The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel (6 page)

“I want a name, Ms. Fraser.”

“So would I,” I heard myself say.

“It’s a stretch to classify as a coincidence you being at a murder scene where the victim was carrying a photo of you, don’t you think?”

I didn’t respond because I was officially beyond words. At that moment, I knew I really needed a lawyer. The sight of the photo combined with the smell of my own clothes and the chair I’d been sitting in made me feel more than a little queasy.

There was a knock at the door—as the door was being opened.

“Miss Fraser will not be answering any more questions, Detective Burton.”

I knew that cool, lightly accented voice, and I didn’t need to turn around for confirmation.

Alain Moreau, SPI lawyer.

Speak of the devil.

Most people would be glad to see a high-powered lawyer arrive to save the day. The day might be saved, but I wasn’t, at least not for long.

Alain Moreau wasn’t just any agency lawyer; he was SPI’s chief legal counsel, right-hand man to Vivienne Sagadraco, the boss lady herself. Here he was at oh-dark-thirty elegantly attired in a black suit that probably cost more than I’d make this year; that is, if I still had a job come sunrise. It set off his always meticulously cut white blond hair, pale skin, and light blue eyes to perfection. I’d always thought he looked like Anderson Cooper, minus the giggling and sense of humor. Most people couldn’t carry off that look in the middle of the night, but Alain Moreau wasn’t most people. The night was the middle of his business day.

Alain Moreau was a vampire.

I was sure that plenty of people at SPI had been tempted to make the bloodsucking lawyer joke. An ill-timed vampire lawyer reference to my former editor was what had made me the target of his creepy attentions. So I, like everyone else at SPI, kept any joke urges to myself.

I’d been brought in to the First Precinct for questioning in relation to a gruesome murder.

Now I was really in trouble.

I’d rather have told Detective Burton the absolute and unvarnished truth and risked getting locked up for a full psych evaluation than have Alain Moreau here. Moreau meant that Vivienne Sagadraco had a personal interest in what had happened tonight—and in her two agents who had been there when it’d happened.

“Miss Fraser, if you will come with me.” Moreau’s tone betrayed no emotion whatsoever.

No part of this turn of events could be called good.

Burton stood. “I’m not finished questioning . . .”

“Yes, Detective Burton, you are. Miss Fraser has told you all that she knows. I have spoken with your captain and filled out the necessary paperwork. Miss Fraser and Mr. Byrne will be leaving with me.”

 • • • 

Ian Byrne wasn’t happy.

News flash. None of us in the agency SUV were happy. Not only was I not happy, I was downright terrified.

Alain Moreau sat up front with the driver. He was facing ahead, his eyes on the frozen tundra that was Lower Manhattan, his thoughts probably on the fastest way to terminate my employment and where to scrounge up a new seer on short notice. He hadn’t said a word since we’d left the police station. I didn’t know what he was thinking. Maybe he felt that it was just more efficient to ask his questions once we were in the boss’s office. Maybe Moreau didn’t like repeating himself. Probably he was just too pissed to talk.

Unlike the rest of us, the uniformed driver might not have had a bad night, but I couldn’t see his face from where I was sitting, and he hadn’t so much as glanced in the rearview mirror. Not that I could have seen his eyes anyway. He was wearing sunglasses. According to the blue-lit digital clock on the SUV’s dash, it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. Who—or what—wore sunglasses at two o’clock in the morning? Not that I really wanted to know or find out.

Ian sat next to me, his profile in shadow, illuminated only when we passed a streetlight. “What did you tell them?”

I slouched back into my own little patch of dark. “We were hunting a rat, whiskey was bait, NVGs because rats like the dark, I didn’t know the dead guy . . .”

“And?”

I really didn’t want to have the rest of this conversation, but this wasn’t one of those problems you could ignore and it’d go away. Ignoring it was liable to get me killed—or worse, fired. If I hadn’t offered to help Ollie with his nachtgnome problem, none of this would have happened. Well, the murder still would have happened, but we wouldn’t have been there to hear it and then get caught in the aftermath.

“The dead guy might have known me,” I said.

Silence from Ian, though I knew that was temporary. And even deeper silence from the vampire lawyer in the passenger’s seat.

I told Ian about the bloody photo and made sure Moreau heard every word. This was one story I didn’t want to tell again.

“Are you sure the photo was taken at SPI?” Ian asked.

“It was the only place where I was eating cookies.” I didn’t like what it said about me that most of the time when someone aimed a camera at me, I was eating.

“Who had the camera or phone?”

“No one that I could see.”

“Then who was standing close enough to get that shot?”

“A lot of people. Like I said, there were cookies.”

“What time was it when you ate two cookies?”

“Uh . . . actually that should probably be
which
time was it. I ate two cookies at the same time more than once. They were really good—but they were small,” I hurried to add.

“How many times?” Ian repeated.

“Three . . . or four. Yesterday was a slow day.”

Moreau let a small sigh escape.

Way to make a good impression on the boss lady’s right-hand man, Mac. Tonight you freelanced, got arrested and interrogated, and now Moreau probably thinks you spend more time eating than working.

“I’ll have security pull the break room and adjacent hallway footage for the entire day,” Moreau told us. His disturbingly pale blue eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. I guess that thing about vampires and mirrors wasn’t true; I could see his disapproving expression just fine.

Unfortunately, the identity of the amateur paparazzi at SPI wasn’t the end of my stalker worries.

I closed my eyes for a moment. Come on, Mac. Spill it. “And I’m pretty sure someone else is following me, too. Then again, make that two someones.” I watched Ian’s face. “And one of them knew you.”

I told them about the homeless man and the yuppie vampire.

Ian was incredulous. “Why didn’t you tell me when we—”

“Because you would have pulled the plug on my nachtgnome hunt at Ollie’s.” I didn’t mean to snap, but I didn’t try to stop myself, either. It was probably due more to emotion overload than anything else. I’d been shaking in my boots since I’d stepped into Ollie’s office, and my night had yet to get any better. “I promised to help him, and I was raised to do what I promise. It wasn’t like either one of these guys followed me to Ollie’s.”

Ian gave me a suspicious frown. “That you know of.”

“Yes. That I know of. I checked behind, beside, in front, and above me the entire way there. And to be extra-super paranoid, I walked around sewer grates so nothing could grab my ankles.”

Ian was watching me steadily. “Exactly what did the man say?”

“Give my regards to your partner.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“What was his tone? Any inflections? Did he have an accent?”

“He had a silky voice. Kind of slimy, actually. Smug.” I thought for a moment. “No accent that I could tell.”

“Everyone has an accent.”

“If he had one, I don’t know what it was.”

“And you could only see the bottom half of his face?”

“Right. The—”

“How about his hands?”

“Gloves. I think.”

“You think?”

What little composure I had left went bye-bye. I felt like I was being interrogated all over again, this time by my own partner. “The first time he was sitting on the sidewalk in the dark. I couldn’t see his hands. The second time, I had a freakin’ vampire at my back.” I froze. Oh shit. “No offense, Mr. Moreau,” I quickly added.

“None taken, Agent Fraser. During the course of my lengthy life, I have been called many things, but ‘freakin’’ has never been one of them. I’ll consider it a novelty.”

Ian raked a hand through his dark hair and exhaled slowly. The tension level went down by a couple of notches. “I’m sorry I snapped.”

If he could make the effort, so could I. “Me, too.” I swallowed on a dry throat. “It’s been a shitty night.”

“Agreed.”

“About the guy’s face,” I said. “He had . . .” I hesitated. I had no idea how to describe what I’d seen. “He had more than one, if that makes any sense. They were like images, layered one on top of the other.”

That got everyone’s attention. Even the driver’s sunglass-covered eyes gave me a quick glance in the rearview mirror.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said.

“You’re sure it wasn’t an aura from a veil?” Moreau asked.

“Positive.”

“Were all the faces human?”

I thought back to the fun-house mirror images that I’d seen. “The top few layers were. The others weren’t as clear.”

“How many were there?” Ian asked quietly.

“Too many to count. I’m sorry I can’t give any more detail than—”

“That’s okay.” My partner’s expression seemed to soften. Maybe it was just a trick of the shadows between the streetlights. “You can only see what you see.”

I hesitated. “Do you know him?”

“No.” Ian gazed out the window, his eyes narrowing in concentration. His thoughts were his own, and he seemed determined to keep them that way.

I slumped back in my seat, dropped my head into my hands, and closed my eyes for a blissful three seconds.

I raised my head. “So does anyone know who the vampire might be?”

“I don’t know of any such individual personally,” Moreau replied. “However, I am on good terms with the mistress of the Manhattan coven. I will make inquiries until I locate him.”

“What about a man with multiple faces capable of scaring a vampire clear across the street?”

Alain Moreau almost smiled. “I especially look forward to meeting him.”

3

WHILE New York was the city that never sleeps, sometimes it at least closed one eye. It was the middle of the night and absurdly below freezing. The only people out driving were those who had to be, or people who were crazy enough to want to.

The driver pulled into a private parking garage on West Third Street a block from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, and began spiraling down to the lowest level. The garage was dimly lit, yet the driver kept his sunglasses on and seemed to have no trouble seeing where he was going. I chose to ignore anything that implied, concentrating instead on my fear of being squashed. Let’s just say I was prone to claustrophobia. Once we got to the bottom level, there couldn’t have been more than a few inches of clearance between the top of the SUV and the concrete slab above it.

The driver pulled into a parking space near the back of the garage between a pair of concrete columns, turned off the engine, flipped open a small panel on the SUV’s dash, and pressed a button. Almost immediately, the car began to sink, the only sound the low rumble of some serious hydraulics hidden in the columns and in the wall in front of us. I had been taken to SPI this way once before. I didn’t like it then, and I didn’t like it any better now. But when you had four people in a company SUV, there were only so many ways you could get to headquarters.

The elevator stopped with a disconcerting jerk, and a pair of steel doors ground open in front of us, opening into one of the city’s many abandoned subway tunnels. In this particular tunnel, the tracks had been removed, and the ground smoothed and paved. The driver pulled out of the elevator and turned down the former subway tunnel as if it were just another street. After about a hundred yards, we came to what looked like a dead end. At SPI, things and people were rarely what they appeared to be. Moreau pushed another button on the dash, and what looked like a wall of rock and construction debris lifted, revealing another parking garage with seven black SUVs identical to the one we were in, two troop transport trucks, and a limo. All of the SUVs had sunroofs that weren’t for admiring the view. They were for those occasions when our teams needed quick access to the big guns—and to get them back out of sight with equal speed. The NYPD frowned on rocket-powered grenade launchers or belt-fed machine guns being used in the five boroughs. I was glad to say that my presence hadn’t been needed on any of those missions.

I much preferred the entrance I used on a daily basis. I’d go into Saga Partners Investments through the front door, walk through the office into the back room, open the door to the cleaning supply closet and step inside. All I had to do was put my hand up to the hand scanner, and that closet became a pine-scented elevator down to SPI headquarters. A pleasant scent, minimal claustrophobia, and the elevator opened near the break room with its life-giving coffee and occasional cookies. What’s not to love?

Me, Ian, and Moreau got out of the SUV, but the driver stayed. Maybe he had more wayward agents to pick up at another police station. Moreau held his hand in front of what looked like a sheer concrete wall. There was an approving beep and a door-sized portion of the wall smoothly swung open. A short access tunnel and another hand-scan-activated door later, we were in what we called the bull pen.