that made me feel better about this case. Based on the rather interesting individuals he brought in to lecture us on lock picking, surveillance, scams, and other things your mother wouldn’t want you to know, Venec had collected an assortment of contacts in various low places. When we got back, I’d lay money that he’d have a full dossier on anything and everything there was to know about the people involved, even better than the official files.
Stosser looked like he was going to argue, then nodded instead. He wasn’t happy about it, though, and shoved us into the elevator with a look on his face that made us all hush our usual chatter. Not that anyone was feeling much in the way of wisecracks. Organ-leggers lent themselves to the bad jokes, the more disgusting or punny the better. Attempted rape and actual disembowelment, not so much. Add in a ki-rin … We were all quiet, locked in our own thoughts, in the time it took to get to the lobby and out to the avenue.
There was an SUV with TLC plates already waiting outside our building. Obviously the boss had made some calls before he brought us in. Stosser got shotgun, the rest of us were in back, elbow-to-rib and knee-to-knee. The car came with a manic driver who swung through the morning traffic like he’d been a Shanghai cabbie in another life, shoving us around even as packed-in as we were. Nobody complained. The subway might have had more room, but it would have taken too long. Since we opened our doors for business, the main problem had been that we weren’t called in until after everyone else had tromped all over the scene and made things harder for us to sort out. Today, we’d been given time to get in and take a look while things were clean … but the clock was ticking and the twenty minutes it took us was nineteen minutes too long.
I sat back in the seat, stuck in the middle, trying to ignore Nifty’s elbow hitting my ribs, and Nick’s cheap, toxic cologne in my nose, while Sharon and Pietr got the very back seat with all our kits. Four basic black hardcases and one bright red one: Pietr’s, as though to make up for his unwanted but useful ability to disappear when you were looking straight at him. Sharon had added a discreetly stylin’ silver tag to hers, and mine had a glittering 3-D ice-spider decal on the side, just where anyone looking to steal it would see it and be freaked out. Nifty and Nick didn’t bother with anything, far as I could tell.
I stared up at the ceiling as we zoomed through lights that were yellow-turning-red, trying not to guess at what we were going to find on the scene. The trick to scene investigations was to look without expecting to find anything, examine without assumption. Current was directed by what we desired; even without the words of a spell, you could possibly create something just by assuming strongly enough that it was there.
Or so Venec warned us, at least twice a week.
The driver let us out on the corner, and zoomed off like he had to be in Queens three seconds later. The minute we got out, I was shivering inside my coat, but it wasn’t because of the sharp wind coming off the river. Something had walked over my spine, and that was never a good thing. I had a slight touch of precog, what my mentor J called “the kenning,” and it told me this was a bad place to be. Bad things happened here.
No choice, though. This was the job: investigating bad things.
The others were already walking toward the scene, and I had to stretch my legs to catch up. We weren’t the only ones interested; there was a small crowd already gathered around the scene of the attack, maybe twenty people, and even from the street you could tell that the mood was not good. Sometimes there was a weird party atmosphere when people rubbernecked a crime scene. Not here. I could practically smell the current on them, crackling like ozone, and I knew the rest of the team was getting the same vibe: Talent, wanting to know why another Talent was dead, and a second wounded, at the hands—horn—of a fatae.
Normally interactions between fatae and humans in the Cosa Nostradamus were cautious but healthy, but something like this … I didn’t need Stosser’s warning still ringing in my ears to know that things would get a lot worse, and fast, if we didn’t get the evidence sorted and delivered, soon.
I wondered, suddenly, why so many Talented bystanders were here. Coincidence? Or had someone put the word out, in the time it took for us to get called in? And if so … why, and who?
Questions I didn’t have answers for, yet.
Someone in the crowd noticed our arrival, and a low mutter went up, like the first roll of thunder. Hot and ugly. Ian had it on the nose.
Stosser had already given the crowd a once-over, and was issuing orders. “Cholis. Run the tape. Lawrence, crowd-watch.”
“On it, boss,” Nifty said, and he and Pietr moved toward the crowd, walking like men with purpose. The tape wasn’t the yellow crime-scene tape so beloved of Null cops, but a thin red extrusion of current that flickered and snapped in the cold air as they spun it out, walking a circuit around the scene. The tape was invisible to Nulls, but warned Talent and fatae alike away from the investigation. If they trespassed, Pietr, our rope-man, would know.
“Hey!” Pietr scowled at a lanky figure that brushed against the wire leaning in to get a better look. “Back off!”
“Or what, little man?” The intruder—your basic suburban white-boy macho wannabe in clothing too expensive to be tough—loomed over Pietr, who seemed to almost fade from sight, the way he did when stressed. There was an instinctive urge to go to Pietr’s defense, but I checked it. We would all be given our particular assignments, and that wasn’t mine. Nicholas James Lawrence wasn’t all that big, for an ex-college linebacker, but he presented like a big-ass mofo when he wanted to. Nobody threatened a coworker when Nifty was around.
Satisfied that the guys had things in-hand, I turned my attention back to the boss. Ian’s long orange-red hair was covered by a black wool watch cap, making him tougher to identify at a distance. I wasn’t sure if that was intentional or not, since he was normally a flamboyant publicity-magnet. Oh, hell, Ian never did anything unintentionally. He was letting us go public, and playing it close and quiet himself. Interesting. Not useful, right now, but interesting.
“How virgin is the scene?” I heard the word come out of my mouth and winced. I’m not normally big on tact, but that had been particularly ill-chosen even for me.
Stosser didn’t even seem to notice, although Sharon’s cheek twitched a little in response. “Thankfully, one of ours was with the first responders, and was quicker on the draw than most of his peers. Paramedics took the human bodies, but the cops haven’t gone over the scene yet.” A grim smile touched his face. “New York’s finest decided to wait for someone to come down and take care of the ki-rin before they approached the scene itself, so the area’s about as untouched as we’re going to get.”
I couldn’t blame the cops—I wouldn’t want to deal with a ki-rin in a bad mood, either.
“Not that there’s any doubt of who did what,” Stosser went on, “but I am informed that the fatae community’s already screaming for blood—more blood, I mean. They don’t like that a ki-rin’s been shown disrespect, disrespect being anything other than kissing its hooves in abject adoration.”
Wow. That was the bitterest I’d ever head the boss man get. Normally he left the snide comments to Venec.
“What kind of blood do they want?” Nick asked.
“Who the hell knows.” He seemed to remember he was talking to staff, not himself, and I saw the usual cool exterior go back up. “Our contact thinks the fact that there was any investigation by Nulls at all set them off. They’re already demanding that the ki-rin be released, and nobody’s even questioned it yet.
“The one thing everyone agrees on is that this needs to be cleared up and closed down as soon as possible, if not sooner. That means we have to determine exactly what happened, who did what, and in what order.”
“That’s what you built us to do,” I said. And then, since he hadn’t really answered me before, I prompted him again. “The scene?”
Stosser looked up at the sky, checking the thickness of the clouds. Normally we—Talent—like storms, since electrical storms