Hard Magic (24 page)

Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. From the looks on everyone else’s faces, neither had they.

“Anyway,” Venec went on, “Midwest Council isn’t totally incompetent. They checked for that, thoroughly. Pinning it on a breed would have been easier all around.”

“Council would rather it be a fatae killer than a human,” I agreed. “Just makes their life easier.” Lonejack and Council both were human organizations; the nonhuman members of the
Cosa Nostradamus
tended to stay within their own enclaves, associating mostly with their own kind. That made me think of Bobo, and wonder if maybe he’d take me somewhere fatae tended to hang out, in the city. Maybe we could take Nick, really make his weekend. Except I was going to tell J to can it with the bodyguard. Wasn’t I?

“Well, are we absolutely sure that the killer’s female?” Nifty asked. “Could the toenail shred be a plant, to distract us?”

Nick made a rude noise. “If the killer was going to plant something, why the hell would it be a toenail? And where would he get it? Okay, please don’t answer that. I’m really not up for the
Cosa
to have their very own foot fetishist killer.”

Without thinking, I sent out a thread of current, rocking him back in his chair. “Oh, thank you so much for that image, Shune.”

He recovered and pushed back, just enough to let me know he knew it was me, and made a mocking half bow for the comment.

“Hey, Torres, did your guy have a foot thing?”

“It’s not Will,” I shot back, still kind of distracted by what I’d just done. I mean, not that it was a big deal, but I’d never done that even to J, and it happened so casually, as natural a reaction as reaching out a hand—and it was that natural, I guess. But…

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure, damn it!” I got up and started pacing through the office, wishing that we had a single room large enough to really get some good stomping going. I wanted to stomp. Hard.

Ian took that moment to walk in through the door, and I veered to avoid crashing into him. I kept talking, though.

“What we felt—that was the killer. We didn’t miss anything. There just wasn’t anything to get. We were wrong, our killer didn’t feel anything, no strong emotions at all, and Will’s not a sociopath, okay? I’d recognize that. And even if I didn’t, Sharon would have picked it up when she scanned my memories.”

Ian, managing to pick up what we were talking about, looked over at Sharon, waiting patiently in one of the chairs. She nodded. “I’ve met one or two, in my last job. Not killers, but definitely at least borderline socios, and there’s no mistaking that total and utter ick. Even secondhand. Her Will’s not our guy.”

He wasn’t my Will, not my guy. Not yet, and after I’d blown his messages off, maybe not anytime soon. But maybe we had a chance, if we could just close this damn case.

“So we’re looking for a female sociopath who also happens to be a Talent?” Pietr summed it up pretty well, and with an expression of doubt. “Man, I don’t know much about killers, crazies, or odds-making, but that seems, um, damned unlikely?”

“Our killer’s not a sociopath,” Venec said, after doing some sort of subdued, nonverbal exchange with his partner that we could see but not follow.

“How can you be so sure about that?” Nifty was all puffed up and aggressive, and I could see Sharon bristling in response, even though he wasn’t challenging her, directly. I guess he’d invested in the whole crazy killer idea. It was easier to think of a deviant doing this sort of thing, but…

“A sociopath may not think of others as being human, or equal, but he—or she—still has emotions. Only a paid killer is that distanced.”

“A what?” That got Pietr’s attention, enough that I think he almost faded a bit, even as I was looking right at him.

“A professional,” Ian clarified.

“Impossible.” Nifty sounded so final, so confident in his dismissal of the idea. I didn’t think it was just because he liked the whole crazy thing, either. The thought was unthinkable, impossible. Of all the scenarios we had created and considered, the thought of a hired hit man—hit woman—had never occurred, not to me, and not to the others, based on their reaction to that bombshell. Talent might kill, in passion or fear, but to do it for pay? Thinking about it made me feel queasy, as though I’d been dunked by a wave, and swallowed too much seawater.

“There’s never been—”

“There’s never been a lot of things,” Ian said calmly, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Never been an us before, either. May not be coincidence they both appear about the same time.”

“Cause and effect?” I guess I hadn’t shaken college off my heels as much as I’d hoped, because my first thought was what an awesome paper that would make for my sociology class. Maybe I’d write it anyway. If we were going to have deviants, we’d need paperwork on them eventually, right? And here I was, ground floor on an exciting new field: not even J could find fault with an academic aside, right?

“Maybe.” Ian actually looked worn down, showing how damn tired we all were by this point. “May be just that the world is changing. It does that every now and again. That’s why we’re needed.”

“To hunt Talent who take money to kill other Talent.”

“Among other things, yes.”

Ian looked tired, but he didn’t sound as taken aback by the idea as the rest of us, even Venec. I guess because he was the one who thought of it. Also, I was starting to suspect, that smooth slick-talking guy facade of his covered up a significantly hard core. A guy who could face down an entire Council, and his own family, to do what he felt was right.

And I wondered, for the first time, what had made him so hard, and so determined.

“All this is just great,” Nifty said in disgust, not sounding as if any of it was great at all, “but if you’re right, we have no way at all to track this guy. Woman. Whatever.”

“We don’t have to,” Venec said. “We just have to figure out who hired her.”

I walked out of the office, blinking against the setting sun. After the bombshell of who our killer might be, and the mental reshuffling demanded, Venec had decided that we needed to switch gears and shove all of the case stuff to the background before we got stuck in a rut. His words, not mine. So we’d spent all afternoon working on identifying spell residue, which meant focusing on such a tight detail that, after a while, your eyes crossed and your brain felt condensed into the size of a walnut, but we’d made real progress in establishing a spell that not only worked, but we could pull up at need. Having to let go of the case even for a few hours was really frustrating, but, damn him, he had been right. Ending the day on a positive note was a much better thing.

After all that, though, seeing the outside world was a shock to the system, and a painful one at that. All these people, these buildings, this huge, noisy, busy world going on around us, without a clue… My brain wasn’t used to jumping around between perspectives like this. It hurt.

“
New experiences are good for you, Bonita.”
J’s voice, from way back when I was, what, eleven? The first time I’d ever eaten roasted pigeon, and had to deal with the fact that this bird was both the same and very different from the winged rats that infested Boston. Not quite the same thing, but I understood why I’d remembered it now.

I started to walk toward the subway station, and realized I was going to the wrong line. No more hotel. I got to go home. The thought, despite the exhaustion of the day, made me smile, as did the fact that, although Bobo had said he was only supposed to be on-duty when I left after 10:00 p.m., I could swear I’d seen him when I left the office. I didn’t need a bodyguard, or a nursemaid, or whatever he was. Still, the idea that someone was keeping an eye out was…nice. Especially when that eye was attached to a near ton of furry muscle.

I was still smiling when I made it all the way up the stairs of my building, closed the door behind me, and was confronted by the reality.

My apartment. I said it out loud a few times, just because I could. “My apartment. Mine.”

All right, so it was my very empty apartment, at the moment. During our late-night confab, J had offered to send my bedroom furniture, but I’d—as nicely as I could—said no.

“It’s…it’s nice furniture, J. Really.” It was fucking fabulous furniture, actually. Way better than anything I could afford on my own. “But…”

“But it was what you used when you were a teenager, and you’re not a teenager now, and you need your own stuff and I need to start accepting that?”

“Um. Yeah?”

He’d hired workmen to build my sleeping loft, in between the crazy work-stuff, so he’d be able to sleep knowing it wasn’t going to collapse some night with me in it. For now, a mattress and box spring rested on the bare floor underneath, waiting to get carried up into the loft area. A beat-up but amazingly comfortable chaise lounge in paisley velvet was shoved against the far wall next to a floor lamp and a bookcase—boxes of books still on the floor next to it. On the other side of the space, under the window, there was an old table and two chairs that had been taken out of storage and polished until the chestnut inlay gleamed. I didn’t know much about furniture, but I had a strong suspicion that I could sell that table to an antique dealer and pay the rent for half a year. Using it as a dinner table/desk seemed almost sacrilegious, but it was so pretty I couldn’t say no when it arrived. All my clothing, except the dirty laundry, was still in a huge wardrobe box.

The kitchenette was the only thing that was fully unpacked and stocked, from the cabinets to the fridge. I guess it was pretty obvious where J’s priorities were.

There was a sharp
bzzzt
in the air, and I jumped half a foot before realizing that it was the doorbell.

I walked over and pressed the door switch without thinking, then shook my head. This wasn’t the hotel, where everyone got vetted. I had to remember to hit the talk button first, and ask who was there, not just let anyone in!

Fortunately, I hadn’t let any serial killers into the building. Just a lot of crazy people.

“Greetings, salutations, happy housewarming, where’s the booze?”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this invasion, but I wasn’t given any time to think about it. A parade of coworkers streamed into my studio, making what had just seemed like a reasonable space into something the size of a closet. They must have gathered and left right after I did, based on the objects they brought with them.

“Jesus, woman, this place is so small, you’re going to have to go next door to change your mind!” Nifty stood in the middle of the main room and looked horrified.

“That’s just because you’re a moose,” Pietr said. “People who are normal-size find this perfectly—Ai! Oh my god, look at this floor! Real hardwood parquet! Do you know how much money you could get for this, from someone redoing their place?”

Sharon thwapped Pietr on the back of the head. “She’s renting, you idiot. Pulling up the floor is probably cause to break the lease.”

“Or at least raise the rent,” I agreed, taking the handoff of a bunch of daisies, two bottles of wine, and a bakery box wrapped in red string and juggling them until I could get them safely onto the counter. “Do I want to know how you guys found me?”

Sharon looked at me in disbelief. “We’re investigators, Torres.”

“Also, Stosser told us,” Nick said, sitting on the mattress and bouncing slightly. “Hey, nice bed. Wanna…?”

“Forget about it, Shune.” But his attempt at lechery was so puppy-dog cute, I couldn’t help laugh. “Not even if you were the second-to-last hetero boy in town.”

Nifty was in my kitchen, rummaging through the drawers. “Bonnnnnita, where the hell do you keep the corkscrew?”

“Left drawer. Glasses are in the left-hand cabinet.” I ducked around him to get to the fridge, where there was a chunk of cheese and a bag of ripe pears and…yep, some crackers and fresh figs. J had taught me to always be prepared in case unexpected company arrived. I just hadn’t thought they’d show up the same day I officially moved in!

“Wow! Check that view! Torres, you have one seriously smokin’ hot neighbor!” Nick, of course.

“Her name is Jennie,” I said. “She’s twenty-nine, five-ten, never married, not seeing anyone, works at Saint Vincent’s.” I’d already gotten the details, when the workmen were building my bed.

“She’s a nurse?” His grin almost ate his face. “Oooo, mama!”

“She’s a doctor,” I said, cutting off his fantasies at the knees. “And you’re not her type.”

“Figures. That’s the story of my luck. If you’re her type, can I watch?”

I wasn’t her type, either—she liked them big and Italian. “No.”

Then Nifty got the first bottle open, and things started to get a little hazy. I woke up the next morning with a serious headache, half a dozen wine bottles—all empty—in the sink, and the feeling that my little apartment had just been dubbed PUPI party central.

It was… A pretty good feeling, actually.

I lay in bed, stared at the ceiling, and, for the first time since all this started, I let myself believe that it was going to last.

But first, I had to get through today.

“Bonita Torres and Sharon Mendelssohn here to see Will Arcazy.”

The receptionist behind the chrome-to-impress desk—an older man this time instead of the young woman who was there my first visit—gave us both a once-over that should have been insulting but instead felt coolly, impersonally professional. He was either a security guard or a slaver, in his other job. I was glad I’d opted for a crème-colored linen blouse and dark green knee-length skirt out of my “look adult and responsible” wardrobe. The shoes were crème-colored, too, and cost more than the rest of the outfit combined.

“Is he expecting you?”

Yeah. That was the question, wasn’t it?

“We don’t have an appointment. But I think he’ll see us,” I said, trying to channel Sharon’s natural cool. Curiosity, if nothing else, should motivate him. That was what we were betting on, and why Venec had—reluctantly, I thought—sent us out, rather than the guys. Even the least chauvinistic male was going to see a female as less of a threat, at least if he liked women, and we knew that Will did. So two women—even if the attention wasn’t flattering—wouldn’t be seen as threatening or off-putting.

I was beginning to understand the way they thought, our tricky guys. It gave me a headache, but I figured I’d get better with practice.

The receptionist picked up his phone and spoke quietly into it. I didn’t try to listen in. Sharon might have—I didn’t look at her to see. The trick was to ignore her so much that everyone else would, too.

The phone went down, and the receptionist’s expression changed from politely noncommittal to an impersonal sort of friendliness they must teach at receptionist school. “He is with a client right now, but if you’d like to take a seat, he will be with you as soon as possible.”

“Thank you.”

“Nice place,” Sharon said as we made our way over to the cream leather love seats in a square around the glass-and-chrome coffee table. “If we ever need a lawyer, you think they’d take us on?”

Same thought I’d had, the first time I was here. That made me smile. “I don’t think we can afford them,” I said.

“Mmm. Yeah.” Sharon stared over my shoulder, I guess at the wall, then suddenly said, “Speaking of money, you think the client’s going to pay us? Honestly? Because if she’s not, I’m going to have to put my résumé out there again. This job is…it’s crazy and it’s great, but I need some stability in the paycheck, you know? Walking in some day to find the office empty ’cause the furniture got repossessed is not my idea of fun times.”

Wow. Not that the thought itself was a surprise, just that of all of us, I’d figured Sharon for the last-woman-out, not first rat overboard. “She’ll pay. It would be a matter of respect—all the Guys would have to do would be to let it out that she failed to pay a legitimate bill, even if it was to a disreputable-by-her-standards firm, and the embarrassment alone would destroy her standing in the Council.”

“And that’s important?” Sharon was looking directly at me now, really needing to know the answer.

Again I felt that gulf between us, the divide in our upbringings, that something so obvious to me eluded her. “Yes.” No hesitation in that response. “To someone like our client? It’s that important. More to the point, she knows that the boss knows it’s that important, and won’t hesitate to use it as a stick, if he has to.”

It struck me then that we had all fallen into the habit of not using names outside the office. Interesting.

Sharon looked as though she was digesting what I’d said. “That’s…a whole level of politics I’m not used to considering.”

“It’s Council.”

“Yes, I understand that. In a sort of don’t-understand-it way.” She crossed her legs, adjusted her dark blue skirt to lie neatly across her knees, and double-checked the attaché case that rested at her feet. It was empty—just a prop—but it looked as expensive as my shoes.

“You see people differently than I do,” she said finally. “I look at someone and see an individual, whole unto themselves. You…you see how they’re connected, don’t you? Not just one person, but this endless web of ties and obligations around them. I guess that’s Council, too.”

Did I? Now it was my turn to digest her words. So we sat there, two well-dressed women in the waiting area of a very expensive legal office, indistinguishable from any other client-in-waiting, mulling over our thoughts, deep and shallow. When Will came out through the frosted glass doors, it was a relief to be shaken out of them, and back into the game.

His gaze took me in first, and then slid sideways to include Sharon. There was a moment of understandable appreciation before he recalled his manners, or something, and turned his attention back to me. “I take it that this isn’t entirely a social visit,” he said.

“I wish it were.” I really did.

Give him credit, despite Will’s confusion he was a gracious host, escorting us to his office, offering us coffee, the whole deal, like we really might be potential clients for the firm. Maybe he was just putting on a good show for the partners.

“All right,” he said, after we’d refused refreshments and gotten settled in the guest chairs. “What’s going on?”

The plan wasn’t so much good cop/bad cop as talky cop/silent cop. Sharon was here to observe while I, hopefully, prodded him into revealing more than he meant to. More of Ian’s on-the-job-training, since I was the demonstrably better observer. Not that I didn’t trust Sharon to see things, but I was on overdrive, trying to make sure every twitch and flicker registered, just in case she missed something. And, yes, because I felt that I had something to prove, now.

“You didn’t play fair with me, Will.”

I could see it in his eyes. He was genuinely confused; he didn’t know what I was talking about. I didn’t need Sharon’s confirmation to know that was real.

“Your association with the Reybeorns. You concealed details.”

“Ah.” He leaned back in his chair, like every television show lawyer I’d ever seen, confronted with something tricky. “I answered every question you asked.”

“You didn’t lie, and you didn’t evade,” I agreed. “But you didn’t play fair. You didn’t tell me about your silent partner—or the deal that was still in play when the Reybeorns died.”

“What does Katie have to do with any of this?” He blinked, and again I could see in his eyes when the penny dropped. He leaned forward, all pretense at relaxation gone. Interesting, that he focused in on that part. “You weren’t investigating their deaths, before. You were investigating me?”

“Only incidentally,” I said, hoping to hell that Sharon was picking
something
up, because I had to pay attention to the words, both his and mine, and not the deeds. “Because of your connections to the victims. Your possible connections to the killer.”

Even half-distracted, I could tell when he went from hurt and confusion to anger.

“I told you, I would never do anything to hurt them! I liked them! And you…you’ve been investigating me. All this time, even when…even at dinner? You used me.”

I hadn’t, damn it. I had done everything I could short of quitting to not use him. So why did his words make me feel guilty? I could feel my current stir, cool but awake, and I had to take a second to quiet it. That never used to happen, damn it. I didn’t want to constantly be on the offensive. It took too much out of you. Was it because of Will? Or the fact that I was using so much current lately, it assumed every flicker meant that it was time to play? I needed to ask J about that. Later.

“If I’d been using you, Will, I would have returned your calls. I would have asked questions over dinner, after a bottle of wine—” or in bed, I thought but didn’t say “—not sober in your office with a desk between us.

“So tell me now. Tell me everything, Will. Tell me why you didn’t mention Katie, or the deal. Because it might be important. It might be really important to finding out who killed them.”

“I can’t help you.” His gaze flicked from my face to Sharon’s. I guess he didn’t like what he saw there, because he flicked back to me, as though I was the better hope. “I really can’t. Even if I wanted to, which I’m not sure I do right now, I told you everything useful.”

“Why don’t you let us decide if it’s useful or not?”

He looked again to Sharon, who stared at him with that unreadable can’t-shock-me expression I was starting to understand was a total put-on, and he crumbled. “Katie…we were friends-of-friends. I met her at a party in Chicago—that’s where she’s from. We got to talking one day about investments, and I told her about the deals I’d done with the Reybeorns, and she was interested, but I knew they wouldn’t be interested. They were, um—”

“They ran a closed shop,” Sharon said, more polite than I would have been, and he nodded.

“Katie knew, a little, about…what we are. So I just told her it was like that, that they weren’t going to trust anyone who wasn’t Talent, that it wasn’t personal, and she suggested that we partner up, her money supplementing mine. That way we had a larger slice of the pie, and more say about what was done.”

“And you were okay with deceiving your friends like that?” I asked.

“I…I thought it was tacky, to keep someone out because of what they could or couldn’t do, something they had no control over, in a situation where Talent was not an issue. Whatever you may think of me, discrimination’s discrimination, okay?”

I slid my gaze toward Sharon, whose fingers were still on her lap. That meant she thought he was telling the truth.

“I figured, if they never knew, and Katie and I made money, who could it hurt? All the paperwork was in my name, and I had a side agreement with Kate, so it was all up-and-up.”

Legally, yeah. Morally… I didn’t know. I didn’t support Talent-only any more than I’d not hang with Nifty because he was black, or Sharon because she was WASPy…but something about the way Will wiggled around honesty made me uncomfortable. He had his reasons, and they sounded like good ones, but…

“And that last deal? The one you said you got out of?”

“I had gotten out. I asked them to sell to the developer who was sniffing around. We’d already made enough profit, even without the renovations. But they wanted to hold the course. So Katie bought me out. That way I had the cash I needed, and she got to ride the full term of the deal, and make even more money. It was a done deal, nothing in my agreement with the Reybeorns said I couldn’t sell my shares, and they’d have no choice but to accept it.

“Honestly, I figured that they would dump the property when Katie showed up, rather than work with a Null.”

Sharon’s fingers twitched, then went still.

“Only it didn’t work that way,” I said. “They still owned the property when they died.”

“They refused to honor the paper Katie and I signed. They just…they refused to accept it. Said it was worthless, that without me there was no deal.” He sounded like a little kid who had been knocked off his bicycle. I didn’t have to look at Sharon to know that this, at least partially, was what he hadn’t wanted to think about. He’d taken a hit to his ego—he’d been
wrong
—and wasn’t dealing with it. Did he also suspect, somehow, that that chain of events might have been what led to the Reybeorns’ deaths?

“And you didn’t think it was important to mention this, when we talked the first time?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know until…”

“Until you had lunch with her in Chicago.”

I shriveled a little even as Sharon’s words fell into the air. Will looked at me like I had just told him there was no more chocolate in the world: disbelieving, hurt, and a little panicked.

“You were following me.”

Damn it, Sharon… “You showed up at the auction, Will. You made yourself a person of interest. As a lawyer, you know what that means.”

“I can’t believe you followed me.”

I was starting to get a little pissed off. He was the one who had screwed up, not me!

“When did you sign the papers over to this woman?”

He thought a bit, then shook his head. “About three months ago, I think. I can’t remember the exact date.”

Sharon’s fingers flicked up and down, once.

“Do you have copies of the papers?”

“Do you have a warrant?” he asked in return.

Current coiled, cool and slow, deep in my gut. This time, I didn’t hush it. “You know we don’t. If you want us to, we can go to the Council and ask them to push you on it.”

A Council push wasn’t binding, but it had a lot of weight. Like shunning, among the Amish. I didn’t know if Ian had enough influence to swing one…but I was betting that J did.

We played stare-me-down, and I was the first one to blink…but Will backed down. “I have copies here.” He stood up and walked over to a small filing cabinet. A double tap on the door, and a current-lock was released, the drawer smoothly rolling out.

He ruffled through the files, more for show than anything else, I thought, and pulled out a slim folder.

“Here.”

I took a quick skim, and the name “Kate Walker” jumped out at me. So far, so good.

“If you could make us copies?”

“These are copies. I keep everything in triplicate. Take them and go.”

I took the folder. “Will…”

“Just go, Bonnie.”

The subway back uptown was packed with everyone fleeing their offices for the day, so we didn’t have a chance to talk. I’m not sure what I would have said, anyway. The papers were in Sharon’s attaché case, and I’d swear they were magnetized, the way I couldn’t stop glancing over, like there would suddenly be glowing letters floating midair, proclaiming his innocence….

Please, let him be innocent. Even as I was whispering a prayer, though, I didn’t believe it. I wanted to…but I didn’t. It wasn’t cynicism, just pragmatism. There were too many omissions in his story. A layperson might do that without realizing it. A lawyer? He might not be guilty, but he wasn’t innocent.

“Hey.” Sharon had gotten out of her seat and tapped me on the shoulder. We were coming up on our stop.

“He’s hot.”

“What?”

“Your Will. He’s hot. And he couldn’t take his eyes off you, even when he was pissed off.”

“And he lied to us.”