The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel (5 page)

Whatever had ripped a man to shreds and destroyed a window and half the wall had done it all in less than ten seconds.

Blood covered the pieces of glass on the floor; there were probably more in the alley.

Then I saw it.

A partial handprint wrapped around a section of brick, made by a massive hand that had to have been at least five times the size of Ian’s.

“Police! Freeze!”

Two cops quickly moved into the room, guns drawn, a third guarded the doorway.

I hadn’t heard a thing, and apparently neither had Ian.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” I insisted as the cop twisted my wrist around behind my back and cuffed me. Before he did, I got a glimpse of his ears. He’d look human to everyone else, but I could see his upswept ears clear as day. A lot of elves found their way into the NYPD. For some reason, they had a thing for law and order.

“It never is,” the cop said, cuffing my other wrist.

Though I had to admit it did look bad: two people in an office with something that wasn’t a person anymore, one with two guns and a knife, the other with a rusty sword, and both with NVGs pushed up on their foreheads. If I’d been the cops, I’d have thought we were up to no-good.

“Look at me,” I told the cop. “I only come up to your neck. Do you honestly think I could have done this?” I jerked my head toward Ian. “And him? I mean, he’s all lean and buff, but to do this? Get real.”

“Thanks, Mac,” Ian said.

“Just being helpful.”

“Do you think you can stop being helpful until we get a lawyer?”

My right foot picked that moment to slip on the blood-covered broken glass. I lost my balance and fell against the brick wall, crushing the contents of my messenger bag—and breaking the last bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

As the cop pulled me to my feet, the whiskey ran down my leg and into my boot.

A chittering came from downstairs that could have only been nachtgnome laughter. As the cops took us down the stairs, I saw the gnome dart out the now open door and into the night.
Now
the damned thing decided to leave.

I hoped the sewer gators won.

2

THE advantage to seeing a police interrogation room on TV rather than in real life was that you didn’t have to deal with the smell. My nose was telling me in no uncertain terms that this particular room had recently held a suspect who had serious personal hygiene issues—and had sat in the chair where I was now sitting. Though with the right leg of my jeans sopping wet with whiskey, I was in no position to cast stones.

The buzz of the double-strip fluorescent light directly over the lone table and two chairs was giving me a headache. It had to be some kind of pre-interrogation softening-up technique. Eventually suspects would probably admit to anything just to get out of here.

Right now, I’d settle for a change of clothes, or at least jeans.

I knew my rights. I didn’t have to answer a single question without a lawyer present. Yet there were only two chairs in the room: one for the suspect, and one for the detective. It was like they wanted you to think, “No chair for a lawyer, so no lawyer for you.”

Ian and I had been separated from the get-go. We’d been brought to the First Precinct in separate cars, and not allowed to talk to each other from the moment we’d been cuffed. Ian had been on the phone with SPI when we’d been arrested. Hopefully, they’d send a lawyer. Ian had been with SPI long enough to warrant legal assistance. I’d been there only a few months. I probably warranted being fired and booted to the nearest curb, seer or no seer.

While no one at SPI had ever specifically told me not to hunt Bavarian nachtgnomes on the side, I knew they’d frown on anything that resulted in one of their agents sitting in a NYPD interrogation room. Getting arrested while doing a little freelance work for a friend risked exposure, and exposure of the supernatural was one of the very things SPI had been established to prevent. What I had done tonight—and by association, Ian—wasn’t the problem. Getting caught was. In SPI’s opinion, the resulting risk of exposure was the same as if we’d being caught running naked at high noon through Times Square in front of a church tour group from Alabama.

Ian and I had been seen, caught, and brought in for questioning by the mortal authorities in connection to a gory murder that had been perpetrated by something that in no way, shape, or form could have been human.

We hadn’t been charged with murder, but when the police get an anonymous call about a murder, and the officers dispatched to the scene find two armed people in the same room with a shredded third person, questioning was a given. The cops had to have arrived almost while the murder was happening. In my mind, that meant someone knew there was going to be a murder and wanted to make sure that the police all but walked in on it.

In my TV-viewing experience, detectives either stood for the small talk then sat in the chair across from the suspect for the questions they really needed answers to, or stood and walked around behind the suspect the entire time trying to throw them off balance. This guy looked like a sitter, not a pacer. Good. I was in no mood to spend however long I’d be here swiveling my head around like Linda Blair to keep track of the guy.

Detective Burton had introduced himself as soon as he’d come into the room and shut the door behind him. Polite, yet businesslike, he looked more like an accountant than a detective. He was on the short side with practical black-framed glasses, yet his dark eyes were sharp behind those lenses. People probably tended to underestimate him. I was determined not to be one of those people. I couldn’t see a third-string junior detective being assigned to question a suspect (or whatever they thought I was) in a murder where the victim probably had to be shoveled into a body bag. At the moment, he was making a show of reviewing what he apparently wanted me to believe was incriminating paperwork in a manila folder.

While I didn’t have to talk without a lawyer, I wanted to know who had called the police to report a murder that hadn’t happened yet. The trick was to find out if the police knew anything I didn’t while saying as little as possible, thus avoiding having my potentially soon-to-be-unemployed butt being kicked to the aforementioned curb.

Ian and I had been up those stairs within seconds of the slaughter. Two minutes later, the police had arrived. The math didn’t even begin to add up. I would’ve said that I smelled a setup, except no one knew I was going to be in Ollie’s shop except Ollie, Ian, and Sam. Maybe Ollie had gotten talkative to someone else, perhaps to the guy with the bug tattoo. Why bug tat guy had been in Ollie’s office, how he had gotten in, and why a monster had spread him all over the place like strawberry jelly then taken a couple of body parts for souvenirs, were more questions that needed answering.

Detective Burton closed the folder, lightly tossed it onto the table, and leaned back against the wall with the two-way glass, casually crossing his arms over his chest.

“Ms. Fraser, do you honestly expect me to believe that you and Mr. Byrne were in Barrington Galleries attempting to capture a rat?”

A cut-to-the-chase kind of guy. Good. I might get out of here before the buzzing light made me homicidal.

When dealing with small supernatural critters, the go-to answer for New York’s SPI field agents was “big rats.” Agency rule number one was to stick to the truth as much as possible.

“That’s what Ollie told me it was,” I said, sitting back and resisting the temptation to cross my own arms. Keep the body language non-defensive and not guilty. “That’s what we were looking for. Due to someone being murdered upstairs, we didn’t get to catch it. Though hopefully it ran out the front door when your boys left it standing wide open.”

Detective Burton’s sharp eyes narrowed.

Way to go, Mac. You probably just added an extra half hour to your fluorescent buzz torture. What happened to saying as little as possible?

“We have been trying to contact Mr. Barrington-Smythe to corroborate your statement, and to inform him of the crime that occurred on his property. However, we have yet to locate him. You wouldn’t happen to know where he is, would you?”

“No.”

I’d have put up with an entire night of a buzzing light if it meant getting Ollie alone for a very meaningful chat. I didn’t believe he’d known that his office was going to be redecorated with human body parts while I was gnome hunting downstairs. However, I knew that Ollie dealt with some unscrupulous people. Oliver Barrington-Smythe’s double-barreled surname was real enough, at least as real as Humphrey Collington or the five other aliases I knew about. And I’d bet my right to an attorney that Ollie could put a name to the hand with the bug tattoo.

“The officers on the scene reported that you and Mr. Byrne were found wearing state-of-the-art night vision goggles,” Detective Burton said. “And you had three bottles of Jack Daniel’s with you. One bottle was found empty, the other empty and then shattered as if it had been thrown, and the third was broken in the bag which was found on your person. Explain the high-tech gear and the whiskey.”

Ian and I had both been given breathalyzers when we were brought in and hadn’t blown a thing, so the obvious explanation of a whiskey-induced, NVG-enhanced party for two wouldn’t work. I didn’t have to answer, but these were questions I actually had answers for. I wasn’t guilty of anything, and a little cooperation might go a long way—or at least get me out of here faster.

“Part of a bottle was for the rat,” I said. “My grandma told me that rats like the smell of whiskey; must be the grain. The other two were for my New Year’s Eve party Saturday night. And rats don’t like light, hence the goggles.”

“And the bottles were broken how?”

“I tripped. It was my first time using night vision goggles.”

Burton raised an eyebrow. “The broken bottles were found in different sections of the shop. So you’re saying you tripped twice?”

“I threw the second bottle at the wall because the rat was climbing up it. I don’t like rats.”

“There was more glass found by the door from a broken jar containing a”—Burton flipped open the manila folder and read with distaste—“monkey brain, according to the jar’s label.”

My frozen, open-mouthed grimace wasn’t an act. I remembered the wet, squishy plop hitting the floor by my feet after the nachtgnome had chucked that jar at me. “I could have stepped on a
monkey brain
?”

Ollie only carried stuff he knew he could sell. I didn’t know what disturbed me more: a monster on the loose that could tear off arms and legs, or some wacked-out collector scurrying around the city shopping for just the right monkey brain to go on his mantle.

“Odd thing though,” the detective continued, sitting down across from me at the table. “Whatever liquid was in the jar shorted out the alarm keypad. So the jar couldn’t have been broken before you arrived as you said in your statement, since you claim that you deactivated the security system using the code that Mr. Barrington-Smythe gave you.”

I sighed and slouched in my chair. “Listen. I don’t know anything about security systems. Ollie gave me the code and I used it. That’s all. I have no idea what the alarm and the monkey brain did or didn’t do before I got there.”

Detective Burton leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands folded. “Ms. Fraser, I don’t believe a word you’ve said. But as a former reporter at one of our city’s least reputable tabloids, no doubt you’re more than capable of fabricating what you need to fill in the gaps.” He inclined his head toward the manila folder. “I see that you’re presently employed by Saga Partners Investments. That’s quite a move from a tabloid reporter. Exactly what do you do there?”

Saga was just one of the business fronts for SPI. Located off Waverly Place near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, Saga was an actual, working private securities firm, whose clients included SPI agents and employees. Saga had a few clairvoyants on staff, so our 401k accounts were in really good shape.

Having worked at a sleazy tabloid didn’t make me sleazy. I was tired, I smelled like a still, and I wanted to go home. I sat up straighter and looked Burton in the eye. “I’m an investigator. I do background checks on the smaller companies we recommend, or don’t recommend, to our clients.”

Burton nodded absently. “And how do you explain this?”

He tossed a ziplock bag tagged for evidence. Inside was a small, blood-spattered photo.

Of me.

I just stared at it. I blinked and looked again. It was still me and still bloody.

In the photo, I was wearing the green sweater my grandma had knitted me for Christmas. I had a cookie in each hand, and was eating one of them. I wasn’t doing that great a job of it, judging from the powdered sugar I was wearing in addition to the sweater. I’d worn it to work for the first time yesterday. Judy from HR had baked and brought cookies.

Someone at SPI had taken that photo. At SPI headquarters.

“It was found in the coat pocket of our John Doe,” Burton said.

I’d heard the expression about your blood running cold, and at that moment, I knew exactly what it felt like. A photo of me was taken yesterday at the super secret—and supposedly secure—SPI headquarters and was found tonight on a dead man whom I’d never seen before. Who took the picture and why? At least at my old tabloid job, I knew who wanted to stab me in the back—everybody. I hadn’t been at SPI long enough to have pissed anyone off that bad, at least I’d like to think so. At SPI, the stabbing could be literal and it could be anyone.