“The limo turned off from the main road that Akiyama holds between Wilmington and the Findlay estate,” the operator said. “It’s heading west now.”
We told him to keep us informed, and I adjusted our course a little to the west.
“Call Luanne and ask her to search for any construction permits issued in the past three months for Tina Stewart’s address north of Columbia,” I said.
Carmelita did so, then asked, “You think Susan is using the place?”
“No idea, but what happens to drug dens and other criminal hangouts when the owners die?”
“The government takes them?”
“Yeah, theoretically. For the most part, they sit until they rot waiting for the bureaucracy to get off its ass. Susan probably didn’t have any construction work done, but she might have sent in a cleaning crew after we hauled all the bodies away. She can’t use her place anymore, and she had to sleep somewhere between the time she killed Crozier and when she shacked up out at Findlay.”
“No-tell motel, probably,” Carmelita said.
I didn’t comment but privately agreed. The drone would prove me either right or wrong fairly soon.
We flew on for a few more minutes, then the radio said, “Another gray limo has left Findlay House in convoy with six SUVs.”
Carmelita glanced at me.
“Probably Courtney going up to Wilmington,” I said. “Track them.”
It soon became apparent from the roads it took that the first limo was headed to the old mansion Tina Stewart had stolen from Brian Crozier. I adjusted course.
“Call Whittaker and get a SWAT team out to Stewart’s mansion,” I told Carmelita. “And see if there are any drones in that area.”
Sure now as to where we were going, I increased our speed. We reached the mansion before the limo, and I climbed high enough we wouldn’t be identifiable from the ground. A drone had arrived before us, and Carmelita asked its operator to share its camera to the screen on our dashboard.
Half an hour later, the limo showed up and parked to the right of four other cars in front of the gates to the estate. Someone in a gray coat with a hood got out of the limo. Even with a telescopic lens, it was impossible to tell from above who it was. He or she went to the door of the gatehouse and entered. Shortly thereafter, the figure emerged inside the compound.
Instead of approaching the main house, the person went around it and entered a door to the servants’ quarters behind the mansion.
“I’ll bet that’s Susan,” I said.
But in barely a minute, the person came out again. This time the camera showed me enough of her face that I could verify that it was Susan Reed.
She hurried across the compound, went through the gatehouse, then back to the limousine. As she passed the other four cars, she put out her hand and patted the hood of each of them. As soon as she crawled back into the limo, it backed out and sped away.
The servants’ quarters and all four remaining cars simultaneously erupted into flame.
“What the hell?” Carmelita squeaked.
We sat there, stunned, looking at the scene below us. It took me a moment to recover my composure, then I snapped, “Don’t let the drone lose sight of that limo.”
“I’m on it,” both drone operators said through the radio.
The SWAT team arrived a couple of minutes later, and their helicopter set down on the road outside the compound. I gave a quick briefing to their commander and asked him to hang around until the fires were out. While I broke out of my circling pattern to follow the limo, Carmelita called the fire department and our office to send a couple of detectives and a forensics team to the mansion.
“What do you suppose all that was about?” she asked when she got off the radio.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I replied, “but the first thing that comes to mind is Susan eliminating witnesses. With her entire criminal empire crashing down, maybe she’s trying to distance herself. If you stop and think about it, the only thing we have on her is that she attended some HLA meetings and broke out of the prison in Gettysburg. She could find a good lawyer to make the case that she was innocently in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And the prison escape?”
“Wasn’t her idea. Crozier kidnapped her as a hostage. With him dead, who could prove she’s lying?”
Carmelita nodded. “I hate to think she’s that slick, but she’s been ahead of almost everyone ever since we met her.”
We followed the limo as it retraced its route to the Findlay estate. It was admitted to the compound, a lone figure in a gray coat exited the vehicle a few yards inside the walls, and then the limo blew up, taking the driver with it.
“Holy—” Carmelita exclaimed.
“Yup. Eliminating witnesses,” I said. “That woman has no conscience whatsoever. No wonder she and my Aunt Courtney get along.”
Chapter 24
I was getting a little bit tired of Susan Reed. I had pegged her as a sociopath from the first time I spoke with her, but I hadn’t seen her as a psychopathic serial mass murderer.
Reading the email for the fifth time—sent to my personal email from a free email account established the previous day—I decided I needed to do something about her.
Dani,
I’m tired of this cat-and-mouse game. My life is a shambles, and I admit you’re winning. All I want is a new identity so I can move somewhere else and start over. In exchange, I’ll hand you Courtney on a platter. Think about it.
SR
Whether her offer was a trap or not, the idea of giving Susan a free ticket to resume her activities somewhere else was a non-starter. The last thing I wanted was to hear about Magi being poisoned in Denver or blown up in Vancouver. And I had little faith that we had rounded up all her contacts for cross-rift drugs. No police force in history had managed to completely stamp out a drug trade.
I wasn’t naïve enough to believe I could set up a sting by offering her a new identity. Susan was too smart to fall into that kind of trap. Besides, with the computer systems used all over the world, a new identity wasn’t an easy thing to manufacture. It required erasing Susan Reed from the international computer network and inserting a completely new person. I could do it officially, or as a hacker, but it was too much work either way.
Whittaker would never go for it officially. Courtney Findlay-Moncrieff wasn’t nearly as important to the Council as the assassin of dozens of high-status Magi.
The question was how to lure Susan Reed out and capture her.
I sat back in my chair and thought about my options. Normally, I tried to stay true to my oath as a police officer. I didn’t even fix speeding tickets for Kirsten, or diddle our utility bills, though either of those things would be child’s play for a magitek hacker with my skills and my implant.
But if I got the chance again, I would settle with Susan permanently. The woman was too dangerous. Considering her track record, I wouldn’t trust the high-security arcane prison in Antarctica to hold her.
That evening after dinner, I went out to my workshop behind my and Kirsten’s house. The ward Kirsten had set on the little building behind the kitchen would admit only me and her. Inside, there were some storage spaces that even she couldn’t access.
I went through my inventory of devices I had either made or picked up over the years. Some, such as the magikally enhanced laser rifle, were legal for me to have as a cop but not as a private citizen. A few were illegal unless specifically sanctioned by the Council.
Setting aside those devices and weapons I thought would be useful, I locked everything else up and went to bed.
The following day, I told Whittaker I needed the next day off. I spent an hour or two checking all the drone video taken of the Findlay estate for the previous thirty days. Susan didn’t go outside much—not that there was a reason to in the middle of winter. Considering the number of tunnels on the property and the size of the mansion itself, a person could probably live inside all the time. But
I was able to identify her a few times on the vids and note which doors she used going in and out. That helped me to figure out where in the mansion her room was most likely located.
After work, I rode my bike out to Worthington Ridge. It was cold, but the motorcycle was my personal property. The car I drove belonged to the Police Department and had a tracker on it.
I had never lived in the mansion full time, but I had my own suite of rooms and had spent considerable time there when I was in high school and university. In other words, when I was old enough that I wanted to sneak out and back in occasionally.
The walled enclave covered about forty acres, and although the normal and magitek security systems made the place almost impregnable, a smart teenaged girl could figure out a way around such things.
I parked the bike in some trees about two hundred yards from the wall, past a bend in the road that ran by the estate. I knew that none of the sensors or cameras could see me. A short hike through the woods brought me to a large oak tree near the wall. Using the oak to shield me from the estate’s watchers, I was able to approach close enough to use my magik.
There was a magitek warning sensor on the wall opposite the tree that was different from all the others. If it was turned off, it didn’t transmit that fact back to the central monitoring system. When I was seventeen, it had taken me three tries to get it right, and I hadn’t used it in fifteen years. But since I was the one who did the maintenance checks on the estate’s magitek system, I also knew it hadn’t been replaced and still worked the way it was designed.
I deactivated the sensor, then activated two of the devices I carried. One was a device I had built with Mychal’s help that generated an airshield around me. The second was a cloaking device I pocketed when I arrested HLA member Carl Beaver for conspiracy to murder. Between the two, I hoped I would be invisible and protected from any weapons.
With butterflies in my stomach as large as bats, I stood in front of the wall. When I was a teen, sneaking in and out of the estate was a game. Losing then would mean a scolding. Now, it would probably get me killed.
Pulling on a pair of special gloves and taking a deep breath, I edged around the tree and walked directly toward the inactive sensor on the wall.
Almost invisible, unless someone looked very closely, were indentations in the wall. I had ground them out using a power tool to create places for fingers and toes so I could climb the wall, and I’d done the same thing on the other side of the wall.
I climbed up until I reached the top, then carefully unclipped the razor wire where I had cut it long ago. Small brackets on either side held it to the wall and kept it from springing away from the cut.
Chuckling to myself that I couldn’t remember either the name or the face of the boy who inspired such elaborate measures, I pulled myself onto the wall, turned around, and climbed back down inside the compound.
The path to my old room was one I had navigated many times so high on weed and alcohol that it was a wonder I hadn’t broken my neck climbing over the wall.
Twenty feet in front of me was a gardener’s shed full of tools and equipment. I walked along behind it until I reached the end, peeked around the corner to make sure no guardians were present, then crouched low, and sprinted across an open space to a hedgerow that formed a border around a gazebo used for lawn parties.
I skirted through a copse of flowering cherry trees, past the east rose garden, to the main gardener’s garage with all the lawnmowers and heavy power tools, and finally came to the main barracks for the bachelor guardians who lived on the estate.
From there, through a small peach orchard, I arrived at the wall bordering the inner garden that surrounded the house. I hopped over the wall and found a stone pathway that led me around the back and directly under the window of my old room. The windows were dark.
Until recently, that room had been occupied by young Mr. William Moncrieff, Courtney’s grandson. I had been part of the operation that liberated him and returned him to his mother. Unless Courtney gave that suite to Susan Reed, I couldn’t imagine who else might be living there. And if it was Susan, then my task would be considerably simpler.
A concrete drain from the roof ran right next to the balcony. By standing on it, I was able to jump high enough to grab two of the spindles of the balustrade. Since no one else in the family was a six-foot-tall part-elf, no one had ever considered that as a means of entry.
I pulled myself up and over. My magik unlocked the French doors, and I slipped inside. Pulling on a pair of magitek night goggles, I looked around. As far as I could tell, the room didn’t look any different than the night I rescued William Moncrief. A football still sat on a table in the sitting room, and I doubted Susan would have left it there.
So, not in my old room, but I still suspected Susan was housed in the same wing. I couldn’t imagine that Courtney would put a stranger in the family wing. That would be both a breach of security as well as protocol. For one thing, Denise Butler-Findlay, Courtney’s mother, still lived there. Even moving one of Courtney’s paramours into the family wing would probably cause questions my aunt wouldn’t want to answer.
There were a lot of times I wished I had witchy magik. Kirsten would have been able to cast a spell and locate Susan’s exact location. The only thing on my side was that I didn’t expect many people in my grandmother’s wing of the house.
A pair of magikally enhanced earplugs served as auditory enhancements. Even on the plush carpet, I should be able to hear anyone long before they might see me.
There were a dozen suites in that wing of the house, most with either two or three bedrooms and two or three bathrooms, and a sitting room. My grandmother’s apartment was even larger. Olivia had her own kitchen, although she never cooked, a second sitting room, or parlor, a study-slash-library, and an office.
I started at the far end of the hall, quietly unlocking the door and peeking inside, then going to the next suite. The first six suites, including mine, were dark. But the next one showed light when I cracked the door. I waited, listening, but didn’t hear anything, so I ventured inside.
No one was home, but someone definitely was living there. Reminding myself that the cloaking device made me invisible, I searched through the rooms. I had to smile to myself. In spite of all the empty rooms in the mansion, Courtney couldn’t help spreading a little spite. I had no idea what her relationship was with Susan, but it was the smallest bedroom suite, with larger empty accommodations on either side of it.
I found the confirmation I needed in the bedroom closet. I had seen Susan wearing one of the dresses at least twice.
There was an electric kettle, a drip coffee pot, and a pound of expensive Caribbean coffee on a buffet in the sitting room. I made a pot, poured myself a cup, found a comfy chair, and sat back to wait on Susan to return. I laid the Raider on the arm of the chair, but it was intended to be a distraction. Far too noisy to use inside. The magitek lightning box I set next to the coffee cup was much more practical.
I switched off the cloaking device. It required me to use magik continuously to keep the effect. The box for the airshield also required a steady use of magik, but I kept it on.
I waited for two hours before someone unlocked the door. Susan must have been at dinner with Courtney, because she was wearing a much fancier dress than I’d ever seen her in. She came in, set her clutch on the table by the door, and walked into the sitting room. It took her a moment to realize I was there. The startled expression along with a sudden jerk as though she’d been slapped were quite satisfying.
“Hello, Susan. I got your message.”
Chapter 25
Susan’s eyes darted to the Raider, then around the room.
“It’s all over,” I said. “Of course, I didn’t have to come in person. I could have just forwarded your note to Aunt Courtney.”
“There’s no way you could prove that email came from me.”
I chuckled. “You assume that Courtney is less of a psychopathic murd
erer than you are. I would consider that a dangerous assumption. And as far as power is concerned, you’re playing in the big leagues now. I doubt you can even conceive of what she’s capable of doing.”
She tried to project a casual nonchalance, but her posture was still fairly rigid.
“Courtney’s clever, but not too bright,” Susan said. “She thinks she’s a lot smarter than she is. But we’re friends. She’d never believe you. Besides, that note did what it was intended to. It brought you here.”
I smiled. “Right into your trap?”
She smiled back, and raised a small pistol.
Without warning, I activated the lightning box, loosing an electrical charge that was enough to knock out a man or stun a demon. Susan’s gun went off, the bullet hitting a cabinet ten feet to my left. She did a little shaking dance and dropped to the floor in a heap.
Rising from my chair, I walked over to her, placed the box against her temple, and activated it again. She jerked, and then lay still. I checked her pulse and felt it slow and then stop.
I knelt beside her for a moment, curious about whether I might feel anything, but I didn’t. I had come to kill her, not talk to her, not to arrest her. It wasn’t any different from killing a demon, or a vampire, or any other monster. I didn’t feel guilt or sorrow.
Taking a quick look around, I grabbed a laptop computer and shoved it in my knapsack. There was a knock on the door, and I froze.
Whoever was outside in the hall waited for a few moments, then knocked again. I triggered the cloaking device and retreated, as quietly as I could, to the chair where I had been sitting. Holstering the Raider, I crossed the room to the window overlooking the back garden. Susan’s room didn’t have a balcony.
“Susan?” my Aunt Courtney called out, knocking louder on the door. “Susan? What was that noise? Are you all right?”
Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Page 13