She got a puzzled look on her face. “My mother doesn’t live here.”
“Is this where Norma Thompson lives?” I made up the name on the fly.
“No, you have the wrong address.”
“I’m sorry. What’s your name?”
“Janice. Janice Iranski.”
“Well, I’m so sorry to bother you. You live here alone?”
“Who are you? Why are you being so nosy? It’s none of your business.”
She shut the door in my face. Johansson kept a fifteen-year-old mistress? I hadn’t felt any magik from her, and she was obviously human. Retrieving a miniature magitek camera from one of my bike’s saddle bags, I went back to the apartment and stuck it in a place where it could record any movement both at the door and through the front window. The curtain was currently closed, but if it was open, the camera’s view would include the room inside.
A short ride took me back to Crofton’s neighborhood. The girl who answered the door at Walker’s house was almost the same age as Johansson’s mistress.
“Hi,” I said. “Jordan Walker? I called earlier.”
“Oh, yeah.” She turned and yelled. “Dad! Someone to see you!” She disappeared back into the house, leaving the door open and me standing on the porch.
He came to the door, and I said, “Mr. Walker? Ronald Crofton gave me your name. I’d like to talk to you about Sarah Benning.”
For a moment, I was afraid he might have a stroke. His mouth fell open, and he stared at me, then turned to see if anyone behind him might be listening. Seeing we were alone, he stepped outside, pulling the door shut behind him.
“Who are you?”
“The police detective assigned to find Sarah.” I held up a picture I had printed from one of the vids the vamp gave me. It left no doubt that Walker and Sarah knew each other intimately. “Where were you between nine and ten o’clock on Tuesday night?”
He was practically hyperventilating but managed to gasp, “Picking my daughter up from her concert practice.”
“Oh? She goes to Loretta Academy?” That was Sarah’s school.
“Yes.”
“Your daughter goes to school with Sarah Benning?” One would think I had seen it all in my profession, but I was shocked and blurted, “My, God. Are you doing your daughter, too?”
He turned red in the face, breathing heavily, and slid down to sit on the stoop, staring at me in horror. I figured I’d better get out of there before I was blamed for causing a heart attack.
“Well, have a good day, Mr. Walker.” I turned and walked away. His alibi would be easy enough to check. I hoped he was innocent of my suspicions concerning his daughter. Maybe I was naïve, but I couldn’t imagine that little girl spanking her own father. He probably hadn’t touched her.
Something I hadn’t done yet was drive the route Sarah should have taken between the school and her home. I did that, along with checking several alternate routes that would have taken her by stores that would have been open late in the evening. I checked with dispatch at the Met, and no incidences were reported that night in the entire area. Rich mage territory. Very low crime rate due to burglars and muggers having a low survival rate.
When I got home, I took a long, hot shower and scrubbed myself so hard I was bright red when I finished. I still didn’t feel clean.
Chapter 16
Kirsten’s shop was closed on Sundays, and it was a rare occurrence for me to have the day off, also.
“What do you want to do?” she asked as she dropped a delicious-smelling fruit-and-cream-cheese breakfast tart in front of me. “We could ride out to one of the orchards and get some apples and cider.” I noted a hopeful tone in her voice. There were advantages to rooming with a hearth witch, and then there were additional advantages to rooming with a hearth witch. Just thinking about what she would do with those apples made my mouth water.
“I can’t,” I told her. “I owe Whittaker a report on my search for Benning’s daughter, and I need to put some time into that search. Because so far, I’ve got zilch to report other than his little girl has a thing for perverts. But I’m no closer to figuring out what happened to her.”
“Sounds like she planned to meet someone on her way home.”
“Yeah, but only briefly. Either to get something from them, or to set up something for later. But it didn’t work out the way she expected.”
“Drugs?”
I shook my head. “None of her friends mentioned drugs, and I didn’t see any evidence any of them are using. A little weed, maybe, but she wouldn’t need a late-night meeting to buy that.” There had been one weed shop I’d driven by. But she didn’t seem the type.
None of the men I had connected her with lived between her home and the school, either. A new client?
After breakfast, I checked my monitor and reviewed what the camera I’d left at Janice Iranski’s apartment had captured. Martin Johansson had showed up around ten in the evening and used a key to enter. He left at two-thirty in the morning.
I studied him. He was a large man, overweight and easily over six feet. He would dwarf the girl I met. I could see where Johansson would give a woman the creeps. He wasn’t attractive at all. Power and wealth were the only things I could see that he had to offer. At seventy-nine, he looked his age, which was unusual for a mage. We normally aged much slower than norms. My grandmother was one hundred ten, and she still looked to be in her early fifties.
Not knowing what else to do, I sent my consciousness into the datanet and searched out Johansson’s accounts again. Kirsten had asked me to describe how I did that, what it ‘looked like,’ and how it felt. I floundered trying to do so. A stream of golden particles floating in rivers and streams of color. Streaks of color. Buzzes and tingles and occasionally electric shocks if I came too close to some kinds of intrusion-protection devices.
I had no idea how I translated that into thoughts and numbers and words. I had spoken with a couple of other magiteks about the phenomena, and they were as clueless as I was about how it all worked. We did know that only about one magitek in a hundred could do it, and all of us that I knew about had a certain type of very expensive implant. An implant designed by my father. Needless to say, none of us, including my dad, had ever officially reported the ability. Magiteks faced enough suspicion without the authorities knowing we could crack banks and top-level military networks.
I quickly discarded the accounts associated with Johansson’s legitimate businesses, and those of his wife and children. I found the account through which he paid the apartment rent and his mistress’s expenses.
The personal accounts had some interesting expenditures, but the money sources were legitimate. That wasn’t what I was looking for.
Three accounts were totally disconnected from his personal and business interests. Outside money was deposited to the accounts, only one receiving a relatively fixed amount on a regular basis.
I traced the payments into that account to an account associated with a casino located in North Africa. It supplied a nice monthly income, and he siphoned it into his mistress’s account and a few others. I had no idea why a casino run by an Arabic criminal enterprise would be paying Johansson, but I knew that Muslims were forbidden to gamble. The truly interesting thing was that half of that money was forwarded to Ashvial, the demon lord.
Turning to the second account, I followed the sources to a trucking company, a shipping company, and several businesses located along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. If I was a suspicious kind of person, I might have guessed it had to do with smuggling of some type.
I struck gold on the third account. Among the businesses paying money into it was one owned by Ashvial. Among those receiving payments from the account was the vampire who owned the BDSM dungeon I had visited. Money had also gone to Fredo several times. Some of the payments, going both in and out, were huge.
Johansson was involved in human trafficking. Not just involved, but he was a major player, and he was in deep wi
th the demon.
I ran a separate search in the police database on the name Janice Iranski and turned up a woman named Jovana Iranski, a drug addict who had been arrested several times for various offenses. She also had a record with Social Services for neglecting her daughter, Janice. All records of Janice ended about a year before, as did Jovana’s problems with eviction and arrests for drug sales.
Going back into the data stream, I searched Johansson’s account and found payments to someone named Camille Cordero. That was the name of the social worker assigned to the Iranski family.
It didn’t take long to put the pattern together. Young girls in Cordero’s caseload almost always disappeared from official records, and the cases against the parents were closed.
But how did that tie into Sarah Benning’s disappearance?
Chapter 17
All of the Hundred were rich. The families that were considered the Ten were the richest and the most powerful. Their founders were such strong mages that they had risen to the top and established control of a huge chunk of the world.
Johansson, I discovered, was one of the richest men in the Hundred, and one of the most low-key. Considering where a lot of his money was coming from, that made sense. I figured that half of his wealth came from illegal enterprises, and as far as I could tell, no one suspected. That required a lot of intelligence.
No one would blink an eye if I told them that Ashvial was involved in criminal dealings. He was a demon. Everyone assumed demons were criminals. It wasn’t just that they had a different morality than humans, they didn’t even have the concept of morality. Vampires were predators who fed on humans. The Fae, especially elves and dwarves, considered humans to be inferior. The only reason any Rifters bothered to give lip service to human laws was because we outnumbered them so badly. Some people maintained that it was our superior technology, but considering their magik and how difficult demons were to kill, I doubted that technology had much to do with it. Before the Magi stepped in, the demons and their vampire allies were winning the war against humans.
To have a human criminal kingpin who was also a member of the Hundred was rather unnerving. To have him in partnership with a demon lord was alarming. I wondered how many cops, judges, and politicians he owned. But if I could expose him to the Ten, it wouldn’t matter. The Magi ignored laws when it suited them, and enforced their own rules, whether written or not.
Of course, none of the evidence I had compiled was useable. If anyone in authority even knew I had the ability to search bank records the way I had, I’d either be dead or serving a life sentence in Antarctica. I didn’t even tell Kirsten about that talent. She wasn’t terribly computer savvy, and although she knew my magik allowed me to access the datanet without a computer, I didn’t tell her about the banks and corporate firewalls.
It was late afternoon, and I had spent most of the day inside the datanet. I wrote up a quick report for Whittaker and Justus Benning and shipped it off, then went looking for Kirsten.
I found her in her laboratory—a concrete building in the backyard—mixing potions and spelling charms to sell through her store.
“There you are,” she said with a smile. “I wondered if you’d ever pull your head out of that computer.”
“I’m starving. Buy you dinner?”
“Sounds good to me. Where are we going?”
“Annapolis for crabs?”
“You do love me.”
The nice thing about picking crabs is you don’t have to get dressed up. We hopped on our bikes and headed south along the coast. Motorcycles were too weird to turn into flying machines, but I was able to install magikal gyroscopic stabilizers in them. That made them almost impossible to tip over and much safer.
Annapolis had been hit hard by the rising ocean water. The old tourist area downtown was gone, and the new buildings were built on stilts high above the marinas. Our go-to place, though, was one that Kirsten’s father turned us onto when we were kids, and he learned of the restaurant from his father. It was a family-run business south of town on one of the Chesapeake’s many inlets, with butcher-paper-covered trestle tables outside overlooking the water, and large pitchers of cold beer.
The day’s offerings—fresh fish, oysters, and blue crabs—were posted on a chalkboard. A young woman wearing a hygienic mask came to our table and took our order. After that, she made two trips to our table, once with the beer, and the second time she dumped a bucket of steamed crabs on the table, set down a bowl of hush puppies, and left us to it.
We had decimated half of the bucket when my phone rang.
“Ignore it,” Kirsten said.
I glanced at the number and began frantically wiping my hands, which were covered with spices and crab bits.
“James.”
“Sorry to call on your day off,” Whittaker said without a trace of regret in his voice, “but we have an incident involving multiple Rifters.” He gave me an address southeast of Baltimore and as close to Annapolis as it was to my home in Baltimore.
“I’m in Annapolis,” I told him. “It’s going to take me at least half an hour to get there.”
“I’ll let Novak know. Make sure you don’t try to go through Essex. There’s a food riot going on there, and we’ve got it blocked off.” Essex was a poor area with a history of pollution dumping. At the same time that people such as Kirsten and me were dining on fresh crabs, a few miles away people scraped to afford yeast and soy.
“So much for our quiet dinner out,” Kirsten said.
I tossed her my credit card, drained my beer, and said, “Sorry. Finish them off, or take them home. Be careful, okay?”
“You be careful. Are you armed and armored?” she asked.
“Yes, and yes. In my saddle bags.”
I hurried out to where we’d parked our bikes, shrugging on my jacket as I went. I pulled on my helmet, kicked the engine to life, and rode out.
Once I reached the highway, I triggered the cop lights and the siren, then punched the bike up over a hundred.
The location Whittaker had provided was a waterfront bar—the Middle River Boat House. The working-class area had been subject to Rift openings in the past, so I passed through a number of streets with old boarded-up or half-demolished houses and shops.
The main Rifters who interacted with humans were demons, vampires, shifters, and Fae. The Arcane Division of the Mid-Atlantic Metropolitan Police were charged with holding the line between the Rifters and a human population, most of whom the Rifters considered prey.
The marshy areas near the Bay were home to a number of predators that had crossed the Rift and carved out new roles in the ecosystem. Since the Rift first opened, the Chesapeake Bay and its shores had been inhabited by non-Earth creatures. The common term for most of them was ‘monster.’ Like the purple pizza-trash thing, though he was intelligent. No one seemed to know where they came from. A lot of them were simply animals from different worlds.
The afternoon’s entertainment at the bar involved a concert with three bands. Whittaker’s brief synopsis said a biker gang had gotten into a fight with a group of vampires.
The sun was setting and an ambulance was leaving when I pulled into the parking lot. The colors on the water were pretty, and I knew it would be the same where Kirsten was finishing off my share of the crabs. There were a lot of cop cars and three more ambulances, not to mention at least thirty motorcycles. I showed my ID to a uniform and left my bike where several cop cars were parked. Then I went looking for Lieutenant Kelley, the officer in charge, according to the uniformed cop.
Around the back on the deck, I found ample amounts of bright red human blood and dark maroon vampire blood. At first glance, it was difficult to tell if anyone won the encounter.
“Lieutenant Kelley?” I asked a man in a suit. He appeared to be around my age, not bad-looking, with a harried expression on his face.
“Yeah?” He looked up from the headless body at his feet. “Ah, shit. This is a crime scene, lady. Police only. G
lass?” he called to another detective. “Get her out of here.”
“Detective Sergeant James,” I said, holding up my ID, “Arcane Division.”
“Huh? Oh, sorry.” He waved Glass away and looked back down at the body. Usually, a headless body belonged to either a vampire or a demon, decapitation being a sure-fire method of ensuring death for those species of Rifters. That particular body, though, was covered in bright red human blood. It also wore a cutoff jean jacket and had a beer belly such that I’d never seen on a vampire.
“Looks like you’ve got a mess on your hands,” I said.
“That’s an understatement. Seven dead so far, but we’re not sure we’ve found them all. More than twenty transported to hospitals.”
The bar-restaurant had glass doors that opened out onto the deck. They were smashed, and I could see the inside of the place was a wreck. Broken tables, chairs, and glass littered the floor. A vampire hung from one of the pilings out on the dock by a motorcycle chain around its neck. A wooden stake protruded from his chest.
An unfortunate blend of musical tastes had brought the two groups together. The bikers were fans of a heavy-metal group, and the vamps were there to see a vamp-goth band. Add some alcohol and meth to the blend, and it ignited.
I wandered around, checking things out. Another vampire sat against one of the piles with a Bowie knife lodged in her chest. Contrary to the old myth, vampires could be killed in a lot of different ways. As with all biological beings, cutting off their heads or driving a spike through their hearts would do the trick. But a bullet through the brain or blowing off a leg with a shotgun also worked fairly well. Both of those methods had been employed at the Middle River Boat House that day.
So, I had found four dead vamps and a dead biker, but Kelley’s count was seven. I looked around some more. Inside the bar, a biker chick was impaled with a table leg, proving that humans also died when staked.
“James?”
I looked up and saw Mychal Novak, gesturing to me from one of the side doors. The seventh body turned out to be a devil. Novak had found him outside, on the opposite side of the building from where the brawl took place.
Magitek (The Rift Chronicles Book 1) Page 8