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I left him to it under Doc’s protective eyes, turning my attention to the big blond CSI tech crouched beside the corpse. He also looked like he’d had a few sleepless nights, although not quite as many as Dan. “Mays.”
“Hart,” he replied, his blue eyes showing both fatigue and a kind of painful sharpness. It seemed like pretty much everybody was running the knife’s edge these days. “Are we… violating some rules?”
“Not yet,” I answered.
Mays was a smart man, understanding exactly what I meant. “Tierney put time of death about nine hours ago, probable cause is the hole in his head, which seems to be a nine-mil, no exit wound.”
“So Ordo,” I said.
“I couldn’t possibly say,” Mays replied, the creases at the corners of his eyes giving away the almost certainly sardonic smile that was hidden by his mask.
“Right.” I snorted.
“Hart?” came my boss’s tenor.
“Yeah, Ward?”
“Mr. Landa’s work bag seems to be missing—something that his boss will be rather upset about,” Ward informed me.
“And his boss is…?”
“Some guy named Steve Marston, but Steve’s boss just happens to be everybody’s favorite mayoral candidate.”
I turned around at that. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Ward shook his head, his smirk concealed behind his gaiter-style mask.
“Well, isn’t that just a fascinating fucking coincidence.”
“Wait—” This was Dan, who had come up behind us from elsewhere in the apartment. “As in… Julian Vidal?” He didn’t sound happy about this. I didn’t blame him one bit.
“Yep,” I replied, standing up and walking over. “The same guy whose name shows up on some paperwork in Richard Bazan’s office. And whose sister seems to be missing a rather important magical artifact.”
“No shit,” Dan breathed, and I could almost see the gears turning in his head as he started to put the pieces together. Then his brow furrowed in a frown. “Fucking hell, Hart, you know that means they’re going to throw this in a goddamn chest freezer and chuck it in the James with a padlock, right?”
“Probably,” I agreed.
“And you’re not spitting mad about this because…?”
“BecauseIdon’t work there anymore,” I told him. “And they can’t stop us from talking to the dead people they’re not willing to investigate.”
Dan made a harumphing noise in the back of his throat. “Don’t rub it in, Hart.”
“Sorry.” I grimaced. I did feel bad for him, but with this many tumblers falling into place, we had to be closer than ever to picking the lock. I honestly didn’t give two shits if Dan was the one who made it open or I was—I just wantedsomeoneto get the damn thing unlocked so that the people responsible could answer for what they’d done.
And no, I hadn’t yet gone full mask-and-cape vigilante. I had no intention of adding homicide or murder to the list of things that I could probably get into trouble with the RPD for doing. I intended to hand whoever this was over to the RPD or the FBI, and I also fully intended to send copies of whatever evidence we dug up to the press, if that’s what it took to get this case out of the icebox and into the public fire.
Okay, that left a lot of questions—such as how the fuck I was going to turn the testimony of a bunch of dead people into actionable evidence that could be given to the RPD, the FBI, or the press, but one baby step at a time. First we had to know where to look, then we could worry about what we found there.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed, and I pulled it out to find a picture text from Mays. I opened, it then blinked rapidly at the image of the crime scene. I looked up, confused, to find that he wasn’t in the room anymore.
Another buzz. This photograph was of the outside of the house.
I frowned down at my phone.
The next one didn’t buzz because I already had the text thread open. It was of some slightly trampled grass, the off-white siding of the house evident in the background.
The last one was a faint muddy boot print on a sidewalk square.
