Mark Del Franco - Face Off

Sinclair chuckled. “Same difference.”

Laura shrugged. “I got the job done. That’s all that Terryn asks. Terryn said to rattle some cages. Mariel rattles cages.”

They passed through Logan Circle, a section of the city due north of the Guildhouse. “Isn’t this a local crime incident? Why didn’t he ask the Guild to send someone over?”

Laura pursed her lips. “He probably did and got nowhere. Internal politics.” InterSec’s local authority in D.C. was tenuous at best—based on the fact that at least one of the victims in the new case was not a U.S. citizen. Not quite the explicit intervention protocol that InterSec’s international mandate demanded, but Terryn didn’t like the D.C. police dragging their heels.

Traffic slowed as emergency lights flashed into view ahead. Sinclair double-parked near a paramedic van. They left the car, pausing to survey the scene. “I’ll tell you one thing for sure, Jono. After the Guild hears we were here, they’ll get involved. If there’s one thing Guildmaster Rhys doesn’t like, it’s being embarrassed in public.”

A gaping hole puckered the front of the building up on the U Street corridor of cafés and boutiques. Wrapped bars of soap and lotion bottles in bright yellow-and-orange packaging lay scattered on the ground amid fractured-building char and debris. Odors tweaked Laura’s nose as soon as she left the car. Heavy soot, burnt herbs, crisped wood, and a touch of C-4 explosive.

A plainclothes officer came toward her. “Agent Tate?”

She stepped under the crime-scene tape with Sinclair beside her. “Yes.”

“Mariel Tate?” he asked. She sensed annoyance from him, particularly directed at her. Someone wasn’t happy his case was being looked at by another agency.

She cocked her head, letting him see her eyes, which glittered with the preternatural light of an Old One, a fey who had lived in Faerie. “Are you expecting more than one Agent Tate?”

The look had the intended effect. The officer’s mouth closed as he paused. “Yes. Well, I mean no. We got word a few minutes ago that InterSec was sending someone.”

She paced across the front of the building, not looking at the officer as she perused the damage. Follow my lead, Jono, she sent. “They have. This is Officer Sinclair. He’s consulting with us.”

The policeman narrowed his eyes as he pulled out a memory. “Out of Anacostia?”

Anacostia was Sinclair’s last posting with D.C. SWAT, where he was when he met Laura on a case. The entire D.C. police force knew that Sinclair was the only survivor of his squad. Rather than keep him in Anacostia with a new crew, he was officially on leave, an administrative lie that Terryn had put in place.

“That’s right,” he said.

“Surprised you’d be working with . . .” The officer glanced at Mariel and stopped speaking.

Mariel tilted her head at him. “I didn’t get your name, officer.”

“Willis. Detective Willis,” he said.

She turned her attention back to the building. “Well, Willis Detective Willis, maybe we can skip the biographies, and you can fill us in.”

Her sarcasm had the desired effect. Willis’s body signature glowed with anger. Good, Laura thought. He’ll grouse about her, and word will get back to the Guild that much quicker.

“Bomb thrown through the window. Two bodies inside. The owner and a customer. An Inverni fairy and a normal.”

He said the word without a hint of embarrassment, a feeble attempt to get a rise out of her. “Normal” was a mild dig. It meant human, as opposed to the “abnormal” fey. The fey used the same word, only their meaning was intending to convey someone, a human in particular, was nothing special. Laura didn’t like either sense of the word, but she didn’t rise to his bait. “This is the eighth fey business to be attacked in the last two months, Detective. Dead bodies mean this one is an escalation, don’t you think?”

He frowned. “We’ve been looking at several leads.”

Laura gave the shattered storefront a significant look. “Just looking doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”

“You got something to say?” Willis asked.

Laura gave him a bored glance. The Mariel persona had a stop-in-your-tracks attractiveness that prompted people to resent her or fall over themselves helping her. She used both reactions to her advantage. Willis was falling into the former category.

Sinclair stepped between them with a feigned oblivious-ness. “Maybe we can take a look inside?”

Willis hesitated, shooting one more glare at Mariel before leading them through the remains of the door. A uniform theme ran through the store design and product packaging, bright colors in a brightly lit space. The small shop sold skin-care products and beauty aids. Laura didn’t recognize the brand. The owner probably marketed his own skin-care line. Lots of fey with herbal expertise did. The scented air was an unlikely mix of burnt chemicals, flower oils, and blood.

The apparent owner lay partially visible halfway down the room, crushed behind an overturned and destroyed counter. Against the wall on the opposite side of the shop, the mangled body of the customer slumped against the base of a shattered display case. Laura squatted to examine the line of scatter from the explosion. Pivoting on the ball of one foot, she peered toward the street, then back along the floor of the store.

“Any witnesses?” Sinclair asked.

“Not yet. We’re canvassing and checking for store-security footage,” said Willis.

Laura pointed at the floor. “I don’t see any glass on the floor near the window. All the scatter is outside. The bomb wasn’t thrown in. It was brought in and detonated inside.”

Willis slid his hands in his pockets. “I’m sure crime scene would have picked that up.”

Yeah, but you didn’t, Laura thought. She was getting a sense of why Terryn wanted InterSec to push the case along. If the officer in charge had such a bad attitude, she wasn’t surprised that the broader investigation into attacks against the fey wasn’t progressing much. She stared at the customer, the emotional part of her mind clicking off as she registered the extent of the damage. The bomb had savaged the lower half of his body until it was unrecognizable. She stepped around a fallen shelving unit for a closer look at the body.

“The scene hasn’t been cleared yet,” Willis said.

Ignoring him because she knew he was the type that hated being ignored, she crouched next to the body and slipped on latex gloves. With a professional detachment, she examined the destroyed body. Major damage. She pulled his torso away from the wall to peer behind him. Her senses picked up chemicals on his undamaged side that shouldn’t have been there if the bomb went off in front of him.

“You’re disrupting a crime scene,” Willis said.

“I think I know what I’m doing,” Laura said with enough inflection to imply Willis didn’t.

More anger clouded his body signature. “Is this my case or not?”

“Relax. We’re here to help,” Sinclair said.

Willis shoved his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

Sinclair gestured with resignation. “We didn’t ask to come. We’re all doing our jobs here.”

Laura released the body, letting it fall back against the wall. Resting her elbows on her thighs so that her hands dangled, she pressed her sensing ability against the man’s skin and found traces of industrial oils.

“This isn’t a customer. It’s the bomber,” she said.

Surprised, the officer stared at the dead man. “You can tell that by looking?”

She stood, removing the gloves. “Something like that. I’m picking up C-4 in the air, and this guy”—she gestured at the body—“has chemical traces on his skin that are in line with bomb-making materials. Given the body damage and the extreme coincidence of the chemicals, I’m comfortable with my assessment.”