Hard Magic

Fourteen

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…”

Stosser slapped the table with the flat of his hand, making me jump. “And this, puppies, is why it’s so important to be on the scene immediately. If we’d been able to see the bodies, before they were moved or pawed over, we would be able to determine if current was used offensively on the body, and pick up the aggressor’s signature. But we weren’t, we didn’t, and we couldn’t, and so we don’t have that. So we need secondary support for this theory. We need to run some tests, see how much current is actually required to choke someone to death, and if it would leave physical trace.”

Even Sharon looked taken aback at that, and Stosser did a double take at the looks. “What? Oh, no! Not on each other, no. We’ll build a model. Do none of you watch Myth-Busters?”

Venec shook his head, clearly more used to the way his partner’s brain worked than the rest of us. “I’m sure we can get an unemployed dummy that will do the job. No need to put temptation in Sharon’s path.”

There was a snicker from somewhere, quickly muffled before the source could be identified.

“Right.” Venec kept us moving along. “What next?”

Nobody else seemed ready to say anything, so I figured it was my turn, get people away from the potentially pleasing thoughts of choking each other.

“I met with William Arcazy. Had a public spat with the vics about a month before they died. He’s a lawyer, working in a very hot little boutique firm specializing in interesting problems.”

“Interesting how?”

“They try not to talk too much about their clients, but I took a look at some of the papers that were left out on desks.” I wasn’t proud, but then, he should have put them away before letting me in, right? Ditto for his assistant, who walked away from his or her desk and left things out in full view of anyone with good eyesight and inquisitive intent. “Apparently Mr. Arcazy specializes in people who have long conversations with Federal Marshals, and then disappear, among other sidelines. That, by the way, means that they have access to a lot of privy information…and generally, for lawyers, are on the up-and-up. At least, the ones who aren’t crooked, are.” Some of that had been in the original file, complemented by the case they were working on now, via the paperwork I’d scoped. The last bit I’d gotten out of Will during dinner. He’d been pragmatic but disapproving of the level of corruption in his field. At least outwardly.

“And is Mr. Arcazy, Esquire, on the up-and-up?” Venec asked. It didn’t sound as if he knew I’d gone above and beyond the order of business. Maybe. Maybe I wouldn’t have to write up a report after all. Somehow, I suspected Stosser was still going to want a written report. As a physical reminder of the lesson, if nothing else.

“He admits to having been in business with the vics, and to having words with them when things started to go sour. But…I don’t know. I got the vibe that he was telling me the truth.”

Sharon’s truth-scrying gift would have been useful to have, to confirm that vibe, and for the first time I wondered why the Guys hadn’t sent her to interview anyone.

“You sure about that? That the vibe wasn’t something else?”

Excuse me? There was an accusation in that question, oh yeah. I guess he did know, after all. I didn’t want to look at Venec, not with those eyes looking my way, but I’d never been ashamed of my actions, and I wasn’t going to start now. I lifted my head and gave as good as I got, glarewise.

“Yes, I’m sure. Nothing he said or did was the act of a man with any kind of grudge or—” I stopped, struck by something.

“Or what?”

I held up a forefinger, to indicate I was still processing. “Will said he did a lot of deals with the victims—their smarts and his money, investing in buildings and then reselling them once they were renovated. He was pleased with the return, but opted out because he wanted the money for something else, so if anything they’d be the ones to want to kill him, not the other way around.”

“But they did have a loud, public argument?” Venec knew they did, damn him. It was in the dossier I’d read on the way to interview Will; that’s how I had known to follow up on it.

“About his investing his money without them—I guess they weren’t happy with him cutting them out of any deals, but again, isn’t that more cause for them to do him harm, not the other way around? But what I was wondering was, are there other partners, people who gave them money and weren’t happy with their returns? That car was expensive—maybe someone bought it with money they expected to get, and then didn’t?”

I was starting to roll on that idea. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but killing someone with the vehicle that symbolized everything that went wrong? That’s the kind of thing that would appeal to anyone who would go to this kind of bother, including destroying all traces, rather than just shoot them. Plus, it would be a way to get rid of the car while they were at it.”

“They had to have bought it first, though, so a dealer should’ve had records. And not file a police report?” Sharon said. “How would they get insurance money, which they’d probably want, after being out cash already?”

There’s always a nitpicker. “Maybe they didn’t insure it? If it was used in a murder scheme, I sure as hell wouldn’t have. I don’t know, I’m proposing theories here, not answers.”

Venec seemed to think it was a reasonable theory. “This kind of deal, the whole setup, wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. There had to be a reason, and probably not a brand-new one. Going on Bonnie’s idea, we should be looking at people with older grudges, not brand-new ones. Ian?”

Stosser nodded agreement at his partner. “Female, business deals, say two-year to two-month window, to start? I’ll put in a call and see what I can get. The rest of you, it’s late. Lawrence, your report is already on my desk?”

He nodded, looking a little smug.

“All right. Everyone go get some sleep, and we’ll start fresh in the morning.”

We stood, and started to file out. Stosser was right; everyone was dragging something fierce.

“Torres. A word with you?”

That? Was not the sound of anything good. Despite his approval of my theory, I had a sudden fear I was about to get canned.

I waited until the room had cleared out, and it was just me and Venec. The tension between us was well past simmering, but not in the good way.

“I don’t care what you do on your own time. You’re a smart woman, and I’m not going to read you any lectures about interpersonal relations or STDs because it’s none of my damn business. But I don’t care how badly you need your itch scratched, you do not, and I repeat do not ever screw a suspect, no matter how many vibes you have or how ironclad his alibi appears, or I will can your ass so fast you won’t know what side to sit down on. Are we understanding each other?”

We were.

Venec glared at me once for good measure, and walked out of the room.

It took a few seconds, but my lungs unfroze and I could breathe again. Contrary to recent events with J, I was not used to screwing up, or being called on the carpet. It stung. Worse, it stung because never mind how he found out, and never mind what he might think of me, Venec was totally, completely right. I’d let the itch overpower the brain.

Never again. As I’d said to J, this job was too important to me, already. I wanted it. I might even need it.

Still, the fallout wasn’t all bad. Sure, getting reamed by your boss was decidedly un-nice, but I was still employed, my limbs were all still attached, and he hadn’t told me not to see Will again ever, specifically….

Just not so long as he was still a suspect.