28. Chapter 28
Crowe
Two nights of road put enough country between me and that mountain to stop watching the mirror.
I pull into a turnout an hour before first light, kill the lights, and call Odile.
She picks up on the fourth ring.
“You’re alive,” she says. “I had money on it. Thank you for that.”
“I need something.”
“No hello. No ‘you’re a marvel, Odile.’” A door shuts somewhere behind her voice. “You left the mountain.”
“Two nights ago.”
“Aurora thinks you’re driving back here with a report and a list of expenses. Ysabelle has been saying so out loud, at length, in rooms with people in them.” A pause. “You’re not, are you?”
“No.”
“Then tell me what you’re doing. I’m about to lie for people about you, and I’d like to know what I’m lying about.”
“I got her back safely, but I get a bad feeling about it.”
“Okay.” She drags the word out. “Why?”
“When Kalli disappeared, they found a body on the clan mountain,” I say. “Right height, right coloring, dressed for it, with her grandmother’s ring on the hand. Her own mother looked at it and said it was her daughter. They buried it. It wasn’t her.”
Odile doesn’t say anything.
“Somebody put a body up there that looked like her, and did it inside two days. Until I know who, she’s living in a house with the person who arranged it.”
“And Aurora would say that’s clan business.”
“Aurora would say the job’s closed.”
“The job is closed.” She waits for a second. “Go on, then.”
“I want everything Aurora took out of the compound. Not the summary. The intake records, the transport orders, anything with a client’s name on it.”
“That’s theft.”
“It’s copying.”
“It’s theft with a nicer word on it.” A pen scratches on her end. She’s already writing. “Where do you want it?”
I give her an address I’ve used before. She reads it back to me twice and makes me confirm it.
“And Ysabelle?”
“Faine doesn’t need to know yet.”
“She is going to be very unpleasant to me.”
“You’ll enjoy that.”
“I will, a little.”
I watch the sky over the pines start to go from black to something thinner.
“One more thing. I need to find whoever provided that body. That’s a name I can’t get from a records room.”
“No,” she says. “That’s a name you buy.” A long pause on her end. “You want Farrow.”
“I do. That’s partly why I’m calling. I need his number.”
“Merde,” she mutters. “That man is intolerable. Are you prepared to put up with his terms? You know he can be unreasonable. Don’t agree to it if there’s another way.”
“There isn’t.”
“There never is with you.” The pen stops. “Don’t get killed. I have money on you finishing the year.”
She reads me the number twice, and then she’s gone before I can say anything else.
Farrow picks up on the second ring and doesn’t say hello.
“Odile called ahead.” His voice hasn’t changed in twelve years. Pleasant, unhurried, entirely without inflection. “She said you’d be difficult.”
“She’s not wrong.”
“She rarely is.” Something sets down on a hard surface at his end. “Before you ask me anything, I don’t do Syndicate business,” he says. “I’d like that clear first so we don’t waste our time. I won’t touch it, I won’t confirm it, and money doesn’t change it. Those people make life difficult.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Good. Then tell me what it is.”
“A job I’m on. Woman I got out of a trafficking ring.
” I don’t mention that it was Syndicate connected because he doesn’t need to know that.
“I took her back home, and it turns out they thought she’d been dead all along.
When she disappeared, they found a body in the mountains.
Family identified it as her. It wasn’t. It was close enough that it fooled all of them. ”
“Pro job.”
“Somebody supplied that body. I want to know who.”
He’s quiet for a second.
“That I can do.” Paper moves. “The money first. There’s always money first.”
He names a figure. It’s high, and it’s fair, and it’s within a hundred dollars of what’s in the envelope in my coat.
“Agreed.”
“And then there’s the second half. A favor. I don’t name it now. I collect it when I need it, and you don’t get to tell me it’s a bad time.” He says all of it flat. He’s said it many times before. “That’s my price for good information. Cheap information is cash only. This isn’t cheap information.”
I sit in a cold truck with my hand on the wheel and think about it for about a second.
“Agreed.”
“Say it properly, please.”
“I owe you a favor. Unnamed. Whenever you call it in.”
“There.” Nothing in his voice changes. “It’s said, so it’s done, and I’ll thank you not to make me remind you.
” He gives me a name and a town and a street, and makes me repeat all three.
“She doesn’t like visitors, and she doesn’t have a number to call.
She’ll hang up on a stranger, and she’ll shut the door on one, so don’t waste your one knock. ”
“Understood.”
“One more thing, and this one’s free.” Now there’s something in it, and it’s curiosity. “I heard what you did to Ilmar Vex. Everybody east of here has heard some version of it by now. A Turned man ending a Vex in a bedroom. That gets a man noticed by people he’d rather not be noticed by.”
“I’ve been noticed before.”
“Not like this.” Same flat tone. “Watch the road behind you. I mean it as a courtesy. I don’t threaten men who’ve already paid me.”
He hangs up first.
The town he gave me is a night and a half west. I spend the day between in a motel with the curtains taped shut and a chair against the door, and I get four hours of the kind of sleep that doesn’t help.
I get there on the second night. One main street, a church with a crooked steeple. My battered map takes me to the address Farrow gave me. A blue house sits back from the road with a gravel drive and no mailbox.
I knock once. The woman who opens the door is somewhere past sixty, gray hair cut short and practical, reading glasses pushed up into it. She looks at me the way a doctor looks at a chart.
“You’re not from around here,” she says.
“No.”
“And you’re not human.”
“No.”
“Well.” She steps back and holds the door. “Come in, then. I’ve had worse than a vampire with manners knock on this door. At least you’re not selling anything.”
“I might be, by the end of this.”
“Everyone is, eventually.”
The front room is ordinary. A couch, a lamp, a shelf of paperbacks. Under the coffee smell there’s something clinical, close to rubbing alcohol. She sits down across from me and doesn’t offer coffee and doesn’t apologize for it.
“You’re Crowe,” she says when I don’t speak. “Farrow said you’d come. I’m Branna.”
“And you opened the door.”
“If Farrow vouches for you, it’s worth finding out what your business is.” She settles back, ankles crossed, in no hurry. “And I suspect it’s connected to mine.”
“It is.” I nod. “Is that a problem?”
“A man who’ll do Farrow a favor is not someone I need to be worried about.”
“I’m glad. I wouldn’t want you to be worried.” It’s a different kind of interrogation than I’m used to, but I get the sense that this is someone who wouldn’t respond well to pressure.
“I do a kind of work,” she says. “I don’t ask why anybody wants it done, and I don’t ask what happens after. That’s the arrangement. It’s kept me in business thirty years and out of trouble the whole time.”
“I know what you do.”
“Then you know I’m not going to feel bad about it because you’d like me to.”
“I wouldn’t waste the trip.”
That gets a smile out of her. “Good. Most men who come here want me frightened first and helpful second, and it never works in that order.” She looks at me properly. “What do you actually want?”
“About a year ago, somebody came to you to source a body. Woman’s build, red hair, made to pass for somebody specific. I want to know who.”
She doesn’t flinch at that.
“I remember the work,” she says. “I don’t remember doing business with you. So tell me why I should.”
“I’ll pay your fee,” I tell her.
“My previous client paid a fee too.” Her expression is flat. “Why should I hand them over to you?”
“You don’t like being found,” I say. “I found you anyway. That’s not luck.
It’s what I do for a living, and I’m good at it.
” I give that time to sink in. “Whoever ordered that body knows your name and your street. This kind of thing comes apart eventually, and when it does, somebody is going to be on your porch asking these same questions. If it’s the authorities, you’re finished.
If it’s the man who ordered the work, you’re a loose end.
I’m the one person in this who has a reason to make sure nobody else ever finds this house.
” I hold her eyes. “That’s the offer. My word that this is the last time your door gets knocked on because of it. ”
She considers this.
“That’s something,” she says. “Most men offer me money like I don’t already have plenty. You’re the first one who’s offered me something I actually want.” She sits back. “All right. Ask your questions.”
“Tell me about the order.”
“It took me three weeks. That’s long for me. Most of my work takes a weekend.” She takes her glasses out of her hair and turns them over in her hands.
“What was different about this one?”
“Few things.” She puts her glasses on and peers at me. “Most times, a body is brought to me. This one had to be sourced.”
“Sourced? How exactly do you source a body?”
She chuckles. “I don’t go around killing people, if that’s what you’re worried about. I have a network. Mortuaries, funeral parlors. You’d be amazed how many bodies never get claimed. But it can take time to find one to fit all the requirements. That’s what took so long.”
“He had specific requirements.”
She nods. “This one was exact. He gave me her height and her weight, both of them precise, nothing rounded off. Coloring down to the shade. And a drawing of a ring, done carefully, with notes on the setting. How the stone sat, how high, which way the band was worn thin. He checked my notes twice before he left the first day.”
“Most of your clients are in a panic.”
“All of them are. Somebody’s dead who shouldn’t be, or alive who’s supposed to be dead, and they need it handled before anyone notices.
They sweat. They talk too fast. They ask me whether it’ll hold up.
” She shakes her head, slow. “He didn’t do any of that.
He came in calm, and he left calm. He came back twice to check the work, and both times he was pleasant to me.
Happy, even. I’ve never done a job for a man who was having a good time. ”
“How did he pay?”
“Cash, both times. Counted it out himself on that table.” She shrugs. “I don’t ask where money comes from. But I’ll tell you this: it wasn’t stolen money, and he had plenty of it.”
“Describe him.”
She taps her lip with a fingertip. “Nice,” she says. “A little younger than you. Short hair, auburn. Tall, good build. He had an easy laugh and a good face. Seemed trustworthy. The kind of man you want to like.” She chuckles. “Ironic, right?”
I am silent as she speaks, but she doesn’t seem to need me to respond in any way.
“That’s everything,” she says. “I never got his real name. People in my line rarely give one, and I don’t ask, like I told you.”
“Thank you.” I stand up to go.
“There’s one more thing.” She says it before I’ve reached the door. “And it’s the part I’ve been deciding whether to tell you since you sat down.”
I stop.
“He came back,” she says.
“When?”
“A few days ago. Maybe a week.” She takes her glasses off. “Same man. Same manners. He didn’t want another body.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to know how a real accident looks different from a staged one. What impact does to a body that actually hit something, against one that’s been laid out afterward to look that way?”
I stand very still.
“What did you tell him?”
“Everything I know. He paid me for it, and he paid well.” She holds my eyes. “Thirty years in this business and nobody has ever asked me that question. They come to me to make a thing go away. He wanted to know what real looks like.”
“And that bothered you.”
“It’s bothered me every day since.”
I go out to the truck without saying goodbye properly, and I don’t think she minds.
I sit behind the wheel and work it out, and it doesn’t take long.
He isn’t buying another body. He doesn’t need one. He wants to know how to kill her for real and have it pass for an accident.
And he asked the same week she walked back into that hall alive.
He isn’t covering up what he did a year ago. He’s getting ready to do it again, properly this time, and he started the day he found out she wasn’t in the ground.
It’ll be a road, in bad weather, with nobody near her. It’ll look exactly like what it’s supposed to look like, because he’s done the work.
There’s one reason it hasn’t happened yet.
She hasn’t been alone for a minute since she got there. Four levels of household. A mother who keeps her in sight. Aldis at every door she goes through. He can’t get near her inside that mountain, and he’s too careful to try.
She’s safe as long as she stays on it.
She isn’t going to stay on it.
I know that the way I know my own name. I’ve watched her decide things. She’ll push that house as far as it will go, and when it stops giving her anything, she’ll walk down those stairs on her own, and the first empty road she’s on will be the last one.
So I have to get word up there before she does.
I can’t do it from a truck. There’s no phone in that mountain and no line running up to it. Anything I send goes to the gate and then up through the household, and the household is where he lives. A message that reaches her reaches him first.
Aurora. It’s the one place with the standing to put a warning in the Aldrake’s hand and be listened to. Caleb Craven can get a runner up that mountain inside a day, and nobody at that gate will turn him away.
It’s also the only place she’d go if she ever came down.
I tip my head back against the headrest and shut my eyes. And that’s when it happens again. Closer than it’s ever come.
Her teeth on my skin before anything else. The heat I remember. The fire in my veins, her hot flesh against mine.
Then it’s gone, and I’m sitting in a cold truck with my hand pressed flat against my own throat for no reason I could explain to anybody.
I put the truck on the road for Aurora, and I don’t slow down again.