Mercy Blade (22 page)

That was debatable, and I let a small smile curve my lips, but Jodi spoke before I could refute his claim. “What was the victim doing in this office?”

“I have no idea,” Leo said. “It was not by invitation.”

Jodi looked at Kem. “Was she sent to steal something?”

Kemnebi smiled. “To my knowledge, the Mithrans have nothing of value to us.” Which sounded like so much insult. He swiveled his head and made a small bow to Leo. “Except the prospect of peace and political alliance in the world of humans.”

This was why I was never gonna make it as a politico. Slap, insult, kiss and make up, tease, bait and switch.

Leo bowed back, matching the bow for depth and duration. “The Mithrans of the Louisiana Territory are honored to work with the were-cats of Africa.” I figured it was part of the diplomatic stuff until another possible meaning sank in. It might have been two conspirators agreeing to cover each other’s backs. I analyzed the words as the others talked, not liking the ambiguities at all.

“What do you keep in this office?” Jodi asked.

“My personal and clan records: financial, historical, and diplomatic, current and cached.”

Jodi looked around the room and I could see the avarice in her eyes. It was like a treasure trove to a cop who catalogued such information, and Jodi’s team did. “Did Katie do this?” she asked, gesturing to the body.

“Traditionally, Masters of the City have handled Mithran lawbreakers,” Leo said. “Until our status is clarified with Congress, there is no legal reason to change that.”

“That isn’t what I asked,” she said.

“No. It isn’t.” He stood there, looking superior and dazzling and the tension in the room went up another notch.

“He won’t incriminate her,” I said. I looked at Kemnebi. “Kemmy, baby, how’s your nose?” His brows went up, whether at the meaning, the nickname, or just being addressed by a woman, I didn’t know, so I pushed. “’Cause if you can smell the attacker, it’d be a big help.”

“I am not a dog to sniff out murderers.”

Jodi’s eyes narrowed. “You calling cops dogs?”

“I think he’s talking about the wolves. Seems big-cats and wolves aren’t best buddies.” My earpiece crackled and I said, “Angel has the footage pulled up and the monitors ready.”

Jodi looked at the coroner, her cousin. “Peter, you okay here? Need anything?” Peter didn’t look up, but grunted and made a little shooing motion with one hand. I took that as a desire to be alone and led the way to the stairs. On the way I heard that the little green guy had been found swimming in the fountain in the back yard. “Looks like the backstroke,” the voice said over the ear-com system. “The water’s bloody.” I heard the sounds of water splashing and soldiers cursing, and the voice said, “His clothes show traces of blood and he doesn’t seem to understand English. He’s gibbering at us.”

I dropped back to Kem and said, “What species is the green guy you brought with you?”

“He is a grindylow,” Kem said, “from Britain.”

“Grindylow, like in Harry Potter?” Jodi asked.

“Harry Potter? No.” There was no mistaking the expression on Kem’s face as anything except contempt. Harry wasn’t his favorite fictional character.

“What’s a grindylow, then?” Jodi asked.

“They are ... pets. Most of the time. Guardians, occasionally. Less often, the enforcers of were-law. They are of limited intelligence, similar to a small child, or a chimpanzee.” He looked up, as if trying to remember something. Or as if taking time to concoct a lie. “They like water and prefer cold climes. But they will stay with their ... master, no matter the climate change.”

“Right. Uh-huh.” There was something in his tone that set my teeth on edge.

“Is there any way he gutted Safia?” Jodi asked, deliberately crude, watching his reactions.

Kem’s face contorted for an instant, twisted by the grief he was keeping so tightly bound. Then his face smoothed again. “The grindy is much like—
was
much like—Safia’s puppy, devoted to her in every way. I can think of few reasons that he would harm her.”

Few reasons, not none. It wasn’t a denial. I shot a look at Jodi, who nodded. She was playing bad cop. “The grindy was swimming in the back fountain,” I said. “Blood on his clothes, but well washed off. A couple of our guys yanked him out and have him in custody.”

“I’ll send CSI to bag his clothes.” She looked around at the hallway, shaking her head. “This whole place is a maze of areas we need to contain. We don’t have enough men.”

“Well, let’s see if the security footage lets us narrow it down some,” I said.

 

The large security-conference room was an assault on my senses. The room was filled with people. The bronze light fixture and track lights I hadn’t noticed before were lit up like torches. The oval table was cluttered with papers, laptops, cell phones, and electronic devices. The air was heavy with smells and noise: a stink of sweat, stress pheromones, the acrid reek of anger, the tang of old tobacco and coffee, the greasy scent from a plate of food that had been picked over and left on the table; a cacophony of voices, phones ringing, electronic beeps, miscellaneous clatter, and coffee was gurgling in the back of the room. The huge monitor hanging from the ceiling was lit up, showing twenty camera angles. It was chaotic and Beast sent me a sleepy vision of rats running across the ground in panic before she closed herself off from me again. I was relieved that she was at least watching. Beast often noted things I missed.

A thin, mid-sixties woman—who had geek written all over her—and Angel looked up as we entered. Angel swiveled his chair and gave me a small nod, as if glad to see me. “Miz Yellowrock, the CSI lady tech and I have narrowed the pertinent camera angles down.”

He looked at the woman and she shrugged. “I’m no lady.
Sonny
.”

He snorted softly. “You got to stop calling me that,
Gramma
.” They both chuckled and Angel pointed to the right side of the big monitor. “This one shows the hallway outside Mr. Pellissier’s office, these show the ballroom from three angles, this revolving sequence shows the victim exiting the ballroom and making her way to the office, these two show the wolves exiting unmonitored rooms as their counterparts jumped through the ceiling in the ballroom, the rest show the grounds, the room Yoda with fangs was in, and several shots of him in various areas of the compound. He only appears for a moment or two at a time, easy to miss.” He looked at me. “No excuses, ma’am, just the facts.”

I had a feeling the gramma had helped restore his equanimity. They were an unlikely team, the young, black, ex-marine communications/ET tech and the middle-aged, white CSI tech, but their partnership seemed to be working.

He returned his attention to the screen. “The views showing the hallways that connect the ballroom to the office are over to the left. We’re dealing with two hours of digital feed from over seventy cameras, so there’s a lot still to go through and a lot more that might be found, but so far these are the pertinent ones, bookmarked for easy retrieval.

“I also took the liberty of going through the camera footage of the walls and the back courtyard trying to narrow down the time the wolves came over, if they came that way,” Angel said. He tapped a camera. “A chef gathering herbs looks up, right here, as if he heard something overhead. Four thirty-two this afternoon. Then, at five seventeen, a guard hears something and looks up. It might give you a timeline for interrogation.”

“Police don’t interrogate. We question,” Jodi murmured, but there wasn’t any heat behind the disputation. Angel’s Tit cocked a brow in disbelief.

We watched silently, the little group gathered behind Angel’s chair, and we proved one thing. Unless she had been moving at warp speed and had done a time jump, Katie didn’t kill Safia. We had a time stamp of the little assistant entering Leo’s office at twelve forty-seven. It might not stand up in court, being only the flare of her dress from her left hip down and one raffia sandaled left foot as she entered the office, but she moved like Safia.

Nearly an hour later, just before she appeared in the ballroom, Katie raced through the front door, unseen by the guards, and all but flew up the hallway and into the office, moving fast. Even with the feed slowed down, she was a blur, but it was her, no doubt. The dried blood was a dead giveaway, even from behind. Exactly twenty-six seconds later she exited. There was fresh blood on her face, but according to the coroner, Safia had been dead nearly an hour by then. So ... maybe Katie had some leftovers?

I wanted to smile at my whimsy, but my face was frozen with exhaustion. Beast was bored with the investigation. She was sleeping somewhere inside me and the lack of her conscious awareness was enervating.

We went through the footage several times at various speeds. Found two things. The most important one was—an intruder had been in the ballroom.

The unidentified person was hard to see, and his position was unlikely at best. The toe of a boot was visible in one of the ballroom’s ceiling-mounted cameras. A booted person had literally hung around in the arched ceilings, unseen, for hours before the party started, and then, when the wolves made their dramatic appearance, had disappeared. No unidentified person had appeared in any other footage, not so far.

Leo seemed to stop several times in the evening, motion arrested as if he smelled something, and look around the room and up in the ceiling, much as he had when he first entered the ballroom. But he never seemed to discover the source of whatever—or whomever—it was he smelled. I was guessing it was the booted person in the arches. The boot and Leo’s scent searches reminded me of Gee, but I kept my suspicions to myself.

The second interesting thing was a little conspiracy brewing. The vamps were passing a little note around, small enough to be cupped into a hand. Every vamp it came into contact with stared at the note for a long moment, looked grim, and passed it on. That footage appeared to interest Leo but was likely unrelated to the murder. When a being is potentially immortal, life has to become terribly boring. What is there to do but suck blood, have sex, and conspire? But Leo had just won a bloody war; he didn’t need another; neither did the city of New Orleans. So Leo followed the activity and note around the ballroom, reviewing the footage several times, taking names and looking dour. I asked for some footage sections to be bookmarked and a list kept so we could find everything easily when needed.

It became apparent that the note originated with Amitee Marchand, formally of the Rochefort clan in France, and her brother Fernand. The fiancée of Leo’s deceased son was plotting behind his back and I bet myself that they were not planning a surprise birthday party for their master. Leo, grimly satisfied, was clearly memorizing all the players in the little conspiracy, whatever it might be. When he rotated his hand in a little
go ahead
gesture, Angel spun around in his chair, his hands dangling off the chair arms, his posture relaxed and confident. “The next part is Gramma’s,” Angel said.

“Cheeky kid,” the older tech said. “There’s a lot of things that don’t add up, but this one might—or might not—be one of the most important.” She keyed up a final monitor. It showed Tyler, Bruiser’s second in command, talking to two of the weres, Roul and the woman, in a hallway after the fiasco in the ballroom. And there was something in his body language that suggested agitation.

Leo asked, “Where is Tyler now?”

“In the back garden,” Gramma said, “with the leader of the armed children.”

“She means he’s with Derek,” Angel said.

“Miss Yellowrock, please see that Tyler is escorted directly here.” Leo’s voice hadn’t changed, his still-as-death body language hadn’t shifted. But I knew he was ticked off. I could smell anger pheromones coming off him. He added, “By two of your men.”

Two? Oookaaay
. I keyed my mike, the action repeated so many times tonight it was second nature. “Derek, please escort Tyler to the security room. One of your men to each side, one behind.” If Leo thought Tyler needed two humans to keep him under control, I figured overkill might be wise.

There was a slight pause while Derek interpreted my words, then said, “Will do.”

Tyler looked like a well-coiffed, twenty-something, disingenuous kid, but he moved like a trained soldier. And he was smart. He knew he hadn’t been summoned for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. As soon as the men pushed through the doors, he took the initiative and said, “What’d I do, boss?”

Leo nodded to a chair, and Tyler took it. “Remove your weapons, please.” Tyler did, like a well-trained soldier, removing the clip from the semiautomatic handgun and ejecting the round in the chamber, lining up two additional clips beside it, and setting two knives beside the weapon. Leo said nothing, just watched and breathed. And I realized he was smelling changes in Tyler’s body chemistry. I took a shallow breath through nose and mouth and caught the smell of sweat, manly, not rank, soap, antiperspirant, beef and mayo. No worry, no fear.