Pack of Lies (8 page)

I resisted the urge to pat him on the top of his buzz-cut head. “It's not about calling them, it's about getting them.” He looked at me and I raised my hands palm-up in a don't ask-me gesture. “Not my kind of game, but some do it. So our girlfriend was playing the game but not paying the pot.”

“Looks like.”

Quiet fell in the room as we both stared at the pieces of paper. Magic was all sorts of fun and splashy, but this was how we did most of the grunt work: Everyone put some elbow grease and some brain sweat into the mix, and we stirred it with a big stick until it smelled right. Another Venec quote.

Pietr put down the file he'd been reading and looked over the table at the napkins, too. “There are three different bars there, at least.”

Nifty looked up at him, then down again at the table. “How can you tell that?”

“Different paper. Look at the textures.”

“We supposed to go check each bar, see who she might have chatted up?” He sounded discouraged.

“We should,” Pietr said.

“Why?” I tilted my head and looked at my coworker, playing devil's advocate. “You going to claim that she asked for it, somehow? That maybe she blew one of these guys off, before, and that's why they attacked her? Doesn't matter, to our job. We're not here for the why, just the who and the how. We know who did it. One guy's dead, the other's in custody, and the cops will get the story out of him. All we have to do is make sure the ki-rin's skewing was clean, or whatever the cop terminology is, and the case is closed. No need to poke around anything that happened before, right?”

“Right.” But he didn't sound convinced.

I looked at Nifty, who looked back at me and shrugged. He didn't know what was up with ghost-boy, either.

“It's not about poking into her personal life or accusing her of being a tease, Bonnie. I just have a bad feeling about this. Like there's something under the surface, and it's going to bite us if we're not careful.” Pietr was too mellow, as a rule, to be defensive, but he was skirting awfully close. Considering my own twitchiness, I wasn't going to rag on him for it.

“You got precog?” Nifty asked, interested. If so, he'd been holding out on us. Precog wasn't a common skill set, but it did happen, and would be amazingly useful in this job. My own kenning worked mostly on people I already knew and cared about, so it didn't quite qualify.

“No. I don't think so. I just…” He exhaled hard. “How would I know?”

That, I could tell him. “It feels bizarre, like a goose walking over your grave, only in your brain.”

Pietr considered that a moment, rubbing his fingers along the front of his shirt. “No. It's more like an itch somewhere I can't reach.”

“There's probably something you're seeing, but haven't identified. Did you…” I hesitated. “Did you look at the gleaning?”

He shook his head, a little stiffly. “Venec said no.”

“So it has to be something you saw on the site, maybe, or talking to people?”

“Yeah, I guess. But what? And how the hell would I know, if it didn't strike me enough to consciously remember?”

Good point. I had no answer.

“Did anyone say anything that gave you a wiggy feeling,” Nifty asked. “Was there anything in your report that you hesitated over, or rethought?”

I looked at Nifty in surprise. That sounded like something J would have asked me. Mr. Lawrence had better think about mentoring at some point, because he had the knack for it.

Pietr was considering the question. “I don't know. No.” He shrugged. “This whole thing, it's making me feel…urgh. Uncomfortable. Dirty.”

Huh. It might not have been something he saw, but something he was feeling. Like me. Of all the guys, it wouldn't surprise me if Pietr reacted that way. Nick got it on an intellectual level, but all those years of being overlooked and near-invisible because of a quirk he had no control over had given Pietr a level of empathy you didn't normally find in the average twentysomething male.

“Hey, guys.” Speak of the devil and he pops in. Nick wandered over to the coffee station and refilled his mug. Sharon had bought us all individual—and individualized—mugs a month ago, after one too many “wrong coffee” incidents. Nick's was a bright blue, with a yellow happy face with a bullet in the forehead. It had an odd sort of fascination for me, in a way that my own—a beautifully appropriate black one with a colorful but dead parrot on the side—didn't. “You hear the news?” he went on. “Girl's not going to press charges.”

“What?”

Pietr's yelp was outraged. I discovered that I wasn't even slightly surprised by the revelation. Depressed, but not surprised. Like I'd said to J last night, it's hard enough even today to come forward with sexual-assault charges. Having to explain how your attacker died? How about doing that without mentioning the ki-rin, Talent, the
Cosa Nostradamus
or anything else that would get you locked in the psych ward for evaluation? The very best scenario involved a
Cosa
-sympathetic cop and judge, where she'd still have to relive every minute of the attack; worst case brought up the possibility that they'd think she had killed the guy and nail her for manslaughter, provoked or not. And it's not like they
could punish the guy who died, or bring back her relationship with the ki-rin….

Nifty didn't look surprised, either. I bet he'd seen a lot of that kind of scared-silent, all the years he spent playing high school and college football. The bitterness in my own brain surprised me again. I knew, with the rational portion, that I was being unfair, tarring Nifty just 'cause he'd been a jock. But the rational part wasn't leading in this dance.

Nick was nodding sagely. “Stosser told Venec, who just told me. I think she thought the ki-rin was going to pretend it didn't happen, or something. She went totally hysterical in the emergency room.”

“Nicky, you're an insensitive asshole,” I said. Nick must have realized how his words sounded, because he blushed. “I didn't…”

“The ki-rin is refusing to acknowledge her now, isn't it?” Pietr asked

The bitterness in my brain escaped into my voice. “You expected anything different? That's how ki-rin are—it's like asking a dryad not to put down roots, or a griffon not to fly. It's what they are—she had to know that before she agreed to the terms, and evidence is that she'd adhered to her part of it all the way up to that night. Being a ki-rin's companion isn't something you pull out of a Cracker Jack box. There's no greater honor, by fatae standards, a human can aspire to, and one asshole with more brawn than humanity took that away from her, for his own jollies. You think you'd be calm and rational right now, if it was you in that emergency room?”

That pretty much put a damper on the entire conversation,
and Nick took his coffee and his mug out with enough speed that I almost felt sorry for snapping at him. Almost.

“So if we can't do anything for her, and the guy who did the attacking is dead…are we still on the job?” Nifty wondered, giving up on his napkin-puzzle. “I mean, what does it matter? Christ, I'm sorry for the girl, but I can't see our client paying for our time if the girl is going to sweep it under the rug her ownself. It's over and done with, nothing to see here, move along, thanks for your time. Right?”

He probably wasn't wrong, and I'd wondered the same thing myself. Except… “J says—” it wasn't really a secret in the office that my mentor had Connections into all the best gossip lines, or that I tapped into them as needed “—that there's been a bunch of fatae-related incidents in town already. Folk are tetchy, rumbly—like the crowd we saw at the scene.” I saw the guys process that, then nod. “He thinks the Eastern Council thought that if they did some proactive digging into this, or had us do it…”

“They'd be off the hook for whatever happened after,” Pietr finished for me. “Nice.”

“Council.” The disgust in that single word dripped from Nifty's mouth and splashed into a thick puddle. “So that's who we were working for—again?”

Other than Stosser, I was the only Council-side member of the pack, and even my connection was only through J. Lonejacks didn't have much use for the Council, either the actual seated members who made the rules or the general members who followed those rules. Lonejacks didn't have much use for anyone who followed rules, period, which made for interesting group interactions—and probably why
Stosser and Venec kept us on such a loose rein most of the time, when we weren't in training.

“You didn't guess that?” Pietr sounded surprised. “Most of our work's going to come through Council contacts, at the very least, not lonejacks. Lonejacks settle their own scores. They're not going to suddenly step back and let us determine who's at fault—not until we have a lot more street cred, anyway.”

I had a feeling Pietr's family was Gypsy—they tended to be more clannish than the independent lonejacks, but just as regulation-scorning, hence the nickname—but he had a strong pragmatic streak that put even Venec to shame.

“Council leads may be callous bastards,” he went on, “but they're the callous bastards with a checkbook. And their checks clear faster than most. Get used to it.”

Nifty looked like he wanted to argue the point, but couldn't.

“Doesn't matter, anyway,” I reminded them. “Until we're told otherwise, we're still on the job.”

“Here…” Pietr held out the file he'd been reading, offering it to me. “The dossier Ben put together, plus what we were able to add in the follow-up.”

“Give me the highlights,” I said, not taking the file. I thought better hearing information than I did reading it.

“Right. Dead would-be rapist was a local boy—lonejack, but his mentor's long dead and his only remaining family's crossed the river down in Ohio.” Crossing the river meant going from lonejack to Council, or vice versa. It happened, but not all that often. “Not very well-liked, from what the people who were willing to talk about him said.”

“Nasty? Or did he owe everyone money?”

“Had a less than savory reputation with women. No criminal charges, but a restraining order against an ex, and rumors he didn't always take no for an answer. Nobody's surprised he moved up—or down—to assault.”

Nifty made a note in his pad. “Someone should have taken him out before this. Ten minutes in the alley would've done it.”

Nifty had two little sisters still living back home, I suddenly remembered. I wasn't going to argue the pros and cons of presumptive justice, though, not right now. Especially when I pretty much agreed with him.

“His friend, on the other hand, the guy who landed in the recovery ward, is fourth gen lonejack, and a first-time offender. Hangs out with a stupid crowd, reportedly, but stupid isn't a crime, more's the pity. The two of them don't have any connections before about a month ago, when they reportedly met in a bar, and hit it off. So we've got bad seed leading bent sapling astray….”

“Or giving him the courage to do what he wanted to, anyway,” I said. The fact that the guy was there in the first place made him just as responsible for what happened as the dead guy. The ki-rin might only be interested in actions. Me, I thought about intent, too.

Sharon came in from the outside hallway, her hair for once not in the sleek coif I coveted, but rather loose down to her shoulders, and her china-blue eyes were tired-looking. There was a lot of that going around today. She took off her coat and handed it to Pietr, who automatically hung it in the closet for her. I don't think either of them realized
they'd done it; Sharon just had that aura around her—alpha female—and Pietr was our omega. “Is Venec around?”

“In back,” Pietr said. “Why, what's up?”

“You finally quitting?” Nifty asked.

She shot him a glare, but you could tell that her heart wasn't in it. Considering that the two of them usually wrassled for alpha spot in the team with gleeful ferocity, that set off all sorts of alarms in my head. In Nifty's, too, because he actually sat up straight. “You're not, are you?”

“No. I'm not. You don't win that easily.” She suddenly realized we were still on alert, and waved her hand. “It's nothing. I'm fine, it's nothing to do with the case. Just something Venec asked me to look into last night, is all.”

Huh. I was going to make a crack about being teacher's pet, but whatever it was, it must have been grim, and she obviously didn't want to talk about it—or couldn't, if it was on Venec's orders—so we let her go in search of the Big Dog without further comment.

“So if we're all here, cheer, cheer, where's Stosser?” I asked, curious, after she'd gone.

None of the guys had an answer for that. “Haven't seen him since the scene,” Nifty admitted. He sank back into the sofa, and put his feet up on the table, dislodging the napkin bits. “You think something's up?”

“With Stosser? You think I have a clue what's in Stosser's mind?” I paused, and gave a delicately staged little shudder. “You think I want to go there?” Genius minds were scary places.

I sat down on the other end of the sofa, not so meh-depressed that I didn't notice I was still keeping an unusual
distance between the guys and myself…but I hadn't twitched when Sharon came in, and the women on either side of me on the subway hadn't triggered it, either. My brain gratefully seized on something concrete to analyze. Gender, definitely, and not mitigated by the size of a guy, since Nifty was all bulk and Pietr was slender. Raw nerves again, survival sense kicking in overtime when a male someone, known or otherwise, got into my personal space.

If you weren't used to noticing things, it probably wasn't, well, noticeable. Problem was that PUPI training was to
be
investigators, to notice things, and look for their causes. I saw it. I had to believe that the guys saw it, too. And nobody commented on it, which meant they were treating me as damaged, or at least delicate goods. Damn it.