Tricks of the Trade (17 page)

Bonnie nodded, a subtle dip of the chin. “So my dad's old buddy implied, yeah.”

“And you think, suddenly, these hiring guys had someone shut him up?”

“Nope.” And the grin came out in full force, totally inappropriate but infectious nonetheless. “We think his fellow freelancers did.”

 

Aden slid into the booth exactly twenty-nine minutes after Ian arrived. She was wearing jeans and a college-logo sweatshirt, and her red hair, darker than his own, was tousled, her face clean of any obvious makeup.

She barely looked as old as the pups, until he looked into her eyes and saw the utter weariness there. Weariness, and wariness.

“What's wrong?” he asked again, and this time he meant it. She was his sister, damn it. Anything that made her look like that, he had the urge to hunt down and hurt.

She hesitated, her pale fingers twining against each other like a nervous schoolgirl. Ian resisted the urge to put his hand over hers, to warm that chilled-looking flesh. “What's wrong?”

She took a deep breath, and lifted her gaze again to meet his.

“You've been so busy with your…experiment, I don't know how much attention you are paying to the chatter, these days.”

By chatter she meant Council gossip, specifically; the constant exchange of information and suggestion that tied the social and political bonds tight. Ian listened in, but not with the finely tuned ear he used to have; too many other things demanding his attention these days, and if it didn't affect PUPI… “You've heard something that upsets you.”

“There's…not talk. Not even whispers. Suggestions of whispers. Madame Howe is not content with the status quo.”

Madame Howe. Leader of the regional Council of the Eastern seaboard and known—with both fear and respect—as the electric dragon. He visualized her in his mind as he'd seen her at their last meeting: a delicate, older woman who didn't try to hide the spine and balls of steel under the demure and elegant lady-of-an-older-generation exterior. She was a powerhouse of both current and political savvy, with a family history of leadership, both on her own side and through her late husband.

“Not content, how?” Each Council was independent, and strictly forbidden to interfere with the affairs of other regional Councils. That was deliberate, done with the full knowledge of the personalities who might rise to power within the Council, and had held for over two hundred years, almost as long as the
Cosa Nostradamus
itself had been in America. Even the old-world members adhered, mostly, to the Council restrictions, these days, and for much the same reasons.

“She wants to…expand. The whispers say she's already
made outreach to other leaders, offered them…deals.” Aden said the last as though the word tasted foul.

Ian almost smiled, despite her obvious distress and the seriousness of what she was saying. His baby sister was a traditionalist to the core—her argument with him had never been about the need for oversight and accountability, merely the idea that someone outside of the Council would be allowed to investigate Council matters. The idea that another Council member—a leader as respected as Howe—would go against tradition in such a manner, so obviously forbidden by the very structure and history of the Council itself…

Ian was older than Aden, and far more cynical, and found the idea of shake-up within the Council less horrifying than intriguing. What new fault lines were developing, in that rarified ground? And how could he use that to forward his cause?

“What do you want me to do, Aden?” The waitress brought him a glass of iced tea, and he sipped it, more to buy time than any desire for the liquid itself.

“You still have standing with the Midwest Council.” Standing that, thanks to her recent attempts to shut him down, she had lost. “Talk to them, find out what's going on, find out if it has spread there.”

“Investigate, you mean? Use my contacts to find out what she's planning, and stop it?”

Aden didn't even hesitate. “Yes.”

The irony was heartbreaking. “I can't.”

She glared at him like he had just kicked her puppy. “What do you mean you can't? You have to! Find out what she's doing, and stop it!”

He wanted to. He wanted to do whatever his baby sister asked of him, above and beyond any benefit he or his project might gain from it. But if she was a traditionalist then he acknowledged himself as an idealist, and he could no sooner go against his ideals than she could break tradition.

“Aden, it doesn't work that way. You've bitched so much about PUPI, you should know how we operate. We investigate, yes. But that is all. We remain neutral, only gathering information, not acting on it. And we cannot go into anyone's business, most especially the Council's, without cause. A complaint. A client.” Especially right now, when he was so close to finally gaining their approval.

There was only one way he could justify poking his nose into this, right now. “Are you hiring us, Aden?”

She glared at him, and Translocated out in a sulk.

The waitress reappeared, not at all surprised by one of her customers disappearing. “So, you're not going to be wanting to order, then, hon?”

“Short stack of applejacks, extra syrup, and another iced tea, please.”

He couldn't investigate, not the way Aden wanted. But he could ask around. If the electric dragon was planning a power grab, he wanted to be well aware of it
before
the shitstorm broke.

This was his town now, too. He'd be damned if he let her ruin his plans.

It was one thing to gather intel and come up with what we thought was a brilliant deduction. It was another, entirely, to lay it out in front of Venec, and wait for his reaction. We didn't have to wait long. The moment I finished, he exhaled heavily, the kind of surprised-pleased-thinking exhale, and leaned back a little. You could practically see the thought process racing through his neurons like current.

“Lawrence. How's the itching?”

“Totally gone,” Nifty replied, although I'd seen him scratching his elbow against the chair arm not five minutes before. Either Venec had missed that—unlikely—or he was willing to pretend it hadn't happened, because he nodded. “You and Pietr go track down the coworkers last seen with our corpse. Ask them a few pointed questions about their feelings about his relations—or lack thereof—with their employers, and how it was affecting them. Don't be coy. If Bonnie's info is right, these guys
are not going to understand subtle. You may have to lean a little.”

Well, that explained why he was sending Nifty, who outmassed all of us put together, practically. I guessed Pietr was going along to provide the potential good cop in that scenario?

“But—” And Venec held up a hand as the guys stood up from the table, clearly anticipating a nice day out of the office trying to intimidate witnesses. “Any questioning you do, make sure it's in full view of at least two others, not involved. Do not go with them anywhere, no matter how good an idea it might seem.”

Pietr really didn't need the reminder, but Nifty tended to think with his bulk, and while that was fine when facing down humans, against fatae who could maybe, if we were right, restrain a Bippis, maybe less so. From the annoyed “do you think we're idiots?” expression on their faces, I suspected that the fact that they were being sent to question suspected murderers hadn't quite filtered into their awareness. But they nodded seriously, and went off to do their dirty work with probably more enthusiasm than was healthy.

I don't know why I'd expected more from Pietr—smart guys were still guys, sometimes.

“All right, that's being dealt with. Where do we stand on the break-in?” Venec asked, turning his attention to those of us left in the room. I hrrmmmmed and errrred a bit, not having any idea. Thankfully, Nick and Sharon—whose case it had been, originally—had more clue.

“We finally got a report of what was missing,” Nick said, and from his expression I was guessing that “we”
meant “him.” “And confirmed what the owner claimed, that for all the damage that was done, there were only two objects taken—a silver pocket watch, ordinary, and a glass dagger, which looked like an ordinary paperweight, but was actually a memory-glass.”

A memory-glass was a Talent-trinket. Nulls get to use digital frames and downloads, we store images and voices a different way. They were low-res, incredibly basic so anyone could use it, even Nulls, and it probably wasn't all that surprising that the client—who had fallen for the “magical defense” line—had one. It was odd that anyone had stolen it, though. They're not lockable, so odds were he hadn't hidden any blackmailable memories in there, even assuming he trusted a Talent enough to share it in the first place, for storing….

But they were taken, so that had to mean something.

“What was stored in the glass?” Venec asked, probably matching my thoughts exactly.

Sharon picked up the narrative. “Nothing sensitive according to the client. Some memories that he didn't want to forget, family trips, things about his wife, that sort of whatnot. Sentimental value, nothing more. Ditto the watch. Pretty, but not particularly valuable or unique. He didn't even have photos taken for insurance purposes, never saw the need, which for this guy means he really didn't think it was valuable—he had photo, acquisition cost and market value on every other thing that was broken.

“Client is convinced that someone stole them in order to put a hex on him, and before you ask, yeah, he's got the usual string of ‘nice guy, fair businessman' testimo
nials that could have come from a playbook, they're so generic. If he has enemies they're playing it cool.”

She paused. “I couldn't tell if he was lying or not, but I'm pretty sure he was telling the truth that they were only sentimental memories, not anything worth stealing. And since he wasn't the one who installed the memories…I'm not sure anyone could actually use it for a hex, at least not on him. Could they?”

Lou shook her head. “The only thing to latch onto would be the signature of the Talent who made it. Anyway, anyone who could do this wouldn't bother with a hex, if they wanted to hurt the guy. There are more direct, more impressive ways to do damage.”

Venec frowned, leaning forward again. “Wife's dead?”

Nick picked up this time. “Cancer. Kid disappeared soon after, packed a bag and gone. Cops investigated—husband filed a missing persons report—kid had run away before. There were no known enemies, no domestic complaints, so… Guy's had a crap life, for all the money—wife's dead, kid gone a year later, I guess it makes sense he'll pull out all the stops, even magic, to reclaim stuff that holds good memories, even without fear of a hex.”

Venec had a look on his face I couldn't quite decipher. The temptation nibbled, to lower my walls and see if I could read his emotions, but I didn't. Wasn't kosher, and, anyway, if I did that he'd be able to read me even easier, and that wasn't kosher, either.

“What was this guy's name again?”

“Wells.”

“Huh. Okay, no.” Whatever it was that niggled him,
he wasn't sharing. “So we have a guy whose very nice little mansion was ransacked and trashed—”

“Portions of it were trashed,” Sharon clarified. “Only the two rooms downstairs, the office and the…call it a library, I guess. Nothing upstairs, the kitchen and front parlor were left alone.”

“Right, two rooms taken apart. Specifically, the two rooms where someone might store something valuable, either physical or electronics, not just current-based memory-keepers. Magical thieves do not mean only a magical theft, people.”

I hadn't even thought about that, and from the lack of notes, neither had Sharon or Nick. Damn it, that was sloppy. The client was a Null, so we should have thought about digital records. We weren't allowed blind spots like that.

Venec didn't stop for us to beat ourselves up. “So our violence-prone intruder was possibly looking for something specific, either business or personal, but all they took were trinkets? And our client has no known enemies, no business rivals, nobody who'd get a thrill out of seeing him get taken down a few notches?”

“Seven names on the list,” Lou said, touching the pad of paper in front of her. “Three of them are totally Null, so it's almost improbable they'd have been able to hire anyone from within the fatae community.”

It was a weird tick to Nulls—the more current-blind they were, the more they managed to float through life without even a glancing interaction with the
Cosa Nostradamus
, at least within a magical range of interaction. Not only were they not going to hire supernaturals, they
wouldn't hire anyone who would then hire supernaturals. J said there was some kind of physics explanation to it, but I'd never cared enough to look it up.

I pulled out my own pad and made a note to myself: it was time to do some reading about that. If that Null aversion field was a way to eliminate suspects, we needed to know. While I had the pad out, I wrote “electronic files as motive” and underlined it. Twice. Next time, we wouldn't forget to consider it.

“I was hoping that one of the rivals would turn out to be useful,” Nick said. “Rumor was he'd had an affair with the dead wife, years ago, and blamed our client when the kid went missing, but the guy, Isaacs, came up clean, and—”

“What?”

Venec's voice didn't rise, and his body didn't move—in fact, if anything, his tone dropped and he went incredibly still, exactly like the air before a tornado hit.

“Ah, he came up clean?”

“The name.”

“Isaacs. Jerry Isaacs.”

Venec moved then, his hand snatching out to grab the file from in front of poor Nick. “Damn it.”

That simple, heartfelt swearword was more chilling than any invective he might have unleashed, because it brought a storm I hadn't felt coming, slamming against my walls in a wave of emotion I was pretty sure he hadn't meant to unleash.

Anger. Annoyance. And…guilt. Overwhelming, agonizing guilt. The hell?

“Boss?” Lou had picked up something, too, while Nick was flicking his gaze from the file in Venec's hand, up to his face, then back again.

The wave of emotions stopped, his wall slamming back up, and I discovered that my heart was pounding and my body was wobbly, like I'd just dashed up all seven flights of stairs in record time, during a fire alarm.

When Venec spoke again, it was as though nothing had ever harshed his calm. “An interesting development. Possibly of importance, possibly merely coincidence.” He paused to consider his words. “Or possibly not coincidence, but inevitability.”

Whatever he was about to say, I didn't think we were going to like it.

“I was employed, years ago, by the now-dead wife.

Christine.”

Before PUPI, Venec had been a PUI on his own, that was why he taught us, handled the day-to-day stuff. But he'd been based down in Atlanta, or somewhere, not New York. So how…

Venec's voice was low and soft, like he was talking to himself. “Christine was referred to me. Her son had gone missing while he was in college, down my way. She wanted me to find him. That was my specialization, finding people who had jumped the track. Usually people who had skipped out on a bond, but runaways, too. She had used that guy's name, though. Isaacs. That's why I didn't recognize this…and Isaacs, he had come with her, I thought he was her husband.”

Okay, the boring break-in case had suddenly gotten
a hell of a lot more interesting. I didn't think that was a good thing.

From the feeling I got off Venec, neither did he.

 

Venec left them to rechecking their information with a focus on Isaacs—in their business you couldn't discount someone just because he was dead—and headed for the garage on the East Side where he kept his bike. It was a fast ride uptown from there, up the Henry Hudson and into the Bronx, and the private community of Fieldston. The house looked the same as Ben remembered it. It had been full summer, then, with everything in bloom, under a lazy heat that had felt cool to him, having flown out of the Atlanta airport that morning. He had been there to examine the boy's room personally and see if there was any clue the parents and the cops had missed.

There hadn't been. The room had been utterly, completely normal, for the only child of a well-off family. Ben had wondered, then, if he'd missed anything important. He knew he had, now. He just didn't know what.

Dismissing old memories, he drove past the house, not even bothering to look for parking on the street; in this neighborhood, that was a good way to get a ticket for not having a resident sticker. His bike took the corner easily, down the street and out of the elite neighborhood, to the more blue-collar areas where a motorcycle parked on the street wouldn't raise an eyebrow from anyone, or gather notice from an overzealous private security force.

He left his helmet with the bike, running his hands through his hair to smooth it out, and tugged at his hip-length leather coat to make sure it was hanging properly.
He might not be as appearance-savvy as Ian, but he knew the importance of looking the part.

He walked back, observing the neighborhood from foot. A wide range of house styles, but they all had the same thing in common: distance from the street, and from each other. Privacy was important to these people…and that meant there wasn't going to be anyone to confirm or deny the owner's report other than his own staff, who couldn't be trusted.

He didn't fault Sharon or Nick for not second-guessing Wells. They were sharp, but they still had an innate hope that humans would do the right thing. Even Sharon, with her truth-sense, still had hope.

He wasn't going to beat that out of them. Life would do it soon enough. Life, and this job.

He had found the son a few weeks after his visit, living in a group house in New Orleans. He'd told the boy his mother was looking for him, asked for permission to give her his current address. The boy had resisted, at first, but the longing and loneliness had won out. The boy had been maybe fifteen; healthy and clean. Whatever else might have been going on in that house, he'd loved his mother a great deal, and she had loved him.

The boy had gone back home. According to the dossier Nick and Lou put together, the mother, Christine, died about a year later. A sudden, fast-moving cancer. There was no mention of what had happened to the boy. Probably he had hit the road again, this time for good. If his mother was using another man's name when she searched for him, odds were there wasn't much love between the father and anyone else in the house.

According to the report, Wells had taken residence in his summer home, up in the Catskills, while the repairs to the damaged rooms were being made. The housekeeper remained, to oversee things. He had never met the housekeeper on that first visit, if she was even the same woman, so he wasn't worried about any awkward questions. So far as they knew, he would merely be the supervising investigator, coming out to check on his employees' work.

Assuming the housekeeper saw him at all. He was going to try to avoid that.

There was a gate at the base of the driveway, but nothing surrounding the lawn itself save low shrubbery. He frowned, trying to remember if the gate had been there back then.

It hadn't.

So. Something new the grieving father had installed? Or an insurance requirement? Ben touched the metal briefly with one finger, letting himself reach for anything, electrical or magical, that might be waiting within.