Hidden Crimes (3 page)

“Shit,” Rick said even as he dug out the
keys. He might not like giving up control of his car, but everybody
knew Nate was the best driver.

“Should we call Carmine?” Tony asked. Carmine
was the final member of their five-man squad, an older wolf with a
wife and family.

“No time,” Adam said. “He’ll have to read
about it in the reports.”

Adam flashed his canines in a grin anyone
would have called wolfish. Alpha energy boiled off him, his
normally green eyes taking on a flame blue glow. As often as wolves
went into law enforcement, that’s how much they hated members of
their own species choosing a criminal route. Nate’s heart thumped
faster despite his preference for keeping cool. His alpha’s relish
for this chase was infectious.

Because they might come up against anything,
Adam shoved two depowering charms in his back pocket. Nate tucked
the taser Tony handed him into his waistband.

“We ready, boss?” he asked, adrenaline
tightening his fist around Rick’s car keys.

“We’re ready,” Adam assured him.

~

Resurrection’s warehouse district stretched
along the banks of the North River. Once known for shipping and
manufacture, today it combined actual warehouses with condo
conversions. Aspirations to trendiness aside, the area’s yuppie
colonizers hadn’t yet conquered its seediness. The address dispatch
had given Adam was in the district’s less savory reaches.

Nate spotted the sign for Quince Street
painted on the brick of an old sardine plant, now a by-the-night
boarding house for demons. If demons could behave themselves, the
fae allowed them in Resurrection. They seemed unlikely to improve
the locale’s cachet. Wrinkling his nose, Nate turned Rick’s dull
gray Buick into the narrow thoroughfare. Quince ran uphill, its
steepness creating the impression that the worn-down buildings were
about to roll down on them. Nate had an urge to pull a U-turn right
out of there.

“Do you feel that?” he murmured to Adam, who
sat up front next to him.

His alpha nodded, hands braced on the
dash—perhaps to resist an impulse to grab the wheel. “Someone has a
go-away spell fired up nearby. Maybe not on this street but
close.”

The realization tensed all of them. Nate
ordered his foot to stay on the pedal, sticking to a cautious but
not unnatural rate of travel. Two workmen in spattered overalls
passed on foot to their left, on the opposite pavement from where
the repulsion spell was strongest. The pair walked briskly, like
they couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

“There’s the sign for the tobacco shop,” Tony
said softly. The shop was also on their left, the exotic hookahs in
the window suggesting it sold more than legal smokes.

“Repulsion spells are pricey,” Rick put in,
leaning toward the front seat as his brother had. “If Vasili didn’t
buy the enchantment, maybe he’s been using its shadow to hide
in.”

This would require self-control but wasn’t
impossible, considering how intensely Vasili must want to steer
clear of his brother.

“The shop door’s opening.” Nate turned the
car to the side as if about to park. Not wanting to get too close,
he slowed to an inching crawl.

The timing couldn’t have been better. As they
watched the glass of the door shimmer with movement, the gawky form
of Ivan the Terrible’s little brother emerged from the small smoke
shop. He wore old clothes and a cap pulled low on his forehead. As
disguises went, it didn’t do much good. His was a face and figure
they’d memorized.

“Gentle now,” Adam cautioned, easing his door
open.

Tony and Rick left the car just as
silently.

It was Rick who caught Vasili’s nervous eye.
The strapping wolf was on the nearer side of the car and just too
damn big to miss.

Vasili stiffened and appeared to curse as he
noted their black bulletproof police vests. Warned, he took off at
a dead run. His long legs were made for it. Nate wasn’t certain
he
could have caught up with him.

They were pack then, even more than they were
cops. Adam didn’t have to bark instructions. They’d pursued prey
together too many times before. Coordinating by instinct, Adam and
Tony pelted up the street after Vasili, while Rick pulled himself
monkey-style up the nearest warehouse’s fire escape. From the
vantage of the roof, he’d watch where their target went, then relay
it to the others through their linked earpieces.

Alone in the car, Nate wanted to circle the
block to his left but decided this was what Vasili was counting on.
If he’d been hiding here a while, he’d have numbed himself to the
repulsion spell. What Nate ought to do was drive as close to its
source as the car would get.

Gritting his teeth, he did exactly that.

In spite of his good intentions, he was only
able to do it at five creeping miles per hour. The closer he got to
the skin-crawly thickness, the more his foot tried to ease up on
the pedal. Swearing under his breath, he slung the Buick onto the
sidewalk in front of a boarded up blanket factory. Sweating like
he’d
been buried in blankets, he ducked under the plywood
that had been partially torn off the front door.

To his dismay, he heard footsteps running
inside, presumably searching for Vasili. Tony and Adam must have
reached the factory before him, which he—as the one person with a
vehicle—was never going to hear the end of. His competitive streak
wouldn’t let him retreat, though his legs were shaking almost too
much to walk. Going deeper into the dimness, he found a set of
trash-strewn stairs and went up.

People had squatted here but not recently.
The smells his wolf nose picked up were old. He forced himself to
the second floor and pushed through a swinging door. The go-away
spell was even stronger, like nightmares congealing the molecules
of the air. He was in a long corridor, shut metal doors with glass
porthole windows on either side of him. The floor was concrete, not
polished like his loft but rough and broken up. There was nothing
here. No sounds. No movement. He could leave if he wanted to.

Nate didn’t like that he wanted to very
much.

“Fuck this shit,” he whispered.

He smelled something then, a whiff that was
out of place. It reminded him of oil of cedar. Under that, he was
certain he smelled blood.

The blood woke his wolf and, apparently, his
wolf had some immunity to this particular magical compulsion. His
spine straightened and his knees steadied. He strode to the third
door down, from which the scent had come.

With his wolf’s lack of consideration for
consequences, he snapped the lock and went in.

For three long blinks, he had no idea what he
was looking at.

The room he stood in didn’t belong in a
factory, at least not one that had woven blankets a hundred years
ago. The space wasn’t big, maybe twelve by twelve and about ten
feet high, its walls sheathed in steel. Someone must have erected
this metal box inside the factory’s original loom bay. Its walls
and ceiling were featureless, and it didn’t contain furniture. A
round drain, maybe a foot in diameter, marked the low spot on the
floor. It was from this that the scent of blood and cedar came.

None of this should have frightened him. He
was within the confines of the aversion spell, and it no longer
affected him. He walked to the drain and knelt. The cover was
steel, with generous holes piercing it. Nate used a thumb and two
fingers to lift the thing away.

The pipe underneath was clean except for a
small pale shape he couldn’t quite make out. The object was lodged
about three feet down where the pipe elbowed. Something more than
squeamishness inspired him to dig out the latex gloves he kept in
his bulletproof vest’s pocket. His heart thudding in his throat,
Nate stretched his arm inside.

He pulled it back holding a child’s shoe.

It was a nice shoe: sturdy white leather in
the high-necked lace-up style parents bought to steady wobbly
ankles while their kids learned how to walk—the sort they preserved
in bronze as keepsakes. Fluids had washed the leather; Nate saw
that from the stains, but at the moment it was bone dry.

He nearly dropped it when Rick called his
name from the hall.

“We got the bad guy, Nate,” he said in a
teasing way. “It’s safe to come out now.”

Nate stood, shoe cupped within his cradling
palm. Werewolves weren’t psychic, as a rule. Changing shape was the
main magic they performed. All the same, he felt very strange, like
his nerves were vibrating in ways they weren’t meant to.

“In here,” he called hoarsely.

Rick appeared in the steel room’s door. His
mouth fished open at what lay behind it.

Nate had never been so happy to see his
beta’s good-natured face. Rick was the epitome of normal, a
slap-your-back high school jock who only occasionally wore wolf’s
clothing. Nate extended the hand with the baby shoe. “We need to
get this to the lab. And probably ask the precinct Seer to take a
scan.”

“Shit,” Rick said, a sentiment Nate
understood perfectly.

~

The city’s criminal forensics lab was backed
up. Every pair of hands they had was sorting evidence from a secret
burial chamber that had been discovered under a high rise on the
East Side. Normally, residents wouldn’t have minded living atop a
tomb. Resurrectioners had strong nerves, and the units were
rent-controlled. Problem was, the nearly departed weren’t RIPing.
Figuring out why they’d decided to cause a ruckus had become a
nightmare.

To make matters worse, the precinct psychic
was on vacation.

“Vacation?” Nate burst out. It was late. He
sat at Adam’s kitchen table with his boss and Ari. Earlier, Adam
had promised to work on getting their case moved up in priority,
and Nate had felt compelled to check on his progress. “Is that even
allowed? Shouldn’t she be working the East Side thing with the rest
of them?”

Seeing how upset he was, Adam reached across
the beat-up table to wrap his palm over Nate’s forearm. “She
was
working it. There are hundreds of restless spirits at
the site. Evidently, talking to them is exhausting the
mediums.”

Usually, the touch of any pack member
soothed. To his wolf, the contact was instinctively comforting. It
meant he wasn’t alone, and that someone had his back. Tonight, he
couldn’t settle, not even when Ari also laid her hand behind his
tense neck. Because he liked her, Nate struggled not to jerk away.
She meant well. He simply wasn’t in the mood to be calmed.

Maybe she sensed this. She let her hand fall
away from him. “Why does an empty room have you tied in knots?
You’re usually laid-back, no matter what.”

Nate wondered if Adam had told her about the
baby shoe. Maybe not, considering her recent motherhood. “Something
bad happened in that room,” he said. “And that go-away spell was
recently refreshed. Someone was planning on using it again.”

“Vasili claimed he didn’t know anything about
it,” Adam reminded him.

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he? He’s got enough
on his plate without adding accessory to whatever the hell this
is.”

“All right,” Adam said, though his temper
seemed to be thinning. To his credit, Adam always tried to be an
even-tempered boss. “I’ll let Rick and Tony have at him tomorrow.
Those two are good at interrogation, and they understand brother
ties. If Vasili’s hiding something, they’ll crack it out of
him.”

“Are you hungry?” Ari pushed back her chair.
“I could heat up some lasagna.”

Nate looked at her, muss-haired and half
swallowed by an old RPD T-shirt of Adam’s. Her worried eyes made
her look like an innocent, though Nate knew she wasn’t that. He’d
watched those same baby blues face down demons without flinching.
At the moment, she looked sleepy. He’d woken her when he knocked on
Adam’s door, though thankfully not Kelsey.

“Sorry,” he said, meaning it. “I shouldn’t
have bothered you with this. I’ll go home now and catch a few hours
sleep before tomorrow.”

He rose and Adam rose with him, walking side
by side with him to the door.

“We won’t let this drop,” Adam assured him.
“We’ll find out who was using that room and why.”

Nate nodded, not quite meeting his alpha’s
eye. His throat was tight, his normally cast-iron stomach uneasy.
Though he couldn’t explain the feeling, he knew time was of the
essence in solving this mystery.

A man like Nate had passions. Three of his
biggest were French press coffee, good red wine, and Outsider-style
cherry pie. Something about those tart ruby fruits glistening in
sweet sauce had the power to make his troubles seem like small
things.

At present, his loft had coffee, a
well-stocked wine closet, but not one bite of pie. Tony must have
snuck in at some point and raided his supply.