Dragon Justice (13 page)

“The knife…definitely a feel of magic to it. But faint, so it’s
not the knife itself. No Excalibur.”

“Thank you for small blessings,” Venec muttered. Artifacts were
a headache in and of themselves, even without the homicide.

“The killer’s signature, maybe.” Venec didn’t sound too
hopeful, since signatures were only useful if you had something to match it
against. Someday we were going to get that database of magical signatures.
Probably about the same time we got a solid and lasting peace treaty in the
Middle East.

I was certain the blade was metal. Stone could hold current,
but it wasn’t flexible, and ceramic was magically inert.

“There are easier ways to kill someone if you’re Talent,
though.” God knows, we’d seen enough of them, the past two years. “The knife had
a signature, but it wasn’t… If it was resonating from the killer, it should have
been more definite. The edges were all smudgy.”

“If the killer wasn’t Talent, then—”

The door opened, and Charles Andrulis stormed in—and I mean
stormed like a raging cloud wrapped up in wind and filled with hail.

“Just got an updated count. Ten years ago, in San Diego,”
Andrulis said, his words hitting like that cold hail I’d sensed. “Ten
bodies.”

“Ten in ten?” I didn’t mean for it to sound funny. Nobody
laughed.

“And ten years before that. In Montreal.” He waved a folder in
his hand, I guessed filled with the reports he’d been waiting for.

“It’s happened twice before…these kind of killings?”

“Exactly the same, down to the knife strokes. And the fact that
they were all Talent. Two cities…maybe more. I have them looking for anything
thirty years before.”

“You’re saying we have a serial killer,” Venec said.

“Maybe.”

Another cop came in then, an older guy, balding with a paunch,
and a cardboard box of pastries in his hand, like he knew we were going to be
here awhile. I had a mournful thought for the night I’d half expected when I
came down here, and let it go.

Andrulis took the box and nodded. “Thanks, Dave.” Dave nodded
in return, then glanced sideways at us, less out of curiosity than an ingrained
habit of checking faces, and backed out again.

Andrulis was too big a guy to let himself lose control, but I
could feel the tension in him, even without current. “Nobody’s going to say
anything officially, not yet, but…”

But that many bodies with such specific means of death probably
meant one killer, and you didn’t have to be a genius—or a cop—to know what that
meant.

“There was no connection to the other bodies before,” Andrulis
went on, putting the box of doughnuts on the table. “They were all different
social strata, different neighborhoods, over a period of time, and the reports
just said knife wounds as cause of death, not… It wasn’t until the reports were
entered into the database and the specifics subcategorized…and even then it took
us asking for a specific string to give back a pattern. You people don’t exactly
advertise.”

“A serial killer going after Talents.” Venec reached into the
box and pulled out a pastry that looked so sugar-laden it made my teeth ache. He
ate it in two bites. “Why did nobody know there was a serial killer before?”

And by “nobody” Venec meant “us.” Or maybe Council… He was
lonejack-bred but had been around Ian long enough to assume the Council had
their finger on everything one way or the other.

“Because we try not to see things like that,” I said, and I
meant Council. “Because we still, even now, want to pretend that we’re better
than the average bear, more adjusted, less prone to the usual level of
maladjusted psycho crap. Like current somehow makes us superior.”

“Dammit…” He knew I was right. He also know that pretense was
utterly wrong. We’d seen enough to prove that.

“We need to tell Ian. And get some people down here.” He looked
at Andrulis and held out his hand. “Is that file for us?”

“It is now. I don’t have the authority to offer you official
status, beyond bringing you in to see the bodies, but unofficially, whatever
help we can give is yours. Two bodies is bad enough. We do not want ten.”

The idea of eating one of those Danish, weirdly, made me feel
ill, despite the current I’d used earlier. It had been too long a day, the
cheesesteak sandwich and the half-eaten pizza still sitting heavy in my stomach,
and the windowless room was adding to my disorientation. It was still dark
outside, wasn’t it? Or was it already coming up on the morning? How long had we
been in here? Only the sense of Venec, solid and real next to me, kept me from
thinking I’d fallen into some more-bizarre-than-usual rabbit hole.

Once I let my brain wander, I wondered about Ellen, and how she
was faring with Wren, and if the little girl was happy being home, and if the
Fey Lord planned to honor whatever promise he had made to Stosser in exchange
for our help, and if those other girls in the Park had somewhere to take hot
showers, after sleeping on the rocks, and what had their leader planned for
them, when they got older? I’d had Lou call Danny and let him know to check the
Park for his own missing girl. That didn’t break my promise to leave them alone,
technically, and if anyone could get those girls help, it was Danny. Hopefully
he’d get backup before tackling the leader.

The threads tangled in my head, kicking back odd associations
and nonexistent connections. There was the instinctive urge to find
correlations, and never mind that they were all different cases. No wonder Lou
and Stosser had wanted me out of the office for a while; pity it hadn’t worked
out quite the way they’d planned.

“What’s going to happen to the bodies now?” I asked suddenly.
“The ones in the morgue.”

“The ME’s signed off on the autopsies, so normally we’d release
them to the next of kin. Do you have a reason for us to hold on to them?”

Not really, no. It was rare that a second visit told you more
than the first, gleaning-wise. Current weakened, signatures faded, and the
inevitable decay wouldn’t help matters, either. But I had the feeling that I’d
missed something.

“I’d like the others to take a look, if you can wait another
day or two. We all have different strengths.... Sharon should come down. And…” I
paused, running through the pack in my mind. None of the newbies, not for
something like this. “Pietr.” Nifty wasn’t as good at gleaning, and Nicky’s
specialization meant we kept him in reserve, when we could. Pietr also had the
strongest stomach: if the bodies did start to turn, it wouldn’t bother him.

“Right.” Andrulis looked unhappy, but I couldn’t tell if it was
because I was bringing in more people or the thought of having to deal with more
Talent specifically.

Or maybe he was thinking about the same thing I was, about the
eight other people who might be next, if this was a serial killer looking to
rack up ten kills before he was done.

Chapter 10

It turned out to be a little after 1:00 a.m. when we
finally left the precinct house, let out the back door into a warm, sticky
night. Philadelphia not having the cruising taxi-sharks we were used to, we’d
asked the guy at the desk to call us a cab back to the hotel, and despite the
sugar high, we’d no sooner made it into the room—large, with a king-size bed
prominent in it—than we collapsed. I had a vague memory of taking off my shoes
and rummaging in my bag for a toothbrush, but only the fact that I woke up
shoeless and without that horrible morning-after feel in my mouth proved I’d
done either.

I also woke up fully dressed, tangled around a likewise
fully-dressed Venec. My hand was numb from where it had been tucked under his
ribcage, and his knee had slid between my legs, cradling me in a way that would
have been erotic if we hadn’t both been so flustered.

Not from waking up that way but from the way we’d woken up,
with an alarm ringing in our ears. Not physical; magical. The museum.

“Damn it, I forgot to reset it after the last attempt,” Venec
muttered, sitting upright and scrubbing at his face. “I hope to hell someone’s
paying attention there.” He leaned over to reach for the phone half a beat
before it rang.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know, I…They got in? That fast? Damn it. But
they didn’t…Okay, good, yeah. All right, no, no, I’ll be over.”

Two attempts within twelve hours, and on the second time they
got all the way past before Ben’s alarm noticed the thief?

I had a sudden sinking feeling in my gut that I knew who had
triggered the alarm.

“Go back to sleep, Bonnie,” he said, leaning over to grab his
shoes from the floor where he’d kicked them off last night. “I’m going to have
to rebuild the blasted thing, it sounds like, and that could take an hour or
two. No reason we both should be exhausted when the others get here.”

“Yeah.” My voice sounded even less awake than I felt, and I let
myself sink back onto the too-soft mattress, watching him reach for his jacket
and wallet. His hair was sticking up a little at the top of his skull, and his
skin was a little soft and pouchy under the eyes, exactly like a guy woken at
5:00 a.m. by the sound of alarms chiming through his bones. “You…”

“Yeah?” He turned, but I could see—hell, I could feel—that he
was already out of the room and gone.

“Never mind. Mmm, gonna keep the bed warm. Have fun.”

He gave me a tight, fierce grin. “I will.”

I watched him leave and then closed my eyes but didn’t drift
back into sleep. Instead, my mind followed the patterns of the system the way
Venec had shown me, mentally ticking off each trap and wondering how Wren had
managed to bypass them.

Because it had to be her. The only thief—the only Retriever—I
knew who could match Venec for trickiness, for speed, and for sheer
determination to come back for a second try so quickly and succeed.

Almost succeed, I reminded myself. But I wasn’t sure who I’d
put money on, third time around. And there would be a third: Wren had her entire
career resting on the fact that she always got the job done.

I’d worried about this, from the first. The day that Wren
Valere and PUPI went head-to-head. Now that it was here… With the memory of the
corpses in the morgue not hours old, a museum break-in seemed such a minor
thing. Nobody would die over this: let them have their fun. May the sneakiest
mind win.

With the scent of Venec’s body on the pillow under my cheek, I
let my thoughts drift into sleepy mist and then into sleep itself.

* * *

The phone woke me about two hours later. Those two hours
were incredibly important: this time my eyes opened easily, my body stretched
lazily, feeling things crackle nicely into place, and I felt amazing.

The phone rang again, and I rolled over and snagged it.
“Allo?”

Once, not so long ago, I’d taken phones for granted. I couldn’t
carry a cell phone, no, but a landline hadn’t taken damage from the current in
my core, beyond the occasional crackle in the line. Two years working with PUPI,
using current every day, had changed that. Phones, credit cards, all the
accoutrements of modern life, were not for the likes of us. I was just thankful
that mass transit, for the most part, was larger than any single core, and we
didn’t seem to impact trains or subways without specific effort.

Most of us didn’t fly much, though.

“Bonnie.” Sharon, her voice sharp and clear through the
receiver. “We’re here.”

“Here?” My brain, still sleep-fogged, didn’t quite compute.

“In the lobby. They won’t give us your room number, though.”
She sounded deeply annoyed, and I focused enough on the clock to realize that
they must have left New York at Oh Hell Early to get here by now.

“Why didn’t you just Transloc?” A simple ping would have gotten
our location, and there wasn’t any risk of being seen arriving, if they came
straight to the room.

There was a long silence, and I started to laugh. Oh.

“I’m fully dressed. And alone. Room 722. Come on up.”

I hung up the phone and started the little coffeemaker, hoping
that I’d have time for a shower before we met with Venec.

The moment the coffee started to burble, there was a knock on
the door and the faint stirring of something at the back of my awareness. I
opened the door without looking out the security pinhole, letting Sharon and
Pietr in, and went back to monitoring the coffee. The stirring in my head pushed
a little harder.

*yeah?*

Venec’s sense-of-self came through: exhausted but satisfied.
He’d managed to retrofit the alarm system enough that he was satisfied it would
hold up against another attempt, and transferred the alert from himself to
whoever was their designated alarmee. I didn’t envy the bastard that job one
bit.

*they’re here* I sent back. *meet you there or you here?*

A sense of intense hunger, a feeling of urgency, and an address
came into my thoughts. A diner, halfway between the hotel and the museum. A safe
place for discussion—Talent-owned, then. Or at least Talent-friendly. Also, the
sense of where to Translocate in, to avoid appearing on top of anyone. Very
Talent-friendly, then, if they had a place specifically set aside.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and went into the bathroom,
leaving the other two to contemplate the fact that there was only one bed in the
room.

When I came out, showered and ready to go, they both looked
smugly satisfied but didn’t say anything.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that nothing had
happened.

Okay, nothing like that had happened, anyway.

I watched them trying not to watch me, smiling a little. Sharon
was still the same as ever: lush curves and blond hair in a simple but stylish
coif. I knew for a fact that she had an entire closet of tailored suits, but
today she was wearing a knee-length skirt and heels under a lightweight cotton
sweater that should have looked casual, but on her were still stylish. Pietr was
slender and sleek in chinos and a cream button-down, with gray eyes that when I
first met him had been filled with mischief but now were tempered with a sort of
amused skepticism. I wondered sometimes what my pack mates saw in my eyes, but I
never wondered enough to actually ask. I knew what I saw, and that was hard
enough.

“Right. We’re supposed to meet Venec downtown. How much did
Stosser tell you?”

“Two dead bodies, both Talent, same cause of death, get our
asses down here in a way that does not raise any eyebrows but do it now.” Sharon
recited the words as we headed down the hallway to the elevator bank. “He seems
really intent on there not being any notice taken of our being here. Technically
we’re not even on a job—we’re here on vacation, same as you. So what the hell is
going on?”

Big Dog was playing this one tight. Weird, this and the
missing-kid case—usually Stosser was all about making us visible. But from an
investigative angle, it made sense: we stumbled onto this case, and so far there
had been no chatter at all—which meant that, right now, nobody should know about
the potential back history except us and Allen’s cop-friend Charles. That meant
that we had a chance for a totally clean investigation. More, we had a chance to
figure out what was going on before anyone else twigged to the fact that someone
was hunting—and killing—Talent, and had been for maybe thirty years, without
being caught.

All that boiled down to one immediate fact: we probably should
take the old-fashioned route to the diner, rather than Translocating. Low-key.
Minimal current-use and no flashing of our kits. Which was good, since I hadn’t
even brought mine down.

“We don’t know anything about the two victims,” I said,
listening to the hum of the elevator around us. Thankfully we were the only ones
in it, and I was pretty sure that while hotel security might monitor with
cameras, they weren’t eavesdropping, too. Pretty sure.

Venec might want to teach us how to short out a recording
device, next training session. I wasn’t going to try it on my own, though, and
sure as hell not in a moving elevator car. We all still had bad memories of an
elevator car plummeting through the shaft, even though none of us had been in
it.

“Okay, that’s not true,” I corrected myself. “We know the
basics—both male, mid-forties, so pretty much prime of life. Both in excellent
condition, according to the ME’s report. They should have made it to their
eighties at least. Standard height, standard weight, no distinguishing features
or factors… They were pretty much factory-setting ordinary guys, who also
happened to be Talent.”

“Names?”

I handed Sharon the file, which Venec had thankfully left by
the side of the bed when he headed out this morning. I noted that they hadn’t
asked where he was. Not that that was unusual: we normally handled this stuff on
our own.

“Warren Schultz and Ed Brock. Both unmarried, no kids. Schultz
worked out of a home office, so nobody even noticed he was missing until he
didn’t show up for a meeting.

“The ME says he was dead for a few days when they found him.” I
didn’t want to think about what the body had looked like before he was cleaned
up. The killer restitched the cuts, but so sloppily…why sew the body up at all?
Was he rushed, or uncertain, or just bad with a needle? Was the resewing a clue
to finding the killer or just a useless quirk?

There are no useless pieces of information. The echo of a
long-ago training session.

Yes, boss, I thought obediently. But if we don’t know what it
means, for now, it’s useless.

“They found Brock the next morning, though,” Pietr said,
reading over Sharon’s shoulder.

“Cause of death wasn’t anything magical, but…knife wounds?”
Sharon frowned.

“That’s a delicate way of putting it. They were taken apart
very carefully with a sharp-edged instrument. Not a scalpel but something like
it.”

We stopped talking as the elevator opened onto the lobby. There
were only a handful of people milling about, checking in or out, but it seemed
prudent to shut up until we were outside.

I’d once spent months living in a hotel, so while the others
looked up and down the street for a cab—none of us were willing to risk an
unfamiliar city’s mass transit, that morning—I turned to the doorman and smiled.
“Can you get us a cab for three, please?”

One sharp whistle-blast later, and we were being tucked into a
very clean cab with a driver who, despite appearances, spoke perfectly
enunciated English. A smile and a “please” can get you far in the world. He also
had a privacy board between his seat and ours, and after giving him the address,
we made use of it.

“When you say taken apart, you mean…?” Pietr had the file now,
having taken it from Sharon when we were in public and she couldn’t make a fuss.
But instead of looking through it—and there were pictures, unfortunately—he
turned to me, waiting for an answer.

I thought about making him look at the photos for himself, but
there was no point.

“I mean, they were taken apart. With a knife that had a
definite current-signature, although I suppose that could be from something as
basic as a sharp-edge spell.” I said it, but I didn’t believe it. What Venec and
I had sensed was something different, less identifiable. “The bodies were sliced
open deliberately, like the guy was cutting on the dotted line. The entire body,
neck to ankles, and their insides scraped around under the skin.”

“Cut open?” Sharon wasn’t getting it. Pietr did.

“Vivisection.” The word was flat and hard, and the hand holding
the file tightened so much his knuckles went white.

“Yeah.” I’d been trying not to think about that, avoiding the
word. About the one bit of info I’d only discovered in the file, not during my
examination. According to the ME’s report, they’d been cut open, dissected,
while they were still alive.

We’d seen a lot, the past two years. Murder for money. Fraud.
Obsession and betrayal and just out-and-out meanness. But this…this was
something new.

I was suddenly very glad I hadn’t ditched the rules and tried
to glean for emotions.

“Vivisection is a scientific pro—” Sharon started, then
stopped. “Ugh.”

Yeah.

“And someone did that to them....” Sharon, interestingly, was
having trouble dealing with it. Usually she was the least squeamish of us all.
“I’m guessing he did it without anesthesia.”

I was guessing that, too. “Generally, the kind of person who
does this, I’m thinking they don’t worry much about the suffering they’re
inflicting. In fact, that may be the point.”

“So it’s not just a serial killer. It’s a sadistic serial
killer who likes sharp, shiny things. Joy.” Pietr was still the king of deadpan,
out of all of us.

“And the number ten,” Sharon added. “Ten bodies, ten years
between… which probably brings in a whole ’nother level of pathology to the
discussion. I don’t know about you, but I’m not qualified to even talk about
that.”