered the explosion was due to a car bomb. The car it was in was destroyed, and a couple of dozen pedestrians on the street were blown to kingdom come. The bomb
didn’t carry out its intended purpose, however. No one inside the bar was killed, and there were only a few minor injuries to people sitting near the door.

  Ed had wards set on the front of the building, except for the door, of course. Whoever set the bomb should have known an ex-cop would have bought protection.

  Chapter 27

  When I fell out of bed the following morning and looked at the clothes I’d worn the day before, I wondered why I should try to look nice. Soot, blood, and other things I didn’t want to think about soiled the pretty red jacket. I mumbled something to that effect to Kirsten.

  “That’s why they pay you more,” she said. “When you were a beat cop, they gave you a uniform allowance and barely enough to eat. When you made sergeant, they paid you enough to eat and let you wear what you wanted. Carve some time out during the day, and we’ll go shopping for clothes you can wear to work. Black leather and jeans aren’t going to cut it anymore. As to those,” she waved at my ruined clothes, “I’ll take care of them tonight after work, and they’ll be good as new in the morning.”

  Having a hearth witch as a roommate was a wonderful thing.

  By the time I got to work, the HLA had announced they were responsible for the bombing at Whodunit. “A strike against the oppressive Magi secret police,” was the way they put it. Propaganda. If we were such a secret, they wouldn’t have found us drinking in a bar across the street from the very public Police Headquarters.

  Carmelita and Luanne were waiting for me outside my office. I opened the door, and using my magik, entered my access code into the security database.

  “Put your hand on the sensor,” I said. Luanne complied, then I had Carmelita do the same. “Okay, both of you now have access to the office. Luanne, that’s your desk. Carmelita, that one is yours.”

  One of the perquisites of being a captain. There was an outer office with three desks, and an inner office.

  I put Carmelita to screening the cases that had come in overnight, then I spent some time orienting Luanne to her new job and what I wanted her to do. By the time I finished, Carmelita had the case reports sorted out, and in another twenty minutes, I had them all assigned.

  “Armstrong, you have the office. Domingo, you’re with me.”

  We walked down the hall to the elevator, and Carmelita asked, “What’s up?”

  “We’re going to try and find Susan Reed.”

  I led her down to the parking garage and claimed my car. As soon as we were out of downtown, I took the car airborne. We flew down to College Park, then I set the car back on the ground to drive to Susan’s house in Berwyn Heights. We had put cameras on the house to alert us if Susan ever came home, but none of them had given an alarm. I didn’t necessarily trust that.

  As I expected, the house was warded. Also as I expected, so were the cameras. Susan was a witch, and had proven to be a smart one. A full-scale parade could have marched into the house, and the cameras wouldn’t have seen a thing. The ward on the house prevented us from gaining entrance, but it didn’t stop my magik from shutting down the electricity at the circuit box outside the garage or the water at the meter. Since it was the end of November, anyone staying in the house would be very uncomfortable.

  I set up two magitek cameras—one in a tree across the street, and the other on a light pole on the next street, aimed at the back of the house. Carmelita used her aeromancy to float up to where I wanted the cameras placed.

  “Okay,” she said when she landed after setting up the second camera, “what’s next?”

  “We pull in your boyfriend Elesio Gomez for questioning.”

  “My boyfriend! Not hardly.”

  I laughed. “But he has the hots for you.”

  “He’ll be suspicious.”

  “Maybe, but my bet is that you can spin a story that will bring him out to meet you. Give him a call.”

  Elesio wasn’t one of the HLA members arrested after Carmelita-Dolores’s car blew up. We had considered him too low level to be involved in planning the murders and bombings. As it was, the two hundred or so radicals we did pull in filled the jails and took weeks to interrogate.

  Sure enough, Elesio had it bad. Carmelita-Dolores was cute as a new kitten, and he never suspected that she was six or seven years older than she appeared, a condition not uncommon among magikers. She set up a meeting with him at a pizza place in College Park.

  We parked behind the restaurant, and she went in first. I followed a couple of minutes later and took a table across the room from them. It turned out that Elesio wasn’t quite as gullible as I had hoped, and he brought two friends with him. My elven heritage gave me better hearing than a human’s, and I could hear their conversation.

  Carmelita pouted, pushing out her bottom lip. “I wanted to see you, not your friends.”

  After a couple of minutes, the friends got up and went outside. I made a call and asked for a couple of uniforms to come help me with a bust, then I followed Elesio’s friends. They had retreated to a car and were sitting in it smoking a joint while they waited on him.

  When the cop car showed up, I approached it and showed the cops my badge. “See that car over there with the smoke? I think those are HLA radicals we want to question. Can you please take them down to your station?”

  After the bombing at Whodunit, the HLA wasn’t the police’s favorite group. The two cops bracketed the car, tapped on the windows, and arrested the occupants. After they drove away, I went back into the restaurant, ate the sandwich I had ordered, and waited.

  Carmelita soon left with Elesio, and I followed. He seemed confused that his friends weren’t waiting for him, but their car was still there.

  I walked up to where Carmelita and Elesio were standing and flashed my badge. “Elesio Gomez, Dolores Hernandez,” I said, “you’re wanted for questioning about the Human Liberation Army’s bombing of a bar in Baltimore.”

  He looked like he was going to faint, but before he could try to run, I grabbed him and slapped a pair of cuffs on him. I also cuffed Carmelita for show. Taking both of them by the shoulders, I steered them around the building and shoved them into the back of my car.

  I got in the driver’s seat, then swiveled around so I could see him.

  “I don’t know nothing about no bombing,” Elesio said.

  “Where’s Susan Reed?” I responded.

  “I dunno.”

  “That is not what I call cooperative. Who does know?”

  After fifteen minutes of bullying him, I had a list of places to check and a couple of names. I was also convinced that he wasn’t deep enough into the HLA that anyone would trust him with information concerning their terrorist activities.

  Carmelita-Dolores was far less cooperative, refusing to answer any questions at all. I turned Elesio loose, warning him to find a better set of friends to hang out with.

  “And as for you, young lady, you’re going down to the station. I don’t appreciate your attitude.”

  We left Elesio standing in the parking lot. We already knew the car he came in wasn’t his, but I didn’t care how he got home. A block away from the restaurant, I pulled over and took the cuffs off Carmelita. She crawled into the front of the car.

  “You can be a major bitch when you want to be,” she said.

  I laughed. “I guess we know who takes which role in a good-cop-bad-cop interrogation.”

  We drove down to the local cop shop, where they had put Elesio’s friends in separate interrogation rooms. I checked in with the lieutenant in charge, and then we spent about forty-five minutes with one suspect and half an hour with the other. In the end, we charged both of them with suspicion of terrorist activities just so we could hold them.

  “Okay, now what?” Carmelita said as we left the station.

  “Three suspects, one name in common,” I said.

  “The lawyer.”

  “Gold star for the little lady. Let’s go see him.”

  Gordon Montoya was a criminal defense lawyer Elesio had met a couple of time
s, and he suspected Montoya was sleeping with Susan. Our other two suspects had named him when they asked to call a lawyer. They had been watching too many crime videos. The concept of civil rights for criminals was a relic of a time long gone, but it made good drama. Arcane Division operated by a different set of rules, and in terrorism cases, especially against the Magi, we really didn’t have any rules as long as we restored order and the ruling class’s peace of mind.

  Carmelita pulled out her laptop and checked on Montoya. He had a history of representing human radicals as well as personal injury cases against corporations. His office was in the better part of downtown Silver Spring, and his house was north of there, in an area of large homes on large lots carved out of the forest. She also checked his banking records.

  “I’m Captain Danica James,” I told the receptionist, “and this is Detective Sergeant Carmelita Domingo. We’d like to speak with Mr. Montoya.”

  She buzzed him, then said, “There are two policewomen to see you.”

  “I’m on a call,” the box on her desk squawked, the quality terrible. “Give me five minutes.”

  She looked up at me and I nodded. “We’ll wait.”

  We sat and admired the pictures on the wall for seven minutes, then the box squawked again. “Send them in.”

  His office was intended to convey money and success. Montoya was medium height, with dusky skin, slicked-back black hair, and a pencil mustache. His affluence was signaled by a five-thousand-dollar suit and forty extra pounds.

  I identified ourselves and took a chair in front of his desk. Carmelita wandered around, studying the pictures on the walls, a couple of small statuettes, the flower arrangement on a sideboard, his coffee service, and the liquor bottles. Her moving around seemed to distract and annoy him, and I silently applauded her.

  “What can I do to help the Metropolitan Police?” Montoya asked.

  “We’re looking for a woman named Susan Reed,” I said, showing him a picture I had taken of her at the HLA meeting in Columbia.