“It wasn’t just some weird feature of the house,” she said. “At the least, they knew it was there. More likely they installed it along with their new counters. The question is what for?”
Took resisted the quick, petty urge to sneer “obviously.” It caught in his throat to see Lawrence at Madoc’s shoulder, but that wasn’t her fault. He needed to remind himself of that.
“Exactly,” he said stiffly. “There was some paperwork in there with Nora, but between the fire and her blood, it was too damaged to read easily. It looks like the family passports and some medical records, but until the lab gets through with them, we can’t be sure.”
Madoc, jaw still set in a tight line, walked around to the far side of the dining table and leaned on the waxed, golden wood. He reluctantly ran his eyes over the coffin, his attention caught on the dry scraps of burned flesh in the corners.
“No one builds a box this size for some papers,” he said. “They just put them in the safe or under a floorboard if there’s something that needs to be concealed.”
“Contraband?” Lawrence suggested without much conviction. “We’ve had cases before where people smuggled sacred items out of the Nation. The Nations’ reprisals are usually tidier, though, and I’ve never known them to target children. And what’s the connection with the Warings?”
Took had wondered that too. He didn’t have an answer, so he pushed it back at her.
“It seems like that would have come up in the original investigation,” he said. Lawrence flushed, two quick stripes of angry color over her cheekbones, as though it were a jibe. It wasn’t, not entirely, at least. “Did you ever find any connection between his victims? Or work out how he picked them?”
“Took,” Madoc said softly, a warning under his smooth voice.
“It’s fine,” Lawrence said. She glared at Took and her voice was scathing when she answered him. “And no, we didn’t. All we had to go on was his confession and that we caught him red-handed at a murder scene.”
“He never confessed,” Took corrected her.
“He didn’tdenyit either,” Lawrence pointed out. “If you hadn’t killed someone and you were accused of something, wouldn’t you say something? React? Respond?”
Took shrugged. “Probably, but what does that prove? Other than being white and male, I haven’t got much in common with Dom Waring.” It was McCallan’s influence, Took thought dourly as Lawrence glared at him. For the last two decades, McCallan had taught preternatural behavioral science at Quantico and convinced too many of VINE’s best and brightest trainees that empathy was the key to a killer’s motivation. It worked for him, but the rigid old vampire had given his students an unreasonable faith in the idea that they could put themselves in a killer’s shoes. “Did you look for a connection anyhow?”
“Of course,” Lawrence said as she folded her arms over the tablet. She tapped out a brisk tattoo against the metal back. “We knew… we thought he’d done it, but you can’t predict how a jury is going to react. Especially once Liam Waring rolled his political game into full gear. So we tried to belt and suspenders it, but the only connection was that they were mixed families with dhampir kids.”
“If we assume you didn’t miss anything—”
“She didn’t,” Madoc interrupted, a flat note of reproof in his voice as he looked up from the box.
“I might have,” Lawrence said. “I missed Annabelle Franklin.”
Guilt pinched at the back of Took’s brain, a vinegar sting in the back of his throat. The lash of self-flagellation in Lawrence’s voice was too familiar to ignore. He’d always been a piss-poor teacher, but he could hardly sneer at her for McCallaning stuff up if he didn’t give her an alternative.
“Always assume you missed something, because you probably did. It’s human nature to edit out stuff we don’t think is important. This—” He tapped his knuckle against the box. “—has to be what links all the others. Somehow. And everyone missed Annabelle Franklin, or rather no one did. She was made to pass unnoticed.”
That fired a neuron in the back of his mind—a flash-fire burst of satisfaction as he realized that he had the key to stitch all the pieces together. But it turned flat as the inspiration flashed by too quickly for him to catch. It was something, but… what?
“Do you think the Arons had smuggled things out of the Nations?” Madoc asked. Something clouded and cold flickered through his eyes. “The local gods have been restless of late. Maybe something has moved through. From your research it looked like the Arons were interested in magic.”
“Human magic—distillations and concoctions, formulas, vials, and control subjects,” Took said. He felt the twinge of “got it” again but ignored it for the moment. He’d have time to worry at that later, pick the neurons apart to reverse engineer the idea. “Besides, even if they were willing to… contract out… the divine to a god they didn’t worship, the Nations’ gods wouldn’t answer. Not their worshippers; not their circus. They didn’t build this to hide something.”
Madoc pulled himself away from the table. It was habit to register his discomfort, the way he didn’t take a breath to speak until he was as far away from the box as possible in the dining room. Took remembered Madoc’s weight on him in the Aron house as the first Molotov went off, the protective hand on the back of his head.
Fire. Madoc had never liked fire.
“Then what was it for?” Madoc asked.
Took rubbed his fingers along the edge of the box. It was thinner than the rest of the metal, shiny where someone had taken a grinder to it.
“Have you ever seen people in an evacuation?” he asked. “Hardly anyone takes the designated escape route. They run along routes they know, the rat runs that they think no one else will find.”
When they were done with him, someone usually dragged him back to the Box. Tonight someone else was screaming. Some old habit made him pick apart the vowels and weigh the consonants, but he couldn’t find the part of his brain that knew how to make sense of that.
Ruined. Broken.
The words were in his head, but it wasn’t his voice. It was a liar as well. He was ruined, he knew that, but they hadn’t broken him—not yet. He didn’t know why not, exactly, but he knew.
