“He’s that good,” Madoc admitted. “I don’t think it ever made him that happy.”
Lawrence looked at him as though he’d missed something, but she just pointed at the laptop with her chin. “I guess we need to find out what we missed, then.”
Definitely a good agent. Madoc turned back around and unmuted with a tap of his finger. He caught the tail end of Quick’s absently tuneless hum before the man swallowed the rest of the melody.
“Sir,” he said as he straightened up. With one finger he pushed the glasses he hadn’t really needed for half a century up the bridge of his nose. “Did Bennett really blow up a trap house?”
The preliminary report from the county fire chief had understated the cause as “misadventure.” One of the Goats apparently had a fondness for jury-rigged booby traps and homemade explosives. In addition to a perimeter of trip wire IEDs that matched the one that took out Gatlin, there had been a stash of homemade explosives in the garage. The theory was that the fight Took started in the kitchen had caused a gas leak, caught a spark, and then everything went up.
That was the theory. Madoc would wait for VINE’s CSU techs to have a look before he called it fact.
Those were just the details, though. Quick wanted the story. He hadn’t liked Took much at first, or at least he hadn’t liked the fact Took was his superior despite that five-decade head start. In the end he’d come around. People always did. Now he wanted to take this and roll it out for the rest of the Biters. Proof that Took could still make any situation more dramatic, that he hadn’t changed.
“Looks like it,” Madoc said dryly. “What’s that make it. Four?”
“Are we counting cars too?” Quick asked with a chuckle. He sobered quickly as he glanced over Madoc’s shoulder at Lawrence. “You think this has something to do with the Waring case.”
“There might be a connection,” Madoc said.
At the same time, Lawrence said, “Bennett thinks so.”
Quick hesitated for a moment but then accepted both answers. He absently ran his hand over his cropped, salt-and-sand curls as he looked down at a notebook.
“Well, our system throws up a few red flags where Appleton is concerned, but mostly to do with pockets of support for Hunter extremists in the area,” he said. “There’s nothing to do with Waring. I just checked in with Lopez and Tsosie, who had the case before it fell under Biter jurisdiction, and it hadn’t crossed their radar either. They weren’t even sure where it was. Did Bennett have any timeline for when this place was relevant?”
“Not that he was willing to share,” Madoc said.
Quick rolled his eyes. “Some things never change, eh? So, do you need me to file a flight plan back, or….”
Everyone in the room knew it would beor, so Madoc ignored the question. “Send me everything—everything—we have on the Waring case. Get me an update on the parents as well and check how Waring has fared since we put him under The Salt.”
At the bottom of the screen, Quick’s hands were just visible as he quickly typed the instructions. He poked his tongue between his teeth in concentration, and then it disappeared back into his mouth.
“Will I get the Charleston office to send over an Eclipse sedan?” Quick asked absently.
“If we’re going to poke our nose in,” Lawrence pointed out, “we should run it past the local VINE SSA, make sure we don’t step on any toes.”
Madoc curled his mouth in a thin, sour smile. His presence had already stepped on the relevant toes. He doubted a belated effort to pretend he gave a flying fuck what SSA Crane thought of Madoc’s presence in his territory would smooth anything over.
It was the effort that mattered, though—the acknowledgment that they all served new masters now and none of them thought wistfully of the old days of Empire. It would also mean that Madoc could make the drive to Charleston in relative comfort. He had served his time in car trunks and, before that, the scratchy beds of carts as he breathed in hay and chicken.
“You can liaise with Crane,” he told Lawrence. “Find out what he knows about Bennett being on this case while you’re at it. Quick—”
“It’ll take me a bit to chase down everything on the parents, but I’m on it,” Quick said. “The Waring file and all the associated forensic evidence is in the cloud.”
He glanced up briefly with a flash of pale amber eyes over a smirk. “Do you need me to help you get into it? Again?”
Madoc snorted and disconnected the call. He might be old, but he hadn’t started the slow calcification that took some of the elders. They weren’t senile as the living experienced it—more reluctant to knit new memories into long-term recall—but it was close enough for Quick to think his jokes were funny.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Lawrence said. “Appleton doesn’t fit as one of Waring’s hunting grounds. It would be like hunting trout in a parking lot. It might not be a dry town anymore, but no vampire is going to move here with their family, not when they have other choices.”
She wasn’t wrong. Of course a hunter didn’t just need a hunting ground. They needed a bolt-hole too.
“Get in touch with West, smooth his feathers about our involvement,” Madoc said. He stood up. The leather of his uniform had been shaped to his body by years of blood and sweat, until it was too supple to creak or pinch, but he still felt the weight of it sometimes. “I need to go and talk to the sheriff and see what story Bennett fed him.”
THE BRUISEon Anderson’s arm looked stark against tanned, weathered skin as the sheriff wearily stripped off his jacket and hung it up on the back of the door. He looked tired, with purple stains thumbed in under his eyes and deep grooves etched into the skin around his mouth. If the slurs from earlier hadn’t been fresh in Madoc’s mind, he’d have felt sorry for the man.
“Gatlin died an hour ago,” Anderson said grimly as he went to the metal cabinet on the other side of the room. He pulled the top door open and lifted out a half-drunk bottle of unlabeled booze. “I had to go to his house, wake his wife up, and tell her that she’d need to bury him. So don’t get me wrong, but right now I don’t give a fuck about your agent. Maybe he walked Gatlin into that trip wire, maybe not, but none of this would have happened if he’d stayed out of our town. Hell, if we stayed dry, then there would be a helluva lot of our people up and walking. At least, that’s the way I see it.”
