Pack of Lies

eleven

I woke up to a warm but empty bed, and a note on the pillow that Pietr had gone out running. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, and did a quick check on my entire system. Core still low but otherwise…

Settled. Calm. It wasn’t the sex, as such, but the intimate contact that did it for me; the sharing of pleasure. Now, if I could just hold on to that, when things got hinky again…

I collected my clothing from the pile on the floor, got dressed, and considered my next move for about ten seconds. I scrawled a note on his note—gone home to shower, see you later—and let myself out of the apartment.

It wasn’t the same as leaving in the middle of the night, and I’d never had a real problem with the so-called Walk of Shame, dragging myself home after a night out, but I still felt sort of awkward. I’d broken the one rule I had, and while I wasn’t sorry—rules that no longer made sense needed to be updated—leaving like that bothered me. Maybe I should have waited, or showered there, or…

No. We both knew what we’d been doing the night before; no promises had been made or asked for, and he hadn’t told me to wait for him to get back or anything, just that he’d see me later. It was copacetic, right?

The rain had let up a little overnight, but it was still damp and miserable. The site of the attack would be washed clean; any chance we had of collecting any kind of evidence was over. What we had needed to be enough. Please god, it would be enough.

I made it uptown before the morning rush really kicked in, dunked myself under the shower, grabbed a PowerBar for breakfast, got dressed, and was back on the subway in plenty of time to not be late to the office, if the transit gods were kind.

“You’re late.” Nifty stood by the coffeemaker, impatiently waiting for it to finish brewing. He looked as dapper as always, but there were traces of dampness at the hem of his chinos that made me think he hadn’t been there all that long, either.

I shook off my umbrella and shoved it into the closet with my jacket, running fingers through my hair to assess the damage done by the rain and wind. “I know. Sick-passenger delay. We got our marching orders?”

“Not yet. Stosser wanted everyone to show up before we started. Don’t worry, you’re not that late. Nick’s last man in, today.”

“We should start a pool.” Actually, we shouldn’t. I might not lose, but I’d never win, either.

“Is the coffee ready yet?” Pietr came in from the back offices, mug in hand. “Hey,” he said to me, casual and calm as he ever was.

“Hey,” I said back. “Not yet, based on the way the big man over there’s lurking.”

“Damn. My coffeemaker died last night—totally shorted out.”

Current-flare during sex could do that, even low-vulnerability tech like coffeemakers and alarm clocks. If he was trying to make me blush, he was going to have to work harder than that. But he just dropped the comment into the conversation and went on, like there was no ulterior motive at all. A part of me I hadn’t been aware was tense, relaxed. Copacetic.

Nick came in just as the coffeemaker made the all-clear beep. His hair was plastered wetly to his forehead, and his mood was thunderous even at a distance. Great. What now?

“Told you not to buy that cheap umbrella,” Pietr said, and disappeared back into the office. Nick made a face, and I relaxed, making a note to buy him a decent rain hat, something really dorky. Coffee properly doctored, I followed Pietr’s tracks, with Nifty and Nick bringing up the slightly damp rear, pun totally intended.

“Good morning, everyone,” Stosser said. He was wearing another of his funky, trying-to-be-crunchy-granola outfits today. That always freaked me out, because flannel and denim so didn’t work on him; he’d been born to the bespoke-suit brigade, same as J. Venec was standing by the single window, holding the blinds away with one hand to look out onto the street below. Or maybe he was checking to see if it was still raining. He looked over when Stosser spoke, and did a weird kind of almost-invisible double take that I felt more than saw.

Huh. And uh-oh.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a certain distinctly feminine pleasure at the fact that I knew that Venec knew something had changed, but at the same time part of me just wanted it all to get shoved under the table—or better yet, out the window. This was part of why I hadn’t planned on fishing off the company pier, damn it. I’m an uncomplicated girl: work is work and sex is sex and the two shouldn’t get tangled, ever. The fact that I had only myself to hold responsible didn’t help, either.

Not that it was any of Benjamin Venec’s business. He was my boss, not my keeper, no matter what kind of wonky current had sizzled between us.

I took the seat next to Sharon, who was busy jotting something in her notebook. I leaned over to read, trying to distract myself, and she raised her arm, warning me away. I took the hint and moved back, watching everyone else take their seats. Venec stayed by the window, exuding a sort of silent-brute brooding force that was only partially playacting. All right, he was going to be Tough Dog today, and Stosser was going to be Guide Dog.

“Mash informs me that the girl will be staying with him for the duration. She is traumatized and shaky, and he strongly suggests that we not approach her further.” Ian’s face twisted a little at that, and I suspected that Mash had used stronger words in his suggestion. From what I’d heard and seen, Mash didn’t have much patience with things like tact or diplomacy, and probably hadn’t given Ian more than three syllables before slamming the door in his face, physically and metaphorically.

“So that avenue of investigation’s shut down,” Sharon said. Her voice sounded resigned, making me think she’d been privy to that bit of news already.

“I don’t think we were going to get much more from her anyway,” I said. “Whatever else happened, she was seriously scared about those threats, and now? The only one who could get her to talk would be the ki-rin, and it won’t associate with her anymore.” Knowing why it was acting that way—that it didn’t really have a choice—didn’t make me any less angry.

“The ki-rin isn’t associating with or talking to anyone,” Ian said. “My source says that it’s claimed the privilege of extreme age, and refused to speak to anyone save his own kind.”

I’d been right, then: the ki-rin was old. The Asian cultures had more respect for that than we did, even now. Combine age and stress and grief, and the ki-rin might as well be on another planet, for all the access we’d get.

“Great,” Nick said, echoing my own thoughts. “It would take an act of god to get near it, now, and not even Stosser’s got god in his back pocket.” He looked sideways at the boss. “Do you?”

“Unfortunately, no. Nor, despite Ben’s best efforts, do we have access to the perp, who has been released from the hospital and will not be charged with anything, as the girl refuses to press charges and the ki-rin is legally incapable of doing so.”

“And the site’s dead,” Sharon said, confirming my earlier thoughts. “I stopped by on the way in, and…” She shook her head. “Clean as washed slate.”

“So what the hell are we supposed to do, just close the file and demand our payment?” Nifty sounded pissed off.

“We can’t,” I said. “Ian was right, earlier. This isn’t about who hired us, or why. It’s about the truth. It’s about us being put on the job, and not stopping until we know, for certain, what happened.”

“Something bad happened there,” Sharon said, adding her vote to the tally. “A girl was attacked and a guy was killed and we still don’t know who was telling the truth and who was lying about what happened. We can’t just walk away and say it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if the check clears or not—I can’t just leave it that way.”

I cared a lot about if the check cleared or not, but Sharon was dead-on, otherwise. We’d been hired to determine what had happened—the Council might be willing to let things rest, but that wasn’t the PUPI way. We closed the case, not just for our own peace of mind, but for the victims, too. Although I was starting to wonder just who the victims were, here….

“It’s worse than that,” Venec said, and I got the feeling he was responding to my thoughts as much as Sharon’s words. “If it were just human against human we could maybe let it ride. But the fatae are involved, and now the antifatae movement is involved—or at least someone holding those views is threatening the victim. If we back off now, it will look as though the Council told us to—that the Council was hand-in-glove with whoever threatened the girl, and silenced us, too. We can’t afford to let it go. This is a match, people, and the entire city is tinder.”

That fell like it had a real, solid weight, and Stosser used the moment after to push his chair away from the table and stand up. “Things happen at a time for a purpose,” he said, and I guessed that was as much of an apology for doubting him as Venec was ever going to get. “The convergence of this case and Ben’s investigations, and our involvement in both, however glancingly, isn’t coincidence. We are meant to be involved—and to act. So do so. Ben, get them moving, and keep me updated.”

Nifty leaned back to say something to Pietr and Nick, while Sharon flipped open her notebook again and scribbled a new note in it, then looked at Nifty, her expression pure challenge. Fighting off Mercy’s attackers had put the ginger back, and she wanted lead. The question was, did Nifty want it just as bad, or would he give way? It was always tough to tell with him.

“Where are you off to?” Venec asked, leaning forward across the table toward his partner. His voice lowered a bit, but if he’d really wanted to keep it private he’d have pinged, so I felt no shame in listening in.

Ian hesitated, only half a second, but Venec felt it, and therefore so did I. Boss man was avoiding something. “Oil on water,” Ian said finally. “Some local wire-wits tried to make a fuss over our involvement, claiming we were interfering with the natural order of magic, get us shut down. The usual crap. I have to give our dog-and-pony show again, make nice with the villagers.”

The same claim his sister had made. No wonder he didn’t want to bring it up. “Better you than me” was all Venec said, and I could feel his desire to be nowhere near the political pow-wowing as though it were my own emotion. All right, that was going to get annoying, fast. I took a deep breath, grounded myself, and rebuilt the wall between us. At some point I’d have to figure out how to make it more pliable, to let him reach me in case of an emergency. But for now, in the same room, it would have to do.

“Okay, puppies,” Venec said, clapping his hands once to get everyone’s attention as Stosser slipped out the conference room door. “Be brilliant. Find a way to wring new facts from the evidence, and answer the million-dollar question—who is lying?”

“That’s not the question,” Sharon said. “Bonnie was right, when this all started. The question is…can everyone be telling the truth? Because they all are, as far as we can tell. That’s the problem.”

“So someone’s lying well,” Nick said.

Sharon shook her head, stubborn. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Truth’s Sharon’s gig,” Nifty said, handing over the lead gracefully. “Let’s go with that. Short of psychosis, which one of us probably would have picked up, how and why can you believe a lie is the truth?”

“Love and religion,” Pietr said promptly.

“Wise-ass.”

“No, he’s right,” I said. “Not religion, exactly, but faith.” My thoughts earlier, when I was on the site, attached themselves to Nifty’s words, illuminating them in my brain so I could find the edges of the puzzle and fit them together. I thought about Mercy’s expression, the desolation in her eyes, and the fear in her voice not at what might happen to her, but for what already had. Her life had been destroyed…but she still loved the ki-rin. Still had faith in it. Why?

“For love and faith, people can convince themselves of almost anything,” Sharon said in agreement.

“And money,” Venec said.

“And money. But the ki-rin’s got money, and attacking Mercy wouldn’t bring any to our perps, so I can’t see that being a cause. So…love?”

“Mercy loves the ki-rin,” I said. “Without a doubt. Not human-to-human love, and not a girl-and-her-pony love, either.” I remembered the smeared lipstick, the attempt to put herself back together, when everything inside was shattered. “Something different, but real.”

Nifty asked the next question. “Did it love her? I mean, it dumped her pretty fast….”

“It didn’t have a choice,” Sharon said. “She wasn’t pure anymore, by its rules; even though there was no actual rape, she had been tainted.” Her voice didn’t show any emotion but I could see what she thought of that in her face. “It has to follow its nature. I’m betting there’s something in its makeup, genetic or magical, that requires it adhere to the rules, the way mers are stuck in tidal waters, and brownies are tied to specific buildings.”

“It…was fond of her,” I said, remembering the images I’d seen, still putting them all together with what we’d learned, even as my coworkers were doing the same. “I don’t know if it feels love the way we do—love isn’t restful—but…it was fond of her. It wouldn’t have chosen her, otherwise.”

“I think it’s safe to say that she didn’t love the guys who attacked her…she didn’t know either one of them, far as the dossier says.” Venec tapped the folder on the table in front of us. We all had copies, but the original stayed in the office at all times, to make sure you could check something at any time, and it was the most updated version. “No connection, no contact… Nothing to indicate they’d ever even been at the same party at the same time. No love, no faith, no money. Not even a way to claim hate as the opposite of love, since neither of our perps, for all their other flaws, had ever come up with antifatae reputations. Two separate pairs, meeting by purest coincidence.”

“Huh.”

We all looked at Nick.

“What?” Sharon asked.

“Nothing. No. I don’t know.” I could practically see his own pieces slotting together behind his eyes, and wondered if he had something I was missing. “Gimme a minute.” He got up and left the room before anyone could ask him another question, like he was afraid one more word would ruin whatever he was building.

“Right.” Sharon took point. “Recap.” She stared at the chalkboard wall, where the colored lines mocked us, refusing to explain themselves at all. “All the physical evidence is inconclusive or unavailable, the eyewitness reports contradict, and we’re running out of time before somebody does something stupid, according to Ben.”

That sounded, depressingly, about right.

“Nifty, you’re thinking everyone’s got something to hide?” Sharon asked.

“Professional cynic, that’s me. Yeah. I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t hedging their bets, somehow. But you’re pretty sure the people you talked to aren’t lying?”

“Ninety percent sure. Maybe even ninety-five.” She hummed a little in frustration, trying to explain it to us. “There’s a feeling people have around them when they’re telling the truth, this rock-steady grounding, but it’s rare. Damned rare. Most people, if they were even slightly unsure of their truth, waver a little. Human self-doubt.”

“So you think this certainty’s unnatural?” Venec asked.

“I interviewed a pure-P psychotic once as part of a deposition, and he had that same grounding no matter what crap he was spouting. It’s usually a warning sign.”

“You could have made a fortune as a professional witness evaluator,” I said in awe.

“I don’t make money off my skills,” Sharon said, all Miss Prim again suddenly, and then realized what she’d said, and laughed. “You know what I mean. Not that way. That would have been…unethical.”

Straight shooter: that was our Sharon.

Nick came back in, carrying a case about the size of a notebook, and put it on the table at the far end from the rest of us.

“Are you sure that’s smart?” Venec asked him, worried.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. We rigged this one special. The battery’s warded seven ways from Sunday, and up and down, too.”

“Holy shit, that’s a computer?” I was distracted by the shiny, I admit it. Laptops fascinated me. Desktops you could ground and protect easier, but every Talent I’d heard of who used a laptop singed it within a week. Knowing I couldn’t use one without killing it the first time I forgot and pulled current nearby didn’t keep me from wanting one, though. It was so cute!

“Jesus, man,” Nifty said. “I have paperbacks larger than that thing.”

“Talent are always way behind the tech curve,” Nick said, flipping the lid up and waiting for it to power up. “They’re called netbooks, people. Cheaper, lower powered, fewer bits and pieces to get whacked by current, but just as useful as a larger machine. They’re pretty damn durable, but try not to have a spike for the next half hour, okay, everyone?”

I could see why Venec was worried: mixing current and tech was, well, risky, even for someone like Nick. But if he wanted to work in here, with the risks… I guess I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the brainstorming, either.

“All right, back to work,” Venec said, herding us into a tighter group at the near end of the table. “Ignore Boy Wonder over there and focus on the problem. I think we’re on the right track, what Sharon and Bonnie were saying. There was a lot of powerful belief on the site, enough to influence the bystanders. What depends on being believed to be true? Religion and politics…I think we can rule those out. Love seems to be an impasse right now. So we’re back to money?”

“How? Seriously—unless you’re going to claim that someone took out a sexual hit on Mercy, or hired Mercy to entrap those guys…” My voice trailed off. I couldn’t imagine reasons to support either scenario, and from the expressions on the rest of the pack, neither could they.

“I still think hate’s a pretty good reason. I mean, the two guys knew each other, maybe…” Nifty’s voice trailed off the same way mine had. “But they didn’t know each other more than a few weeks, and the survivor was, by all his friends’ accounts, fascinated with his new badboy buddy.”

“What if the wildest theory’s right,” I said, slowly. “What if it was all part of the antifatae group, I mean, from the start? And they jumped her for associating with a ki-rin, the way white girls used to get attacked for dating black guys?”

“They did?” Pietr looked bewildered.

Nifty nodded, although I wasn’t sure if he was responding to my comment, or the question. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe. That could work. Damn. I hope not, because there won’t be a chance of keeping a lid on this, then.”

I had the passing thought that we could bury it, but no, Nifty was right. That wasn’t what we did, and anyway, once you dug something up, it tended to stay up.

Sharon picked up the thread. “Bonnie, do you think that could account for the blackness you felt? Hatred? Something so nasty it can’t be burned clear even by current?”

I thought about it, trying to remember the icky, sticky feel of what I’d sensed.

“No. Hatred’s clearer than that, not sticky and…greasy. Grimy.”

“Madness,” Venec said, maybe catching one of the tendrils of my memories, because he shuddered a little, so slightly I was probably the only one to notice. “You felt madness.”

“Yeah.” The bits clicked into place once I had the word to identify them. “Yeah. Rage and fear and scared and funny, all at the same time. Ugh.” I was the one to shudder then, and Venec’s hand reached out to touch mine, almost like he wasn’t aware of what he was doing. Flesh-to-flesh, and the shudder left me. Just like that: I was grounded and steady again.

His hand pulled back like I’d burned him, and my skin felt cold where he’d touched, and I wanted him to cover me again. Bad. Very bad. We really needed to do something about that. But not right now, not here. I curled my hands in my lap and tried not to look at him.

“Crazy-mad. Rabid-dog crazy. That would tie in to it being part of the antifatae crowd, right?”

“But the trace was on the sites after the fact,” Nifty pointed out. “We didn’t feel it immediately after, when we were at the site. Did you?”

The gleaning was starting to go fuzzy around the edges in my head, thankfully, but that much I knew without having to consider it. “No. We didn’t pick up any current on the scene.” I stopped, and considered that. “Think about it, guys. We couldn’t find any current from any of them. Not enough to carry emotion, not anything.”

“We didn’t test…” Pietr looked sideways at Venec, our screwup out of the bag.

“We shouldn’t have had to. Three Talent, a violent confrontation, and no current residue even a few hours later? Not from them and not from her—it was a purely physical defense. Any current they used, it was weak as hell—or it was wrapped tight around their core.” The way it would be if, for example, they had a spell cast over them: to make them believe something.

Stosser had cast a similar spell to make us believe that Venec was dead, during our job interview. We’d felt the magic around him, not on the scene.

“Maybe Mercy learned, after the attack? She wasn’t very good at it, clumsy as hell,” Sharon said, playing devil’s advocate. “But yeah—it would be instinctive to try. Unless she was so used to the ki-rin protecting her all the time…”

“Maybe.” That had the depressing ring of truth to it. “And she was tiny, they wouldn’t have felt the need to use current to subdue Mercy, especially once she was down on the ground. But it’s still odd that the guys wouldn’t use any to protect themselves, once the ki-rin showed up.”

I’d barely gotten the last word out of my mouth when the table suddenly jumped straight up into the air, almost knocking us in the face. Five blasts of current hit the table, shoving it back down again and locking it into place even as hands slammed down to control it, physically.

“Damn it!” Nick said, more annoyed at the current-spike than the table actually moving, and a burst of chatter came from the rest of my coworkers as they tried to figure out what the hell had just happened, but I knew.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I said to Ben. “You’ve trained us to react, to defend ourselves. She didn’t have that advantage. Not sure the perps would, either.” Like I’d said earlier, not everyone got trained by the Big Dogs.

Venec nodded an apology at Nick, then turned back to me. “You would have reacted differently, before?”

“I wouldn’t have thought to lock it down,” Pietr said. “But I would have shoved, instinctively.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I admitted, and Nifty nodded. Only Sharon didn’t chime in, but sat there with an odd look on her face. Nick, at the other end of the table, had already gone back to working over the netbook. There were strange spirals of current circling around it, and I was suddenly very glad I couldn’t actually see the screen. The one time I’d helped Nick with his tech-magic, even in a very secondary role, it had given me a serious headache.

“I wouldn’t have done anything,” Sharon said finally, in response to Venec’s question. “Or, I might have, but I would have tried to pull it back in, immediately. My mentor was part of the Reasonable Limits school, and I guess I absorbed a lot of that. I tried to pass. As a Null, I mean.”

“The what school?” Nifty asked, before I could.

“Reasonable Limits. It’s…what it sounds like, I guess. That current isn’t something to use instinctively, but only after deliberate thought and only if nothing else is appropriate to the task. It grew out of the Old Magic, during the burning years, when even the hint of magic could get you killed, and merged with emerging environmentalist philosophies in the 1900s, and…” Her voice trailed off, trying to explain it to us.

“That’s insane.” Nifty sounded horrified. “Not using current isn’t the answer to people being scared of us.”

“Different ways of approaching the problem,” Venec said calmly, cutting off what might have become another argument. “The fear was real, generations of it, and I know you all have enough education to know how quickly suspicion can turn to fear can turn to violence.

“But I think we can agree that even if the girl had Sharon’s kind of training during mentorship, some sort of instinctive current-use would have been a normal reaction to violent physical threat, if there were any. And we sure as hell would have found trace of a violent emotion in the original site, especially if she then pulled it back into herself, rather than letting it disperse naturally. I’m assuming that someone checked on that, at least?”

Bastard. “Someone” meaning me, since I was the gleaner of record. “Yeah, I did. I didn’t find anything that could be identified as from Mercy, who had the most reason to feel emotion. Never met the dead guy, or the other perp, so had no basis. But everything was pretty much overlaid by the black goop by then. I’m not good enough to strip that away without destroying the scene. Maybe you or Ian?”

Back in your lap, boss, I thought with justifiable viciousness, still not meeting his gaze. I was pretty sure he heard that, too.

“By the time I got there, too many people had been on-site,” he said. “And Ian…”

Ian Stosser was many things, including brilliant, persuasive, and charming, but he left the hands-on gruntwork to us.

“So what little we have, the fact that she didn’t feel a strong emotion, and didn’t use current to defend herself, that points to the guy’s claim being true, that they weren’t threatening her?” Pietr asked.

“No,” Venec said, and I could hear the frustration in his voice, no weird linky-link needed.

I felt my brain fold over on itself, trying to figure out where he was going with that. “Why not?”

There was a hissing, staticky noise from the other end of the table. I forced myself not to look, and could tell everyone else was doing the same. The skin on my arms and neck was all goose-bumped, though. Nick was doing something at a level none of us could match; not better, not lesser, just using skills that we didn’t have, and personally I didn’t want. Hackers could and did overrush faster and harder than anyone else, and when they did, every network in the region went, to use the technical term, blooey.

Venec went on with the discussion, pretending there was nothing at all happening down there, nope, nothing at all. “Because they didn’t use current to defend themselves, either. A Talent being attacked by another human, maybe they’ll keep it on the down-low, try not to escalate things, especially if they don’t know the others’ power level.”

Kids played at that, games like snap-dragon and push-tag, to see who was stronger. Adults played different games, more subtle, but we played them.

“Being attacked by a fatae? An obvious fatae?” Venec drummed his hand against the table, a gesture I hadn’t seen him use before. Irritation? Anger? Frustration? Maybe all of the above. It made my fingers itch in sympathy, and I refolded them carefully in my lap. There was a time to mirror the boss, and a time not to. This was a not-time.

“Being attacked by a ki-rin, those toughs should have been shitting themselves, and hauling out the hard power. They didn’t. Is that damning enough, though?” I asked.

“They may not have had time to,” Nifty said. “I saw the autopsy reports.” He and Pietr got that job, mainly because I puked all over myself the first and only time they had me read medical stuff, and Sharon and Nick just out-and-out refused. “It was over so fast, I bet the guy never realized what was happening.”

Pietr shook his head. “The first guy, maybe. But the other guy did. He saw the first attack happen, was far enough away that he had time to know what was happening, which, Bonnie’s right, would have made me shit myself, no matter how much a hard-ass I was.”

“He fought back—the ki-rin had bruises.” I hadn’t gotten close to the fatae, but even at that distance the dark marks on its chest and neck had stood out against the nearly luminescent skin, enough to be noticed, so at odds with its perfection otherwise. “A human wouldn’t be able to hit that hard physically, especially once he was down, so they had to be current-strikes. But not enough to be fatal. And not enough to leave any lingering signature that we could pick up or, I guess, that the Council suits who took it away would have picked up?” I heard the question in my voice, but didn’t think I’d get an answer. They might have, and they wouldn’t think to tell us. Why should they? They were convinced it was a justified kill, whatever else had happened, and they had no further interest beyond that. God, I hated amateurs.

From the look on Venec’s face, he was having the same bitter thought.

“We can ask, but I bet they didn’t even notice,” Nifty said. “I’m not sure it matters. The available evidence—the fact that there was no trace, and only limited bruising—suggests that the second perp wasn’t strong enough to hurt the ki-rin significantly.” He shrugged, his broad shoulders lifting in an almost operatic gesture, telegraphing both frustration and resignation. “This guy is not one of life’s better results. Just because the average Talent could do it…well, half of everyone is below average, right?”

“Average or mean? Never mind.” Pietr waved off his own question as irrelevant. “You’re right, we made a logical assumption that current was not used in the attack or defense, because we didn’t find any lingering traces at the site. And Bonnie says that there was no fear, not the kind he should have felt, fighting for his life—just the way there was no fear from Mercy. That’s what we should be focusing on, not the defensive blows. Why weren’t we picking up any emotion in the signatures, especially once we were specifically looking for it?”

“Bonnie’s right, we may not be good enough to pick it up, especially with how many other people were on the scene so fast,” Sharon said bluntly. “And yeah, Ian and Ben might have had better luck but…emotions? Come on, people, let’s not give ourselves demigod status just yet.”

Brutal, but true. Hell, the fact that we could identify signature so clearly was a major leap for most of us from what the general Talent could do. I could see everyone let themselves relax a little from the self-questioning that we were all doing, even—maybe especially—Venec.

“So is this a dead end,” Pietr asked, “or evidence we have to look at differently?”

“Dead end,” Sharon said. I had to agree. Magic, for once, wasn’t helping us solve this case.

“So we have a lot of…nothing.” Venec got up, stretching his hands over his head to the ceiling, and we all heard his back crack. My spine whimpered a little at the noise. He seemed to feel better, though. “Come on, people, we can do better than that. What are we overlooking?”

“Money.”

It was almost a relief to let my head turn and finally look to the far end of the table. Nick was shutting down his netbook, closing the lid with the air of someone with a stupendously fantabulous secret. He got up from his chair, and staggered a little, putting a hand on the back of his chair to steady himself. Current-wear. He’d probably just burned five-six hundred calories, with that kind of tight-focus work.

“We already thought about that,” Nifty objected. “We couldn’t figure any way it would make sense.”

“That’s because we weren’t thinking the right way,” Nick said. “We’ve been going about it all totally the wrong way.”

I blinked at him, feeling myself get pissed. What did he mean, the wrong way? I’d chased down every single damn avenue I could think of….

“What’s the one assumption that we’ve been making about this case, all of us, from the very beginning?”

We stared at him, and he grinned; sweaty, ego-triumphant, and perfectly willing to wait until we bowed down before his greatness and begged for the answer.

“If you don’t spill, I’m going to hold you upside down by your scrawny ankles and shake it out of you,” Nifty said, instead.

“Spoilsport.” Nick sat down, folded his hands in front of him and leaned forward. “The assumption we’ve all been making was that this was a crime of passion—lust or hate or just sheer moment-of-opportunity violence. It wasn’t.”

“A calculated attack?” You could hear the gears turning in Venec’s head, and Sharon was drawing lines and boxes in her notebook with quick strokes, muttering as she reworked whatever logic-equation she was using.

“Maybe. More to the point, calculated by someone else. See, I got to thinking…none of it made sense, right? Like Sharon said, usually you doubt even the stuff you’re almost a hundred percent sure about. That’s just natural. Everyone being so rock-hard in their truth, that’s the kind of thing it takes a while to build up, and usually it needs, I don’t know, a trigger or something. Something or someone reinforcing their belief that it’s all hunky-dory, reassuring them. We’re all much more likely to believe someone else, someone with authority or enthusiasm, when they say it’s all golden, right?”

“Point?” Venec asked, but he was alert, not doubting. He knew Nicky-boy was on to something. I was barely able to breathe, I was listening so hard. Nick had it, I could feel it, like all the puzzle pieces clicking in, even if I couldn’t see the final picture, yet.

“My point is, people aren’t as smart as they like to think they are—there’s always trace when you try to meddle. Only we weren’t finding any trace at all—no guilt, no anger, no residue. So I thought…we’ve been considering the things that matter to the Cosa, Talent and fatae, either one. Why? What if this had nothing to do with the Cosa at all—what if it was just a human thing?”

“None of the players were Null,” Sharon objected.

“None that we knew about,” Nick corrected her. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

He didn’t stop to check our reactions this time, but lurched right into the explanation.

“I went looking in the most likely places where our players could have ulterior motives—health and wealth. No medical records beyond the basic for our girl, nothing at all for the others. So someone might have been slipping them something to make them violent, or whatever…or maybe not. Moving on, I just did a deep read into their financial records, what they’ve been spending, what they’re investing, that kind of thing.”

He paused, shaking his head. “Man, don’t ever use Trade-World for your brokerage house, they’re almost painfully easy to hack. Anyway, guess who got pretty little deposits into their bank accounts?”

“The attackers?” Sharon said.

“Our survivors,” Nick corrected her triumphantly. “All three of them—ki-rin, girl, and alleged attacker who didn’t get whacked.”

“Ki-rin have bank accounts?” That surprised the hell out of me, although I don’t know why.

“Ki-rin even have brokerage accounts, chica. It dabbles a bit here and there, although nothing major. But I don’t think that matters, although it’s damn interesting, because we’ve got a smoking gun right here in their checking accounts. Whoever it was sending them the money staggered times and sources to make it look random, but it came to the same total amount for all three of them. What are the odds on that, huh? And a sum of money like that? Can support a whole lot of certainty, even without the added fillip of magic.”

“And the source?” Venec asked, impatient.

“A little more digging, and I found the answer to all our questions.”

He waited, trying to build suspense.

“Your ankles are looking grabable,” Nifty warned, and while I usually had time for Nick’s games, even I was getting twitchy. I didn’t even look at Venec, knowing the thunderous expression that was probably glaring at Nick right now.

“All right, fine. Turns out the dead guy? Had a serious insurance policy for an underemployed loser, made out to his best friend from back home. A million dollars payable on certification of death. Nice, huh?”

“Fuck me,” someone said softly, almost reverently, and suddenly all the parts started clicking together like prefab furniture. The colored chalk appeared again, and Nifty grabbed them off the table, wiping the old board clean and starting fresh.

“Gimme the starting play,” he told Nick.

“Financial transactions, starting seven months ago. Sums from between $2,000 to $5,000, deposited on seemingly random days, several times a month, to each player’s checking account, for a total of $25,000 each.”

It seemed cheap to me, but I knew firsthand that people killed for less, without flinching or regret. $25,000 to some people was a year’s salary, a way out of debt, the salvation of a dream—was that the price for a scum-of-the-earth’s life?

“A few were electronic transfer, a few were cashier’s checks, and a couple were cash, which must have been fun to process. Those were the smaller ones. I’m not a money guy, but it sounds like they were broken up to avoid any kind of pattern-trigger?”

“Likely,” Venec said. “And that would suggest that whoever set this up knew what he was doing…or had watched enough television to think he knew what he was doing.”

“Our best friend of the deceased is an MBA?”

“Sadly, no. Mr. Harrison, Null, is a schoolteacher. Not even a math teacher, either. World history, pounding dry facts into ninth graders’ heads, out in Nashville.”

“What the hell is a schoolteacher doing best friends forevering with a skeevy guy like our dead body?” Nifty asked.

“Went to high school together, managed to keep it going.” Nick shrugged. “I’m not going to argue nature versus nurture with you. People hook up and stay friends for all sorts of weird reasons. All I know is this Steve Harrison and our very dead Paul Blake named each other in their life insurance policies about seven years ago, so it’s likely he knew about the Cosa, and, it seems, the less savory parts of it.”

“So how did they know about the ki-rin, how to lure it into this?”

“Don’t know. Unless we can get it to talk, odds are we’ll never know.”

“’Scuse me,” I said, and got up. Venec and Pietr both watched me leave the room, which weirded me out a little; the others kept going on the play-by-play.

I grabbed my bag from the closet, then walked down the hallway to Stosser’s office. The door was open, so Ian had already left to do his political oil thing. I sat down at the desk, and pulled a card case out of my bag. Had I put it in there…I had! Picking up the phone, I dialed the number on the business card, and waited. Venec might have contacts in the police force, but I had friends in lower places than that.

“Sylvan Investigations. How can we help you?”

The voice was pleasant, mellow, and male.

“Can’t afford a receptionist, huh?”

“Bonnie?” The voice made an instant switch from smooth to raspy. Raspy sounded better on him. “How you doing? Why are you calling? Who died?”

“Are you always that paranoid?”

Danny made a rude noise. “Bonnie, when a Talent calls me on the phone, it’s never good news. Unless you’re calling to invite me over for breakfast?”

“Not this time, sorry. I have a favor to ask you.”

“I knew it. All right, Blondie, shoot.”

“Can you dig up any dirt on a guy named Steven Harrison? He’s a history teacher out in Nashville. Yes, Tennessee, you know of another Nashville? He’s not a Talent, so my contacts would be useless. He doesn’t have a police record, far as we know—” if he did, Nick would have found that “—but I figure he’s probably going to have something off-color in someone’s file somewhere.” You didn’t be BFF with a loser like our dead guy without some trouble, somewhere. I trusted Nick’s talents, but there were some things that needed magic…and some that needed old-fashioned snooping.

“This has to do with the case you’re working on?”

“It could help us crack it.”

“And you’ll owe me?”

“PUPI will owe you.”

There was a pause, the sound of papers being shuffled, and he laughed. “I’ll settle for that. How can I reach you?”

I gave him the office number, and, after a second’s thought, my home number, too.

“God, I wish you people could use email like the rest of us. At least you’re not demanding it all be couriered, because P.B.’s rates are getting crazy. I’m assuming that these are landlines?”

“You betcha. I gotta get back into the fray. Let me know as soon as you’ve got something!”

The entire exchange had taken maybe ten minutes, but by the time I made it back down the hall, the chalkboard was already full of names, timelines, and exclamation points, and everyone was talking rapid-fire, bouncing ideas off each other.

“If he was just killed, yeah, there might be suspicion on the event,” Sharon was saying. “But a known sexual predator who gets what’s coming to him? Nobody would be surprised, and damn few would question the actions of the killer…. No, it could work.”

“If he died while committing a crime, though,” Pietr responded, “the insurance company might stop payment, right? What’s the legal ruling on that?”

“If he’s killed in the commission of, or in connection to the commission of a crime, all payments are off. It’s more complicated than that, because if it was simple we wouldn’t need lawyers, but if he was charged with a felony the insurance company would be able to refuse benefits.” Sharon might not have my total recall, but she was damn reliable for legal stuff.

“Legal rulings are moot,” Nick said irritably. “If the girl won’t talk, then it’s he said/she said and there’s enough reasonable doubt to turn him into a possible victim. She doesn’t press charges, there is no crime.”

“And they can’t use the ki-rin’s involvement to prove the assault because that would require Nulls admitting to the ki-rin’s existence,” Nifty added, making a swooping red circle around the ki-rin on the board, and then crossing it, to make the international Do Not Have sign. “So the insurance company has no basis to not pay, even if they smell something off—an investigation would turn up nothing other than the surface report.”

“So our antifatae activists are enabling the scam to go forward, by giving her a reason not to accuse her alleged attacker….” I was trying to catch up with where they’d gone while I was out of the room.

“That would be the end result, yeah,” Nifty said. “I don’t know if it was our perps’ original plan, or just a happy-for-them secondary result of bigotry. But it sure as hell gives her legitimate motivation for keeping quiet, in case anyone—like us—starts sniffing around.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “If we’re going to propose that the guy was set up to get killed by the ki-rin, which it sounds like we are…?”

There were nods around the table.

“It all works,” Nifty said, and gestured to the tangle of chalk marks that backed up their thought process. “If she doesn’t file a claim and nobody’s going to fess up that a crazy-ass unicorn skewered the guy, then the death will be listed as by unknown assailant for unknown reasons, case open and nobody expects it to ever get solved. The insurance company might or might not sic their own investigator on it, but they’ll hit the same wall—the girl isn’t talking, the ki-rin won’t talk, and even if they have a Talent highly placed enough in the company to know what happened, I really doubt they’re going to want to put down in writing the cause for refusal, especially if any kind of truth-spell shows what we got, that they were all telling the truth. So the company pays out, eventually, and this Harrison guy pockets the money and comes out nicely ahead, even after the payout he made to have his buddy set up and killed.”

I didn’t have any drama with their logic, just one small tangle in it. “There were three payout chains made. You’re saying that Mercy was part of this. That she…”

There was a weird little silence. They’d been so caught up in figuring out the logic-chain, they’d forgotten that part of it. The fact that she’d been complicit in her own attack. And it had been an attack—if we were right, the dead guy had tried to rape her, therefore triggering the ki-rin’s justifiable-to-the-Cosa’s actions. He hadn’t known it was a setup, and his partner couldn’t have stopped him, or he risked tipping the game. The violence had been real.

“People do a lot of things for money,” Venec finally said, his voice dry. “I can’t speak for the girl, but $25,000 tax-free can make people do things you’d swear they’d never do.”

I thought about Mercy, how subdued and scared she’d been. Subdued, scared…but not traumatized. Not physically or, really, mentally. Not the way a sheltered girl whose first sexual experience had been against her will should have been.

You never want to know what people are capable of. Unfortunately, this job gave us a front-row ticket.

“Losing the ki-rin’s companionship overrode everything else,” I said out loud. “I’d thought she was in shock over that, so it was blotting out the physical aspects, but…”

“But she might have been bruised and battered, and sad but not scarred,” Sharon said. “Damn it. She played us.”

“And the ki-rin went along with this?” Venec wasn’t questioning that, just making us consider all the elements.

Nick shrugged. I was starting to understand why my mentor trained that movement out of me—it really did give a passive-aggressive vibe. “Never assume a fatae isn’t just as eager for filthy lucre as a human. It took a hit in the stock market, so maybe it thought this was an easy way to recoup its losses? If the girl was willing to exchange sex for money—there isn’t anything immoral in that. Illegal, okay, but the ki-rin doesn’t live by our laws. Not for sex and not for murder. So it hears this plan and his companion’s okay with it, for whatever level of stupidity, and hey, it’s just a trash human nobody was going to miss, anyway, right? No, Bonnie, I’m not being a bigot, just pragmatic. I mean, we’re not exactly outraged on the dead guy’s behalf, are we? And we’re the only ones who seem to care what happened to him.”

Ugly, but true. I felt more than a little sick.

There was a chime in the air, similar to the one Stosser used to call us in for a meeting, but with a different pitch. The phone was ringing.

“I’ll get it,” I said before anyone else responded, and dashed down the hallway before anyone could ask if I was expecting a call. There was no way it could be Danny already…. But it was.

“You’re fast.”

“Don’t spread that around, I’ll never get another date. You sitting down?”

I sat. “Talk to me.”

He did. I started to take notes, and then stopped, and just listened.

“Holy… You rock. I’ll get back to you later, k?”

Walking back through the hall, I was trying to figure out how to pass along what Danny had dug up, but in the end, I just walked in, and blurted it.

“The cop who called the Council? First guy on the scene, the one who spread his signature all over the site? The one who claimed he was just doing his civic duty, calling the Council? Drinking buddy to our schoolteacher heir back in college. What do you want to bet he’s got a payoff hidden somewhere, too?”

“Motherf—” Nifty started to add that fact to the crowded board, and just stopped. “Too many connections. There’s no way anyone could think there was reasonable doubt, not with all this. Not the way every single damned player ties back somehow to our presumptive heir. This was all a scam, start to finish.”

“Not a scam,” Sharon said, and her voice was tight with anger. “Conspiracy to commit murder, plus insurance fraud, and…god, I don’t even know what else. The evidence…just the Null-admissible material would be enough, and it would hold up in court, I think, enough to convince a jury, yes. But…it’ll never get there.

“They planned on that. They planned on all of this to cover their asses. The lure, the setup, the conflicting stories that raise reasonable doubt that couldn’t be proven one way or the other because they believed their own truths. Even if someone got on her enough that she had no choice but to press charges, the case would probably be dismissed because she didn’t agree to a rape kit. They even planned for the Council to be involved from the start, the cop calling them in, to ensure the situation was muddied by their tromping all over it. The bastards probably hoped the Council’d help sweep any investigation under the rug, rather than let the dirt surface.”

Sharon had it summed up. Everyone else was pissed and angry, frustrated at having been used, but there was a soft, subtle vibe of satisfaction in the air, too. And it was coming from Venec. I looked at him, my eyes narrowing in suspicion.

“Boss? You have something up your sleeve. What?”

Everyone looked at him then, and Venec smiled, that small, barely there smile that always made me think of a wolf contemplating the lamb.

“It was a very clever scam. Very clever, yeah. It almost worked. But the key word is almost.”