Diana Rowland - Sins of the Demon

“Because you don’t know how to use it,” she retorted.

I hmmfed and plopped into a chair. It didn’t help that she was right.

“Okay, according to the report the victims were Robert Lamothe, Frank McCreary, Cherie and Keveen Bergeron, Peter Cerise, and Gracie Pazhel.” At my grandmother’s name she glanced up at me with a slight grimace before returning her attention to the screen. “Now I’ll run a check on them through my various people search functions.”

I felt a bit silly just watching her work, but Ryan and Zack watched her just as intently.

“Got something!” Jill crowed. “The married couple did indeed have a son. Gerald Bergeron. He lives in Baton Rouge at—” She grimaced. “Nope, scratch that. He died several years ago.” She continued to click the touchpad and finally exhaled. “Ah, but he had a kid. He’d be in his late twenties now.” She looked at me. “Could be?’

“It’s our only lead so far,” I said with an answering shrug. “Gimme everything you have on him.”

Her brow puckered in concentration as she worked the search. “Well, I have a name—Raymond Bergeron.” Her forehead puckered. “But no DL, no passport. No pics that I can find anywhere.” She clicked a few more keys. “Oh, here we go. Raymond was reported as a runaway when he was fourteen.”

The back of my neck prickled, and I sat up. “This sounds promising. Maybe he changed his name.”

“What about the parents?” Ryan asked. “What else do you have on them?”

“Lemme get back to that screen,” she said. “Plenty of stuff on them.” She fell silent, her eyes flicking across the screen. “The mom died about two years before Raymond ran away.” Jill winced. “Suicide. Shut herself in the garage, stuffed blankets under the doors, and left the car running.” Pursing her lips, she clicked through some more screens. “And the dad, Gerald Bergeron, passed away from a heart attack about five years ago.”

“Crap,” I muttered, frustrated. “This kid, Raymond, has to be our guy. I just know it. There are no pictures of him anywhere?”

“Not on any databases I have access to, but…” she trailed off and tilted her head, frowned. “Oh, wow.…”

“What?” I demanded, fighting an urge to rip the laptop away from her.

She exhaled. “Well, no pics of Raymond. But I do have a DL pic of his dad.” She turned the laptop toward me.

I stared. I couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d shown me a picture of the Pope. “There’s no way,” I said.

Jill shrugged. “It might not be,” she said. “This is a picture of the father, after all, so any similarity in appearance could be nothing more than coincidence.”

“I don’t understand,” Ryan said, frowning. “Who do you think it is?”

“Well,” I said, “unless this guy has a double running around, this is the father of one Officer Tracy Gordon.”

“He was in my house. In my basement.” I kicked at the carpet and scowled. “He took pictures of my summoning chamber!”

“The basement was clean,” Eilahn reassured me for about the tenth time. “He saw nothing.”

But surely he could sense the arcane residue from the diagrams. Would he be able to figure out the configuration? No, I decided after a moment’s thought. Without knowing the structure of the sigils it would be impossible. I’d been able to figure a lot of it out on my own, but it had been that one particular sigil that Rhyzkahl gave me that jump-started my whole thought process.

“Is he working today?” Ryan asked. “Maybe we can get into his house while he’s not there and see what we can find. Do you know where he lives?”

In answer I looked to Jill. She was the one doing the fancy computer work. “Hang on,” she said as she slid her finger on the touchpad. “Got his address—lives in Lakewood Heights subdivision. And according to the shift schedule, no, he’s not working,” she said, mouth tight. Ryan grimaced.

Yeah, that would have been way too easy. “Okay, so we don’t have shit for info on Raymond,” I said, “but what do we have on Tracy Gordon? He had to go through a background check to get hired.”

Jill bent her head to the screen again. “Good point.” She chewed her lower lip as she did her computery stuff. “Hmm. Well, according to this, Tracy Gordon is about two years older than Raymond, and ran away from a foster home in Colorado about a year before Raymond took off.”

“They met as runaways,” Ryan murmured. “Something must have happened to the real Tracy—died or was killed, and Raymond took over his identity.”

A terrible chill walked up my back. Is that why Ryan and Zack’s backgrounds are so perfect? Did they replace real people? I tasted bile in the back of my throat. Somehow I knew that was the truth. Nothing else made sense. Whoever exiled Ryan…did they kill the original Ryan and Zack? Or were their deaths fortuitous and convenient?

“It gets better, folks,” Jill said, frowning at the screen. I forced myself to pay attention. “Tracy went to a shelter for runaways when he was sixteen, got his GED, and was accepted to LSU—possibly because his standardized test scores were through the roof.”

“He’s definitely not stupid,” I said.

“Uh huh, and then he proceeded to graduate with a degree in chemistry, and went on to—ta-da—pharmacy school, though it looks like he dropped out after three years.” She cocked an eyebrow at me. “I think any doubt that he’s our man is gone gone gone.”

“And then for some reason he decided to become a cop,” Ryan murmured. “When did he get hired?”

Jill clicked some more keys. “Early summer of this year.”

I met Ryan’s eyes. “Right after we stopped the Symbol Man.”

“He read between the lines of the news reports and figured it out,” Ryan said, eyes narrowed. “Figured out you were a summoner. Maybe had you assessed to be sure.”

“And whatever his plan is,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose, “he needs a summoner or someone with a decent level of arcane ability.”

Jill looked up from her keyboard. “So, is he also behind these attempts to summon you to the demon realm?”

“No,” I said with a shake of my head. “Or rather, if so, certainly not directly. Whoever’s doing that is actually in the demon realm. A summoning is just that—a summons, or call. It’s not possible for someone to push or send me through from this end.” I glanced at Tessa and Eilahn for confirmation.

“Correct,” Eilahn answered as Tessa gave a nod. “The summoning attempts must be considered a completely separate threat.”

I sat down on the fainting couch and dropped my head back to stare up at the ceiling. “Right, because one threat simply isn’t enough for my boring ol’ life.” I sighed as another realization came to me. “Y’all do realize that there’s no way we can prove Tracy killed those people, right?”

The answering silence told me that if they hadn’t realized it before, they sure as hell did now. I lifted my head to look around at them. “Seriously. I doubt he conveniently left behind a To Do list that says, ‘Murder Kara’s enemies’ on it.”

“Maybe not,” Ryan said, “but he seems pretty hell-bent on fucking with you. There isn’t enough evidence to have you arrested right now, but what if that’s his next step?”

“But if I’m in jail, how can I go do whatever it is he wants me to do with whatever’s in that hot zone?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think that’s part of his plan. He has something else in mind.” Sitting up, I shot a hard look over at my aunt. “You need to stay tight within these wards, y’hear me? If he’s gunning for revenge for his grandparents, you’d be a target.”