Ghosts & Echoes (9 page)

THE ROOM WAS A FLUORESCENT HELL: CHEAP LINOLEUM, CHEAP paint, cheap video camera aimed squarely at the table bolted to the floor, all of it reflecting the flicker-shine of the false light. A rectangular window high up, filled with wire-mesh glass, showed a sky going blue and bright outside.

Here we go again,
she thought, stiffening her spine. It was hard: With all the other Suarezes, she felt equal portions irritation and patience. With Adelio Suarez—she just felt guilt. Rafael had been his son, and when Rafi had come to work for her, she’d told Adelio she’d keep him safe. He’d been pleased. One child out of the line of fire.

He stabbed his thumb at the chair. “Sit.”

Disobedience ran deep in her soul, but she dropped into the wooden chair, heard it
screek
against the faded turquoise linoleum as she shifted her weight. The sooner she shut up, the sooner she’d be out of here. He paced behind her; then, just when she was preparing to start the game by asking for a phone call, he said, “Wait here,” and left the room. A total change of pattern. It made her wary.

Adelio came back with a file folder, and her gun, which he set on the table before her. It drew her eyes like a magnet; she missed his first words, lost in the itch to reclaim what was hers.

“. . . even with your testimony and Ms. Figueroa-Smith’s, we’ve had no luck finding the cultists that killed my son. We’ve got a set of probable names, but the suspects themselves are gone. All of them vanish on the same night, except for one of them, who disappeared some days earlier—a college student named Mira Castellan. She vanished from the UM campus, and funny thing is, Shadows, campus security recalls seeing your truck on that day. You’re no student.” He flipped through the folder, showed Sylvie a picture of the woman. Sylvie felt her upper lip curl, restrained any other response.
Murderess.

“Campus is open to community,” she said. She traced a chip in the table’s laminate, pried at the edge of it with her fingernail. There wasn’t any point in denying her presence there. Her truck was noticeable, had been ever since the dire hound—her very first monster—had clawed six long furrows through the red paint to expose the metal beneath.

“These are the people who killed my boy, right?”

“You’re the detective,” she said.

“What happened to them?”
Suarez said, his voice strung tight. “Did they run from you? Where are they, Shadows?”

Sylvie sank back in the seat, folded her arms. “I wish I could tell you.”

Yeah, this was a change of routine, and an unpleasant one. She wondered how the hell he had gotten the cultists’ names when she hadn’t been able to.

Hadn’t needed to. The god of Justice had done her scutwork.

While Adelio Suarez didn’t have preternatural help, Sylvie should have realized that grief, determination, and the resources of an entire police department were enough. Look what she managed with attitude and a gun.

He pressed his chair back to two legs, stared at the ceiling for a long moment, and dropped it down again with a
thunk
that made the table vibrate. “You
wish
you could tell me?”

“I don’t have any answers,” Sylvie said. “Does that make it clearer?” She stared him down; after werewolves, succubi, and gods, one overworked night-shift detective was barely a blip on her radar.

He dropped his gaze. “Tell me this one thing, Shadows, one thing. Do you think they’ll ever resurface?”

Sylvie grimaced. Maybe if he hadn’t been asking her in the middle of a police station, maybe then she’d be tempted to give him the answer he expected.

“Look, Lio, I’m sorry about Rafi—you know I am—but I don’t have any answers for you. And that’s a client of mine you’ve got cuffed out there. He’s got nothing to do with anything.”

“They never do; you take them down with you, anyway.” Suarez stood, turned away, facing the door. His shoulders slumped.

Sylvie was grateful for his weakness. It hid her own, the quick tears that burned her throat and filled her eyes. He was right, of course. Demalion was only the most recent, most graphic example of that. The Furies had shredded him down to his soul for doing what she had asked him to do. She reached out blindly, put her hand on the gun, finding familiar, cold comfort.

“Can I go?” she said.

“When you answer one question more for me,” he said. His voice was ragged, as if he’d been fighting to control his breath.

Sylvie groaned, put her head on the table, smelled greasy laminate and the lingering scent of gun oil. “I should have stayed at the beach.”

“Explain to me why you and your client were passed out at a crime scene. Or did you not know the Bayside Mall was the latest in a string of robberies?” Suarez leaned over the table, forced her to look at him. The sunlight creeping through the barred window was unkind to him, pointed out the fatigue tint to his skin, the silver in his stubble, and blanked those remarkable eyes.

“Motherfucker,” Sylvie muttered, the heels of her hands pressed tight to her forehead. “That’s why I was there. To prevent it or find out who was doing it.”

“Your Chicago beat cop hired you to worry about south Florida robberies?”

“Ever heard of multitasking?” Sylvie said. “He’s not my only client. Just the most needy.”

“The robbery?”

Sylvie shook her head. “I didn’t get a good look.”

He waited, leaning pointedly against the hallway door. She growled, but forked over her list of the car plates, the long one with all the cars in the lot, and the new additions nicely circled for him. She felt like she was back in high school, handing homework over to a bully. Except, of course, she had never been the bullies’ target.

He folded the paper into his hand, expression still somber. “Anything else?”

“I gave you my leads. You give me nothing. I think we’re more than done. I think you owe me one.”

“There was graffiti this time,” he said, as she pushed away from the table.

“Graffiti’s nothing compared to a list of getaway vehicles,” she said.

“So you don’t want to know what it said?”

Her hand was on the doorknob. She wanted out, but the case, her clients . . . “Something really interesting, I hope.”

“One word. Glory. On the glass of the sporting goods store. Nothing elaborate, a rush job. Just the word. You get anything from that?”

She imagined it. Narrow letters scrawled across the glass. Handwriting, spray-painted, scraggly, and too large. Hurried, even though they had had all the time they could need. Testing the waters. Feeling their oats. Getting bored with the ease of it all.

A faint image came to her, the shape of the group moving toward the stores, one lagging a little behind. “Someone’s feeling ballsy. Teenagers, Lio. You’re looking for teenagers. But I’ll find ’em first.”

He let her go, and she swept out into the main room, found Wright released and drinking cop-shop coffee. He said, “Finally free?”

“I’m not a dangerous criminal after all,” she said, kept moving for the main door. “This visit didn’t even cost me money. Just my head start on a case.”

He gulped down the last of the coffee and hastened after her. “Where to now?”

“Depends,” she said. She juggled her cell phone into her hand and dialed Alex. If Alex could pull the plate information soon enough, Sylvie could beat the cops to the cars’ owners. After a visit from the police, they’d be stirred and defensive.

Just before it went to voice mail, she was rewarded with a series of
clatter
s and
thunk
s, then a sleepy mumble. “Syl? You in jail again?”

Sylvie laughed. “Shaking the dust from my feet as we speak.”

“Then c’n I go back t’sleep?”

“Run some plates for me first? Addresses first, personal info as you can?”

Alex yawned, an audible jaw-cracking contagion that set Sylvie off in response.

“I guess.”

Sylvie snapped her fingers at Wright, hovering politely just out of hearing range. He scowled in response to her abrupt demand for his attention, spread his hands in the universal “what?” gesture.

She bit back her own irritation. Fugue state, ghost, right. Whatever had happened, Wright didn’t remember it. She pointed at his jeans, and said, “Pocket.”

He found the crinkled paper with weary surprise and passed it over. She rubbed her thumb over the elegant script, noticing this time that the handwriting was different. His earlier notes had been squared off, the pencil tip pressed into the paper. That was strange but might fit with a trauma-induced personality shift. Or someone using the muscles of his hand differently.

Cedo Nulli.
The memory spiked her adrenaline straight to redline, jolted her heart. How
did
Wright know about that? If it were the god of Justice poking around in her life again, he’d have dropped by, made sure she helped Wright out.

The government thorn in her side, the Internal Surveillance and Investigations agency, knew about her personal motto inked onto her skin. They could have set her up. Wright could be some sort of poisoned apple. It would be just like the ISI, overelaborate and sneaky.

But Wright seemed genuinely scared. Even now, standing in a sunlit Miami morning, he couldn’t rest. He was all angles, jittery, restless, moving from one defensive posture to another.

“Syl?” Alex whined, waking Sylvie back to the moment. Sylvie read off the plates’ numbers, let Wright’s problems slide. “The ones I’m most interested in are a Navigator and the Subaru. More room for stuff.”

“Did they get stuff?” Alex asked, all disapproval. “You were supposed to keep them from getting stuff.”

“Plans change, Alex,” Sylvie said.

“That excuse is old, old, old,” Alex muttered, but low enough Sylvie could ignore it. She chose to. “Hey, Syl? Speaking of changing plans . . . Zoe took off.”

“When?” Sylvie said.

Alex sighed. “Sometime last night. I’m sorry, Syl. I was running a few programs—updating the office laptop—and I fell asleep. Woke up. She was gone.”

Sylvie sighed. She should have expected it. When she was Zoe’s age, she hadn’t paid much attention to the rules, either. Especially when there was a boyfriend waiting in the wings. “I’ll catch her later. What about the plates?”

“The Navigator’s in the Grove. The Subaru’s in Kendall. The Taurus? That’s a rental, not what you’re looking for, unless you think your thieves are renting a getaway car. The Audi is right at home on the Beach. Got a pen?”

Sylvie cadged Wright’s pencil stub and took down three addresses. “Those are pretty nice neighborhoods, Alex.”

“What? The rich never steal? Tell that to the SEC, Sylvie.”

“Your point,” Sylvie said. “Go on back to bed.”

“Wright still with you?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said, and glancing over, found she was wrong. Wright was nowhere to be seen. “Got to go.”

“Syl—what are you up to?”

“Chasing down my client,” Sylvie said. She scanned the street, found Wright waiting beside a cruiser, leaning back against the hood, idly kicking the toe of one foot against the heel of the other. His fidgeting, his quizzical expression when she waved him back over, reassured her that Wright was in charge, that his wandering off was courtesy and not fugue state.

“I mean, it’s six a.m., you just got out of jail, and if you go sneaking around the Grove, harassing people and breaking into garages, you’re going to end up right back in jail.”

“If I go now, I can beat the cops there—”

“Nope,” Alex said. “No. This is your common sense speaking. Go home. Let the cops handle it. Give them a chance, and if they screw it up—then you can show ’em how it’s done.”

Sylvie hesitated. She hated to cede the advantage when she was being paid to investigate, but she was tired, grubby, and not even sure that following up on the cars would be useful. Only in children’s books and
Scooby-Doo
would the cars turn out to be owned by the perps.

Alex was right. Let the cops rule out the obvious and save her the effort. Time to get some sleep. Real sleep. Whatever else that sleep spell did, it didn’t leave its victims feeling rested.

SYLVIE AND WRIGHT TOOK THE METRORAIL BACK TO THE MALL AND reclaimed her truck. She went round front of it, pulled the parking ticket with a curse—Felipe was so damn petty—then asked Wright, “Where am I dropping you?”

He slumped against the door. His face, already reddening in the slanting tropical light, grew red highlights on his cheeks and ear tips. “I wasn’t joking,” he said, quiet. “I got nothing. No money. No local connections. Nothing. This is my Hail-Mary moment. My life’s in your hands, and you don’t even believe me.”

She pulled her sunglasses from the visor, covered her expression with them. He watched her as intently as a dog, trying to read her mood.

Sylvie reached over and pushed the passenger’s-side door open. “Get in,” she said. “There’s a couch in my apartment.”