Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) (13 page)

“I was waiting to give them proper, respectful burials,” Sister Catherine said. “I needed to dispose of them discreetly on holy ground. I couldn’t let them rot, or be thrown away, or…”

“That’s sweet of you, considering you fucking killed people.”

She bit the inside of her cheek. Her eyes dropped to her feet, which were also bound to the chair in leather cuffs.

“You want to confess to anything?” I asked. “Explain why you’re using demons to kill people? Tell me how many other victims we should expect to find? Fill in the blanks for me, Sister. I’d sure appreciate the help.”

The woman took a deep breath. When she returned her gaze to me, she looked resolute. “Yes, I am responsible for the death of Jay Brandon and the nurse at the hospital. I have been in Helltown consorting with demons. Whatever confession you would like me to sign, please present it as soon as possible and notify my lawyer.”

Yeah, my dart had definitely missed. Now she was messing with me.

I stood up and dropped the photos on my chair.

Pacing around Sister Catherine, I pushed back my jacket so I could brace my hands on my hips. Drum my fingers against my belt. It was so quiet in there that I could hear the tap of skin against leather.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re in Helltown to help people.”

“I am in Helltown to consort with demons, which led to the death of Jay Brandon.”

That was what I’d gone into the room expecting to hear. I
wanted
to hear it.

Now that I had, I wasn’t happy.

“Why?” I asked. “What do you get out of the murders?”

Sister Catherine’s mouth opened and then closed again. Her hands tightened into fists. “Well, what do witches typically get out of working with demons? Power, I’d assume. Yes, I’ve been getting power from this. It makes me stronger in my pagan witchcraft.”

“And what kind of demon is that thing we saw you with, exactly? The thing in the basement of the hospital?”

“It’s so powerful that it’s a breed of its own.” That answer came more promptly. She might have been telling the truth. I’d been reading about demons. The biggest and nastiest were one of a kind.

“And now this thing is roaming around without its keeper?” I asked.

The nun considered this. “No, it only comes out when I summon it. Now that you have me, that demon won’t be causing problems anymore. You shouldn’t bother looking for it.”

Which meant that it was still out there. Probably vulnerable without Sister Catherine and capable of murdering again.

I needed a new tactic.

“How much do you know about the Office of Preternatural Affairs?” I asked.

“Only what I’ve heard people say at the church.” She had the courtesy to look embarrassed. “They don’t say many positive things.”

Yeah, I would bet they didn’t. “When witches break our rules, we make them disappear. Some of them get retrained and hired to work for us. Some of them get relocated where they’ll cause less damage. But we do something else with the witches responsible for killing people.”

She paled. “I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t. Our jails aren’t like mundane jails. They’re bad places to be. You’ll be cut off from your power for the rest of your life.” I was guessing, but it sounded scary enough to suit the OPA. We were scary people. “There definitely aren’t any churches.”

Sister Catherine couldn’t seem to speak. Her eyes glistened, and a single tear rolled down her cheek.

I wasn’t a bad guy. I didn’t want to do bad cop. But the truth was that if Sister Catherine signed a confession saying that she was responsible for everything, she
would
disappear for a long time.

Maybe I wasn’t a bad cop so much as a brutally honest cop.

“You have given me a really bad weekend, Sister,” I said. “I’d like it if this week was better, so I’ll give you one more chance to tell the truth before we call your bluff and toss you in one of our coldest, darkest cells. What the hell is going on here?”

She swallowed hard. “Exactly what I said.” The nun was trembling all over. “Bring the confession and I’ll sign it.”

Isobel was waiting for me in Fritz’s otherwise empty office. I mean, of course she was. It was nine o’clock in the morning and Lucrezia de Angelis was somewhere on the campus, so Isobel was in the one place where she was most likely to get caught.

And here I’d trusted Fritz to take her back to her RV after we were done in Helltown.

“Jesus, Izzy,” I said, slipping into the office and shutting the door behind me. “Are you
trying
to get caught?”

She looked irritated. “We were interrupted trying to leave. I’m hiding until Fritz can get me out of here. Have some faith, Cèsar.”

Isobel was doing a terrible job of hiding. Fritz had a corner office with huge windows and a great view of the entire grassy OPA campus. It also probably allowed anyone on the sidewalk to see us talking.

I shut the curtains so that the only light came from Fritz’s desk lamp.

“You can’t send Sister Catherine to prison,” Isobel said. “Or wherever it is you send people.”

“We have a detention center run by the Union,” I said, “and it’s a horrible pit of darkness where people who use demons as murder weapons deserve to go.”

“She didn’t do it,” Isobel said.

That was exactly what I was struggling not to think.

It didn’t make any rational sense. She had the victims’ hearts at her house. If that wasn’t incriminating evidence, then I didn’t know what was. But her reaction had been all wrong. She was still hiding something. I was beginning to suspect that “something” was that she was actually innocent.

Like I’ve said before, I have a pretty good gut instinct, but a gut instinct against a closet of body parts didn’t mean anything.

“Give me all your evidence for her innocence and I’ll let her go,” I said. “Better yet, find the real killer. I’ll wait here, twiddling my thumbs, until you get back.”

Isobel paced, twisting her hands together. “She’s a good person. She’s selfless. She couldn’t deny a beggar asking for a quarter, much less kill someone.”

“Look, I don’t think you know Sister Catherine as well as you think you do,” I said. I ticked off the reasons on my fingers. “She was hostile toward me when I initially questioned her at the soup kitchen. She just confessed—literally five minutes ago—that she’s responsible for the murders. We found a closet at her house with pieces of the fucking murder victims inside. This isn’t the kind of shit that innocent people do.”

“I bet that if you dig into it, you’ll find that the evidence was planted. And if Sister Catherine was hostile to you, then you were probably acting like a jackass,” Isobel said.

“Am I ever a jackass?” She opened her mouth. I cut her off with a gesture. “You know what, don’t answer that. You met Sister Catherine in Helltown. That alone says a lot about her character.”

She batted her eyelashes at me. “I live in Helltown sometimes.”

“Not really. You live in an RV and it’s sometimes in Helltown. Big difference.”

Isobel slipped away from Fritz’s desk and started plucking at my tie. I had loosened it coming out of the interview room, and now she untied it completely, tugging on it until it slithered from around my neck. “You’re just making excuses for me because you like me.”

“I wouldn’t make excuses for Sister Catherine even if she was as hot as you are,” I said. “Murder is murder.”

Her hands hesitated on my chest. “Is it?”

“Usually. Yes. Definitely. I don’t know.” She had pressed the full length of her body against mine, and it was getting awfully hard to think. “Wait, are you trying to seduce me into letting Sister Catherine go?”

“You would be a lot more fun if you stopped thinking for a few minutes.”

“Gotta say, that might be the first time I’ve been accused of thinking too much.”

“I’m not trying to convince you to let her go, per se,” Isobel said. “I just think that you’re wrong about her. You need to keep looking for the truth. If you don’t, then there will only be more death—and you’ll have incarcerated a helpless old woman in the meantime.”

She was right. She might as well have been reading my mind for all that she was speaking my thoughts.

“I’ll keep looking,” I said.

“That’s all I want. Thank you.”

She’d just scored the victory she wanted, but it was hard to think of anything but how soft her curves felt. “So you bake a lot of cookies, huh?” I asked, because that was the only thing I seemed to have gotten out of Isobel’s relationship with Sister Catherine.

“When I have a kitchen to do it in.” Her embarrassed smile was pretty damn cute. “It’s not easy in my RV.”

“I have a kitchen.” It slipped out before I could think to stop myself.

Isobel’s full lips spread into a smile. She looped the tie around her neck alongside all the bone and feather necklaces. “Just tell me when, Agent Hawke, and I’ll be there.”

I cleared my throat. “I should go find Suzy. Can I, uh… Can I have my tie back?”

She ignored my outstretched hand and tied it loosely in a neat Double Windsor. The long strip of black cloth looked happy to be nestled between the globes of her breasts, but maybe I was just projecting my own feelings onto an inanimate object. Just maybe. “I’ll give it back when I come over to your apartment to bake cookies.”

God, I wanted to be that necktie.

Isobel leaned toward me, stretching up on her toes.

Don’t kiss your boss’s ex-girlfriend in his office. There are probably cameras. Don’t do it. He will kill you.

“So, uh, where’s Fritz?” I asked.

Best way to kill the mood? Bring up the ex.

“I think he’s in a meeting,” Isobel said, immediately stepping back.

Victory
. “Did he say who he’s with?” It was a lot easier to think with some breathing room between us.

“Let’s see.” Isobel helped herself to the planner on Fritz’s desk. “It just says ‘Vice President.’ The meeting ends in about five minutes if you want to ask him about it.”

Shit. Lucrezia de Angelis would be heading straight toward me in five minutes.

“I have to go,” I said.

Isobel looked like she was about to say something else, but I didn’t listen to her. As soon as she opened her mouth again, she was going to say something that turned off my ability to think rationally, and then I’d be really screwed.

It wasn’t the most dignified exit, but I left Fritz’s office, abandoning my tie to the blissful chasm of Isobel’s cleavage.

And I ran right into someone outside the door.

The first glimpse of a woman with blond hair froze me to the floor, but it wasn’t Lucrezia de Angelis.

It was Janet from the forensics department.

She was slightly better than the vice president in the way that a plague is slightly better than a nuclear bomb.

“Cèsar,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

I edged away from her. “Who were you expecting?”

“Director Friederling and the vice president. They asked to meet with me.”

“You’re in the wrong place. They’re down in the conference rooms. You better go find them.”
And get the hell away from the office Isobel is hiding in
.

She called after me when I tried to walk away. “Aren’t you attending the meeting, too? I know that Lucrezia wants to speak with you.”

Better and better. “Sorry, I’m in the middle of something,” I said. “Rain check?”

I left Janet gaping at me in the hallway outside Fritz’s office.

I HAD TWO CHOICES at that point: Stick around to talk to Lucrezia de Angelis, or go back to Helltown looking for more information about Sister Catherine.

For once, Helltown was the slightly less unpleasant option.

I made my second trip at one in the afternoon, right when the sun was at its apex and the shadows were at their fewest. That was the safest time to visit, which wasn’t saying much.

Instead of heading in the way that Isobel had taken me that morning, I went my usual route. It was on the south side of the neighborhood. Not so coincidentally, it was farthest from Silver Needles territory. And then I only had to go a block to visit my not-so-favorite infernal contact, Monique.

If you think you’ve seen ugly before, you’re wrong, because you’ve never seen Monique. She didn’t have a nose, lips, or eyebrows. She was about as tall as my hip standing up, but she usually crouched on a stool like a mutant frog so it was easier to see her mangled face. Her gnarled hands were blistered from numerous accidental burns while blowing novelty glass sculptures. And then there was the smell.

Now, I’m not a guy who judges based on appearance. I could get past her looks if she was good company. I’d dated too many beautiful women with horrible personalities in college—I knew what mattered most.

So when I say that Monique’s ugly, I’m not just talking about the way she looks. I’m talking about her from the inside out. She’s a misanthropic, self-centered bitch. She used to sell bongs infused with infernal energy to college students, knowing that it would open them to demonic possession. Monique didn’t care as long as she got paid.

She didn’t look happy to see me stroll into her shop. She was never happy to see me.

“Smile,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Monique said, lipless mouth flashing jagged teeth.

I had to duck to get into her shop without knocking glass off the shelf over the door. You know where I keep all my fragile stuff? Low on the wall where any guy over six feet tall could destroy them by walking past.

Knowing Monique, it was probably a tactic to get customers to accidentally break her crafts and have to pay for everything.

“You’ve been busy,” I remarked, sliding between two bongs that were hung from the ceiling by leather cords wrapped around their shiny glass testicles.

“What the fuck do you want?”

“You always think the worst of me, Monique. Maybe I want to buy something.”

“Oh, you’re gonna buy something, all right,” she said. “You come into my shop, you constantly disrespect and threaten me—you better at least give me cash, asshole.”

She needed an insult thesaurus. I was so many more things than just an asshole.