Made for Sin (2 page)

It was over an hour before Speare finally managed to extricate himself from Doretti's house, and another couple of hours before he'd managed to drop off the expected stack of filled-to-the-brim Tupperware at his house and make the trek to the McDonald's in Whitney.

Well, he wasn't actually going to McDonald's, which was probably a good thing considering he was still stuffed from the enormous amount of food Laz had pressed upon him. He was going to the parking lot behind McDonald's. Construction going on next to it blocked its view from the street, which made it a convenient place to meet people he didn't want to be seen meeting.

Or to meet people who didn't want to be seen meeting
him.
Chuck Majowski, LVMPD Homicide, was already there, sitting in his unmarked cruiser with the engine running. Speare backed his own car into the next spot, then slid smoothly out of the driver's seat and into the passenger seat of Majowski's Dodge.

“Speare,” Majowski said, with what wasn't quite a sneer. “Doing murder investigations now? I thought your line was following husbands to strip clubs or catching insurance scammers.”

“I guess Laz thinks he needs somebody who knows what he's doing on this one,” Speare replied. Yeah, yeah, all the cops liked to make fun of his work. Let them. He made more money than they did, he had more free time, and he wasn't constantly under scrutiny. It almost made him glad that the beast had made it impossible for him to join the force the way he'd hoped to do when he was a kid. “Someone who can actually solve it.”

Majowski stared at him for a long moment; Speare stared back, perfectly calm. Majowski didn't scare him. He never had, but he especially didn't at that moment, when they both knew that Lazaro Doretti would cut Majowski loose if he tried anything. No more kickbacks, no more moonlighting, no more college funds or Caribbean vacations. No more job, either, because Doretti's payroll stretched way over Majowski's rather pointy balding head.

Then Majowski smiled, a genuine smile. “Well, maybe you're right. I guess ‘The Spear' doesn't have to worry about constitutional rights and Miranda warnings. You don't have to do it the right way.”

Speare ignored the nickname but gave Majowski a thin smile in return. “Any way that finds the killer is the right way. The sooner you give me what I need, the sooner I can start.”

“Right.” Majowski reached into the pocket in his door and pulled out a manila folder. “Here. Everything we have so far. Photocopies, of course, and some of it's not typed up—let me know if you have trouble reading any of it, the handwriting may not all be great. All the pictures are there. The autopsy's not done yet, so I'll call you when I have it. Tomorrow's most likely—they're speeding this one through, including the tox results and all that other shit, but you know it'll still take a good few days, at least, for tox.”

Speare flipped through the file. Lots of notes. Witness interviews. Pictures—ugh. Worse than he'd thought. “They really wanted that arm.”

“Sure did,” Majowski said. He sounded almost admiring. “Took the whole damn thing, collarbones, shoulder blade…all of it. I'm thinking it's probably some kind of sorcery thing, you know, but it could just be some serial killer's got a weird fetish.”

“Clean cuts,” Speare said, examining a close-up picture. The bright sunlight coming through the passenger window made the paper gleam, almost like he was looking at art instead of a badly lit, badly framed image of a horrible mutilation.

“Surgical.”

“What about his clothes? Anything unusual there?”

“Don't think so. Just—”

Speare heard the car coming before it appeared—one of the few benefits of sharing his head with a demon. He ducked down to the floor, just in case.

Majowski picked up his phone and started playing with it. Just a cop taking a break for a few minutes, maybe digesting a couple of Big Macs before heading back out onto the streets. Or, considering he was riding unmarked, just a dude digesting Big Macs. Either way, nothing for random passersby to pay attention to. “I hope nobody's looking out any windows,” he said. “They'll think you're servicing me down there.”

“That's sexual harassment, you know,” Speare said, amused in spite of himself. “I'm going to make a complaint.”

“Yeah, I'm sure that'll go to the top of the list.” Majowski set down the phone. “You can get up now, they're gone.”

The pictures seemed worse the second time he looked at them, maybe because his initial curiosity had been satisfied and he now had to realize what he was looking at. To think about it. “Were you at the scene? Have you seen him?”

Majowski nodded. “Not a pretty sight.”

Like he'd thought it would be. “His clothes. Were they bloody, too? I mean, in the pictures here his shirt is next to the body, but was there any blood that might not have been his, or any other clues as to location, or…anything?”

“They were on the ground outside a dumpster.” Majowski shrugged. “Hey, don't look at me like that. They were just clothes, no blood other than what looked like minor seepage from being placed next to the body, lots of garbage and slime from being left there. They had kind of a funny smell, too, kind of bitter and tingly. The kind of smell that makes you want to cough, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” Maybe it wasn't Fallerstein, then. A lot of things used in occult rituals smelled bitter or strange. Especially things used when dealing with demons: summoning them, controlling or imprisoning them, banishing them. Point was, if Theodore's murder had been a ritual killing, that was a problem, since the Vegas Families weren't supposed to engage in magics of that type. Almost everything else was okay, but hands-on rituals to cause deaths in other Families were off-limits; that agreement had been made forty years or so before, and Speare had never heard of anyone violating it. “Is there some way I can get a look at it? In person.”

Majowski thought for a moment. “Maybe. I might be able to pull the evidence bag and bring it out to show you. I don't know about opening it, though. Chain of custody and all.”

Speare tried not to laugh. “Do you think this is ever going to make it to a trial?”

“Oh. Right. I guess it doesn't matter much.”

“Wait a minute.” Something else caught Speare's eye, something that made the beast in his head shiver in a way that was half-pleasant, half-unpleasant. A way that reminded him the thing was there, as if he could ever forget. It recognized that mark. It felt it, even thirdhand, printed on paper. He held up the photo, angled so Majowski could see what he meant. “This mark. Was this fresh?”

Majowski looked but obviously didn't see what Speare saw—well, of course he didn't; he was normal. “I dunno. We won't have a cause of death until the autopsy, like I said, but—”

“Was this mark fresh? Did it smell of anything—did you notice anything odd? Other than the missing arm, I don't see any other marks on him. Were there any?”

The mark on the back of Theodore's neck, a tiny, almost invisible little black squiggle like a fancy bracket on a keyboard, didn't look like much at all, Speare knew. But if he was right about what it was…if he was right, they had a hell of a lot more to worry about than one death. Literally, a hell of a lot more.

“Back off, Speare.” Majowski's hand slid down to rest on his holster. “You've always been decent to me, and Doretti wants me to help you out so I will. But I know your reputation just as well as I knew Theodore's, and I'm not becoming a casualty.”

Shit, he hadn't realized he was leaning in so close, looming quite so…well, loomingly. He sat back in his seat and lifted his palms in what looked like a shrug but which they both knew was him letting Majowski see his hands. “I could tear that gun out of your hand and shoot you with it before you had a chance to stop me, you know.”

“You could try.” Majowski's smile was friendly, and if it wasn't as warm as it had been before, it was warm enough to show that he knew he hadn't just been threatened. Speare liked him even better for that. Not every situation like the one they were in ended with everybody getting to keep their dignity.

“Anyway.” He held up the picture again. “Did you see this mark? Did you notice anything about it?”

“It wasn't blistered,” Majowski said. “So it happened at the time of death, or immediately after. Burned into his skin, like a brand. Doesn't look like a brand, though. Why?”

“It's not a brand.” Shit. It was even worse than he'd worried it would be. “It was a demon-sword. Somebody got hold of a demon-sword, and they used it to kill Theodore.”

Vegas was not one of those “nothing starts until midnight” cities. That was one of the things he loved about it. Anytime, day or night, he could head for the Strip—or, usually, the areas just outside of it—and find something to do. And people to do it with. It was the closest a man with a problem like his would ever get to heaven.

Speaking of the problem…a slight tremor rolled down his spine. Just a twitch, really, not even big enough to count as a shudder, but big enough to serve as a warning. Lying and a little gluttony hadn't been enough to hold him—to hold the thing inside him, anyway—for long. He could feel it coiled in the back of his head, waiting, getting hungry. Funny how something that lived in his head could be such a pain in his ass.

Theodore had last been seen alive around two thirty in the morning at Fortuna's Wheel, a dive bar that catered to the occult and criminal underworlds, which had a considerable amount of overlap. It was a damned good place to find sins of all kinds; Speare had ended more than a few nights by stumbling out of the place with a woman on his arm or some black-market goods in his car. Or both. The beast inside him wasn't picky about the
type
of sin he had to commit to keep it quiet, as long as it was sin.

Which was another reason he loved living in Vegas. Sin was everywhere he looked; it filled the air with its rich, spicy fragrance and covered everything with an aura of shiny greeny-gold. The city's blood was thick with it, like plasma, and it pumped through every building, every street, every single person crowding together under the lights. They glowed with avarice and envy, with gluttony and lust and vanity. Just being near them all made the beast in his head awaken further, and he hated how much its excitement became his. How they felt it together. And how good that felt.

It still didn't quite dim his pleasure in the Strip, but perhaps that was because he needed that pleasure. A demon-sword. His blood would have run cold if it had been able to. Was some psycho running around brandishing an underworld weapon without realizing its true power, or was someone deliberately harnessing that power, or what? Neither was a good option.

But at least it gave him some kind of lead, which was why he made a left onto Sahara and kept going until he reached the Sweethearts Delight Midnight Chapel.

What a shithole it was. Every time he parked in the patch of broken pavement and leggy weeds that sat directly in front of the squat box of flaky tan stucco, he wondered why Felix didn't clean the place up a little—at least enough to make it believable as a wedding venue. Rather than looking like a place where love's young dream was fulfilled, it looked like a place where love was beaten and shot execution-style. The only less-appealing-looking place Speare could think of to get married would be a garbage barge floating down a river of sewage and misery.

The dented bell above the door gave its customary off-note
ping
when he entered the place. Air-conditioning washed over him in a damp, icy wave scented faintly with dog.

Said dog rose to her feet and padded across the floor to greet him. He bent to scratch her shaggy brown head. “Hey, Parsnip. Felix around?”

“I'm here.” The man himself, clad in a rumpled Hawaiian shirt and age-soft khakis, pushed through the curtain of pink-and-green glass beads that separated the foyer from the rest of the building. “Come on back.”

Speare followed him down the hall to the large chapel area. “How's everything?”

“Oh, you know.” Felix reached the back wall, painted with a ridiculous mural of plump cherubs and cupids floating above a rainbow, surrounding a golden-rayed sun. It would have served as a backdrop for wedding pictures, as well as an added incentive for the newlyweds to avoid sleep—the nightmares it could cause were profound and disturbing, as Speare knew from personal experience—if anyone had ever actually gotten married there. “The wedding business is nonexistent.”

“Just the way you want it to be.”

“Well, yes.” Felix unlatched the hideous mural so it swung open to reveal another room: the room that housed his real business. Shelves lined the walls, providing resting space for Felix's vast inventory of magical and occult items. Grimoires and bones and ritual daggers, bezoars and stones and bottles of holy water, every type of magical powder and substance known to man or beast—or anything in between. All of it sat on the shelves, and more lay in heaps and stacks and boxes on the floor and filled cabinets and at least one back storeroom. “I can't have people in here wanting to get
married.
That's just boring.”

“Well, here's something that isn't boring.” Speare sat on one of the stools at the counter, next to the one Felix chose for himself. “Theodore Bryant was found dead this morning, about six blocks away from here.”

Felix's watery eyes grew larger in his sallow face. Speare always thought he looked like a fox with rheumatism, his sharp features obscured by five o'clock shadow and weary cynicism. Even his hair was foxlike, a bushy reddish brown swept back from a widow's peak, graying at the temples. “Theodore?”

Speare nodded.

Felix reached over the counter and produced a bottle of whiskey and a couple of glasses, and sloshed two fingers' worth into each glass. “What a tragedy,” he said, clapping his fists on his chest. “May his soul arise in the Realm of Silver.”