Laura Anne Gilman - PUPI 03 - Tricks of the Trade Read online

  “A what?” Distracted, I tried to place the word, and couldn’t.

  “Bippis. I think that’s how it’s pronounced, anyway. I recognize the arms.”

  I went to look at the body under the tarp, and saw what Pietr was talking about. The corpse looked almost human, if you could ignore the dark green skin that glittered like mica, but the arms were twice as thick around as mine, and all muscle, and extended like an orangutan’s down to its knees. And the head, which was hairless, and shaped like an anvil, almost. No wonder she’d covered it. Even in NYC, even out here where tourists didn’t wander, a corpse like that might draw notice.

  “Is the color normal, or did it react to the water?” Weird question, but when it came to the fatae, it paid to ask. Or, actually we were paid to ask.

  “Damned if I know.” He knelt down on the grass and touched the skin before I could remind him that we were supposed to wear gloves. Not because we might interfere with evidence – we collected data a little differently from Null CSIs – but because, well, look at what happened to poor Nifty. Some things bit even without teeth. Or even dead.

  “Skin’s cool, but dry. I’m thinking the color’s natural.” He rubbed his fingers together thoughtfully. “No flaking, either.”

  “You people freak me out.” That was our cop, looking a little queasy now, rather than bored.

  “Human floaters are better?”

  “At least they’re human,” she said, distaste evident in her voice.

  Ah, bigotry, alive and stupid in New York City. She should be glad it wasn’t summer, yet. I didn’t think this guy would smell too good, a few hours in the heat.

  “Somebody tied him up,” I said, taking Pietr’s lead and ignoring the cop, who returned the favor, wandering off to pointedly look away from whatever we were doing. I crouched beside him and pulled the tarp aside a little more without touching the corpse itself. “Hands and feet – they didn’t want him to be able to swim at all.”

  “Assuming the breed could even swim. He looks solid, all muscle... might have sunk to the bottom, anyway,” Pietr said. “Alive or dead when he went in?”

  “Oh, sure, give me the crap jobs.” I shook out my left hand, and mentally reached in to gather some current, selecting threads from the neat coil of multicolored, static-shivering magic inside my core, and drawing them up my rib cage, along my arm, and down into the fingers I’d just loosened.

  Like so many of the cantrips and preset spells we’d been working on in the office the past year, this one hadn’t actually been tested in the field yet. It should work, but should and did weren’t always reading from the same page, and we’d had a few go rather spectacularly sour when tried under real-life conditions.

  At least nobody was watching, or grading, this time.

  I selected a specific thread, a glittery glinting dark blue that was almost purple, and directed it down away from me, into the corpse’s chest. The thread slipped through the flesh like a needle, and I could feel it tunneling down into the lungs. I don’t care who you are or what you did, the sensation of current moving like that at your command never got old.

  Older spells, and modern traditionalists, used words to direct their current. Venec frowned on that: we weren’t here to entertain or impress – or intimidate – but to work. So I kept it simple. “Wet or dry?” I asked down the line of current, imbuing a sense of what I was looking for into the words, and waited. A scant second later, the current sent back its answer.

  “Water in the lungs,” I said. “Our boy was tossed in still breathing. Cause of death probably drowning, unless there’s something funky about the Bippis physiology?”

  “Not so far’s I know,” Pietr said. That meant absolutely nothing; there were more breeds within the Cosa Nostradamus than any human could ever encounter, or even read about, and most of ’em had at least a small community living here. New York City: melting pot of the world, and not all the ingredients were human.

  “So, it was caught, tied up, and tossed in the water... ” Pietr knelt again, opening his kit and taking out a brush and a small vial of something glittering. The brush was just a makeup brush, a very expensive one, and the glittery powder was fine-ground, electrically charged metal shavings. Metal conducted current the same way it did for electricity, allowing us to use the lightest possible touch and lowering the risk that we’d disturb evidence. He added a pinch of shavings to the brush, and swirled it over the top of the bindings, careful this time not to touch anything with his bare hands. His personal current could affect the shavings, even through the latex.

  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.”

  Nick shoved his hands into his jacket pocket and smirked. “I like gaudy. It takes a lot of money to be that tasteless.”

  The house they were looking at wasn’t actually tasteless, although it leaned that way: a gleaming white, pseudo-Federalist structure on a lot not much larger than the house itself. There was enough frontage, barely, to allow for an imposing driveway from the street, and enough shrubbery to suggest privacy without hiding the grandeur of the house from the peasants driving by. Peasants were, clearly, supposed to be aware of their own insignificance in the face of such a house.

  Sharon said as much, as they walked up the driveway, each of them carrying their kit in their off-hand, so as not to bump against each other. Nothing in the kits was terribly unstable, but some of their equipment was best neither shaken nor stirred.

  “In this neighborhood, any peasants would get kneecapped by the private security force,” Nick said, not really joking. They had noted the discreet but blunt signs when they walked down the street: nonresidents were not welcome here, unless invited.

  The double doors were white, with lions’-head knockers in brass, and a simple buzzer underneath.

  Sharon touched the buzzer, and they waited.

  “Yes?”

  The woman who opened the door for them wasn’t the owner – she was dressed in a neat cream pantsuit that had the feel of a uniform, and had an air to her that was pride but not ownership.

  Nick took the lead. Women of a certain age and position, Venec said, would respond more automatically to a man than a younger woman, especially a good-looking man. You used whatever tools you were given. “We’re from PUPI. Mr. Wells is expecting us.”

  “Oh.” The woman wasn’t flustered, just checking them out, her gaze taking in the details of Sharon’s neat, dark blue suit and pumps, and Nick’s more casual slacks and loafers. He was wearing a leather jacket, but it was quality enough to pass muster, apparently, because the housekeeper nodded once, and stepped back to let them in.

  “Mr. Wells is in the sunroom,” she said. “Please follow me.”

  They both took in the details, not obviously scanning their surroundings. The foyer was larger than either of their apartments, with marble floors and a carpet that was probably worth more than they earned in a year.

  “Ouch,” Nick said softly, and Sharon’s gaze followed his as the housekeeper led them down the wide hallway. The left-hand side of the hallway boasted only closed doors, but to the right there were archways opening to a great room with soaring ceilings and expensive furniture – that had been torn apart. Fabric was shredded, as though huge claws had used it as a scratching post, and cabinet doors were ripped off their hinges, antique-looking carpets shoved in a crumpled pile against the walls.

  “I don’t think this was a Retriever,” Nick said softly.

  “No?”

  “It just doesn’t feel right. Retrievers are pros. They don’t leave behind any trace, much less damage.”

  Sharon nodded. “Although, it could just have been the owner’s temper tantrum after being robbed.”

  “You really think one guy could get that mad?”

  Sharon merely looked at Nick, one delicate eyebrow raised. Anger could make even the calmest, most sedate people do things you wouldn’t expect; they both knew that. And they had no idea who – or what – their client might be.

  “In here, please,” the housekeeper said, pushing open an interior door, and ushering them inside.

  The sunroom was a surprisingly cozy place after the grandeur of the rest of the house, filled with orchids and small potted trees placed to catch the appropriate light coming in through oversize windows, and a series of comfortable-looking chairs upholstered in dark gray fabric. Each chair had a small table next to it, p
erfect for a newspaper or drink.

  Nothing in this room appeared to have been disturbed, not even a trace of dirt on the parquet floor where a plant might have been knocked over.

  The woman stopped the moment they entered the room. “Mr. Wells.”

  It was less an introduction than an announcement, the way a museum docent might say “The Mona Lisa.” The client was – to all appearances – an ordinary sixty-something-year-old male. Tall and well built, with skin just naturally dark enough to avoid assumptions of WASPy wealth but not so much that an observer assumed any particular ethnicity. His head was clean-shaven, his face lined and slightly creased around the eyes and mouth. His clothing was rich-man’s casual – a pair of expensive twill slacks, and a black pullover sweater that obviously was cashmere, and not a cheap single-ply weave, either.

  “These are the – ”

  “The investigators I hired.” His voice was cultured, almost lazy, with an oddly clipped drawl. “Yes. Thank you, Joyce. You may go now. Please remind the staff not to touch anything in the affected rooms.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Please,” the client said, waving to a grouping of cloth-upholstered chairs off to the side of the room. “Be seated.”

  They sat. The chairs weren’t as comfortable as they looked.

  “You had a break-in last night.” Nick took the lead without checking with Sharon, continuing how they had begun with the housekeeper. It was fifty-fifty how the client would respond, but Sharon’s truth-sensing would be a strength here, and it was easier to use it when she could focus her attention entirely on the subject, without worrying about how to phrase the questions. And Nick, while not diplomatic, could do a solid guy-to-guy thing. So Sharon sat and watched, and listened.

  “Yes. It happened early this morning, actually. Around 3:00 a.m. We heard the noise.”

  “We?” They knew already, from the original report, but the more the client talked, the more detail they could pick up, even if the client didn’t think it was important.