Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  Quickly, like before a trial could call more attention to the crime. Quickly, like a suicide with a note admitting guilt.

  My phone beeped politely, telling me I had a second call.

  “I assume you think that I can be a help?” I asked—otherwise he’d never have called me.

  “We cannot come to his aid. He needs a good lawyer, and someone to find out who killed O’Donnell. Someone needs to talk to the police and tell them that Zee did not kill this scum. Someone they will believe. You have a friend on the Kennewick police force.”

  “O’Donnell died in Kennewick?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll find a lawyer,” I told Uncle Mike. Kyle was a divorce attorney, but he would know a good criminal defense lawyer. “Maybe the police will keep the worst of the details out of their press releases. They’re not going to be all that interested in having the press of the world descend upon them. Even if they just tell people he was beheaded, it doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Maybe we can buy a little time with the Gray Lords if it stays out of the major papers. I’ll talk to the policeman I know, but he might not listen.”

  “If you need money,” he said, “let me know. Zee doesn’t have much, I don’t think, though you can never tell with him. I do, and I can get more if we need it. But it will have to go through you. The fae cannot be more involved with this than we already are. So you hire a lawyer and we will pay you whatever it costs.”

  “All right,” I said.

  I hung up, my stomach in knots. My phone said I’d missed two calls. Both of them were from my friend Tony the cop’s cell phone. I sat down on the knob of a tree root and called him back.

  “Montenegro here,” he said.

  “I know about Zee,” I told him. “He didn’t kill anyone.”

  There was a little pause.

  “Is it that you don’t think he could do something like this, or do you know something specifically about the crime?”

  “Zee’s perfectly capable of killing,” I told him. “However, I have it on very good authority that he didn’t kill this person.” I didn’t tell him that if Zee had found O’Donnell alive, he would most likely have killed him. Somehow, that didn’t seem helpful.

  “Who is your very good authority—and did they happen to mention who did kill our victim?”

  I pinched the top of my nose. “I can’t tell you—and they don’t know—just that the killer was not Zee. He found O’Donnell dead.”

  “Can you give me something more substantial? He was found kneeling over the body with blood on his hands and the blood was still warm. Mr. Adelbertsmiter is a fae, registered with the BFA for the past seven years. Nothing human did this, Mercy. I can’t talk about the specifics, but nothing human did this.”

  I cleared my throat. “I don’t suppose you could keep that last bit out of the official report, eh? Until you catch the real killer, it would be a very good idea not to have people stirred up against the fae.”

  Tony was a subtle person, and he caught what I wasn’t saying. “Is this like when you said it would be very good if the police didn’t go looking for the fae as a cause of the rise in violent crime this summer?”

  “Exactly like that.” Well, not quite, and honesty impelled me to correct myself. “This time, though, the police themselves won’t be in danger. But Zee will, and the real killer will be free to kill elsewhere.”

  “I need more than your word,” he said finally. “Our expert consultant is convinced that Zee is our culprit, and her word carries a lot of weight.”

  “Your expert consultant?” I asked. As far as I knew, I was the closest thing to an expert consultant on fae that the Tri-Cities police forces had.

  “Dr. Stacy Altman, a folklore specialist from the University of Oregon, flew in this morning. She is paid a lot, which means my bosses think we ought to listen to her advice.”

  “Maybe I should charge more when I consult for you,” I told him.

  “I’ll double your paycheck next time,” he promised.

  I got paid exactly nothing for my advice, which was fine with me. I was liable to be in enough trouble without the local supernatural community thinking I was narking to the police.

  “Look,” I told him. “This is unofficial.” Zee hadn’t told me not to say anything about the deaths on the reservation—because he hadn’t thought he would have to. It was something I already knew.

  However, if I spoke fast, maybe I could get it all out before I thought about how unhappy they might be with me for telling the police. “There have been some deaths among the fae—and good evidence that O’Donnell was the killer. Which was why Zee went to O’Donnell’s house. If someone found out before Zee, they might have killed O’Donnell.”

  If that were true, it might save Zee (at least from the local justice system), but the political consequences could be horrific. I’d been just a kid when the fae had first come out, but I remembered the KKK burning a house with its fae occupants still in it and the riots in the streets of Houston and Baltimore that provided the impetus to confine the fae on reservations.

  But it was Zee who mattered. The rest of the fae could rot as long as Zee was safe.

  “I haven’t heard anything about people dying in Fairyland.”

  “Why would you?” I asked. “They don’t bring in outsiders.”

  “Then how do you know about it?”

  I’d told him I wasn’t a fae or a werewolf—but some things bear repeating so eventually they believe you. That’s the theory I was working with. “I told you I’m not fae,” I said. “I’m not. But I know some things and they thought I might be able to help.” That sounded really lame.

  “That’s lame, Mercy.”

  “Someday,” I told him, “I’ll tell you all about it. Right now, I can’t. I don’t think I’m supposed to be telling you about this either, but it’s important. I believe O’Donnell has killed”—I had to go over it in my head—“seven fae in the past month.” Zee hadn’t taken me to the other murder scenes. “You aren’t looking at a law enforcement agent who was killed by the bad guys. You are looking at a bad guy who was killed by—” Whom? Good guys? More bad guys? “Someone.”

  “Someone strong enough to rip a grown man’s head off, Mercy. Both of his collarbones were broken by the force of whatever did it. Our high-paid consultant seems to think Zee could have done it.”

  Oh? I frowned at my cell phone.

  “What kind of fae does she say that Zee is? How much does she know about them?” I figured if Zee hadn’t told me any of the stories about his past, and I had looked for them, this consultant could not possibly know any more than I did.

  “She said he’s a gremlin—so does he, for that matter. At least on his registration papers. He’s not said a word since we picked him up.”

  I had to think for a minute on how to best help Zee. Finally I decided that since he was actually innocent, the more truth that came to light, the better off he would be.

  “You’re consultant isn’t worth squat,” I told Tony. “Either she doesn’t know as much as she says she does, or she’s got her own agenda.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “There are no such things as gremlins,” I told him. “It’s a term made up by British pilots in the Great War as an explanation for odd things that kept their planes from working. Zee is a gremlin only because he claims he is.”

  “Then what is he?”

  “A Mettalzauber, one of the metalworking fae. Which is a very broad category that contains very few members. Since I met him, I’ve done a lot of research on German fae out of sheer curiosity, but I’ve never found anything quite like him. I know he works metal because I’ve seen him do it. I don’t know if he’d have had the strength to rip someone’s head off, but I do know that there is no way that your consultant would know one way or another. Especially if she’s calling him a gremlin and acting like that is a real designation.”

  “World War One?” asked Tony thoughtfully.

  “You
can look it up on the Internet,” I assured him. “By the Second World War, Disney was using them in cartoons.”

  “Maybe that’s when he was born. Maybe he’s where the legends come from. I could see a German fae tampering with the enemy’s planes.”

  “Zee is a lot older than World War One.”

  “How do you know?”

  It was a good question, and I didn’t have a proper answer for it. He’d never really told me how old he was.

  “When he is angry,” I said slowly, “he swears in German. Not modern German, which I can mostly understand. I had an English prof who read us Beowulf in the original language—Zee sounds like that.”

  “I thought Beowulf was written in an old version of English, not German.”

  Here I was on firmer ground. History degrees aren’t entirely useless. “English and German both come from the same roots. The differences between medieval English and German are a lot smaller than the modern languages.”

  Tony made an unhappy noise. “Damn it, Mercy. I have a brutal murder and the brass wants it solved yesterday. Especially as we have a suspect caught red-handed. Now you’re telling me that he didn’t do it and that our high-paid, expert consultant is lying to us or doesn’t know as much as she says she does. That O’Donnell was a murderer—though the fae will probably deny that any murders ever took place—but if I so much as ask about it, we’re going to have the Feds breathing down our necks because now this crime involves Fairyland. All this without one hard, cold piece of evidence.”

  “Yes.”

  He swore nastily. “The hell of it is that I believe you, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how I’m going to tell any of this to my boss—especially as I’m not really in charge of this case.”

  There was a long silence on both our parts.

  “You need to get him a lawyer,” he said. “He’s not talking, which is wise of him. But he needs to have a lawyer. Even if you are sure he is innocent, especially if he is innocent, he needs a very good lawyer.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “I don’t suppose I could get in to get a look”—a sniff, actually—“at the crime scene?” Maybe I’d be able to find out something that modern science could not—like someone who’d been at one of the other murder sites.

  He sighed. “Get a lawyer and ask him. I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you with that. Even if he gets you in, you’ll have to wait until our crime scene people are through with it. You’d do better to hire a private investigator, though, someone who knows how to look at a crime scene.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll find a lawyer.” Hiring a human investigator would either be a waste of money—or a death sentence for the investigator if he happened upon some secret or other that the Gray Lords didn’t want made public. Tony didn’t need to know that.

  “Tony, make sure you are looking farther than the length of your nose for a killer. It wasn’t Zee.”

  He sighed. “All right. All right. I’m not assigned to this case, but I’ll talk to some of the guys who are.”

  We said our good-byes and I looked around for Kyle.

  I found him standing in a small crowd a little ways away, far enough from the stage that their conversation didn’t interfere with the next performer’s music. Samuel and his instrument cases were in the center of the group.

  I put my cell phone in my back pocket (a habit that has destroyed two phones so far) and tried to blank my face. It wouldn’t help with the werewolves, who would be able to smell my distress, but at least I wouldn’t have complete strangers stop and ask me what was wrong.

  There was an earnest-looking young man wearing a tie-dyed shirt talking at Samuel, who was watching him with amusement apparent only to people who knew him very well.

  “I haven’t ever heard that version of the last song you played,” the young man was saying. “That’s not the usual melody used with it. I wanted to find out where you heard it. You did an excellent job—except for the pronunciation of the third word in the first verse. This”—he said something that sounded vaguely Welsh—“is how you said it, but it should really be”—another unpronounceable word that sounded just like the first one he’d uttered. I may have grown up in a werewolf pack led by a Welshman, but English was the common language and neither the Marrok nor Samuel his son used Welsh often enough to give me an ear for it. “I just thought that since everything else was so well done, you should know.”

  Samuel gave him a little bow and said about fifteen or twenty Welsh-sounding words.

  The tie-dyed man frowned. “If that’s where you looked for pronunciation, it is no wonder you had a problem. Tolkien based his Elvish on Welsh and Finnish.”

  “You understood what he said?” Adam asked.

  “Oh, please. It was the inscription on the One Ring, you know, One Ring to Rule Them All…everyone knows that much.”

  I stopped where I was, bemused despite the urgency of my need. A folk song nerd, who would have thought?

  Samuel grinned. “Very good. I don’t speak any more Elvish than that, but I couldn’t resist playing with you a little. An old Welshman taught me the song. I’m Samuel Cornick, by the way. You are?”

  “Tim Milanovich.”

  “Very good to meet you, Tim. Are you performing later?”

  “I’m doing a workshop with a friend.” He smiled shyly. “You might like to attend it: Celtic folk music. Two o’clock Sunday in the Community Center. You play very well, but if you want to make it in the music business, you need to organize your songs better, get a theme—like Celtic folk songs. Come to my class, and I’ll give you a few ideas.”

  Samuel gave him a grave smile, though I knew the chances of Samuel “organizing” his music was about an icicle’s chance in Hell. But he lied, politely enough. “I’ll try to catch it. Thank you.”

  Tim Milanovich shook Samuel’s hand and then wandered off, leaving only the werewolves and Kyle behind.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, Samuel’s eyes focused on me. “What’s wrong, Mercy?”

  chapter 4

  Kyle found a lawyer for me. He assured me that she was expensive, a pain in the neck, and the best criminal defense attorney this side of Seattle. She wasn’t happy to be defending a fae, but, Kyle told me, that wouldn’t affect her performance, only her price. She lived in Spokane, but she agreed that time was of the essence. By three that afternoon she was in Kennewick.

  Once assured that Zee wasn’t talking to the police, she’d demanded to meet with me in Kyle’s office first, before she went to the police station. To hear the story from me, she told Kyle, before she spoke to Zee or the police.

  Since it was a Saturday, Kyle’s efficient staff and the other two lawyers who worked with him were gone, and we had his luxurious office suite to ourselves.

  Jean Ryan was a fifty-something woman who had kept her figure with hard work that left taut muscles beneath the light linen suit she wore. Her pale, pale blond hair could only have come from a salon, but the surprisingly soft blue eyes owed nothing to contact lenses.

  I don’t know what she thought when she looked at me, though I saw her eyes take in my broken nails and the ingrained dirt on my knuckles.

  The check I wrote to her made me swallow hard and hope that Uncle Mike would be as good as his word and cover the amount—and this was for only the initial consultation. Maybe my mother had been right, and I should have been a lawyer. She always maintained that at least as a lawyer my contrary nature would be an asset.

  Ms. Ryan tucked my check into her purse, then folded her hands on the top of the table in the smaller of Kyle’s two conference rooms. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  I had just started when Kyle cleared his throat. I stopped to look at him.

  “Zee can’t afford for Jean to know just the safest part,” he told me. “You have to tell her everything. No one knows how to sniff out a lie like a criminal defense lawyer.”

  “Everything?” I asked him, wide-eyed.

  He p
atted my shoulder. “Jean can keep secrets. If she doesn’t know everything, then she’s defending your friend with one hand tied behind her back.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and gave her a long, level look. There was nothing about her that inspired me to trust her with my secrets. A less motherly looking woman I’d seldom seen—except for those eyes.

  Her expression was cool and vaguely unhappy—whether it was caused by driving a hundred and fifty miles on a Saturday, defending a fae, defending a murderer, or all three, I couldn’t tell.

  I took a deep breath and sighed. “All right.”

  “Start with the reason why Mr. Adelbertsmiter would feel the need to call in a mechanic to examine a murder scene,” she said without tripping on Zee’s name. I wondered uncharitably if she’d practiced it on the drive over. “It should begin, ‘Because I’m not just a mechanic, I’m a—’”

  I narrowed my eyes at her; the vague dislike her appearance had instilled in me blossomed at her patronizing tone. Being raised among werewolves left me with a hearty dislike of patronizing tones. I didn’t like her, didn’t trust her to defend Zee—and only defending Zee would be worth exposing my secrets to her.

  Kyle read my face. “She’s a bitch, Mercy. That’s what makes her so good. She’ll get your friend off if she can.”

  One of her elegant eyebrows rose. “Thank you so very much for the character assessment, Kyle.”

  Kyle smiled at her, a relaxed, full-faced smile. Whatever I thought of her, Kyle liked her. Since it couldn’t be her warm manner, it must mean she was good people.