Bad blood, p.8
Bad Blood, page 8
part #7 of Jack Dahlish Series
She reached up to tap a slim finger against the page. “This part.”
I read the lines she indicated. Deceased was seen walking out of his office ten minutes after sounds of argument. Was not seen again until the body was found two hours later. Time of death is estimated to be in the middle of this period, therefore deceased must have returned to his office within an hour.
“What I get from that is that his employees weren’t very observant. Everyone always sees the boss, especially if they’re as irritable as this guy seems to be, so they should have noticed his return.”
“That’s what I find so odd, Dahlish. The statement from the facility manager says our victim rarely left his office during the day, to the point that he even had lunch delivered so he could work while he ate. It’s strange that he left on this day, and then ended up dead two hours later.”
“An hour,” I said, pointing to the line on the page. “Estimated time of death was an hour before discovery of the body.”
She waved that off. “Those things are very subjective, and there are a variety of factors that could skew the results. We always add an hour or two to either side of TOD, to cover the bases.”
“We know for sure he was alive less than two hours before his body was found, so that still limits our time frame.”
“Do we?”
Annie and I both looked to Thirteen, who was still standing beside the chair I’d been seated in. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Did anyone speak with the man they saw? Could they be sure it wasn’t someone merely wearing his form?”
I thought back to the fomorian who had taken on the face of one of the Nine, fooling me and another of the coin bearers in the process. I really hoped another of his kind hadn’t found their way to my city. “Some kind of shapeshifter? I hadn’t considered that.”
“Aren’t all Nox shapeshifters in one form or another?” Annie asked as she waved a hand over her face to indicate the human masks that almost all had to wear.
“Sort of, but they don’t really have control over how they appear when the masks are in place.” I shrugged, trying to remember what I’d learned about them in my early years. “The way it was described to me was like eye color. When you’re born, the genes of your parents mix and that’s what decides if your eyes are brown, blue, or something else. As soon as a Nox child is old enough to conjure their human mask, it takes a form that mixes that of his or her parents.”
“That sounds really complicated, but I’m sure biologists would love the chance to study it.”
I chuckled in agreement, happy to deny such an opportunity for as long as possible. “Long story short, they take on another form, but they can’t assume the form of a specific person. I’ve only seen that once before, when the fomorian came through town.”
“There are others,” Thirteen said flatly. “In my time as one of the gray, I have encountered several beings capable of changing their shape. Bayou Jean has done it on a few occasions, though he can only do so for short periods. The process takes a lot of his energy and leaves him incapacitated for days after. We are often called upon to protect him during that time.”
I was intrigued by that but waved a hand through the air. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. This could be a simple case of our victim walking outside for a little fresh air while he cooled down from an argument. Just because Savione didn’t make a habit of leaving his office doesn’t mean there weren’t other occasions when he’d done so.”
Annie took a deep breath, but I could see she was coming around to my cautious way of thinking. “There’s only one thing for it, then. We need to go interview the people who work in that warehouse and hear their story for ourselves.”
“Agreed. We can head over after lunch, and that way we’ll be sure to find the same people who should have been working around the time of the sighting and death.”
I walked back to my chair, picking up a new case file as I sat. I wasn’t going to say it out loud, but I started reading the reports of other crime scenes hoping to find evidence of another possible shapeshifter sighting. Unfortunately, most of the deaths occurred before or after business hours, or in offices that were isolated with little traffic near them.
As the minutes passed, I became more comfortable with Thirteen looming over my shoulder. He was amazingly still and quiet for the couple of hours we spent reading all the files cover to cover, and I thought he would make a good spy or assassin even without the near invisibility offered by being a gray man.
Annie slapped a folder closed, releasing a long groan. “This is like reading the Cliff Notes version, Dahlish. All the juicy parts are cut out, and just when I think I found something that could help us narrow down our suspect pool, I hit a dead end.”
I agreed with her assessment as I read the last of the files. There were a lot of notes referencing pages we didn’t have or pointing toward coroner and forensic reports we also didn’t have. Stretching my tired limbs, I stood and glanced at the grandfather clock standing in a corner of the parlor. The steady ticking had long since become background noise after the months spent living in Windemere.
There was an icon on my phone screen alerting me to new email, and I swiped my finger across the sensor to unlock it with anticipation. I had three different mail apps loaded, with three different email addresses that I used for separate aspects of my life. Only one of them had new mail, and it turned out to be an offer for an extended warranty on a car I had traded in more than five years ago.
“Mariah should have sent those forensic files by now. I’m going to call and see what’s taking so long.”
“I’ll call the sarge while you do that, and see if he can tell me anything that wasn’t in the files he was able to get for us.”
She pulled out her phone to dial Ollie’s number, while I walked out of the room and through the front door. It was a little cold out on the wide porch that wrapped around two sides of the house, but nowhere near as bad as the bitterly cold mornings I’d experienced recently in New York.
The phone rang several times after I pressed Mariah’s number in my contacts list and was answered by her generic voicemail message. “Mariah, it’s Jack. I’m calling to see if you’ve had a chance to get those reports for us yet. Um, we’re at a point where we really need those to proceed. Call me.” I pulled the phone from my ear, and then slapped it back as I remembered something else. “Oh! Any luck setting a meeting with Uriah yet? If I need to call him or something, just give me the number. Talk to you later.”
Annie was laughing when I walked back into the parlor, and the way her eyes shot to me I knew she and Ollie were talking about me. “Don’t worry, sarge, I’m keeping my eyes on him. No stupid decisions while I’m around.”
I sighed heavily as I dropped into the leather wingback chair. Make a couple of boneheaded decisions to rush into a situation without backup, and you’re branded for life as impulsive and reckless. Although… if I was being honest, it had been more than a few times. Much more.
“Did he have any other information for you?”
“Nothing he could discuss at the moment. He was working a crime scene. The bastards put him on tape duty, Dahlish.” She gritted her teeth as she said it, referring to the job of standing behind crime scene tape and keeping the curious bystanders or reporters back. It was the kind of work usually given to the lowest ranking patrol officers on a scene, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a sergeant doing it.
“Mariah didn’t answer, so she’s probably in the middle of something, too. Maybe she’s at the same scene?” I asked, feeling a sudden desire to find out where it was and drive over.
Annie could read the thought on my face, and she shook her head. “Some old geezer drove through the wall of a bank, and there were a couple of people with minor injuries. No need for forensics on a case like that.”
There went my best idea for moving the case along. We’d have to wait for both of our contacts to get back to us before we could do much in those directions. I patted my hands on the arms of the chair, a sign of impatience that even I recognized. “We could drive out to some of the crime scenes. Maybe we’ll find more of that strange hair.”
She shrugged as she pivoted to get off the chaise. “It’s better than sitting around here waiting on a call. Let’s go.”
TWELVE
W e took the Honda so that Thirteen could come along; the backseat of the Mustang was cramped at the best of times for anyone over the age of about ten. Annie twisted around in the passenger seat, watching him with interest as I backed out of the garage. It took me a while to realize what she was doing, and when I heard her suck in a breath, I knew the gray man had disappeared from her sight the moment we left the protection of Windemere.
Her eyes went glassy for a second, and then she turned to face forward. “That was weird. I thought someone was in the car with us for a second.”
I looked up to the rearview mirror and met Thirteen’s eyes. He looked back at me impassively, as if asking what I expected. “Uh, Annie, do you remember our houseguest?”
She looked at me in confusion. “You mean Monica?” Then she tilted her head, and her eyes took on a faraway look. “No, there’s someone else. I can almost see his face, but… what were we talking about?”
Okay, that was going to be very annoying. I decided I’d have to talk to Narise, Windemere’s librarian and knowledge keeper, to see if there might be a way to extend my ability to Annie beyond the bounds of the house.
“Never mind, it’s not important. Which crime scene should we hit first?”
We spent several hours visiting five of the crime scenes. At nearly every one of them, we knew the moment the car was parked that we’d find nothing of interest. These were high traffic areas that had seen a lot of workers and customers come through in the weeks or months since the murders. Annie and I spent at least ten minutes in each location, scouring the area just to be certain we hadn’t missed anything.
Only one of them was truly promising. It was a small shop in the back end of a two-story strip mall that had seen better days. The woman who had been killed there was an antiques dealer, and she only allowed showings by appointment. As such, there was no need for her to have any other employees and the store had remained closed since the murder.
Getting into the store proved difficult. Annie took one look at the locks on the door and shook her head. “This lady spent serious cash on security. I might be able to get through these if we spent five or ten minutes working on it, but we’d be noticed.”
I looked along the balcony walkway, where there were other businesses with steady streams of customers. There was a CPA, a dental office, and a couple of insurance firms, and all of them were packed at that time of day. “I don’t think we’re going to find a back door this time.” We had already checked the rear of the building, finding only a few doors into businesses that occupied the ground level. There were barred windows for the second-floor offices, but none were large enough to squeeze through if we wanted to try climbing.
“The janitor had these,” Thirteen said a few moments later, as a heavy ring of keys pressed against my palm. I lifted them, looking at thirty or forty keys that were all identical. Each had a number written on them in black marker, and I realized those markings corresponded with the individual suite numbers of the shops.
As I flipped through to find the one that matched the antiques store, Annie raised her eyebrows. “Where did you get those from, Dahlish?”
“Janitor,” I said, not explaining further as I inserted the key into the lock. It turned smoothly, and there was a loud click as the bolt retracted. “Let’s get a look before he realizes they’re missing.”
“She,” Thirteen said, a flash of amusement on his face.
“Whatever. Before she notices they’re missing.”
Annie gave me a look that said she was worried about me as we entered the store. “Are you hearing a voice in your head or something? I know we’ve been pushing hard these last several months trying to find the Rosu twins, but if you’re going to have a breakdown, I’d like to be notified in advance.”
I snorted a laugh. “You remember those gray men who came after me?”
“The ones who ruined our first date? Yes, Dahlish, I remember what you told me about them. Why?”
“Because one of them is working with us. You’ve met him. You’ve talked with him. But you can’t remember it right now.”
She scoffed. “I think I’d remember talking–” Thirteen grabbed her arm, and she gasped as she looked at him. “What the hell, Thirteen? Give a girl some warning before you grab her.”
I watched recognition and memory dawn on her face. “Yeah, you’re going to forget him again as soon as he breaks that hold.”
“There has to be a way around that, Dahlish.”
“It’s on my list. Trust me, I don’t like you thinking I’m crazy any more than you do.” I grinned at her as I bent to start looking under the lip of a display case.
“You’re going to have to tell me how you lifted those keys,” she said. I thought she was talking to the gray man at first, but when I turned my head, she was staring at me with her arms crossed. “What other skills are you hiding from me?”
“We’ll talk about it back at Windemere,” I said as I started crawling along the floor. I could already tell that no one had been allowed in this store for at least a couple of weeks, and I was hoping it hadn’t been cleaned since before the murder. If I could find those strange hairs at another crime scene, that would make it a lock that it came from whatever Nox was responsible.
“This is some nice stuff,” Annie said, running her fingers across an old accordion box camera that was easily over a hundred years old. “I don’t think I could afford to buy the scraps of a broken item from this store.”
“The owner would have had really good connections,” I told her, running my fingers through a small pile of dust bunnies and finding no hairs. “Donors get all kinds of perks, and this one probably used the Harrison network of contacts to get leads on the best items for sale across the country. Even donors from other clutches would look favorably on deals with a fellow food source.”
“I’m sure they love being called that,” she said with a laugh. “Are you picking up any of that essence stuff in here?”
“None, just like every other place we’ve been today. It was so faint around the hairs we did find that it must dissipate incredibly quickly.”
“Is this what you are looking for, Jack Dahlish?”
I turned to see Thirteen bending over to look under an easel holding a painting that looked exorbitantly expensive. The moment I looked to where he was pointing, I caught the tiny waves of sickly yellow essence. I hurried over to grab the hairs, and as soon as I touched them, I felt the coarseness between my fingers. “That’s it. This is the proof that we’re looking for whatever kind of Nox sheds these hairs.”
Annie walked over to look at the few hairs pinched in my fingers. “These look different, though. Darker and longer.”
She was right. I’d been thinking the same thing, though it was hard to tell in the dim light of the shop. I motioned for one of her evidence bags and put the hairs inside as I stood up. “Let’s take a look at them in the daylight and compare them to the others.”
We managed to get out of the antique shop unobserved, and Annie stood beside me to block anyone’s view as I locked the door. I passed the keys to Thirteen behind her back, and he took off at a quick walk to return them to the janitor. It was amazing to see men and women step aside for seemingly no reason, or suddenly stop and look around before they continued on their way.
I took Annie’s hand in mine, returning her smile as I did so, and led the way down the stairs and across the parking lot to where I’d parked. As soon as we were in the car, she opened the glovebox and pulled out the two evidence bags holding the hairs we’d found the day before. Those hairs were only an inch long, with dark roots that turned brownish gray at the other end. The hairs I’d just recovered were twice as long, less stiff, and dark throughout.
“Different attackers?” Annie asked, holding the bags up to the light.
“Possible, I suppose. But it would have to be the same type of Nox. The essence coming off those hairs are identical, right down to the faint smell of skunk musk and wet fur.” I was just as perplexed as she was by the differences in the hairs. It was bad enough that I was still trying to figure out why we were finding animal hairs in the first place, but now I had to deal with this new mystery. “We need to have these checked out, and the forensics lab would be the best place.” I checked my phone, disturbed that Mariah still hadn’t called back. I’d phoned her a couple more times, always hanging up when I got her voice mail.
“Let’s hit that delivery company first,” Annie said, pulling her seatbelt across to click into place. “What are you waiting for?”
“Just thinking,” I said, watching Thirteen walk across the parking lot at a slow pace. A car screeched to a halt to avoid him, with a confused driver looking around as if trying to figure out why he’d hit the brakes. I started the car, letting the noise from the radio cover the sound of the rear door opening and closing softly before I drove forward and left the lot.
THIRTEEN
W e were on the opposite side of town from the row of warehouses that held Louis Savione’s business, but it took less than twenty minutes to get there in the relatively light afternoon traffic.
“No chance of finding any clues here,” Annie muttered as I parked nearby. Several dark blue vans and trucks were idling inside the open rollup doors, and we could see at least a dozen people hard at work loading packages as they scanned each one that went into a truck.
“I’ll be happy just ruling out this shapeshifter idea,” I told her.
“Hey, that was your idea.” Annie paused with her hand on the door as her face clouded. “Wasn’t it?”
