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“This is an HK UMP submachine gun. Renowned for its stopping power and reliability. Cyclic rate of fire: eight hundred rounds per minute. That means I can empty this thirty-round clip into you in less than three seconds. At this range, I’ll cut you in half. ” It wasn’t strictly true but it sounded good. “You see what it says on the barrel?”
On the barrel, pretty white letters spelled out PARTY STARTER.
“You open your mouth again, and I’ll get the party started. ”
The rider clamped his jaws shut.
I looked at the Biohazard guy. “Appreciate the job you’re doing for the city, sir. Please carry on. ”
Ten seconds later, I got through the roadblock, steered the Jeep down Monroe Street, and turned right onto North Avenue. I made it two blocks before the street ended in a mountain of crushed glass. This intrepid adventure would have to continue on foot. I parked, checked my guns, took my crime scene kit out of the trunk, and jogged down the street.
Maybe Raphael wouldn’t be there.
Sooner or later I would have to interview him. My heart rate sped up at the thought. I took deeper breaths until it slowed. I had a job to do. The Order might not think I was worth much, but the Pack obviously did. I would be professional about it.
Professional. Just the facts, ma’am. Move along, there is nothing to see here. No need to panic.
This wasn’t my first case and this wasn’t my first murder. It was a chance at work that mattered and I would not blow it by making a spectacle of myself.
Fourteen-twelve Griffin resembled a small hill of twisted metal, decorated with chunks of concrete, mixed with dirty marble, piles of shattered bluish glass, and fine gray dust, the result of magic’s fangs grinding at the substance of the building. A backhoe and some other heavy-duty construction vehicle the name of which I didn’t know sat across the street, next to a tent.
A reinforced tunnel led inside the hill, with two shapeshifters standing guard. The one on the left, in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, was a male bouda in his late thirties, lean, dark, with an easy smile. I’d met him before—his name was Stefan and he and I had no problems. Like most boudas, he was good with a knife and occasionally, if his opponents really pissed him off, he would scalp them after he killed them.
The other shapeshifter, on the right, was larger, younger, and dark-eyed, with chestnut hair cropped short. I inhaled his scent. A werejackal.
I came to a halt before the tunnel. Stefan’s eyes widened. “Hey, you. ”
“Hey, yourself. ”
The jackal gave me a long look. I wore a white long-sleeved shirt, brown pants, and a leather vest over it. The vest’s main advantage was its million pockets. My two Sigs rested in twin shoulder holsters. The jackal’s nose wrinkled. That’s right, I don’t smell like a normal bouda.
“Jim sent me,” I told Stefan.
Stefan raised his eyebrows. “That Jim?”
“Yup. Did Raphael make it back from the cops?” My insides clenched up.
“Nope. ”
Thank God. I was a coward. A terrible, sad coward. “I need to examine the scene. ”
The jackal finally identified the scent. “You’re…”
Stefan sidestepped, casually stomping on the jackal’s foot with his steel-toed work boot. “She’s point on this case. Come on, Andrea, I’ll show you around. ”
He ducked into the tunnel. I took off my shades, tucked them into a vest pocket, and followed him. A dry stone odor greeted us, mixed with something else. The secondary scent coated my tongue and I recognized it: it was the faint, barely perceptible reek of early decomposition.
When magic attacked a tall building, it gnawed on the concrete first, attacking it in random places until it turned into dust. Eventually the building crashed like a rotten tree. Concrete and breakable valuables perished, but metal and other valuable scrap endured. Reclamation companies went into the fallen buildings and salvaged the metal and anything else that could be sold.
Fallen wrecks like this one were unstable. It took a special kind of insanity to burrow into a building that could collapse on your head at any moment. Shapeshifters turned out to be well-suited for it: we were all insane to start with, enhanced strength let us work fast, and Lyc-V-fueled regeneration knitted broken bones together in record time.
Whatever other faults Raphael had, he made sure to keep the broken bones to a bare minimum. The passageway was six feet wide. Thick steel beams and stone pillars supported the roof and metal mesh held back the walls. I was five foot two, but Stefan had six inches on me, and he didn’t have to duck either. A string of electric lights ran along the ceiling, blinking dimly. Dimly was plenty. We paused, letting our eyes adjust to the gloom, and walked on.
The tunnel angled down.
“Tell me about the building,” I asked.
“It fell about seven years after the Shift, right in line with the Georgia Power building behind the Civic Center. Before it crashed, it was a thirty-floor tower of blue glass shaped like a V. Built and owned by Jamar Groves. Jamar was a real estate developer and this baby was his pride and joy. He called it the Blue Heron Building. People told him to evacuate, but he got it into his head that the building wouldn’t fall. He’s still here somewhere. ” Stefan nodded at the ceiling. “Or at least his bones are. ”
“Went down with his ship?” The stench of decomposition was getting stronger, clinging to the walls of the tunnel like a foul patina.
“Yep. Jamar was a weird guy, apparently. ”
“Only poor people are weird. Rich people are eccentric. ”
Stefan cracked a grin. “Well, Jamar owned a huge art collection and he had some interesting ideas. For one, he had a Roman-style marble bathhouse on the second floor. ”
“So you’re after the marble?” I asked.
“Screw the marble. We’re after the copper plumbing. The whole structure had old-school copper pipes. Copper prices are through the roof right now. Even copper wiring is expensive. Of course, if you smelt the plastic off of it, it’s worth twice as much, but we won’t be doing that. The smoke is toxic as hell, even for us. There is steel, too, but the copper is the real prize. That’s why Raphael bought the building. ”
“He bought the building?” A few months ago when Raphael and I were together, he mostly did work for hire: the owners of various buildings would employ him to reclaim the valuables for a percentage of anything he recovered.
Stefan grinned. “We can do that now. Playing with the big boys. ”
The tunnel kept going, lower and lower, burrowing down.
“Why dig so deep under the building? Why not come from the side?”
“The Heron is a toppler,” Stefan said. “It went over right above the sixth floor. And it never caught fire. ”
Magic took buildings down in different ways. Sometimes the entire inner structure collapsed and the building imploded in a fountain of dust. More often, the magic weakened parts of the building, causing a partial collapse until the whole thing crashed, toppling on its side. Topplers were valuable, especially if they didn’t catch fire, because anything underground had a decent chance of surviving.
“We were trying to get into the basement,” Stefan confirmed. “There are fire-suppression and heating systems down there, generators, access to both freight and regular elevator shafts—that’s a lot of metal right there. And you never know, sometimes you can get computer servers out. Stranger things have survived a fallen building. Here we are. ”
Ahead the passageway widened. Stefan flicked the switch and the twin lamps in the ceiling flared into life. We stood in a round chamber, about twenty-five feet wide. Four bodies lay on the dirt floor, two men and two women. At the far wall, a six-foot-tall disk of metal thrust out, revealing a round tunnel filled with darkness—a vault door left ajar.
“A vault?”
Stefan grimaced. “It wasn’t on any of the blueprints and none
of the building-related correspondence we had access to mentioned it. We were merrily digging our way up and ran into it last night. We screwed around with the door for about an hour, but we didn’t have the right tools for it, so Raphael posted two guards here and two by the entrance, and we cleared out. A locksmith was supposed to come in this morning and open the sucker. Instead we found this. ”
Four people dead, sprawled in the dirt. Last night they had hugged their loved ones before going on their shift. They had made plans. This morning they were my responsibility. Life was a vicious bitch.
“Okay, let me see the log. ”
“The what?”
“The crime scene log? The record of who’s been down here and at what time?”
Stefan gave me a blank look.
“Eh…”
God damn it. I took a small notebook and a pen out of my vest pocket and kept my voice friendly. “I tell you what, we’ll start one. Here, I’ll be the first. ”
I marked the date at the top of the page and wrote: “Andrea Nash. Time In: 8:12 a. m. Time out: ___________. Purpose: Investigation. ” I signed it and passed the notebook and the pen to him.
“Now you write yourself in. When people come to pick up the bodies, you make them write themselves in, too. We need to keep a record of who comes and goes down here. ”
I set my crime scene bag on the side, opened it, took out gloves and put them on. Next came the Polaroid Instant Digital camera and a stack of paper envelopes for crime scene photos and evidence. Other cameras took better pictures, but magic played havoc with digital data. Sometimes you’d get crystal-clear high-definition images, and sometimes you’d end up with a blurred gray mess or nothing at all. Polaroid Instant Digital cameras produced photos faster than anything else on the market and stored the image digitally as a bonus. It was as close to an instant record of evidence as we could get.
“Have the bodies been moved at all?”
Stefan shrugged his shoulders. “Sylvia found them, she checked their pulses, examined the vault to see that nobody was there, and backed right out of the dig. We know the drill. ”