Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale (19 page)

When they reached the entrance of the building and stepped out into the fresh afternoon air, Luc inhaled deeply, savoring as never before the scents of the city, food mingled with trash mingled with humanity mingled with stone and metal and earth.
Nothing had ever smelled so good.
He couldn’t really recall the last time he’d felt as grateful to leave a place—or as glad that he’d been there.
For all the misery being in those haunted corridors had caused him, he knew the dead would be delighted they had visited.

Corinne barely contained herself until they reached the sidewalk.
She gave Luc half a second to draw in a deep breath—one he’d needed desperately, judging by the gray-green tinge to his skin—then pounced.
Metaphorically, of course.

“What was it?”
she demanded right there on the sidewalk at First and 32nd.
“What did you see when you looked at that scar?”

He sighed, but the sound held no impatience, just a bucket-load of relief.
A visible release of tension followed closely on its heels.

“The doctor was right about the cause not being any of the things she mentioned,” he said, beginning to walk down the street and away from the ME’s office.
“He wasn’t shot, stabbed, burned, or grafted.
She was wrong, though, about the mark’s age.
It was recent; probably as recent as last night.”

Corinne swore under her breath.
“Then it was related to the attack.”

“Almost certainly.
I’ve seen scars like that before, but very rarely.
They don’t happen to the Fae; only to humans.”

“What causes them?”

“A very powerful blast of Fae magic.”

She paused to chew on that.
It left a bad taste in her mouth.
“I thought you said Seoc wasn’t capable of hurting anyone.”

Luc’s jaw clenched.
“I didn’t believe he was, but clearly I was wrong.”

Corinne didn’t want to doubt Luc’s judgment, and she didn’t want him doubting it, either.
“Just because the blast was caused by magic doesn’t necessarily mean that Seoc is to blame,” she said carefully.

He snorted.
“So there just happens to be some other person from Faerie with enough power to summon that kind of energy wandering around
Ithir
at the same time as Seoc?
No, that kind of magic is specific to the sidhe.
The noble race of Faerie.
People like me and Seoc and the Queen.
Brownies and imps and the other sort of creatures from our world just don’t have that kind of ability.
It had to have been Seoc.”

Corinne took a deep breath and let it out carefully.
“Okay, so now we know.”
She stopped walking and reached out to grab his hand, pulling him to a stop beside her.
“Finding out was the first step.
It’s time to move on to the second.”

He nodded curtly.
“We have to find Seoc immediately.”

“Well, we have four witnesses left.
So let’s go knock on some doors.”

The knocking elicited very little other than a burgeoning headache for Corinne and an increasing sense of urgency for them both.
There at been no answer at the apartments of two of the models Ava had told them about.
At the third, they found only a disgruntled roommate who bitched at them for waking her up in the middle of the damned night (it was three in the afternoon) and told them that if they saw Leena before she did, they should tell her that if she was late with the rent again, her “ass” would be “grass.”
A trip to the bartender’s place yielded nothing until the super poked his head out to see who was knocking next door and told them that Mark Ingram had moved over the weekend.

“So much for sixty days’ notice, right?”
the man griped.

“You have his forwarding address?”
Corinne asked.

“What, do I look like the postman to you?
He paid up, he left.
No business of mine where he went.”

Corinne gritted her teeth to keep from baring them at the grumpy, unhelpful bastard.
“And what if you need to find him again?
Say he damaged something moving.”

“I still got the number at his job.
Pulls the taps at a little place up in Gramercy.”

Luc nodded.
“Thank you.
We’ll find him there, then.”

The super’s snort stopped them before they reached the exit.
“Not at this time of day, you won’t.
Works nights.
Says he likes the money.
Personally, I’m gonna like not getting woke up when he slams his door at four a.m.
But he never goes on till at least seven.
At this hour, he’ll be stretched out wherever his new place is sleeping like a corpse.
And good luck waking him.
Slept through a police raid once.
Lady in 3B had her drug-dealing brother staying with her last year.
Cops broke three doors yanking his ass out.
Bet yer ass her lease ain’t gettin’ renewed.”

“Thank you.
You’ve been very helpful.”

“And charming,” Corinne muttered as the man closed the door in their faces and went back to his blaring television set.
“Damn it.
Hank Buckley clearly didn’t double-check after he got Ingram’s address.
There’s no telling where he moved to.
He could have gone out of state for all we know.”

“Not if he’s still working his old job.”

“Only one way to find out.”
She had her cell phone in her hand and had already started dialing.
She placed it on speaker again so Luc could listen in.

“Landslides, can I help you?”

The voice over the phone was feminine and brusque, but polite, and Corinne held up her finger to Luc to indicate he should be quiet.
“Hi, I’m looking for Mark Ingram.
Is he working right now?”

“He’s not scheduled until seven, which means he’ll be here by eight, if the past week is anything to go by,” the woman informed them, her tone going cool.
“That being the case, I doubt he’s going to have time to chat on the phone tonight.
Not if he wants to keep his job.”

The receiver clicked into silence, and Corinne hung up.
“Somehow I doubt she’d appreciate us calling back and asking for his new address.”

“Is there another way we could find out?”

There were always ways, Corinne knew, but none of them would be easy.
“Nothing quick.
I can check with the utility companies, see if he’s started service somewhere new.
And I know a PI who’d probably do me a favor, but none of that will get us an answer before eight.”

“Seven.”
Luc shrugged when she looked puzzled.
“What can I say?
I’m an optimist.”

She huffed out a laugh.
“Well, I’m a realist.
Honestly, we’ll waste the least amount of time if we just wait until tonight and catch him at work.
If we hang out at the bar for a few minutes, he can talk and work at the same time and hopefully not piss off the boss.”

“And in the meantime?”

“We regroup.”

They headed back to her apartment thoroughly frustrated.

“You’re a writer,” Luc mused in the elevator up to her floor.
“Is there an adjective out there that means an unmitigated disaster, spiraling quickly toward a close approximation of Armageddon?”

“I think
fubar
is the closest you’re going to get,” she said, leading the way to her door and letting them into her living room.

“What language is that from?”

“Military-speak.
It’s an acronym.
It means ‘fucked up beyond all recognition.’”

He nodded.
“I think that will do to be going on with.”

Corinne made a noise of angry frustration and marched to the desk tucked under a window at the rear of the main room.
Ignoring the bulk of the mess teetering precariously on every inch of available surface, she grabbed a woefully inadequate stack of papers and photos and carried them back to the sofa.
Depositing them on the coffee table, she knelt down between it and the sofa and began to spread everything out until she could lay eyes on every scrap of information all at once.
Then, still not satisfied, she yanked her notebook out of her backpack, flipped it open to the pertinent pages, and added that as well.

“Okay,” she said, looking over the chaos and wishing there were more of it, “this is everything we have.
I’ve been over it all twice, but there’s got to be something I’m missing.
I refuse to believe there isn’t something in here somewhere that will point us in the right direction.
We just have to find it.”

Luc sank onto the sofa next to her shoulder and surveyed the scene.
“But what exactly is it that we’re looking for?”

Corinne bit back a growl.
“I don’t know yet.
Damn it, I’m going to need coffee for this.”

She left him sitting in front of the paperwork and stalked into the kitchen to put on a pot of life’s blood.
If her feet pointed backward, she’d have kicked her own ass.
She knew she was missing something.
Had she been so blinded by anger with her editor and irritation over finding herself embroiled in Others’ business that she had ignored some vital clue?
Because she didn’t think she could live with that.
She didn’t think she could stand knowing that if she’d paid closer attention, she might have helped Luc find Seoc before anyone got hurt.

Coffee dripped while she brooded.
As soon as she could, she poured a cup and carried it back to the sofa.
Settling beside Luc, she sipped as she took another look at the information she had gathered.
“You know, there’s something that really bothers me about the rabbi’s murder.”

“You mean aside from the wanton loss of life?”
Luc snapped, then apologized when she shot him a quelling look.

“I mean, why was it necessary?
If your theory about Hibbish’s disappearance is right and Seoc sent him into limbo, why not just send Aaronson there when he got in the way of Seoc’s experiments?
Why kill him?”

“That assumes the rabbi was killed because he knew about Seoc’s experiments—which doesn’t make a lot of sense.
So far, the witnesses to Seoc’s activities have been dismissed as crackpots, am I right?”

“Yes, but you heard Ava.
Interest in the story is growing.”

Luc nodded.
“True enough, but for the moment, Seoc has no reason to fear human discovery.
There had to be another reason for the murder.”

None occurred to her.
“So what was it?
Any brilliant theories?”

Rising to pace restlessly, he scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck and scowled.
In all, he looked thoroughly disgruntled.
“No.
And frankly, it’s driving me bonkers.”

“Join the club.”
Corinne reached for a couple of sheets of paper and scanned the contents.
“Maybe the motive is buried somewhere in the rabbi’s statement.
Maybe there’s something he reported or something about him that set him apart from the other witnesses?”

Interest lightened the man’s grim features.
“You could be right.
Do you have a copy?”

Corinne shuffled through more papers and frowned.
She scanned everything laid out on the table, then scanned again.
She shook her head.
How could she not have something so important?

“I can’t find it.
I swear Hank told me he gave me all the statements he’d gathered.
Why wouldn’t Aaronson’s be here?”

“What information about his sighting
do
we have?”

She referred back to her notes.
“Just that he—” She broke off and read the line over again, to be sure she hadn’t imagined it.
“Holy shit.”

Luc snatched the paper out of her hand.
“What?
What did you find?”

“Right there.”
She jabbed a finger halfway down the page.
“Hank never gave me his original statement because no one ever recorded it.
Rabbi Aaronson was the only one of the eyewitnesses who contacted the police directly about what he’d seen, but they thought he was a total crackpot.
Hank sent a PI to verify his report later, and Aaronson said that at first he thought the cops were very professional, listening closely and taking detailed notes, but he’d forgotten to give the officer who took his statement a card.
When he went back inside to get one, he saw the cop laughing with a colleague and tossing his statement in the trash.
That certainly sets him apart from the others, don’t you think?”