Forrester frowned and adjusted his glasses again. “Well, no,” he admitted, “not a common one, but nothing about this is common. The body—”
“Child,” Pally corrected.
Forrester cleared his throat and started the sentence again. “The child has, theoretically, been entombed in this box for nearly five years. Sans any of the usual complications, she should have….” He stumbled over what he wanted to say as he looked over at Pally, but there was only one word for it. “Decomposed. There’s no evidence of that whatsoever. Based on the body, she could have died yesterday in that fire. If it isn’t a burn pattern, I should be able to tell you more once I have permission to get started on the autopsy.”
“Don’t expect that,” Madoc told him.
Pally stepped forward and produced a black silk winding cloth from his pocket and shook it out. There was enough of it to swaddle a full-grown Biter in his gear. They had no Enochian priests on the team, but Pally’s devotion was close enough for most, and the child fit easily within the folds.
“We take care of our own,” Madoc told him as Pally lifted the body as though it weighed nothing.
Forrester gawped for a second and then gathered up his indignation as he cut across the room. He barred Pally’s way out with spread arms and a glare. “The Aron case belonged to Charleston. Whatever VINE’s interest in this child is, you can’t just cut us out of the investigation completely. Dhampir or breathing child, she’s in our jurisdiction and it is our responsibility to find out what happened to her.”
“I admire your dedication,” Pally said harshly. “But you will not change my mind. Now move or be moved.”
Forrester looked around the room. Usually it would have been Took he looked to for backup, an assumption more than a few people had made and regretted. Now he just found another Anakim face in a room where one more dead person wouldn’t be noticed for a while—not that Madoc intended to kill the man, but vivid imaginations had spawned more defeats than anything else.
“I am going to report this,” he warned stiffly as he moved away from the door. “And if this case is challenged because you broke chain of custody….”
Pally just snorted and walked out the door. It swung shut behind him and Madoc caught it in one hand. “Took?”
“Just a second.”
Madoc leaned against the door and waited as Took grabbed a notebook from the table and scrawled something in it.
“Any trace you find,” he said, “run against this name.”
Forrester glared at the scrap of paper. “I don’t work for VINE,” he said. “And even if I did think it was a good lead, why the hell should I tell you anything about it?”
“Because dhampir or breathing, she was just a little girl,” Took said. “So were the others. We’re better equipped than anyone to find whoever did it.”
MADOC’S PHONEwas full of agitated texts and insistent voice messages. NBC wanted a quote about the Aron house, the boyars wanted to speak to him immediately, and the Charleston sheriff wanted a reckoning.
“Are you going to answer them?” Lawrence asked as Madoc flicked his phone off. She was perched on the edge of one the armchairs.
He tucked it into his pocket. “I’m an old man,” he said dryly. “Modern technology confuses me. Maybe I got upset and threw it out a window.”
She rolled her eyes at him and then looked around the small living room. They had decamped to the nearest VINE safe house, which was Took’s current residence. Madoc had braced himself for a fight over it, but Took just shrugged and told them not to bother the cat.
The cat bothered Madoc. Reminded of its existence, he turned around and, after a quick search, found it crouched on the top of the door—a loaf of white fluff with malicious eyes.
“It’s not what I imagined his house was like,” Lawrence said, and Madoc glanced back at her. “He was one of the best profilers VINE ever had, and after what happened to him… I mean, you wonder what happens afterward.”
“And you’d decided?”
She shrugged. “More Miss Havisham—books and texts and files of old cases,” she said. “Less… renter on a short lease.”
Madoc tried to see the space with her eyes. He liked it, but then he’d spent a night here tangled around Took. Satiation improved a man’s opinion of a space. There were no mementos, no knickknacks—unless you counted the stake in the kitchen, and Madoc doubted Lawrence would approve—and the layout of the place had the disinterested appeal of the generic.
It looked much like Took’s old apartment had, just like the small office-library, the only space he’d bothered to claim as off-limits, looked like his desk at VINE. It had never occurred to Madoc, who’d lived in luxury but owned nothing as a cardinal, that it was odd.
“He’s not a sentimental man,” he said as he walked over to the door. The cat gave him a pink-rimmed glare and leaped down. It darted off down the hall, probably to go glare at Pally, and Madoc closed the door. “What did the Hunter they caught at the scene tell you?”
Lawrence wrinkled her nose. “Not much. Took was right. He’s not a real Hunter. He’s just some blowhard wannabe who got together with his friends to vandalize Anakim homes and harass Anakim women. He’s a bottom-feeder. Only a few nights ago, the real deal in the morgue came to him with an offer he didn’t want to resist.”
“Did they know each other?”
Lawrence shrugged. “They used to run in the same circles, but our friend is a dead end for anything that happened between the last time Alan Beam got arrested and what happened after they went to the bar. He did say… well, boasted, that Beam had gotten in tight with some big name.”
