Spell Blind (5 page)

“You think he was connected to any of the other kids?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” Kona said. “A few of them were at the university; most of them were using.”

“But this is the first time we’ve—” I smiled self-consciously. “That you’ve had any kind of link between Robby and a victim.”

“Yeah. This is the first.”

We started walking again, and I stared at Robby’s name on that list. His address hadn’t changed since I arrested him. “I guess you should go see him.”

“Why don’t you?” Kona said. “Kevin and I have more than enough to keep us busy, and this is the type of thing you’d be doing for Wriker anyway.”

“All right.”

I expected her to remind me that since I wasn’t a cop anymore, I couldn’t push Robby too far, but she didn’t.

“I’ll let you know what I find out,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ll do the same.”

“Thank you, Kona.”

We’d reached Washington again.

“No problem, partner. Talk to you soon.”

She continued back toward 620; I turned toward the City Hall parking lot, my chest aching. I’d never begrudge Kona her badge, but at that moment I wanted mine back more than I wanted anything.

Nobody would be surprised to learn that a drug dealer like Robby Sommer was a screw-up. What always amazed me about the kid, though, was how lucky he’d been. In the years since I’d arrested him, he had been hauled in at least three or four more times. But he’d only been convicted once, and then on a reduced count. Something always seemed to go wrong with Robby’s arrests—evidence was misplaced, procedures got fouled up. One time an assistant district attorney was found to have manufactured evidence in a number of cases—it was a huge scandal at the time—and while the evidence against Robby was completely legit, all of the perps in all of the assistant D.A.’s cases were released as a matter of course. This was the luckiest kid on the face of the earth.

I turned that thought over in my head as I drove to his place, amazed that this had never occurred to me before: What if Robby wasn’t merely lucky? What if the punk had access to magic? What if he had been hiding it from us all these years? Most of the time I could identify a weremyste on sight. They usually appeared to shimmer and waver, as if there were heat waves in front of them. A powerful runecrafter might look like little more than a blur. I’d never noticed anything like this with Robby, but maybe he wasn’t strong enough for me to notice, or at least hadn’t been the last time our paths crossed. I thought of that faint hint of beige glow on the door of the building where I had found Jessie Tyler. Could that have been Robby? Had luck saved him yet again?

Maybe. But with Claudia Deegan dead, with drugs found in her backpack and in her blood, and with some connection established between her and Sommer, it was possible that Robby’s winning streak was about to end.

Robby might have been thinking the same thing. As soon as I knocked on the door of his house, a small place on Hermosa, near the interchange of Highway 101 and U.S. 60, I heard a screen door fly open in the back. I leaped off the front stoop and sprinted around the house in time to see someone disappear over a cinderblock wall.

I went after him, knowing that I could clear the wall easily. But as I was about to throw myself over it, I felt magic. I stopped myself the only way I could: essentially by running into the wall. I didn’t go over it, which was good because flames had erupted from its top—just like the flames I’d seen earlier that day at the spark den. I gathered that fire was Robby’s attack magic of choice, which wasn’t so surprising. Fire spells were about the most rudimentary assailing magic a myste could use.

Three elements: the cinderblocks, Robby’s flames, and a magical blanket to snuff them out. The air around me hummed with the power of my own spell, and an instant later the flames on the wall died down. I climbed over, feeling the heat of the blaze still radiating from the stone. Once on the ground again, I ran on, following the retreating sound of Robby’s footsteps.

It was my turn for an attack spell. I didn’t try anything fancy; I wanted to slow him down, not kill him. My hand, his back, and a good hard shove.

I heard him stumble, then curse. Emerging from between two houses, I saw him scrambling to his feet half a block down the street. And yes, this time I did notice a faint blur around his face and neck. The son of a bitch was a runecrafter, albeit a weak one. He glanced back, took off again. I chased him across a couple of small yards, and followed him into another narrow alley between two ramshackle houses. This wasn’t exactly textbook police procedure, but Robby had never been a violent kid. Just a slimeball, and not a particularly smart one at that. He broke out into a second open street and I ran after him; by now I was only a few steps behind. He dodged a kid on a bicycle; I tried to do the same, spun, and fell, tearing my jeans and most of the skin on my right knee.

I was on my feet again in a second or two, but I was limping now, and I was pissed off. I might have lost him, but he turned down a second alley that proved to be a dead end. Did I mention that Robby wasn’t so smart?

I hobbled into the alley, glancing down at my bloodied leg and swearing loudly. Robby backed away from me until he bumped into the scalloped steel door of an old garage. He pulled something from his pocket and fumbled with it.

“Stay away from me!” he said, waving his hand at me. It took me a moment to realize that he was holding a small knife.

I stopped and considered drawing my Glock, which was still in my shoulder holster. I’m licensed to own it and Arizona law allows private citizens to carry a concealed weapon. And though I hadn’t been on the job in some time, I still felt more comfortable with a weapon at the ready. In this case though, I figured I’d learn more from Robby if I got him calmed down.

“Put the knife away, Robby. You don’t want to get hurt.”

“I said stay away!”

I started walking toward him again. “You really are an idiot, aren’t you?”

In a way I hoped he would try to cut me. My leg was aching and I was itching for an excuse to kick the crap out of him.

“I’m smarter than you think. I know that you guys want to nail me for dealing, especially now that Claudia’s dead.” His eyes were darting from side to side, searching for any way out of the alley. He might well have been desperate enough to attack me.

“Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m not trying to pin anything on anyone.”

“Bullshit,
cop!
”

“I’m no cop.” He started to argue, but I raised a finger to silence him. “I was when I busted you, but I was kicked off the force a while back.”

“Yeah, right. What for?”

I wasn’t about to tell him that. “I beat a perp to death.”

His eyes widened.

“Put the knife away, Robby. I just want to talk. I’m a PI now. A private investigator,” I added, seeing his puzzled expression. “I’m doing a little work for the Deegans, trying to figure out what happened to their daughter.”

Fear and uncertainty chased each other across his features.

“The cops are after me, though, right?”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you. They know you didn’t kill her. But they also know that you deal, and that Claudia had drugs with her when she died. Lots of the Blind Angel victims did,” I added, eyeing him as I spoke the words.

Robby seemed to sag. The hand holding the knife fell to his side. “Shit,” he muttered, eyes on the ground. I’m not sure that he heard my last remark. “I didn’t do anything.”

“No? What about Jessie Tyler?”

His gaze snapped back to mine. “That was you today.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Throw another spell at me and I’ll break your neck.”

“The Deegans, the Tylers. I guess business has been good.”

“Did you know Claudia well?”

He glanced around again, still searching for some way out. At the same time, he let out a short breathless laugh. “Yeah, I knew Claud. She and I were a thing once.”

“That right?”

Robby raised his chin, eyeing me. “You don’t believe me.”

I wasn’t certain that I did. It’s not like I thought girls would find Robby unattractive. He had a friendly face, shaggy dark hair, big brown eyes—the kind of down-and-out good looks that some girls like. But Claudia Deegan had been a beauty, and with her name and money she could have had any guy she wanted.

“Sure I do.”

“No, you don’t. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t either. I know who Claud was, before she became the woman I knew. If she’d been right with her family, she wouldn’t have given me the time of day. I understand that, you know? I think she saw me as a way of getting at her old man. But I didn’t mind.” He stared past me; his expression had softened. “I . . . I liked her. A lot.”

Maybe I did believe him. “What was she on?”

He met my gaze again, narrowing his eyes. After a moment’s hesitation, he gave a little shake of his head. “Everything. You name it, she was into it. Spark, X, crystal, coke. It’s not like she was short on money, you know?”

“Did she buy her stuff from you?”

“Is that what the Deegans told you? Them and that boyfriend of hers?”

“What boyfriend?”

“I don’t remember his first name. Last name is Ruiz. He’s some rich Mexican kid. But they all had it in for me. Blamed me for all of Claud’s problems, which is bullshit. I mean, sure, we did some stuff, you know? But it’s not like she’d never used before she started hanging out with me. It’s not like she was a damn saint or something.”

“Did you have any contact with the Deegans?” I asked. “Conversations, letters, emails?”

“Not her old man. He’s not around that much, and anyway, his people probably wouldn’t let him anywhere near someone like me.”

I was sure Robby had that right.

“But Claud’s brother came around once right after we broke up. Told me stay away from her. Threatened to have me thrown in jail if I ever went near her again.”

“So did you stay away from her after that?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Couldn’t. I went to that freakin’ protest because I thought she’d like me more if I was into one of her causes, you know?” He laughed, sounding bitter. “That worked out great. She barely noticed me, and I wound up getting busted along with the rest of them.”

“Did she buy her drugs from you?”

He chewed his lip, seeming to weigh whether it was safe to tell me the truth. “Yeah,” he said at length. “I sold her Spark, coke, X. I don’t deal meth anymore, so if she had any on her, it wasn’t from me. But the rest probably was.”

“What about the others?”

“What others?” Robby asked, growing wary.

“The other Blind Angel murder victims. Did you sell to any of them?”

“I thought you were working for the Deegans.”

“I am. I’m trying to figure out why Claudia is dead. And if I can learn something about the other murders, too, all the better.”

His gaze slid away. “Yeah, well, I don’t know anything about that.”

He was shutting down on me, so I turned the conversation back to Claudia, hoping that he’d open up again.

“Do you find it odd that this guy would go for Claudia? I mean, she’s probably the most famous girl in Arizona, right?”

“He probably didn’t recognize her,” Robby said. “I mean, have you seen Claudia recently?”

“I saw her a little while ago,” I said. “I’ve just come from the Medical Examiner’s building.”

He gaped at me, his face going white. “No shit?”

“I swear it.”

Robby swallowed. “Well . . . well, then, you know. She changed. A lot. She lost weight—got really thin, you know? Unhealthy. And she dyed her hair black, used lots of eyeliner—went Goth. Actually it was a pretty cool look for her. It was like she was trying to be someone else, leave the blonde princess behind. That’s what she called herself sometimes, when she was feeling especially anti-family, you know? Anyway, that was the weird thing about Claud. On the one hand she acted like none of the rules applied to her, you know? She thought she could get away with stuff because of who she was. And you just know that she got that from her old man, from being a Deegan. But at the same time, she was always trying to be someone else.” He shook his head again. “Poor Claud.”

I didn’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I also didn’t doubt that the guy loved her. Robby wasn’t the brightest bulb on Broadway, but he’d given some thought to what made Claudia Deegan tick. It almost made me feel bad for him. Still, he hadn’t answered my question, and I couldn’t leave him alone until he did.

“What about the others, Robby? Did they buy from you, too?”

His gaze wandered away again. “I told you, I’ve got nothing to say about that.”

“Well, I’ll take that as a ‘yes’, and I’ll be sure to mention it to my buddies at the PPD.”

“You think I remember everyone who’s ever bought from me? You’re crazy! And I don’t know the names of all the people this guy’s killed.”

“You’d remember if you sold to someone and heard a day or two later that she’d turned up dead. In fact, I think you do remember. And I think it’s happened more than once.”

“You’re wrong.” He kept his eyes down as he said it, and I could tell that he was hiding something, and that he was terrified. For a second I thought he might start crying.

“You’re lying.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t have to,” I said, taking a step toward him. “Like I said, I’m not a cop anymore.”

He raised the knife again. “Stay away!”

“Which ones, Robby? Which victims bought from you before they died?”

“None of them did! And you can’t prove different! Neither can your cop friends!”

I didn’t believe him for a minute. But he was right; I couldn’t prove anything, at least not yet.

“Fine,” I said, relaxing a bit, checking my knee again. What a mess.

He regarded me, wary again. “Fine what?”

“I believe you didn’t sell drugs to any of the other Blind Angel victims. You can go.”

“That’s it? I can go? Just like that?”

“What’d you expect? I told you I’m not a cop anymore. If I could throw you in the pen for a while let you stew on all of this, I would. For Claudia and for Jessie. But I’m just a PI. Even if you are lying to me, I can’t do anything about it.”