City of Ghosts (13 page)

She waited. Waited, and forced herself not to think. Not to speak.

“Why you askin?”

“I think he’s connected. To them. I heard—ow!—I just need to know what you know about him. If he’s doing any other business besides the potions, or if he said anything to you or Bump about—”

“Oh, aye. I dig. Figure we got knowledge we ain’t sharin with you. Figure we got whoever-the-fuck workin for us, and ain’t gave you the tell.”

“No! I don’t mean it that way. I just need to know what you know about him, that’s all. Maybe he said something and you didn’t think anything about it at the time, or whatever.”

“Too stupid to know what to pass on, what not to?”

“Damn it, will you stop? I don’t think you’re too stupid to know what to pass on, and I don’t think you’re hiding anything—”

“Good, causen I ain’t the one who lies, aye?”

The venom in his voice almost made her jump, and not just because it hurt her feelings or scared her. It didn’t sound like him. How many beers had he emptied before she got there? She’d never seen him drunk, not really, and fear settled cold in her stomach. He had a target on his back most of the time; sure, in general people were too scared to go after him, but all it took was one pissed-off speedfreak with a gun. And he knew it. She’d seen his caution, his awareness of his surroundings; they’d even talked about it once at his place—the only place he said he really relaxed—before she passed out on his couch.

No point in asking, and no point worrying about it. That road didn’t lead anywhere good, and she had more than enough to worry about already. Instead she lit a cigarette to give herself something to do and tried again. “I need to know what you know about him, for the case. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me.”

His own lighter clicked; the alley glowed for a second before he snapped it off, shutting down the six-inch flame. “Aye,” he said finally. “Came and talked to Bump. Bout three, maybe four weeks past, I were still in the hospital. Been here longer’n that, though. Said he’d been.”

“Did he say what he was doing? Any businesses aside from the potions?”

“Ain’t talked to him myself, dig. Only know what Bump gave me.”

“But if he was doing something else, you’d know, right? You would have heard.”

His eyebrows rose a fraction, like he was trying to figure out if she was using cheap flattery or not. “Ain’t heard shit on him. Got a family, he say. Guessin a big one. Sells whatany he sells to feed em. But nobody say me aught else.”

Damn. That didn’t give her much of anything, did it?

“His potions. He might be selling them to—Did Bump try them? Did Maguinness give him any of them, like, as a sample or something before Bump said okay?”

“Aye. Bump said ain’t done shit for him. Say tasted some nasty, too.”

“That might not have been one of his real potions, though. Not one of the ones …” Shit. She couldn’t finish that sentence, even if she thought she was right, which she didn’t. The Lamaru had had some involvement with Maguinness. Maybe it was about his potions, maybe it wasn’t.

Terrible shifted position, his face a deeper shadow. “Got other asks, or can I get gone?”

She wanted to ask him more questions. She wanted to let him go. Figuring out if it hurt more to have him run away or to stay and talk to her like she barely existed didn’t really appeal. Of course, she’d spent most of her life feeling like she barely existed, but never around him. Not before, anyway.

“Got shit to do. We done here?” He gripped the door handle to head back into the bar.

“I guess—No, wait. Can you talk to Maguinness? Or ask Bump to talk to him? Ask him about this, you know? And if I could be there when you do, that would really help.”

A pause, a curt nod. The door opened, and he was gone.

Chapter Thirteen

The Church has a hand in every aspect of your daily life, from food production to education to transportation. It watches you, so you can relax and live a safe and happy life.

—
The Church Guides You
, a pamphlet by Elder Warren

Her choices after that conversation were easy. Break into the slaughterhouse in the middle of the night, hunt for Maguinness, or go home, take everything she could manage to shove down her throat, and pass out. Not a hard decision, but she regretted it a bit as she walked across the slaughterhouse parking lot the next afternoon with the stench making her stomach dance and Lauren’s voice pounding into her skull like a screeching, whiny jackhammer. Three Cepts helped; when they got inside she’d duck into the bathroom and take another one.

“I don’t appreciate getting such a late start, Cesaria. You said yesterday you’d be ready by noon, and here it is almost two—”

“Sorry.” Another sunny day, too. The day before it had thrilled her; today she would have given her left hand for some fucking cloud cover. Or some speed. Or both.

“I don’t mean to be a bitch, I really don’t, but I’ve been waiting here—”

“I said I was sorry.” Damn it, the bitch actually had a point there. Chess
had
agreed to meet Lauren at noon, and she couldn’t really blame her for being pissed; hey, she could get in fucking line, right? The long, long line of People Chess Let Down or Fucked Over or whatever.

She just wished Lauren would shut the hell up about it.

“My father says the Elders speak very highly of you, and that’s why I think you should know that behavior like this—”

“I know, Lauren. I am
sorry
. Okay? Can we stop talking about it now?”

Lauren did stop, to Chess’s surprise. The sun glinted off her hair so bright and sharp that it was painful even through the dark lenses of Chess’s sunglasses; two days in a row she’d remembered them, which had to be some sort of record.

Lauren gave a half-shrug. “Fine. Just don’t be late again, please. This is a horrible place to wait. It stinks and it’s dirty and noisy. How can you live here? How do you sleep?”

With lots of chemical aid, was generally how Chess slept, but she wasn’t about to say it. Nor was she about to point out that she didn’t actually live that close to the slaughterhouse, so the smell and the noise weren’t as bad, or that she’d happily deal with both as long as it meant she had easy access to the afore-unmentioned chemicals. Instead she just shrugged. “You get used to it.”

“Ugh.” Lauren adjusted her jacket and started walking toward the building. “I feel like I need a shower just being here.”

“Wait till we get inside,” Chess muttered, but Lauren didn’t hear her. Chess assumed she didn’t, anyway, since she didn’t turn around or make a snotty reply.

The slaughterhouse waited for them, a dark gray stone hulk with tiny windows and spiky smokestacks like weapons raised toward the sky. Death hovered over it; now Lauren had finally gone quiet the sounds of animals drifted across the parking lot, growing louder with every step. Chess pictured them, long lines of them trapped in curving mazes, each step taking them closer to their messy end.

A security guard, visible through the glass double doors of the entrance, buzzed them in, and called the plant manager when they explained why they were there.

“Mr. Carlyle be here in a minute,” he said, settling himself back down in his chair. “Usually Mr. Hunt deals with you guys, but he ain’t showed up in weeks.”

“Mr. Hunt?”

The guard nodded. “Assistant manager.”

Chess glanced at Lauren, already dangling Vanhelm’s picture from her manicured fingers. “Is this Mr. Hunt?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Why? He do something?”

“We’re just establishing his employment,” Lauren lied. “How well did you know him?”

“Didn’t. Not much. He didn’t talk to me ‘cept hi in the morning and ‘bye at night. Mr. Carlyle be the one to ask.”

“Was there anyone he did talk to?” Chess asked.

“Wouldn’t know. I just sits here at the desk.”

A door opened off to the left; the animal sounds that had been muffled by it blared through the open frame before quieting again when the door snapped into place.

Chess didn’t know what she’d expected the manager of a slaughterhouse to look like; she supposed if she thought about it she’d have imagined some sort of burly lumberjack with dried blood under his fingernails. But Mr. Carlyle—”Call me Ben, please”—stood barely taller than she did, with wispy brownish hair, watery blue eyes, and so many nervous tics she almost wanted to offer him a Panda to calm him down.

“Erik Hunt?” he said, after leading them back into his office. The nervous tics made more sense after that walk; if Chess had to hear all that noise, feel that fear and death and panic slamming against her skin for hours on end every day, she’d be a wreck too. Not that she wasn’t already, but damn, that place was awful.

“He’d been with us for six months or so. Nice guy. Good manager. I mean, the employees liked him, and I liked him. I can’t imagine why he would just stop coming to work, he was so dedicated. Always coming in early, staying late, all of that.”

The words were accompanied by various cuff tuggings, nose rubbings, and hand wringings.

“And he showed you photo ID when you hired him?” Lauren asked.

“Of course! Of course he did.” Carlyle turned to the row of filing cabinets behind him, the same industrial tan as the files kept in the Church library. “We conform to all Church rules here, in hiring and in practices. Here.”

Chess reached for the file folder he set on top of his paper-strewn desk, but Lauren beat her to it and began flipping through the papers inside.

Okay. Chess had some questions anyway. “What Church practices? Aside from hiring, I mean.”

Carlyle shrugged and played with his earlobe. “We follow Church rules in our slaughtering practices, of course, and maintain a Ritual Room for Haunted Week meats and dogs, and—”

“Dogs? What do you mean?”

Lauren glanced at her; Chess caught the frown but ignored it.

“Well, Miss—Putnam?—all slaughterhouses are required to keep our own psychopomps as well as providing hallowed space for their creation should it be necessary. We only handle a few a year, but of course for Haunted Week—”

“Right, you have a special room. and you have psychopomps in that room?” Her head spun.

“Of course. I guess this isn’t your department, but we’re not permitted to do any slaughtering during that week without a psychopomp present—”

“Who oversaw them? The psychopomps, I mean. Was it Va—Hunt? Or do you have someone else?”

Lauren opened her mouth, but Carlyle spoke before she could. “Yes, it was one of his responsibilities.”

“This is all in order,” Lauren interrupted, handing the employment file back to Carlyle. Chess hadn’t had a chance to look at it, but Lauren didn’t seem to care and frankly neither did she. Who gave a fuck what ID Vanhelm had provided? He’d handled psychopomps here. He’d been in charge of them. He knew about them, in other words.

So she ignored Lauren’s glare. “Can we see that room?”

“Of course.”

It took a minute for Carlyle to find his key—apparently he was as absentminded as he was jittery, although Chess couldn’t help wondering if perhaps some of his nerves were due to their presence—and lead them along an iron walkway above the slaughterhouse floor to the Ritual Room.

By the time they reached it her ears were ringing and her entire body felt sticky and cold. Not just from the fear and death and pain, either; actually, if she were honest, she’d have to admit the floor wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be. Loud, yes, but not horrible.

Something else lurked beneath it all, though, something she didn’t have time to stop and think about but that she was aware of, slow and sinuous in the air. Something wrong.

It didn’t feel like Lamaru; didn’t have the same dark, almost maniacal edge to it, the same feeling of evil lurking beneath it.

But something was there, and she didn’t know what it was, although it tingled just out of reach in her memory.

“This is it,” he said, pushing the thick, heavy-looking iron door open and ushering them inside.

The energy hit her harder there, locked in—she assumed—by iron-lined walls. Snippets of information came back to her, hazy memories of lessons she hadn’t paid much attention to since she’d known from the beginning she wouldn’t be working in Compliance or any of the Government-related Church jobs. Slaughterhouses were required to have ritual rooms, just as hospitals were required to have iron-walled wards for terminal patients. Death of any kind posed a double threat during Haunted Week, and no chances could be taken.

The room she stood in appeared to be in total compliance: locked, clean, empty save for a naked lightbulb high overhead. Faint brownish stains lurked on the concrete floor, but that was to be expected. The scent of bleach tickled her nose.

“Erik started working for us just before last Haunted Week.” Carlyle scratched his neck. “He oversaw production in this room during the week, and the cleanup after.”

Chess inched her way along the walls, scanning the floor. “And that included psychopomps?”

Behind her Lauren sighed, but who gave a fuck what she thought.

Carlyle nodded. “We have Elders in the room, of course, for the summoning, but Erik was in charge of the team.”

The closer Chess looked at the room, the less convinced she became that it hadn’t been used in months. She supposed the bleach smell could remain in the air as strongly as it had, with the door locked. She supposed the energy could stay as heavy, too, given the iron in the walls. Determining the age of a spell or a particular energy usually didn’t pose much of a problem, but with iron walls …

It didn’t matter, anyway. Lauren said her name, loud enough to cut through her thoughts; she looked up to see Lauren and Carlyle outside the room again, Lauren with that raised-eyebrow look that made Chess want to hit her. Want to hit her
more
.

“Will you call me if you hear from him?” Lauren handed Carlyle something that could only be a business card. La-de-da. Chess didn’t have business cards.

Carlyle nodded and smiled, and made all the right responses, but Chess blocked him out. He didn’t have anything to do with the case; she’d known that the minute she shook his hand. He had about as much magical ability as Lex, which meant none at all.

But that room, and Vanhelm …

“Vanhelm handled psychopomps,” she said as they left. Intellectually she knew the parking lot didn’t smell any better than the interior had, but it still felt amazing to be outside again.

“So?”

“So? Lauren, come on. Vanhelm handled psychopomps here. He manipulated a psychopomp at Church yesterday. You can’t tell me—”

“He didn’t ‘handle’ them, he might have seen them once or twice. And you don’t know that he manipulated that psychopomp. And even if you did, that’s not our—”

“It
is
our investigation. The Lamaru are our investigation, and if they’re doing something with psychopomps, we—”

Lauren sighed. “Okay, Cesaria. Fine. Let’s say for the sake of argument you’re right. How do we prove that? How do we find out what their plan is?”

“We—” Oops.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She’d been about to mention Maguinness, and the possibility of finding and questioning him. Had been about to mention the toad fetish. Damn it. She had real information, information that could have made a difference to Lauren, but she couldn’t share any of it. Instead she had to let it fester in her mind, had to spend hours turning it over and over again to find some way to introduce it.

“Fine.” Lauren pulled her keys out of her little purse. “Look, Cesaria. I appreciate you think you’re right about this. I don’t agree. But even if I did, spending hours in useless conjecture does us no good. We need to work with the facts, and the facts we have are that the Lamaru are murdering people with real physical weapons.”

“This could be a lead—”

“And so could the bodies. You know, the actual evidence we have. Let’s focus on that, okay?”

The worst part was that as much as she wanted to, Chess really couldn’t fault Lauren. Given the information they had—the information they were
supposed
to have—Chess might very well have thought the same way.

Oh, who the fuck was she kidding. No, she wouldn’t have, at least she hoped she wouldn’t have. But she couldn’t totally fault Lauren, which pissed her off.

“Fine,” she said, because Lauren seemed to want her to say something.

“Good. Now why don’t you meet me at the Church in, say, three hours. We should have some new reports by then. And we can head over to the docks and check out the place where the Lamaru body was found, what was his name?”

“Denby,” Chess said. “Why three hours? Why not head over now?”

“I have a meeting with Daddy.” Lauren frowned and checked her watch, while Chess just managed to restrain her eye roll. “In fact, I’m late. Have you finished studying the file? You said yesterday you were looking into that genetic anomaly—did you finish?”

“I haven’t had time, since—”

“Well, you have time now.”

Chess gritted her teeth.
Mustn’t smack the Grand Elder’s daughter. Mustn’t smack the Grand Elder’s daughter
. “Yes, I guess I do.”

Lauren plunked herself down into her car. “Good. You can fill me in later. See you then.”

She didn’t wait for a reply. Chess hadn’t expected her to. Instead she watched the car speed out of the lot, and thought about what to do next. Yes, she could head over to the Church and sit for hours in the Restricted Room. She probably should do that. But what the hell did it matter? The case wouldn’t be solved by figuring out what the genetic problems of the victims were. The case would be solved when they caught the fucking Lamaru and figured out what the hell they were doing with psychopomps, and what that had to
do
with people with genetic problems.

She had her psychopomp with her, in her bag. For the first time ever she thought of it with unease, picturing the skull as something that could erupt into being without warning and attack her. In her years as a Debunker she’d gone through four or five of them; they were tools, something to be controlled. More than that, they were part and parcel of the Church, a symbol of its sovereignty, and as such represented her own power and independence. Her freedom, such as it was.