Pack of Lies. Laura Anne Gilman
it, and another one to realize why.
Damn it, this was Nifty. He was a good guy. He was on our side.
He was a guy.
I guess my nerves weren’t quite as under control as I thought.
Whatever calm I’d gotten went sizzle like water on a griddle, my core shifting from its usual cool loops of neon to something more jagged and hot. Bad. Very bad normally, and even worse here, in the office. Be calm, Bonnie, I told myself. Be still and controlled, that’s what you do, remember? You’re the one who has the most excellent control.
Knowing why I was reacting this way, and that logic wasn’t going to work, not right now, didn’t help. All I could do was deal with it, and try not to let it get in the way of the work. With that in mind, I consciously leaned forward to get a better look at what he was doing, even as I smoothed the jagged spikes back down into cool loops through sheer force of will. I would not let nerves show. Would not.
“I really wish I had a camera right now.”
I twitched, and looked up at Pietr, who had been his usual silent self until now, meaning I hadn’t even realized that he was in the room. He had an amused look in his gray eyes, so I looked down to see what the hell he was talking about, and started to laugh. Me, my white-blond hair, pale skin, and black outfit, and Nifty’s dark skin and white sweater—yeah, I could see where we’d make an irresistible target.
The tension broke, a little, and I could function again, control slipping back into place naturally.
“You try bringing a camera in here,” Nifty said, mock-scowling, “I give it a week, tops, before it goes snap, fizzle, pop.” Warding could only do so much; the moment current was free of either core or spell, it looked for an electrical stream to hook up with, the more powerful the better. That was why we’d trashed the original expensive coffeemaker for a simpler, if still wicked, brewmaster, and why there was only one phone and one computer, and both were down in Stosser’s office, where nobody did any workings by order of the Big Dogs.
“So what’re you doing?” I asked Nifty, leaning in a little more easily now.
“Girl had a bunch of scraps in her pocket, got ‘em in this morning, courtesy of one of Venec’s contacts. Looks like they were napkins or something, but there’s writing on them.”
I took a closer look. They were smudged and incomplete, but I recognized them. “Oh. She was collecting numbers.”
“Numbers?”
“Phone numbers.” I looked at him in astonishment. “Dear god, Nift, for a jock you sure are innocent….”
He stared down at the bits of paper, trying to see what I saw. “That’s a lot of numbers for a virgin to be collecting.”
I resisted the urge to pat him on the top of his buzz-cut head. “It’s not about calling them, it’s about getting them.” He looked at me and I raised my hands palm-up in a don’t-ask-me gesture. “Not my kind of game, but some do it. So our girlfriend was playing the game but not paying the pot.”
“Looks like.”
Quiet fell in the room as we both stared at the pieces of paper. Magic was all sorts of fun and splashy, but this was how we did most of the grunt work: Everyone put some elbow grease and some brain sweat into the mix, and we stirred it with a big stick until it smelled right. Another Venec quote.
Pietr put down the file he’d been reading and looked over the table at the napkins, too. “There are three different bars there, at least.”
Nifty looked up at him, then down again at the table. “How can you tell that?”
“Different paper. Look at the textures.”
“We supposed to go check each bar, see who she might have chatted up?” He sounded discouraged.
“We should,” Pietr said.
“Why?” I tilted my head and looked at my coworker, playing devil’s advocate. “You going to claim that she asked for it, somehow? That maybe she blew one of these guys off, before, and that’s why they attacked her? Doesn’t matter, to our job. We’re not here for the why, just the who and the how. We know who did it. One guy’s dead, the other’s in custody, and the cops will get the story out of him. All we have to do is make sure the ki-rin’s skewing was clean, or whatever the cop terminology is, and the case is closed. No need to poke around anything that happened before, right?”
“Right.” But he didn’t sound convinced.
I looked at Nifty, who looked back at me and shrugged. He didn’t know what was up with ghost-boy, either.
“It’s not about poking into her personal life or accusing her of being a tease, Bonnie. I just have a bad feeling about this. Like there’s something under the surface, and it’s going to bite us if we’re not careful.” Pietr was too mellow, as a rule, to be defensive, but he was skirting awfully close. Considering my own twitchiness, I wasn’t going to rag on him for it.
“You got precog?” Nifty asked, interested. If so, he’d been holding out on us. Precog wasn’t a common skill set, but it did happen, and would be amazingly useful in this job. My own kenning worked mostly on people I already knew and cared about, so it didn’t quite qualify.
“No. I don’t think so. I just …” He exhaled hard. “How would I know?”
That, I could tell him. “It feels bizarre, like a goose walking over your grave, only in your brain.”
Pietr considered that a moment, rubbing his fingers along the front of his shirt. “No. It’s more like an itch somewhere I can’t reach.”
“There’s probably something you’re seeing, but haven’t identified. Did you …” I hesitated. “Did you look at the gleaning?”
He shook his head, a little stiffly. “Venec said no.”
“So it has to be something you saw on the site, maybe, or talking to people?”
“Yeah, I guess. But what? And how the hell would I know, if it didn’t strike me enough to consciously remember?”
Good point. I had no answer.
“Did anyone say anything that gave you a wiggy feeling,” Nifty asked. “Was there anything in your report that you hesitated over, or rethought?”
I looked at Nifty in surprise. That sounded like something J would have asked me. Mr. Lawrence had better think about mentoring at some point, because he had the knack for it.
Pietr was considering the question. “I don’t know. No.” He shrugged. “This whole thing, it’s making me feel … urgh. Uncomfortable. Dirty.”
Huh. It might not have been something he saw, but something he was feeling. Like me. Of all the guys, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pietr reacted that way. Nick got it on an intellectual level, but all those years of being overlooked and near-invisible because of a quirk he had no control over had given Pietr a level of empathy you didn’t normally find in the average twentysomething male.
“Hey, guys.” Speak of the devil and he pops in. Nick wandered over to the coffee station and refilled his mug. Sharon had bought us all individual—and individualized—mugs a month ago, after one too many “wrong coffee” incidents. Nick’s was a bright blue, with a yellow happy face with a bullet in the forehead. It had an odd sort of fascination for me, in a way that my own—a beautifully appropriate black one with a colorful but dead parrot on the side—didn’t. “You hear the news?” he went on. “Girl’s not going to press charges.”
“What?”
Pietr’s yelp was outraged. I discovered that I wasn’t even slightly surprised by the revelation. Depressed, but not surprised. Like I’d said to J last night, it’s hard enough even today to come forward with sexual-assault charges. Having to explain how your attacker died? How about doing that