Made for Sin (8 page)

He didn't look like he believed it, though, and Speare definitely didn't. “That's kind of stretching, isn't it?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so,” Majowski said. “But we might as well have a look.”

“I'd rather have a look at a drink,” Ardeth said. “Somewhere else.”

Funny, Speare had been thinking the exact same thing. There might be a lot more to learn from examining the body—there undoubtedly was more to learn from examining the body—but he couldn't do any examining without potentially screwing things up for the police and the ME. They probably wouldn't be the ones solving the case, no, but he didn't want them coming to talk to him because he'd left a hair or a fingerprint or some DNA where it shouldn't have been. Dealing with the cops was not his favorite thing.

But then, none of what he'd done so far would come close to being on a list of his favorite things, and he was still stuck doing them, so what was one more not-favorite activity?

Majowski checked his watch. “You guys probably should go somewhere else, actually. I really need to get this called in and get the crime-scene guys out here.”

Time for yet another not-favorite thing, Speare thought as they said goodbye: analyzing the possible motives of someone who liked to play with body parts and demons.

Ardeth's silence was especially deep in the car, the kind of silence that made it seem like the silent person was on another planet in their minds. Whether it was because she'd just been looking at a dead body—a dead and
mutilated
body—in general, or if it was because it was the dead and mutilated body of someone she knew, he wasn't sure, and he didn't want to ask. That would be weird. And he didn't care.

Much. He didn't care much. Not too much, certainly. Why should he? He wasn't supposed to care about her—he couldn't care about her. That would only lead to problems, and he didn't need more of those.

Besides, it wasn't like she cared about him. She thought he was a sleazeball, and she barely tolerated him.

Well, she'd bandaged his arm, and hadn't been judgmental or nasty about the stolen Coke, and had shared some interesting thoughts about the murder they'd just learned about, but aside from that she barely tolerated him. And she'd only done those nice things because she wasn't a horrible person, and she stole for a living so why would she judge him for that?

Those nice things had still been nice, though. And that body they'd just seen had upset her. “Hey, are you o—?”

“I'm fine.”

She wasn't, though. He knew it. The beast knew it. One thing that bastard could do was sniff out misery; it was like an unhappiness radar, constantly pinging in the background, slavering at the thought that someone was in pain. Including him. Which meant it was always slavering.

He ignored it. “It's not easy seeing somebody like that, when you knew them alive.”

“I didn't know him. I just met him a few times. It's not a big deal, okay? He wasn't my friend, and he's not the first dead body I've ever seen, and I'm not some delicate little flower, so you can put away your big-strong-tough-guy bullshit.”

“It's not bullshit.” Had he touched on something sensitive? She didn't seem the type, but then he remembered her comments earlier at the bar, about having no one to back her up and having to look after herself.

She probably wouldn't appreciate him bringing that up, though, and he didn't want to get into a big conversation about it, either. It wasn't like they were forming some kind of relationship or something. They were working together—sort of—on this one case, and that was that.

So he'd go in another direction. “I really am that big and tough.”

He'd hoped she would laugh. He didn't anticipate how hearing that laugh would make him feel like he'd done something special, or how some of the tension in his shoulders and back would disappear.

“So I hear,” she said, and her voice sounded easier, happier, too. “Maybe later you'll tell me about the Gallo thing.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“Not according to Felix.”

He shifted in his seat. Damn Felix. “It wasn't a big deal. He was a husband I was tailing, and he and his wife got in a fight and she told him all about it. He showed up at my place with a gun and demanded I give him everything I had on him—which was a lot—and I refused. That's all it was.”

“You broke his arm, his collarbone, and his leg,” she said, “and made him shoot himself in the foot.”

And he'd be breaking Felix's gossiping mouth next, or he would if he wasn't one of the few real friends he had. Although it was hard to remember what a good friend Felix was when he could feel Ardeth's eyes focused on him, watching his reaction, waiting for a response he couldn't think of.

Damn it, why was she putting him so off-balance? It wasn't the strangeness of the circumstances, of the night, or of anything else. He just felt like…like there was something he wanted to say to her, like there was a conversation they should have been having that they weren't having. He'd spent plenty of time with plenty of women, but he couldn't remember ever feeling so unsure of himself.

Maybe it was better to change the subject back to something he felt comfortable with. “So why Mercer, do you think? What do you know about him?”

She paused long enough to let him know she was well aware that he was changing the subject, and why, but she allowed it. “He's—he was—a great dipper—a pickpocket. I don't think he'd ever been caught, at least not once he got out of his teens. A great lockpick, too. Trained by a magician—Enzo Lario. Ever heard of him?”

“Yeah,” he said, surprised in spite of himself. “My mom used to pal around with him, before I was born. I met him once or twice, but I guess he wasn't too into dating a woman with a kid.”

“I didn't know that.” It was her turn to sound surprised. “I mean, I know your mom spent a few weeks guesting at the old Crown when he was there, but I didn't know they were friends.”

“Everybody was my mother's friend. If you can call it that.”

“Hey, she did what she had to do,” Ardeth said. Something in her voice sounded different. Sad? No, wistful, he thought. Wistful. “It can't have been easy.”

His mother was another subject he definitely didn't want to discuss. “What did yours do?”

“Died,” Ardeth said. “When I was three.”

And now he felt like an asshole again. “Oh. Sorry.”

“It's okay. I don't really remember her. And my dad took care of me. Taught me everything I know.”

“I've heard of your dad,” he said. “Mickey, right? Mickey Coyle.”

“That was him.” Pride touched her voice.

“I'm sorry for your loss.” Her recent loss, now that he thought of it; Mickey Coyle had died just a couple of months before.

“Thank you.” She shook her head slightly, her smile soft and sad in the darkness. “He used to take me to work with him, when I was little. I was an experienced decoy by the time I was five. When I was six he started teaching me basic lifting—you know, finger tricks, card tricks, sleight-of-hand stuff. He was the best.”

“I've heard that.” It was true, too. The guy had been something of a legend—kind of like Va-va-voom Vera, now that he thought of it.

“What did yours teach you?”

That was an odd question. She knew so much about him, she had to know that. “Never had one.”

“That's not the way I heard it.”

Oh, right. She meant Laz. “Nobody's ever told me anything different,” he said. “So why don't we leave it at that.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn't realize it was a sore spot.”

“It's not.”

“Sure it is.” She sucked on the Coke he'd bought her and made a face. Yeah, sitting in the car for forty minutes hadn't made it taste any better. “You're kind of a walking sore spot, Speare. I wonder why.”

“You're not as good at this little analysis game as you think you are,” he said. “It's kind of sad. But please, keep going, if it amuses you so much.”

“I'm just—”

“I know what you're
just
doing.” They hit a red light, which meant he could give her a nice long narrow-eyed look. If this was her idea of a truce, he'd hate to know how she went to war. “And I don't like it.”

“And nobody ever does things you don't like,” she said.

“No. They don't.”

“Must be nice. How do you manage that?”

Well, he generally threatened them with either physical violence or the exposure of secrets, at least if they were people he wanted or needed to keep around for any length of time. But he wasn't really in the mood to disclose any of that to her. Or hear her opinions on it. “So, Mercer. He's not connected with Doretti, as far as I know—do you know if he was connected to Theodore, or why he might be a target?”

Another knowing pause. “Well, really, isn't everybody in our business connected to somebody, in some way? Even if it's just knowing each other's names? Especially here. You know that. You're part of it, too.”

“So who was he connected to,” Speare said, trying to just be grateful she hadn't pressed it, “and why?”

“Nobody specifically, not that I know of. But again, he was highly in demand. They say he never met a lock he couldn't break, that his hand was like a key itself, it was so sensitive.”

The word “hand” hit him the second it left her mouth. Apparently it hit her, too, because her last words came out slowly, like the wheels in her head were spinning in another direction, and she looked at him with wide eyes. “He was left-handed,” she said, answering the question he'd been about to ask.

He nodded. “And Theo's right hook was legendary. What about his legs, Mercer's legs?”

“I don't know about that. I never heard anything. But collecting body parts, really?”

“With a demon-sword,” he said. “And you said those skills can be preserved in those parts, right?”

“But why?” They were near his neighborhood now, and the streetlights showed him every detail of her confused, unhappy expression. Her distressed expression. Damn, he was really showing her a good time, wasn't he, with the mutilated corpse of her friend and the talk about her dead father and all. She was probably very glad that she'd agreed to meet with him.

He started to reach for her, intending to rest his hand on her shoulder again, maybe to chase that look off her face, but he stopped himself before his hand left the wheel. Why get rejected, especially when—to remind himself for the fiftieth damn time—she wasn't someone he'd be spending time with after this. She wasn't someone he could ever really touch.

And that was fine. He was just having a hard time getting used to being around a woman who looked like her and not touching her, that was all. Usually that was one of the first things he did when he saw a woman he wanted. If they gave him a look or moved his hand or moved themselves away, he knew he had to try a different approach or give up and find someone else. If they let him touch them, odds were they'd let him touch them in other places, too, after a little while; odds were they wanted him, too.

Not that he wanted her. Because he didn't. He did not want that body pressed up against his, or to bury his fingers in that vivid hair, or to press his lips against the pale, delicate skin of her throat. Nope, he didn't want that at all.

Right?

She was looking at him, her eyes wide; for a horrible second he thought he might have said that out loud or that she could somehow read his mind, but then he remembered she'd asked a question.

“I don't know why,” he said, making the turn into his neighborhood. “I think it's safe to assume it's not for some kind of altruistic reason, though. They might be collecting the parts just to display, or to do some kind of ritual to absorb their power.”

“Black magic,” she said. “Not everyone can do rituals like that, so whoever it is, they're really skilled. Powerful. Really evil, too.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that.” He smiled at her, so she knew he was joking. “None of those parts have turned up anywhere, though. If they were just taking the skills from them, wouldn't they discard the parts?”

“They might.” She thought about it for a second. “Unless they're waiting for something. Maybe their ritual needs to happen at a certain time, or they need some other part….”

That couldn't be it. Could it? “Like they need a complete body.”

Her shudder was visible even with his gaze directed elsewhere. “They want to make a whole body with used parts? That's a little—well, no, I guess it's realistic, but again…why?”

“Can you use a body like that to kill people, to—I mean, can you command a body like that?”

“If you have the right spells, I guess,” she said. Fear and disgust tinged her voice. “If you're powerful enough to properly use a demon-sword, you're probably powerful enough to use it to make a zombie-thing.”

The very idea of it made him queasy, especially since the beast thought it seemed like the most fun thing it had ever heard of. “That might be…”

“Might be what?” Pause. “What's wrong?”

“I don't know.” He shut off the headlights and set the emergency brake without hitting the regular brakes at all—no need for red lights glowing in the rear—before cutting the engine. Something wasn't right. The closer they got to his place, the weirder the air felt. Whether it was himself sensing it or the beast picking it up or both, it was one of those rare occasions when he and the thing that shared his head were in perfect agreement: Going home wasn't the best idea.

Ardeth's hand landed on his arm, its light, cool weight somehow soothing and reassuring and oddly exciting. He got the message she meant by it, too, which was that she was ready for anything—if they needed to get out and run, if he needed to start the car back up and speed off, whatever.

His window was already down. He rolled it down a little more and leaned toward it. It was stupid to think he would actually hear or see something, but it was possible. And it was almost definite that the beast would feel something, smell it.

Ardeth didn't say a word. She didn't move. He couldn't even see her breathing. Her father had trained her well.

But still he heard nothing. Maybe that was the problem? The people up the street weren't arguing and the obnoxious kid three doors down from him wasn't playing his shitty music, and that seemed odd, although those things didn't happen every single night and he doubted anyone coming for him would have killed all of his neighbors.

It wasn't anything he could put his finger on. Just something was not right.

Ardeth rolled down her window, too. He started to turn to her but she was already moving; in a flash she'd slipped out the window feetfirst, turning over halfway so she landed softly, silently, outside her door.

He wasn't going to let her go alone. Of course, he wasn't going to try to maneuver his much-larger frame out the window, either. The well-oiled door opened silently, and he pushed in the button while closing it so it held the door barely shut when he let go.