Apart from a shoe rack next to the door, a rug on the floor and a small table with a bowl to drop keys in, the hallway was devoid of anything. A set of stairs led up, and there were three doors, one a few steps inside the house, one at the far end of the hallway and another under the stairs. Olivia walked to the doorway at the far end of the hall.
"Kitchen," she said, as she clicked on a torch and opened the door under the staircase.
I took a moment to adjust my eyes with magic and could soon see, even in the almost total darkness that the house was in. "Why don't you just turn a light on?" I asked as Olivia disappeared from view.
Her head popped out a few seconds later. "You want to see this. And I don't want anyone watching the place to know someone's here. Just in case you're right and Vicki is involved."
"You're coming round to my way of thinking?" I asked.
"Just follow me." And she disappeared from view again.
I did as was asked and ducked my head as I stepped through the door. A set of steep stairs led down into a sizeable basement. "She has an office in the basement," I said, looking down.
"The house is only two bedrooms. I guess Vicki used the basement to get her work done."
And she would have spent a lot of time doing it. One long desk sat adjacent to the staircase. A computer monitor and laptop both had a thin film of dust on them. Two filing cabinets sat at the end of the room.
I took a step toward the cabinet, but Olivia stopped me. "You're not the only one who can get into a locked cabinet." She flicked her finger toward her target and a stream of ice smashed into the lock, pushing it into the cabinet with a shriek, where it ricocheted around the top draw.
There were no glyphs or marks that lit up under Olivia's use of her element. If I'd been standing in front of her, I'd have seen her irises turn a pure light blue, but that would have been it. Whereas sorcerers manipulated elements using magic, elementals were one with the element itself.
Olivia pulled open the top cabinet draw and removed a thick file from inside. She passed it to me, before she removed a second of equal size and began going through it.
I took mine over to the desk and opened the cover, immediately understanding why it was locked up. The front page had a picture of a man in full police uniform. According to the information written beneath it, he was over six feet tall, and weighed twenty stone. His name was Peter Jarvis, thirty-six and a serial killer responsible for sixteen murders in two years. The six victims were the same as those that had been in the files on Vicki's desk.
"So, why was she reading through the victims' files?" I asked.
"Because of this." Olivia passed me the file she'd been reading, which contained a picture of Peter with a young blond woman. They were stood in front of a large oak tree somewhere in a forest. They both appeared young and in love, the smiles genuine as they held one another. "This is Vicki."
"Your agent was dating a serial killer?"
"Yeah. It led to her drinking problem," Olivia said. "Like I told you, she had some anger issues."
"Anyone else know this about her?"
Olivia shook her head. "Just me. Peter used to beat her pretty badly. He nearly killed her once, just before she left him. She said she drank to forget what had happened. Sometimes she would wake up in a cold sweat at the thought of him coming after her."
"According to his file, he died in prison two years ago."
"His cellmate slit his throat. Vicki took a week off, and drank herself silly. I remember because Amber called me, worried that she was going to kill herself."
I bit my tongue, stopping myself from saying what I was thinking, but Olivia pretty much said it for me. "What the fuck have you got yourself into, Vicks?"
I grabbed one of the files inside the cabinet and started reading. related to a series of murders committed between five and seven years previously. Each of the victims had been young, pretty and murdered in brutal fashion. Their cars had been discovered on the major motorways around the New Forest, and their bodies found tied to trees with their hearts cut out.
"Fucking hell," I whispered. “Why wasn’t this house searched before? Hell, why didn’t you mention that Vicki’s ex was killing people in the same way as the current murders?”
Olivia snatched the file from me and started reading it. “Fuck. I swear I didn’t know the details of the murders. It was a human crime; I was far too busy to take notice. Even with it involving Vicki, I still didn’t find out much about what happened. She wasn’t exactly chatty about it, and I was swamped with work.”
“And the house?”
“Reid told me some human cops did it on our orders, just a cursory check… damn it, I fucked up.”
“We’ll ask Reid why he didn’t find anything.”
I opened the drawers on the desk, found a rucksack inside one, and used it to place the files inside. "They might come in handy," I pointed out.
We had one last look around the basement, but after finding nothing, decided it was best to head back upstairs.
Olivia's phone rang almost immediately and she walked off to answer it, leaving me alone to search the large living area of the house. Paintings were hung on walls, and a near empty bottle of vodka sat alone on the coffee table. Apparently, Vicki still had issues.
On a sideboard against the far wall sat rows of photos, all in elegant frames. Most of them were pictures of Vicki and Amber smiling, but one was a picture of seven women, including Amber and Vicki, all dressed up for a party. I picked up the photo and stared at it, until the realisation of where I'd seen them before clicked in my mind. They were the other victims. I turned it over n my hands and removed the photo from the frame. A date of four years previously was written on the back in pen.
I raced back to Olivia who'd finished on her call. "We got the bastard," she said with a smile.
I passed her the photo, fully aware that it would deflate her happiness. "I think we have a really big fucking problem."
Olivia's enthusiasm was quickly dampened when I showed her the photo, and the realisation that Vicki knew not only Amber, but all five of the remaining victims. And that every single person in the photo was now dead, or missing.
"You searched the victims' houses. Did any of them have the same photo?" I asked as Olivia placed the frame back where it had come from.
She shook her head, appearing slightly dazed, as if the photo had literally knocked the sense out of her. "Damn it, Vicks. Where are you?"
"We'll find her," I said.
"I hope so. Neil should be waiting for us by now, maybe he has some answers."
Chapter 19
"Why are we at a human police station and not LOA headquarters?" I asked when we arrived at the police station.
"I might be able to answer that," Agent Reid said, as he stepped out from between a pair of parked cars. He dropped a cigarette onto the floor, and put it out with his foot. "Had to find a nice dark place to hide for a smoke," he said. "I'm meant to go to the designated smoking area, but I don't have the time to hunt for it."
"I have to admit, I was wondering about the locale myself, Agent Reid," Olivia said.
"As the humans are the ones taking the glory for the arrest, we might as well bring the prisoner here for questioning. There are runes on his manacles that stop him from changing. He's not going anywhere, and it gets the humans a little good publicity before he vanishes into a deep dark pit somewhere."
Olivia wasn't buying it. "The real reason, Agent."
Reid glanced at me before answering. "I wasn't sure that he would last the night at LOA headquarters. I'm pretty certain he would have had an accident."
"How many non-Avalon are there inside this station?"
"About ten," Reid replied. "There's up to a hundred and fifty during the day, normally about thirty or forty cops at night, but most of them are out working."
Reid opened the door for Olivia, and the three of us walked into the florescent-lit reception. "This way," Reid said. He entered a four digit code on a keypad and pushed the door open.
There were no human police on the way to the rear of the building where the interview rooms were, but when we arrived it was easy to figure out which room Neil was being held in. The two huge guards standing at rigid attention outside the door sort of gave it away.
We walked past the guards and into a small room which contained two metal chairs, a recording device and a small table. One wall was made of one-way glass, allowing us to stare at Neil Hatchell who sat in the next room, on one side of a bare table. His wrists were bound with thick steel manacles, which were then chained to the floor. The manacles and chain were both inscribed with runes.
His long, dirty-blond hair had been joined by the beginnings of a beard. His clothes - a pair of beige combats and a black hooded top - appeared to be old. The combats were frayed just above his shoeless feet. His fingers were dirty, and he had a smudge of redness on his cheek, along with red and puffy eyes. He kept twitching, scanning the room for whatever he expected to pounce out on him. He couldn't have been more a perfect suspect for a murder if he'd actually brought the body to the police himself.
He was ignoring Agent Greaves, who seemed to take the "yelling at the prisoner" approach to interviews. On a person like Neil, who didn't even seem to be taking notice, Greaves might as well have been talking to himself.
After a lot more shouting, Greaves told Neil he was going to die alone, and left the room, arriving in ours moments later.
"He'll crack," Greaves said. "Everyone does."
"He's not going anywhere," I said. "He's ignoring you."
Greaves stepped up to me. "You got a better idea?"
"Give me five minutes with him," I said to Olivia.
"You overstep your boundaries, and I'll have you out of there."
"Fair enough." I held out my hand as Olivia silenced Greaves' objections with a wave of her hand. "The manacles key, please."
"Not a fucking chance," Greaves said.
"Give it to him," Olivia ordered, giving me an expression which told me to watch my step.
Greaves all but slammed the key into my hand, and I walked out of the room and into the interview room. Neil stared at the ground, his eyes flicking toward me as I sat down.
"Hey, Neil," I said. "How's things?"
Neil looked up at me, and then started the twitching thing again.
"Ah, the marks of a madman: twitching, unable to look at anyone else, slightly unkempt. You're probably going to mumble something in a minute aren't you? You've probably already got something in mind. Well, don't let me stop you."
Neil stopped his movements and stared directly at me.
"I'm going to take a guess here. You were coached. Someone told you that, as the humans were interested in this case, if you made yourself appear to be batshit crazy, they would try you in a human court and put you in a mental institution. As a werewolf, you could break out of it anytime. And even if they put runes on you to stop your transformation, you're still better than any human. You could take care of yourself until you escape. That sound about right?"
Neil continued to stare.
"Well, it's not going to happen. You see, it only appears that those murders are being investigated as a human crime. The LOA is letting the humans take the glory. So, you will go back to the Hole for this, or Tartarus. Whichever they feel you deserve more."
That got his attention. Fear flickered behind his eyes, and I knew which one of the two he feared the most.
Neil had been placed on only in the third floor in the Hole on his last visit. If he was found guilty of these new murders, he would hopefully be placed a lot further down. No amount of backing is going to help a murderer of humans get away lightly twice. People like Neil were cut loose the second they stopped being useful.
But as awful as the Hole was, Tartarus was a whole other league of scary. Every single person there was classed as an enemy of Avalon. And once you were imprisoned there, you never came back. Ever. I'd been there a few times, and the reality and the legend were vastly different. But that didn't stop people from believing the worst. Or stop me from playing on that fear.
"Tartarus scares you?" I asked. "Probably should. I don't think you'll like it there. A werewolf rapist like you, who likes to murder young girls? You'd last about ten minutes before one of the Titans tore you in half. And I mean that literally."
"You're right," he said. "I don't want to go to either of those. So what have you got?"
I placed the manacles key in front of him. "Take them off."
He hungrily picked up the key and removed the restraints, rubbing his wrists once they were off.
"If you try anything, I'll rip you in half myself," I said, and Neil nodded in agreement.
"Why did you get released from jail?"
Neil shrugged. "I didn't want to go. I was told I had to leave, and no questions. I wanted to stay. The beast in me had hurt those women, and I wasn't sure I could control it."
"Bullshit."
Neil had the audacity to smile.
"The beast wants to kill and taste blood," I said. "It doesn't rape. The man does. And if you lie to me again, I'll remove one of your hands."
The smile melted away. "You're not LOA," Neil said after a moment's silence.
"Never said I was, but you're still going to tell me two things--one, why Elijah was protecting you so furiously? And two, who's really murdering these women?"
Neil mimed locking his lips with a key and throwing it over his shoulder.
"So whoever this is scares you more than the LOA."
"I'm not going to help you put me in jail for the rest of my life."
"You want to know what confuses me? You're a predator, and you're free. So, why aren't you doing what you've wanted to for so long?"
Neil smirked. "Who said I wasn't?"
"I saw your photos, lots of them, but you never touched any of those women. I think you were castrated, figuratively speaking anyway. I think you had to stay locked away until they needed you, because they couldn't trust you not to fuck it all up. Is that it? Did you have to ask permission to do anything?"