Pack of Lies (14 page)

If you suddenly weren't special anymore, couldn't stand out in the crowd, what chance did you have?

I shook my head violently, trying to knock the thought out of my head. Enough self-pity, Bonnie-girl, I told myself sternly. That was her. That wasn't me. My self-esteem was and always had been perfectly fine and not hung on any one thing, thank you very much.

I stood up and headed for the shower, hoping that hot water would soak this mood off me. I'd been living with
shortcomings, current-wise, my entire life. I had achieved more than my dad had, and less than J, and that was all right with me.

Look where wanting to be special had gotten our victim.

 

That shower, and the unexpected gift of a subway car sliding into the station the moment I passed through the turnstile, didn't quite banish my fey and gloomy mood, and I climbed the stairs at my destination still distracted.

It was a block from my subway stop to the office, taking me past a row of brownstones that had seen better decades. The weather was dry and reasonably warm, so some of the boyos were there, hanging out.

“Hey, mama!”

I shot a dirty glare at the one who had shouted, all of fourteen, wearing a pair of jeans so new they squeaked, and a battered Rangers jersey.

“
Ai mama,
pretty lady,” he said, staggering back with his hands to his chest like I'd actually wounded him, “who done you wrong this morning?”

I reined in my mood and slapped it soundly. No need to take it out on someone just trying to say good morning.

“Do yourself a favor, Jack-O,” I said to him. “Don't ever miss church. God gets you. Maybe not that Sunday, but eventually.”

I don't think Jack or his buddies had been inside a church since the last time their mothers dragged them in by the ears. That was okay: it had been at least that long for me, too. But
the comeback amused them enough that I was forgiven for not playing our usual flirting game.

They were good kids, mostly. Bored and restless, but good kids.

“Kids, hah. They're all of maybe six years younger than you,” I reminded myself as I went into the lobby, the current-lock on the door buzzing me through without a pause. When we started, that buzz-in had been a puzzle, a challenge. Once I'd figured out how Venec set it up, it was just another useful bit of current-tech.

Those six years might as well be a lifetime; I felt at least a decade older than my street-corner homeboys. I was being too good a girl, that was all. Upstanding Citizen Blues. All work and no play was making Bonita a very sober girl. This weekend? I was dying my hair again. Definitely. Magenta. Or maybe a nice dark purple. Give Nick something new to rag me about. Hell, maybe I'd get him to dye his hair, too. Strawberry-blond would look good on him. And then we'd go clubbing all damn night.

I stopped in front of the elevator, intending to brave my inner turmoil there, too.

A spark of life, suddenly gone out, even as we heard the clang and crash of the metal box hitting the basement floor.

I chickened out before the doors opened, and took the stairs instead, justifying it as exercise. There wasn't anyone in the break room, but the coffeepot was hot and half-f, so I wasn't the first one in. I grabbed my mug and poured a shot, then tested the milk for consistency. Still liquid, still safe to drink. All it took was one solid mass glopping into your morning coffee to make you forever suspicious.

My movie-watching buddy came in from the inner office. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” I saluted Sharon with my mug, and took a sip. The brain cells stirred, then shook off the last of the morning's unease and resettled themselves into something closer to work-mode. I probably could just make coffee at home, but had never gotten around to buying a coffeemaker. Why bother, when by the time I got into the office someone had almost always prepped a fresh pot?

“You sleep last night?” Sharon asked.

“A little.” Like a rock, hard but uncomfortable, thanks to the dreams.

“I didn't,” Sharon said, her voice glum.

That made me give her a long hard look. Last night she'd been in black wool slacks and a dark blue blouse, over loafers, her hair in a French braid—about as casual as she got. Today, a dark blue suit, subtle check pattern, skirt at regulation-knee, plain stockings, black low heels, lilac silk blouse, blond hair in its usual chignon and her curves still as kill-a-trucker lush as ever. Like her 1940s movie heroines, Sharon was cool class all the way. But the woman I'd met back in August would never have admitted to the slightest hint of weakness, even if she'd had a week of insomnia.

I wasn't sure if the change made me feel better or not.

“Bad dreams?” If I could blame it on the popcorn we'd shared, or the coffee, I'd feel a lot better.

“No, I just couldn't sleep. I couldn't stop thinking. There's something wrong about this entire case. You feel it.” She wasn't asking a question.

“You mean other than the he said/she said, the potential
fatae-versus-human crap, and the overall ickiness of rape that makes me want to scrub my skin?”

“Yeah. Other than that.”

I considered my teammate more closely. She didn't flinch under the scrutiny, maybe understanding that I wasn't looking at her, exactly. Sharon could tell if people were lying. Or maybe she could tell if they were telling the truth. I wasn't sure which, or if there was even a difference. It wasn't precog or kenning, but the fact that she was feeling hinky about this case, too… Just like Pietr.

The Big Dogs hired us for our instincts, not our looks.

“You've done the most interviewing—what are you getting off the people you talked to? What did you put in your report?”

She pursed her lips, then her face twisted like she didn't know what to say, and she looked away. “I don't know. I… The humans are all so filled with emotion, so that confuses the issue. And fatae are tough to read. Their vibes aren't the same, not to us, and not even to each other, so I can't get a baseline. And some of them…their inherent magic just screws with me.”

Fatae didn't use magic, not the way we did. They
were
magic, living breathing current. For Sharon, it must have been like trying to ground and center in the middle of a lightning storm. Possible, but really damned difficult with all the distractions.

I felt Venec come in, even with my back to the door, and I held up a hand to keep him from saying anything, not even thinking about how the boss might take it. “So what did you get from the humans, other than emotions?”

The words came more easily this time, as though she'd been thinking about it, subconsciously, just waiting for the right question to be asked. “Everyone feels the same. I can't… The eyewitness stories don't add up, they contradict and cross each other, but they all feel the same. There's none of the disruption I get when someone's breaking from the truth. They're all totally and absolutely convinced that they're telling the truth, even when they can't be. It's making me uncomfortable.” She stopped, tapped her fingers on the counter, her polished nails clicking. “This…this whole case is making me uncomfortable, and I haven't even had to talk to the victim,” she said thoughtfully.

No, she hadn't. Stosser should have brought her with him—but who knew that we'd have to question two different stories? The evidence we had should have been enough to settle what happened. Next time, we'd know better. Even if the Boss Dog insisted he would do it himself; he was the boss, but
we
were the investigators.

“There's too much belief,” Sharon went on, her expression changing slightly, like a shift of light. You only saw it if you were watching for it. “Too much certainty for it to be real.”

I almost understood what she was saying. Almost. “Didn't someone feel more certain, more…whatever truth feels like? I mean, everyone can't be lying.”

“No?” She sounded like she was up against the ropes, emotionally, and something Danny had said tickled something in my brain, about truth and subjectivity.

“Sharon…can everyone be telling the truth?”

Her head jerked up like I'd yanked a cord, and there was
a sparkle back in those lovely eyes. “Oh. Huh. Okay, that's trickier.”

The thought was a wicked nasty one, and I was talking it through even as she processed the suggestion. “Is that even possible? I mean, if one person's telling the truth, and the other has a story that contradicts it… I know truth is subjective but that's… Someone has to be lying!”

I listened to my words a second, and then added, “Or at least…they have to be not telling the truth. Right? I mean, even through a filter, there's truth and then there's not-truth. Right?”

Oh, god, my head hurt. Behind me, I heard Venec start to say something, then check it. I wasn't sure Sharon even noticed that he was there, as she sank into the sofa with a graceful movement that I envied madly. “There's an old joke one of the partners used to tell,” she said, indirectly responding to my question. “I don't remember the setup but the punch line was ‘the truth, the other truth, and the legal interpretation.' I never worried about the legal side, because that's not…it's not truth so much as it is best-supported-belief. But what I'm getting now…maybe if two people believe something with equal ferocity, they're both true? I mean, isn't that all religion is, anyway—strongly held beliefs claimed as The Truth? And maybe if the perps, being Talent, believed it strongly enough, it affected people who were there, watching?”

Venec made a louder noise that could have been either a cough or a laugh, and Sharon stopped, as though she suddenly realized he was there, but I ignored him. We were
not going to get into another religious “discussion” like happened last week. Not without referees handy, anyway.

“Yeah but…the difference between sexual assault and a girl coming on to you isn't like arguing over whose burning branch or dust-devil spoke louder,” I asserted, not looking at Venec, even though I could feel him coming closer.

Sharon focused on me again. “I don't know about then, but now—the guy got beat up pretty bad, saw his buddy smashed into dead pulp in front of him. There could be brain injuries they haven't found yet. Maybe he really does believe what he's saying? Or maybe he can't tell the difference anymore between what he did and how he justified it?”

“Could you tell, if you spoke to him?” Venec asked, finally joining into our confab directly.

Sharon considered the question, hard, humming under her breath. Finally she said, “I don't know. I've taken depositions from people in injury cases before, but… Hell, Ben, it would be easier to talk to the ki-rin. I could get a baseline from it….”

“Not possible,” Venec said, moving all the way into the office to stand between us. His dark curls were slicked down as usual, and he looked rested, but deeply annoyed. Not at us, though, I was pretty sure about that. “We have been informed that the ki-rin, overset by recent events and in mourning for the loss of its companion in such a brutal manner, has decided to return home, and will speak with no one while it undergoes a period of reflection and preparation prior to its travel. End quote.”

Not unexpected, really, but the news still settled like doom on the two of us.

“It's ducking us,” I said. Ki-rin didn't lie, so anything it said would be taken as a hundredweight of gold—like Sharon said, the baseline we could measure everyone else by—and the Council would accept it. Hell, everyone would accept words as gospel, from a ki-rin. So if the girl's story was true, why wasn't it talking?

“Or, equally possible,” Venec said, “all of the above claim is also true. It is in mourning and reacting perfectly within character. So far, every player in this scene has acted exactly to character.”

In character, telling contradicting truths… “You know what we need? We need a way to talk to the dead guy.”

“Bonnie!” Sharon, for the first time since I'd known her, looked seriously horrified. “That's…!”

“A joke, Shar. Okay? A joke.”

Mostly a joke. It was possible. Theoretically, technically possible. Current was akin to electricity, and electricity was what the body ran on, and for someone, as the saying goes, “only mostly dead” you could… But it wasn't done. In fact it Wasn't Done At All. Necromancy was one of the really old magics, the stuff that got left behind when Founder Ben—that's Ben Franklin to Nulls—codified the rules of current, and moved us away from superstition and into rational usage.

You might still find people practicing hedge magics; sympathetic magic, or charm-making, stuff like that. If you were Talent, they'd work, mostly. If you weren't…well, you might believe that they worked.

Messing with the not quite dead? No thanks. I'd let someone crazier and more high-res than me play in that minefield. Like the old ones, that was stuff best left uncalled. Venec just looked at us and didn't say anything, which made me wonder, a little uneasily, what his stance on necromancy was.

Nifty and Pietr showed up then, breaking the mood with a rather heated discussion about baseball that had obviously been going on for a while. While they were hanging up jackets, bitching to each other about stats of some incomprehensible function or another, Nick staggered in, and Venec kicked us into the main conference room.

Just walking into the room and sitting down, I felt the last lingering shreds of doubt and mental fuzziness fade. The break room was more comfortable to hang out in, but the moment I sat down at the conference table, I felt…energized? Maybe. More confident, less distracted. I guess J was right, and your surroundings really do make a difference: sofas were for schmoozing; straight-back chairs were for strategizing.

Or maybe it was just being surrounded by my pack that made me ready to get back on the hunt. I wasn't going to question it, right now.