“Then what is he?”
“A Mettalzauber, one of the metalworking fae. Which is a very broad category that contains very few members. Since I met him, I’ve done a lot of research on German fae out of sheer curiosity, but I’ve never found anything quite like him. I know he works metal because I’ve seen him do it. I don’t know if he’d have had the strength to rip someone’s head off, but I do know that there is no way that your consultant would know one way or another. Especially if she’s calling him a gremlin and acting like that is a real designation.”
“World War One?” asked Tony thoughtfully.
“You can look it up on the Internet,” I assured him. “By the Second World War, Disney was using them in cartoons.”
“Maybe that’s when he was born. Maybe he’s where the legends come from. I could see a German fae tampering with the enemy’s planes.”
“Zee is a lot older than World War One.”
“How do you know?”
It was a good question, and I didn’t have a proper answer for it. He’d never really told me how old he was.
“When he is angry,” I said slowly, “he swears in German. Not modern German, which I can mostly understand. I had an English prof who read us Beowulf in the original language—Zee sounds like that.”
“I thought Beowulf was written in an old version of English, not German.”
Here I was on firmer ground. History degrees aren’t entirely useless. “English and German both come from the same roots. The differences between medieval English and German are a lot smaller than the modern languages.”
Tony made an unhappy noise. “Damn it, Mercy. I have a brutal murder and the brass wants it solved yesterday. Especially as we have a suspect caught red-handed. Now you’re telling me that he didn’t do it and that our high-paid, expert consultant is lying to us or doesn’t know as much as she says she does. That O’Donnell was a murderer—though the fae will probably deny that any murders ever took place—but if I so much as ask about it, we’re going to have the Feds breathing down our necks because now this crime involves Fairyland. All this without one hard, cold piece of evidence.”
“Yes.”
He swore nastily. “The hell of it is that I believe you, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how I’m going to tell any of this to my boss—especially as I’m not really in charge of this case.”
There was a long silence on both our parts.
“You need to get him a lawyer,” he said. “He’s not talking, which is wise of him. But he needs to have a lawyer. Even if you are sure he is innocent, especially if he is innocent, he needs a very good lawyer.”
“All right,” I agreed. “I don’t suppose I could get in to get a look”—a sniff, actually—“at the crime scene?” Maybe I’d be able to find out something that modern science could not—like someone who’d been at one of the other murder sites.
He sighed. “Get a lawyer and ask him. I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you with that. Even if he gets you in, you’ll have to wait until our crime scene people are through with it. You’d do better to hire a private investigator, though, someone who knows how to look at a crime scene.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll find a lawyer.” Hiring a human investigator would either be a waste of money—or a death sentence for the investigator if he happened upon some secret or other that the Gray Lords didn’t want made public. Tony didn’t need to know that.
“Tony, make sure you are looking farther than the length of your nose for a killer. It wasn’t Zee.”
He sighed. “All right. All right. I’m not assigned to this case, but I’ll talk to some of the guys who are.”
We said our good-byes and I looked around for Kyle.
I found him standing in a small crowd a little ways away, far enough from the stage that their conversation didn’t interfere with the next performer’s music. Samuel and his instrument cases were in the center of the group.
I put my cell phone in my back pocket (a habit that has destroyed two phones so far) and tried to blank my face. It wouldn’t help with the werewolves, who would be able to smell my distress, but at least I wouldn’t have complete strangers stop and ask me what was wrong.
There was an earnest-looking young man wearing a tie-dyed shirt talking at Samuel, who was watching him with amusement apparent only to people who knew him very well.
“I haven’t ever heard that version of the last song you played,” the young man was saying. “That’s not the usual melody used with it. I wanted to find out where you heard it. You did an excellent job—except for the pronunciation of the third word in the first verse. This”—he said something that sounded vaguely Welsh—“is how you said it, but it should really be”—another unpronounceable word that sounded just like the first one he’d uttered. I may have grown up in a werewolf pack led by a Welshman, but English was the common language and neither the Marrok nor Samuel his son used Welsh often enough to give me an ear for it. “I just thought that since everything else was so well done, you should know.”
Samuel gave him a little bow and said about fifteen or twenty Welsh-sounding words.
The tie-dyed man frowned. “If that’s where you looked for pronunciation, it is no wonder you had a problem. Tolkien based his Elvish on Welsh and Finnish.”
“You understood what he said?” Adam asked.
“Oh, please. It was the inscription on the One Ring, you know, One Ring to Rule Them All…everyone knows that much.”
I stopped where I was, bemused despite the urgency of my need. A folk song nerd, who would have thought?
Samuel grinned. “Very good. I don’t speak any more Elvish than that, but I couldn’t resist playing with you a little. An old Welshman taught me the song. I’m Samuel Cornick, by the way. You are?”
“Tim Milanovich.”
“Very good to meet you, Tim. Are you performing later?”
“I’m doing a workshop with a friend.” He smiled shyly. “You might like to attend it: Celtic folk music. Two o’clock Sunday in the Community Center. You play very well, but if you want to make it in the music business, you need to organize your songs better, get a theme—like Celtic folk songs. Come to my class, and I’ll give you a few ideas.”
Samuel gave him a grave smile, though I knew the chances of Samuel “organizing” his music was about an icicle’s chance in Hell. But he lied, politely enough. “I’ll try to catch it. Thank you.”
Tim Milanovich shook Samuel’s hand and then wandered off, leaving only the werewolves and Kyle behind.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Samuel’s eyes focused on me. “What’s wrong, Mercy?”
Chapter 4
Kyle found a lawyer for me. He assured me that she was expensive, a pain in the neck, and the best criminal defense attorney this side of Seattle. She wasn’t happy to be defending a fae, but, Kyle told me, that wouldn’t affect her performance, only her price. She lived in Spokane, but she agreed that time was of the essence. By three that afternoon she was in Kennewick.
Once assured that Zee wasn’t talking to the police, she’d demanded to meet with me in Kyle’s office first, before she went to the police station. To hear the story from me, she told Kyle, before she spoke to Zee or the police.
Since it was a Saturday, Kyle’s efficient staff and the other two lawyers who worked with him were gone, and we had his luxurious office suite to ourselves.
Jean Ryan was a fifty-something woman who had kept her figure with hard work that left taut muscles beneath the light linen suit she wore. Her pale, pale blond hair could only have come from a salon, but the surprisingly soft blue eyes owed nothing to contact lenses.