“You hacked her personnel files,” I said. I didn’t approve, but I was going into this mess blind, so I wasn’t going to condemn him for doing what I would have asked him to do eventually anyway.

  “Is it really hacking, though? For me, it’s more like walking through the front door. Besides, you were going to tell me to do it anyway. I just got ahead of the curve.”

  Yeah, he got me. We spent another few minutes going over Meneses’s service record (spotless), her employment record (decent), and everything Dennis could find about her relationship to Faye Spataro (blissful). I pulled up in front of a warehouse-turned-brewpub in the Mission District and tossed the keys to a pimply-faced valet with a crew cut and a red vest.

  Southern Pacific Brewery is the kind of industrial chic joint that the hipsters love, with overpriced burgers, apps like garbanzo beans, but good beer brewed on premises, and reasonably priced. I scanned the room for Sergeant Meneses but didn’t see anyone who looked like the woman I video called with six hours before. I grabbed a barstool, ordered the house porter, and leaned back on the bar to watch the room until she showed up.

  Which was about two minutes later as a woman bulled her way through a clump of dudes by the bathrooms, making her way over to me with all the subtlety of, well, a Marine Gunnery Sergeant. I guess you don’t ever get rid of some things. I stood up as she approached and held out my hand.

  “Mr. Harker,” she said, giving me a firm handshake.

  “Sergeant Meneses,” I replied with a nod. “Beer?”

  “Not for me,” she said. “Did you drive here?”

  “Yeah, I rented a car at the airport.”

  “Good. Our…my apartment isn’t far from here, so I walked. You can drive us to the scene.”

  “Now? It’s a little late, isn’t it?” It was only about nine-thirty, but that was still later than most cops wanted to be out looking over a crime scene. Especially one that’s a day or two old.

  “You need your beauty sleep, Demon Hunter? Shit, from what Faye told me, I thought you were a badass.”

  “From what your file told me, I thought you gave more a shit about protocol.”

  “My wife is dead, Mr. Harker. If it gets us closer to finding the motherfucker that killed her, I’ll go over that crime scene with a toothbrush at midnight.” The fire in her eyes was real, and I saw some of what her Marine evaluators saw in her to promote her all the way to E-7 before she decided to get out.

  “Fair enough, Gunny. You drive, though.” I downed the rest of my beer, tossed seven bucks on the bar, and walked out to the valet stand.

  A couple of minutes later, another crewcut pimpled valet pulled up front in my rental, and Meneses looked up at me. “You rollin’ like that, buddy, you damn skippy I’ll drive.” She slid in behind the wheel while I tipped the valet and walked around the SUV.

  “Don’t be too impressed,” I said as I fastened my seatbelt. “I got hooked up at the rental car place. Now where are we going?”

  “Hope you wore good shoes,” she said. “‘Cause we’re going for a hike.”

  She wasn’t bullshitting me, either. An hour after I walked into the brewery, I was following Sergeant Meneses up a dirt trail on the side on Mt. Sutro, a giant hill in a city made of giant hills. This one was also a nature preserve, with one-hundred-foot trees and fog rolling in as the night grew dark. We’d been walking about fifteen minutes when the glow from her flashlight flickered, then died.

  “Shit,” Meneses muttered, slapping the flashlight with the heel of her hand.

  “I got this,” I said, reaching for the light. She obliged, and I focused my will on the tiny bulb. “Lumos,” I whispered, almost a breath of a word, and released a tiny sliver of power into the bulb. It lit up at least three times as bright as before, and I handed it back to the sergeant while I tried to blink the spots out of my eyes.

  “Nice,” she said. “I guess Faye was right when she said you threw around magic like white girls drink pumpkin spice.”

  I managed not to laugh out loud but couldn’t hold back a snort. “How much farther to…where she was found.” I was trying to both treat this like a normal murder scene, and be respectful of Lena’s feelings, but I was tired as fuck, my new tattoos hurt, my back still hadn’t forgiven me for driving four hours to Atlanta, then jamming myself into an airplane for another six hours, and I was more than a little unnerved that someone had the balls, and the talent, to catch Faye Spataro off guard. She was one of the best fortunetellers I’d ever met, so whoever got the drop on her had some serious juice.

  “You can call it the crime scene,” Lena replied, her voice small and tight. “It helps me, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that doesn’t help worth a damn, but I feel like I should say it.”

  “Thanks,” she replied, forging ahead with the new super-flashlight carving a wide path through the growing darkness. “It does help, a little. I think I’m still in shock, to be honest. It happened…they just found her this morning.”

  I stopped in the middle of the trail. “What?”

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “You mean to tell me your wife died this morning, and you’ve already gotten your shit together enough to call me in and walk me to the crime scene? Holy shit, Marines are tougher than fuck.”

  She laughed then, and it was a brittle thing that sounded like the slightest touch could shatter it, and her, into a million pieces. “You think I’ve got my shit together? Mr. Harker—”

  “Call me Q. Or just Harker. Mr. Harker makes me think you’re going to try to sell me something.”

  “Okay, Harker. I’m focusing on this because the longer I’m out here with you, the longer I can avoid going home to a house with no Faye in it. The longer I hunt for the bastard who took my baby away, the longer I don’t have to deal with telling our dog that Mommy isn’t coming home, and I don’t have to look in the closet, which is almost all her clothes, by the way, and figure out which one of her flowy hippie dresses I’m going to bury her in. The longer I’m out here, the longer I can avoid lying in bed with the awful goddamn silence I know is waiting on me…goddammit!” She veered off the trail, stomping a few feet into the woods, and slammed her hand into the trunk of a towering eucalyptus. She hammered the tree with palm strikes once, twice, three times, then leaned her head against the trunk and let out a scream so primal I knew I’d heard it before.

  I knew I’d screamed it before, more than seventy years ago in France when the woman I loved was taken from me. I knew that pain, and knew that Lena Meneses was dancing on the razor’s edge to madness. I knew, because when I danced on that edge, I fell over and lost myself for four years. I stood by, waiting and watching, ready to bind her if she looked like she was going to do herself any serious harm. She was done, though, and after another minute or two, she came back to the trail, reached down to her hip, and handed me a pistol in a holster.

  “Hang on to that for me. For a little while.”

  I didn’t say a word, just clipped the Sig onto my belt and nodded. Nothing else needed to be said.

  She took a deep breath, then said, “Okay, now that we’ve had our moment, let’s go start the real work.”

  It was another twenty minutes of walking before we came to the crime scene tape, but I saw the light from the portable floodlamps long before that. The scene was lit up like a movie set, with crime scene techs buzzing around the place, snapping pictures and taking samples of dirt and other trace evidence. A burly uniform came over to us as we ducked under the yellow tape, his hand out, but he froze when he saw Lena.

  “Sergeant Meneses…um…I…you can’t…” He looked around, desperately searching for anyone higher up the food chain than him.

  I took pity on the poor bastard and pulled out my badge holder. “Quincy Harker, Homeland Security,” I said, handing over the ID. He didn’t need to know that my relationship with DHS ended not long after I put a bullet in the head of one of their regional supervisors. I mean, he was half-demon and a multiple murderer who was trying to bring about the end of the world, so he totally deserved it, but they still got a little pissy about me shooting their agent.

  The badge had the desired result, though. It immediately got the local LEO’s panties in a twist about the feds coming to take their case away, all the worse because it was the spouse of one of their own. No way was he going to let me in there without a fight. Except, I was with Lena, so…

  I watched all those thoughts flicker across his face in the span of two heartbeats and held up a placating hand. “I’m not here to step on anybody’s dick, Officer…” I leaned in to read his nameplate.

  “Burleson,” he said.

  “Officer Burleson. I promise, I’m here to help. Sergeant Meneses and I served together, and I have some resources that local police departments don’t, so she called in a favor. It’s not like I don’t owe her enough.”

  Burleson let out a breath as some of the tension eased from him. “Oh, okay then. Let me call this in, and I’ll…”

  I wasn’t listening. I’d opened my third eye to the scene and was scanning the area in the mystical spectrum. I rocked back a little on my heels at the ferocity of the energy in the small clearing. There was more anger and pain in a fifty-foot circle than I’d seen since I had a rogue angel serial killer loose in Charlotte. Only the magical footprints this creature left behind were even more vibrant, meaning whatever had killed Faye had more juice than one of the Host.

  I started to think I might be fucked.

  3

  The clearing was circular, about fifty feet across, with a couple of little hiking trails leading in and out. The ground was littered with dozens of little yellow evidence tags, every one near an area of blood spatter. There were a lot of them. Like, more than I thought most forensic teams carried in their cars.

  “Are you sure you want to be here?” I asked Lena.

  “I want to be any fucking place but here, man. Are you stupid? I’m sorry, that was…”

  “It’s fine. It was a stupid question.”

  “But the real answer is I have to be here. I have to work the case. Even if I can’t work the case, I have to.”

  “I get it.”

  “Okay. What do I do?” She looked up at me, barely hanging on to her sanity through her grief, and she was looking to me for coping advice. I didn’t have much for her. My reaction to loss was half a decade of blackout insanity and a body count that made Jim Jones look like an amateur.

  I took a deep breath. She was not going to like my answer. “You run interference with Burleson for me, make sure nobody screws with me while I do my thing, and generally stay out of the way.” I braced for the inevitable explosion.

  None came. I raised an eyebrow at her. “I get it, man. I’m not a magical type. I don’t have the juice to do what you do. If I did, I would have let you stay on the east coast with all the other uptight wizards. So, go do your thing. I’ll keep Burly off your back. But as soon as you’re done, I get the full debrief. None of this bullshit where you hide stuff because of some Wizard’s First Rule or something.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s just the title of a book,” I said. Actually, I knew it was the title of a book. I love Terry Brooks.

  “I don’t give a fuck if it’s the Latin translation of those tattoos you’ve got on your arms, I want to know every fucking thing you find out about the son of a bitch who killed my wife. Comprende?”

  “Comprendo,” I replied. “But one question first.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Were you a badass, then a Marine? Or did the Marines turn you into a badass?”

  “The Corps doesn’t make you anything. It takes what’s inside you and makes you into the best you possible, but if you don’t have it, you’re not gonna get it just because you put on a uniform. Now get to work.”

  I resisted the urge to snap off a salute, mostly because my salutes have always been sloppy and usually disrespectful, and said, “Yes, ma’am.” I got to work. I started walking the scene by looking around in the mundane spectrum. I knew the crime scene techs were better than me, there was little to no chance I was going to find anything they missed, but I wasn’t looking for footprints, or dropped cigarettes, or a discarded condom full of the killer’s DNA. I was looking for signs that a ritual was performed here, scratchings in the dirt that appeared random to folks who had never actually summoned a demon but looked like magic to me.

  The soil was thick, dark, and rich. The kind of dirt where you could drop an apple on the ground and come back five years later to find an orchard. Leaves and twigs dotted the clearing between the blood spatter and landscape of yellow plastic evidence tents but nothing arcane in nature. There were scuffed patches in the dirt and a couple of long drag marks, but no evidence of a casting circle, or wax from candles, or anything to indicate that a ritual was performed here.

  I waved Lena over. She patted Officer Burleson on a shoulder and came over to where I knelt on the ground. She crouched beside me, averting her gaze from the patch of bloody earth three feet away from my knee. “What’s up? Did you find something?”

  “Not yet, but I need to talk through what I’m seeing with someone. It helps me process, and sometimes can get me to logic leaps I can’t make on my own. I need you to tell me the truth, can you be objective enough to be that person, or do I need to call my people back home?”

  To her credit, she didn’t answer right away. Her mouth opened, then she closed it again after a second or two. “I don’t know. I want to say yes because telling you I can’t feels like weakness. It feels like I’m not doing everything I can, but…”

  “But it’s your wife.”

  “Yeah. It’s my wife. And I don’t know if…”

  “Then don’t. I’ll call my people back East. If we do this right, there’s going to come a time in the next day or two that I’m going to need you to dig deep and maybe pull my ass out of some bad mojo. If I break you today, there’s no damn way that can happen. Now go back to keeping your buddy Burleson company, and I’ll Skype with my consultants in Charlotte.”

  “You mean your girlfriend,” Lena said.

  “Oh, hell no,” I replied. “It’s almost one in the morning back there. If I wake her up, she’ll march all the way to San Francisco to kick my ass. No, I’ll call Luke. He knows more about this stuff than Rebecca anyway.”

  She chuckled. “Sounds fair. And thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me until we get through whatever this shit is. If we’re still alive when whatever killed Faye is dead, then you can thank me.”

  She nodded at me, dashed away a tear from one eye, and walked back over to where Burleson watched us. I pulled out my phone and pressed the home button.

  Dennis’s human face popped up, looking like he did the last time I saw him alive. He’d been a round-faced twenty-something with curly hair and a feeble attempt at a beard, and seeing that face rocked me a little. It was way more comfortable talking to a digitized unicorn than the actual face of a friend who died because I got him involved in something over his head. I hoped I wasn’t repeating history in the west coast in this case.

  “What’s up, boss?” Dennis asked.

  “How much do you know about what’s going on out here?”

  “I know that Faye Spataro, regarded as one of the most skilled practitioners of elemental magic in the Council’s experience, was found horribly mutilated in the clearing where you’re currently standing. I know her body is currently at the San Francisco City Morgue, where Dr. Jacob Yao is scheduled to begin her autopsy first thing in the morning. The investigation has been assigned to one Harold Rinol, the most senior detective in the Mission District Station. His partner, Arlena Meneses, has been placed on light duty and officially ordered not to have anything to do with the case, due to her personal connection with the victim.”

  “Lena’s partner is the lead detective on the case?”

  “Yep.”

  “That explains why we haven’t had much trouble with the cops on the scene. Lena probably got the nod from her partner to be up here, even if she didn’t mention me specifically.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Dennis said. “How did you manage to not get thrown out the second you got there?”

  “I’m still carrying around a Department of Homeland Security badge. It’s not like they called anybody to check up on me.”

  “Yeah, that never blows up in your face at all.”

  “Have a little faith. Is Luke around?”

  “Yeah. I’ll buzz him.”

  A few seconds later, the aristocratic features of Lucas Card, real name Vlad Tepes, my “uncle,” popped onto the screen. “Quincy, how are you? Rebecca told me of the death of your friend. My condolences.”

  “Thanks. Comes with the longevity, I guess.”

  “How well I know,” Luke said. He did, too. He’d buried more people than I’d met, and I’m a lot older than I look. “What can I do to help?”

  “I need to run the camera around the scene. Tell me if anything looks weird to you.” I held up the phone and pressed a button to transmit the camera view from the back of the phone to Luke’s screen. I slowly turned in a circle, trying to make sure he got a good view of the entire scene. I pressed the button on the screen again, and his face came back into view.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t see much, but I am sure that Dennis was recording everything you transmitted, so we can go over it in greater detail at our leisure. I do not know what did this, but there are some things we can eliminate fairly easily.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11