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“I’m not ready to give up on the Oldham case,” I told him, earning a sigh. “And I know you can’t touch that, but do you remember the journal we found in the Miller-Duskevicz house?”
“You want me to dig it out of evidence, don’t you?” he asked, his tone resigned.
“Images of some of the pages would likely be enough, if you can’t get me the whole thing,” I answered. I’m not unwilling to compromise—and I knew it was a big ask. I wanted those lists of initials to see if I could link them to anybody tied to the Oldhams, or, hell, to the museum, for that matter.
Dan took another mouthful of beer, then set his glass back down. “You think that Oldham is tied to that Harrod debacle?”
Dan had been in the house when Ward had damn near blown up the entire underground ritual chamber. He’d been eliminating the nightmarish fucking horror that was an undead revenant warlock being kept alive-ish through ritual human sacrifice. Dan hadn’t been with the rest of us in the basement, but he’d seen the expressions on our faces when we came back upstairs.
And he’d seen the charred remains of the revenant.
“It’s… tied to the Harrod case,” I confirmed, then frowned when I saw that Dan was already shaking his head. “What?” I demanded.
“Ordo cases are dead in the water, Hart,” he replied.
“The fuck does that mean?”
Dan sighed, then drained his second beer. “It means,” he said, sounding tired, “I’ll try, but anything that smells of Ordo immediately gets the door slammed in its face.”
“I’m getting that, but why?” I asked. “If it’s not tied to Oldham, explicitly, why would he care if you look at old evidence from a completely different case?” I knew they were related, and Dan knew, but if Dan himself wasn’t investigating…
I’d assumed that the reason Villanova had asked me to drop the Oldham case had to do with the Oldhams’ political clout or their relative popularity among some of the more radical conservatives in local government. But ifeveryOrdo case was being closed or iced… There was no way that boded well.
The thing that worried me most was the Ordo’s hatred of Arcanids—they might be pro-magic, but they were basically the ‘magic for us, but not for you’ version of the Magic-Free Movement. And I could absolutely see the Ordo pushing an MFM agenda to get policy through that was anti-Arc and anti-Nid, pretending that they weren’t also totally conducting complicated rituals while wearing robes and masks in somebody’s creepy basement ritual chamber.
And if that was true, we were in so much fucking trouble.
I was hoping Dan would have some sort of insight that would help alleviate that fear, but no such fucking luck.
“I dunno,” was Dan’s clearly frustrated response. He took a bite of his pizza, chewing aggressively. “And it’s pissing me off.”
I took a drink, rolling the beer around in my mouth a little before swallowing. “No idea?”
“Oh, I’ve got ideas,” he replied. “But no goddamn proof.”
“Like what?” I wanted to know.
“The usual. Politics, money, somebody who doesn’t want the Ordo in our crosshairs because of either politics or money.”
“I don’t suppose you can be any more fucking specific about any of that?”
Dan shrugged, then nodded a thank-you when the server brought him a third IPA. “I’d guess more politics than money, if only because I was read the riot act when I went trying to find a link between the Oldhams and Ian Whitehead.”
“Who the fuck is Ian Whitehead?” I asked.
Dan’s fingers tapped against the side of his beer glass. “Another disappearing bullet case,” he finally answered.
“Fuck.”
“Iced. Pretty much immediately.”
“How the fuck can Villanova get away with icing both cases?” It was one thing to freeze a case where the husband was also in prison and could plausibly take the blame to the press—which Jeremiah Oldham was, although I very much doubted he was at all tied to his wife’s death—but it was a very different thing to forcibly freeze a totally new case.
Dan was shaking his head again, his thick hair falling into his eyes as he stared down at his pizza. “I dunno, Hart. I really don’t. But—” He took another drink, then went back to staring at his uneaten pizza. “Ian Whitehead was found dead in his front hall. Bullet hole, no bullet, no exit wound, no damage to the rest of the house. Same basics as Oldham and those Tranquil Brook murders from a few years ago.”
“Fuck,” I repeated. “Fuckety fuck, fuck.”
“Pretty much, yeah.” Dan took another bite of pizza.
