Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

Dante and I decided to stop by a Starbucks on the way back to the office. It was nearly 12:30 and I asked him to text Sophia that we’d be back for lunch by 1:00, so leave us some food.

“What are you going to do about the cat?” Dante asked, as we approached the office.

“I’m going to see if he can get along with Jangles,” I said. I glanced in the review mirror. Murdoch was resting quietly in his carrier. He seemed perfectly content.

“I mean, are you going to take him back to the office until the end of the day?” Dante sucked on his straw. He liked caffeine almost as much as I did.

“Yeah, I guess. It’s half an hour to my house and then half an hour back. We can put him in the supply room and put his litter box in there with him. Angela gave me some spare litter and food, so he’ll be all right until it’s time to leave for the day.

“What do you think about the mandrake root? You think somebody stole it?”

I thought for a moment. “I think so, but we can’t take anything for granted. Maybe…” I told him about the letters I found. “Do you think Angela might have found out and decided to pay her sister back for betraying her? Does she seem capable of murder?”

Dante slipped out of the car and pulled out the litter box, litter, and food. “I’ll come back for everything else.” As I took hold of Murdoch’s carrier and we headed into the building, he added, “I’m not sure. Angela seems to have everything under control, including her emotions, but I feel that she’s more devastated than she acts. Some people put on a big show of losing a loved one when they’re the ones behind it, but…I don’t know. That rigid control feels ready to slip, and I truly think when it does, she’s going to break down. I don’t think she’s lying.”

We came off the elevator and I opened the door to the office, holding it for Dante, then followed him in. Sophia looked up, saw the carrier, and snorted.

“Client or guest?” she asked.

“Apparently, he’s going to be my houseguest. We’ll see if it becomes permanent. Can you set up the litter box and some food and water in the supply room until the end of the day? And make certain nobody opens the door and lets him out.” I handed her the carrier.

“Sure. What’s his name?”

“Murdoch.”

She turned to Dante. “Follow me. I assume those are his supplies?”

“That they are,” Dante said, following her down the hall.

Orik passed them, blinking as he saw the carrier. The cat let out a mew and he stopped to peek in. “Hey there. My wife would tell me to say hi to you,” he said, then when he saw me, he hurried toward me, holding out a file. “Here,” he said. “I found Benny some work.

I glanced at the file. “The Albertson case? What on earth can Benny do for you on that?”

Careena Albertson, a local bear shifter, was trying to find out who was stealing her chickens. We suspected her neighbor’s rottweiler, but she was convinced it had to be another neighbor who was a kitsune—a fox shifter. She was a human with a big grudge against shifters, but apparently she wasn’t too proud to hire a half-demon to investigate the case for her.

“I’m paying him to stake out the fox the next couple nights. Which means he’ll most likely be sitting outside in the cold without anything to do, but I’m paying him a hundred-fifty a night, and he was more than willing to agree. I have to give the little perv this much: when he agrees to do a job, he does it. I’ve never met a goblin with a better work ethic.” He snorted, then shrugged. “I figured you’d be okay with the idea.”

“You’re right. It’s a perfect job for him. And it will keep him in food for a while. Say, while I have you here…” I fluttered my eyelashes.

“What do you want?” he asked, giving me a look that said he was onto me.

I winked. “What makes you think I want anything? But…yeah. What are you doing Saturday?”

“Saturday? I was going shopping at the farmer’s market over in Redmond, and then I think I was supposed to spend the afternoon at Home Depot. I’m going to renovate the bathroom.” He sounded as thrilled over the idea as I would have been.”

“You want to play hooky?”

“Sure, what do you have in mind?” He sounded eager to get out of the shopping expedition.

“Penn is moving into my house, and we could use muscle to help with the boxes and furniture. But if you’re busy?—”

Orik sat down in one of the chairs near Sophia’s desk. “So, my choices are traipsing around a megastore, looking for plumbing supplies, or carrying boxes for my boss’s best friend? I can get out of shopping,” he said. “The bathroom can wait a week.”

“And you’re happy to help out,” I said, laughing.

“Hey, anything to get me out of going shopping.” He glanced at his watch. “What time do you want me over at your place? Or Penn’s?”

“Ten, at Penn’s. Dante will be there too.” I handed him back the file. “Okay, sign off on Benny’s expenses, and tell Sophia I approved them. We need to meet in the staff room, now that Dante and I’ve looked at Letty Hargrove’s house.”

“You have any ideas on the case yet?” Orik asked.

“We have a lot more questions now than when we went there. Anyway, gather everyone and meet me in the conference room in ten minutes, please.” I headed to my office. As I passed the storeroom, I heard Dante and Sophia laughing and playing with Murdoch.

Ten minutes later, we were in the conference room, briefing the others on what we had discovered. “Sophia, I need you to set up an appointment at the school for me. I need to examine Letty’s office. I suppose you can tell them I’ve been asked by her sister to pick up her effects. I need to look through her office, so do what you can to get me in there.”

“Will do,” Sophia said. “I know someone in the main admin office there. She might be able to help.

“Good. Carson, we need you to hack into her computers so we can see what she has on there. Once you break through her password, then do an inventory and find out what she has in her records.”

“Can do. Anything else?”

“I don’t think so, not right now.” I glanced at Dante. “We have a number of books that we took from her house on demonology. Check on who wrote them and see if you can find out if there was a connection between Letty and the authors. They don’t look like anything you can buy from a bookstore.” I paused. “By the way, any luck on the gargoyle?”

“Yes!” Orik perked up. “I forgot to tell you when you came in. I caught it this morning while you were out. The little critter is on its way to being relocated into the wilds. It almost bit me, but I managed to net it, and it’s now safely out of the barn. Chelsey wrote us a big fat check, which I turned into Sophia.”

Chelsey, the puma shifter whose barn had become a refuge for the gargoyle, had hired us more than once, and she always added a generous tip to her checks. She was a successful artist who never shirked payment. I was always happy to take her cases.

“Well, finish the paperwork and file the report in the closed cases.” I glanced at Carson. “Any news on the Megani situation?”

“I’m afraid my news isn’t as good as Orik’s. I think somebody tipped off the members of Tortious, because they found Sylvie’s body this morning.” He hung his head. “She’d been tortured, assaulted, and shot before they dumped her. Destiny Kan let me know.”

Destiny was one of our liaisons from the Seattle PD, and we worked closely with her when circumstances warranted it. They had been trying to break into Tortious for years, but they never managed to make an inroad. So, they worked with us, and with a couple other groups around the area, to make inroads into stopping the white slavers.

Carson tossed a file folder on the table. “Pictures of the body, for our files, in case we ever need them for some reason. It’s bad.” He stared at the table, a grim look on his face. “She was so young…”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, quietly picking up the folder. I didn’t want to look, but I owned Shadow Blade Investigations, and any case that came across my desk was ultimately my responsibility. I quickly glanced through the pictures, my stomach tightening. “Did the cops notify her parents?”

He nodded. “Yeah. They know. I figure we should contact them, as well, given they knew we were working on the case.”

“Yes, we should. Sophia, find out when the funeral is and send a tasteful arrangement of flowers from the firm. We all sign the card before it goes out, as well.”

Sophia jotted down the instructions. “Will do,” she said.

I slowly replaced the file on the table. “Scan and file them. We should ask if anyone has tried to contact her spirit. We might be able to find out something that way.” I caught Sophia’s eye. “You’re good at diplomacy, where I am not. Do what you can to find out the info.”

She nodded, adding it to her list.

“Okay, what about the potential cases you called back this morning? Did you get hold of them?”

Sophia pulled out the appointment book. We used both physical and digital planners so we didn’t lose anything if the power went out or something else happened. “I’ve scheduled an appointment with the Shifter Community Action Council representative for tomorrow at nine-thirty. The woman wanting us to investigate her boyfriend’s past is coming in at 10:30. Her name is Rowan Leaf, and I warn you, she sounds like a space cadet.”

“Lovely,” I said. We had our fair share of nutcases, and then we also had the people who thought every creak meant there was a ghost in the house. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, the man who wants us to investigate a theft? I got hold of him and he refused to tell me anything, but he insisted on making an appointment. He’s coming at 11:15, and his name is Alf Lindstrom.” She frowned. “I don’t like the feeling I get when I talk to him. Watch him.”

I nodded. We paid attention to Sophia’s premonitions. “We could call him back and tell him we’re overbooked, if you think it wise.”

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No…but…just don’t jump in too fast.”

“That we will,” I said. “See if you can get me into the school tomorrow. Ask Angela to verify that I’m there at her bequest, in case they call her to confirm my story. With that, let’s get busy. Dante, why don’t you call Destiny and talk to her about Sylvie, and I guess I’ll call her parents. I’m not looking forward to this.”

As we gathered our things and headed to our offices, I thought about the call ahead. I’d had to make too many of them, over the years. But when I was fourteen, I was the one on the receiving end of the call, and that memory had never left me.

The year was 1998, and it was January. I had just turned fourteen, and for my birthday my mother had brought home leftover cake from the restaurant she worked at. She had bought me a bracelet—a real splurge, even though it was only a silver bangle with a heart on it.

“You’re my everything,” she said when she gave it to me. “You’re my heart, Kyann. I’d do anything for you.”

I’d put on the bracelet, and I never took it off.

The streets were cold and rainy, and we lived in a rundown apartment over a diner on First Avenue in the Belltown District. It was a three-room apartment—a main living area, a bathroom, and a tiny kitchenette. The wallpaper was peeling, we constantly battled cockroaches and rats, and we didn’t dare leave any food out on the counter. I kept everything in the fridge, scolding my mother every time she forgot to put boxes of crackers and bags of chips away.

I managed to make it to school, though how I got there escaped me—but every afternoon I’d come home to find her at one of the three jobs she held just to pay rent. I’d change clothes, do my homework, then go down to the restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher from 6:00 PM till midnight. I was paid off the books because I wasn’t supposed to work more than three hours a day during the school week, and I was pulling a six-hour shift every day. But we needed the money, and I sucked it up and dealt with it.

My mother worked three jobs—one as a waitress at Jugs, a breast-forward restaurant with a uniform that accentuated every curve the waitresses had. She worked there every afternoon from noon till four. Then she hustled to her second job, tending bar at a dive known as Right Hand Tony’s, and she worked there from six till midnight. At midnight, she went to work at an underground gambling parlor, selling drinks and cigarettes. She worked till two in the morning, then came home and crashed until it was time to wake up and do it all again. Once in awhile, she had a date. She’d meet her boyfriends after work, and come home near morning.

Between the two of us, we managed to pay the rent, pay the bills, and put money into savings for my college education. That is, until she met Jace.

Even though my mother was an independent woman, she had a weakness for bad boys. Her boyfriends were all temporary, and she never let them come home with her. She met them at their place, or she waited for them on the corner and they’d pick her up in their car. I tried to get her to start dating nice men, but all she’d say is, “All men are the same below the surface. I don’t think I could live in suburbs…and I don’t have the education for anything better.”

I’d try to convince her to go back to school, but she always shook her head and said it was too late for her, and we were going to focus on me and my future.

Anyway, when she first mentioned Jace, I got a bad feeling and warned her, but she waved me off. “I know he’s bad news, honey…but there’s something about him that I can’t ignore.”

“Like my father?” Erin—my mother—had told me over and over that my father had mesmerized her, seduced her, and then left the moment he found out she was pregnant.

“He’s not a demon, so no. But…he’s…charming. He treats me like a lady,” she said.

I couldn’t argue her out of it. A few weeks after she started dating him, I woke up one morning to find she hadn’t come home. I waited for her as long as I could—we didn’t have cell phones at that point—and then, when I couldn’t wait any longer, I scribbled a note telling her I was headed to school, and to leave a message when she came in.

By evening, when she still wasn’t home, I called the cops and asked if there had been any accidents. Then I went to her first job, but she’d missed her shift that day, and none of her friends had heard from her. She wasn’t at the bar, either. Finally, I went to the club and asked her boss if she’d called in. He told me no, and then handed me a fifty, as though that would calm me down.

The next morning at six am, the cops were at my door.

I stared at them, still tired, but I knew. “My mother’s dead, isn’t she?”

The older officer—a woman probably in her forties—gave me a sad smile. “You know?”

“I’m guessing. She wasn’t home all day yesterday or last night. She didn’t show up at any of her jobs, either. She went out with this sketchy guy, and I haven’t heard from her since then.”

They found her down by the docks. She’d been brutally murdered, her head bashed in. They tried to soften the details, but I could feel the brutality of the attack in their words. By the time they finished, I was numb.

“Do you have family you want us to contact?” the second officer asked.

I shook my head. “I’ll get in touch with them.” I was lying. We had no family. I had no clue who my grandparents were, who my father was, or anybody else that might be a blood relative. She’d barely ever said anything about her own roots, let alone my father’s.

“We’ll check back to make certain you’re okay,” the older woman said. “I’m so sorry, Kyann. We’ll do everything we can to find out who did this.”

But I knew who it was. I knew it was Jace. As the cops left, I shut the door. I got dressed and I waited until the landlord was awake. I asked him if he’d like to buy the furniture we had, and that I’d be moving at the end of the week. I tried to play on his sympathy to get back a prorated part of the rent for the month, and he caved.

As he paid me the rest of the rent and the cash for the contents of the apartment, I added up how much money I’d have from with what we had in savings. Then, I sorted through everything that we had, taking the few pictures that my mother kept, and the important documents, and I went to a safety deposit company and rented a small box and stored everything important in there, including all the cash I could get my hands on.

The next day I carried all my mother’s clothes, along with a few of my own, to a thrift shop and managed to sell them for another small sum. I went back to my mother’s places where she worked and they gave me her last paychecks, made out to me.

That money went in with the rest.

Finally, I invested in a switchblade, and at the end of the week, I headed out to live on the streets. I had one plan in mind: I’d find Jace myself, and I’d make him pay.