Courts and cabals, p.18
Courts and Cabals, page 18
“Nothing,” the Director had raised an eyebrow when he reported in. “No evidence, no leads, no witness statements, no forensics; are you honestly going to tell me that you have exhausted all options in your mission to discover who broke the law at St. Vincent’s?”
“Yes,” he answered simply, but he didn’t look her in the eye. He wasn’t used to failure, and neither was she.
She also didn’t rub it in. She nodded her head in acknowledgment, and dismissed him. She punished him by having him sit on the sidelines for a few days to stew in that shameful feeling. It made him think, rethink, overthink and come at the problem from every possible angle.
He called Wood, not only to thank her for her assistance, but to see if anything else had popped up. The locals had moved on, but he had her send their dispatch records for the last week anyway.
He sat at his desk in the corner, his eyes on his tablet, as the giant threat board at the front of the room showed current and future problems. He knew he shouldn’t be focused on the past, but this case was an itch he just couldn’t scratch.
The Sheriff’s data didn’t offer anything new. A local pizza joint had seen a wall knocked down with an adjoining pharmacy, but no drugs were stolen. While Wood didn’t buy the owner’s story – who happened to be another shifter – of a renovation gone wrong, it didn’t look like it had anything to do with his case.
Tuesday night, before he left the office, he was about ready to pull his hair out. “I need more data,” and that meant putting in a request. That pushed him out of his comfort zone.
Like any field agent, Vernon hated the loopholes he had to jump through with a bureaucracy as big as the UN. He made do with the information available on his tablet because that was all he usually needed. Now, he needed the real power of the WRA’s data-gathering infrastructure behind him.
He half expected his request to get denied because someone thought he didn’t need the data. He desperately wanted it, and it was his last shot to get closure on something that was driving him absolutely crazy. Surprisingly, his request was approved, but the precious, allotted server time was being cut short by fucking traffic.
This wasn’t the first time he’d questioned his decision to take a government car to and from work. The subway was easier, but he was required to be armed at all times; and if he was armed, he needed his badge. The few times he’d done it out of necessity, the transit cops had judged him hard, and the looks he got from his fellow New Yorkers hadn’t been friendly. Driving, while a pain in the ass, helped restore his faith in humanity a bit by keeping him far away from them. Sometimes, a person just needed some alone time.
Now it was hump day, and if this clusterfuck didn’t start moving, he’d be humping it the rest of the way in to work. He was running out of time. He’d already received a warning order for his next mission. That meant this therapeutic mindfuck the Director was allowing was over, he’d exhausted her patience. There was a group of wendigos out in the plains that were leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. It was his mission to make sure they became the corpses.
Technically, it was pieces of corpses the supernaturals were leaving in their wake. Wendigos were cannibals who needed human flesh to survive. Like vamps, wendigos were perfectly capable of surviving with a vegetarian lifestyle. Vegetarian for them meant eating humans after they were dead. There was a national program set up for morgues to donate corpses to food banks for the various supernatural species that needed to feed on flesh.
On an intellectual level, Vernon knew these creatures didn’t have a choice. They needed to eat people to live. The solution wasn’t perfect. He preferred to eat a freshly cooked burger rather than one that had been sitting in the fridge for several days.
“Tough shit,” was his frame of mind when it came to things like this. Supernaturals like wendigos were a problem, people had found a doable solution, and if they didn’t take it, it was his job to stop them.
The only problem was he didn’t want to leave the St. Vincent’s case open to chase wendigos for a few weeks. If there were any leads, or clues buried in the data, they’d be long gone. It was literally now or never.
He pulled his car into the UN employee garage nearly half an hour late, went through security, and for the first time, went to his private office. It was a blank slate with a desk and pair of chairs. There was a musty smell in the air from disuse, and since wasted space was sacrilege at the HQ, he got some dirty looks from employees walking past the door.
Everyone else looked to be at least forty or fifty in human years. You had to be someone to get an office, and they were all wondering who this kid was. Vernon completely ignored them and attached his tablet to the desktop’s port. He had a pair of screens, so he could take in more info at once.
Once he was into the master data feed, he needed to create filters and sort to get what he desired. He started with the most obvious data point, “Lightning strikes.” That was a mistake, it took forty-five minutes to complete the search, and it gave him jackshit.
He was trying to look for patterns. Just like humans, supernaturals always succumbed to patterns. Pattern recognition solved crime. Knowing the MO of a serial killer helped police narrow down a victim profile, and perform analysis to identify behavioral triggers, where the sicko might live, and even his hunting ground.
That’s what Vernon was attempting to do. If the evidence was to be believed; none of the students had done it, none of the faculty were involved, and Cameron Dupree couldn’t have pulled it off. The next, most likely, possibility was that the kid was the target all along, and this wasn’t some weather-permitting fluke. It was a long shot, but he needed to see if anyone else had been similarly targeted.
Searching lightning strikes wasn’t the way to go. He got tens of thousands of hits for that day alone, and it didn’t even tell him if anyone was involved. It was a dumb move from someone with little network experience, and it cost him nearly an hour. He was on a flight to Nebraska tonight, so he needed to make today count.
His next search was more defined: magically-generated storm system involving lightning strikes. He expected that to narrow down his search, and it did, but it wasn’t quick. He still had two dozen potential incidents to investigate, and it was closing in on lunch.
“How do the data crunchers do it?” he was so bored watching the little circle spin on the screen as the data loaded. He was used to being on the move all the time. If this experience taught him anything, it was that he was never leaving the field. He wasn’t built for office work.
Working through the two dozen storm systems took him past lunch. He had to individually pull up the data on the storms, from three independent systems, and review it. The big filtering software the UN used could only get him so far. By the time three o’clock rolled around, he’d flagged half a dozen incidents as fitting a possible pattern. Two of those had cases open for them. One was from a field office in Moscow, and the other in Australia. The time differences didn’t help. It was one in the morning in Russia and five in the morning in Australia. Both offices were closed, so he couldn’t talk to the agents in charge. However, he could read their notes.
They were surprisingly informative. “Two kids . . . roughly Dupree’s age . . . near miss . . . no other data available,” the latter was code for when an investigation came up with diddly squat.
The lack of information actually helped him. By the time he looked up from reviewing the case files it was ten past four. He needed to leave for the airport in twenty minutes if he wanted to make his flight to America’s heartland. Instead, he picked up his tablet and marched toward the person who put him on this mission in the first place.
It was almost quitting time, so the Director wasn’t excited to see him. She never stopped working, but others did, which meant she had five o’clock deadlines to meet.
“Ma’am,” his drawl was thicker than usual with excitement, as he closed the door behind him without permission.
She just cocked an eyebrow at him, and pointed at a seat. “Found something?” he was surprised that she sounded so surprised.
He knew she’d allowed him to work his shit out over the last few days. The opportunity to review everything and give it a second look with a fresh set of eyes, one step removed from the investigation, was the whole point of this exercise. She wanted him to get over it, get his head straight, and go kill some wendigos. She didn’t expect the data he shoved in her face.
“I’ve got two more cases nearly identical to St. Vincent’s,” he started. “They’re all over the globe, and still open, so our algorithms didn’t catch them. Even worse, they would have remained open as cold cases because there is no way in hell they’re going anywhere. Like St. Vincent’s, there’s just no leads to follow up on. They’d end up in some basement server and lost to all but the cyber gods in a few weeks. We never would have been able to connect the dots,” he was so excited his normal drawl slurred his words together, making him difficult to understand.
The Director didn’t say anything, she just reviewed the data. Her eyes darted from chart to chart, report to report. Vernon’s had been the most thorough of all the open cases because he’d ordered the physical for Dupree. The other agents had made cursory visits, tested some mages, and checked to make sure the victims were okay. Everyone was fine, so the cases were being put on the backburner.
“What’s your threat assessment?” she finally spoke.
“I . . . I don’t know,” he admitted with a huff of frustration. “Whoever did this knows our database protocols . . .”
“Don’t,” the Director held up a finger. Her skin was aged and wrinkled, but that finger controlled billions of dollars, and directed trigger pullers that took hundreds of lives. “This isn’t an inside job. This is not some spy movie, Agent Dud. We aren’t even spies,” she leaned back in her chair. “We’re law enforcement, and the connections you’ve made are thin at best. They’re actually nonexistent. You’re trying to prove a positive by the lack of information on a topic. It doesn’t work like that, and accusations like the one you nearly made are inappropriate and downright dangerous.”
He picked up what she was throwing down. Accusations of espionage in the greater WRA team would lead to a massive review of the program. Internal affairs would tear through every data point over the last thirty years looking for discrepancies; and there were always discrepancies. In the politically fragile climate, it could be deadly for the Response Division; and despite his accusations, Vernon very much believed the division had an important mission to carry out.
“Yes, ma’am,” he nodded his head. “However,” he stuck his neck out, “I do believe this warrants future investigation.”
“I agree,” she answered immediately. “Tell me about the boy. He’s the best lead we have.”
Vernon told her: average kid, toed the line with some school rules, outright broke others. The cabal affiliation was a surprise to her, but not by much. The cabals always tried to recruit them when they were young and stupid.
“What tests did you order?” she swiped to pull up the medical data.
“Standard physical with standard DNA panel,” he informed. That was the protocol on cases like these.
“You have my authorization to do a deep dive,” she ordered. “If this was a magical attack of some kind, there could be latent effects. I’ve seen it before, and we would be failing in our duty to protect a US citizen if we didn’t look deeper.” She put a good amount of political spin on what amounted to a gross invasion of genetic privacy, but it got them where they needed to go.
A deep dive was a full mapping of a person’s DNA. It was time consuming, expensive, and would end up on a report that went to every government each month. With Dupree’s cabal affiliation, there were going to be calls from lawyers, but they were willing to take that chance. The new data would tell them, indefinitely, if someone was trying to unleash a magical plague with Cameron Dupree as the carrier.
“Whoa . . . That’s a little much,” Vernon told himself.
There had only been two instances where a disgruntled mage had tried to unleash a magical plague. One had tried to use the postal service as a delivery method, and the other a dirty bomb over Philadelphia. The postal services’ own ineptitude foiled the first attempt, and the Division only had to do clean-up operations. Vernon had been on the second case that took down the mage and contained the plague. In both cases, there was a potent, magical trail that something with that much destructive power left in its wake. He hadn’t seen anything like that at St. Vincent’s.
“I’ll put a call back into the locals to keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary,” he offered.
“You’ve got good ties with that local shifter sheriff,” from the tone of her voice, she knew they’d bumped uglies.
He didn’t know how she knew, but he didn’t rise to the bait. He also felt exhilarated in a way that was lacking over the last few days. Proving that he wasn’t a failure, and finding new leads, had him firing on all cylinders.
“Do you want me to call someone and put them on the wendigo case?”
“No,” her single word brought all his new-found enthusiasm to a crashing halt. The mission still continues as usual. We don’t have anything concrete at this time, and the DNA mapping will take weeks. You’ll need to multi-task, Vernon. Now, get your ass on that plane to Lincoln, and keep me informed.”
That was an order he couldn’t argue with. He left her office feeling both satisfied and frustrated. That was something new to him.
Chapter 16
“Shit,” I hustled across the hall, holding my knife in one hand. I never went anywhere without it. My other hand struggled to hold up my towel, and balance my shower caddy. “Shut up,” I growled at the chuckling shifter. I would have given him the finger, but that would’ve resulted in me flashing him. No one wanted that.
Wednesday had come and gone, and aside from the morning sex, it had been like any other day of my high school career. After days of traveling with bodyguards, being paranoid about every dark corner, and having a hot-as-fuck dwarf sleep in my room; it was surreal for the day to be so normal. As I walked the halls and moved between buildings, not only did Aveena’s changelings not try to kill me; they were actually polite and friendly.
One even approached me, nervously wringing his hands, to ask if I knew when Jerome was going to start selling again. Not only had this little blood feud affected my own hustle, but it had thrown off the student body’s ability to get weed at a very stressful time. The change in atmosphere put me at ease, and that showed Wednesday night.
After going several days with little sleep, on top of Dani’s nightly beatings, I’d zonked out and overslept. Now, I had to rush through my shower, skip breakfast, and make it to math in time for the midterm. Mrs. Fletcher wasn’t as much of a hard ass as Miller, but she was a stickler for tardiness. If I was late, I’d have to make the test up in her office after classes, and automatically get docked ten percent. If Lilith and I were going to do college, I needed to keep my grades up.
Today, the shower stalls were empty for all the wrong reasons, but I still grabbed the handicap stall and turned the water to hot. I used the steamy blast from the faucet to wipe the last bits of sleep from my body, and hurriedly soaped up. As I scrubbed the sweat off my skin, I thought back to last night.
Despite my desire, I did not take Dani to pound town. It was the last day of her duty to protect me, and she was committed to remaining vigilant. She had a different idea of how to make the night special.
“Here, I want you to have this,” she handed over the short-sword that had been attached to her hip every night.
“But this is your favorite sword,” I took the cold-iron blade she’d forged with her own two hands. It was surprisingly light, and perfectly balanced.
“I have a new favorite sword,” her eyes zeroed in on my crotch, and I coughed uncomfortably. “But more importantly, I want you to be safe. Your little knife is good, but it doesn’t have the reach to save your ass in a real fight. Plus,” she waved me forward with a conspiratorial grin, “the very tip of this is silverbane. Not only can you fuck up any Fae that comes after you, but if a shifter gets uppity, you can teach them a lesson as well.”
“I . . . I can’t possibly accept this,” I tried to hand it back, but she resisted, and ended up shoving me onto my ass.
“You can, and you will,” she ordered. “You’re not half bad to have around, and I’d like to see you not die a horrible death.”
“Okay, fine,” I accepted the blade and placed it reverently on my bed. I’d need to hide it somewhere so Miller didn’t find it during his weekly room searches.
I smiled as I washed the last of the shampoo from my hair and shut the water off. I stepped out and started to towel off when the door swung open and Dani walked in.
“I know you want to go for round two, but I’m so late,” I made a point to tie my towel around my waist. “I just can’t right now,” I apologized. I didn’t even have time for a quickie.
“That’s fine,” she replied with a grin.
The grin was . . . wrong, and something behind her caught my attention. The door was slowly swinging closed, but not fast enough that I missed the shifter lying in a slowly spreading pool of his own blood. His eyes found mine, and they were full of fear and pain. My eyes darted to not-Dani, who was only an arm’s length away and still wearing that foreign grin.
“You’re . . .” was as far as I got.
I didn’t even see her move. A dagger appeared in her hand and it flashed toward my stomach. The pendent I’d been wearing nonstop since Sunday finally flared to life; hot against my flesh. The dagger shattered on the invisible barrier, but the kinetic force of the blow still knocked me into the wall. I saw stars as the back of my head cracked against the tile; then I slipped in the puddle of water and ended up on my ass.
