The dust settled, and Pietr cocked his head, studying the results. His current was so light, so subtle, I couldn’t even see a hint of it in the air over the bonds. Impressive, as always. I was good at gleaning, my memory capturing details I didn’t even notice I’d seen, but when it came to this kind of physical collection, Pietr had me beat.
I waited, shivering a little as the wind off the river reached through my jacket, while Pietr focused on the spell’s results. The shavings carried the spell into the dead body’s tissue, showing him the muscles that had last been used, and how much energy they had burned. “Yeah, it struggled. Another ten minutes, maybe, and the ropes would have given way.” They were thick twine, but definitely frayed, I had noticed that. On a human, they would have been enough to immobilize someone indefinitely. “But that kind of struggling would have used oxygen, and sped up the drowning. Whoever tossed it in knew what they were doing.”
I exhaled heavily, feeling the air leave my lungs, thinking about what was being said – and what wasn’t. “Which probably means Cosa, not just some scared humans looking to clean the world of a freak.” We’d been having trouble in the city – actually, we’d been having Troubles: humans – Talent and Null – bashing up against the fatae, and everyone coming out the worse for it. During the ki-rin “he said, she said” disaster, it had looked like the entire city was going to combust, but when we’d been able to prove that both humans and fatae had been involved, the flames died down to coals again.
Died down, but hadn’t gone out. I still had nightmares, sometimes, about the sound of the ki-rin’s voice when it admitted its guilt... regret and remorse that came too late, after four lives were ruined, one fatally.
I’d always been a sunny-side-up girl, but the world was a very gloomy place, some days.
“Maybe. Probably, yeah.”
“Joy.” And trying to get answers out of the fatae community was always such a pleasant experience. Even when they were human-friendly, they didn’t like to tell us anything. Except when they were telling us things we didn’t want to know, or trying to talk us into something to their benefit, of course.
“All in a day’s work,” Pietr said, putting away the dust and brush, and locking his case again. There were still things to be done, but you didn’t leave your kit open, ever.
“You gonna take the body, or not?” the cop asked, coming back from her wander of the perimeter to stand over my shoulder, getting way too close inside my personal space.
“You rush your lab techs this much?” I snapped, annoyed at being interrupted.
The cop showed a wide, toothy, happy-to-annoy-you grin. “Yep.”
“Great. Try to rush me again, and I’ll hotfoot you in ways that won’t wear off for a week.” She could try to match me, but we both knew she’d lose. I might not be a natural powerhouse the way some of my pack mates were, but you didn’t get to be a pup without picking up some serious skills, and I’d a year’s worth of training under my belt now.
She backed off.
I looked over at Pietr, who was still studying the body. “You want to do the gleaning?” It was normally my job, but there didn’t seem to be anything particularly difficult, and the Big Dogs like everyone to keep at least their pinkie in with that particular spell.
“Not really. But I will.”
Gleaning is our version of videography: we collect all the visual evidence, and replay it, back in the office, into a three-dimensional display. We tried, at first, to glean the emotional record, since current leaves trace, and a strong Talent can usually pick up strong emotions after the fact. Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that when you’re talking about the sort of violence we tend to uncover, that’s not always the smartest idea. We’d been caught up in it, and our first case had almost been our final one. So Venec laid down the law: physical evidence only.
While Pietr went into fugue-state to glean, I wandered down to the East River, or as close as I could get to it, standing on a man-made concrete pier. It looked like... water. Bluish-gray, little ebbs and currents swirling the surface, underneath... Who the hell knew what was underneath. The rivers, Hudson and East, were a hell of a lot cleaner than they had been once upon a time, but a tidal river could hide anything... at least until it pushed it to shore.
I stared out across the surface, anyway, looking. They’d pulled the body out here – I saw a little yellow flag fluttering in the breeze – but odds were it had gone into the river somewhere uptown and floated down. All the landing site would tell me was what size shoe the finders had worn, and how far they’d dragged him before he’d been wrapped up in official sailcloth and brought up here, in direct contradiction of every rule of Standard Operating Procedure the NYPD was supposed to follow. I looked, anyway. You never knew where or when or how something useful might turn up.
In this instance, though, I didn’t even find a candy wrapper that looked suspicious, just a lot of gunky mud I had to knock off my shoes when I got back up on the pier. I guess I understood why they’d moved the body, but it still pissed me off. I’d bet the NYPD hadn’t even bothered to do a basic sweep of the area before calling us in – something this obviously Cosa business, their protective filters snapped up and they didn’t see anything, didn’t know anything, didn’t have to write up anything.
I turned back to stare at the water again. I would do a deeper read, but it didn’t matter: between the fatae that lived in the local rivers and the ocean waters that fed it, and the power plant upriver, and the general ambient noise of however many thousands of Talent in this area on a daily basis, there was enough magical white noise to cover a multitude of clues, and not even Venec’s nose was good enough to sniff anything out of this.
I gave up, and went back to the body.
“I got it,” Pietr said, standing up and wincing as his knees cracked loud enough for me to hear.
“You’re getting old, old man.”
“It’s not the years, it’s the damned mileage,” he said, and he wasn’t joking. We were in our twenties, everyone except the Big Dogs and Lou, but some days I woke up feeling like the tail end of a forty-year-old. Current took it out of you. What we were doing, what we were seeing... that took it out of you, too.
I looked at the tarp. Someone had taken it out of our vic, too.
You didn’t end up bound-and-drowned by accident. Someone had killed this fatae, for whatever reason. We didn’t know who it was, if it left a family, if it had been murdered for cause or on a lark, or if there were other bodies waiting to be found, or if the killing was a one-off or if they would strike again. Hell, we didn’t even know the victim’s gender, or how to check.
I’d be carrying all those unknowns with me tonight when I tried to get to sleep, and keeping me company in my dreams, and when I woke up again, hoping against hope we’d be able to find even one answer... and knowing we might not.
Sometimes, this job sucked large, pointed rocks.
Pietr pulled the tarp back over the body and nodded to the cop that we were done. They’d cart the body off to the city morgue, to the little cold room in the back that nobody talked about, and stash it there until we figured out who the next of kin were. “You think Shar and Nick are having more fun?”
I glared up at the clear blue sky. “They’d better be.”
Sharon’s report later was the usual tersely professional recounting, but no, they hadn’t been having more fun.
Mass transit didn’t reach into their destination, so they had to walk from the bus stop, pausing to check their directions several times.
“Huh. Nice.”
Sharon let out a sniff that wasn’t entirely disagreement. “Gaudy.”