Tricks of the Trade (16 page)

Nifty slapped the table with one oversize palm. “Nick, give me a checklist. What
do
we know?”

“We know that it wasn't a domestic thing—the vic
lived alone, didn't seem to be interested in anyone of any breed, and only owed the usual amount of money.”

“And that someone wanted it dead enough to use a significant amount of force…and wanted to make sure the body was found,” Lou added. “There are places to dump the body where you won't ever find it again, even for Nulls. You think the fatae are any less creative?”

Damn it. She seriously deserved that raise. We were so caught up in how the DB was offed, we forgot to wonder about the whys of the dumping. And that was important.

“Someone wanted to send a message. But if not the Mafia, and we've already ruled out any kind of union goon squad…do the fatae have their own goodfellas?”

“Like a union, that would require them organizing,” I said dryly. “They're even worse at it than lonejacks.” Not to mention that the different breeds only played well with each other when they were playing against humans. But that gave me an idea. “Maybe we're looking at this wrong.” I thought it through out loud, listening to how the logic sounded. “We were warned off from investigating by a fatae, right? And the killing was probably done by a fatae, so we've been assuming, based on the available evidence, that it was an intrabreed thing.”

There hadn't been any warnings since my pushy visitor, but it had only been a few days, and maybe they were waiting to see how hard we pushed back. Or maybe we had read the situation wrong.

“Huh. Maybe it's not a fatae thing at all. Or, at least, not entirely.”

I looked around the room, and saw that I had everyone's attention.

“My dad was a carpenter,” I said, the words coming almost as fast as I was thinking. “A damned good one, and he got called in on a lot of jobs out of the city because people talked about his work, passed his name along. There's a—hell, call it a brotherhood, why not—of people who do finer work like that. They share job leads, information, news about who pays well and who stiffs or treats their workers like shit.”

“But not a union?”

“Not a union. No dues, no leadership, no organization except as how they felt like it at that moment. All totally under the radar.”

“And?” Lou asked, waiting.

Pietr was thinking along my brain tracks. “And you think that it's this brotherhood, or something like that, that offed him? Because…what?”

That was as far as my thinking had thought out. “I don't know. But it makes as much sense—more—than looking for an individual with a grudge, or some breed-on-breed hostility that nobody else is whispering about.” Especially after recent events, when human-fatae relations had taken a seriously negative turn. We'd heard buckets about that. “You said that he didn't owe enough money to get killed over. That means he was working regularly…but he doesn't seem to have been on a job when he died. We need to find out what he was doing the days before he took his swim. I'll bet you next round of drinks that someone says something that points us toward the reason he was killed, and once we have the reason…”

“We have the killer,” Nick finished.

 

Ian Stosser knew that the pups were having their weekly meeting, no bosses invited, so he wasn't too worried about them poking their noses in at the wrong moment when he took the phone call, already knowing who was on the other end.

“I want to see you. Alone.”

The meaningful emphasis in Aden's voice made it clear who she meant: no pups. Particularly, no Benjamin Venec.

His sister hadn't always hated his best friend, had she? Ian pinched the bridge of his nose, and shook his head. “We have nothing to talk about, Addy. The Council is deliberating my most recent proposal. Go politic at them—leave me alone.”

There was a pause, the click of china cup against saucer, and then she spoke again. “This isn't about that.”

Her voice was still the cold, dry tone she had used with him ever since he had first gone up against their home Council, years ago. But Ian remembered the little sister who had clung to his leg when he was a teenager, who had called him every Thursday night when she went away to college to ask his advice about classes, and dating, and talk about what books she had just read.

Across the office, Ben frowned, but didn't say anything, aware that on speakerphone she would be able to hear him as clearly as he heard her. Ian didn't need to ping his partner to know what he was thinking. Ben didn't trust Aden not to have something else up her ever-fashionable sleeve. That was wise, probably. Aden was not to be trusted any more than he, Ian, was to be trusted.
Not when it came to the survival of this office, or of the idea behind it, that no Talent could escape accountability for their actions.

Aden truly believed that rank had privileges, and one of those was being accountable only to others of that same rank. Or, in the case of Talent, of equal or greater ability.

She was also his little sister.

“My choice of time and place,” he told her.

“Agreed.”

Ben looked startled, and then covered it up behind his usual stone-faced exterior. For Aden to agree so readily, either she was plotting something interesting, or she genuinely needed to talk to him about something other than their ongoing disagreement. Ian wasn't sure which one worried him more.

“Half an hour. The old diner, down in Philly. You know the one?” Ian would have had her come here, but she was still under Council ban from entering New York City limits, and even his direct invite could not put that aside. And in that short a period of time she would not be able to adapt any schemes to the location, or call in backup. Hopefully.

The click of the phone being hung up on the other end was his only answer.

“This should be…interesting,” Ian said, his voice as dry as hers had been.

Ben shoved his hand through his hair, a move that harkened back to when they were teenagers, and scowled. “What do you think she's up to?”

Ian laughed: a real laugh, with real amusement. “This
is Aden we're talking about, Ben. Who the hell knows?” He shook his head, dismissing the question for another thirty minutes. “The cops are starting to push for some kind of answer on the floater. They want to know if they can bury the report. And the client called this morning, he's getting pushy about the break-in—he wants to know what happened to his trinkets. He also wants to know why his anti-magic protections didn't work.”

“Oh, Christ.” The cops were a known headache, but Benjamin Venec had no use for fools, Talented or Null.

“Let's just get this solved, all right? Take them off the floater if you have to—he's not going anywhere and if no more bodies have turned up odds are we aren't looking at the start of a serial killer.”

“You're asking us to give priority to a break-in over a murder?”

“Not priority, no. Just an additional push on that front, for now.”

Ben wasn't happy. Ian understood that. Murder should always be the first priority. But the dead have patience. The living did not.

“Right, fine, whatever. I'll tell them soon's their powwow's over.” Ben stood up, stretching his arms overhead until something cracked, then moved his head side to side, as though loosening knots there, as well.

“Are you getting enough sleep?” The question slipped out before Ian could stop it.

Ben looked at him as though he'd lost his mind. “Who are you, my mom? Go worry about your sister, Ian. I'll whip the puppies into shape. Sleep is for people who don't have things to do.”

The moment the door closed behind Ben, Ian stood, as well, moving to the bare corner of the room. Technically you could Translocate from anywhere, so long as you knew that your destination was clear, but it was less of a current-drain if you left from a familiar place, so that your mind and body both knew what to do, instinctively.

He closed his eyes, visualized the booth in the diner that was always left empty in case a Council member wanted to have a meeting in that city, without fuss or formality. Technically he no longer had the right to use the booth…but the deli's present owners were old friends of his from college, and would not tell anyone.

More, they would not give Aden any succor, should this be a trap.

Drawing in his current, Stosser dropped down into fugue-state, and disappeared.

In the hallway, Venec felt the gentle movement of current that indicated a Translocation, and shook his head. He wouldn't trust Aden Stosser to pet a dog without there being trouble for the dog, but it wasn't his call to make.

There were raised voices coming from the conference room, indicating that the door had been unlocked and the bosses-out portion of the meeting was over, so he headed in that direction.

“Mafia!” Nick, gleeful in a way that meant he was intentionally trying to goad someone.

“There is no
Cosa
mafia.” Sharon, still patient, so no bloodshed was imminent.

“You know the name was a joke, right?” Lou, amused.

“Sort of a joke.” Bonnie. “Okay, not really a joke. But that would require way too much structure. So would
a trade union. We don't enforce, that's always been the problem.”

“Someone wants to change that, looks like.” Nifty, the somber note.

“Yah.” Nick, less gleeful now.

He paused before opening the door, listening to their voices layering over each other, barely space to breathe in between. He didn't have to hear her voice to know Bonnie was there, and that she was excited about something. They all were, even Nifty: the pack had gotten a clear scent, and were baying as they tracked it down.

He thought about leaving them to it, and remembered Ian's words, and pushed the door all the way open.

“Hey, boss.” Lou spotted him first, her normally solemn face looking as animated as he could remember it being, since she failed her first field run and had been assigned in-office responsibilities.

“We figured it out.” Nick looked equally triumphant, although he was always an easier show. “The dead body. We know who killed him.”

“Technically,” Bonnie said, and her voice was less readable, although she was practically radiating excitement to his awareness, “we don't know
who,
as in, a person we can point to. But we're pretty sure we know why, and the why will lead to who.”

The others in the room were surprisingly quiet, but no less wound-up. Ian's instructions would wait—if they could shut this down and get the NYPD off their backs, so much the better.

He went into the room and pulled out a chair, turning
it around and straddling it, leaning his forearms on the back, and catching each of their gazes in turn. “Tell me.”

It was Bonnie's case, even though he'd yanked her off it briefly, so she took the lead. “Before it went splooey, my diorama showed me that the body was probably dumped, not way upstream, like we'd thought, but just a little bit above. Anywhere else, the current would have dumped it somewhere else. So that threw our estimated timing off. For it to reach that spot when it did, the body wasn't dumped in the middle of the night, but early morning.”

Ben nodded, indicating he understood.

“So, you have a guy, you want to off him, but even bound hands and feet you don't slit his throat and toss him into the nearest trash heap. Instead they toss him into the river, right there, at that exact spot. Why? You want to drown the schmuck, okay. Nasty way to kill someone, but why there instead of tossing him off the pier, or dumping the corpse in the landfill, or any of the many many ways there are to dispose of a body? The only reason you'd toss him into the river there is if you wanted the body to be easily found, because if you really want to hide something, you don't toss it right into the nets. Right?”

Her logic was convoluted, but sound.

“They might not have known about the net,” Nifty said, clearly playing devil's advocate, a role Sharon normally took.

Lou jumped in, there. “Even if they couldn't see, or read the signs warning boaters, the net system was on the news two nights before the murder. The city was thinking about cutting the budget and pulling some of
the nets, and every network rehashed old stories about stuff that's been caught in there, over the years.”

“All right, so if our killer watched the news, he knew. And?” Venec waited; they wouldn't be this excited if they hadn't already reached near endgame.

“The DB worked construction, off-radar, right?” Fatae, except in specific, unusual cases, were all off-the-books. “The off-books construction gig is a tight one,” Bonnie went on. “A few months in the game, and you know pretty much everyone who's any good, and the ones who are really bad, too. Our DB, being in the freelance construction business, was good…but he hadn't been working lately.”

Bonnie's father had been in construction, Ben remembered. Clearly she had kept some contacts, even after Zaki Torres died. “Because?”

“Mainly because, according to one of my dad's old compadres whom I just checked with…”

He'd been right, and Bonnie had that canary-aperitif grin just waiting to burst out.

“Our vic was in the middle of a squabble with several of the folk who slipped him money under that freelance table, about money he says they owe, and they say they don't.”

“I thought the report said he didn't owe…” Venec stopped, feeling the grins break out across the room, even though they were all mostly work-sober, waiting for him to twig in. “He doesn't owe. They owe him. Or so he claims…but I bet nobody will back up his accusation?”

Nick confirmed it. “Because if they do, if they piss
off the hiring guys, and then they lose work, too. Yeah. That's how we're seeing it.”

“Was he agitating against these hiring guys?”