Laura Gilman - Pack of Lies

“So what’re you doing?” I asked Nifty, leaning in a little more easily now.

“Girl had a bunch of scraps in her pocket, got ‘em in this morning, courtesy of one of Venec’s contacts. Looks like they were napkins or something, but there’s writing on them.”

I took a closer look. They were smudged and incomplete, but I recognized them. “Oh. She was collecting numbers.”

“Numbers?”

“Phone numbers.” I looked at him in astonishment. “Dear god, Nift, for a jock you sure are innocent….”

He stared down at the bits of paper, trying to see what I saw. “That’s a lot of numbers for a virgin to be collecting.”

I resisted the urge to pat him on the top of his buzz-cut head. “It’s not about calling them, it’s about getting them.” He looked at me and I raised my hands palm-up in a don’t-ask-me gesture. “Not my kind of game, but some do it. So our girlfriend was playing the game but not paying the pot.”

“Looks like.”

Quiet fell in the room as we both stared at the pieces of paper. Magic was all sorts of fun and splashy, but this was how we did most of the grunt work: Everyone put some elbow grease and some brain sweat into the mix, and we stirred it with a big stick until it smelled right. Another Venec quote.

Pietr put down the file he’d been reading and looked over the table at the napkins, too. “There are three different bars there, at least.”

Nifty looked up at him, then down again at the table. “How can you tell that?”

“Different paper. Look at the textures.”

“We supposed to go check each bar, see who she might have chatted up?” He sounded discouraged.

“We should,” Pietr said.

“Why?” I tilted my head and looked at my coworker, playing devil’s advocate. “You going to claim that she asked for it, somehow? That maybe she blew one of these guys off, before, and that’s why they attacked her? Doesn’t matter, to our job. We’re not here for the why, just the who and the how. We know who did it. One guy’s dead, the other’s in custody, and the cops will get the story out of him. All we have to do is make sure the ki-rin’s skewing was clean, or whatever the cop terminology is, and the case is closed. No need to poke around anything that happened before, right?”

“Right.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

I looked at Nifty, who looked back at me and shrugged. He didn’t know what was up with ghost-boy, either.

“It’s not about poking into her personal life or accusing her of being a tease, Bonnie. I just have a bad feeling about this. Like there’s something under the surface, and it’s going to bite us if we’re not careful.” Pietr was too mellow, as a rule, to be defensive, but he was skirting awfully close. Considering my own twitchiness, I wasn’t going to rag on him for it.

“You got precog?” Nifty asked, interested. If so, he’d been holding out on us. Precog wasn’t a common skill set, but it did happen, and would be amazingly useful in this job. My own kenning worked mostly on people I already knew and cared about, so it didn’t quite qualify.

“No. I don’t think so. I just …” He exhaled hard. “How would I know?”

That, I could tell him. “It feels bizarre, like a goose walking over your grave, only in your brain.”

Pietr considered that a moment, rubbing his fingers along the front of his shirt. “No. It’s more like an itch somewhere I can’t reach.”

“There’s probably something you’re seeing, but haven’t identified. Did you …” I hesitated. “Did you look at the gleaning?”

He shook his head, a little stiffly. “Venec said no.”

“So it has to be something you saw on the site, maybe, or talking to people?”

“Yeah, I guess. But what? And how the hell would I know, if it didn’t strike me enough to consciously remember?”

Good point. I had no answer.

“Did anyone say anything that gave you a wiggy feeling,” Nifty asked. “Was there anything in your report that you hesitated over, or rethought?”

I looked at Nifty in surprise. That sounded like something J would have asked me. Mr. Lawrence had better think about mentoring at some point, because he had the knack for it.

Pietr was considering the question. “I don’t know. No.” He shrugged. “This whole thing, it’s making me feel … urgh. Uncomfortable. Dirty.”

Huh. It might not have been something he saw, but something he was feeling. Like me. Of all the guys, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pietr reacted that way. Nick got it on an intellectual level, but all those years of being overlooked and near-invisible because of a quirk he had no control over had given Pietr a level of empathy you didn’t normally find in the average twentysomething male.

“Hey, guys.” Speak of the devil and he pops in. Nick wandered over to the coffee station and refilled his mug. Sharon had bought us all individual—and individualized—mugs a month ago, after one too many “wrong coffee” incidents. Nick’s was a bright blue, with a yellow happy face with a bullet in the forehead. It had an odd sort of fascination for me, in a way that my own—a beautifully appropriate black one with a colorful but dead parrot on the side—didn’t. “You hear the news?” he went on. “Girl’s not going to press charges.”

“What?”

Pietr’s yelp was outraged. I discovered that I wasn’t even slightly surprised by the revelation. Depressed, but not surprised. Like I’d said to J last night, it’s hard enough even today to come forward with sexual-assault charges. Having to explain how your attacker died? How about doing that without mentioning the ki-rin, Talent, the Cosa Nostradamus or anything else that would get you locked in the psych ward for evaluation? The very best scenario involved a Cosa -sympathetic cop and judge, where she’d still have to relive every minute of the attack; worst case brought up the possibility that they’d think she had killed the guy and nail her for manslaughter, provoked or not. And it’s not like they could punish the guy who died, or bring back her relationship with the ki-rin….

Nifty didn’t look surprised, either. I bet he’d seen a lot of that kind of scared-silent, all the years he spent playing high school and college football. The bitterness in my own brain surprised me again. I knew, with the rational portion, that I was being unfair, tarring Nifty just ‘cause he’d been a jock. But the rational part wasn’t leading in this dance.

Nick was nodding sagely. “Stosser told Venec, who just told me. I think she thought the ki-rin was going to pretend it didn’t happen, or something. She went totally hysterical in the emergency room.”

“Nicky, you’re an insensitive asshole,” I said. Nick must have realized how his words sounded, because he blushed. “I didn’t …”

“The ki-rin is refusing to acknowledge her now, isn’t it?” Pietr asked

The bitterness in my brain escaped into my voice. “You expected anything different? That’s how ki-rin are—it’s like asking a dryad not to put down roots, or a griffon not to fly. It’s what they are—she had to know that before she agreed to the terms, and evidence is that she’d adhered to her part of it all the way up to that night. Being a ki-rin’s companion isn’t something you pull out of a Cracker Jack box. There’s no greater honor, by fatae standards, a human can aspire to, and one asshole with more brawn than humanity took that away from her, for his own jollies. You think you’d be calm and rational right now, if it was you in that emergency room?”

That pretty much put a damper on the entire conversation, and Nick took his coffee and his mug out with enough speed that I almost felt sorry for snapping at him. Almost.