“It looks like one of Conleth's kills,” Camille said from behind us. She had moved to peer at the picture from over Ryu's shoulder.
“It looks like one of Conleth's kills, but it isn't,” the old man insisted, shaking his white head adamantly.
Ryu crooked his eyebrow. He didn't believe Silver.
“Damn it, boy,” Silver said, and I almost smiled. Ryu might look about forty years Silver's junior, but he was actually around two hundred years older than the human in front of us. Silver stood up, painfully, to go stand in front of Ryu. Taking the sheaf of papers away from him, Silver flipped through till he found what looked like a report.
“That's Donovan's autopsy. Her body was obviously very badly burned, but they still found evidence that she hadn't just been killed and then set on fire. She was abused first. Brutally.” Silver pointed to one line buried in the middle of the report. One word had been highlighted.
The word was “tortured.”
I shuddered, as Ryu read the report.
“How did you get all this, sir?” I asked, giving Ryu time to read and trying to keep my overactive imagination from dwelling on that single, horrible word.
“I had a contact in the police I pumped for information when I hadn't heard from Brenda in a while. Her letters just stopped and I knew she was in trouble. So I came back to the States.” The gray-haired head bent as Silver stared at his hands. When he finally spoke again, his voice was dark with competing emotions. “She was an ambitious bitch in a lot of ways. But she didn't deserve to die. Especially not like that.”
Ryu finished reading, and he put the autopsy report at the back of the sheaf of papers as if to get it out of sight.
“Conleth's changed his MO,” he said. “He's even more dangerous than he was before. He needs to be caught now.”
Silver peered at Ryu as if he'd just claimed that cream cheese was made of moon spooge.
“Have you listened to a word I've said, boy? Whoever killed Donovan made it look like Conleth, but there's no way Conleth did that. Whoever killed that woman was something else entirely. Con's a murderer but he's not, yet, a monster.”
“Sir, you said yourself that Conleth had changed.”
“Not that much, damn it. And none of the murders in Boston are like this. He kills, but he doesn't torture!” Silver was getting increasingly irate and I, for one, was glad he no longer had his shotgun.
“And how did he get to Chicago, anyway? And then back to Boston?” Silver looked like he'd played his trump card, but I'd seen Conleth go rocket blaster. I wasn't sure how far he could sustain such power, but his getting to Chicago wicked fast wasn't an impossibility.
“Conleth has ways of traveling great distances.” Ryu's voice was still gentle, but it was also obvious that he didn't believe a word Silver had said. And the old man knew it.
“If you won't listen, you won't listen,” Silver said, finally. “But I'm warning you: You're making a mistake not looking beyond Conleth for something more. I'm not saying he's an innocent; God knows he's committed crimes. But this isn't one of them. And I have no doubt that once you begin digging, you'll find other bodies, other murders. And they won't have been Conleth, either.”
The old man poured himself another brandy and then settled himself on his sofa. His white head bowed and he stared down at his hands. He looked defeated, but his voice was strong when he finally spoke.
“Now get out of my house and let them come for me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Of course, we hadn't just let them come for Silver. We'd left a pair of Stefan's most powerful deputies to watch him. He was, after all, a well-baited trap as well as an innocent in need of protection.
Well, relatively innocent, I thought as I remembered everything that had been in those files.
We'd gone from knowing virtually nothing about Conleth to knowing everything—down to his preference
for boxers—in one evening. We should have been euphoric at the break in the case. But the “break” had just led to a billion more questions.
We finally discovered exactly how Conleth had ended up in that lab. He'd been abandoned at a convent when he was a baby, which he proceeded to burn down, killing everyone inside. Rescue services had found the baby—perfectly unharmed—sitting in the smoking ruins, still burping fire.
Which is how he'd ended up in a laboratory. One reason he'd never come to the attention of the supes is that the FBI labeled him a different code word than the one they usually used for their brushes with the supernaturals. They'd genuinely thought he was some Rosemary's baby devil-child and had code named him “Firecrotch,” a stonkingly inappropriate name for a being one supposes is the Antichrist. Any supe in the Bureau at the time probably thought it was a dirty joke involving a redhead.
So, through a series of accidents, Conleth had gotten swept away in bureaucracy, to be forgotten about until he'd come to the attention of this mysterious donor. The records petered out then and stopped with Silver's having been fired. But, from what the old doctor had said, that's when things had really gotten bad for Conleth.
Unfortunately, we had no easy way of investigating Silver's claims about the murders in Chicago. The supes were all very territorial, and both Nell and Ryu had drilled into me their supernatural geography. Most of what humans considered to be northern Illinois was firmly entrenched in an area the supes knew as the Borderlands. Much like the mountainous regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Borderlands between neighboring territories were lawless places, ungoverned by the Alfar. Chicago, however, was an extreme case. The city and its surrounding suburbs were a sort of black hole for the Alfar: They sent spies in, but no spies ever emerged. This huge urban area that everyone knew was there, and functioning, and even Google mappable, was invisible to the Alfar and their pure-blooded subjects.
I imagined it must drive the Alfar crazy, but apparently there was nothing they could do about it. With the fertility issues and their already low numbers, compounded by the nagas' treachery—Orin and Morrigan's territory had lost a lot of people fighting Jimmu and his nestmates—they simply didn't have the manpower to charge into the Borderlands willy-nilly.
So we were at an impasse, in terms of that aspect of the investigation. Ryu had no contacts in the Borderlands. There was no supernatural power structure that he knew of to call and question. So he'd set Camille to calling the human police. But with only a very limited ability to glamour them over the phone, they were unlikely to give up any sensitive information. Ryu had also set Julian to hacking into the Chicago PD's computer system. He'd search for bodies that had been burned, hopefully giving us a place to start.
Silver's files had, however, yielded some extra clues for our Boston investigation. After Ryu took me for a quick swim off a pier near the New England Aquarium to recharge my batteries, we'd pored over Silver's files all night, trying to get a bead on Conleth.
Unfortunately, there were only two people left alive who'd worked at the laboratory during the years the new sponsor had been in charge. One was a receptionist who had straddled Silver's reign and the new sponsor's regime. Conleth had developed a rather serious crush on her; one she hadn't reciprocated. Eventually, he'd turned violent against the scientist that he was convinced she fancied. She'd either quit or been asked to leave and was replaced with the woman who Con toasted with her boyfriend. If Con was that mean to somebody who merely worked the front desk, I shuddered to imagine what he'd do to someone who'd also rejected him.
That's what had brought us to Allston, and the apartment where Tally Bender, the former receptionist, had moved. She'd been tough to track down, as she'd been living with an ex and had been in the process of moving out when she had quit. Not to mention, Allston was populated almost entirely by students from either Boston University or Boston College, so a lot of renting was done through sublets, or moving in as a roommate on somebody else's lease. But once we had a Social Security number from Silver's files, Julian was able to get a fix on her.
I was perched on the hood of Ryu's car, parked a few houses down, as the others made their way to Tally's. Julian was with me, and we'd been tasked with making sure our friends weren't followed into the apartment. Worried for the girl's safety, Ryu and his team were going in hard and fast, so they really meant “stay out of the way.” It sucked, but I had to agree. I'd gotten good at defense, as Ryu's leaving me with Julian acknowledged, but offense was still not my strong suit.
“Sorry you have to babysit,” I said to my fellow halfling, as he cleaned his glasses on his shirt.
He grinned at me, the ridiculously long lashes framing his sea-green eyes waving a friendly “hello” as he blinked.
“No problem. I'm not really all that big on the action,” he said. “If this were a human movie, I'd be the hacker. The one bent over the keyboard, sweat dripping down my face, the music crescendoing behind me to disguise the fact that all I'm really doing is typing.” He finished wiping his specs and put them back on. “Of course, the hacker usually dies in those films, so I hope I buck that trend.”
