“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been trying to talk sense to him for an hour,” said Janey.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Murdock rested his hands on his hips. “I was thinking the best way to find out if Jark was telling the truth about the night he died was to ask Sekka.”
I joined them at the table. “You want to reanimate her.”
“Exactly,” he said.
I opened my sensing ability and looked at Sekka. “I think we’re too late for that. Her body essence is long gone.”
“Well, then, where is it? You keep saying the Dead are here because TirNaNog is gone. If that’s true, where are the dead solitaries going?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have an answer for that, Murdock. But I do know that there is no more essence in this body, and without essence, there is no reanimation.”
Janey crossed her arms. “I already told him Jark killed Sekka.”
That surprised me. “He’s an eyewitness to his own murder. How do we refute that he said she killed him?”
Janey gestured at Sekka’s body. “Physical evidence. Jark left here with a city-issued coverall as clothing. He didn’t want what he was wearing when he died.”
“I don’t blame him. It did go through the sewer,” I said.
Janey nodded. “But that didn’t wash out the DNA evidence in his clothes. I tested it. They were soaked in Sekka’s blood and his own.”
I pursed my lips. “You’re suggesting he couldn’t have Sekka’s blood on him if she killed him first.”
“Right.”
“But if she was near him when she was killed, her blood could have gotten on him if she was close enough.”
Janey nodded again. “True. But if she killed Jark first like he said she did, she’d have his blood on her. It’s virtually impossible to decapitate someone and not get blood on you. I checked everywhere. The only blood on Sekka is her own. The blood on Jark is hers and his.”
“He killed her first,” Murdock said.
“Which leaves the Hound,” I said.
Murdock stared down at Sekka. “You’re sure this won’t work?”
I shrugged and looked at the clock. “Yeah, but we can wait until dawn if you want.”
He nodded. “I’d like that.”
Janey and I exchanged a bewildered look. Murdock usually deferred matters of the fey world to me. He never disputed the things I told him. For someone who had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, Janey seemed a lot more understanding than I was. As the only fey person on staff at the OCME, Janey was used to humans making odd requests and ignoring her expertise.
“Okay. We’re here, so we might as well,” I said.
Another twenty minutes would decide the issue either way, and waiting was a small thing compared to contributing to Murdock’s anger and frustration. I didn’t see the need to get into an argument about it.
“You want to tell us what’s going on, Murdock?”
He spread his hands over the body. “Let’s see what happens. I need to see what happens.”
“Okay,” I said.
The clock ticked off the minutes as we waited in silence. Murdock stared at Sekka’s body like it was going to reveal something important to him. Maybe it was. He didn’t like the whole reanimation thing, didn’t like the questions about his faith it created. Yet now he wanted to make it happen.
Dawn arrived. Sekka lay still, no sign of movement. No sign of essence. Murdock continued staring as Janey checked her watch. “It would have happened by now,” she said.
Murdock had a strange look on his face, at once relieved and frustrated. A polite smile flickered on and off his face as he looked at Janey. “I’m sorry. I had to take the chance.”
Janey pulled a sheet over the body. “Don’t apologize. Part of my job is research. We answered a question.”
We didn’t speak as we left Janey to close up the lab. Murdock pulled out of the parking lot and into early-morning rush hour. We crept along the access road to the highway, waiting to cut over to the Southie side of the channel.
“Are you going to tell me what that was all about?” I asked.
“My father ordered the stand-down the night the Dead attacked the neighborhood meeting,” he said.
I nodded. “I thought so. I didn’t want to say anything because I thought you might think I was being cynical.”
“You are cynical. It gets worse. He as much as admitted he’s letting the Guild operate with no oversight,” he said.
“Why the change? He never likes the Guild to get the upper hand,” I said.
“They persuaded him that the issue was critical. The solitaries are hiding something the Guild wants. In exchange for allowing them in to get what they needed, the Guild offered to take care of the solitary leadership.”
I turned my head toward Murdock in disbelief. “Are you telling me your father—the police commissioner—took out contracts on fey people?”
Murdock grunted. “I asked the same thing. My father said the Guild assured him it meant the solitary leaders would be taken into legal custody. Then he said, of course, if someone dies in the attempt, it serves the same purpose. He smiled when he said it.”
“What does Sekka have to do with this?” I asked.
He glanced in the rearview mirror as he cut across the traffic lane. “She knows who killed her. We make an arrest, we expose the whole damn scheme.”
“You’ll expose your father, too,” I said.
“He’ll survive. That’s the point of their plan, Connor. It’s set up so that everyone can deny what’s going on.”
“So why bother?”
Murdock smiled. “Because it will stop. I don’t care what game the Guild is playing. I never have. I just want the killing stopped.”
“So, we’re back to square one, then. Sekka didn’t reanimate,” I said.
He pulled up in front of my apartment building. “Maybe not.” He gave me a sly smile. “So, who’s the Guildmaster sleeping with these days?”
I chuckled. “That’s funny. That’s very funny.”
I pulled the sending stone out of my pocket. The palm of my hand tingled as my body signature interacted with the ward spell on it. I held it near my mouth. “Hey, gorgeous. I have something for the Old Man.”
Her voice floated softly out of the stone. I hear you, handsome. I’ll let you know when a car’s ready.
28
As luck would have it—my luck anyway—my request to see Eagan fell on the same day as his annual Winter Solstice party. When Tibbet called back and told me Eagan thought the party would be a convenient cover for the meeting, I tried to beg off and arrange another time. Eagan wouldn’t hear of it.
It had been over three years since my last invitation to the party. Three years ago, I was a sought-after party ornament. I realized after I lost my abilities that’s what it really was all about: who could get the prize guest. I was riding high then, solving big-time cases, the go-to guy for advice, and the role model for a career on a rocket. Any host who snagged me with a party invite could bask in my coveted reflected glory. Receiving Eagan’s invitation to the Solstice party put me on the must-have list for everyone else’s events. Getting dropped from his list had the opposite effect. No one wanted to preen over last year’s favorites, and now I was not even that.
The cedar-lined driveway to the Guildmaster’s mansion was a postcard-perfect Yule scene. The car headlights reflected off the snowbanks to either side, and the soft crunch of tires rolling over the snow-softened pavement evoked a warm nostalgia for winters past. At the top of the drive, the cedars ended, opening to the wide vista of the front lawn, a meadowlike expanse of untrodden white velvet. A soft yellow glow lit the windows in the house with telltale flashes of blues, pinks, and yellows from flits dancing in the air.
Dozens of cars and a few limos lined the drive, where brownie security guards jockeyed them into place. They cleared the front as my car approached, and the driver stopped at the front steps. Someone opened the rear door for me, and I got out of Eagan’s official Guildhouse limo. Eagan wanted people to notice me arrive and had used his own car to send the message that he had invited me. Whatever his reasons, he wasn’t bothering with subtlety.