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“Now?”
He has a beard but I can make him out.
“It’s Trevor Moseley. What’s he got to do with this?”
“Look at his robes, Sherlock. The symbols match the pole.”
“I could barely see the pole.”
“Oh.”
He calls up Candy’s pole shots and puts one beside Moseley. He’s right. A lot of the badly cut and stitched symbols on his cheap robes match what’s on the pole.
“So, what do they mean?”
“I’m not done. Look at this. You’d have saved some time if you’d paid more attention to Traven.”
He pulls up the shot I took of Moseley’s half-crushed corpse. Zooms in on a tattoo half covered in blood. It matches one of the symbols on his robes and the pole.
“Is that what I think it is?”
Kasabian nods.
“Your boy Trevor’s last walk down the Yellow Brick Road was with an Angra cult. It was right there in front of you the whole time.”
“But I’ve only been going after tinhorn bad guys. I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for Angra worshippers.”
“Maybe you spooked them, running all over town pissing in everybody’s dream home.”
He puts the three photos side by side on the screen. The answer was in front of me the whole time. But it brings up another question. Why was a clockwork Trevor Moseley playing footsie with an Angra cult? Maybe the Trevor in the photo is real—I don’t know if an automaton can grow a beard—but now I’m surer than ever that the one that stepped in front of the bus wasn’t any more human than the ones we found with Atticus. It also explains why Samael didn’t see any sin sign on him. He wasn’t human, so technically nothing he did was sinful.
I light a Malediction.
“At least I’m getting through to someone. These gangsters are getting boring. By the way, don’t look for Trevor anymore. He’s not going to be in Hell.”
“Are you saying he’s in Heaven?”
“I’m saying he doesn’t have a soul.”
“Lucky duck.”
I puff the Malediction. Something bothers me.
“When did I send you the shot of Moseley?”
“You didn’t. I took it.”
“You hacked my phone?”
He looks up at me. His hellhound body whirs and clicks quietly when his head moves.
“You ask me to hack things and then you’re surprised when I do it? By the way, your idea of online security wouldn’t stop a mollusk with a TRS-80. If you ever want to get serious about protection, ask me.”
I want to be mad, but stealing the image did answer some important questions. And if I’m going to be pissing people off, maybe I ought to learn more about security.
“What’s going on with your swami gig? You ever track down that guy’s hoarder brother?”
“As a matter of fact I did. He’s with the misers and small-time grifters.”
