Hard Magic (17 page)

He went from embarrassed to surprised in an instant. “Cheat me? No, never.” He sounded confident about that, at least. “They weren’t the type. I know, everyone hears ‘developers’ and they immediately assume sleazy, but they weren’t like that, not at all. Yes, it was about the profit, but they also liked making things better. When a family bought one of their houses, and moved in and made it a home, that was as much a reward as the money.

“It was kind of quaint, but sweet. One of the reasons I liked investing with them. Other than the fact that they always made a profit, of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed.

He looked me directly in the eyes. “Rumor has it this isn’t just a formality, that you really think they didn’t commit suicide.”

“We were hired to determine exactly what did happen. We do not go in with any predetermined idea of the result. That would only hamper our investigations.” Another quote-perfect line from Stosser.

He sighed, his shoulders slumping in a move that felt both practiced and sincere. “Horrible as it might sound…I almost hope they didn’t. Commit suicide, that is. The thought that someone would kill them is terrible, but…suicide’s worse. They enjoyed life so much.”

A faint buzz went off, and he looked at his desk. I prepared to make my farewells, assuming that he was being reminded of another appointment.

Instead, he invited me out for a drink.

“My doctor’s orders,” he explained as we were walking down the hallway, and he waved good-night to the receptionist. “Too many twelve-hour days, like I mentioned before, and my stress levels were climbing too high. That was why the place on the Cape, too. So twice a week, if I don’t have to be in court, I’m supposed to kick out an hour early and go do something relaxing, and totally non-work-related.”

He took me to a nice little Irish pub a few blocks away, and a drink turned into drinks-and-light supper, the way I’d halfway expected it to. We ate at the bar, very casual…and he followed up with an invitation to have coffee in his apartment, since it was early yet, and he lived right around the corner.

Oh, he was about as subtle as a bear coming out of hibernation. I admit it, I’m a born snoop in addition to having an eye for an attractive playmate. I said yes.

His condo was like his office: quietly classy, expensive without advertising the fact, and totally a bachelor pad, right down to the black towels in the bathroom and black sheets on the bed. Yes, I looked. At least they were plain cotton, not satin. I’m not sure I could have taken him seriously, if he had black satin sheets.

I told him that when I came back from using the bathroom.

“Oh, please tell me you’re single.” He was futzing around in his top-of-the-line but Spartan kitchen with a chrome-and-black coffee machine that had to have cost more than I made in a month.

“Now is a really bad time to ask,” I scolded him. “A lawyer should know that plausible deniability is no excuse in the face of the law.”

“Nitpicker. Are you married?”

“No.”

“Engaged?”

“Nope.”

“Looking for a wealthy lawyer to snag?”

“God, no.”

“Thank god.”

I choked back a bad case of the giggles. This wasn’t going to go anywhere right now, despite whatever he might be plotting, but I definitely wanted to see Mister Arcazy again, to see where it might lead. Sex is always fun, but sex with another Talent has that extra edge to it, no matter what their experience levels—and I was betting that Will had some significant experience.

In the back of my mind there was a thought that I probably should have said no to the drinks, to the dinner, and not even be thinking about sex. But the urge of the previous night hadn’t ever been settled, and I was still too damned twitchy and feeling the need. I didn’t like being that unsettled.

To my credit, I did extract myself from Will’s apartment before six, despite an unspoken invitation to stay longer, and headed back uptown to report in. It wasn’t as though we worked nine to five, and better a little late than never, right?

When I hit the office, Sharon and Nick were still there, staring intently at some spot in the middle of the table. So that’s what it looked like when you were in the magic-evidence room. Interesting.

“Torres.” Stosser was in the hallway talking to Pietr, who looked like he’d swallowed an entire nest of canaries. “You’re late.”

“I stopped for dinner. I’m here now.” I realized after the words left my mouth that being flippant probably was not the smart choice when being reprimanded.

“I realize that you’re still young and inexperienced, Bonita, but we would appreciate it if you would remember that your obligations to the office and the investigation come before your personal life when we are on a job?”

Stosser had gone totally Council on me, and I responded exactly the way I was supposed to: I stood up a little straighter, took the blow square, and apologized.

“Yes, sir. I understand. Should I report on my findings to you, or Venec?”

“Make a formal report, and have it on my desk before you leave tonight. Protocol, Bonnie. Everything gets documented.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ian nodded and went back to his discussion with Pietr.

“Sheesh, kiss his ass a little more, why don’t you?”

Nifty had come into the hallway while I was being reprimanded, and was watching, his arms folded against his wide chest, looking like a block of supercilious ebony. He had changed for his interview, too, replacing the gray pullover with a blue dress shirt and striped tie.

“He’s the boss,” I said, my voice lower pitched than Nifty’s had been. I tried to go around him, but he blocked the doorway. I didn’t want to deal with this; my good mood slipping away like ice on a griddle. I was tired of the constant sniping and status-pulling that he and Sharon were engaging in, and I just wished they’d leave me out of it. I wasn’t interested in being their chew toy, not about this. So I stared up—and up, because that boy was big—into Nifty’s face, and bared my teeth in what might, to someone not paying attention, have looked like a smile. “You think I should challenge him? Or is that your job and you’re warning me away? You gonna try to be lead dog, Nifty?”

“You ever hear the saying, if you ain’t lead dog the view never changes?”

I was about to tell him he was an ass no matter what, when another voice joined the party.

“Lead dog doesn’t just have the view, hotshot.”

Oh hell. Despite our attempts to keep it low, Ian had decided to join us, and his grin wasn’t a friendly smile at all. “You’re not lead dog in this pack, Lawrence.
I’m
the goddamned lead dog. You’re all a bunch of snot-nosed puppies still wet behind the ears and falling over your paws.”

Nifty and Stosser glared at each other, me trying to shrink and disappear the way Pietr had once again managed. Bad current rising, hard and fast, and I really wanted to be anywhere but where I was. I seriously considered Translocating the hell out of there, but didn’t want to even tap my current right then and there.

“Puppy, huh?” Nifty’s voice was hard and hot, but the anger I’d been expecting wasn’t there.

“Snot-nosed,” Stosser agreed. “And not housebroken yet, either.”

I braced myself for the smackdown, and then the two of them were laughing, and I wanted to slug them both myself, hard, for making my stress level skyrocket.

Men.

I don’t know if it was my glaring, or the fact that they knew damn well they were getting punchy—and close to being punched—but the general hilarity died down pretty quick, thankfully. Stosser looked at Pietr, proving that he, at least, had no trouble finding our disappearing pup, and then at the rest of us. “All right,” he said. “Since it looks like everyone’s still in the office, why don’t we do a debrief now. Find out if anything’s come up or anybody’s got any brilliant new developments to share.” I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or not, but the three of us followed him to the main conference area, meeting Venec, with Sharon in tow, in the hallway. Nick was already in there, dumping sugar into his bright red, oversize coffee mug.

Venec looked at me, then away again. I stayed cool, but coming off my near-close encounter with Will Arcazy made me even more aware of my responses to Benjamin Venec. Not the casual fun sense of possibilities here, no. Just being in the same room as Venec made my rib cage feel smaller, as though it was harder to breathe, and my gut tightened, and yeah, I could practically feel my vagina contracting in anticipation. All without me even thinking anything remotely sexual. It was as if I couldn’t
not
be aware of him. And not just physically, either, because my core was lighting up in tiny pinpricks of color, like miniature fireflies all excited for dusk.

I shushed them, and made myself breathe around the physical reactions, and made myself focus on the job stuff.

Right. Between yesterday and today, it was becoming clear that
nine to five
really didn’t mean much when we had a job. I had no idea how long this was going to go on—I don’t think anyone did—but we were going to need some serious downtime after, if it was all like this.

I made a mental note to stock up on vitamins, and make sure that there was a deli in the neighborhood that delivered, because while the coffee was more than decent, the fridge was too small to store more than milk and maybe a bottle or two of soda. If I was going to be here at midnight, I was going to need food, and I couldn’t always count on someone inviting me out for munchies—although I was doing a pretty good job of it so far, wasn’t I? A spark of smugness flashed and was quashed, all in one mental motion. Don’t count on it, girl.

On second thought, I realized the boys had probably already thought of that, and would have taken care of the food-delivery situation. I made another mental note to check with Nifty, who likely never missed a meal.

“So,” Stosser started, even as we walked in. “The first forty-eight are up. We’ve been attacked once, possibly twice, gotten yelled at by the client’s kid, and cashed the retainer fee. So bark, puppies. What do we have to show for all that?”

Sharon and Nick looked confused at the “puppies” reference, while Nifty chuckled. Despite her knowing she’d missed a joke—or maybe because of that—Sharon took point, making an important-sounding noise so that we’d all know she was going first. Fine by me—I was still trying to figure out what I was going to say.

She walked to the far end of the table while we all grabbed seats, and mimicked Stosser, unintentionally or not, by standing in lecture pose. On her, it didn’t work so well—now that my appreciation of her physical appearance had been modified by familiarity, I could see that she was too stiff, too aware of what she was doing. If being top dog required poise in front of groups, Nifty had her beat by a mile.

But she wasn’t putting on a show for the nightly news, only reporting on what they had found poking around in my—our—trace.

Not that I was still annoyed about that, or anything. Okay, maybe a little. But I was starting to sniff out the method in their assignment-madness: nobody got to be possessive over the details.

Sharon paused, as if she was about to make some huge announcement, then said, “There wasn’t, as expected, much that was useful in the current-debris that Bonnie collected.”

I would have taken exception to that sidewise snipe, except I’d halfway expected it. The fact that I’d gotten anything at all had surprised me; for it to jump up and shout the name of the killer would’ve been damned unlikely. Sharon wouldn’t have done any better, and might even have gotten less.

Sharon went on: “Because of the number of people who had gone over the vehicle, both Talent and Null, and the number of electrical instruments that had been used in and near it since the deaths, it was difficult to separate out distinct threads of current.”

“Bet I could have done it,” Nifty said, not quite softly enough. Without even looking, Venec reached over and hit him across the back of the neck with a rolled-up magazine. Nifty shut up.

Sharon, to give her credit, totally ignored their byplay. “We were, however, able to distinguish the victims’ signatures, and bring them out of the tangle.”

“It was like excavating a garbage dump,” Nick said, breaking into Sharon’s presentation. “You just keep peeling back one layer after another, until you get to the oldest. It’s tricky, but we can do it.”

“How did you know it was them?” Pietr asked, leaning forward in the chair he was sitting in—backward—and raising narrow, dark eyebrows in visual question. “None of us ever met them.”

“I had,” Stosser said quietly.

I had forgotten that. Not like me, to forget anything. I
was
tired, I guess.

Sharon took the reins back. “Yes. Ian gave me a comparative sample, and they matched. So we were able, starting from there, to peel each layer and assign it to a number of the items found in our physical search, as well. From the time the Reybeorns got into the car, every current-touched item has been accounted for.”

“I smell a
however,
” Venec said.

“Yes, indeed.” Sharon managed not to look smug, but you could tell it was a stretch for her. Nick was actually grinning proudly. Oh, this was going to be good. “There was a signature layered
under
theirs, and mingled with it, indicating not only that this person had been in the car before them—was maybe the actual owner—but had shared the space with them for at least a brief period.”

Ooooh. Nice work. I wondered how they’d managed to keep the signatures separate after the peel; had they managed to create a mounting slide that would keep the current intact?

While I was starting to geek out the details, Venec was picking up the
however
in their
however.
“Was any of the physical debris his? Was there a connection between the signature you found, and any of the physical evidence?”

Sharon had to admit failure, there. “We weren’t able to connect anything with him, no.”

Her partner went from euphoric to hangdog in an instant. “It’s a major step—and a nonstarter all at once. Unless somehow we’re going to walk all over Chicago sniffing out the signature of every person we run into? Lacking a database…” Nick sounded as though he wanted to kick something. “Yeah. We’ve got detail, and we’re still nowhere.”

“Except that we now know for certain the previous owner—” Nifty stopped, chose a different word “—the previous possessor of the car was in the car with them,” he finished, surprisingly positive, considering it had been partly Sharon’s work that he was referring to. Maybe he was geeking the details, too. Or maybe, just maybe, getting that moment of bonding with Stosser, then getting whapped in public, had settled him down a little? God, I hoped so.

Nick tapped the table, thinking out loud. “So maybe he sold it to them, or loaned it to them, a cash deal or under the table so there was no paperwork, and was showing them how to work the seat belts?”

“Damn.” From Sharon, that relatively demure curse sounded a lot worse.

“All right,” Stosser said. “Sharon, Nick, that was well done. The information may be incomplete, but it’s more than we had before. Now we know that there was someone in the car with them, and that person had possession of the car previously.”

“More than the cops managed to get,” Venec added. “And we’re not entirely without a place to go from here. Pietr? Did you find anything specific to the car?”

Pietr’s expression was back to his usual deadpan, but I could still see the glimmer of self-satisfaction lingering around him. “The Chicago police had run a search on the VIN, but it was a dead end—the vehicle identification number was obscured so badly they couldn’t be sure of it, and none of their tries turned up the right description. There were no plates on the car, and no registration papers, so the DMV wasn’t able to kick back anything, either. The car itself was brand-new, barely on the dealers’ lots yet, so the theory was it came straight from the factory. That implied an illegal car-trafficking ring, maybe, but without a VIN there was no way to confirm that hypothesis. Either way, it takes a pro to manage all that, not some garden-variety hoobah.

“If we were able to get another look at the car itself, I might be able to lift the original etching, or make a reproduction, but Ian nixed that idea.”

“We managed to sneak in once, but I’m not willing to take the chance again, not after what happened the first time,” Venec said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs in front of him, as though he were comfortably at home. Maybe he was, maybe to him this was home. Another few hours and I might just move in here myself, rather than trudge back to the hotel. “Someone clearly did not want us—or anyone—in there looking. You guys are too expensive to be used for target practice.”

“And we appreciate that,” Pietr assured him. “So. Dead end with the car. So I went and mucked around with the physical trace, since Sharon and her Boy Wonder were doing current. And that toenail clipping Bonnie found?”

I could feel my ears swivel forward, metaphorically, at that. We were coming to whatever had made him so pleased.

“Definitely human, and, based on the very faint remnants of polish, either female or seriously metrosexual male. Or a cross-dresser, but I don’t think so. No drag queen I know would get a spa pedicure. Way too subtle.” He pushed an envelope across the table. “More to the point, the impression we took off the door handle suggests that the clipping was caught under at least two sets of fingerprints, including one I determined belonged to the missus. So, we have someone, likely female, who is short-tempered enough to rip a toenail off rather than clipping it, and have it catch on her clothing, and then opened the door to the car…before the victims.”

I’d taken a statistics class in college, and the one thing the professor had told us that stuck in my head even after the actual math fled, was that statistics can’t convey how often impossible stuff actually happens.

“You’re saying that the toenail belongs to the mystery person whose current-trace we have sort-of-not-really identified?” Nifty had pulled a small spiral-bound notepad out of his pocket and was making notes with a tiny pen that looked even smaller in his hands. The note-taking bug had caught everyone, looked like.

Pietr half rose from his seat to take a bow. “The very same, whoever she may be. Our Lady X. Lady, not gent. Please take note, and adjust your pronouns accordingly.”

Oh, nice. Except… “I hate to be the bad guy here, but you realize that chain of connective logic won’t hold up to a stiff breeze, much less a cross-examination?” It sounded good, though, and I was surprised to feel a warm glow of pride in Pietr. He might be the freak of our little group, but he was a
smart
freak. More, he was
our
smart freak.

“We are but ’umble techs in the infancy of our techiness,” he said. “I have faith in our innate amazingness.”

Geek-freak. But I was starting to think he had something there. Venec was right; in a little over forty-eight hours we’d gone from newbies with nothing, to far more information—and more reasonable theories—than the police or Council snoops had managed in months. We had the advantage, though. We had magic on our side. And we didn’t have an agenda to cloud the facts.

“All right, so we may be looking for a woman,” Stosser started to say, when Nifty interrupted him.

“You really think a woman could kill two people like this?”

Six heads swiveled to look at the far end of the table as if a rock troll had just emerged from a wedding cake.

“Lawrence, how did you manage to survive this long saying stupid shit like that?”

For once, I couldn’t find anything to object to in Sharon’s words or her tone. I was wondering the same thing.

“I just meant…physical strength,” he tried to explain, and then gave up. “Right. Never mind. I’m a sexist pig. And if she’s Talent, physical strength doesn’t mean squat.”

“Especially if they’re already dead. The cause of death was listed as asphyxiation from car fumes, rather than traumatic asphyxia, but did they have to be in the car when that happened?”

Nick pulled a sheet of paper—the autopsy report, I guessed—off the table and skimmed through it. “The guy had a skull fracture. It wouldn’t be enough to kill him, and the ME thought that it happened during his death throes not as the cause of them, but if he’d been knocked out first, filling his lungs with carbon monoxide would be relatively easy, right?”

“Or a touch of gas could have knocked them out, and then the setup, and then the actual murder? You can kill rodents if you run a pipe from the exhaust into their hidey-holes,” Pietr said. “Hypoxia would knock them out, and then the bodies could be dragged into the car. If you did it quickly enough, and set the scene right, the assumption, supported by the autopsy, would be suicide—and that’s exactly what happened.”

“Except that there was no indication of toxic gas being run anywhere except in the car, and yes, that was tested and listed in the notes,” I said, a touch smugly. “So how did the killer get them to sit still and not struggle?”

“A Talent wouldn’t even need to run a pipe to get at them,” Nick said. He lifted his hand and made a gesture, as though he was choking someone. “I find your lack of faith…disturbing.”

“Someone used current to choke both of them?” Sharon picked up the idea and ran with it. “Or one first and then the other, if they were in different rooms…”