Shadow's Fall (22 page)

Faith supplied a small plastic evidence bag that was already labeled with the date and location; the Prime had harvested several already that housed various bits of blown-up detritus that could be pieces of bomb or possibly pieces of Monroe, she couldn’t tell which. A series of samples from the floor and walls had been sent for analysis yesterday to test for explosive residue and anything else Hunter Development could find. David’s quest was to find evidence of the bomb itself.

He held up the bag and peered at the small fragment of metal he’d retrieved; it was a section of a disk about the size of a button, and she would have thought it
was
a button. David brought it over to the table, under the light, and, after switching one of the dials on his scanner, ran it over the button.

“Transmitter,” he said. “In fact … I’ll be damned … it’s remarkably similar to the one that Hart brought to me last time he was here. Same technology, and I’ll bet …”

Faith watched, wondering for the thousandth time—that week—about his sanity, as David leaned in close to the wall where he’d found the button and
sniffed
the bricks.

“Sire,” she said, “you know how people think you’re crazy?”

“Do they?” he asked absently.

“Well, I do, anyway.”

David straightened and faced her. “Come smell this.”

“Not a chance in hell, Sire.”

He laughed. “All right, I’ll spare you—it smells very faintly of acetone.”

“Nail polish remover?”

“I don’t think it’s actually acetone. I do think it’s a liquid explosive, something along the lines of nitroglycerin. Liquid nitroglycerin isn’t as unstable as people think it is, but a good, sharp shock will still detonate it. Based on the spatter patterns …”

“I do love it when you talk spatter patterns.”

“ … he was standing about right here and blew out in all
directions, which means either he was holding a bottle of the stuff, or …”

He trailed off.

“Or?” she prompted.

“Given that we haven’t found any evidence of a container, I would have to assume it was taken internally. If this transmitter was the same as the last one, it had a tiny charge inside it, and if that went off anywhere on his body …” David made a
boom!
gesture.

“Wait … if he drank it, that means he killed himself.”

“Unless he didn’t know he was drinking it.”

“But that kind of thing is highly toxic, Sire. He would have gotten sick.”

David nodded, considering. “True. He probably would have vomited it up within minutes of ingestion … if he was conscious. If whoever Misted in here knocked him out first, then poured the explosive down his throat or even injected it with a hypodermic, then stuck the transmitter in his mouth, for example, and Misted out, then set off the charge, there would be no evidence left behind besides remnants of the transmitter itself.”

“Why not just punch him in the stomach to blow it, then, and not leave any evidence? Or—here’s a wild idea—stake him?”

“Stake him and you risk getting blood on yourself and being seen with stained clothes. This way he could set it off at a distance, and all that’s left are a few fragments of metal and traces of chemical residue. Best of all, liquid explosives are easy to make from common ingredients. There’s no way to trace them back to the bomber himself. And I didn’t get a damn thing off the last transmitter even before it blew, so I doubt there’ll be much on this one either.”

“So we’re nowhere, still,” Faith said. “Fantastic.”

“Not exactly nowhere.”

“How so?”

David began gathering up the sample bags and his tools, and said, “I’m going to get a closer look at this fragment. If in fact it is the same design as the one from three years ago,
we know the two were made by the same manufacturer. There aren’t a whole lot of people who deal in this kind of tech. Chances are the same person who left behind the first one was responsible for this, too.”

“But you said Hart didn’t have anything to do with the first transmitter—that he found it by a dead Elite. Shadow intelligence was that whoever was killing Hart’s people is still doing it, just only once in a while to spook him … Hart brought you the earpiece thinking you were behind it, right? Wouldn’t that mean Hart
didn’t
kill Monroe?”

“That’s making the wild assumption that Hart was telling the truth about the earpiece in the first place,” David reminded her. “At the time I believed him. He seemed sincerely disturbed by the loss of his Elite. But I admit I could have been duped. I’m going to have to revisit my notes from back then and compare them to whatever I can get off this. Finding its origins became less of a priority with everything else that was going on, but now that I have pieces of two of them, I might make more progress.”

As they left the interrogation room and locked it behind them, David handed her the instrument case long enough to strip off the plastic coat and gloves and stuff them in the trash. Underneath it he had on jeans and a tourist-looking T-shirt advertising someplace called Jaynestown, Canton.

“If Hart didn’t kill Monroe …” Faith began, not really sure where the sentence was going to go; she had no idea what the alternatives were.

“Then another Signet probably did,” David finished for her.

“Sire …”

He stopped walking. “What’s wrong?”

“We have to consider … it might have been Deven. He was alone with Monroe when we walked in on them. He gave him blood—what if the explosive was mixed in the bag?”

David lifted his eyes to the star-flecked sky, sighing wearily. “The thought had crossed my mind. I just don’t see what advantage he’d gain by killing his own agent after
going to all that trouble to get Monroe into Hart’s Elite and having him botch the shooting, then get caught. It makes far more sense for Hart to have done it to destroy evidence connecting him to the crime. Plus, as you said, it would have been hard to get Monroe to drink the stuff—I’ve never tasted nitroglycerin, but I’m betting it comes through the taste of blood.”

“Red Shadow operatives are more than willing to die on command, Sire.”

“True. But again, why? Monroe was supposed to testify against Hart. Deven hates Hart as much as I do. And Deven, for all his faults, doesn’t throw his agents’ lives away without good reason. It would have taken Monroe decades to get to Claret level; that’s a lot of time and training gone to waste.”

“I don’t know,” Faith answered truthfully. “I’m just saying it could have been him. His agenda is about three miles past inscrutable.”

“Acknowledged, Second. And as much as I don’t want to believe that Deven would conspire against us, he was willing to let Miranda get shot, and although I think … or want to think … that his intentions are good, who knows? He operates from a rather skewed sense of morality. He’s not above lying to me, that’s for damn sure.”

The Prime started toward the Haven again, and she fell into step beside him, frustrated. “I hate this,” she said. “Is there anyone left who can be trusted?”

He offered her a smile. “Besides you? I doubt it.”

She nearly tripped over a nonexistent pebble in her sudden discomfort. “I … I appreciate that, Sire.”

David held open the side door for her. “At least I have something to work with. I only hope it’s the only transmitter Hart—or whoever—left here.”

Faith froze halfway over the threshold.

Expecting her to have entered already, David nearly blundered into her; he caught himself on the door frame and said, “What the hell?”

She stepped out of the way, brain spinning, and put her
head in her hands. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “Stupid, stupid—”

“Faith, what are you talking about?”

Averting her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see his face, Faith reached into her pocket and handed him Jeremy’s cuff link.

Eleven

“Hi everyone … it’s Miranda. As you can tell by my awesome fashion statement here, I’m out of commission for a while. I wanted to thank you all for your wonderful support. I heard today that the blood bank has had a record number of donors …”

Stella paused the video, biting her lip.

She’d always played it off as a trick of the light, or a reflection, but … the necklace
was
glowing. She could see it through Miranda’s hospital gown, just barely, and there was no way
that
was a reflection. Especially now that Stella had seen that other guy’s green one doing the same thing.

She grounded and centered herself, then lowered her shielding enough that she could See, and started the video again.

“ … going to be a while before I’m back onstage, but I’ll be keeping you up to date here on the website. And since I can’t really go anywhere, I’ve got plenty of time to work on songs for the new album … as soon as I can sit up and hold my guitar, anyway. But I did want to ask you guys for one thing: Please don’t hang out at the hospitals. I don’t want anybody to get in trouble over me. I’m at a private facility and not at one of the big Austin hospitals, so you’re probably not going to find me anyway.”

Miranda looked like crap. She was all bandaged up and hooked up to monitors … just like a normal human would
be. And Stella couldn’t See a damn thing, not even her regular aura; something about the video was weird. It might be the editing; Stella had tried Looking at some of the other footage she had downloaded of Miranda onstage at different times, but only a couple of them showed anything psychically, and they were all normal … sort of.

Stella had figured one thing out: Miranda was gifted. Watching her perform with her inner eyes open, Stella could See something when she played—it was subtle, and if she’d just Seen it once, she wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but after poring over a dozen videos, she knew it wasn’t a coincidence.

She just had no idea what it was.

Stella’s gift was visual clairvoyance; she could See people’s energy, and it told her a lot about them: whether they were lying, what kind of intentions they had, how strong they were. She could spot another Witch in a crowd of a hundred people, and often she could tell what kind of abilities they had, but whatever Miranda had … she’d never seen it before.

It was hard to detect and definitely rare … and Miranda was definitely aware she had it. The way it showed up, like soft tendrils reaching out to the audience, was too perfectly controlled, and the shielding around it was too organized to be purely instinctive. Miranda had been trained.

Stella’s phone rang. She jumped, losing her hold on the Sight with a bitten-off curse. She looked at the phone and sighed: her dad.

She’d call him back later.

Maybe.

He was trying. She had to give him credit. She’d never expected him to be the one to reach out to her after months of hardly speaking, but he’d called her last week wanting to have lunch and even got her a signed poster and a wristband for the music festival as a tacit apology. They’d talked about the festival and the bands she was going to see; he’d asked about her job, carefully avoiding The Subject, and she’d asked him about work. He always had great
stories—fewer now that he was a detective and wasn’t busting naked crack addicts anymore, but still. It had felt good to talk to him again.

She wondered if he knew anything else about the shooting; there wasn’t a whole lot he could tell her other than they had a guy in custody and had some letters he’d written Miranda, but he might be willing to offer up a little extra info if she agreed to go to lunch again.

“Nice, Stell,” she muttered. “Way to use your dad.”

She’d call him back. Later. She would.

She grounded again and went back to the video.

“ … just wanted you all to know I’m okay, and that I love you all. I’m going to sink into a nice Vicodin coma now, so … talk to you later.”

Miranda smiled wearily at the camera. The video went dark. Stella hadn’t Seen a thing … but Miranda being very obviously in a hospital bed like that went a long way toward proving she was human.

Unless it was staged.

Stella had absolutely no idea how to go about proving Miranda was a vampire. The only thing she’d been able to think of was watching the video footage for more psychic anomalies. She’d even done a web search for others who had similar theories, but the two she’d found were run by crazy people who had no evidence other than the
Constellation
article and its aftermath. One of them even thought there was some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth; he claimed that other websites trying to investigate Miranda Grey had been yanked off the Internet with no explanation.

Facts: Miranda never went out during the day. It wasn’t just that she was a night owl; she had literally
never
been seen in the sunlight. She didn’t travel—what was that thing about vampires crossing running water? She had some kind of scary dark energy underneath a flawless set of shields. No one had ever seen her eat, either. She was rarely photographed by the media; there were a lot of fan videos of her concerts, but she was almost never in magazines or on TV.

But the porphyria explained the daylight thing. And it would make traveling pretty awful. And she had a reflection—that much had been made clear in the
Rolling Stone
interview … assuming it wasn’t staged, too.

It was absurd. There was no reason a normal person would think Stella was anything but nuts for thinking Miranda was anything besides a quirky celebrity and a great musician.

But that darkness …

Stella couldn’t deny her own Sight. And she couldn’t shake the conviction that came from somewhere deep in her heart that the woman in that hospital bed wasn’t human. Maybe she wasn’t a vampire, but … she was something.

Lark had been skeptical, but she also knew that Stella wasn’t the type of person given to wild flights of fancy, so she must be on to something. She’d agreed to help if Stella could figure out which way to turn. So far, she had nothing.

She looked up at the clock. Shit—time to go to work.

Stella closed her laptop and straightened her socks. She gave herself a quick once-over in the mirror. Yep, still her. Still a bit of a chubby pixie, freckled and bespectacled, with a fire-engine-red bob with brown roots just starting to show. She had a black spiderweb tattoo on her right shoulder, with a cheerful cartoon spider hanging on a thread down near her elbow. She was wearing one of her favorite outfits: a ruffled pink skirt with a black skull-and-crossbones T-shirt, over-the-knee striped socks, and combat boots. Foxglove would roll her eyes, but Revelry didn’t have a dress code, as long as her bits and boobs were covered.