Dragon Precinct (13 page)

Bogg stared down at her for several seconds. Then he turned and slammed his fist into the table a second time.

This time it broke the table in half.

As he exited the interrogation room, Torin said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to bill you for that.”

“W
ell, it’s about damn time
somebody
arrived!”

Lieutenant Dru exchanged a glance with Lieutenant Hawk as they approached the apartment house. The woman standing in the doorway wore a battered housecoat, had a nose that was too big for the shape of her head, eyes that were too small for the rest of her face, hair that was too unkempt to be believed, and a voice that was too deep for her gender. Though she was obviously human, Dru had to wonder if she had some troll in her blood, especially given her girth, which almost exceeded that of the doorway.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“I sent that damn boy out two hours ago to fetch one’a ya! He’s been goin’ at it for longer than that, an’ I’m
sick
of it!”

Again, Dru looked at his partner’s dark face; this time Hawk shrugged, his dreadlocks bouncing. They had come here because Jonas informed them of a sighting of their rapist suspect going into this building. They had been about to head home for the day, but—as this was their first actual lead and all—they decided to follow up on it. So they wended their way through the ever-darkening streets of Dragon Precinct, which were illuminated only by recently lit torches—Dragon couldn’t afford the magicked lanterns they had on the streets of Unicorn. Several people recognized what their brown cloaks symbolized and asked if they were going to capture whoever murdered Gan Brightblade and/or Olthar lothSirhans.

“Hell,” Hawk had said after the fourth time they had responded negatively, “we should just be sayin’ yes. Beats seein’ that look on they faces.”

Dru had just shrugged and run his hands through his close-cropped brown hair. “No big deal.”

“To you, maybe. Torin and Danthres, they be gettin’ all’a good cases, all’a overtime—”

“—and all the shit from the other side of the castle. I’m all for the overtime, but I can live without meetings in Rom-Shit’s office. Remember that crap with his nephew?”

Hawk had nodded gravely. Sir Rommett’s nephew was the prime suspect in a double murder—of which he turned out to be innocent, but Rommett had spent so much time twisting himself into a pretzel to protect the boy from the charges that he made it damn near impossible for them to investigate. If the chamberlain had simply left well enough alone, they would have found the real killer in less than a day, and that would have been that.

“Course,” Hawk had said, “we still got Osric on our asses ’bout this rapist.”

“Osric’s
always
on our asses. That’s how we know he’s awake. But I can’t just laugh off the shit the way Torin does, and I
sure
as hell don’t have the balls to mouth off at the uppers the way Danthres does.” Dru had shuddered, remembering the reaming he’d gotten from Sir Rommett in his office. Scared to death of losing his job and its concomitant pension, which would allow him and his wife and kids to retire in peace in some nice city very far from Cliff’s End, Dru just sat there and took it, nodding and saying “Yes, sir” a lot. It was the most humiliating experience of his life, and he had no urge to repeat it.

“Yeah, well, don’t be praisin’ Danthres’s balls
too
much. She keep up like this, she gonna get the big boot, and then
we’re
gonna get the shit. ’Cause you can guaran-damn-tee that they ain’t gonna give Gan Brightblade’s murder to Iaian an’ the fish.”

Eventually they arrived at the apartment house. The informant—a merchant who worked the corner diagonally across from the intersection where the house was located—assured Dru and Hawk that a man matching the description he’d been given by the guard who walked this beat went into the house and hadn’t come out. The guard in question—an alert young man named Kellan—verified the merchant’s story.

Now they stood in the doorway, confronted by this woman from hell. “Who are you, ma’am?” Dru asked before they went any further.

“I run this place—it’s a
nice
place, an’ that’s ’cause I don’t let this sorta thing go on.”

“What sorta thing?” Hawk asked.

“Fornicatin’!” she practically screamed. “I won’t have it, but that damn bastard’s been at it for hours! An’ I can’t get the damn door open!”

“Don’t you have a key?”

“Bastard changed the lock,” she muttered. “That’s against the lease agreement, by the way. He’s a fornicator
and
a contract-breaker! I want him arrested!”

Dru shook his head and looked again at Hawk. The latter shrugged. If this woman ran the building, they’d need her cooperation to find the rapist. And dealing with this particular domestic squabble would probably get on her good side.
Assuming she has one. Hell, she probably hates fornicating so much because she doesn’t get any practice.

“Take us to the apartment, please, ma’am,” Dru said.

They entered the lobby and started walking up the creaky wooden stairs. “You gonna break the door down?” she asked. “I can’t afford to replace no doors. They’re oak, y’know.”

When they arrived at the top of the landing, Dru saw that the doors, while wood, were
not
oak. The owner no doubt was hatching plans to overcharge when billing the city-state for replacing the door they were about to break. “No worries, ma’am. The door will be intact. We’ve got a skeleton key.”

With that, Dru reached into a pouch in the belt he wore and pulled out a talisman in the shape of a skull. All the detective teams were issued these by the Brotherhood as a less destructive alternative to breaking down locked doors.

Troll-Woman led them to a door on the far end of the second story. Dru could hear the cause of her complaint from the moment they arrived on the landing. The moans, grunts, and groans of two people having very passionate sex echoed throughout the hallway, which made Dru wonder how loud it was
inside
the apartment. He also wistfully wondered why he and his wife never made that much noise anymore.

“See what I mean? Fornicatin’.” Troll-Woman shook her head. “First Gan Brightblade, then Olthar lothSirhans, now this. City’s goin’ straight to the sewer in a hurry.”

Hawk grinned, his white teeth a contrast to his dark skin. “Shall we be tryin’ the simple approach ’fore we break an’ enter?”

Dru indicated the door. “Be my guest.”

“What’s the name, ma’am?” Hawk asked.

“Torval, but I’m just gonna call him ‘bastard’ from now on.”

Hawk chuckled as he pounded on the door with a fist. “Mr. Torval, open up! This is the Castle Guard!”

To Dru’s annoyance, neither pounding nor verbal imploration had any discernible impact on the moaning, grunting, or groaning.

“Okay,” Dru muttered and held the skull in proximity to the lock. He concentrated. The way Boneen explained it to him the one time he asked—well, actually, the twentieth time he asked, and the M.E. finally realized that he’d get no peace until he provided the lieutenant with an explanation—was that the skull housed a spell that would focus the wielder’s concentration and open any nearby lock. It didn’t seem to matter what one concentrated on—it was force of will that triggered the spell—so Dru thought very hard about how much he wished they could have the unlimited overtime Danthres and Torin had.

The eyes of the skull glowed even as the door made a satisfying clicking noise.

Then the door made another clicking noise. Frowning, Hawk tried it, only to find that it was again locked. “Shit.”

Dru shook his head. “He must have the door magicked. How the hell does someone living in this shithole afford a Locked Door Spell?”

“Hey!” Troll-Woman said. “I run a good home here!”

Ignoring her, Hawk held up his arms. “I ain’t gonna be bustin’ down no more doors. Cap’n tol’ me the next Healing Spell for my shoulders’ll be comin’ outta my damn paycheck. I got a family to support.”

“You got a father who knows his son’s a soft touch.” Dru sighed.

“Hey, he’s a cripple.”

Dru started to say something, then thought better of it. Everyone knew that Hawk’s father was no more crippled than Hawk himself. However, occasionally complaining about how much his leg hurt was enough to convince his son that he should support the old man with his Guard wages.

“Let me try again.” He held up the skull and concentrated again, this time on how much he wished his partner would wise up and make his father get a damn job.

This time it took an extra second for the second click to relock the door.

“Shit. Guess we gotta break it down,” Hawk said.

“No, wait,” Dru said, putting a hand on Hawk’s arm. “I think I’m making progress.”

He held up the skull a third time and thought very long and very hard about how much he wanted his wife to make the noises he was hearing from the female half of the couple on the other side of the door.

The door clicked only once.

When in doubt, go for sexual frustration,
Dru thought as he put the skull back in his belt. Hawk grinned and opened the door.

The apartment they saw was fairly nondescript. It was a one-room affair, with a waste bucket in one corner, a basin in the opposite corner, one filthy window in the center of one wall, another wall covered in shelves that were stuffed with various pieces of parchment, and no furniture save a very large bed.

On that bed were two humans. The woman seemed to be glowing slightly. She had no obvious reaction to Dru and Hawk’s entrance.

The man—Torval, presumably—did, however. He looked up in shock.

That shock was matched by the two lieutenants, who found themselves staring at a man with small, beady eyes, a nose that had been broken more than once, oversized lips, thatches of hair on his cheeks that looked like a failed attempt to grow a beard, and enough hair all over the rest of his unclothed body for him to pass as an orangutan in a pinch.

This rather unfortunate concatenation of features matched that of the man Dru and Hawk last saw in Boneen’s scrying pool when the M.E. showed them the results of the peel-back of the rapist’s last victim.

“It’s our guy!” Dru cried.

Torval leapt out of the bed and ran toward the wall with the window.

“Stop!” Hawk yelled. “Don’t make—”

Then he ran
through
the wall—again, just as he had in the images Boneen had shown Dru and Hawk from each of the crime scenes.

True, they had known he was capable of this—it was why he’d been so damned hard to catch, as the guards who had chased him said—but it was still fairly disconcerting to see it up close like that.

As soon as he had left the bed, the woman disappeared in a puff of smoke, which, along with the glow, identified her as a sex-simulacrum.

Dru immediately turned and ran out of the apartment. He almost knocked Troll-Woman over on his way out, let out a hasty “Excuse me,” and ran down the stairs, taking them three or four at a time. As he ran, he thought,
How the hell does someone who lives in this dump afford a Walk Through Walls Spell, a Locked Door Spell,
and
a sex-sim?

Only when he reached the street did he realize that Hawk hadn’t followed him.
Some partner,
he thought, irritated. Hawk could usually be relied upon to have Dru’s back.

Putting Hawk’s odd behavior aside, he turned his attention to the street. Unfortunately, not only was there no sign of a naked man running through the street, there was no sign that anyone had seen one. The latter wasn’t necessarily conclusive, as it was dark and folks in this neighborhood tended to mind their own business, but still…

“Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

Dru turned to see Kellan jogging up to him. “Did you see him?”

“See who?”

“Dammit.” Dru looked up at the side of the building. The other side of the wall that Torval ran through was open space, but it wasn’t far above the roof of the building next door. Even barefoot, Torval probably easily ran off up there without anyone noticing, especially with the building cornices shadowing the rooftops from the street lanterns.

He turned back to Kellan. “Get the word out—we’ve got our rapist. His name is Torval, and right now he’s running along the rooftops of Dragon, totally naked.
Find
him.”

Kellan quickly nodded. “You got it, sir. We won’t let him stop us now.”

“If you see one of the youth squad—”

“Right ’ere, sir.”

Dru turned around again, and looked down to see a young man dressed in rags that barely fit and dirt streaking his face.

“Hear tell you found’a rapist,” the boy said. “He ’round?”

“Not yet, but we’ve got a name. Listen, I need you to run to Dragon Precinct and tell Sergeant Kel to put out a search for a naked man matching the description of the rapist—his name is Torval—and get the M.E. over here to check his apartment. You got that?”

“No problem, sir,” the boy said in tones much more deferential than members of the youth squad usually employed. Dru reached into a pouch on his belt to fetch a copper piece, but the boy put up his hand. “This one’s free. That Torval guy? He raped m’mom. Whatever you need, you got from me.”

There were tears welling in the boy’s eyes as he ran off. Now that Dru thought about it, he saw a resemblance between the kid and the second victim.
We’ll get him,
Dru thought.

“ ’Ey, Dru! Get your bony ass up ’ere!”

Dru looked up to see Hawk sticking his head out of Torval’s apartment. “What’re you still doing up there?” he asked angrily. “You’re supposed to be my partner, an—”

“Shutcha damn mouth and start gettin’ your damn ass up those damn stairs and back in this
damn apartment!”

Blinking a few times, Dru stood his ground before finally commencing to move back into the building.
Wonder what he found up there.

He ran back upstairs, his sword banging against his leg. When he reentered Torval’s room, he asked, “All right, what’s so important that—?”

“Look at these shelves.”

Dru looked again at the shelves that lined one wall—as before, they were stuffed to the brim with assorted loose parchments. He turned back to Hawk. “It’s full’a parchments. So what? You’re my
partner,
you’re supposed to—”