A Local Habitation (27 page)

Read A Local Habitation Online

Authors: Seanan McGuire

Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fiction - Fantasy, #Science Fiction And Fantasy, #American Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Fantasy - General, #Fairies, #Women private investigators

BOOK: A Local Habitation
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“You’re probably right. It’s just weird to think anyone would want to hurt me.”
“You realize that if this is politically motivated, you’re in more danger than anyone else here?” I held up the drawer from Barbara’s desk. “I have information. Can I come in?”
Jan eyed the drawer. “What is that?”
“Evidence that Barbara was screwing you.” I brushed past her into the office. She closed the door, following me to her desk, where I put the drawer down atop a pile of papers. “That’s not the most important thing. I know why you can’t reach your uncle.”
“What?” Her eyes went wide. “What do you mean?”
“It’s the phones.” I outlined my conclusions, including the fact that calls placed from outside the knowe, or to phone numbers ALH hadn’t installed, worked just fine. I left out my discussion with Tybalt. It didn’t seem like something she’d need to know.
At first, Jan just stared. Then her eyes narrowed, expression going cold. “It really was one of us,” she said, in a soft, dangerous voice. I’d heard that tone from her uncle. It generally meant it was time to look for cover.
“I think so,” I said, and handed her the envelope I’d found in Barbara’s desk, with the seal of Dreamer’s Glass turned upward. “It looks like Barbara had a second job.”
She stared. “She was working for Riordan?”
“She was taking bribes. I don’t know any more than that—not yet, anyway. I will. There was a secret compartment in her desk. I also found her checkbook; if the dates are accurate, she’s been receiving payments from them for at least a year.”
“Barbara was a spy?” She hoisted herself onto the edge of the desk and crossed her legs, reaching for her laptop. “If Elliot ever calls me paranoid again, I’m going to
spank
him.” Flipping the screen open, she started to type.
“Uh, Jan?” I tucked my hair back behind one ear, bemused. “What are you doing?”
“Here at ALH, we pride ourselves on respecting the privacy of our employees’ personal lives,” she said, briskly. Then her tone changed, becoming more cynical as she added, “But if we have reason to believe they’ve been spying for the skank next door, I get to crack their computers like eggs and play with the gooey goodness inside.”
“Huh?”
“It’s called ‘hacking.’ Well, it would be if I didn’t own her computer. But I do, so it’s called ‘taking an interest in network security.’ ” Jan continued to type, fingers moving in sharp, vicious jabs.
“The computer was off,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as lost as I felt.
Jan looked up, and actually grinned. At least one of us was enjoying this. “That might matter if we were, y’know, in the mortal world. But getting electricity in the Summerlands is hard enough that it never works quite right, so we have to deal with kludges. Generators instead of ground power, lights on timers . . . computers that don’t realize they’re supposed to forbid network access when they’re turned off.” The laptop made a sharp pinging sound. “We’re in.”
“In what?”
“Barbara’s computer. I have full access.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Can you do some sort of search for things that might have to do with Dreamer’s Glass?”
She looked at me, amused. “I can make this computer dance the polka if I want it to.” Her typing picked up speed, only to stop when the laptop pinged again. “And . . . whoa.”
“Whoa? What whoa?” I craned my neck to see the screen. “What did you find?”
“Only everything,” she said, mouth compressing into a thin, hard line. She tilted the laptop so that I could see the screen; it was covered by a list of file names so long that it scrolled off the bottom. “This is what I get when I search for files with the words ‘Dreamer’s Glass,’ ‘report’ and ‘confidential.’ ” She tapped the screen with the tip of one finger, and the first title lit up for a moment before a word processing program took over the screen, opening the file. “She was a busy little girl.”
“Yes,” I said. “It looks like she was.”
The file Jan had opened was a financial overview of the company, the County, and their performance over the last few years. It was annotated, showing where Barbara had interfered with the County to the advantage of Dreamer’s Glass. I glanced to Jan.
“We couldn’t figure out where the money was going,” she said. “Another two years and she’d have closed us down.”
“Would someone have killed her over this?”
“Possibly,” she admitted. “I might have strangled her myself. But . . .”
“But you wouldn’t have killed the others. Can you print Barbara’s records for me?”
“Of course.” She shook her head, frowning. “This is so . . . wow. Babs was our
friend
.”
“She was a cat. The Cait Sidhe have never followed the rules.” I shoved my hair back again. “Would Dreamer’s Glass have anything to gain by killing you all?”
“Just the land.”
“There’s nothing special about the knowe?”
“Not a thing. We dug the Shallowing ourselves.”
“Great.” Another dead end. “Make those printouts, and we’ll keep working. Just be careful. Getting yourself killed won’t bring anyone back.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t storm over to Dreamer’s Glass and confront the Duchess.” Her smile was mirthless. “Although when this is over, I’m kicking her ass.”
“Totally fair.” I paused. “Is there any chance Gordan was working with Barbara?”
“No, not really,” Jan said. “She got Barbara hired on, and she was always worried about her doing something stupid. They were working on a project together, and they’d been fighting for months.”
“What about?”
“I was never quite sure. They seemed to be sorting it out between themselves.”
“Good to know,” I said, and hefted the drawer. “I’m going to go back to Quentin and start shuffling through this stuff. See if there’s something else in here that we can use.”
She blinked. “You left him alone? After telling us to stay together?”
“I left him with a locked door between him and the rest of the knowe,” I said, feeling suddenly uncomfortable about that decision. “He’s got the keys, and I needed to do some hunting.”
“Well, at least it paid off.” She looked up at the ceiling. “April, could you come here?”
The air in front of her flickered, and April was there, delight transforming her face into something bright and real. I looked at her, remembering what Gordan told me. April loved her mother. No one could see them together and deny it.
Jan looked down, and smiled. “Hey, sweetie. I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”
“Nothing of importance, Mother. May I assist you in some way?”
“Please. Do you remember Quentin?”
April’s nod was immediate. “Yes. He is located on the first floor, in office A-3.”
I stared at her. Either she’d just been visiting him, or she knew where he was without thinking about it. If it was the latter, the killings
couldn’t
have been an outside job—she’d have spotted an intruder before they could do anything. “You watched us get here, didn’t you? That was you in the woods,” I said, before I fully realized I was going to.
“Yes,” April replied. “I watch all entrances.”
Right. Unless our killer was somehow invisible to April, we were dealing with a person, not a thing. “Have you seen anyone strange coming or going right around the murders?”
“Only you.”
“I see. Will you be available later? I’m going to want to talk to you.” I just needed to figure out what I was going to ask her.
She slanted an anxious glance toward Jan. “Mother?”
“Do as Toby says, sweetie; it’s all right.” April made an unhappy face. Jan smiled. “I know you don’t want to. Tell you what: I’ll come to your room and watch a movie with you tonight, real-time, okay? We can snuggle.”
“Will there be popcorn?”
“Popcorn and cartoons.”
“Acceptable,” April said, and vanished.
Jan looked toward me, a tired smile on her lips. “Normally, she watches movies straight from the file server, but she’ll watch them slow if it means I do it with her.” She removed her glasses, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. “Motherhood is exhausting. What was I thinking, saying I could handle a County and then adopting a kid? I must’ve been crazy.”
“Jan . . .”
“This whole thing is crazy.” Sighing, she put her glasses back on. “I’m sorry we were so weird when you got here. We’ve been running scared for a while now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and was surprised to realize that I meant it. “We’re doing our best.”
“I know you are.” A flicker of something like anger crossed her face. “It’s almost ironic. What we’re trying to do here . . . people shouldn’t be dying. That’s the last thing that should be happening.”
“What
are
you trying to do here?”
“Nothing big. Design better computers. Get the Summerlands onto a decent phone plan. Save Faerie.” She waved a hand vaguely, like she was brushing off a fly. “The usual nonsense. What are you going to do now?”
“Go back to Quentin, and go through the rest of this paperwork.” I picked up the drawer, tucking it under my arm. “I need you to be more careful. All of you. Gordan’s in the cube maze, alone. Elliot is Oberon- knows-where, alone. Cut it out.”
“I’ll talk to them,” she said.
“We’ve reviewed the information you gave us and searched the offices we could find. Did Yui have an office?”
“Yeah—she just hid it really well.” She pursed her lips, looking momentarily unhappy. “When Elliot gets back, I’ll ask if he can lead you there. He can usually find it.”
“Elliot? All right. We can’t find anything the victims had in common, other than working here. I’m going to have a second look at the places where the bodies were found, but I don’t expect to find anything.”
“They were hired from a lot of different places, for a lot of different reasons,” Jan said, almost apologetically. “Colin . . . well, we needed a Selkie for some of our integration testing. It’s difficult to explain, but race really mattered. Peter was a history teacher with a specialization in folklore—that wasn’t just human folklore.”
“Faerie historian?”
“Genealogist.”
“Why did you need a genealogist?”
“Market research.” Jan shrugged. “You can’t use the same sales pitch with a Daoine Sidhe and a Centaur. It’s not going to work. Yui was our team alchemist. She could make just about anything compatible with anything else, if you gave her time.”
“What about Barbara?”
“Friend of Gordan’s, hired in a nonsecure position. She was from San Jose. That probably explains why . . .” Jan stopped.
“Why she betrayed you? Yes, it probably does.”
“Don’t the bodies tell you anything?”
“Nothing. They died of some internal trauma; I have no idea what it was, but the external wounds can’t have killed them. Maybe I’d know if I were more of a forensics expert, but I don’t, and I’m not.” The fae have never needed forensics training; that’s what the Daoine Sidhe are for. Unfortunately, that means we don’t have many options when the blood fails us.
“Maybe you’re too weak to ride their blood,” Jan said, slowly. “Changelings are weaker a lot of the time, aren’t they?”
“Quentin tried, too. Nothing.”
“We can’t get you a forensics expert. We can’t get the police involved.”
“I know,” I said. “Unfortunately, the dead aren’t talking.”
“But why are they like that?” she asked. “Why didn’t the night-haunts come?”
“I have no idea.” I raked my hair back with both hands, trying to hide my exasperation. “You’d have to ask the night-haunts.”
“Well, can you do that?”
I paused. “Can I . . . ?”
Could I ask the night- haunts? Were they something you could
ask
? I’d never seen them, and neither had anyone I knew; they came in the darkness, took the bodies of our dead and were gone. They weren’t something you saw . . . but
could
I see them? Was there a way to summon them—and more importantly, could they tell me what I needed to know? The Daoine Sidhe know death, but the night-haunts
are
death. They might have the answer. I owed it to Jan to try.
Jan was watching me. I nodded, saying, “It may be possible; I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it being done. Maybe they can be summoned without a body.” I paused. If there was anyone who would know how to call the night-haunts . . . “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
“Please.”
“I’m going to head back to the office, go through these files, and try to figure out whether it’s possible. And get coffee. I really need coffee. Will you be okay until Elliot gets back?”
“I’ll be fine.” She pushed her glasses up with one finger. “I’ll lock the door and check in with April every few minutes.”

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