Wild Hunt (13 page)

S
omeone had given me a blanket, possibly out of the mistaken idea that mental shock required the same treatment as physical shock. The blanket itched and hung heavy over me like a wool tent, but I couldn’t make myself shrug it off.

The ambulance had come, and gone, and judging from the EMTs’ expressions, they weren’t optimistic about Abigail’s chances. She’d lasted long enough for the ambulance, I told myself; that had to mean something, right? But that self-consolation was a weak shield against the memory of that wound in her throat—hell, of all the wounds. And of the jar, the damn empty jar from the Three Cranes. Had her attacker used it to call down a death on Abigail, in some weird inversion of sympathetic magic? Or had they just left it behind, now that it was used up…

A police car had followed the ambulance, and the younger of the two officers had listened to a trimmed-down version of my story, then told me to stay put. That had been maybe half an hour ago. Since then I’d watched one long procession of police, panicked witnesses, Animal Control officers, and staff from the hotel that was the closest building to the park. I thought I recognized the name of the hotel, then real
ized I’d called it the other day: it was where Abigail had been staying. Of course.

Tania had called twice. I didn’t have the guts to call her back.

Right now the officer who’d taken my first frazzled statement was talking to a determined young woman with a notebook, explaining that no, there was no dog problem in the park but yes, they would be conducting a full investigation. I huddled a little further into the musty heat of the blanket.

A shadow fell over me. “I told you everything already,” I muttered, pulling the blanket back down, then stopped. A small, dark-haired woman holding a Boston Police Department badge loosely in one hand gazed down at me with an expression of mixed shock and dismay. “Jesus,” I breathed. “Rena, my God, it’s good to see you.”

I got to my feet and almost hugged her. Almost. I noticed two things in time: one, a tall black man standing a few paces behind her, watching me. Two, Rena may be a hugging person, but only when she’s off duty. And now she wore her duty like a coat of armor.

I didn’t often see Rena in her official capacity, mostly because when I saw her she didn’t want to remember that it existed. When she put on that badge, it was like her entire skeleton was rearranged, making her stand a little taller, a little broader, radiating a sort of quiet immobility that I usually associated with bedrock. Whatever she’d been so excited about a few days ago, none of it showed now.

I didn’t know the guy with her, though he looked more at ease. He was younger than Rena, though they seemed to be on equal footing. I wondered if they’d partnered him with her to make up for her lack of height, and decided they’d have to be idiots to do so. “Excuse me,” he said, with that peculiar cadence that cops have when they don’t mean excuse me at all. “Do you know each other?”

I hesitated—the last thing I wanted was to get Rena
into any trouble—but she answered for me. “We do. Evie—Ms. Scelan, this is Assistant Detective Foster. May we ask you a few questions?”

“I don’t think I can stop you—” I caught Rena’s sidelong glance toward the officer who’d been first on the scene, and I finally registered what had been bothering me. The side of the first officer’s car didn’t show the BPD logo; it was a Newton Police Department car.
Newton? How the hell did I get to Newton?

Well, I knew the answer to that question. It just wasn’t one I liked.

So Rena and her partner were outside their jurisdiction, and she wanted to quiz me anyway. Any other cop and I’d have said no. But Rena had called me in to deal with tattooed bodies and dismembered cats and other cases that no one else would look at, and she’d seen things that would have driven strict rationalists batshit insane. And she sang a mean karaoke. Inasmuch as I could trust a cop, I trusted her.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

Rena pressed her lips together, but she nodded. If her partner had only been with her for a little while, then there was only so much I could say about undercurrent matters.
Bruja
shit, as Rena called it.

“I was out for a run,” I began. Foster glanced at my biking cleats. My feet still hurt like anything, and I tried not to shuffle them. “I came around that way,” I continued, pointing to the mauled hedges, “and heard a snarling sound. That’s when I heard the old woman yell something, and so I ran toward her.”

Rena raised her chin a little—not much, but enough of a tell that I knew she was trying to suppress her usual tics. She’d caught on that I was leaving a lot out. Whether she’d ascribe that to bruja shit or guilt on my part was another matter. “I didn’t see the dogs,” I went on. Best not to lie about something when I could tell a half-truth. “I saw her lying on the steps, and I started trying to bandage the gash.”

My hand went to my throat, and for a split second
I had a flash of Janssen tipping his head back. He’d been showing throat, consciously or no. Realizing that should have made me feel better, but it just gave me the chills. “And that’s when the young woman came over. I gave her my cell phone and told her to call nine-one-one.” She’d handed it back to me as the ambulance arrived.

Foster wasn’t buying any of this. “You went for a run in those shoes?”

“I didn’t have a chance to change.”

“Let it be, Foster,” Rena said. “Did you know the victim?”

For a moment I thought about lying. But I owed Rena the truth, or at least as much of it as I could give. “She was a client of mine,” I said.

“And when did you see her last?”

I shrugged the blanket off my shoulders, then took a moment to fumble it back into place, thinking furiously. What could I afford to tell them without screwing things up for Abigail? Or, for that matter, getting tossed in the looney bin? “This morning.”

Foster and Rena exchanged glances. They had to be new partners, I figured; otherwise they wouldn’t be giving this much away. “I met her a few days back,” I went on. “She stopped by this morning to talk about a job she had for me.” Rena took a notebook from her front pocket and started writing in it. That I didn’t like.

“What kind of job?” Foster asked.

“I can’t tell you that.” I met Rena’s gaze. “I’m sorry, but I do have a confidentiality agreement with my clients. As most of my work goes, it was pretty innocuous.” I paused a moment, thinking over the rest of our conversation. “She seemed…spooked, this morning. Like something had gone wrong for her. But she wouldn’t tell me what.” Instead she’d asked to use my bathroom and left. Goddammit.

“I see,” Foster said, with that cop inflection that clearly means
and I don’t believe it
. Rena had the
same look on her face, and her pencil had stilled on the page.

“Look, if I’d known—I would have done something—” I remembered and snapped my fingers, dislodging the blanket again. This time I didn’t bother to retrieve it. “She left a down payment with me for the work she wanted me to do.” I dug into my much-abused courier bag. Tucked at the very bottom was the leather-wrapped bundle that Abigail had left with me.

Rena leaned closer, and I unwrapped the emeralds for her to see. “Foster,” she said.

His eyes narrowed. “Hard to say,” he said.

I started to speak, then paused. Foster prodded at the emeralds with a pen. “They’re not stolen, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said.

“As a matter of fact, that is what I was thinking, Miss Scelan,” he said without looking up. “Mind telling me what makes you so sure they’re not?”

The same thing that had told me Abigail was scared to death, but I couldn’t tell him that. “I’d probably have heard about it.”

“I’m inclined to agree with her,” Rena said. I did my best not to look grateful; Rena didn’t need me bollixing this up for her.

“Look,” I said, “how about you take them in and have your lab rats do whatever tests they need to. Hell, you can keep them as long as you want, so long as you give me a receipt.”

I’d thought that was a decent concession, all things considered, but if anything, Foster’s demeanor only became chillier. Rena, for her part, had that weary look she sometimes got when I started talking Sox games or when one of us had done something really stupid the night before. “I see,” Foster muttered, the blankness of his expression saying volumes. He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his shirt pocket. “We’ll give you a receipt, as requested. In the meantime, I’d like to take them in and do our ‘lab rat’ stuff, as you put it.”

“Oh, be my guest,” I said. Rena gave me a warning glance behind Foster’s back:
Watch it
.

“We’ll be in touch,” she said, scribbling on a form and handing it to me.

“You know my number.” I stuck the receipt in my wallet. Foster held up two plastic bags, one with the emeralds, the other with the leather strip that had held them, then packed both away. I suppressed a sigh as he did so; that was a couple of months’ rent right there. “Rena, can I talk to you for a moment?”

Foster gave her a glance, but retreated a few car lengths into the parking lot. “Your new partner’s kind of a dick,” I said.

“He’s new. And you got under his skin.” Rena gazed past me, toward the gazebo and the fluttering crime-scene tape. “He’s just up from forensics, and I don’t think he liked being called a lab rat.”

“Whoops.” Well, there went my hope for a playing-nicely-with-cops merit badge. “Tell him I’m sorry.”

“Won’t help.”

I picked up the blanket and started trying to fold it up. “Seriously, Rena, what are you doing out here in Newton? You couldn’t have come out here just for me.”

She snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Then what the hell was it? You’ve complained about the local PDs before; it’s not like they’re going to volunteer information just to be neighborly. And hell, dog attacks aren’t your beat, are they?”

“No, they’re not. More yours, from what I hear.” She held up a hand as I started to sputter. “Not what I meant. Evie, I can’t tell you what I’m doing here.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I mean, this isn’t any of your goddamn business.” She glanced over at Foster, reached for the pack of cigarettes that I knew no longer lived in her pocket, and shook her head. “Shit. Evie, you just had to get involved in this, didn’t you? I swear, this
bruja
shit better not mess with my case.”

“It might. I don’t know. I could tell you if I knew what your case was—”

“No. You can’t. And I can’t tell you, okay? I’m not any more happy about it than you are. Less, even.” She drew a long breath, the kind that ought to be drawn with a mouthful of smoke, and let it out slowly. “I wish to God you hadn’t been the one to find this woman.”

“You and me both.” Even though I’d shaken off the urge to join the pack, the memory of it revolted me. “Rena, if I learn anything more, anything that isn’t weird shit, I will tell you. Okay?”

She didn’t look convinced. But she didn’t look disappointed either, and that was enough from Rena. “We’re on for a week from Saturday, right?”

“Last I heard.”

“Maybe I can tell you about it then.”

My bike was still there when I made my way back, footsore and out thirty bucks for the cab ride. Tania had called a third time, and I’d finally answered to say that I’d been in an accident. Well, it was close enough to the truth. She asked how I was, how my bike was, and whether I could pull another shift tomorrow, at which point I pleaded PTSD and told her to fuck off. Not in so many words.

A shiver passed over me as I unlocked my bike, and I looked up to see—well, nothing. Again. That damn blank spot, the ghost who had latched on to me at the tower and now seemed to unwilling to let go. “Skelling,” I murmured, and must have imagined the flicker of absence at the back of my perceptions.

Skelling
. That was it. I hadn’t heard the name before; I’d seen it, seen it written on a card in a display case. I swung my bike lock over the frame and gritted my teeth at the pain in my soles. Elizabeth Yuen. She’d know what Skelling did, or at the very least her father had. And if I could find out, I might have some idea why Abigail had been attacked.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth had finally had enough of Boston. I made my way through the clutter of traffic in Chinatown (some idiot had parked an RV on a one-way street and refused to pull over further so that traffic could go around him) and pulled up in front of the Three Cranes to see the windows of her apartment dark and shuttered. My heart sank, but I locked my bike to the closest rack and hurried down the stairs.

Boards had been nailed over the door, and the original sign had an addendum tacked to it: P
LEASE DIRECT INQUIRIES ELSEWHERE
. Hell. How else to find this Skelling? Mount Auburn probably had records, but I got the shivers about going back there, even in daylight. Maybe the library—and where would I even begin, once there? The vast repository of information and porn that was the Internet? I turned away from the door, intending to head on home, then stopped as someone clomped down the stairs toward me. I caught the scent a moment before I saw him, and my lips curled back from my teeth.

Janssen saw me too, but a moment too late. He backed up a step, the shit-eating grin dropping off his face. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“None of your business.” I tried to move past him.

He moved into my path, hands out in a placating gesture. “Hang on, hang on, I didn’t come here to fight. They’re closed up? For real?”

“Yes, for real.” I paused. “You didn’t know that?”

Janssen grinned. From this angle he looked different, off, some aspect of how he held his head, how his body language had changed from the cravenness of the day before. I didn’t like it. “I don’t usually bother with the small-fry stuff. But there’s only so many places you can get certain things…What about you? Fair’s fair.”

“I ran out of Tiger Balm.” If Janssen hadn’t known about the Three Cranes being closed, he wouldn’t have been the one to hire those three bozos from yesterday.
They’d counted on the “closed” sign keeping away witnesses. Just because he didn’t have anything to do with it didn’t mean I liked him any better, though. “I thought you were getting out of town. Mind telling me what made you stay?”